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Summary:

Overview: Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and American musical life today, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active. Porter begins with the Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lueneberg, a harpsichordist who also presided over seventeenth-century North German court music as an impresario. At the forefront of French Baroque composition, composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre bridged a widening cultural gap between the Versailles nobility and the urban bourgeoisie of Paris. A century later, Josephine Lang, a prodigiously talented pianist and dedicated composer, participated at various times in the German Romantic world of lieder through her important arts salon. Lastly, the twentieth century brought forth two exceptional women: Baroness Maria Bach, a composer and pianist of twentieth-century Vienna's upper bourgeoisie and its brilliant musical milieu in the era of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Korngold; and Ann Schein, a brilliant and dauntless American piano prodigy whose career, ongoing today though only partially recognized, led her to study with the legendary virtuosos Arthur Rubinstein and Myra Hess. Mining musical autographs, unpublished letters and press reviews, interviews, and music archives in the United States and Europe, Porter probes each musician's social and economic status, her education and musical training, the cultural expectations within the traditions and restrictions of each woman's society, and other factors. Throughout the lively and focused portraits of these five women, Porter finds common threads, both personal and contextual, that extend to a larger discussion of the lives and careers of female composers and performers throughout centuries of music history.

Table of Contents:

• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth: composer, harpsichordist, and impresario in the North German baroque
• 2: Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre: Versailles and Paris in the twilight of the ancien regime
• 3: Josephine Lang: music of romanticism in South German cultural life
• 4: Maria Bach: Vienna from imperial splendor to the Second Republic
• 5: Ann Schein: American concert pianist in today's world
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index.

Author/Creator:

Porter, Cecelia Hopkins

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Five lives in music: women performers, composers, and impresarios from the baroque to the present [by Porter, C.H.]

Subjects:

Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess, consort of August, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 1613-1676

Jacquet de La Guerre, Elisabeth-Claude, 1665-1729

Lang, Josephine, 1815-1880

Bach, Maria, 1896-1978

Schein, Ann, 1939-

Women musicians — Biography

Women composers — Biography

Musicians — Biography

Composers — Biography

Women musicians

Women composers

Musicians

Composers

Genres:

Biographies

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-237) and index.
Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. Available via World Wide Web.
Description based on print version record.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Digital Characteristics:

text file

Call Numbers:

ML82 .P675 2012eb

ISBNs:

9780252094132 (electronic bk.)
0252094131 (electronic bk.)
9780252037016 [Invalid]
0252037014 [Invalid]
9780252080098 [Invalid]
0252080092 [Invalid]

OCLC Numbers:

826684855

Other Control Numbers:

EBC3414200 (source: MiAaPQ)
[Unknown Type]: ybp10001176