Mozart's Musical Diary
The online gallery "Turning the pages" of the British Library
Peruse Mozart's sketchbook online. This is simply fantastic!
Enjoy!
Ives: Concord Sonata - Songs
This recording by Susan Graham and Pierre-Laurent Aimard just won a grammy and it's really worth listening to.
Composer: Charles Ives
Performers: Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Susan Graham
Label: Warner Classics
Release: May 11, 2004
Songs
1. The Things Our Fathers Loved
2. The Housatonic At Stockbridge
3. From The Swimmers
4. Memories (A - Very Pleasant, B - Rather Sad)
5. Ann Street Listen Listen Listen
6. Serenity (A Unison Chant)
7. 1, 2, 3
8. Songs My Mother Taught Me
9. The Circus Band
10. The Cage
11. The Indians
12. Like A Sick Eagle
13. A Sound Of A Distant Horn
14. September
15. Soliloquy (Or A Study In 7ths And Other Things)
16. A Farewell To Land
17. Thoreau
Piano Sonata
18. Emerson
19. Hawthorne
20. The Alcotts
21. Thorea
George Jellinek, History through the Opera Glass
Jellinek chronicles where opera and history have crossed paths. He writes of legendary figures as they actually were and as they were re-created and re-imagined by some of opera's greatest artists. I so much enjoyed reading this book, I am sure you will, too.
This first-of-its kind, highly entertaining, and carefully researched account reveals how nearly 200 operas by leading composers and librettists have portrayed the major events and personalities of more than 2000 years of history. In a continuous and absorbing narrative, the book sweeps from Roman times to 1820, with a cast of characters that includes Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Attila, Charlemagne, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Napoleon - and hundreds more. All are seen as the figures historians generally perceive them to have been and as their on-stage counterparts, created and re-imagined by some of opera's greatest artists.
Among the operas are Andrea Chénier, Boris Godunov, Fidelio, Giulio Cesare, Gloriana, Les Huguenots, Mary Queen of Scots, Norma, Simon Bocanegra, Il trovatore, War and Peace - and the list goes on. Its comprehensiveness, enhanced by an exhaustive Chronology that provides further information on historical dates and on more than 1200 operas dealing with historical subjects, makes the book an indispensable reference in its field.
George Jellinek, an internatioanlly recognized authority on opera, is the author of Callas, Portrait of a Prima Donna (1960), a frequent panelist on Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, and for almost 30 years the host of The Vocal Scene radio program on WQXR in New York and syndicated nationally.
Paperback: 405 pages
Publisher: Limelight Editions; Illustrate edition (August 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0879102845
Peter Watson, Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century
This book is amazing - I think you would really love it.
From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.
Paperback: 864 pages
Publisher: Perennial (August 1, 2002)
ISBN: 0060084383
Questia - The world's largest online library
This is an amazing source of information and a remarkable research tool! I love the fact that I can find books and articles; search for a specific word in a certain book; highlight passages I like or make notes; and read any title cover to cover. Check this site out - I am sure you will be fascinated!
Questia is the first online library that provides 24/7 access to the world's largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles. You can search each and every word of all of the books and journal articles in the collection. You can read every title cover to cover. This rich, scholarly content -- selected by professional collection development librarians -- is not available elsewhere on the Internet. Undergraduate, high school, graduate students, and Internet users of all ages have found Questia to be an invaluable online resource. Anyone doing research or just interested in topics that touch on the humanities and social sciences will find titles of interest in Questia.
To complement the library, Questia offers a range of search, note-taking, and writing tools. These tools help students locate the most relevant information on their topics quickly, quote and cite correctly, and create properly formatted footnotes and bibliographies automatically. Questia provides a comprehensive research environment to meet students' academic needs.
Gustav Mahler: Vienna, Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907)
by Henry-Louis de la Grange
A short description why this book is cool...
When the second volume of de La Grange's monumental study of Mahler appeared, it was hailed in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications as an indispensable portrait of the great composer. Here at last is the third volume of this magisterial work.
Ranging from 1904 to 1907, it explores Mahler's final years as administrator, producer, and conductor of the Vienna Opera. It was a time of intense inner struggle, with Mahler's energy and creative powers drained by the competing demands of running the Hofoper and struggling for recognition as a composer. And they were tragic years as well, especially 1907, Mahler's last year in Vienna, when the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of heart disease forced him to leave the Opera. Throughout the book, de La Grange offers true-to-life portraits of Mahler the human being, the family man, and the composer, and he weaves in innumerable testimonies and anecdotes that throw new light on the great composer's complex personality.
The product of forty years of research, here is the definitive study of a musical giant. It is, as The Wall Street Journal said of volume two, "a work of the first importance, one that nobody seriously interested in Mahler can possibly afford to skip."
Hardcover: 1054 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press (May 1, 2000)
ISBN: 019315160X