Othmar Schoeck : life and works / Chris Walton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walton, Chris, 1963- author.

Series:

Eastman studies in music ; v. 65.

Eastman studies in music, 1071-9989 ; v. 65

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Schoeck, Othmar, 1886-1957.

Schoeck, Othmar.

Composers--Switzerland--Biography.

Composers.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 447 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Suffolk : Boydell & Brewer, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In this, the first extended study of Schoeck in English, Walton places the man and the artist squarely in the context of his time. 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, author of <I>Richard Wagner in Zurich: The Muse of Place</I>, 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 traces Schoeck's relationships to musicians such as Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Furtwängler, 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. 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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

"Concise work catalogue and discography": p. [327]-381.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [403]-411) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-89505-2

9786612895050

1-58046-730-X

OCLC:

680017937