Library

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…