women performers, composers, and impresarios from the baroque to the present /
First Statement of Responsibility
Cecelia Hopkins Porter
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
Urbana, Illinois :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
University of Illinois Press,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
c2014
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
xiv, 244 p. :
Other Physical Details
ill. ;
Dimensions
25 cm
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
First University of Illinois paperback : 2014
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-237) and index
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
List of figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1: Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth: composer, harpsichordist, and impresario in the North German baroque -- 2: Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre: Versailles and Paris in the twilight of the ancien regime -- 3: Josephine Lang: music of romanticism in South German cultural life -- 4: Maria Bach: Vienna from imperial splendor to the Second Republic -- 5: Ann Schein: American concert pianist in today's world -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Overview: Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and American musical life today, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active. Porter begins with the Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lueneberg, a harpsichordist who also presided over seventeenth-century North German court music as an impresario. At the forefront of French Baroque composition, composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre bridged a widening cultural gap between the Versailles nobility and the urban bourgeoisie of Paris. A century later, Josephine Lang, a prodigiously talented pianist and dedicated composer, participated at various times in the German Romantic world of lieder through her important arts salon. Lastly, the twentieth century brought forth two exceptional women: Baroness Maria Bach, a composer and pianist of twentieth-century Vienna's upper bourgeoisie and its brilliant musical milieu in the era of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Korngold; and Ann Schein, a brilliant and dauntless American piano prodigy whose career, ongoing today though only partially recognized, led her to study with the legendary virtuosos Arthur Rubinstein and Myra Hess. Mining musical autographs, unpublished letters and press reviews, interviews, and music archives in the United States and Europe, Porter probes each musician's social and economic status, her education and musical training, the cultural expectations within the traditions and restrictions of each woman's society, and other factors. Throughout the lively and focused portraits of these five women, Porter finds common threads, both personal and contextual, that extend to a larger discussion of the lives and careers of female composers and performers throughout centuries of music history