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Every year, Johann Sebastian Bach’s major vocal works are performed to mark liturgical milestones in the Christian calendar. Written by a renowned Bach scholar, this book provides an introduction to the music and cultural contexts of the composer’s most beloved masterpieces, including the Magnificat, Christmas Oratorio, and St John Passion. In addition to providing historical information, each chapter highlights significant aspects—such as the theology of love—of a particular piece. This book is the first to treat the vocal works as a whole, showing how the compositions were embedded in their original performative context within the liturgy as well as discussing Bach’s musical style, from the detailed level of individual movements to the overarching aspects of each work. The book will appeal to casual concertgoers and scholars alike.

This biography of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) presents a new view of the innovative Hungarian musician. The book traces Bartók's international career as an ardent ethno-musicologist and composer, teacher, and pianist, while also providing a detailed discussion of most of his works. Further, it explores how Europe's political and cultural tumult affected Bartók's work, travel, and reluctant emigration to the safety of America in his final years. The book illuminates Barték's personal life and relationships, while also expanding what is known about the influence of other musicians. It also looks closely at some of the composer's actions and behaviours which may have been manifestations of Asperger syndrome. The book, in short, is a consummate biography of an internationally admired musician.

Across North America, “Messiah Sing-Ins”—performances of Handel's oratorio with the audience joining in the choruses—are a musical and social highlight of the winter holiday season. Christians, Jews, and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music. Little do they know that Handel and his librettist Charles Jennens's work, compiled and adapted from various passages in the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, appears to have been designed, in part, to rejoice over God's purported punishment of Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as the Messiah. In a final insult, the innocently blissful audience traditionally stands to cheer “Hallelujah!” in a chorus that expresses a powerful Christian triumphalism at the “dashing to pieces” of God's enemies, among them “the people of Israel.” Using previously unidentified historical source materials, this book investigates what went into the creation of Messiah, showing how even the most widely cherished artworks can mask hateful sentiments of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism.

With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich, and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany's historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile, and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. The author looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge such as Britain and the United States, and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment.

In the first fully comprehensive study of one of the world's most iconic musical instruments, this book examines the saxophone's various social, historical, and cultural trajectories, and illustrates how and why this instrument, with its idiosyncratic shape and sound, became important for so many different music-makers around the world. After considering what led inventor Adolphe Sax to develop this new musical wind instrument, the book explores changes in saxophone design since the 1840s before examining the instrument's role in a variety of contexts: in the military bands that contributed so much to the saxophone's global dissemination during the nineteenth century; as part of the rapid expansion of American popular music around the turn of the twentieth century; in classical and contemporary art music; in world and popular music; and, of course, in jazz, a musical style with which the saxophone has become closely identified.

French opera is second only to Italian opera in the length, breadth, and diversity of its history. Yet most people, if asked to come up with titles, could mention only a handful—Carmen, Faust, Pelleas et Melisande, Samson et Dalila—a small list for an operatic tradition that began in the seventeenth century and is still very much alive. This book provides a full, single-volume account of opera in France from its origins to the present day. It looks at the leading composers, from Lully to Messiaen and beyond; at the development of French operatic form and style; at performance, performers, and audience; and at the impact of French opera beyond France's borders.

In his Beat-like jaunt through the Parisian and European jazz scene, the author of this book is not unlike Jack Kerouac, Mezz Mezzrow, or Hunter S. Thompson—writers to whom, for different reasons, he owes some allegiance. What makes him special is his devotion to the troubled musicians he idolizes, and a passion for music that is blessedly contagious. Many jazz fans will know the author for his witty, irreverent, and undeniably hip music reviews and articles in the International Herald Tribune that have entertained us for decades. Based in Paris, or, rather, stuck there, as he likes to say, the author has been a music critic for the Trib since 1979 and also had a distinguished career as a trombonist. When he was just eighteen years old, he was invited by Miles Davis to play alongside Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Max Roach in the band that was immortalized as The Birth of the Cool. This book offers a personal account of the jazz scene in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s. The author writes lovingly but unsparingly about figures he knew and interviewed—such as Dexter Gordon, Freddy Heineken, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Chet Baker, Wayne Shorter, and Melvin Van Peebles. Against this background, he tells us about his own life—split allegiances to journalism and music, and to America and France, his solitary battle for sobriety, a failing marriage, and fatherhood.

This book gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. It discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. The book discusses Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, this book demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

In 1999 the Maryinsky (formerly Kirov) Ballet and Theater in St. Petersburg re-created its 1890 production of Sleeping Beauty. The revival showed the classic work in its original sets and costumes and restored pantomime and choreography that had been eliminated over the past century. Nevertheless, the work proved unexpectedly controversial, with many Russian dance professionals and historians denouncing it. In order to understand how a historically informed performance could be ridiculed by those responsible for writing the history of Russian and Soviet ballet, this book explores the tradition, ideology, and popular legend that have shaped the development of Sleeping Beauty. In the process, it provides a history of Russian and Soviet ballet during the twentieth century.

Since his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn's music and personality have been both admired and denigrated to extraordinary degrees. This book weaves together a rich array of documents—letters, diaries, memoirs, reviews, news reports, and more—to present a balanced and fascinating picture of the composer and his work. Rejecting the received view of Mendelssohn as a facile, lightweight musician, the book demonstrates that he was in fact an innovative and highly cerebral composer who exerted a powerful influence on musical thought into the twentieth century. It discusses Mendelssohn's family background and education; the role of religion and race in his life and reputation; his experiences as practical musician (pianist, organist, string player, conductor) and as teacher and composer; the critical reception of his works; and the vicissitudes of his posthumous reputation. The book also includes a range of hitherto unpublished sketches made by Mendelssohn. The result is a portrayal of the man and his achievements as viewed through his own words and those of his contemporaries.