The sounds of lapping water and dipping oars ease readers into the famous canals of Venice, Italy. With mother as gondolier and father singing his calming song to baby, a family floats serenely through this one-of-a-kind historic city, past features as unusual as stone winged lions and golden masks and as comfortably familiar as babbling neighbors and drying laundry. The baby drifts deeper and deeper into Venice’s maze and—finally—sweet sleep. Children cuddling on parents’ laps anywhere in the world will be blissfully transported to wondrous Venice before nap- or bedtime by this dreamy lullaby and its peaceful pastel illustrations.

In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice’s appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.

Naslagwerk van de liedkunst en de literatuur hierover.

The career of Gabriel Faur‘s a composer of songs for voice and piano traverses six decades (1862-1921); almost the whole history of French m die is contained within these parameters. In the 1860s Faur the lifelong prot of Camille Saint-Sa was a suavely precocious student; he was part of Pauline Viardot's circle in the 1870s and he nearly married her daughter. Pointed in the direction of symbolist poetry by Robert de Montesquiou in 1886, Faur as the favoured composer from the early 1890s of Winnarretta Singer, later Princesse de Polignac, and his songs were revered by Marcel Proust. In 1905 he became director of the Paris Conservatoire, and he composed his most profound music in old age. His existence, steadily productive and outwardly imperturbable, was undermined by self-doubt, an unhappy marriage and a tragic loss of hearing. In this detailed study Graham Johnson places the vocal music within twin contexts: Faur own life story, and the parallel lives of his many poets. We encounter such giants as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, the patrician Leconte de Lisle, the forgotten Armand Silvestre and the Belgian symbolist Charles Van Lerberghe. The chronological range of the narrative encompasses Faur first poet, Victor Hugo, who railed against Napoleon III in the 1850s, and the last, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, killed in action in the First World War. In this comprehensive and richly illustrated study each of Faur 109 songs receives a separate commentary. Additional chapters for the student singer and serious music lover discuss interpretation and performance in both aesthetical and practical terms. Richard Stokes provides parallel English translations of the original French texts. In the twenty-first century musical modernity is evaluated differently from the way it was assessed thirty years ago. Faur‘s no longer merely a 'Master of Charms' circumscribed by the belleque. His status as a great composer of timeless

"Munden's vivid, well realised poems range across hemispheres and centuries, embracing music, art, film, historical events, and the potent catalysts of love, illness and death. In these pages our human frailties are apprehended with both a clear eye and a tender attentiveness."--Judy Johnson ***"In Chromatic, Munden's superb use of contrapuntal texture and accumulating melodies announce a fractured and injured reality, set against the visceral burn of passion. The rich musicality of these poems speaks eloquently of beauty and love, both physical and divine. The darker harmonies are often brilliantly jittery in their interwoven and compulsive juxtapositions, accentuating the poems' silences and apertures. In Chromatic, Munden unlocks the musical performance inside his poems, and the result is transportive and rapturous."--Cassandra Atherton ***"In this complex and intricately constructed volume, lyric poems address sometimes difficult, sometimes bewildering aspects of human existence head on, and in surprising and scintillating ways. Paul Munden tantalises and beguiles us with rich evocations of the mysterious and the opaque, reminding us of the strangeness of life and the mystery at the core of what we know."--Paul Hetherington (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]