Bøker av Laurence Dreyfus

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. This title studies the composer and his works, showing how Wagner's obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as "Tannhauser", "Die Walkure", "Tristan und Isolde", and "Parsifal".

In this major new interpretation of the music of J.S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach's music "against the grain" of contemporaries, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach's approach to musical invention posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics.

When Bach's cantatas, masses, passions, and chorales were originally performed under the composer's direction, which instruments played the basso continuo, the line that establishes the harmonic framework? Bach's Continuo Group answers this and other fundamental questions and probes the rationale behind Baroque performance conventions.