Film, Theater and Music

Foreword by Wolf Eiermann and Lisa Felicitas MattheisText by Lisa Felicitas Mattheis, Kristina Jaspers, Marek ZydowiczHow expressionism crossed genres in pursuit of the total artwork, from Nolde to MurnauAs a revolutionary cultural movement, Expressionism endeavored to join art and life and diminish the separation between the arts. The Gesamtkunstwerk—the total artwork—became the ideal for artists. Expressionism in Art and Film traces this crossing of genre boundaries, outlining mutual influences between painting, graphics and film. Exaggerated figures, strong contrast and distorted perspective pervaded all three mediums, reflecting the tremendous angst of the early 20th century’s social upheavals. Social critique also figured centrally in the movement, in caricatured depictions of modern men and women. This volume highlights these elements of Expressionism, drawing parallels between art and film. Artists Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Alexander Kanoldt, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Mueller figure here, as well as directors Robert Wiene, F.W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch.Hardcover240 pages | 130 color imagesText in English and GermanSilvana Editoriale, 20229.5 x 1 x 11 inchesISBN 9788836650361Expressionism, Art and Film

Expressionism in Art and Film

By Ian Roberts "An extremely accessible study of the major works associated with German expressionist cinema. The book provides lucid accounts of several prominent films coupled with illuminating background information about the filmmakers." —Brad Prager, University of Missouri"The book certainly achieves its goal, which is to reveal the contours of Weimar cinema... Recommended." —ChoiceBefore Hollywood's golden age, German expressionist film was arguably the most important cinematic movement in the medium's history. These 'symphonies of... iridescent movement' of Weimar cinema provide some of cinema's most iconic images, and its vivid contrasts and dark spaces constitute a major influence on Hollywood classics such as CITIZEN KANE (1941) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). This volume also offers insights into the technical and thematic developments of the Weimar film. Covering classics such as THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI (1920) and NOSFERATU (1922) as well as under-appreciated examples such as ASPHALT (1929), this volume forms an essential introduction to one of cinema's most historically important movements. Paperback144 pages Wallflower Press, 20086 x 0.5 x 8 inches ISBN 9781905674602 Film, Expressionism

German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow

Original Price: $60 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERSBy Timothy O. BensonA multifaceted interpretation of Richter’s career as a filmmaker, artist, and writer, examining his pioneering work —with a special emphasis on film—in the context of his collaborations with some of the most important figures in 20th-century art.Hans Richter was a central figure in the avant-garde for more than 50 years. Born in Berlin in 1888, he joined the Zurich Dada group in 1916 and within a few years was producing some of the first abstract films ever created. In the 1930s he made commercial and propaganda films for both communist and capitalist interests—a phase of his career that has been, until now, little examined. After moving to the United States in 1940, Richter taught at the City College of New York, serving as a mentor to numerous participants in the New American Cinema movement. He worked alongside a virtual “Who’s Who” of the avant-garde, including Arp, Bowles, Cage, Calder, Cocteau, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Ernst, Léger, Lissitzky, Malevich, Mies van der Rohe, Schwitters, and Tzara. This book examines the ways in which these “encounters”—to use Richter’s own term—with other artists engendered creativity, originality, and meaning throughout his career. Including a chronology and Richter’s first complete filmography in English, this volume sheds light on the relationships between modernism’s most experimental artists, movements, and generations. Hardcover224 pagesPrestel Publishing, 20148.27 x 0.98 x 10.04 inchesISBN 9783791352688 Film, Avant-Garde

Hans Richter: Encounters

By Lotte H. Eisner "A sumptuous meal for those interested in the dark and brooding days of German cinema."—Cinema Journal"Arguably one of the best books on cinema yet written."—Times Literary Supplement The golden age of German cinema began at the end of the First World War and ended shortly after the coming of sound. From The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) onwards the principal films of this period were characterized by two influences: literary Expressionism and the innovations of the theater directors of this period, in particular Max Reinhardt. This book demonstrates the connection between German Romanticism and the cinema through Expressionist writings. Paperback360 pages University of California Press, 20085.8 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches ISBN 9780520257900Literature, Film, Criticism, Expressionism

Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt

By Thea von Harbou This city of the future encompasses two worlds: that of the hedonistic ruling class and that of a segregated subculture, toilers in a mechanized underworld who labor to provide the rich with their pleasures. When a charismatic leader arises, she seeks a savior to unite the disparate social orders. "Between the brain that plans and the hands that build," she declares, "there must be a mediator―the heart."Thea von Harbou, creator of the screenplay for Fritz Lang's iconic 1927 film, wrote this novel to expand upon the movie's ideas and concepts. Vivid in description, rich in characterization and symbolism, the story draws upon ancient myths to form a compelling vision of the future. Noted science-fiction authority Forrest J. Ackerman hailed the book as "a work of genius," and a century after its initial publication Metropolis continues to captivate readers.Paperback224 pages Dover Publications, Reprint edition, 2015 5.12 x 0.39 x 7.87 inchesISBN 9780486795676Literature, Film, History

Metropolis

By Andreas Huyssen “This book will serve as an invaluable guide to the wide variety of miniature writings that emerged in the modern age. Huyssen’s close readings of these literary gems highlight the ways in which they responded to new modes of sensory experience. A brilliant study of literature in the era of visual media.”—Anthony Kaes, University of California, Berkeley“Miniature Metropolis provides a methodology for others who wish to consider the seemingly incidental writings of Modernists that have so often been eclipsed by less modest parts of their oeuvres. With original arguments and meticulous analyses, this fine study deepens our knowledge of familiar authors, and through the light it casts on its subject, it also brings into focus the current challenges to the literary mode posed by digital media and new related social practices.”—Elaine Morley, The Times Literary Supplement“This is a unique, deeply thought, and important work that brings new insights into the literary forms of modernism, and their relations to other media.”—Anthony Vidler, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper UnionIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe’s modernizing metropolises offered a sensory experience unlike anything that had come before. Cities became laboratories bubbling with aesthetic experimentation in old and new media, and from this milieu emerged metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about the experiences of urban life written for European newspapers. Miniature Metropolis explores the history and theory of this significant but misrecognized achievement of literary modernism.Andreas Huyssen shows how writers from Baudelaire and Kafka to Benjamin, Musil, and Adorno created the miniature to record their reflections of Paris, Brussels, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Contesting photography and film as competing media, the metropolitan miniature sought to capture the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression that defined urban existence. But the form did not merely imitate visual media—it absorbed them, condensing objective and subjective perceptions into the very structure of language and text and asserting the aesthetic specificity of literary language without resort to visual illustration. Huyssen argues that the miniature subverted the expectations of transparency, easy understanding, and entertainment that mass circulation newspapers depended upon. His fine-grained readings open broad vistas into German critical theory and the history of visual arts, revealing the metropolitan miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism. Hardcover368 pagesHarvard University Press, 20156.2 x 1.5 x 9.8 inchesISBN 9780674416727Photography, History, Urban Studies

Miniature Metropolis; Literature in an Age of Photography and Film

Edited by Cindy Keefer and Jaap Goldemond The German-American filmmaker Oskar Fischinger is one of the main protagonists in the history of animation and abstract cinema. From the 1920s onward, this pioneer of visual music coupled abstract images with music and rhythms, long before the arrival of the music video. Fischinger was a true virtuoso who created complex animated patterns that develop dynamic rhythms, harmonies, and counterpoints. He played an important and influential role in the development of early abstraction in film during the interwar period, amid artistic movements such as Orphism (Kupka, Delaunay), Neo-Plasticism (Mondrian, Van Doesburg), Suprematism (Melevich), and Futurism (Marinetti, Boccioni). In 1926 he began working with multiple-projector performances, creating some of the earliest cinematic immersive environments. The book examines his animation and painting, his use of music, his experiences in Hollywood, and his influence on today's filmmakers, artists, and animators, and features previously unpublished documents including essays by Fischinger himself.Paperback240 pages200+ illustrationsThames & Hudson, 20138.3 x 0.5 x 10.3 inchesISBN 9780500970515Film, Music, Abstraction

Oskar Fischinger: 1900-1967

By Naomi DeCelles"A crucial intervention into at least three fields: Weimar cinema studies, feminist and queer theory, and film history. Naomi DeCelles carefully and critically explores Lotte Eisner's best and least known work, situating it in history and reclaiming it for our own time."—Patrice Petro, editor of Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s"With both its balanced approach to relevant biographical details and its masterly critical analysis of Lotte Eisner’s writings, this is an excellent, comprehensive, and original study of her contributions to film history and film criticism."—Mila Ganeva, author of Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold WarRecollecting Lotte Eisner provides the first in-depth examination of the remarkable transnational career of film journalist, archivist, and historian Lotte Eisner (1896–1983). From her early years as a film critic in interwar Berlin to her escape from prison in occupied France and from her role as chief curator at the Cinémathèque française to that as the mythic "collective conscience" of New German Cinema, Eisner was a prolific writer and lecturer and a pivotal voice in early film and media studies. Situated at the juncture of feminist media historiography and disciplinary intellectual history, this groundbreaking book is based on extensive multilingual archival research and the excavation of a rich corpus of previously overlooked materials. Introducing samples of Eisner's writing in translation, this volume makes some of the most important contributions of a foundational scholar in the field of film studies accessible for the first time to an English-language readership. Paperback238 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20226 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520388130Film History, Media Studies

Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive

By Anton Kaes Winner of the 2010 Limina Award for Best International Film Studies Book, XVII Udine Film Forum, Udine, ItalyWinner of the 2010 DAAD Book Prize, German Studies AssociationWinner of the 2008-9 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language AssociationOne of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010"This long-awaited book by one of the leading experts on German cinema is a landmark in film studies. . . . Clearly written and beautifully produced with ample illustrations, impressive notes, and a useful filmography of Weimar DVDs, the book is a pleasure to read."—Choice"Shell Shock Cinema posits a complex and convincing model of the fraught relationship between historical violence and representation, as well as a unique perspective on the legacies of war."—Scott Spector, American Historical Review Shell Shock Cinema explores how the classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I and the the devastating effects of the nation's defeat. In this exciting new book, Anton Kaes argues that masterworks such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Nibelungen, and Metropolis, even though they do not depict battle scenes or soldiers in combat, engaged the war and registered its tragic aftermath. These films reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock, reeling from a devastating defeat that it never officially acknowledged, let alone accepted. Kaes uses the term "shell shock"—coined during World War I to describe soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns—as a metaphor for the psychological wounds that found expression in Weimar cinema. Directors like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang portrayed paranoia, panic, and fear of invasion in films peopled with serial killers, mad scientists, and troubled young men. Combining original close textual analysis with extensive archival research, Kaes shows how this post-traumatic cinema of shell shock transformed extreme psychological states into visual expression; how it pushed the limits of cinematic representation with its fragmented story lines, distorted perspectives, and stark lighting; and how it helped create a modernist film language that anticipated film noir and remains incredibly influential today. A compelling contribution to the cultural history of trauma, Shell Shock Cinema exposes how German film gave expression to the loss and acute grief that lay behind Weimar's sleek façade. Paperback326 pages Princeton University Press, 20116.1 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches ISBN 9780691008509Film, Criticism, Essays, Expressionism

Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War

By Ulrich Döge, Thomas Elsaesser, and Laurence Kardish German cinema from the end of World War I to 1933—the years of the Weimar Republic—is widely appreciated for an Expressionist style of film making characterized by anxiety, distorted narrative, and vivid plays of light and shadow. Far less well-known in the United States are the period’s musicals, romances, and comedies, lighter films that were made in equal numbers as the darker fare. Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares puts these contrary approaches side by side, examining the full spectrum of Weimar film making through essays by prominent contemporary scholars and a selection of eighty films. Excerpts from reviews and other writings evoke the reception of these movies at the time, as the use of sound in film gained purchase and the economic and political situation in Germany moved the country toward another, darker historical moment. Paperback216 pages | 130 illustrationsThe Museum of Modern Art, New York, 20108 x 0.8 x 10 inchesISBN 9780870707612Film, Expressionism, Essays

Weimar Cinema, 1919-1933: Daydreams and Nightmares

Edited by Professor Noah Isenberg "Weimar Cinema is the volume on this fascinating era of international film history."—Gerd Gemünden, Bookforum"This superb collection... [is] an excellent overview of the critical frameworks of German film studies... Essential."—Choice"A well-constructed and welcome introduction to a number of classics."—Philipp Stiasny, German History"With its detailed filmography and intelligently organized index, this work could easily serve as the primary textbook for a survey of Weimar film."—Glenn R. Cuomo, German Studies Review Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed production history, its critical reception over time, and the place it occupies within the larger history of the German studio and of Weimar cinema in general. Readers can revisit the careers of such acclaimed directors as F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst and examine the debuts of such international stars as Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, and Marlene Dietrich. Training a keen eye on Weimer cinema's unusual richness and formal innovation, this anthology is an essential guide to the revolutionary styles, genres, and aesthetics that continue to fascinate us today. Paperback 376 pagesColumbia University Press, 20096 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780231130554Film, Essays

Weimar Cinema; An Essential Guide to Films of the Era

By Walter BenjaminIntroduction by George SteinerTranslated by John Osborne"He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe."—Susan Sontag"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener"Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century."—George SteinerThe Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.Paperback256 pagesVerso Publishers, 20235 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781804290460Literary Theory

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By Arthur SchnitzlerTranslated by G.J. WeinbergerThis volume contains the last three dramas written by Schnitzler. The first work, In the Play of Summer Breezes, was the last of his plays to be published and performed during his lifetime. The remaining two works The Word and Procession of Shades troubled Schnitzler, and even though he worked on them for over twenty years, he remained unsatisfied and would not approve their publication. These posthumous plays provide variations on a number of his favorite subjects and fit into the thematic progression of his work.These plays are important works, because they add further thematic dimensions to his artistic range and thus enrich our understanding of Schnitzler as a man and writer. Paperback289 pagesAriadne Press, 19965.5 x 0.8 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9781572410299Plays

The Final Plays

By Bryan GilliamRichard Strauss' successful conducting and composing career spanned one of the most fascinating stretches of modern German history, from oil lamps to atomic energy, from a young empire to a divided Germany. This biography covers Strauss' early musical development, his emergence as a tone poet in the late nineteenth century, his turn to the stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, the successes and misfires of the post-World War I era, the turbulent 1930s, and the period of the Second World War and its aftermath. Paperback212 pagesCambridge University Press, 19995.5 x 0.53 x 8.5 inches9780521578950 ISBNMusic, Biography

The Life of Richard Strauss

By Christian Rogowski This study analyzes Musil's contribution to the praxis and poetics of drama by placing his dramatic efforts in the context of what Peter Szondi has described as the "crisis of modern drama." Musil's plays address such issues as the problem of dramatic mimesis and the question of whether there can be a modern form of tragic drama appropriate to the experience of modernity. Close readings of his texts explore how any drama prefigures the interaction between text/reader and performance/audience by means of self-referential devices. Such an investigation not only reveals a special facet of Musil's oeuvre, but also offers a contribution towards a theory of reading drama, a reading of the printed play as a prefiguration of an enacted event. Hardcover313 pagesAriadne Press, 19936 x 9 inchesISBN 9780929497594Literary Criticism, Drama

Implied Dramaturgy: Robert Musil and the Crisis of Modern Drama

By Tom Stoppard At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today’s most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.Paperback101 pagesGrove Press, 20205.5 x 0.5 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9780802157713 Play, Austrian History

Leopoldstadt

By Frank WedekindTranslated by Jonathan Franzen “Spring Awakening is the best play ever written about teenagers, and Jonathan Franzen's fraught yet buoyant translation is the best I've ever read. In a culture where lies about adolescence prevail, this funny and honest play is more relevant than ever. Spring Awakening is essential reading.”—Christopher Shinn First performed in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's controversial play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid charges of obscenity and public outrage. For the better part of the twentieth century Wedekind's intense body of work was largely unpublished and rarely performed. Yet the play's subject matter—teenage desire, suicide, abortion, and homosexuality—is as explosive and important today as it was a century ago. Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.Today, one hundred years after the play's first performance, a new musical version of this essential modern masterpiece is being hailed as the "best new musical . . . in a generation" (John Heilpern, The New York Observer). Franzen's version of the text—for so long poorly served in English—is unique in capturing the bizarre and inimitable comic spirit that animates almost every line of this unrelentingly tragic play. There couldn't be a better time for this thrilling, definitive new translation. Paperback112 pagesFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007Originally published in 18915.5 x 0.3 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780865479784Play

Spring Awakening: A Play

Original Price: $25.50 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Ödön von Horváth Ödön von Horváth (1901-1939) is one of the most important theatre writers in the 1930s. His reputation rests largely on the four plays in this collection, which he called Volksstucke (popular plays), although he had no desire to embrace this tradition uncritically. Reflected in these plays is the sympathy for the situation of the exploited classes, as well as the concern for the way language is used for deception and self-deception. The hollow characters come across as potentially receptive to fascism. A latent brutality is unmasked, a lack of genuine feeling—all lying hidden under a veneer of facile sentimentality. Paperback243 pagesAriadne Press, 20025.75 x 0.75 x 8.75 inchesISBN 9781572411081Literature, Theatre

Tales From the Vienna Woods & Other Plays

By Mel Gordon The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of a notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s. In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber‘s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine. Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. Among those Anita Berber claimed as members of her vast sexual harem were Marlene Dietrich, Magnus Hirschfeld (the founder of modern sexology and gay liberation), Klaus Mann, Conrad Veidt, Lawrence Durrell, and the King of Yugoslavia. Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and starred in the silent epic, Lucifer. Even Leni Riefenstahl credits Berber for inspiring her controversial career. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of 29. The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including over 150 photographs and drawings that recreate Anita’s enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.” Paperback200 pagesFeral House Books, 20067 x 0.5 x 10 inchesISBN 9781932595123Biography, Film, Theater

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity

By C.W. Gortner "Cinematic in both scope and story, this sweeping reconception of the professionally and personally captivating Dietrich will appeal to both film buffs and fans of historical fiction."—Booklist, starred review"Gortner skillfully evokes the cross-dressing, sexually fluid atmosphere of the seedy nightclubs that helped Marlene define her unique appeal; the scenes are lively and authentic."—Kirkus Reviews A lush, dramatic biographical novel of one of the most glamorous and alluring legends of Hollywood’s golden age, Marlene Dietrich—from the gender-bending cabarets of Weimar Berlin to the lush film studios of Hollywood, a sweeping story of passion, glamour, ambition, art, and war from the author of Mademoiselle Chanel. Raised in genteel poverty after the First World War, Maria Magdalena Dietrich dreams of a life on the stage. When a budding career as a violinist is cut short, the willful teenager vows to become a singer, trading her family’s proper, middle-class society for the free-spirited, louche world of Weimar Berlin’s cabarets and drag balls. With her sultry beauty, smoky voice, seductive silk cocktail dresses, and androgynous tailored suits, Marlene performs to packed houses and becomes entangled in a series of stormy love affairs that push the boundaries of social convention. For the beautiful, desirous Marlene, neither fame nor marriage and motherhood can cure her wanderlust. As Hitler and the Nazis rise to power, she sets sail for America. Rivaling the success of another European import, Greta Garbo, Marlene quickly becomes one of Hollywood’s leading ladies, starring with legends such as Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Cary Grant. Desperate for her return, Hitler tries to lure her with dazzling promises. Marlene instead chooses to become an American citizen, and after her new nation is forced into World War II, she tours with the USO, performing for thousands of Allied troops in Europe and Africa. But one day she returns to Germany. Escorted by General George Patton himself, Marlene is heartbroken by the war’s devastation and the evil legacy of the Third Reich that has transformed her homeland and the family she loved. An enthralling and insightful account of this extraordinary legend, Marlene reveals the inner life of a woman of grit, glamour, and ambition who defied convention, seduced the world, and forged her own path on her own terms. Paperback432 pagesWilliam Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition, 20165.3 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780062406071Biographical Fiction

Marlene: A Novel

By Arthur SchnitzlerTranslation by G.J. WeinbergerStudies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation SeriesSchnitzler's one-act plays represent as great an accomplishment as his full-length plays. The works in the present volume, several appearing for the first time in English translation, deal with some of Schnitzler's favorite themes: the intermingling of illusion and reality in The Green Cockatoo (1899) and Paracelsus (1899), and man as puppet in the Marionettes sequence.Paperback 220 pagesAriadne Press, 1995 5.8 x 0.8 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9780929497969Plays

Paracelsus and Other One-Act Plays

Edited by Christopher HaileyContributions by Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley "Hailey's introductory chapter is remarkable for the amount of evocative and trenchant detail he has managed to offer in a small space; it may well be the best writing about this milieu since Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna thirty years ago. . . . It is an unexpected delight that a real portrait emerges in this volume."—William R. Braun, Opera News"[This collection] should be welcomed . . . as one of the most important and perceptive books on Berg to appear for many years."—Nicholas Baragwanath, Music and Letters"These translations alone make this a valuable contribution to our understanding of Berg the man as well as to Berg the composer."—Contemporary Review Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice. The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics. Paperback392 pagesPrinceton University Press, 2010 6 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780691148564Music, Biography, Vienna, Essays

Alban Berg and His World

Edited by Michael Beckerman "This series of essays serves to confirm Janacek's place in the pantheon of great composers."—Library Journal "I would recommend this book to anyone interested in music or in exploring the development of the nationalistic movement in music. Part I not only gives insight into Janacek the man and composer, but also Part II delves into Janacek the writer and his genuine attempts to comprehend the relationship between musical phenomena and human thought and language. Part II, 'Janacek's Writings,' has numerous musical examples to allow one to follow the composer's creative process."—Carol Ann Modesitt, Opera JournalOnce thought to be a provincial composer of only passing interest to eccentrics, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and original creative figures of his time. Banned for all purposes from the Prague stage until the age of 62, and unable to make it even out of the provincial capital of Brno, his operas are now performed in dynamic productions throughout the globe. This volume brings together some of the world's foremost Janácek scholars to look closely at a broad range of issues surrounding his life and work. Representing the latest in Janácek scholarship, the essays are accompanied by newly translated writings by the composer himself.The collection opens with an essay by Leon Botstein who clarifies and amplifies how Max Brod contributed to Janácek 's international success by serving as "point man" between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. John Tyrrell, the dean of Janácek scholars, distills more than thirty years of research in "How Janácek Composed Operas," while Diane Paige considers Janácek's liason with a married woman and the question of the artist's muse. Geoffrey Chew places the idea of the adulterous muse in the larger context of Czech fin de siècle decadence in his thoroughgoing consideration of Janácek's problematic opera Osud. Derek Katz examines the problems encountered by Janácek's satirically patriotic "Excursions of Mr. Broucek" in the post-World War I era of Czechoslovak nationalism, while Paul Wingfield mounts a defense of Janácek against allegations of cruelty in his wife's memoirs. In the final essay, Michael Beckerman asks how much true history can be culled from one of Janácek's business cards.The book then turns to writings by Janácek previously unpublished in English. These not only include fascinating essays on Naturalism, opera direction, and Tristan and Isolde, but four impressionistic chronicles of the "speech melodies" of daily life. They provide insight into Janácek's revolutionary method of composition, and give us the closest thing we will ever have to the "heard" record of a Czech pre-war past-or any past, for that matter.Paperback 328 pages Princeton University Press, 20036.1 x 0.8 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9780691116761Music, Theater, Opera, Essays

Janáček and His World

Original Price: $85 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Bojan Bujic "Includes rare and revealing illustrations...[A] sane and sensitive biography...A readable illustrated biography of Schoenberg is such an obvious idea what one wonders why it has taken so long for one to appear. Certainly Phaidon's 20th Century Composers series [...] is an ideal format...Bojan Bujic [...] has performed his task with skill and sympathy. It is refreshing to see Schoenberg treated as a passionate human being...Bujic's explication of the serial method and its imaginative origins is sensible and concise...He is also ingenious in using his pictorial material to illuminate musical issues...Overall an extremely useful introduction."—BBC Music"The major (and rare) achievement of the book is its slow but sure description of Schoenberg's move through post-romantic tonality, atonality and serialism. The explanation of musical language is always tricky […] but Bujic remains clear and honest without baffling...particularly deft is his invitation to listen to Schoenberg in a different way…Bujic's biography, like its subject, dazzles and delights."—Classical Music Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was arguably the central musical personality of the 20th century, whose innovative, uncompromising musical language opened up new possibilities for composers and influenced generations of musicians and listeners. A major force in the development of modern music, Schoenberg is famous for abandoning tonality and introducing the 12-tone 'serial' method of composition. In addition to his groundbreaking work as a composer, Schoenberg was an important theorist and an enormously influential teacher, with Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his most famous pupils. This book presents a clear narrative history of Schoenberg’s life, work and cultural context along with essential reference material and striking illustrations, making it a vital purchase for anyone interested in the composer. Brought up in the rich and cosmopolitan cultural life of Vienna, Schoenberg started to play the violin at the age of nine and began experimenting with composition almost immediately, but had no formal training in music until his late teens. Schoenberg first composed in the late Romantic tradition, and his earliest acknowledged works, including the string sextet 'Verklärte Nacht', date from the turn of the century. Over the next decade in Vienna, he developed his musical style, in due course causing a sensation with the dissonance of his 'serial' technique and the harmonic strangeness and complexity of his material. Hardcover240 pages | 80 black-and-white illustrationsPhaidon Press, 20116.8 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780714846149Biography, Music, Vienna

Arnold Schoenberg

By Mark Berry "Berry’s perspective on the controversy (still) surrounding the composer is clear-eyed, empathetic, and pleasingly free of polemics of its own...Berry's survey of the individual works is comprehensive and exemplary."—BBC Music Magazine"A superb piece of writing: informative, engaging and compact. It wears its considerable research with a winning lightness of touch. The best introduction to the composer."—Thomas Hyde, composer and Lecturer in Music at Worcester College, Oxford"Arnold Schoenberg lived a “critical life” by any standards, and his entry here into the Critical Lives series of compact volumes devoted to leading cultural figures of the modern period is very welcome. No composer has ever earned quite such a bogeyman reputation, one still widely held if concert and opera programming is any evidence, yet for those of us who actively crave the sound of his music there is also the fascination of the figure himself—and a deeply human side of the composer, to which those who knew him still testify."—OperaThe most radical and divisive composer of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg remains a hero to many, and a villain to many others. Born in the Jewish quarter of his beloved Vienna, Schoenberg’s early career took him to Berlin, as a leading light of Weimar culture, before he fled in the dead of night from Hitler’s Third Reich. He found himself in the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where he would inspire composers from George Gershwin to John Cage. Schoenberg’s revolutionary approach to musical composition incorporated Wagnerian late Romanticism and the brave new worlds of atonality and serialism, and it changed the history of music forever.In this refreshingly balanced biography, Mark Berry tells the story of Schoenberg’s life and work within the wider context of nineteenth and twentieth-century history. He also introduces all of Schoenberg’s major musical works, from his very first compositions such as String Quartet in D Major to his invention of the 12-tone method. This book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the music and history of the twentieth century.Paperback240 pagesReaktion Books, 20195 x 0.6 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781789140873Music, Biography

By Arnold Schoenberg Edited by Leonard SteinTranslated by Leo BlackForeword by Joseph Auner One of the most influential collections of music ever published, Style and Idea includes Schoenberg's writings about himself and his music as well as studies of many other composers and reflections on art and society. An interpretive essay by Joseph Auner, Chair and Professor of Music at Tufts University, augments this anniversary edition.Paperback570 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20106 x 1.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520266070Music, Criticism, Essays

Arnold Schoenberg: Style and Idea: Selected Writings

Edited by E. Randol SchoenbergIntroduction by Adrian Daub "The storied triangulation of Schoenberg, Mann, and Adorno in all its contentious glory, presented in the most comprehensive assemblage of primary documents ever gathered in English translation. Adrian Daub’s introduction on California as the incubator for this controversy is essential reading."—Joy H. Calico, author of Arnold Schoenberg’s "A Survivor from Warsaw" in Postwar Europe"This is a splendid collection of letters and documents by two of the major figures in twentieth-century culture, Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. It presents their correspondence and writings by their contemporaries about Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, still one of the great literary investigations of music, creativity, and madness. An impressive achievement that should be useful to scholars across many fields."—Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Humanities and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction by German studies scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture. Paperback376 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20186 x 0.9 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520296831Literary Criticism, Music

The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951

By Harvey SachsA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023 “[A]n immensely valuable source for anyone desiring an accessible overview of this endlessly controversial and chronically misunderstood giant of 20th-century music.” —John Adams, New York Times Book ReviewAn astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers.In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.Hardcover272 pagesLiveright, 20236.4 x 1 x 9.4 inchesISBN 9781631497575Biography, Austrian Composer

Schoenberg: Why He Matters

By Oliver Hilmes Translated by Stewart Spencer “A compelling and critical picture of a clever and powerful woman . . . well-documented [and] absorbing.”—Library Journal"More than everything you ever needed to know about Cosima Wagner, this well-written book (translated brilliantly—as ever—by Stewart Spencer) offers a clear and scrupulous insight into how she created and stoked the peculiar mania that infected the Wagner cult."—Della Couling, Classical Music“Bastard daughter of touring music celebrity, unfaithful wife of great conductor, marries genius and becomes one of the leading influences on Western culture. As the Aussies say, you couldn’t read about it. But, here in the pages of Cosima Wagner, you certainly can. And the story is enriched by the author’s access to available documentation at Bayreuth.…This [is] illuminating work”—Robert Giddings, TribuneSelected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010 in the Music category. In this meticulously researched book, Oliver Hilmes paints a fascinating and revealing picture of the extraordinary Cosima Wagner—illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, then mistress and subsequently wife of Richard Wagner. After Wagner’s death in 1883 Cosima played a crucial role in the promulgation and politicization of his works, assuming control of the Bayreuth Festival and transforming it into a shrine to German nationalism. The High Priestess of the Wagnerian cult, Cosima lived on for almost fifty years, crafting the image of Richard Wagner through her organizational ability and ideological tenacity. The first book to make use of the available documentation at Bayreuth, this biography explores the achievements of this remarkable and obsessive woman while illuminating a still-hidden chapter of European cultural history. Paperback400 pages | 30 black-and-white illustrationsYale University Press, 20116 x 9 inchesISBN 9780300170900Biography, Music

Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth

Edited by Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph WolffContributions by Milton Babbitt, Reinhold Brinkmann, Hermann Danuser, Peter Gay, Bryan Gilliam, Lydia Goehr, Stephen Hinton, David Josephson, Kim H. Kowalke, Walter Levin, Bruno Nettl, Pamela M. Potter, Alexander L. Ringer, Anne C. Sjreffler, and Claudia Maurer Zenck "This is a long overdue and brilliant contribution to our understanding of the intellectual migration from Europe. The essays in this volume illuminate in new ways the experiences of musicians and scholars who fled Europe."—Leon Botstein, Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra"With a sweep and coherence very rare in essay collections, this volume immediately takes its place as one of the most important publications on twentieth-century music. The range of source materials is dazzling: anecdotes, letters, memoirs, interviews, newspaper articles, musical scores, films, and archival documents. Handled with deft scholarship, they add up to a balanced yet deeply moving account of how figures of exile experienced and transformed American culture."—Walter Frisch, author of The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg The forced migration of artists and scholars from Nazi Germany is a compelling and often wrenching story. The story is twofold, of impoverishment for the countries the musicians left behind and enrichment for the United States. The latter is the focus of this eminent collection, which approaches the subject from diverse perspectives, including documentary-style newspaper accounts and an exploration of Walt Whitman's poetry in the work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.The flood of musical migration from Germany and Austria from 1933 to 1944 had a lasting impact. Hundreds of musicians and musicologists came to the United States and remained here, and the shaping power of their talents is incalculable. Several essays provide firsthand insights into aspects of American cultural history to which these émigrés made essential contributions as conductors, professors, and composers; other essays tell of the traumatic experience of being exiled and the difficulties of finding one's way in a foreign country. While the migration infused the U.S. with a distinctly European musical awareness, at the same time the status and authority of its participants tended to intervene in the development of a genuinely American cultural voice. The story of the unprecedented migration that resulted from Nazism has many dimensions, and Driven Into Paradise illuminates them in deeply human terms. Hardcover386 pages6 x 1.1 x 9 inchesUniversity of California Press, 1999ISBN 9780520214132German History, Music, Essays

Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration From Nazi Germany to the United States

By Patrick Mackie “Erudite, ambitious and elegantly written . . . Mackie’s assertions about the ways Mozart’s identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful . . . His writing is fresh and imaginative, showing feeling for the musical character and dramatic narrative of a piece.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times Book Review “Mackie’s approach is to situate the composer as an avatar of modernism, facing a fragmented high culture—caught between dry, ritualized forms of courtly music and the ‘hedonistic levity’ betokened by Enlightenment individualism. By laying such tensions bare, Mackie achieves for Mozart what Mozart himself did for music, time and time again: to make the old new, and intelligible as such.” —Robert Erickson, The New Criterion In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being. Paperback368 pagesPicador, 20245.65 x 0.95 x 8.7 inchesISBN 9781250335715Biography, Austrian Composer

Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

By Lawrence Kramer “Sophisticated. Treating opera as a multimedia rather than primarily musical form, Kramer examines Wagner and Strauss in context with ‘the birth pangs of modern life.’”—Stephanie Von Buchau, Bay Area Reporter“Packed with succulent insights well worth savouring.”—Opera Now"Outstanding. Kramer's scholarship is as impeccable as his insights are at once original and consistently brilliant. The presentation is thorough, and the argument is well anchored in theory, history and musical detail. Kramer's discourse is crystalline and jargon free. The connections from one chapter to another are seamless. The story is, simply stated, a page-turner."—Richard Leppert, editor of Theodor W. Adorno's Essays on Music In this enlightening and entertaining book, one of the most original and sophisticated musicologists writing today turns his attention to music's most dramatic genre. Extending his ongoing project of clarifying music's various roles in Western society, Kramer brings to opera his distinctive and pioneering blend of historical concreteness and theoretical awareness. Opera is legendary for going to extremes, a tendency that has earned it a reputation for unreality. Opera and Modern Culture shows the reverse to be true. Kramer argues that for the past two centuries the preoccupation of a group of famous operas with the limits of supremacy and debasement helped to define a normality that seems the very opposite of the operatic. Exemplified in a series of beloved examples, a certain idea of opera—a fiction of opera—has contributed in key ways to the modern era's characterizations of desire, identity, and social order. Opera and Modern Culture exposes this process at work in operas by Richard Wagner, who put modernity on the agenda in ways no one after him could ignore, and by the young Richard Strauss. The book continues the initiative of much recent writing in treating opera as a multimedia rather than a primarily musical form. From Lohengrin and The Ring of the Niebelung to Salome and Elektra, it traces the rich interplay of operatic visions and voices and their contexts in the birth pangs of modern life. Paperback261 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20076 x 0.7 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520251601Music, Opera, Criticism, Modernism

Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss

By Theodor AdornoTranslated by Douglas RobertsonDelves into Theodor W. Adorno’s lesser-known musical career and successful music criticism.Theodor W. Adorno is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most prominent social theorists. Though best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adorno began his career as a composer and successful music critic. Comprehensive and illuminating, Orpheus in the Underworld centers on Adorno’s concrete and immediate engagement with musical compositions and their interpretation in the concert hall and elsewhere. Here, Adorno registers his initial encounters with the compositions of the Second Viennese School, when he had yet to integrate them into a broad aesthetics of music. Complementarily essays on Bela Bartók, Jean Sibelius, and Kurt Weill afford insight into his understanding of composers who did not fit neatly into the dialectical schema propounded in the Philosophy of New Music. Additionally, essays on recording and broadcasting show Adorno engaging with these media in a spirit that is no less productive than polemical and focused as sharply on their potentialities as on their shortcomings. Orpheus in the Underworld offers a captivating exploration of Adorno’s musical compositions, shedding new light on his understanding of influential composers and his critical perspectives on recording and broadcasting. Hardcover300 pagesSeagull Books, 20246 x 9 inchesISBN 9781803093222 Music Philosophy, Essays

Orpheus in the Underworld: Essays on Music

By Stephen Johnson "There have been many books on [Mahler] but Stephen Johnson's new volume is unique, concentrating on the composer's mighty Eighth Symphony (the 'Symphony of a Thousand'), setting the piece and Mahler's work in general within the context of the world and society he lived in. This is a book written with both passion and scholarship that will send listeners to the composer afresh."―Barry Forshaw, Classical CD Choice“In a new book, The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, the British composer and critic Stephen Johnson frames the symphony around the relationship between Mahler and his amorous wife, Alma, whom he feared losing. Much of Mahler’s music is death haunted. The Eighth stands out for its utter excess of love, the force beyond comprehension."―Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times"[A] thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8. . . . Johnson makes a strong case for its quality, musically and philosophically, in this magnificent, strongly argued and yet wonderfully subtle study. Whatever our final judgment may be on the Eighth, having read Johnson, we shall never listen to it in the same way again."―John Banville, GuardianSeptember 12, 1910: The world premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life. Munich’s new Musik Festhalle was filled to capacity on two successive evenings for the performances, which were received with rapturous applause. Representatives of many European royal houses were in attendance, along with an array of stars from the musical and literary world, including Thomas Mann and the young Arnold Schoenberg. Also present were Alma Mahler, the composer’s wife, and Alma’s longtime lover, the architect Walter Gropius. Knowledge of their relationship would precipitate an emotional crisis in Mahler that, compounded with his heart condition and the loss of his young daughter Maria, would lead to his premature death the next year.In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson provides a masterful account of the symphony’s far-reaching consequences and its effect on composers, conductors, and writers of the time. The Eighth looks behind the scenes at the demanding one-week rehearsal period leading up to the premiere—something unheard of at the time—and provides fascinating insight into Mahler’s compositional habits, his busy life as a conductor, his philosophical and literary interests, and his personal and professional relationships. Johnson expertly contextualizes Mahler’s work among the prevailing attitudes and political climate of his age, considering the art, science, technology, and mass entertainment that informed the world in 1910. The Eighth is an absorbing history of a musical masterpiece and the troubled man who created it.Hardcover320 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20205.5 x 8.5 x 1.3 inchesISBN 9780226740829Biography, Music, History

The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910

By Albrecht Dümling Translated from the German by Diana K. Weekes About 9,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany settled in Australia between 1933 and 1945, a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands who fled. Although initially greeted with a mixed reception as "enemy aliens", some of these refugees remained and made a significant impact on multicultural Australia. This book traces the difficult journey of the orchestral performers, virtuoso soloists, singers, conductors and composers who sought refuge on a distant continent. A few were famous artists who toured Australia and stayed, most notably the piano virtuoso Jascha Spivakovsky and the members of the Weintraubs Syncopators, one of the most successful jazz bands of the Weimar Republic. Drawing on extensive primary sources—including correspondence, travel documents and interviews with the refugees themselves or their descendants—the author depicts in vivid detail the lives of nearly a hundred displaced musicians. Available for the first time in English, this volume brings to light a wealth of Jewish, exilic and musical history that was hitherto unknown. Paperback571 pagesPeter Lang AG, 20165.8 x 1 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9783034319515History, Music

The Vanished Musicians: Jewish Refugees in Australia

By Arnold Schoenberg Translated by Roy E. Carter "Schoenberg’s largest and most important treatise. . . . brilliant, wide-ranging yet well focused, expansive yet reflective, eclectic yet comprehensible . . . this book will come as a joy, a revelation.”—Notes Frisch puts Schoenberg's masterpiece into historical and ideological context, delineating the connections between music, theory, art, science, and architecture in turn-of-the century Austro-German culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), renowned Austrian and American composer, musical theorist, painter, and teacher of composition, pioneered compositional and critical approaches to atonality that were landmarks in twentieth century musical thought. Paperback472 pagesUniversity of California Press, 2010Originally Published in 19117 x 1.1 x 10 inchesISBN 9780520266087Music, Theory

Theory of Harmony: 100th Anniversary edition

By Alex Ross"Capacious and enthralling . . . In Wagner’s operas, sums up Ross, 'we see the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled.' In Wagnerism, however, those impulses—aesthetic, sexual, philosophical and political—are deftly untangled, then enticingly presented for the general reader. The result is a superb example of cultural history and, given its themes, a work surprisingly relevant to this plague-ridden, watershed year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington PostAlex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now.In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world. Paperback784 pagesPicador, 20215.38 x 1.25 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781250800084German History, Music History

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music [paperback]

By Hans FalladaTranslated and Adapted by Alistair Beaton A gripping portrait of life in wartime Berlin and a vividly theatrical study of how paranoia can warp a society gripped by the fear of the night-time knock on the door. Based on true events, Hans Fallada's Alone In Berlin follows a quietly courageous couple, Otto and Anna Quangel who, in dealing with their own heartbreak, stand up to the brutal reality of the Nazi regime. With the smallest of acts, they defy Hitler's rule with extraordinary bravery, facing the gravest of consequences. Translated and Adapted by Alistair Beaton (Feelgood, The Trial Of Tony Blair), this timely story of the moral power of personal resistance sees the Gestapo launch a massive hunt for the perpetrators and Otto and Anna finding themselves players in a deadly game of cat and mouse. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Royal and Derngate Theatre in February 2020. Paperback120 pagesMethuen Drama, 20208 x 5 inchesISBN 9781350172401Hans Fallada, Plays

Alone in Berlin

By Donna Rifkind “Rifkind sees the worldly yet unassuming Viertel as at once an extraordinary character and a telling representative of something larger than herself. She’s right to…A labor of love and careful research…startling and powerful…[Rifkind’s] generosity of spirit and attention to detail suit a book about this ‘mother of exiles,’ who was always welcoming outsiders in.” —New York Times Book Review “Among mid-twentieth-century America’s most influential women, Salka Viertel finally gets her due in Donna Rifkind’s marvelous, knowledgeable The Sun and Her Stars.” —Boston Herald “Rifkind regularly takes issue with previous cultural historians who have denigrated Salka’s importance as a screenwriter…Rifkind writes engagingly and often passionately…[Salka’s] had been a remarkable life and she had been blessed with extraordinary friends, as Donna Rifkind again shows us.” —Washington Post National Jewish Book Award Finalist The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its “others”; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo’s movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler—such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel’s living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born. Viertel combined a modern-before-her-time sensibility with the Old-World advantages of a classical European education and fluency in eight languages. She combined great worldliness with great warmth. She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. A vital presence in the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is long overdue for her own moment in the spotlight. Paperback560 pagesOther Press, 20216 x 9 inchesISBN 9781635420920Biography, Women's History

The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood [Paperback]

By Daniel KehlmannTranslated by Ross Benjamin “Nothing short of brilliant.” —The Wall Street Journal “A surpassingly gifted storyteller.” —The New York Times From “one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today” (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich. An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator. Hardcover352 pagesSimon & Schuster/Summit Books, 20256 x 1.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9781668087794Historical Fiction, Cinema

The Director

By Larry Wolff "In Larry Wolff's brilliant telling, an opera's fairy-tale empress and a real-life Habsburg empress come to embody the phantom political culture of an empire that to this day maintains a powerful hold over Central and Eastern European institutions and imagination."—Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History "This alluring and original work of history explores the parallel lives of a twentieth century opera, the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, and its last emperor and empress. Politics is woven into the opera's creation and its later life. In this brilliant book, art imitates life, and life art, through mirror images, shadows and the unexpected destinies of historic personages."—Leon Botstein, Bard College "The Shadow of the Empress has many virtues: great erudition, lively writing, and undeniable energy."—Celia Applegate, Austrian History Yearbook A beguiling exploration of the last Habsburg monarchs' grip on Europe's historical and cultural imagination. In 1919 the last Habsburg rulers, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, left Austria, going into exile. That same year, the fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), featuring a mythological emperor and empress, premiered at the Vienna Opera. Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and German composer Richard Strauss created Die Frau ohne Schatten through the bitter years of World War I, imagining it would triumphantly appear after the victory of the German and Habsburg empires. Instead, the premiere came in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy explores how the changing circumstances of politics and society transformed their opera and its cultural meanings before, during, and after the First World War. Strauss and Hofmannsthal turned emperors and empresses into fantastic fairy-tale characters; meanwhile, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy after the war, their real-life counterparts, removed from political life in Europe, began to be regarded as anachronistic, semi-mythological figures. Reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that rocked post-imperial Europe, Larry Wolff follows the story of Karl and Zita after the loss of their thrones. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War. By her death in 1989, she had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia. Wolff weaves together the story of the opera's composition and performance; the end of the Habsburg monarchy; and his own family's life in and exile from Central Europe, providing a rich new understanding of Europe's cataclysmic twentieth century, and our contemporary relationship to it. Paperback452 pagesStanford Press, 20236 x 9 inchesISBN 9781503635647European History, Performing Arts History

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