Product Description: Music is often defined as art for the ear, as the language of feeling, of the heart, as sound play, or as the science of composition. But music also conveys intellectual and emotional experiences, literary, religious, philosophical, social and political ideas...read more

While unappreciated and controversial during most of his life, Anton Bruckner is today regarded as the greatest symphonist between Beethoven and Gustav Mahler – in terms of originality, boldness and monumentality of his music. The image of Bruckner the man, however, is still extreme instance of the tenacious power of prejudice. No less a figure than Gustav Mahler coined the aperçu about Bruckner being «a simpleton – half genius, half imbecile». The author is out to correct that misperception. His thesis in this study is that contrary to what has hitherto been asserted, there is an intimate relation between Bruckner’s sacred music and his symphonies from multiple perspectives: biographical data, sources and influences, the psychology of creation, musical structure, contemporary testimony and reception history. Additional chapters assess important Bruckner recordings and interpreters and the progressiveness of his music.

Product Description: With this study the author «opened up a previously locked door of Beethoven research» (Martin Geck). The book presents conclusive answers to questions that had occupied critics for more than a century. It makes clear what exactly Beethoven and his contemporaries meant by the term «heroic»...read more

Product Description: With the terms «visionary» and «despot», the author seeks to circumscribe the multilayered personality of Gustav Mahler. Opening up a terra incognita, he draws a comprehensive map of the various aspects of Mahler’s inner biography: his unshakable belief in the «sacredness of musical art» and strongly developed sense of mission, his double life as conductor and composer, his inexorability and refusal to compromise vis-à-vis himself and others, his discomfort with the world in which he lived, the complex facets of his psyche and his enormous energy potential...read more

Product Description: «Music is no mere play of sound, no mere tonal texture, but has a significant psychic, spiritual/intellectual and social dimension. In other words: a musical art work is not merely an autonomous artifact but also document humain...read more

Product Description: Johannes Brahms was until now widely regarded as the archetype of the «absolute musician». Based on new research, the study shows how close autobiographic and poetic elements are in fact linked to his œuvre. Like Robert Schumann, Brahms subscribed to an aesthetic of «poetic» music...read more

Product Description: In the fall of 1976, 14 letters by Alban Berg, renowned composer of the Second Viennese School, were discovered in the posthumous papers of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, wife of a Prague industrialist and sister of Franz Werfel, the well-known Austro-Czech writer...read more