DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Genealogies of Music and Memory

Gluck in the 19th-Century Parisian Imagination

Mark Everist author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:15th Apr '21

Should be back in stock very soon

Genealogies of Music and Memory cover

The history of music is most often written as a sequence of composers and works. But a richer understanding of the music of the past may be obtained by also considering the afterlives of a composer's works. Genealogies of Music and Memory asks how the stage works of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) were cultivated in nineteenth-century Paris, and concludes that although the composer was not represented formally on the stage until 1859, his music was known from a wide range of musical and literary environments. Received opinion has Hector Berlioz as the sole guardian of the Gluckian flame from the 1820s onwards, and responsible -- together with the soprano Pauline Viardot -- for the 'revival' of the composer's Orfeo in 1859. The picture is much clarified by looking at the concert performances of Gluck during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, and the ways in which they were received and the literary discourses they engendered. Coupled to questions of music publication, pedagogy, and the institutional status of the composer, such a study reveals a wide range of individual agents active in the promotion of Gluck's music for the Parisian stage. The 'revival' of Orfeo is contextualised among other attempts at reviving Gluck's works in the 1860s, and the role of Berlioz, Viardot and a host of others re-examined.

A wide-ranging analysis ... Everist succeeds in expanding the scope of reception history. * B. Doherty, CHOICE *
Everist shows us that Gluck himself has sometimes been lost to the repertory, only to be found again, creating each time a new opportunity to reassert his interrupted claims on the operatic stage and the intimate emotions of the public. * Larry Wolff, Times Literary Supplement *
Mark Everist has the enviable knack of discovering areas of research that enable him to rewrite history with greater accuracy, completeness, and nuance. The productions of Gluck's Orphée (1859) and Alceste (1861), with Pauline Viardot in both title-roles, are a reference point for most historians of Gluck reception since, and Everist's scrutiny of primary sources, while also tracking interest in other Gluck operas (notably Armide and Iphigénie en Tauride), shows the extent to which a combination star singer and composer, in 1859, was anticipated in concerts and criticism throughout the earlier nineteenth century. * Julian Rushton, Professor Emeritus of Music, University of Leeds *
In this path-breaking study, Mark Everist offers a fascinating and fine-grained account of the performance and appreciation of Gluck's music in nineteenth-century Paris. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of French musical life during this period, Everist documents an ongoing, variegated engagement with the composer's works, through concert performances, editions, and study, despite an almost complete lack of full, staged productions of the operas during the three decades preceding Pauline Viardot's landmark performance in Orphée et Euridice at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859, in a version arranged by Berlioz. * Bruce Brown, Professor of Musicology, University of Southern California *

ISBN: 9780197546000

Dimensions: 155mm x 236mm x 23mm

Weight: 476g

228 pages