Othmar Schoeck (eBook)

Life and Works

Chris Walton (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2009
457 Seiten
Boydell & Brewer Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-58046-730-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Places the Swiss composer Schoeck, master of a late-Romantic style both sensuous and stringent, in context and gives insight into his increasingly popular musical works.The work of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) has in recent years enjoyed a surge of interest. His 300 songs with piano accompaniment are now all on CD, as are his orchestral song cycles and five of his eight stage works. Yet despite an impressive discography featuring names such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Lucia Popp and Ian Bostridge, no biographical study of Schoeck has ever been available in English. Chris Walton, authorof Richard Wagner in Zurich: The Muse of Place, charts the turbulent course of Schoeck's life and career with care and candor, from a rampant youth to midlife monogamy and an old age ravaged by fears of neglect. He tracesSchoeck's relationships to musicians such as Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky, and to writers Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and James Joyce. New light is also shed on Schoeck's uneasy relationship with Nazi Germany and its culmination, for him, in public humiliation and private catastrophe. As an accompanist, Schoeck was an arch-Romantic master of rubato; as a conductor, he was a fervent champion of the new; and in his compositions, he moved from late-Romanticism through a modernist vortex to emerge in full mastery of an individual musical language both sensuous and stringent. In this thorough new biography, Waltonplaces Schoeck the man and the artist squarely in the context of his time. Chris Walton is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and Managing Director of the Orchestre Symphonique Bienne in Switzerland. He is the recipient of the 2010 Max Geilinger Prize honoring exemplary contributions to the literary and cultural relationship between Switzerland and the English-speaking world.

Inhalt

Introduction: Schoeck and the Swiss
Childhood and Youth
Wolf amidst the Sheep
Leipzig, Munich, and an Awful Little Moustache
Back in the Fold
Hermann Hesse, via the Dentist
Look Back in Melancholy
Chamber Music
The Art of Counterpoint
Busoni
The Picture on the Wall
Touch of Venus
Silent Bronze
Sucking Sweet Folly
Self Portrait, with Sandwich
Elegy
Goodbye to Geneva
The Bee in the Rose
Raging Queen
Storms in the Pigeon Loft
Into the Vortex
Wrong-Note Rag
Hildebill
Variations and Fugue on an Age-Old Theme
Put to the Wheel
Gisela
Lost in the Stars
Whores and Madonnas
". . . he can write music all right . . ."
Tea with (Ms.) Hitler
Aryanizing Music
Arms and the Man
Castles in the Air
Goering's Bullshit
Collapse
The People at Home
The Reckoning
Transfigured Summer Nights
Silent Lights
Fair Measure
Rather Nice Horn
Sleepless in Wollishofen
Echoes and Elegies
Running on Empty
Epilogue
Othmar Schoeck: Concise Work Catalogue and Discography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.9.2009
• Reihe/Serie: Eastman Studies in Music
• Reihe/Serie: Eastman Studies in Music
• Zusatzinfo: 19 b/w, 37 line illus.
• Verlagsort: Rochester
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
• Schlagworte: Biographical Study • Chris Walton • compositions • Discography • Individual Musical Language • Late-Romantic Style • musician • Nazi Germany • Orchestre Symphonique Bienne • Othmar Schoeck • relationships • sensuous • Stringent • Swiss Composer • University of Stellenbosch • writers
• ISBN-10: 1-58046-730-X / 158046730X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-730-8 / 9781580467308