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Details
Genre/Form: | Biographies Diaries History Personal correspondence Biography |
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Named Person: | Giacomo Meyerbeer; Giacomo Meyerbeer |
Material Type: | Biography |
Document Type: | Book |
All Authors / Contributors: |
Robert Ignatius Letellier |
ISBN: | 9781527503960 1527503968 |
OCLC Number: | 1026450526 |
Description: | xxvii, 475 pages, 229 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 22 cm |
Contents: | The sources: a life revealed in his private papers -- The background: historical and familial matters -- A critical life. |
Responsibility: | by Robert Ignatius Letellier. |
Reviews
Publisher Synopsis
"This reviewer suspects that most Meyerbeer 'opera buffs', will be familiar with a basic outline of his life and the dating of the openings of his main grand operas. The author goes further and embraces much of Meyerbeer's less well known music. But there is so much more in this very fine biography, whose scholarship is immediately apparent from Letellier's consideration of his sources. This is a Critical Life, which has to take account of the music for which he dedicated his life, but also the man. General historians should also find this book of interest, through a musical perspective, of the international liberal bourgeois elite of the Western Europe of Meyerbeer's lifetime."Ian Rogers"The major section of the book uses selected extracts from the diaries, with linking commentary, to create a chronological narrative of Meyerbeer's life. It must have been a mammoth task to select appropriate extracts that would give a rounded picture of the composer: his compositional methods, his operas and their reception, his relations with other musicians and contemporaries, and his character; to link them seamlessly with explanatory comment, and to meld the whole into one volume. Robert Letellier has done this. [...] I recommend this volume to anyone who wants to know more about Meyerbeer and his operas."Amazon Review"This is a remarkable book, a groundbreaking book, a great book, an essential book for anybody with an interest in classical music or European high culture during the nineteenth century. For too long Meyerbeer has languished in limbo, a shadowy figure eclipsed and outshone by Richard Wagner. It was not ever thus. In the mid-nineteenth century there was an accepted consensus that whereas music's Rafael was Mozart, its Michelangelo was Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer, not Beethoven, was music's supreme icon."Paul Dawson-Bowling Read more...

