"Among the possible relationships between art forms that express themselves in different sign systems, the pairing of words and images is the one that is most thoroughly explored. And in fact, the most securely established terminology is found in a field that has experienced a significant revival in recent years: ekphrasis. The literary topos through which a poem (or any other text) addresses itself to the visual arts has received much attention in recent years and been subjected to intense scrutiny."--BOOK JACKET.

Program music was one of the most flexible and contentious novelties of the long nineteenth century, covering a diverse range that included the overtures of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, the literary music of Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt's symphonic poems, the tone poems of Strauss and Sibelius, and compositions by groups of composers in Russia, Bohemia, the United States, and France. In this accessible Introduction, Jonathan Kregor explores program music's ideas and repertoire, discussing both well-known and less familiar pieces by an array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers. Setting program music in the context of the intellectual debates of the period, Kregor presents the criticism of writers like A. B. Marx and Hanslick to reveal program music's growth, dissemination, and reception. This comprehensive overview features numerous illustrations and music examples and provides detailed case studies of battle music, Shakespeare settings, and Goethe's Faust.

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

This comprehensive research guide surveys the most significant published materials relating to Giuseppe Verdi. This new edition includes research since the publication of the first edition in 1998.

Joshua S. Walden's study of the genre of musical portraiture since 1945 focuses on significant composers of the period, including Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, and György Ligeti. Grounding his exploration in key works, Walden uncovers contemporary understandings of music's capacity to depict identity, and of intersections between music, literature, theater, film, and the visual arts.

When Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin's music was performed during his lifetime, it always elicited ecstatic responses from the listeners. Wilhelm Gericke, conductor of the Vienna opera, rushed backstage after one of Scriabin's concerts and fell on his knees crying, 'It's genius, it's genius...'. After the composer’s death in 1915, however, his music steadily lost the captivating appeal it once held. The main reason for this drastic change in the listeners’ attitude is an enormous gap existing between the printed scores of Scriabin’s music and the way the composer himself played his works. Apparently, what Scriabin's audiences heard at the time was significantly different from, and vastly superior to, modern performances that are based primarily on published scores. Scriabin recorded nineteen of his compositions on the Hupfeld and Welte-Mignon reproducing pianos in 1908 and 1910, respectively. Full score transcriptions of the piano rolls, which are included in the book, provide many substantial features of Scriabin's performance: exact pitches and their timing against each other, rhythms, tempo fluctuations, articulation, dynamics and essential pedal application. Using these transcriptions and other historical documents as the groundwork for his research, Anatole Leikin explores Scriabin's performing style within the broader context of Romantic performance practice.

Dreaming with Open Eyes examines visual symbolism in late seventeenth-century Italian opera, contextualizing the genre amid the broad ocularcentric debates emerging at the crossroads of the early modern period and the Enlightenment. Ayana O. Smith reevaluates significant aspects of the Arcadian reform aesthetic and establishes a historically informed method of opera criticism for modern scholars and interpreters. Unfolding in a narrative fashion, the text explores facets of the philosophical and literary background and concludes with close readings of text and music, using visual symbolism to create readings of gender and character in two operas: Alessandro Scarlatti's La Statira (Rome, 1690), and Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's La forza della virtù (Venice, 1693). Smith’s interdisciplinary approach enhances our modern perception of this rich and underexplored repertory, and will appeal to students and scholars not only of opera, but also of literature, philosophy, and visual and intellectual cultures.

A new look at the life, times, and music of Polish composer and piano virtuoso Fryderyk Chopin Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), although the most beloved of piano composers, remains a contradictory figure, an artist of virtually universal appeal who preferred the company of only a few sympathetic friends and listeners. Chopin and His World reexamines Chopin and his music in light of the cultural narratives formed during his lifetime. These include the romanticism of the ailing spirit, tragically singing its death-song as life ebbs; the Polish expatriate, helpless witness to the martyrdom of his beloved homeland, exiled among friendly but uncomprehending strangers; the sorcerer-bard of dream, memory, and Gothic terror; and the pianist's pianist, shunning the appreciative crowds yet composing and improvising idealized operas, scenes, dances, and narratives in the shadow of virtuoso-idol Franz Liszt. The international Chopin scholars gathered here demonstrate the ways in which Chopin responded to and was understood to exemplify these narratives, as an artist of his own time and one who transcended it. This collection also offers recently rediscovered artistic representations of his hands (with analysis), and—for the first time in English—an extended tribute to Chopin published in Poland upon his death and contemporary Polish writings contextualizing Chopin's compositional strategies. The contributors are Jonathan D. Bellman, Leon Botstein, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Halina Goldberg, Jeffrey Kallberg, David Kasunic, Anatole Leikin, Eric McKee, James Parakilas, John Rink, and Sandra P. Rosenblum. Contemporary documents by Karol Kurpiński, Adam Mickiewicz, and Józef Sikorski are included.

This book is a unique attempt to systematize the latest research on all that music connotes. Musicological reflections on musically expressive content have been pursued for some decades now, in spite of the formalist prejudices that can still hindermusicians and music lovers. The author organizes this body of research so that both professionals and everyday listeners can benefit from it – in plain English, but without giving up the level of depth required by the subject matter. Two criteria have guided his choice among the many ways to speak about musical meaning: its relevance to performance, and its suitability to the teaching context. The legacy of the so-called art music, without an interpretive approach that links ancient traditions to our present, runs the risk of missing the link to the new generations of musicians and listeners. Complementing the theoretical, systematic content, each chapter includes a wealth of examples, including the so-called popular music.

Three of Olivier Messiaen's later works, La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, and Saint François d'Assise, are linked by the fact that the composer refers to and quotes from Thomas Aquinas. The composer's reception of Thomistic texts is one of the principles guiding the interpretations in this study. On the one hand, Messiaen had been pondering Thomas's thoughts on the role of music in the life of a Christian and on music's possible spiritual content all through his professional life; on the other hand, the oratorio, the organ meditations, and the opera are the only works in which Messiaen quotes extensive Thomistic sentences addressing purely theological subject matter. The first aspect, Messiaen's appropriation of or felicitous congruence with the medieval theologian's views on music underlies all analyses as a kind of background fabric. The second aspect, Messiaen's quotations from the Summa theologica and their musical translation, determines segments of a larger discussion that, in the book's three main chapters, attempts to do justice to the compositions as a whole. While Thomas' theological aesthetics appears as a thread woven through a texture in a way that brings it only periodically to the foreground, the statements from Thomas's writings provide essential foundations determining the works' content and its musical rendering. This book is part of Siglind Bruhn's Messiaen Trilogy.