The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, Edited by Mary Sue Morrow and Bathia Churgin
Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, Vol. 13, 2015-16 Review Review The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume 1: The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, edited by Mary Sue Morrow and Bathia Churgin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012 The five heavyweight tomes that now comprise The Symphonic Repertoire represent a signal accomplishment by any measure. Conceived as a love of labor and scholarly ambition by the late A. Peter Brown (1943–2003), the multivolume series was designed to offer a meticulous, style- analytical account of the symphony in its salient manifestations from the early eighteenth century through the twentieth. Reasonably enough, Brown’s work on the plan focused at the outset on the later, more readily manageable phases of the genre’s history. The first volume to appear in print was The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert (designated as Volume 2, published in 2002, not long before the author’s death). Subsequent volumes appeared during the next several years: Volume 4, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony: Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorák, Mahler, and Selected Contemporaries, in 2003; and then Volume 3, in two parts: The European Symphony from ca. 1800 to ca. 1930, Part A: Germany and the Nordic Countries, and Part B: Great Britain, Russia, and France, both in 2007. It was almost certainly Brown’s intention to follow the two-part Volume 3 with the book that was to have completed the series, Volume 5, The Symphony in Europe and the Americas in the Twentieth Century (such a text has not appeared, although numerous library catalogs include the title in their general listing for the series; it is not currently mentioned on the publisher’s website).
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