Descriptive Piano Fantasias

Series: 19th and Early 20th Centuries  Publisher: A-R Editions
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Descriptive Piano Fantasias

Edited by Halina Goldberg, Jonathan D. Bellman

N081 Descriptive Piano Fantasias
978-1-9872-0609-8 Full Score (2021) 9x12, xxv + 158 pp.
$360.00
In stock
SKU
N081
The works in this volume, chosen to reflect the breadth of narrative and characteristic piano music, illuminate certain largely forgotten musical histories. The highly popular genre of the descriptive piano fantasia, conceived and produced for the musical tastes and technical capabilities of amateur pianists, grew out of eighteenth-century narrative works such as Johann Kuhnau’s “Biblical Sonatas” (1700) and the anonymous Battle of Rosbach (ca. 1780). Starting with František Kocžwara’s Battle of Prague (ca. 1788) and continuing chronologically through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, these works help to contextualize nineteenth-century aesthetic debates of descriptive versus idealistic music (and later programmatic versus absolute music), and the partisanship they engendered, by demonstrating the ubiquity of this repertoire throughout Europe and the United States. Such fantasias reflected cultural preoccupations, based as they often were on historical or fictional events, and were particularly important in Poland, where national upheaval and political marginalization provided fertile ground for musical representation and catharsis. The descriptive fantasias cross generic boundaries and interact in unexpected ways with the canonic repertory, offering insights into compositional techniques and strategies used by such composers as Fryderyk Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms, and illuminating modes of listening familiar to their audiences.
1. The Battle of Prague (ca. 1788), František Kocžwara
2. La mort de Louis Seize (1794), F. D. Mouchy
3. La journée d’Ulm (1805), Daniel Steibelt
4. Battle of Waterloo (1820), Neville Butler Challoner
5. Grande fantaisie lugubre an souvenir des trois héros: Prince Joseph Poniatowski, Ko?ciuszko, et D?browski, Op. 18, No. 1 (1821), Václav Vilém Würfel
6. La bataille de Grochow et Praga (1831), Ludwik Gli?ski
7. Une promenade sur le Nil (1833), Félicien David
8. Une messe de minuit à Rome (1841), Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély
9. Le violon de Crémone (1847), Juliette Godillon
10. Le baptême de la poupée, Op. 114 (ca. 1886), Joseph Delafosse
11. The Johnstown Flood (1889), Alberto Rivieri
12. The Kishineff Massacre (1904), Herman S. Shapiro
13. The Earthquake in San Francisco and the Destruction of the City of the Golden West, on the 18th of April 1906 (1906), Prof. C. H. Stockman
14. Koncert nad koncertami (ca. 1910), Marjan Signio