The best books about classical music released in 2021

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Carmen Abroad edited by Richard Langham Smith and Clair Rowden

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48161-8 350pp (hb)

£75

Having met Carmen in the 1950s, I’ve long assumed I had a fairly good idea of what the opera was ‘about’. This wonderfully illuminating and widely researched volume proves we all have our fantasies. One of the key subjects is ‘alienation’. I had never taken in that all the main actors are ‘playing away’: soldiers go to where they’re posted, gypsies, smugglers and bullfighters to where the money is.

Alongside this goes the alienation between the Basque Don José and the Andalusian Carmen (she claims to be Basque, but this seems to be one of her lies), a contrast which naturally played into the Basques’ long desire for independence. Finally, on the largest scale, it informs the field addressed in the book’s title, there being no continent except Antarctica that remains Carmen immune. A witch, or a proto-feminist paying men back in their own kind? Or both? The general reader can easily pass over the more erudite paragraphs (names and dates) to reach the many fascinating insights this book provides. No question, my Book of 2020.

Review by Roger Nichols

George Frideric Handel – Collected Documents, Vol. 4: 1742-1750

(Ed. Donald Burrows, Helen Coffey, John Greenacombe, et al)
Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-08021-8 986pp (hb)

£140

The fourth volume of the Handel Collected Documents encompasses the years between 1742 and 1750. As well as revivals of major works, these years witnessed the premieres of many of his greatest oratorios, notably Samson, Semele, Hercules, Belshazzar, Judas Maccabaeus, Solomon, Theodora and the first London performance of Messiah. The surviving documents concerning these and many other events make for compelling reading. Many will be familiar to seasoned Handelians but there is much that sheds fresh light on the preparation and performance of Handel’s music.

Among material meticulously assembled by Donald Burrows and his team is that which furthers our knowledge of Handel’s prestigious reputation abroad. Translations are provided where necessary, as for commentaries by Lorenz Mizler and Johann Adolf Scheibe, as well as for a splendid Ode for Handel’s 65th birthday. Comparably valuable is the light which these documents shed upon musical contemporaries, such as William Boyce, who were not connected with Handel’s own productions. Boyce’s fine set of trio sonatas was issued in 1747. The final volume of this impressive undertaking is well on the way and is eagerly anticipated.

Review by Nicholas Anderson

Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford

Faber & Faber 978-0-571-32324-1 832pp (hb)

£30

‘Who wants to read about a happy man?’ asks Jan Swafford in the introduction to his terrifically engaging new biography of Mozart. Certainly the Mozart conjured by those ‘mythmakers’ of the 19th century was an enthrallingly tragic figure, steeped in penury and neglect. Swafford, however, refuses to take the bait and having written acclaimed biographies of Beethoven, Brahms and Ives, declares Mozart to be the ‘sanest’ of the lot. This new biography is thus crucially low on drama: Mozart is presented as neither a revolutionary nor victim, but rather a ‘jolly and informal man’ who was ‘supremely fastidious’ in his music-making.

Swafford’s gifts as a biographer mean that this warm-spirited account of an essentially ‘happy man’ could not be more engrossing. Packed with musical analysis and meticulous historical research, the book is written with a wit, grace and compassion that well befits its subject. For Swafford, the enduring power of Mozart’s music lies in the composer’s profound understanding of the human condition and in his tremendous capacity for love: of music, of his wife and of ‘humanity in all its gnarled splendour’.

Review by Kate Wakeling

The New Beethoven ed. Jeremy Yudkin

Boydell Press 978-1-580-46993-7 572pp (hb)

£95

One of the problems with iconic status is that critical acumen can easily transmute into intellectualised reverence. The stoic features of Thomas Crawford’s 1856 statue, which adorn this mighty tome, captures the Beethovenian myth at its apex: the square-jawed features, the lion’s mane of hair, the impregnable stare of heroism. One could even argue that the publication of a formidable collection of essays as part of the 250th-birthday year celebrations perpetuates (unintentionally) the Romantic archetype.

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Yet far from offering a platitudinous overview, fresh insights abound, ranging from the previously under-acknowledged impact of Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s opéras-comiques on Beethoven’s burgeoning style and the musical instruments he owned, to a set of parts of the Op. 135 String Quartet, copied in the composer’s own hand, that reveal several fundamental rethinks when compared with the original autograph. One might easily have imagined that there was little left to say about Beethoven that had not been said a hundred times before – this bracingly wide-ranging compendium proves otherwise.

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Review by Julian Haylock

Finding the Raga – An Improvisation on Indian Music by Amit Chaudhuri

Faber & Faber 978-0-571-21910-0 272pp (hb)

£12.99

The subtitle, ‘An improvisation on Indian music’, is exact. The book has the feel of a raga, with its delicate calibration of pace and structure and its extraordinary climax towards the end: 14 pages left blank apart from little scatters of digits indicating what readers should hear in their heads.

A novelist and professor of creative writing, Chaudhuri’s bicultural background means he is equally at home in Mumbai and London, and his slow-burning passion for Indian classical music was complemented by his initial ambition to be a rock singer. He draws parallels between raga and European classical music, and brings in cinema, abstract painting, English poetry and Western pop; he offers at once a personal memoir and a brilliantly illuminating cross- cultural commentary.

And he penetrates the mysteries of raga, including its history and development. In a book studded with apercus, let one stand for many: Indian classical music’s revolutionary engagement with antiquity may be why Western classical music never achieved centrality in India.

Review by Michael Church

Puccini's La bohème by Alexandra Wilson

Oxford University Press 978-0-190-63789-7 168pp (pb)

£11.99

Love, death, nostalgia; youth, poverty, art – and Paris. As Alexandra Wilson notes, these striking themes do not in themselves explain the rise of Puccini’s La bohème to operatic super-fame – nor the ‘problematic’ nature of its success for some, as a work that ‘appeared to be attempting to straddle the art- entertainment divide.’

In her astute and engaging monograph, they form the basis of a discussion about the ways in which Bohème both shaped and reflected a particular fin-de-siècle sensibility; one that’s proved remarkably enduring in its combination of romantic fervour with a mythologising realism that speaks to social truths while carefully stopping short of actual brutality or squalor.

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From the politics of national identity to the rise of the gramophone, commercial recording and modern-day pop culture, Wilson is at once wholly invested in and clear-eyed about her subject. Social context is all – and an alertness to snobbery direct and inverted: not just about Puccini, Italian opera and false dichotomies of emotion versus intellect, but how differing responses to Bohème offer important clues to broader tastes and attitudes.

Review by Steph Power

The Edge of Beyond – Ralph Vaughan Williams in the First World War by Stephen Connock

Albion Music
£25

Forever tight-lipped about his music, Vaughan Williams gave barely a clue as to how his harrowing Great War experiences – first as a medical orderly and then an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery – transmuted into such works as A Pastoral Symphony, The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Riders to the Sea and Sancta Civitas. As a result, Stephen Connock’s fascinating new study can only shed so much light on the precise significance of such music.

However, this immaculately researched handbook to the composer’s war will enhance many a listening experience. Connock has visited the Western Front theatres where Vaughan Williams served on numerous occasions, and delves deeply into the available information about the relevant ambulance unit and artillery brigade. This is woven skilfully around such details of Vaughan Williams’s war as are known. With the general reader in mind, Connock sets this account within an overview of the composer’s life and work. Not the least of the attractive features is a veritable photographic treasure trove. This is a milestone work in the Vaughan Williams biographical corpus.

Review by Andrew Green

Beethoven – A Life in Nine Pieces by Laura Tunbridge

Penguin 288pp (pb)
£9.99

Some tomes about Beethoven exceed 1,000 pages. Yet Laura Tunbridge, professor of music at Oxford University, has boiled down some of the key biographical issues into chapters revolving around nine pieces of music. These provide focal points for specific angles and their discussion: for instance, heroism in the Eroica Symphony, spirit in the Missa solemnis, family in the Hammerklavier Sonata.

The structure is part of a literary trend that circumvents our modern attention span (or lack of it), but she makes it work better than most, and uses it to cast truly fresh light upon this much-explored musical titan. As an example, the exploration of friendship via the Kreutzer Sonata encompasses, among other things, Vienna’s social hierarchy, the significance of coffee and the chequered relationships Beethoven enjoyed with violinists such as Schuppanzigh and, crucially, George Bridgetower, plus the radical musical evolutions the work represents.

Tunbridge never stints on musical description, nor compromises her admirable rigour, while her prose is vivid, crystal-clear and never less than fascinating. The only problem is that the ‘nine pieces’ format is necessarily a little bit reductive and stops this wonderfully rewarding book (here reissued in paperback) from being twice as long.

Review by Jessica Duchen

The Music of Frederick Delius – Style, Form and Ethos by Jeremy Dibble

Boydell Press
£40

Those wishing to flesh out their knowledge of the English musical renaissance on either side of 1900 already owe a huge amount to Jeremy Dibble – not least to his outstanding biographies of Parry and Stanford. Now comes an equally authoritative study featuring English music of a very different stamp from the same period. Delius has been a passion since Dibble’s schooldays, so this exercise can only have been a labour of love.

However, there is nothing misty-eyed about this coolly dispassionate study. Dibble rigorously and wholly convincingly tackles significant misapprehensions about Delius’s music – most obviously, that it betrays a lack of interest in formal structures and that its distinctive style is somehow wholly individual. The result is a goldmine of information and analysis that will appeal most obviously to the more serious Delius enthusiast. It will doubtless serve as a one-stop shop for many a programme note writer, not least as Dibble keeps a short-form biographical dimension humming along. Boydell Press have yet again done Delius proud.

Review by Andrew Green

The Bach Cello Suites – A Companion by Steven Isserlis

Faber 215pp (hb)
£12.99

Particularly in the case of Bach’s Cello Suites, when wanting to investigate further the works’ background and creative process, it is easy to become bogged down in academese that no matter how meticulously researched, fails to convey the magic one feels as soon as the music actually starts. This is where Steven Isserlis’s companion really comes into its own, as it is written from a player-listener’s perspective. For many of us, Isserlis’s 2007 recording of the Cello Suites (Hyperion CDA67541/2) redefined what this glorious music is all about, and now you can savour the thinking (and feeling) that lay behind it.

As Isserlis outlines the background to the suites with a deftness of touch reminiscent of his actual playing, one is constantly reminded what is truly essential from a performer’s perspective. Yes, there are many differences between the surviving sources, but as Isserlis points out, none affect the music’s meaning as deeply as discrepancies in articulation, which can alter a whole movement’s essential character. Most cherishable of all is his movement-by-movement survey of the entire opus, which by some subtle osmosis reminds us why we fell in love with the finest of all cello works in the first place.

Review by Julian Haylock

The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf – Life, Letters, Lieder by Richard Stokes

Faber 672pp (hb)
£30Sixty years on, we have a successor to Eric Sams’s serviceable account of Hugo Wolf’s songs. Yet Richard Stokes’s magnificent ‘companion’ is anything but simply serviceable. No song is unturned, each elegantly and accurately translated. Every poet who Wolf set is given a short pithy biography, and interspersed through the text are extracts from the composer’s letters in German and English. As a reference book, this is indispensable.

Yet it is much more than a reference book. The admirable biographies of Goethe or Mörike or Heyse or Friedrich von Matthisson, the poet whose Adelaide Beethoven set, give us a remarkable picture of German intellectual life and the richness of its cultural connections in the 19th century. Hugo Wolf also emerges warts and all, convinced in so many letters that he has just written his greatest song, irascible with a short fuse to a violent temper and finally driven insane by syphilis. Over his friend’s open grave Michael Haberlandt read Justinus Kerner’s poem set by Wolf in June 1883. ‘Night must come/ That you may find light’. Richard Stokes moves Wolf into that light for us.

Review by Christopher Cook

Symphonies for the Soul – Classical Music to Cure Any Ailment by Oliver Condy

Cassell Books 192pp (hb)
£15

‘Many men are melancholy by hearing Musicke, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth… a most present remedy,’ declares Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. In this wise and playful new book, Oliver Condy takes the musical ‘remedy’ a step further, offering us a series of musical ‘prescriptions’ to cure everything from a nasty case of regret to a pang of embarrassment.

The book presents a witty A-Z of maladies, with each affliction paired with a suggested piece of music to listen to, alongside insightful commentary on each work discussed. A broken heart is met by two kinds of remedy: for ‘Heartbreak (getting over)’, Condy prescribes a balanced diet of Purcell, Rachmaninov and Schubert, while for ‘Heartbreak (wallowing in)’ we are recommended a dose of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Condy’s musical choices are commendably eclectic and range from much-loved classics to the more experimental (for ‘Urban malaise’ we are directed to Finnish composer Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus for orchestra and recorded soundtrack of arctic birds). Written with wry humour, the book is nonetheless sincere in its message: there is perhaps no better remedy for a troubled soul than music.

Review by Kate Wakeling

Once Upon a Tune – Stories from the Orchestra by James Mayhew

Otter-Barry Books 96pp (hb)
£16.99

If you’re looking for some bedtime story material, then look no further than this collection of six sumptuously illustrated stories. Each of the tales here inspired pieces of famous classical music, from Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Schiller’s William Tell, and are adapted and illustrated by James Mayhew.

Like all the great fairytales, it’s not all sweetness and light – Lemminkainen is chopped up into bits in The Swan of Tuonela and Peer Gynt is very nearly eaten alive by trolls in In the Hall of the Mountain King. The stories give equal billing to both the composer and author of each work, and Mayhew shares a list of recommended recordings at the end – so there’s a more immersive option, should you wish to read and listen as you go, a perfect way to introduce these works to young ears. Of course, that’s all wonderful, but it’s the illustrations that truly dazzle. Adults and children alike will get lost in the colour and detail of Mayhew’s awesome artworks; he even layers in sections of relevant musical score.

This is a perfect Christmas gift for the children, or even for yourself.

Review by Michael Beek