Apart from the fact that John Field invented the nocturne, very little has been known about the composer and his strange and colorful life. Although is compositions were once widely popular, they are now neglected and misunderstood and even his beautiful nocturnes are seldom played. The author makes the first important reassessment of the composer's life and music, following Field's career from his childhood as an infant prodigy in Dublin and then as Clementi's pupil in London, through his brilliantly successfully years as the favorite of St. Petersburg and Moscow society, the vicissitudes of his love life, his final appearance in London and Paris, his unhappy years of wandering through Europe, to his eventual return to Moscow where he died in 1837. The nature of Field's greatness as a pianist is extensively discussed and the accounts of his teaching and playing methods are based on the numerous and detailed impressions of the composer's pupils and friends. All Field's known compositions are fully considered, including several works recently discovered by the author. Together with the many illustrations and music examples, this is a brilliant study of a composer whose music is at last put into perspective.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

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Bestselling author John Connolly's first collection of short fiction,Nocturnes,now features five additional stories -- never-before published for an American audience -- in a dark, daring, utterly haunting anthology of lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons, and vengeful ghosts. In "The New Daughter," a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in "The Underbury Witches," two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella "The Reflecting Eye," in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.

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