A Compendium of Essays:
Purcell, Hogarth and Handel, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy and Andrew Lloyd Webber
Where Music Meets Art, Literature, and History
From Restoration opera to the modern musical stage, six studies uncover the ideas, conflicts, and cultural forces behind familiar works and celebrated composers.
Music never develops in isolation. It responds to literature, painting, philosophy, politics, changing audiences, and the theatrical world in which it is performed.
A Compendium of Essays travels from Purcell’s seventeenth-century England to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, exploring unexpected connections among composers, artists, writers, and the societies that shaped their work.
Six Essays Across Three Centuries
Purcell — Dido and Aeneas
How did Purcell adapt Virgil’s tragic love story for performance by the young ladies of a Chelsea boarding school? This study examines the opera’s literary origins and the delicate transformation of its classical source.
Hogarth and Handel — An Operatic Satire?
Could Hogarth’s The Levée contain a visual commentary on the rivalries surrounding Italian opera in eighteenth-century London? The painting is reconsidered against the theatrical conflicts of Handel’s day.
Beethoven — History and Philosophy in the Symphonies
From the heroic and the sublime to the pastoral and transcendent, Beethoven’s symphonies reveal a changing response to his age, his struggles, and his ideals.
Liszt — From Word to Deed
Liszt’s Faust Symphony became part of his defence of programme music: an ambitious attempt to prove that music inspired by literature could rival the intellectual stature of the traditional symphony.
Debussy — Where West Meets East
Debussy did more than imitate unfamiliar sounds. His encounter with Eastern music helped inspire new approaches to rhythm, colour, and form within the Western musical tradition.
Andrew Lloyd Webber — The Phantom of the Opera
Viewed alongside Wagnerian opera, Phantom becomes more than popular spectacle. This final essay considers the emergence of the modern musical as a distinctive and increasingly sophisticated theatrical form.
Book Details:
Batalha Publishers ~ August 13, 2010
Second Hardback Edition ~ 198 pages
ISBN-10: 9899684422
(ISBN-13: 9789899684423)
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Critical Reception
The Beethoven Journal
American Beethoven Society, San José State University
Patricia Stroh · Summer 2003, Vol. 18, No. 1
“Bucchianeri posits that Beethoven’s symphonies reflect the composer’s perception of his own world and his attitudes toward society and culture. That this perception changed over time is revealed by the stylistic progression of the works.”
Reviewing “The Symphonies of Beethoven: Historical and Philosophical Reflections Through Music,” Chapter Three of A Compendium of Essays.
