Log In
Or create an account ->
Imperial Library
Home
About
News
Upload
Forum
Help
Login/SignUp
Index
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright page
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Preface
Chapter 1 Opera from Monteverdi to Monteverdi
Princely and Public Theaters; Monteverdi’s Contributions to Both
Court and commerce
From Mantua to Venice
Poetics and esthesics
Opera and its politics
Sex objects, sexed and unsexed
The quintessential princely spectacle
The carnival show
Chapter 2 Fat Times and Lean
Organ Music from Frescobaldi to Scheidt; Schütz’s Career; Oratorio and Cantata
Some organists
The toccata
Sweelinck—His patrimony and his progeny
Lutheran adaptations: The chorale partita
The chorale concerto
Ruin
A creative microcosm
Luxuriance
Shriveled down to the expressive nub
Carissimi: Oratorio and cantata
Women in music: A historians’ dilemma
Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored
Tragédie Lyrique from Lully to Rameau; English Music in the Seventeenth Century
Sense and sensuousness
The politics of patronage
Drama as court ritual
Atys, the king’s opera
Art and politics: Some caveats
Jacobean England
Masque and consort
Ayres and suites: Harmonically determined form
Distracted times
Restoration
Purcell
Dido and Aeneas and the question of “English opera”
The making of a classic
Chapter 4 Class and Classicism
Opera Seria and Its Makers
Naples
Scarlatti
Neoclassicism
Metastasio
Metastasio’s musicians
The fortunes of Artaserse
Opera seria in (and as) practice
“Performance practice”
Chapter 5 The Italian Concerto Style and the Rise of Tonality-Driven Form
Corelli, Vivaldi, and Their German Imitators
Standardized genres and tonal practices
What, exactly, is “tonality”?
The spread of “tonal form”
The fugal style
Handel and “defamiliarization”
Bach and “dramatized” tonality
Vivaldi’s five hundred
“Concerti madrigaleschi”
Chapter 6 Class of 1685 (I)
Careers of J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel Compared; Bach’s Instrumental Music
Contexts and canons
Careers and lifestyles
Roots (domestic)
Roots (imported)
Bach’s suites
A close-up
“Agrémens” and “doubles”
Stylistic hybrids
The “Brandenburg” Concertos
“Obbligato” writing and/or arranging
What does it all mean?
Chapter 7 Class of 1685 (II)
Handel’s Operas and Oratorios; Bach’s Cantatas and Passions; Domenico Scarlatti
Handel on the Strand
Lofty entertainments
Messiah
“Borrowing”
Back to Bach: The cantatas
The old style
The new style
Musical symbolism, musical idealism
What music is for
Bach’s “testaments”
The Bach revival
Cursed questions
Scarlatti, at last
Chapter 8 The Comic Style
Mid-Eighteenth-Century Stylistic Change Traced to Its Sources in the 1720s; Empfindsamkeit; Galanterie; “War of the Buffoons”
You can’t get there from here
The younger Bachs
Sensibility
The London Bach
Sociability music
“Nature”
Intermission plays
The “War of the Buffoons”
Chapter 9 Enlightenment and Reform
The Operas of Piccinni, Gluck, and Mozart
Novels sung on stage
Noble simplicity
Another querelle
What was Enlightenment?
Mozart
Idomeneo
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
The “Da Ponte” operas
Late works
Don Giovanni close up
Music as a social mirror
Music and (or as) morality
Chapter 10 Instrumental Music Lifts Off
The Eighteenth-Century Symphony; Haydn
Party music goes public
Concert life is born
An army of generals
The Bach sons as “symphonists”
Haydn
The perfect career
The Esterházy years
Norms and deviations: Creating musical meaning
Sign systems
Anatomy of a joke
The London tours
Addressing throngs
Variation and development
More surprises
The culminating work
Chapter 11 The Composer’s Voice
Mozart’s Piano Concertos; His Last Symphonies; the Fantasia as Style and as Metaphor
Art for art’s sake?
Psychoanalyzing music
The “symphonic” concerto is born
Mozart in the marketplace
Composing and performing
Performance as self-dramatization
The tip of the iceberg
Fantasia as metaphor
The coming of museum culture
Chapter 12 The First Romantics
Late Eighteenth-century Music Esthetics; Beethoven’s Career and His Posthumous Legend
The beautiful and the sublime
Classic or Romantic?
Beethoven and “Beethoven”
Kampf und Sieg
The Eroica
Crisis and reaction
The “Ninth”
Inwardness
Chapter 13 C-Minor Moods
The “Struggle and Victory” Narrative and Its Relationship to Four C-Minor Works of Beethoven
Devotion and derision
Transgression
Morti di Eroi
Germination and growth
Letting go
The music century
Notes
Art Credits
Further Reading
Index
← Prev
Back
Next →
← Prev
Back
Next →