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The systematic academic study of music gave rise to works of description, analysis and criticism, by composers and performers, philosophers and anthropologists, historians and teachers and by a new kind of scholar - the musicologist. This series makes available a range of significant works encompassing all aspects of the developing discipline.

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178 results in Cambridge Library Collection - Music

Page 4 of 9

My Recollections of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and his Letters to Me
  • Eduard Devrient
  • Translated by Natalia Macfarren
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    24 October 2013
  • Actor and baritone Eduard Devrient (1801–77) first met Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) in 1822, and they remained close friends thereafter. During his lifetime, Mendelssohn achieved celebrity status as a composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor, and it was Devrient who secured in 1829 the famous performance in Berlin, under Mendelssohn's direction, of the St Matthew Passion, which began the Bach revival. First published in German in 1869, this work is reissued here in the English translation of the same year by Natalia Macfarren (1827–1913), singer and wife of the composer Sir George Macfarren. Her work as a translator included the first English versions of Wagner's Lohengrin and Verdi's Rigoletto. Although Devrient does not always exactly reproduce the correspondence, particularly where Mendelssohn is critical of others, the letters and commentary here serve to illuminate the development of a great composer.

The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven
  • Volume 3
  • Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Hermann Deiters, Hugo Riemann
  • Edited and translated by Henry Edward Krehbiel
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    05 September 2013
  • This authoritative biography of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a landmark in its meticulous research and use of source material. For the American author Alexander Wheelock Thayer (1817–97), it represented a lifelong labour of love, yet it remained unfinished at his death. His friend Hermann Deiters (1833–1907) edited and translated Thayer's work into German, publishing three volumes which covered Beethoven's life to 1816. Since Deiters also died before the biography could be completed, musicologist Hugo Riemann (1849–1919) was called upon to conclude the work. The final German volumes appeared in 1907 and 1908. It was the American critic Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854–1923) who prepared the present work, the first and considerably revised English version, published in three volumes in 1921. Volume 3 covers Beethoven's final years, his ninth symphony and late quartets.

Life of Mozart
  • Volume 2
  • Otto Jahn
  • Translated by Pauline D. Townsend
  • Preface by George Grove
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    05 September 2013
  • In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813–69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Köchel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 2 covers Mozart the man, the break with Colloredo, his move to Vienna, marriage, and Freemasonry.

The Annals of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1897
  • Volume 2
  • Henry Saxe Wyndham
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    21 November 2013
  • Commissioned by the enterprising actor-manager John Rich, Covent Garden's Theatre Royal first opened its doors in December 1732. Principally a playhouse during its first century, the venue has had an eventful history involving two disastrous fires and riots over ticket prices. Most notably, it hosted Handel's incomparable operas and oratorios, and was where he presented regular seasons from 1735 until his death in 1759. Not until 1847, under Michael Costa, did the theatre dedicate itself to opera, and in 1892 it received the name by which it is known today: the Royal Opera House. Secretary of the Guildhall School of Music from 1901 to 1935, Henry Saxe Wyndham (1867–1940) published this richly illustrated two-volume account in 1906, celebrating the venue's legendary personalities and productions. Volume 2 covers the period 1819 to 1897 and includes appendices which list principal events and managers.

The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1847)
  • From Letters and Journals
  • Volume 1
  • Sebastian Hensel
  • Translated by Carl Klingemann
  • Introduction by George Grove
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    19 September 2013
  • Sebastian Hensel (1830–98), nephew of the composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), originally intended this work to be 'not only of the family but for the family', drawing on their letters and diaries. Persuaded by friends to publish his narrative in 1879, Hensel in particular provides a first-hand insight into the lives of his uncle, lionized by the music-loving public of his day, and Felix's beloved sister Fanny (1805–47), herself a talented composer and pianist. Translated from the German revised second edition by Felix's close friend, diplomat Carl Klingemann (1798–1862), this 1881 two-volume collection made available for the first time in English a great deal of valuable source material. Covering the period 1729–1835, Volume 1 charts the family's history from the birth of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to the death of his son, banker Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who was the father of Felix.

Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies
  • George Grove
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    23 January 2014
  • Beethoven's symphonies captured the public imagination from the outset and remain compelling today. Revolutionary in their time, these life-enhancing works now sit at the centre of the classical music repertoire, retaining their ability to delight and inspire. The career of Sir George Grove (1820–1900) ranged from civil engineering to biblical scholarship, but he is best known for editing his celebrated Dictionary of Music and Musicians. A driving force at the heart of nineteenth-century British musical life, Grove organised important concerts at the rebuilt Crystal Palace in Sydenham, and he served as the first director of the Royal College of Music from 1883 to 1894. First published in 1896, and reissued here in its swiftly corrected and indexed second edition, this work is a classic of musical analysis, exploring the composition, structure, performance and reception of each symphony in turn. Intended for 'the amateurs of this country', it represents the culmination of a lifetime's research.

The School of Musical Composition, Practical and Theoretical
  • With Additional Notes and a Special Preface for the English Edition
  • Adolf Bernhard Marx
  • Translated by Augustus Wehrhan
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    17 April 2014
  • The influential music theorist and composer Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795–1866) spent much of his career as a professor of music in Berlin and was a friend and mentor of Mendelssohn. He believed music should be part of everyone's general education and lobbied the Prussian government for a comprehensive national scheme for musical education. His compositions included many songs and choral works now largely forgotten, with the exception of the 1841 oratorio Mose. Among his publications is Gluck und die Oper (1863) which is reissued in this series in both the German original and English translation. His most famous and influential work, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, was intended for the students of the University of Berlin, setting out in simple terms the principles of music theory and composition for the untrained. This English translation, of only the first volume of the fourth edition, was published in 1852.

The History of Modern Music
  • A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain
  • John Hullah
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    20 March 2014
  • The music teacher and composer John Pyke Hullah (1812–84) is best remembered for his 'singing school for schoolmasters'. Through his dedicated efforts music was embedded into the school curriculum, and his inspiration influenced the rapid growth of amateur choral societies in Britain. Professor of vocal music at King's College, London, from 1844 to 1874, Hullah was elected to the committee of management of the Royal Academy of Music in 1869 and in 1872 became the first government inspector of music in teacher training colleges. Published in 1862, this accessible history of music from plainsong to the mid-nineteenth century, which Hullah divided into four periods, was first given as a course of six lectures at the Royal Institution in 1861. A further series of lectures, The Third or Transition Period of Musical History, is also reissued in this series in its 1876 second edition.

Marchesi and Music
  • Passages from the Life of a Famous Singing-Teacher
  • Mathilde Marchesi
  • Introduction by Jules Massenet
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    27 June 2013
  • The German mezzo-soprano and celebrated singing teacher Mathilde Marchesi (1821–1913) presents an illuminating account of her life in these memoirs. First published in 1897, the book reflects the significant role that Marchesi played in vocal education during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Having begun her career as a performer, from 1854 she devoted herself to teaching at the Vienna Conservatory and also in Paris and Cologne. She instructed many of the pre-eminent female singers of the age, including Nellie Melba, Mary Garden and Emma Calvé. Also renowned for bringing the Italian bel canto vocal technique into the twentieth century, Marchesi occupied a prominent position in musical history. Featuring musical excerpts and a number of other illustrations, these memoirs record her outstanding achievements and strong opinions. The work also includes a brief introduction by the French composer Jules Massenet.

The Third or Transition Period of Musical History
  • A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain
  • John Hullah
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    24 October 2013
  • The music teacher and composer John Pyke Hullah (1812–84) is best remembered for his 'singing school for schoolmasters'. Through his dedicated efforts music was embedded into the school curriculum, and his inspiration influenced the rapid growth of amateur choral societies in Britain. Professor of vocal music at King's College, London, from 1844 to 1874, Hullah was elected to the committee of management of the Royal Academy of Music in 1869 and in 1872 became the first government inspector of music in teacher training colleges. The work reissued here is the second edition, published in 1876, of lectures given at the Royal Institution in 1865 on the topic of Italian, French, German and English music from the Renaissance to Handel. It expands on part of his overarching 1861 course of lectures, The History of Modern Music, which is also reissued in this series.

Life of John Hullah
  • John Hullah
  • Edited by Frances Hullah
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    27 June 2013
  • The composer and music teacher John Pyke Hullah (1812–84) enjoyed considerable success with The Village Coquettes, his 1836 opera with a libretto by Charles Dickens. He is best remembered, however, for his 'singing school for schoolmasters' which he directed at London's Exeter Hall in the 1840s and later at the specially built St Martin's Hall. Although his use of the French fixed sol-fa system was quickly superseded by Curwen's tonic sol-fa approach, his efforts - with the support of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth - embedded music firmly in the school curriculum. An influence on the rapid growth of British amateur choral societies, he was also appointed the first government inspector of music in training colleges in 1872. First published in 1886, this biography was prepared from Hullah's notes by his second wife, Frances Rosser Hullah (1839–c.1921), a professional sculptor and writer on music for women's periodicals.

Tonpsychologie
  • Volume 2
  • Carl Stumpf
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    27 June 2013
    First published in:
    1890
  • The German polymath Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) influenced one of the most significant philosophical developments of the early twentieth century: his student, Edmund Husserl, founded modern phenomenology. In a distinguished academic career spanning more than five decades, Stumpf also contributed to the growth of Gestalt psychology and ethnomusicology. An accomplished amateur musician, he used experimental methods to further the scientific study of music theory. His best-known work, first published in two volumes between 1883 and 1890, rigorously investigates the psychology of tone and music, ranging in coverage from physiology to acoustics. Its aim is to elucidate the effect that sounds have on various psychological functions. In Volume 2, Stumpf focuses on describing how the mind responds to listening to different sounds at the same time. He addresses the fusion of different sounds as well as distinguishing between sound and noise.

The Troubadours
  • A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages
  • Francis Hueffer
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    22 August 2013
    First published in:
    1878
  • Born in Germany, where he studied music and philology, Francis Hueffer (1845–89) moved to London in 1869 to pursue a career as a critic and writer on music. He edited a series of biographies of notable musicians, served as music critic for The Times, contributed articles to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and was an early advocate and interpreter to the British of Wagner. In 1872 he married Catherine, the younger daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. Their son was the writer Ford Maddox Ford. Provençal studies were an abiding interest of Hueffer's and he intended this work, first published in 1878, to be an approachable English-language study of medieval Provençal literary and musical culture. It won him membership of the Félibrige, the association of Provençal writers, and he gave lectures on the topic at the Royal Institution in 1880.

Richard Wagner
  • His Life and his Dramas; a Biographical Study of the Man and an Explanation of his Work
  • William James Henderson
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    06 June 2013
  • The American music critic and lecturer William James Henderson (1855–1937) wrote for The New York Times and The New York Sun, provided the libretto for Walter Damrosch's opera Cyrano (1913) and authored fiction, poetry, sea stories and a textbook on navigation. He also taught at the New York College of Music and the Institute of Musical Art. Taking up the cause of Wagner with considerable understanding, he published this substantial work in 1902, barely twenty years after the composer's death. It is an illuminating account of Wagner's life and artistic aims, complemented by an insightful analysis of each of his music dramas from Rienzi to Parsifal. Its purpose, states Henderson, 'is to supply Wagner lovers with a single work which shall meet all their needs'. With Ernest Newman's Study of Wagner (1899), also reissued in this series, it reflects the composer's contemporary popularity.

Verdi: Milan and Othello
  • Being a Short Life of Verdi, with Letters Written about Milan and the New Opera of Othello
  • Blanche Roosevelt
  • Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    06 June 2013
    First published in:
    1887
  • The premiere of Otello, Giuseppe Verdi's only new opera for over a decade, was a much-anticipated event in Milan in February 1887, and musical talents from all over Europe had vied for the chance to be part of it. An American author and former opera singer, Blanche Roosevelt (1853–98) took an assignment as a special correspondent in Milan during the weeks surrounding the opera's premiere at La Scala. She was well connected in the artistic community and personally acquainted with Verdi himself, and her dispatches paint an informed and vivid picture of the city and its musical and literary scene in the late 1880s. Published in 1887, along with a short biography of Verdi, anecdotes, illustrations, and reminiscences of conversations with the composer, these writings will appeal to both music scholars and opera lovers.

Joseph Haydn
  • Pauline D. Townsend
  • Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    22 August 2013
  • Admired and studied by both Mozart and Beethoven, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) imbued his life-enhancing compositions with wit, elegance and deep emotion. His output was prolific and included symphonies (most notably those written during his two visits to London, where he received a rapturous welcome), string quartets, chamber music, piano sonatas and choral works. This concise biography, first published in 1884, forms part of music critic Francis Hueffer's Great Musicians series, which was intended to provide succinct accounts of popular composers for the general reader. The author, Pauline D. Townsend, drew much of her material for the book from the painstaking research on Haydn published by the German musicologist Carl Ferdinand Pohl, archivist and librarian of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. A list of Haydn's works forms an appendix, based on the information in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Gluck and the Opera
  • A Study in Musical History
  • Ernest Newman
  • Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    24 September 2009
    First published in:
    1895
  • Early in his long career, the self-taught English music critic Ernest Newman (1868–1959) wrote this influential account of Gluck's life and musical achievements in relation to the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. First published in 1895, Gluck and the Opera traces the composer's ideas and his efforts to move opera forward after a period of stagnation. Musicians, thinkers and satirists had been writing for generations about the need to reform the opera, but it was Gluck who brought about far-reaching changes that paved the way for Mozart, Weber and Wagner. His most notable innovation was the fusing of the Italian and French operatic traditions. The first part of the book is a chronological account of Gluck's eventful career, which took him all over Europe but was centred on Paris and Vienna. The second part deals with Gluck in his broader cultural and intellectual context, and lists his works.

A Concise History of Music
  • From the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time
  • Henry George Bonavia Hunt
  • Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    22 August 2013
  • Henry George Bonavia Hunt (1847–1917) is best remembered as the founder of Trinity College of Music, London, which had grown out of the Church Choral Society he had established in 1872. A talented preacher and choirmaster, he also edited several popular journals, composed, and served as a lecturer in music history for the University of London between 1900 and 1906. This popular textbook, first published in 1878 and reissued here in its revised third edition of 1879, is a systematic study of musical history for easy assimilation by students. It presents an overview of musical epochs, with each paragraph classified according to nationality, thus allowing the musical history of specific countries to be followed. In addition to chronological tables covering major composers and musical events, the work also includes a summary of the development of music as an art. This is followed by more than 200 sample examination questions.

Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes of Music and Musicians, Ancient and Modern
  • Volume 1
  • Thomas Busby
  • Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    05 September 2013
  • The writer, composer and organist Thomas Busby (1754–1838) was originally articled to the composer Jonathan Battishill before setting out to make his living from both musical and literary labours. His compositions (many now lost) include songs, theatre music and oratorios. His written output comprised journal articles and monographs, among them A Grammar of Music and A General History of Music (both reissued in this series). The present work, his most endearing, was first published in 1825. Gossipy, informative and highly entertaining, it yields all manner of insights into musical life through history. Approximately a thousand anecdotes are assembled across the three volumes as a delightful potpourri, interspersed with pen portraits of eminent musicians. Volume 1 includes discussion of Sir John Hawkins, the Panharmonicon, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Beethoven's eccentricity, and music as a treatment for the bite of a spider.

A Study of Wagner
  • Ernest Newman
  • Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    20 July 2009
    First published in:
    1899
  • This is the first of several in-depth studies of Wagner and his music by the renowned music critic Ernest Newman (1868–1959), leading up to the great four-volume biography The Life of Richard Wagner, published 1933–47. This 1899 work presents a thoroughly researched critical analysis of the composer's aesthetics, philosophy, social and political ideas, and their expression through his musical development and theoretical writings. As Newman states in his introduction, his exploration of Wagner's personality through his works aims to answer the question, 'In virtue of what constitution of brain was he so great a musician?' The book considers all the major music dramas; looks at Wagner's theory of music, poetry and music drama; includes a biographical timeline giving the dates of his compositions, publications and other musical events of the period; and ends by discussing the essence of the composer's character and his contribution to music.

Page 4 of 9