Robert Schumann was a unique personality in 19th century music: a celebrated music critic and champion of new composers as well as a talented performer and composer himself, he did much to modernize the literature and performance style for the piano. This book covers the key period of c. 1815-55, exploring how the generation that came after Beethoven was central in reshaping and refining the conception of the concerto style, and particularly the piano concerto. It relates Schumann's own compositional development to his musical environment, recreating the exciting milieu in which Schumann and his contemporaries lived and worked. Written in scholarly, but non-technical language, Robert Schumann and the Development of the Piano Concerto will appeal to college and conservatory teachers and students, as well as music connoisseurs. Also includes 60 musical examples.

Mozart's piano concertos stand alongside his operas and symphonies as his most frequently performed and best loved music. They have attracted the attention of generations of musicologists who have explored their manifold meanings from a variety of viewpoints. In this study, John Irving brings together the various strands of scholarship surrounding Mozart's concertos including analytical approaches, aspects of performance practice and issues of compositional genesis based on investigation of manuscript and early printed editions. Treating the concertos collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the first section of the book tackles broad thematic issues such as the role of the piano concerto in Mozart's quasi-freelance life in late eighteenth-century Vienna, the origin of his concertos in earlier traditions of concerto writing; eighteenth-century theoretical frameworks for the understanding of movement forms, subsequent historical shifts in the perception of the concerto's form, listening strategies and performance practices. This is followed by a 'documentary register' which proceeds through all 23 original works, drawing together information on the source materials. Accounts of the concertos' compositional genesis, early performance history and reception are also included here, drawing extensively on the Mozart family correspondence and other contemporary reports. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.

How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? -- how those notes should be played and sung? -- the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? -- how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? -- what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made? We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers' letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others have begun to be examined only in recent years. Furthermore, musicologists -- including biographers of famous composers -- now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel. These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing -- reimagining, sometimes -- the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future. Roberta Montemorra Marvin is Director of Research and Development for International Programs, University of Iowa; Stephen A. Crist is Associate Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Emory University.

"In a series of dialogues with Martin Meyer, Brendel speaks about his life, the development of his career, his music-making, his travels, his poems and essays; about his childhood in Zagreb, adolescence in Graz, and experiences as a young man in Vienna ("I was in Vienna, but I was never a 'genuine' Viennese"); about literature, painting, architecture, and kitsch.".

Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest pianists of our time, is renowned for his masterly interpretations of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt, and has been credited with rescuing from oblivion the piano music of Schubert's last years. Far from having merely one string to his bow, however, Brendel is also one of the world's most remarkable writers on music - possessed of the rare ability to bring the clarity and originality of expression that characterised his performances to the printed page. The definitive collection of his award-winning writings and essays, Music, Sense and Nonsense combines all of his work originally published in his two classic books, Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out, along with significant new material on a lifetime of recording, performance habits and reflections on life and art. As well as providing stimulating reading, this new edition provides a unique insight into the exceptional mind of one of the outstanding musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether discussing Bach or Beethoven, Schubert or Schoenberg, Brendel's reflections are illuminating and challenging, a treasure for the specialist and the music lover alike.

If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn’s music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer’s life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.