Nineteenth-century Romanticism in Music [antikvár]

FOREWORD Students and informed amateurs of the history of music have long needed a series of books that are comprehensive, authoritative, and engagingly written. They have needed books written by specialists—but specialists interested in communicating vividly. The Prentice-Hall History of Music Series aims at filling these needs. Six books in the series present a panoramic view of the history of Western music, divided among the major historical periods—Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Romantic, and Contemporary. The musical cultures of the United States, Latin America, and Russia, viewed historically as independent developments within the larger western tradition, are discussed in three other books. In yet another pair, the rich yet neglected folk and traditional music of both hemispheres is treated. Taken together, the eleven volumes of the series are a distinctive and, PREFACE The spectrum of nineteenth-century music is characterized by a number of familiar and even overly-familiar compositions, a larger number of worthy works that have fallen into neglect, and an enormous mass of music still awaiting classification and evaluation. To the general observer, the history of nineteenth-century music resembles a panorama of mountains, some in shadow, separated by mist-shrouded valleys; in the limited space of this volume, an author describing this period can only direct the reader's attention to various aspects of the peaks, tell him something about their shadowv portions, and point otit some of the salient features of the valleys. In the few years that have elapsed since the writing of the first edition there has been a great upsurge of interest in the music of the nineteenth centuiy, especially in that of its neglected composers. Festivals of Romantic music have given listeners an opportunity to hear works in live performance that are mentioned in histories of music but had