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Nineteenth-Century Music: The Western Classical Tradition provides a guide to the basic literature of European art music from which we still draw the majority of our repertory in modern concert halls and opera theaters. The study explores standard works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Bellini, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Bizet, Brahms, Strauss, Franck, Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Dvofdk, Mahler, and Puccini, tracing the various artistic threads woven through Western music between 1800 and 1900. Frequent and detailed tables serve readers as guides to examination of musical scores from this period or as roadmaps to listening, and the text provides relevant biographical background on the composers whose work we most often enjoy today. Students will find this history to be a succinct and accessible introduction to a central period in Western classical music, and other readers may enjoy its concise summary of the nineteenth century's musical milieu.
List of contents
1. Nineteenth-Century Music: Overview and Background.
2. The Viennese Ascendancy.
3. Operatic Premises: Musical Drama in the First Part of the Nineteenth Century.
4. The Styling of the Avant-Garde.
5. The Complete Work of Art: Operatic Development from Mid Century.
6. The Life of the Concert Hall After Mid Century.
7. The Diversity of Nationalism.
8. The New Language at Century's End.
About the author
Jon Finson serves as Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught music history and musicology to undergraduate and graduate students for over twenty-three years. An expert in nineteenthcentury music, he has published books on the symphonies of Robert Schumann and the history of American popular song, and articles on subjects ranging from Bach to Barry Manilow in the United States and abroad. He has lectured in the United States, Asia, and Europe, and he is currently working on an edition of Robert Schumann's D minor Symphony in its 1841 version for Breitkopf & Hartel as well as on a book about Schumann's Lieder for Harvard University Press.
Summary
For Nineteenth-Century Classical Music courses.
This up-to-date view of nineteenth-century classical music places a strong emphasis on the history of opera and on schematic representations of musical structure and form. The book presents a highly concise survey of nineteenth-century music tailored for the increasingly limited amount of time available to students for the study of any one period, and focuses specifically on the central repertory heard today in the concert hall and at the opera house.
