Library

A quick-reference compendium of more than two hundred opera plots with cast lists and key musical numbers.

Melody and Harmony is represented here as a researched bibliographic dossier for a historically significant source in music study. The volume belongs to the literature surrounding theory / harmony / melody and is catalogued with normalized title and author variants so that it remains discoverable even when a…

Exercises in Melody-Writing by Percy Goetschius is an important historical contribution to melody / composition pedagogy. The work combines factual information with the author’s critical or pedagogical viewpoint and provides evidence about the musical priorities, repertory and intellectual debates of its period.

A curated dossier for Tristanissimo: The Authorized Biography of Heroic Tenor Lauritz Melchior by Shirlee Emmons. The work is included for its direct relevance to opera history, vocal interpretation, repertory, or the biography of major operatic figures. The record is designed to make the book discoverable through both…

Howie’s two-volume biography is organized around documentary evidence rather than around the legendary image of Bruckner. Volume I follows the path from Ansfelden through St Florian, Linz and the move to Vienna; Volume II concentrates on the years of struggle, controversy and eventual triumph in the capital. Letters,…

Naumann’s large illustrated history was one of the substantial late nineteenth-century attempts to narrate Western music from antiquity through the major European traditions. Volume I is most valuable today as a historiographical source and as a repository of period illustrations, biographies and terminology, while its broad cultural claims…

The second volume continues Naumann’s historical synthesis into later European repertories and composers. Read together with the first volume, it provides a detailed example of nineteenth-century canon formation, biographical narrative and stylistic judgment. It is particularly useful when modern readers distinguish documentary material from the period’s teleological assumptions…