Mozart The Golden Years 1781 1791

Robbins Landon, one of America's most eminent musicologists, examines the last decade of Mozart's life. This musician, who may have suffered from manic depression, used this condition to compose his most emotionally satisfying and artistically brilliant works. Illustrated.

Offers a detailed examination of Mozart's final months, discusses the cause of his death, and looks at his final compositions.

A vivid portrait of Mozart and Haydn's greatest achievements and young Beethoven's works under their influence. Completing the trilogy begun with Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740-1780 and continued in Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780, Daniel Heartz concludes his extensive chronicle of the Classical Era with this much-anticipated third volume. By the early years of the nineteenth century, "Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven" had become a catchphrase—a commonplace expression signifying musical excellence. Indeed, even in his early career, Beethoven was hailed as the only musician worthy to stand beside Haydn and Mozart. In this volume, Heartz winds up the careers of Haydn and Mozart (who during the 1780s produced their most famous and greatest works) and describes Beethoven's first decade in Vienna, during which he began composing by patterning his works on the two masters. The tumult and instability of the French Revolution serves as a vivid historical backdrop for the tale.

A concise biography of a musical genius combines a well-researched life of Mozard the composer with an introduction to his many works, in a study of one of the few musicians in history to have written undisputed masterpieces in every genre of his time.

Comprehensive and engaging exploration of Mozart's greatest works, focussing on his dual roles as performer and composer in Vienna.

This volume of essays on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reflects scholarly advances made over the last thirty years. The studies are broad and focused, demonstrating a large number of viewpoints, methodologies and orientations and the material spans a wide range of subject areas, including biography, vocal music, instrumental music and performance. Written by leading researchers from Europe and North America, these previously published articles and book chapters are representative of both the most frequently discussed and debated issues in Mozart studies and the challenging, exciting nature of Mozart scholarship in general. The volume is essential reading for researchers, students and scholars of Mozart's music.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. Surprisingly, heretofore there has been no truly extensive, broad-based treatment of the genre, and the best of the existing studies are now several decades old. In this five-volume series, A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. Synthesizing the enormous scholarly literature, Brown presents up-to-date overviews of the status of research, discusses any important former or remaining problems of attribution, illuminates the style of specific works and their contexts, and samples early writings on their reception. The Symphonic Repertoire provides an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. The series is being launched with two volumes on the Viennese symphony. Volume II The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert Volume II considers some of the best-known and most universally admired symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, who created what A. Peter Brown designates as the first golden age of the Viennese symphony during the late 18th and first three decades of the 19th century. The last two dozen symphonies by Haydn, half dozen by Mozart, and three by Schubert, together with Beethoven's nine symphonies became established in the repertoire and provided a standard against which every other symphony would be measured. Most significantly, they imparted a prestige to the genre that was only occasionally rivaled by other cyclic compositions. More than 170 symphonies from this repertoire are described and analyzed in The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony, the first volume of the series to appear.