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Francis Poulenc is a key figure in twentieth-century classical music, as well as an unorthodox and striking individual. This book draws upon Poulenc's music and other primary sources to write an authoritative life of this great artist. Although associated with five other French composers in what came to be called “Les Six,” Poulenc was very much sui generis in personality and in his music, where he excelled over a wide repertoire-opera, songs, ballet scores, chamber works, piano pieces, sacred and secular choral works, orchestral works and concertos. This book fully covers this wide range, while also describing the vicissitudes of Poulenc's life and the many important relationships he had with major figures such as Satie, Ravel, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Cocteau and others.

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.

Everyone has heard of George Balanchine. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine's contemporary, who remained in Lenin's Russia and survived censorship during the darkest days of Stalin. Like Shostakovich, Yakobson suffered for his art and yet managed to create a singular body of revolutionary dances that spoke to the Soviet condition. His work was often considered so culturally explosive that it was described as “like a bomb going off.” Based on untapped archival collections of photographs, films, and writings about Yakobson's work in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets, as well as interviews with former dancers, family, and audience members, this biography examines a hidden history of artistic resistance in the USSR through this brave artist, who struggled against officially sanctioned anti-Semitism while offering a vista of hope.

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.

Drawing on a mass of unpublished writings and archival sources from prerevolutionary Russian conservatories, this book offers an account of the Jewish search for a modern identity in Russia through music, rather than politics or religion.

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.

This is a book-length study of Shostakovich's Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues for piano, Opus 87. It explains the cultural context in which Shostakovich composed, relates the cycle to piano works (by Bach, Hindemith, and others), and offers individual commentaries on each of the Preludes and Fugues.