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 pagesWallflower Press, 20086 x 0.5 x 8 inchesISBN 9781905674602 Film, Expressionism

German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow

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 Siegfried Kracauer "Kracauer's profound theoretical investigation revealed film as the form that best captured the new modes of experience that characterize modernity. Miriam Hansen's brilliant introduction chronicles the work's genesis and transformation through Kracauer's conversations with Adorno and Benjamin, his flight from the Nazis, and his uneasy assimilation into the Cold-War United States."—Tom Gunning, University of Chicago"Just as new translations of Kracauer's early works have begun to reveal aspects of his intellectual project previously unavailable to readers of English, this most welcome new edition of Kracauer's magnum opus of media aesthetics will cast a new interpretative light on his later work, thanks especially to Miriam Hansen's highly illuminating introductory essay."—Thomas Y. Levin, Princeton University Siegfried Kracauer's classic study, originally published in 1960, explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. The book takes its place alongside works in classical film theory by such figures as Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin, among others, and has met with much critical dispute. In this new edition, Miriam Bratu Hansen, examining the book in the context of Kracauer's extensive film criticism from the 1920s, provides a framework for appreciating the significance of Theory of Film for contemporary film theory. Paperback364 pagesPrinceton University Press, 1997Originally published in 19605.8 x 1.2 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780691037042Film, Theory, Criticism

Theory of Film

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 Mel Gordon When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. It is the visual scrapbook and inspired design source of hit television series, Babylon Berlin.Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” This edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”). Paperback300 pagesFeral House, 20088 x 0.8 x 11 inchesISBN 9780922915965German History

Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

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

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 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 Michael HaasA Financial Times Best Book of 2023: Classical Music“A deeply thoughtful, intensely detailed and clearly argued exploration. . . . This is not only a fascinating book, but an essential one, which will hopefully inspire further studies.”—Jessica Duchen, Engelsberg Ideas“Michael Haas is absolutely brilliant. His devotion to giving voice to the many creators who were brutally silenced during World War Two is inspiring and essential work. He does this with passion and knowledge.”—Marin Alsop“With great curiosity and empathy, Michael Haas illustrates climactic moments as these Jewish refugees lingered between worlds, lost countries and roots, and searched for new and old identities.”—Ute LemperWhat happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience?In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler’s Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile—composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today’s repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape—and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.Hardcover416 pages | 15 black-and-white images6.12 x 9.25 inchesYale University Press, 2023ISBN 9780300266504Jewish History, Music History

Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers who Fled Hitler

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

Original Price: $30 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Judith Chernaik “This densely informative biography also provides a comprehensive listening guide to [Schumann’s] music. . . . For Chernaik, the music illuminates the story of a man with ‘more feeling than judgment,’ who emerged as one of the most influential Romantic composers, before a harrowing descent into madness.”—The New Yorker“Chernaik is an enthusiastic student of Schumann’s music and a fine chronicler of his turbulent life. Schumann: The Faces and the Masks is a well-proportioned, highly readable biography for general readers that establishes Schumann as a man thoroughly of his time. The book’s greatest contribution is to situate Schumann in a remarkable fraternity of 19th-century composers.”—Michael O’Donnell, The Wall Street Journal“Engrossing . . . A most touching and moving story, beautifully told . . . [Chernaik] understands the poetry of Schumann’s soul and she communicates with quiet urgency the pity of his story and the beauty of his music. If her intention was that by reading this, we’d be inspired to go back to his music with a deeper appreciation, it has worked for me.”—Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Daily Mail A groundbreaking account of Robert Schumann, a major composer and key figure of Romanticism, whose life and works have been the subject of intense controversy since his early death in a mental asylum. Schumann: The Faces and the Masks draws us into the milieu of the Romantic movement, which enraptured poets, musicians, painters, and their audiences in the early nineteenth century and beyond, even to the present day. It reveals how Schumann (1810-1856) embodied all the contrasting themes of Romanticism—he was intensely original and imaginative but also worshiped the past; he believed in political, personal, and artistic freedom but insisted on the need for artistic form based on the masters: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. It details his deep involvement with other composers of his time, such as Chopin and Mendelssohn, Liszt and Brahms, as well as the literary lights of the age––Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann—whose works gave inspiration to his compositions and words to his songs. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, as well more established sources of journals, letters, and publications, Judith Chernaik provides enthralling new insight into Schumann's life and his music: his sexual escapades, his fathering of an illegitimate child, the facts behind his courtship of Clara Wieck—already a noted young concert pianist––his passionate marriage to her despite the opposition of her manipulative father, his passionate marriage, and the ways his many crises fed into the dreams and fantasies of his greatest works, turning his tumultuous life into music that speaks directly to the heart. Hardcover349 pagesFaber & Faber, 20186.6 x 1.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780571331260Biography, Music

Schumann: The Faces and the Masks

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 Nicholas Baer "What medium can bring us closer to Ranke's past 'as it actually happened' than film? So what medium is better suited to comment on 'the crisis of historicism'? In this remarkable book, Nicholas Baer exploits to the full the coincidence of the birth of film with the loss of trust in historiography as a discipline after World War I. He does so in a wonderful analysis of the interaction between both while focusing on its historical as well as its systematic aspects."—Frank Ankersmit, author of Sublime Historical Experience "Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, this is a remarkable achievement, destined to play a critical role in rethinking questions of history and historiography in cinema and media studies while simultaneously expanding the field of film philosophy."—Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History Historical Turns reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Nicholas Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe. Paperback272 pagesUniversity of California Press, 2024 6 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520398825Cinema, Theatre, Historical Criticism

Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema And The Crisis of Historicism

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

The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy

By Ernst Toller Translated by Drew Lichtenberg Hoppla, We're Alive is a landmark drama of the Weimar Republic and one of the founding works of what would become known as a powerful portrait of a fragile democracy at war with itself, inevitably corrupted from within by the rising forces of capitalism and fascism. Toller's main character Karl Thomas, a participant in the failed Communist revolution of 1919, has spent eight years in a mental hospital. Released into the much-changed Germany of 1927, Thomas encounters each of his former comrades in a world where all of the lessons of the first World War and the revolution seem to have been forgotten. Building to a powerful and tragic climax, Toller’s play has lost none of its power to shock, provoke, and awaken readers. Paperback86 pagesBerlinica Publishing, 20195 x 8 inchesISBN 9783960260424Theater

Hoppla, We're Alive!

By Arnold Schoenberg "If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." In this sharp, uncompromising address, he defends the composer’s duty to the text: not to entertain, not to soothe, but to translate meaning with precision and depth. Music, he argues, must obey something higher than taste—something as exacting, and as rare, as truth itself. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an Austrian composer, theorist, and painter who reshaped modern music from the ground up. As the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, he broke with tradition not for shock, but for necessity—seeking structure where tonality could no longer serve. Paperback20 pagesEris Gems, 20257.64 x 4.33 inchesISBN 9781967751136Music, Aesthetics

Shop at Neue Film, Theater and Music