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Later life is a fraught topic in our commercialized, anti-aging, death-denying culture. Where does creativity fit in? The canonical composers whose stories are told here—Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)—offer radically individual responses to that question. In their late years, each of these national icons wrote an opera around which coalesced for them major issues about their creativity and aging. While these and other late works helped them explore creatively their own aging and mortality, the composers nonetheless had to face a variety of challenges that came with their own aging—ranging from health issues to the critical expectations that accompany success. They also had to deal with the social, political and aesthetic changes of their times, including World Wars and the rise of musical modernism. By investigating their own attitudes to their aging and their creativity, their late compositions, and the critical reception of them, this book tells the stories of their different but creative ways of dealing with those changes, Each composer began his career in an individual manner; each also ended it in a unique way. It is the complexity of the interrelationship of aging and creativity in all its individuality that this book investigates.

Samuel Leigh’s New Picture of London (1839) promised its readers a way of making sense of the English capital at a time when it was, through expansion and diversification, becoming ever more bewildering to its inhabitants. We argue that one important way of coming to terms with the implications of that diversity is to consider London through the medium of voice: the speaking, shouting, singing, preaching, groaning, sighing, even sobbing voices—singly, or in concert, or in imagined representations—that sounded through the city during two tumultuous decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. Our volume begins on London’s street with itinerant balladeers and organ boys and ends with scientific experiments on acoustics, including en route essays on domestic singing, amateur choral societies, elite opera houses, popular performers, religious orators, and on the perception of voice in some key literary works of the period.

This book explores music and globalization since the mid-nineteenth century. Its starting-point is the world’s fairs and other exhibitions that showed off foreign musicians and instruments to mass audiences in Europe and the United States; it ends with the worldwide embrace of new musical genres like tango and jazz. The book’s geographic focus is the Atlantic triad of Germany, Britain and the United States, but it traces the migration of non-Western music into these countries and the musical response to globalization in the metropolises of India and China and remote settlements from South America to the Arctic. The three parts of the book capture diverse dimensions of globalized musical culture: its overlap with the arts and crafts movement, scientific analysis of pitch and scales, and worldwide distribution through the phonograph. The cast of characters who made music global includes familiar names like Thomas Edison and Hermann von Helmholtz, but also A. J. Hipkins, a London piano tuner turned renowned scholar and advocate of musical diversity; Erich von Hornbostel, the refined Viennese who directed the first archive of world music; Nuskilusta, who toured Germany with a Native American music ensemble; and the Indian recording star, Gauhar Jaan. In dialogue with historians, musicologists and social theorists, the book concludes that the new global culture is not a novelty of our own time, but a long-established transformation of modern artistic and intellectual expression that still defines how we think, feel and hear.

From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, explores another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds that opera staged, it shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule, but also aspects of tactical government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus celebrating princes and their majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancien regime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced genre than previously thought.

Through a comparison of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics in the Third Reich, Fritz Trümpi offers a richly detailed study of National Socialist musical politics. The politicization of the competing orchestras, whose relationship mirrored a larger rivalry between Vienna and Berlin, served on both sides to cement Nazi authority, though the process played out quite differently for each ensemble. After a comparative look at the early histories of each orchestra, Trümpi explores continuities and breaks in the orchestral business after the rise of the National Socialists and the Anschluss of Austria into Nazi Germany. Along the way, he presents a range of provocative archival material, some presented here for the very first time.

After leaving her parents' home to take up a court post as a professional singer, Anna Magdalena Bach née Wilcke (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, a legendary musical wife and mother. After tracing the rise of interest in Anna Magdalena Bach in the late nineteenth century and across the twentieth, the book follows her from her beginnings as a young, flamboyant performer to her end as a bereft and impoverished widow, visiting along the way the places in which she made and heard music: the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, the church, the courtly music room, and the family home. Wide-ranging reference to social and cultural history illuminates her musical Notebooks' perspectives on marriage and widowhood, her professional and domestic roles, her attitude towards money and fashion, intimacy and sex, and the role of music in confronting the sickness and death of children. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical Notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying.

This book investigates the culture of lieder performance in New York and London between the two World Wars. Treated with hostility initially, German music and musicians became an important barometer by which to gauge questions of identity in an age increasingly anxious about nationalism, internationalism, race, technology, and taste. Through case studies of individual singers, venues, and media history, this book reveals the ways in which transatlantic networks were negotiated by musicians through their choice of repertoire, the spaces in which they played, and the manner in which their performances were disseminated. Also examined are changes in listening practices, prompted by the spread of recordings, radio, and sound film, and encouraged and supported by music criticism and education. The reverence with which lieder are approached today is shown to have been contested politically and aesthetically during the interwar period.

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. The book weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, the ancient modes of the Greeks, pentatonic scales of the Chinese and Celts, or medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and how it has persisted throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.