A comprehensive guide to Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with German/English translation side-by side, and over 30 music highlight examples.

A complete, newly translated LIBRETTO of Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE featuring Music Highlight Examples and German/English translation side-by-side.

(Amadeus). Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths explores in detail 20 of the composer's major works in the context of his tragically brief life and the turbulent times in which he lived. Addressed to non-musicians seeking to deepen their technical appreciation for his music while learning more about Mozart the man than the caricature portrayed in the 1986 movie Amadeus , this book offers extensive biographical and historical background debunking many well-established Mozart myths along with guided study of compositions representing every genre of 18th-century music: opera, concerto, symphony, church music, divertimento and serenade, sonata, and string quartet. Author Roye E. Wates, a Mozart specialist, has taught music history to thousands of non-musicians, both undergraduates and adults, as a Professor of Music at Boston University and from 2002-2004 as director of Boston University's Adult Music Seminar at Tanglewood, summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths provides a unique combination of biographical detail, up-to-date research, detailed musical analyses, and clear definitions of terms. Amateurs as well as more advanced musicians will gain a greater understanding of Mozart's encyclopedic mastery.

Foreword by Jost Hermand The libretti of the greatest German operas: Mozart's The Magic Flute, Beethoven's Fidelio, Wagner's Parsifal, Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and Schoenberg's Moses and Aron.

This volume demonstrates for the first time that Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte is an enactment of the alchemical opus magnum, in the form of a chemical wedding. Towards the end of the 18th century, alchemy was still a prominent mystical current within the Order of Freemasons of which Mozart and his librettists were members. The central part focuses on the opera's alchemical structure, whereas the historical and mythological backgrounds are also dealt with extensively. The book comes with 3 CD's offering a rendition of the integral opera, in contrast to the common practice of leaving out major parts of the libretto. The Magic Flute is a fascinating journey of discovery, an initiation into Initiation. With complete original libretto and over 100 pictures.

The Philosopher's Stone is a collection of case studies in compositional process; not so much about how the music was arrived at through its sketch stages, but more are construction of issues of form as the defining features of a genre, and structure as the individual realization in a particular work. Great musical movements and works are seen as highly creative solutions to problem-solving. The contexts of the works differ considerably. Some were written against the background of a specific precedent or model, as with Mozart's Haydn quartets via Haydn's Op. 33 set. In other cases, as with Beethoven's middle period style, the composer reconsiders a comprehensive range of implications about style and construction, of how, after earlier successes now outworn, to make a new and significant contribution to the genre without duplicating earlier solutions. The essays are grouped into three sections: on Beethoven studies, Mozart in retrospect, and nineteenth-century music. All the movements and works in these chapters pose in their different ways these issues of structural reinterpretation and re-formation, where the reworking of the form leads to a distinctive and higher level transformation

Music excerpts are presented to show Mozart's use of tonal quality, voice interaction, and mood and melody changes in his five greatest operas