Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody

Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody PDF Author: Hans Gal
Publisher: Crescendo
ISBN: 9780800829926
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody

Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody PDF Author: Hans Gal
Publisher: Crescendo
ISBN: 9780800829926
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody

Franz Schubert and the Essence of Melody PDF Author: Hans Gál
Publisher: Rodale Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Schubert is one of the most loved and least understood of the great composers. This wise and searching book aims to provide the key to the man and to his music. The author loves his subject, has studied Schubert's life and works for many years and writes most evocatively. The book's freshness of perception will open the eyes of many who are familiar with Schubert only through a few well-known works. Although this is no srict biography, all the details of Schubert's tragically curtailed life are here; but Dr Gal's main concern is with the character of the composer and of his music. First, the music: for Schubert, Song was Alpha and Omega, and he poured forth an inexhaustible stream of rapt melody--poetry in sound. The profusion of melodic ideas is such that one gladly excuses his initial unwillingness to master instrumental, and indeed symphonic and contrapuntal, style. Dr Gal examines Schubert's relation to his contemporaries (particularly Beethoven) and lays stress on his creation of the lied and on his exclusively Viennese background. We are given insights into his method of work (everything was composed in great haste) and we see how he tackled the manifold problems of setting verse, and begin to sense the reasons which drove him to explore extreme tonal relationships and the symbolic potential of major and minor keys. Dr Gal pinpoints weaknesses in technique and approach, and examines the risks that seemed to be inherent in Schubert's character. He finds the large number of unfinished works significant. Schubert sometimes gave up too easily: new inspirations burst upon him so frequently that they crowded out time which might have been spent refining or wrestling with yesterday's ideas. Shy and modest, he also failed to "push" his own works when completed. In addition intense melancholy underlay a serene exterior: his words and letters failed to reveal to his friends depths of grief and profundity of thought which emerge only in his music--often side by side with passages of radiant sunshine: such was the complexity of the man. Schubert's music is loved by both performers and listeners. This book, with its deep understanding that sheds light on so much that is felt but not fully comprehended, will give immense pleasure, both for the memories it conjures in the mind of the reader, and in the knowledge and wisdom it imparts [Publisher description]

Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert PDF Author: Leo Black
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843831358
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"The old stereotypes of Schubert as Bohemian artist and unselfconscious creator have been replaced over the past half-century with a picture of a difficult man in dificult times. In this accaimed book, Leo Black aims to redress the balance".

Schubert

Schubert PDF Author: Brian Newbould
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520219571
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Of all the great composers, none - not even Mozart - has been so dogged by myth and misunderstanding as Franz Schubert. The notion of Schubert as a pudgy, lovelorn Bohemian schwammerl (mushroom) scribbling tunes on the back of menus in idle moments has never quite been eradicated. In this major new biography, Brian Newbould balances discussion of Schubert's compositions with an exploration of biographical influences that shaped his musical aesthetics. Schubert: The Music and the Man offers an eminently readable description of a musician who was compulsively dedicated to his art - a composer so prolific that he produced over a thousand works in eighteen years. Gifted with an intuitive know-how, coupled with a Mozartian facility for composition, Schubert combined the relish and wonder of an amateur with the discipline and technical rigor of a professional. He moved quickly and comfortably among genres, and sometimes composed directly into score but many pieces required painstaking revision before they satisfied his growing self-criticism. Examining afresh the enigmas surrounding Schubert's religious outlook, his loves, his sexuality, his illness and death, Newbould offers above all a celebration of a unique genius, an idiosyncratic composer of an astonishing body of powerful, enduring music.

The Cambridge Companion to Schubert

The Cambridge Companion to Schubert PDF Author: Christopher H. Gibbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825321
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This Companion to Schubert examines the career, music, and reception of one of the most popular yet misunderstood and elusive composers. Sixteen chapters by leading Schubert scholars make up three parts. The first seeks to situate the social, cultural, and musical climate in which Schubert lived and worked, the second surveys the scope of his musical achievement, and the third charts the course of his reception from the perceptions of his contemporaries to the assessments of posterity. Myths and legends about Schubert the man are explored critically and the full range of his musical accomplishment is examined.

The Unknown Schubert

The Unknown Schubert PDF Author: LorraineByrne Bodley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351539833
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of popular performance. More than any other composer, Schubert steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works. Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic shift to a new perception of song. This valuable book seeks to bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect i

Poetry Into Song

Poetry Into Song PDF Author: Deborah Stein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195093283
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
When Franz Schubert put Goethe's poem "Gretchen am Spinnrade" to music in 1814, he created a musical form that has captivated audiences ever since. In Poetry into Song, Deborah Stein and Robert Spillman challenge readers to seek a richer, more imaginative understanding of Lied - the nineteenth-century German art song. Written for students of voice, piano, and theory and for all singers and accompanists, Poetry into Song establishes a framework for the analysis of song based on a process of performing, listening, analyzing, and performing again. This unique approach emphasizes the reciprocal interaction between performance and analysis. Focusing on the masterworks, Poetry into Song features numerous poetic texts, as well as a core repertory of songs. Examples throughout the text demonstrate points, and end of chapter questions reinforce concepts and encourage directed analysis. While numerous books have been written on Lieder and German Romantic poetry, Poetry into Song is the first to combine performance, musical analysis, textual analysis, and the interrelation between poetry and music in a truly systematic, thorough way.

Schubert

Schubert PDF Author: Walter Frisch
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803268920
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Addressing a wide range of topics—from Schubert’s approach to large-scale musical form to his innovations in instrumental forms and Lieder—Schubert offers a diverse, illuminating portrait of the composer and his music.

Analyzing Schubert

Analyzing Schubert PDF Author: Suzannah Clark
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500597
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
When Schubert's contemporary reviewers first heard his modulations, they famously claimed that they were excessive, odd and unplanned. This book argues that these claims have haunted the analysis of Schubert's harmony ever since, outlining why Schubert's music occupies a curiously marginal position in the history of music theory. Analyzing Schubert traces how critics, analysts and historians from the early nineteenth century to the present day have preserved cherished narratives of wandering, alienation, memory and trance by emphasizing the mystical rather than the logical quality of the composer's harmony. This study proposes a new method for analyzing the harmony of Schubert's works. Rather than pursuing an approach that casts Schubert's famous harmonic moves as digressions from the norms of canonical theoretical paradigms, Suzannah Clark explores how the harmonic fingerprints in Schubert's songs and instrumental sonata forms challenge pedigreed habits of thought about what constitutes a theory of tonal and formal order.

Schubert's String Quartets

Schubert's String Quartets PDF Author: Anne Hyland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009210874
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Franz Schubert's music has long been celebrated for its lyrical melodies, 'heavenly length' and daring harmonic language. In this new study of Schubert's complete string quartets, Anne Hyland challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. Her exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert's development of a lyrically conceived teleology, bringing musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. Her formal analyses grant special focus to the quartets of 1810–16, isolating the questions they pose for existing music theory and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology thereby opening up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them.