Books and Brochures

This compilation of articles serves two purposes. Firstly it supplements and amends the usually held view of Schumann’s activities as related to the piano. There has, to my knowledge, never been a special study written on this facet of his musical development. But on the other hand it describes, however briefly, how occupational disabilities such as those experienced by so many pianists gradually develop. Schumann’s ‘case’ is in fact nothing other than a caricatural exaggeration of the same fallacies that are still perpetrated.

After two introductory chapters on the historical Mazeppa and Romanticism as a style, Chapter III deals with some forty literary products. In Chapter IV the hippodrama genre is discussed in depth; this type of performance evolved into the medium of the (silent) film at the beginning of the 20th century, and is discussed in Chapter V. Chapter VI presents dozens of Mazeppa paintings and drawings. The last three chapters are reserved for the approximately sixty Mazeppa compositions that the author managed to track down. Please see III-03 for the English edition.

Soon after the appearance of the Dutch version (AB III-02), I decided to translate this cultural-historic study into English: Mazeppa in the Romantic Arts. However, this English version is not a literal translation. I have tried to tailor the content to the interests of an international readership. The major difference between the two versions, however, lies in the fact that I decided to narrow down the sections about Liszt’s Mazeppa music and to go into depth about this in a separate monograph, entitled The Mazeppa Music of Franz Liszt (AB III-06).

Max Prick van Wely (1909–2000) studied for the main subjects Piano and Composition at the Amsterdam Conservatory and concluded his studies with the performance of his own First Piano Concerto with the conservatory orchestra in the Amsterdam Bachzaal. The present catalogue lists more than a hundred compositions. However, Prick van Wely made his name primarily as an author. Eleven books were published in addition to various translations, arrangements, song albums and fairy-tale collections. A large number of articles – more than 90 in total – complete this overview.

This richly illustrated booklet (full colour) describes the journey that Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult made through Switzerland in the summer of 1835. The author traced this journey on the basis of Liszt’s Agenda 1835 and the recently published diary excerpt Le voyage en Suisse by Marie d’Agoult, following in the lovers’ footsteps. The result is somewhere between a musicological study and a ‘holiday diary’. With a generous English summary.

The book opens with a Preface by Martin Kloos and a Foreword by Jan Wijn. There then follow 17 chapters covering the complete piano technique, always linking  the technical/physical aspect to the artistic dimension and referring to the regular piano literature through a great number of music examples. Towards the end of the book, the author strikes a completely philosophical/spiritual tone with chapters such as ‘Inner sound image’ and ‘Portrayal and artist’.