Books and Brochures

This simple house edition is a compilation of seven articles written between 1984 and 1988. Central is The pianist Robert Schumann, published in the Piano Bulletin of EPTA-Netherlands in three installments. This is followed by a summary article with partly different illustrations on the same subject that appeared in the music magazine Mens en Melodie. To conclude, one finds a short, thematically related series entitled The Studenthood of Robert Schumann.

After two introductory chapters on the historical Mazeppa and Romanticism as a style, Chapter III deals with some forty literary products. In Chapter IV  and V the hippodrama and film genres are discussed in depth. 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.

Soon after the appearance of the Dutch version (AB III-02), I translated this cultural-historic study into English. However, this version is not a literal translation. I have tried to tailor the content to the interests of an international readership. The main difference between the two versions lies in the fact that I decided to curtail the sections on Liszt’s Mazeppa music and to deal with them in depth in a separate book (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. 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.

On the occasion of his 88th birthday, I wrote a catalogue of my father’s oeuvre. The 170-page book opens with a sketch of his life, illustrated with photos. This is followed by the catalogue, subdivided into the categories Physics and Chemistry (53 books), Biology (72 books), History (19), Languages (16), Reading booklets (27), Miscellaneous (2) and Articles (8). This is followed by ‘Twelve reading pieces’, parts from various editions.

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’.