Amidst the turmoil of Civil War era New York, a young, immigrant woman seeks to escape a life of prostitution so that she may rescue a child from a terrible fate. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Cast adrift in an unfamiliar city, a young Irish immigrant named Molly finds herself forced into prostitution and has a child stolen out of her arms. With the city descending into the chaos of the Draft Riots, Molly must save herself before she can save the child. From the green fields of Galway to the crowded streets of New York and the ornate parlors of New Orleans, Molly never stops fighting to free herself and the child she hardly knows from a terrible fate. "A stunning roller coaster ride of unimaginable tragedies and inspirational triumphs." -Gregory Lee Renz, author of Beneath the Flames

This comprehensive reference book, documents the considerable amount of art-inspired music found on commercial and other mass-produced audio recordings published through 1999. Recording formats included in this survey are long-playing phonograph records (33 1/3 RPM), cassette tapes (7 1/2 IPS), and compact discs. Detailed information is provided to aid in purchasing the recordings or accessing them in library and archive collections.

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life. In this new updated edition, Kinderman gives more attention to the composer's early chamber music, his songs, his opera Fidelio, and to a number of often-neglected works of the composer's later years and fascinating projects left incomplete. A revised view emerges from this of Beethoven's aesthetics and the musical meaning of his works. Rather than the conventional image of a heroic and tormented figure, Kinderman provides a more complex, more fully rounded account of the composer. Although Beethoven's deafness and his other personal crises are addressed, together with this ever-increasing commitment to his art, so too are the lighter aspects of his personality: his humor, his love of puns, his great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace.

The development of the piano, together with changes in culture and society, led to the transformation of song into a major musical genre. This study of the great lieder of 19th-century composers Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf also includes lesser-known composers, such as Louis Spohr and Robert Franz, plus significant contributions from women composers and performers.