| Contents |
Criticism. A profile for American musicology -- How we got into analysis, and how to get out -- A few canonic variations -- Critics and the classics -- Byrd, Tallis, Alfonso Ferrabosco. William Byrd and Elizabethan Catholicism -- Byrd, Tallis, and the art of imitation -- "Write all these down": notes on a song by Byrd -- The Missa Puer natus est by Thomas Tallis -- An Italian musician in Elizabethan England -- Beethoven. Tovey's Beethoven -- An die ferne Geliebte -- Taking the Fifth -- Beethoven's minority -- Opera and concerto. Translating The Magic Flute -- Wagner: thoughts in season -- Verdi's use of recurring themes -- Two early Verdi operas; two famous teretti -- Reading Don Giovanni -- Mozart's piano concertos and their audience -- Tristan und Isolde: the prelude and the play. |
| Abstract |
The author is one of the most eminent, wide ranging, and readable of today's writers on music. Admirers of his many books--on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music --will find much to interest them in this collection of essays, taken from general journals, such as the Hudson Review and the New York Review of Books, as well as more specialized publications. Included are several well-known pleas addressed by the author to his professional colleagues in an effort to get them to adopt a more critical orientation for their work. Other essays range from a moving account of William Byrd as a spokesman for the beleaguered Elizabethan Catholic minority to a discerning analysis of Beethoven's famous obsession with the key of C minor. The controversial tenets of the author's classic Opera as Drama (1956) are reaffirmed in essays on Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, Tristan und Isolde, Ernani, and I Lombardi. |
