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.

Covers forty years which saw profound changes in music, most of them dominated by Beethoven. Provides a detailed, scholarly critical survey of the music of the period with chapters on French, Italian and German opera and on opera in other countries, on Beethoven's orchestral and chamber music and of his contemporaries on the concerto, on piano music, on solo song and on choral music, as well as an introductory chapter on general musical conditions of the time.

Even in Beethoven's day the 'Moonlight' Sonata was a popular favourite. This 1999 book provides an accessible introduction to the Sonatas Opp. 27 and 31 (including The 'Moonlight' and 'The Tempest'), aimed at pianists, students, and music lovers. It begins with the works' historical background - the emergence of a 'piano culture' at the end of the eighteenth century, Beethoven's aristocratic milieu in Vienna, and his oft-quoted intention to follow a new compositional path. An account of the sonatas' genesis is followed by a discussion of their reception history, including a survey of changing performing styles since the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of the Sonata quasi una Fantasia is examined in relation to the cult of artistic sensibility in early-nineteenth-century Vienna. The study concludes with a critical introduction to each sonata.

Our image of Beethoven has been transformed by the research generated by a succession of scholars and theorists who blazed new trails from the 1960s onwards. This collection of articles written by leading Beethoven scholars brings together strands of this mainly Anglo-American research over the last fifty years and addresses a range of key issues. The volume places Beethoven scholarship within a historical and contemporary context and considers the future of Beethoven studies.

Bringing together reception history, music analysis and criticism, the history of music theory, and the philosophy of music, Beethoven Hero explores the nature and persistence of Beethoven's heroic style. What have we come to value in this music, asks Scott Burnham, and why do generations of critics and analysts hear it in much the same way? Specifically, what is it that fosters the intensity of listener engagement with the heroic style, the often overwhelming sense of identification with its musical process? Starting with the story of heroic quest heard time and again in the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, Burnham suggests that Beethoven's music matters profoundly to its listeners because it projects an empowering sense of self, destiny, and freedom, while modeling ironic self-consciousness. In addition to thus identifying Beethoven's music as an overarching expression of values central to the age of Goethe and Hegel, the author describes and then critiques the process by which the musical values of the heroic style quickly became the controlling model of compositional logic in Western music criticism and analysis. Apart from its importance for students of Beethoven, this book will appeal to those interested in canon formation in the arts and in music as a cultural, ethical, and emotional force--and to anyone concerned with what we want from music and what music does for us.

The definitive book on the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven, written by the acclaimed biographer of Brahms and Ives.

Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, Jaroslav Stetkevych attempts in this book to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre. Stetkevych concentrates on the "places of lost bliss" that furnish the dominant motif in the lyric-elegiac opening section (nasib) of the classic Arab code, or qusidah. In defining the Arabic lyrical genre, he shows how pre-Islamic lamentations over abandoned campsites evolved, in Arabo-Islamic mystical poetry, into expressions of spiritual nostalgia. Stetkevych also draws intriguing parallels between the highlands of Najd in Arabic poetry and Arcadia in the European tradition. He concludes by exploring the degree to which the pastoral-paradisiacal archetype of the nasib pervades Arabic literary perception, from the pre-Islamic ode through the Thousand and One Nights and later texts. Enhanced by Stetkevych's sensitive translations of all the Arabic texts discussed, The Zephyrs of Najd brings the classical Arabic ode fully into the purview of contemporary literary and critical discourse.