"**A New Yorker "Best Book of the Year"**
"An excellent work of history."--The Wall Street Journal
A rich and luminous biography of nineteenth century music.
When one thinks of "great" classical music--music with the most
emotional resonance and timelessness--we harken back to the nineteenth
century and the Romantic tradition. We recall the sweet melody of a
Schubert song, the heroine dying for love in an Italian opera, the
swooning orchestration of a Tchaikovsky symphony.
The emotional resonance of nineteenth century has moved generations
muscians and resonated with countless listeners. It has inspired artists
and writers. But no writer until how has adopted such a vividly
insightful narrative approach as Stephen Walsh and he shows how there is
more to Romantic music that meets the eye--and the ear.
With authority, insight, and passion, The Beloved Vision, links the
music history of this singular epoch to the ideas that lay behind
Romanticism in all its manifestations. In this complete, entertaining,
and singularly readable account, we come to understand the entire phase
in music history that has become the mainstay of the twentieth and
twenty-first century concert and operatic repertoire. We also come to
understand Beethoven, Mahler, Schubert, Chopin, and Wagner anew.
The narrative begins in the eighteenth century, with C.P.E. Bach, Haydn
and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, seen as a reaction
of the individual artist to the confident certainties of the
Enlightenment. The windows are flung open, and everything to do with
style, form, even technique, is exposed to the emotional and
intellectual weather, the impulses and preferences of the individual
composer. Risk taking--the braving of the unknown--was certainly an
important part of what the composers wanted to do, as true of Chopin and
Verdi as it is of Berlioz and Wagner. It's an exciting, colorful, story,
told with passion but also with the precision and clarity of detail for
which Stephen Walsh is so widely admired.
The Beloved Vision is a cultural tour de force, by turns bold,
challenging, and immensely stimulating.
