These volumes present approximately 430 letters and documents written to Beethoven (1770--1827) as well as those written by others (relatives, students, and secretaries) on his behalf. Along with over 70 of Beethoven's own letters discovered since Emily Anderson's three-volume Letters of Beethoven, these documents provide new insights into the composer's personal life. They illuminate his dealings with publishers, other musicians, poets, patrons, relatives, friends, and a wide variety of acquaintances. The documents provide important details about the composition of many works, Beethoven's performance practices, his criticisms of other composers and performers, and his role in the Napoleonic era. Gleaned from more than one hundred publications and collected from autograph sources in libraries and archives in Europe and the United States, these materials have never before appeared between two covers. At least sixty of the letters have never previously been published. Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence vastly enlarges accessibility to Beethoven's busy life and the music he made.

"These volumes present approximately 430 letters and documents written to Beethoven ... as well as those written by others (relatives, students, and secretaries) on his behalf ... They illuminate his dealings with publishers, other musicians, poets, patrons, relatives, friends, and a wide variety of acquaintances."--Jacket.

This lively book takes us back to the first performances of five famous musical compositions: Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607, Handel's Messiah in 1742, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique in 1830, and Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps in 1913. Thomas Forrest Kelly sets the scene for each of these premieres, describing the cities in which they took place, the concert halls, audiences, conductors, and musicians, the sound of the music when it was first performed (often with instruments now extinct), and the popular and critical responses. He explores how performance styles and conditions have changed over the centuries and what music can reveal about the societies that produce it. Kelly tells us, for example, that Handel recruited musicians he didn't know to perform Messiah in a newly built hall in Dublin; that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was performed with a mixture of professional and amateur musicians after only three rehearsals; and that Berlioz was still buying strings for the violas and mutes for the violins on the day his symphony was first played. Kelly's narrative, which is enhanced by extracts from contemporary letters, press reports, account books, and other sources, as well as by a rich selection of illustrations, gives us a fresh appreciation of these five masterworks, encouraging us to sort out our own late twentieth-century expectations from what is inherent in the music.

The first full length study of Sir George Thomas Smart (1776-1867), musical animateur and early champion of the music of Beethoven

Travelling Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century is about how ideas travel on the waves of cultural transfer. The volume focuses in particular on the exchange of ideas, knowledge and culture between the Nordic countries and continental Europe. It includes reflections on travelling and transmitting ideas through various forms, and takes a step further in scrutinising how new theories in literary, cultural and historical studies, as well as new methods, are influencing research in the field of cultural transfer and transmission. In the first part of the volume, the authors examine the export and import of ideas through literature in translation, travel letters, international education strategies and the establishment of artists' colonies. Attention is paid to how writers, artists and cultural transmitters used their cross-border mobility in transferring ideas and how they were connected to each other in new contact zones. The second part is dedicated to new research approaches, such as the use of digital instruments, and research on the strategies and politics behind translated literature. Here, translation bibliographies and the bibliographical data of national libraries, which today are often accessible in digital form, come under scrutiny. These sources are valuable objects of study in the mining of translation flows.