Composers Musicians category: 3267 books

This Fascinating biography chronicles Puccini's life and times, with dozens of photographs and illustrations of the period. His Musical heritage, his scandalous elopement with Elvira, his relationship with Caruso and the dramas of his own life and unfolded in loving detail.

Renowned for his literary style as well as his musical scholarship, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote many program notes and articles for newspapers and other periodicals, in addition to his well-known books. These shorter writings, edited by Slonimsky’s daughter, Electra Yourke, are collected for the first...

This new biography is a fascinating account of the period in which Chopin lived, and the way in which the political scene helped shape his music. The important people and places in the composer's life are brought vividly to life by the use of contemporary engraving, paintings and lithographs. The...

The man behind "I Could Have Danced all Night" and "Almost Like Being in Love", lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of the American musical stage. In penning the lyrics to some of the most well-known and beloved Broadway...

In a series of lively essays that tell us much not only about the phenomenon that was Franz Liszt but also about the musical and cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe, Alan Walker muses on aspects of Liszt's life and work that he was unable to explore in his acclaimed three-volume biography of...

Ir has been said that no music amplifies the french ideals of precision and good taste better than the work of Maurice Ravel, yet his background could scarecly have been more cosmopolitan. The son of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, he was born near St. Jean de Luz in 1875; he died in Paris at...

‘Sounds in the silent air’ takes it title from a song by Ivor Gurney (1890 –1937). He was one of a number of English composers who fought in the First World War, alongside Arthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams. How did their experience affect the music they wrote and what impact did it have...

Gerald Finzi is one of the best-known modern English composers. While he is especially famous as a song-writer, for his sensitive settings of poets such as Hardy and Wordsworth, he also wrote in other genres; notable works include the exquisite cantata Dies Natalis, and his cello concerto. He also...

Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course...

This book traces the remarkable course of a creative career which spanned the drawing rooms of the Imperial Russia and the social ferment of 1960s America, and serve to establish Stravinsky not only as the most celebrated composer of his time but also as one of the defining forces of twentieth-century culture.

César Franck (1822–1890), Belgian born and French domiciled, was one of the most remarkable composers of the 19th century. A number of his works are commonly recorded—such as his Symphony in D Minor, Symphonic Variations, Violin Sonata, and the ever-popular Panis Angelicus—and yet 38 years...

The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Through a coincidence of time and place, Gaetano Guadagni was on the forefront of the heroic opera reform, and many forward-thinking...

Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions...

Libby Larsen has composed award-winning music performed around the world. Her works range from chamber pieces and song cycles to operas to large-scale works for orchestra and chorus. At the same time, she has advocated for living composers and new music since cofounding the American Composers Forum...