Overview

The history of music is most often written as a sequence of composers and works. But a richer understanding of the music of the past may be obtained by also considering the afterlives of a composer's works. Genealogies of Music and Memory asks how the stage works of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) were cultivated in nineteenth-century Paris, and concludes that although the composer was not represented formally on the stage until 1859, his music was known from a wide range of musical and literary environments. Received opinion has Hector Berlioz as the sole guardian of the Gluckian flame from the 1820s onwards, and responsible -- together with the soprano Pauline Viardot -- for the 'revival' of the composer's Orfeo in 1859. The picture is much clarified by looking at the concert performances of Gluck during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, and the ways in which they were received and the literary discourses they engendered. Coupled to questions of music publication, pedagogy, and the institutional status of the composer, such a study reveals a wide range of individual agents active in the promotion of Gluck's music for the Parisian stage. The 'revival' of Orfeo is contextualised among other attempts at reviving Gluck's works in the 1860s, and the role of Berlioz, Viardot and a host of others re-examined.

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9780197546000

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Mark Everist has the enviable knack of discovering areas of research that enable him to rewrite history with greater accuracy, completeness, and nuance. The productions of Gluck's Orphee (1859) and Alceste (1861), with Pauline Viardot in both title-roles, are a reference point for most historians of Gluck reception since, and Everist's scrutiny of primary sources, while also tracking interest in other Gluck operas (notably Armide and Iphigenie en Tauride), shows the extent to which a combination star singer and composer, in 1859, was anticipated in concerts and criticism throughout the earlier nineteenth century. -- Julian Rushton, Professor Emeritus of Music, University of Leeds In this path-breaking study, Mark Everist offers a fascinating and fine-grained account of the performance and appreciation of Gluck's music in nineteenth-century Paris. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of French musical life during this period, Everist documents an ongoing, variegated engagement with the composer's works, through concert performances, editions, and study, despite an almost complete lack of full, staged productions of the operas during the three decades preceding Pauline Viardot's landmark performance in Orphee et Euridice at the Theatre-Lyrique in 1859, in a version arranged by Berlioz. -- Bruce Brown, Professor of Musicology, University of Southern California

Mark Everist has the enviable knack of discovering areas of research that enable him to rewrite history with greater accuracy, completeness, and nuance. The productions of Gluck's Orphee (1859) and Alceste (1861), with Pauline Viardot in both title-roles, are a reference point for most historians of Gluck reception since, and Everist's scrutiny of primary sources, while also tracking interest in other Gluck operas (notably Armide and Iphigenie en Tauride), shows the extent to which a combination star singer and composer, in 1859, was anticipated in concerts and criticism throughout the earlier nineteenth century. * Julian Rushton, Professor Emeritus of Music, University of Leeds *

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Mark Everist, Professor of Music, University of Southampton Mark Everist is a musicologist whose field of study includes the music of Western Europe, 1150-1350, music in France between the Restoration and Commune, Music and Cultural Transfer, and Mozart reception. He is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton and was President of the Royal Musical Association from 2011 to 2017.

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