John Tyrrell's biography of the Leos Janácek is the culmination of a life's work in the field. It stands upon his existing documentary studies of Janácek's operas and translations of other key sources and his examination of thousands of still unpublished letters and other documents in the Janácek archive in Brno. Altogether it provides the most detailed account of Janácek's life in any language and offers new views of Janácek as composer, writer, thinker and human being. Volume 1, which goes up to the outbreak of the First World War and Janácek's sixtieth birthday in the summer of 1914, consists of chronological chapters providing a straightforward account of Janácek's life year by year and another forty contextual chapters. Topics include on-going sequences ('Music as autobiography I', etc.; 'Janácek's knowledge of opera I', etc.) and individual chapters on Janácek as a teacher, as a theorist, as an music ethnographer, on his speech-melody theory, his relationship to particularly influential operas (Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Charpentier's Louise), on his mentors (such as Antonín Dvorák) and his bêtes noires (such as Karel Kovarovic). A particular feature are the specially commissioned chapters on Janácek's health by Dr Stephen Lock (one of the editors of the Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine, OUP 1994 and 2001, editor of the British Medical Journal, 1975-91, and a Janácek enthusiast since the early postwar broadasts on the Third Programme), and on Janácek's earnings and finances by Dr Jirí Zahrádka (curator of the Janácek archive in Brno, and editor of authentic editions of Sárka and The Excursions of Mr Broucek).

In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, he explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic and meditation, that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities. Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of writing, the passion and paradox of literature lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible--a leap of faith that calls to mind the mystic's dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, and the ethnographer's attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. Every writer, whether of ethnography, poetry, or fiction, imagines that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.

In this widely ranging collection of essays, a group of contemporary psychoanalyst/authors turn their finely-honed listening skills and clinical experience to plumb the depths and illuminate themes of character, drama, myth, culture, and psychobiography in some of the world’s most beloved operas. The richly diverse chapters are unified by a psychoanalytic approach to the nuances of unconscious mental life and emotional experience as they unfold synergistically in opera’s music, words, and drama. Opera creates a unique bridge between thought and feeling, mind and body, and conscious and unconscious that offers fertile ground for psychological exploration of profound human truths. Each piece is written in a colorful and non-technical manner that will appeal to mental health professionals, musicians, academics, and general readers wishing to better understand and appreciate opera as an art form.

Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music.

Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means of transcending grief. The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor Adele Tutter’s Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor Léon Wurmser’s Epilogue closes the volume. Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity.

A fresh evaluation of Mozart's Requiem which focuses on historical and current understandings in fiction, drama, film, criticism and performance.