Provides a 150 biographical sketches with entries for each composer's important works, each work's genre and duration, the librettist and the libretto's source, the premiere dates, a synopsis, and a musical discussion

Opera Guide, The Penguin (The Viking Opera Guide)

Arts & Photography

WALSH, Stephen

KENYON, Nicholas

Music

Penguin??Books

In these essays, the leading French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez explains many of his most significant ideas about music. The essays are divided into four parts, the first three concerned with common preoccupations (aesthetic, technical, and polemical) and the last a collection of entries intended for a music encyclopedia. Boulez offers penetrating and provocative analyses of the music of the major figures of twentieth-century music including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Debussy, Messiaen, and Ravel. His illuminating comments arise from intimate knowledge of the music, and the resulting collection is an essential document of post-war modern music.

Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship

Boulez, Pierre

Clarendon Press

Stravinsky was one of the most original creative musicians of the twentieth century. In a career spanning six decades he composed a glittering sequence of works of astonishing diversity, from the three vividly colorful early Russian ballets, through the sharp wit and purity of his neo-classical scores and the powerful spirituality of works like the Symphony of Psalms and the Mass, to the highly individual application of serialism in the late works. This is a critical survey of Stravinsky's entire output in chronological order written in an accessible style for students, scholars, and all music lovers. Walsh draws on recent literature and the composer's own letters and sketches to provide fresh insights into Stavinsky's works. He argues persuasively that Stravinsky needs to be seen whole, and that the works are more closely connected in style and method than is generally acknowledged.

The Music of Stravinsky

Stravinsky - The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971

Humor & Entertainment

JONATHAN CAPE.

The emergence of Russian classical music in the nineteenth century in the wake of Mikhail Glinka comprises one of the most remarkable and fascinating stories in all musical history. The five men who came together in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in the 1860s, all composers of talent, some of genius, would be—in spite of a virtual lack of technical training—responsible for some of the greatest and best-loved music ever written. How this happened is the subject of Stephen Walsh's brilliant composite portrait of the group known in the West as the Five, and in Russia as moguchaya kuchka—the Mighty Little Heap. Friends, competitors, and creative intellectuals whose ambitions and ideas reflect the ferment of their times, Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and—most important of all—Modest Musorgsky, come wonderfully to life in this extended account. The detail is engrossing. We see Borodin composing music while conducting research in chemistry (“he would jump up and run back to the laboratory to make sure nothing had burnt out or boiled over there, meanwhile filling the corridor with improbable sequences of ninths or sevenths”); Balakirev tutoring Musorgsky (“Balakirev could not remedy the defects in his pupil’s character, but he could confront him with works of genius”); Cui doggedly producing operas during breaks from his career as a military fortifications instructor. Musorgsky asserts his independence, moving from writing songs and the showpiece Night on Bald Mountain to the magnificent Boris Godunov, meanwhile struggling against poverty and depression. In the background such important figures as Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chernïshevsky shape the cultural milieu, while the godfather of the kuchka, critic and scholar Vladimir Stasov, is seen offering sometimes combative support. As an experienced and widely skilled musical scholar and biographer (his two-volume life of Stravinsky has been called “one of the best books ever written about a musician”), Stephen Walsh is exceptionally wellplaced to tell this story. He does so with deep understanding and panache, making Musorgksy and His Circle both important and a delight to read.

Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

KNOPF

This 20th-century Russian composer, later of French and American nationality, led a varied life which was mirrored by often startling changes in his musical style over the course of his life. His early years found him in Russia, where Rimsky, Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky were great influences. His international career soon exploded with the premieres of the Firebird, Petrushka, and the Rite of Spring. The period from 1920-1939, which he spent in France, was that of the great neo-classical compositions, this stylistic inclination eventually gave way to a highly individual use of serial techniques in his last years, when he took up residence in the US. The New Grove Stravinsky maps the composer's life and works in the finest of detail, bringing this great man and his music to life.

The New Grove Stravinsky

Grove Music

The German invasion of Russia was Hitler's biggest gamble in his quest for "Lebensraum" in the East--and it was at Stalingrad that his gamble failed. Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron is a detailed history of Hitler's great failure, and a comprehensive account of one of the most important battles of World War II. With full-color strategic maps, 170 black and white photographs, over half of which have never before been published, and detailed appendices that contain information on orders of battle, losses, and equipment, Stalingrad is an exhaustive account of the battle that bled the German army dry, and turned the war in the East decisively against the Germans.

Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron, 1942-1943

History

Military

Thomas Dunne Books

This, the second and final volume of Stephen Walsh’s magisterial biography of Igor Stravinsky, begins in 1934, when Stravinsky is fifty-two and living in France. Already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation, Stravinsky is nevertheless at this point a fairly unhappy expatriate, all too aware of the war clouds beginning to gather. Though he still maintains a family life with his wife and children, much of his time is spent with his mistress, Vera Sudeykina, while traveling around Europe giving concerts in order to earn the money to support his dependents–which include a number of relatives. Composing, of course, remains the center of his existence. But changes are imminent: within only a few years his wife, Katya, will be dead, his family scattered, and Stravinsky himself, together with Vera, starting over again in America. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows the composer through the remainder of his long life, years during which he produces such masterworks as The Rake’s Progress and Symphony in C, and achieves a new level of fame as a conductor and raconteur in his own right. With a dazzling command of sources in several languages and a keen feeling for accuracy in situations where truth and falsehood have become blurred, Walsh traces and illuminates Stravinsky’s increasingly complex and often agonized family relationships along with his crucially important connection with his associate Robert Craft. Walsh is also, as a musicologist and critic, able to speak with knowledge and wit about Stravinsky’s work, expertly describing and assessing the composer’s musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing intricacies of his final compositions. The first volume of this biography, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, was received with glowing praise for its insight, narrative skills, and readability. The period covered here, beset as it is with myths and misconceptions, is handled with even greater authority. Carefully weighed, eloquent, packed with rich and fascinating detail, it casts a brilliant new light on one of the greatest artists of our time.

Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971

Bound in the publisher's original black cloth with the spine stamped in gilt.

Music of Stravinsky (Companions to the Great Composers)

Routledge& Kegan Paul

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WALSH, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by WALSH, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WALSH, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Opera Guide, The Penguin (The Viking Opera Guide)

Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship

The Music of Stravinsky

Stravinsky - The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971

Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

The New Grove Stravinsky

Stalingrad: The Infernal Cauldron, 1942-1943

Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934-1971

Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

Music of Stravinsky (Companions to the Great Composers)