Contents |
Pioneer of opera: Claudio Monteverdi -- Transfiguration of the Baroque: Johann Sebastian Bach -- Composer and impresario: George Frideric Handel -- Reformer of opera: Christoph Willibald Gluck -- Classicism par excellence: Franz Joseph Haydn -- Prodigy from Salzburg: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- Revolutionary from Bonn: Ludwig van Beethoven -- Poet of music: Franz Peter Schubert -- Freedom and a new language: Weber and the early Romantics -- Romantic exuberance and Classic restraint: Hector Berlioz -- Florestan and Eusebius: Robert Schumann -- Apotheosis of the piano: Frederic Chopin -- Virtuoso, charlatan - and prophet: Franz Liszt -- Bourgeois genius: Felix Mendelssohn -- Voice, voice, and more voice: Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini -- Spectacle, spectacle, and more spectacle: Meyerbeer, Cherubini, Auber -- Colossus of Italy: Giuseppe Verdi -- Colossus of Germany: Richard Wagner -- Keeper of the flame: Johannes Brahms -- Master of the lied: Hugo Wolf -- Waltz, can-can, and satire: Strauss, Offenbach, Sullivan -- Faust and French opera: From Gounod to Saint-Saens -- Russian nationalism and the mighty five: From Glinka to Rimsky-Korsakov -- Surcharged emotionalism: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky -- From Bohemia to Spain: European nationalists -- Chromaticism and sensibilite: From Franck to Faure -- Only for the theater: Giacomo Puccini -- Romanticism's long coda: Richard Strauss -- Religion, mysticism and retrospection: Bruckner, Mahler, Reger -- Symbolism and impressionism: Claude-Achille Debussy -- Gallic elegance and the new breed: Maurice Ravel and Les Six -- The chameleon: Igor Stravinsky -- The English Renaissance: Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams -- Mysticism and melancholy: Scriabin and Rachmaninoff -- Under the Soviets: Prokofiev and Shostakovich -- German neoclassicism: Busoni, Weill, Hindemith -- Rise of an American tradition: From Gottschalk to Copland -- The uncompromising Hungarian: Bela Bartok -- The second Viennese school: Schoenberg, Berg, Webern -- Post-1945: the international serial movement. |