The Cambridge Companion To Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal system to be liabilities. However, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the composer. This Companion surveys the results, focusing on the principal genres, the social and historical context, and topics perennially controversial over the last century. Chapters cover Strauss's immense operatic output, the electrifying modernism of his tone poems, and his ever-popular Lieder. Controversial topics are explored, including Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich and the sexual dimension of his works. Reintroducing the composer and his music in light of recent research, the volume shows Strauss's artistic personality to be richer and much more complicated than has been previously acknowledged.

Arnold Schoenberg – composer, theorist, teacher, painter, and one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music. This Companion presents engaging essays by leading scholars on Schoenberg's central works, writings, and ideas over his long life in Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Challenging monolithic views of the composer as an isolated elitist, the volume demonstrates that what has kept Schoenberg and his music interesting and provocative was his profound engagement with the musical traditions he inherited and transformed, with the broad range of musical and artistic developments during his lifetime he critiqued and incorporated, and with the fundamental cultural, social, and political disruptions through which he lived. The book provides introductions to Schoenberg's most important works, and to his groundbreaking innovations including his twelve-tone compositions. Chapters also examine Schoenberg's lasting influence on other composers and writers over the last century.

Leo Strauss was a central figure in the twentieth century renaissance of political philosophy. The essays of The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss provide a comprehensive and non-partisan survey of the major themes and problems that constituted Strauss's work. These include his revival of the great 'quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,' his examination of tension between Jerusalem and Athens, and most controversially his recovery of the tradition of esoteric writing. The volume also examines Strauss's complex relation to a range of contemporary political movements and thinkers, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Gershom Scholem, as well as the creation of a distinctive school of 'Straussian' political philosophy.

The contributions to this handbook bring together a full-length study of Elektra in English. The volume examines the many facets of one of Richard Strauss's most complex operas. First, P. E. Easterling surveys the mythological background, while Karen Forsyth discusses Hofmannsthal's adaptation of his sources. The second part brings the music to the fore. Derrick Puffett offers an introductory essay and synopsis; Arnold Whittall considers the tonal and dramatic structure of the composition; Tethys Carpenter explores the musical language of the work in detail, with special focus given to part of the Klytaemnestra scene. The third part of the volume offers two contrasting critical essays: Carolyn Abbate provides an interpretation informed by her recent work on narrative, and Robin Holloway analyses Strauss's orchestration of the opera. The book also contains a discography and an appendix of excerpts from the Strauss-Hofmannsthal correspondence.

Beginning several generations before Schubert, the Lied first appears as domestic entertainment. In the century that follows it becomes one of the primary modes of music-making. By the time German song comes to its presumed conclusion with Richard Strauss's 1948 Vier letzte Lieder, this rich repertoire has moved beyond the home and keyboard accompaniment to the symphony hall. This is a 2004 introductory chronicle of this fascinating genre. In essays by eminent scholars, this Companion places the Lied in its full context - at once musical, literary, and cultural - with chapters devoted to focal composers as well as important issues, such as the way in which the Lied influenced other musical genres, its use as a musical commodity, and issues of performance. The volume is framed by a detailed chronology of German music and poetry from the late 1730s to the present and also contains a comprehensive bibliography.

This first full-length study of Salome in English since Lawrence Gilman's (1907) moves from historical and literary analysis to critical appraisal and includes a synopsis, bibliography and discography.

This guide to the orchestra and orchestral life is unique in its breadth of coverage. It combinesorchestral history and repertory with a practical bias offering critical thought about the past, present and future of the orchestra. Including topics such as the art of orchestration, scorereading, conducting, international orchestras, recording, as well as consideration of what it means to be an orchestral musician, an educator, or an informed listener, it will be of interest to a wideranging readership of music historians and professional or amateur performers.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Stauss's death, scholarly interest in the composer continues to grow. Despite what was once a tendency by musicologists to overlook or deny Strauss's importance, these essays firmly place the German composer in the musical mainstream and situate him among the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally published in 1992, this volume examines Strauss's life and work from a number of approaches and during various periods of his long career, opening up unique corridors of insight into a crucial time in German history. Contributors discuss Strauss as a young composer steeped in a conservative instrumental tradition, as a brash young modernist tone poet of the 1890s, as an important composer of twentieth-century German opera, and as a cultural icon manipulated by the national socialists during the 1930s and early 1940s. Individual essays use Strauss's creative work as a framework for larger musicological questions such as the tension between narrative and structure in program music, the problem of extended tonality at the turn of the century, stylistic choice versus stylistic obligation, and conflicting perspectives of progressive versus conservative music. This collection will interest Strauss scholars, musicologists, and those interested in the artistic and cultural life of Germany from 1880 through the Second World War. Contributors. Kofi Agawu, Günter Brosche, Bryan Gilliam, Stephen Hefling, James A. Hepokoski, Timothy L. Jackson, Michael Kennedy, Lewis Lockwood, Barbara A. Peterson, Pamela Potter, Reinhold Schlötterer, R. Larry Todd

Written for students, performers, and music lovers.

This Companion to Schubert examines the career, music, and reception of one of the most popular yet misunderstood and elusive composers. Sixteen chapters by leading Schubert scholars make up three parts. The first seeks to situate the social, cultural, and musical climate in which Schubert lived and worked, the second surveys the scope of his musical achievement, and the third charts the course of his reception from the perceptions of his contemporaries to the assessments of posterity. Myths and legends about Schubert the man are explored critically and the full range of his musical accomplishment is examined.