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Hermann Abert’s classic biography, first published in German more than eighty years ago, remains the most informed and substantial biography of Mozart in any language. Now available in English for the first time, Abert’s great work is not only superbly translated but also fully annotated to take into account all recent developments in Mozart scholarship.

An exploration of fifteen major paintings and a number of drawings by Watteau as well as drawings and prints by other 18th-century artists aimed at understanding the influence of music and theater on the art of Watteau.

Informed by a wealth of information that has come to light in recent years, this engaging biography tells the complete story of the life and work of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The book is the first to set all Sibelius’s works in historical and musical context, assess the full range of his formerly unknown early works, and dispel myths surrounding his life ...

In this book, a renowned concert pianist and foremost authority on Sergei Prokofiev guides music lovers and serious pianists through the great Russian composer’s nine sonatas. Boris Berman discusses each work in detail and offers a Master Class for each with suggestions and advice for interpretation and performing.

This book is the first to explore the profound impact of the Bible on African American culture and history, from the colonial era to the present. Connecting hip-hop, soul, sermons, and a wide range of other arts to the Bible, Allen Callahan shows how certain biblical themes have helped African Americans deal with extraordinary injustice and find a collective identity.

 

Hitler’s rising influence sent a flood of musical talent abroad, and many, including Klemperer, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, wound up in the Los Angeles area. This book tells the stories of the immigrant musicians who profoundly influenced the film industry, the music institutions of LA, and the next generation of American musical leaders.

A collection of off-stage photographs of rock & roll superstars––among them Elvis, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix––by the most talented photographers of the era.

 

This is the first practical guide to historical singing styles, covering the early baroque period to the present and spanning Europe, Russia, and the United States. In chapters devoted to separate historical eras, Martha Elliott discusses singers and composers of the time, the vocal repertoire, stylistic conventions, and more, drawing everything together into a convenient handbook fo...

Challenging the notion of the ineffable “Russianness” of Russian music and other myths, this book examines Russia’s long era of state-endorsed musical nationalism, from Glinka’s opera A Life for the Czar to Stalin’s death in 1953. The book illuminates the mystique and richness of Russian nationalist music as well as the eventual p...

In the two decades prior to the Civil War, the Hutchinson Family Singers of New Hampshire emerged as America’s most popular musical act. This engaging book tells the Hutchinsons’ story and documents their contributions to abolition and temperance, to the transformation of American culture, and to the history of the American protest song.

In this appealing book, acclaimed photographer Ralph Gibson offers more than 60 intimate black-and-white portraits of guitar masters playing their instruments.

The clarinet has a long and rich history as a solo, orchestral, and chamber musical instrument. In this comprehensive book Eric Hoeprich, a performer, teacher, and expert on historical clarinets, explores the entire history of the clarinet, from its early antecedents to its modern form, as well as its repertoire, performance history, and modern roles.

An essential resource for scholars and performers, this multifaceted comparative study by a world-renowned specialist illuminates the piano music of four major French composers, elucidating matters of artistic ethos and style, structure, text, and historical and performing issues.

This outstanding guide to Mozart’s operas encompasses his most popular works and offers the most up-to-date, authoritative, and accessible information for listeners who have enjoyed a stage production or opera video and are curious to learn more.

This pioneering book by an acclaimed expert is the first to discuss all Bach’s unaccompanied pieces in one volume, including an examination of crucial issues of style and composition type and the options open to interpretation and performance

With works by artists including Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon, this book looks at the dynamic relationship between visual arts and rock-and-roll culture.

Every opera-lover enjoys a performance more when accompanied by a knowledgeable friend. In this indispensable guide, well-known opera critic Charles Osborne provides exactly that. Osborne fills in the details on 175 of the world’s most frequently performed operas, including facts about the composer and the music, a plot outline, accounts of famous performers, and much more.

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This lively book is the first to explore the history of the tenor voice from the sixteenth century to the present, shining the spotlight on such extraordinary performers as Enrico Caruso, Richard Tauber, Mario Lanza, Roberto Alagna, Ian Bostridge, Andrea Bocelli, Il Divo, and, of course, Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras.

In this book a leading international violin soloist offers the equivalent of a master class on the performance of Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin. Advanced students and performers will find priceless guidance on practical matters of performance from a uniquely gifted teacher and practitioner.

This book examines the great burst of artistic experimentation that transformed the modest Russian town of Vitebsk into an influential center of the avant-garde soon after the October Revolution. Marc Chagall, El Lissitsky, Kazimir Malevich and other luminaries flourished there, inspiring one another and changing the course of modern art history.

Filled with a remarkable cast of characters and set against the backdrop of imperial Russia, this tale of forbidden romance could be the stuff of a great historical novel. But in fact The Pearl tells a true tale, reconstructed in part from archival documents that have lain untouched for centuries. Douglas Smith presents the most complete and accurate account ever written of the illicit love...

In 1764-65 the irrepressible playwright Beaumarchais traveled to Madrid where he immersed himself in the culture and society of the day. Inspired by his visit, Beaumarchais returned home to create The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. This entertaining book offers a lively account of the playwright’s trip and of the society that fired his imagination.

Having scoured original sources to uncover the truth of Robert Schumann’s life, John Worthen now offers the first reliable portrait of the enigmatic composer. Far from a depressed and often helpless individual, Schumann emerges in this biography as an astute, witty, and immensely determined creative genius who composed some of the best music of his era.

One of our most influential theater figures takes a provocative look at how Shakespeare’s plays were influenced by misogyny, racism, elitism, and other social and sexual prejudices of his age, and how he managed to transcend them and write universal works of art.

Premiering on Broadway in 1943, Oklahoma! launched Rodgers and Hammerstein’s brilliant musical partnership. This fascinating book presents the first complete behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the show, dispelling many myths about the beloved musical and revealing much about its creators, producers, cast, and cultural significance.

A haunting play based on the lives of nineteenth-century Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, The Boys of Siam is the inaugural winner of the new Yale Drama Series.

This book presents the first detailed study of Sigmund Romberg, the operetta composer whose popularity in American musical theater in the 1920s was unsurpassed. The book examines Romberg’s musical accomplishments on Broadway and in Hollywood, demonstrating his important and lasting influence on the history of American musicals.

This elegantly written book—a major reinterpretation of Spain’s theater of kings in the Golden Age—examines Spanish drama’s complex relations with the culture of absolutism and the rise of the modern state.

Jacob Gordin’s Jewish King Lear, first performed in New York in 1892, was an immediate and continuing success. This book presents the original play in English for the first time and explains the significance of Gordin’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play for his audience of new Jewish immigrants making their way in America.

Featuring previously unpublished original documents, this book paints a vivid portrait of the Moscow Yiddish Theater, an avant-garde hub of innovation during the 1920s.

The first study of composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, longtime Broadway collaborators whose successes include  Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman.

This book chronicles the remarkable stage career of Joseph Jefferson, the nineteenth-century actor most famous for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle. Through the lens of Jefferson’s experience, the book presents a lively history of American theater from the pre-Civil War era to the dawn of motion pictures.

A. D. Nuttall’s profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare’s thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare’s evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespea...

All of O’Neill’s themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays. They are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here gathered in a single volume are nine one-act plays that span the poet’s career--from the early sea plays to the Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape to the eerie nocturnal monologue Hughie, a play written near the end of O’Neill...

This richly illustrated study of the actress in Georgian England focuses new attention on her various roles as coquette, whore, celebrity, muse, and creative agent and on her contributions toward professionalizing the theater and fine arts.

Frank Loesser, most famous for composing the ever-popular musical Guys and Dolls (1950), also wrote the music and lyrics for the Pulitzer prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and other hits. This book is the first to bring the full story of Loesser’s life and creative achievement in Hollywood and on Broadway into the ligh...

Critic Marc Robinson brings his unique perspective to the history of American drama and theater, closely examining plays both celebrated and obscure and offering an array of new insights. Always thought-provoking, he proves a peerless guide to the unfolding of more than two centuries of theater history.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola,  shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of Illyria. Complications ensue—deceptions, infatuations, misdirected overtures, malevolent pranks—as everyone is drawn into...

King Lear, one of Shakespeare's darkest and most savage plays, tells the story of the foolish and Job-like Lear, who divides his kingdom, as he does his affections, according to vanity and whim. Lear’s failure as a father engulfs himself and his world in turmoil and tragedy.

Treacherous, power-hungry, untempered by moral restraint, and embittered by physical deformity, Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, is ablaze with ambition to take England’s throne. Richard III, Shakespeare’s long chronicle of Richard’s machinations to be king, is a tale of murder upon murder. He gains the throne, but only briefly...

In no other play has Shakespeare created two such equally titanic personages as Rome’s great soldier and statesman Mark Antony and the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. The story of their irresistible attraction, their jealous quarrels and betrayals, and the effects on friends and subjects of their ruinous choices is a tale leading irretrievably to despair and defeat. ...

This revealing biography of Gypsy Rose Lee—an American icon who brought striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street—uncovers the long-obscured facts of her life and sets her accomplishments in the context of mid-20th-century American culture.

Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom of the Opera, Evita—composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s phenomenal musicals are familiar to hundreds of millions of audience members. This book, the first comprehensive survey of Webber’s creative career, explores his impact, the vast range of influences on his works, and the reasons for the controversies that surrou...

In this new verse translation of the Theban plays of Sophocles, one of the most important translators of our time presents an elegant and economical version of Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannos, and Oedipus at Colonus. David R. Slavitt preserves the innate verve and energy of the dramas for a fresh rendition that will appeal both to readers and to theat...

Winner of the second annual Yale Drama Series competition, Grenadine is the fantastical story of a man’s quest for love in the company of his three devoted friends.

Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, here published for the first time, provide a dazzling and uninhibited look into the interior life and creative process of one of America’s great literary geniuses. Encompassing his life from undergraduate days to his death in 1981, the notebooks reveal Williams’s private thoughts, personal encounters, and growth as a writer.

Erdmut Wizisla’s groundbreaking work explores for the first time the important friendship between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht during the crucial interwar years in Berlin, and illuminates nearly two decades of European intellectual life.

This portrait of Fred Astaire, widely acclaimed as America’s greatest male dancer, explores his life, his unforgettable movie performances with Ginger Rogers and other great dance partners, and how he came to represent the very essence of style, class, and charm.

This book is the first to offer a full account of dance in Renaissance culture and society, showing how it was at the core of social activity and was connected in important ways with most major issues of the period.

This translation of the influential writings of the brilliant and feisty Akim Volynsky, Russia’s great ballet authority of the early twentieth century, offers a treasure trove of new information about the St. Petersburg ballet and its major personalities as well as unique insights into the theory and practice of classical dance.