A fascinating and insightful biography of one of the greatest composers of all time, Johann Strauss. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

From the favorites of Tin Pan Alley to today’s international blockbusters, the stylistic range required of a musical theatre performer is expansive. Musical theatre roles require the ability to adapt to a panoply of characters and vocal styles. By breaking down these styles and exploring the output of the great composers, Songwriters of the American Musical Theatre offers singers and performers an essential guide to the modern musical. Composers from Gilbert and Sullivan and Irving Berlin to Alain Boublil and Andrew Lloyd Webber are examined through a brief biography, a stylistic overview, and a comprehensive song list with notes on suitable voice types and further reading. This volume runs the gamut of modern musical theatre, from English light opera through the American Golden Age, up to the "mega musicals" of the late Twentieth Century, giving today’s students and performers an indispensable survey of their craft.

To this day, Johann Strauss, Jr remains one of the most popular composers in his native city of Vienna. In The Legacy of Johann Strauss, Zoë Alexis Lang examines how the reception of Strauss's waltzes played a key role in the construction of twentieth-century Austrian identity. Using press coverage from the centennial celebration of Strauss's birth in Vienna, Lang argues that his music remained popular because it continued to be revitalised by Austrians seeking to define their culture. Revealing the origins of the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert, Lang considers how Strauss was appropriated as a National Socialist icon in the 1930s and 1940s, and explores the Strauss family's Jewish ancestry, along with the infamous forgery of paperwork about their lineage during the 1940s. This book also includes a case study of Strauss's Emperor Waltz, considering its variegated usage in concerts and films from 1925 to 1953.

During the 1884 inauguration of the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest, political elites staged a gala concert in the auditorium while the angry crowd, excluded from this ceremony, demonstrated on the street. In 1917, the crowds queuing to a Béla Bartók premiere needed to be forcibly held back. The book follows the history of the contested institution through a series of scandals, public protests, repertoire controversies and their representation in the urban press of the time. Such conflicts often led to larger issues that concerned the Opera House as a music institution, the birth of the modern public sphere and the modern audience. Thereby, the book calls for a critical rethinking of the cultural history of Budapest and Hungary in the late Habsburg Monarchy.

This book shows how over the hundred years between the Vienna Congress and the dissolution of the Empire, the waltz altered from signifier of upper-class artifice—covering with glitz and glamour the poverty and war central to the time—to the link between the three classes, between man and nature, and between Viennese and “Other.”

Originally published: London: Elliott and Thompson Limited, 2015.