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81 books match the query 'Composers' and 3 start with g

cover of George Frederick Bristow

George Frederick Bristow

Katherine K. Preston

University of Illinois Press, 2020

As American classical music struggled for recognition in the mid-nineteenth century, George Frederick Bristow emerged as one of its most energetic champions and practitioners. Katherine K. Preston explores the life and works of a figure admired in his own time and credited today with producing the first American grand opera and composing important works that ranged from oratorios to symphonies to chamber music. Preston reveals Bristow's passion for creating and promoting music, his skills as a businessman and educator, the respect paid him by contemporaries and students, and his tireless work as both a composer and in-demand performer. As she examines Bristow against the backdrop of the music scene in New York City, Preston illuminates the little-known creative and performance culture that he helped define and create.
 
Vivid and richly detailed, George Frederick Bristow enriches our perceptions of musical life in nineteenth-century America.
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cover of George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait

George Gershwin

An Intimate Portrait

Walter Rimler

University of Illinois Press, 2009

George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place for himself--no family of his own and no real home in music.

He and his siblings received little love from their mother and no direction from their father. Older brother and lyricist Ira managed to create a home when he married Leonore Strunsky, a hard-edged woman who lived for wealth and status. The closest George came to domesticity was through his longtime relationship with Kay Swift. She was his lover, musical confidante, and fellow composer. But she remained married to another man while he went endlessly from woman to woman. Only in the final hours of his life, when they were separated by a continent, did he realize how much he needed her. Fatally ill, unprotected by (and perhaps estranged from) Ira, he was exiled by Leonore from the house she and the brothers shared, and he died horribly and alone at the age of thirty-eight.

Nor was Gershwin able to find a satisfying musical harbor. For years his songwriting genius could be expressed only in the ephemeral world of show business, as his brilliance as a composer of large-scale works went unrecognized by highbrow music critics. When he resolved this quandary with his opera Porgy and Bess, the critics were unable to understand or validate it. Decades would pass before this, his most ambitious composition, was universally regarded as one of music's lasting treasures and before his stature as a great composer became secure.

In George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs.

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cover of Gustav Mahler--Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888-1911

Gustav Mahler--Richard Strauss

Correspondence 1888-1911

Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss came to know one another as young conductors in Leipzig in 1887. From then until Mahler's death in 1911—the year of the first performance of Der Rosenkavalier—they kept in touch. Mahler himself described their relationship as that of two miners tunneling from opposite directions with the hope of eventually meeting.

This first publication of their correspondence, which includes twenty-five previously unknown Strauss letters, offers a portrait of two men who were as antithetical in their musical means and goals as in their temperaments and personalities, but who exercised a strong fascination for one another. These sixty-three letters show both composers advancing in their careers as they battled against adverse conditions in the musical world at the turn of the century. They present Mahler's energetic support of Strauss's Symphonia Domestica, which Mahler conducted in 1904 and, in turn, Strauss's championing of Mahler's music, especially the Second and Third Symphonies.

The correspondence is fully annotated and is supplemented with a major essay by Herta Blaukopf.

"Unfailingly absorbing. . . . An indispensable addition to the literature on these composers."—Norman Del Mar, Times Literary Supplement
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