Write All These Down

by Kerman, Joseph

• ISBN13: 9780520213777
• ISBN10: 0520213777
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr on Demand

Summary

If one name stands out among musicologists writing today, that name is Joseph Kerman. Eminent, wide-ranging, and wonderfully readable, Kerman's writing on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music has informed and inspired an extensive audience both in America and abroad. There is much to interest both the general reader and the musicologist in this collection of twenty essays. Included are several notable pleas addressed by Kerman 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 well-known obsession with the key of C minor. The controversial tenets of Kerman's classicOpera as Drama(1956) are reaffirmed in essays onDon Giovanni,The Magic Flute,Tristan und Isolde,ErnaniandI Lombardi. Kerman's legacy to a younger generation is here, too: in an exemplary writing style, he offers challenging models for a humane and historically informed music criticism. An added gem is the Preface, which provides an intellectual and anecdotal road map of the place of the essays in Kerman's academic and public expeditions. Joseph Kerman has been at the very center of musicology for almost four decades. This overview of his work will be warmly received and greatly valued.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
CRITICISM	1	(74)
1 A Profile for American Musicology	3	(9)
2 How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out	12	(21)
3 A Few Canonic Variations	33	(18)
4 Critics and the Classics	51	(24)
BYRD, TALLIS, ALFONSO FERRABOSCO	75	(78)
5 William Byrd and Elizabethan Catholicism	77	(13)
6 Byrd, Tallis, and the Art of Imitation	90	(16)
7 "Write All These Down": Notes on a Song by Byrd	106	(19)
8 The Missa Puer natus est by Thomas Tallis	125	(14)
9 An Italian Musician in Elizabethan England	139	(14)
BEETHOVEN	153	(86)
10 Tovey's Beethoven	155	(18)
11 An die ferne Geliebte	173	(34)
12 Taking the Fifth	207	(10)
13 Beethoven's Minority	217	(22)
OPERA AND CONCERTO	239	(112)
14 Translating The Magic Flute	241	(16)
15 Wagner: Thoughts in Season	257	(17)
16 Verdi's Use of Recurring Themes	274	(14)
17 Two Early Verdi Operas; Two Famous Terzetti	288	(19)
18 Reading Don Giovanni	307	(15)
19 Mozart's Piano Concertos and Their Audience	322	(13)
20 Tristan und Isolde: The Prelude and the Play	335	(16)
Acknowledgments	351	(2)
Index	353