Film, Theater and Music

By Damien Lewis"Damien Lewis chronicles [Josephine Baker] with much fresh detail… What most beguiles us today is the sense that a proud revolutionary lurked beneath the winsome savage, the snowy smile. Spycraft wasn’t so much what Baker did as who she was.”―The New Yorker“Mr. Lewis is a prolific author of wartime histories and novels…Agent Josephine is a fascinating story, thoroughly researched and richly detailed…written in the breathless style of a thriller.”―Wall Street JournalPrior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all “negroes and Jews.” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine, bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer’s life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers—a cover for her spying work—Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served—the US, France, and Britain. Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Lewis upends the conventional story of Josephine Baker, explaining why she fully deserves her unique place in the French Panthéon.Hardcover496 pagesPublicAffairs, 20226.45 x 1.85 x 9.7 inchesISBN ﻿9781541700666 Music, Theatre, Espionage

Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy

Edited by Christopher HaileyContributions by Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley "Hailey's introductory chapter is remarkable for the amount of evocative and trenchant detail he has managed to offer in a small space; it may well be the best writing about this milieu since Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna thirty years ago. . . . It is an unexpected delight that a real portrait emerges in this volume."—William R. Braun, Opera News"[This collection] should be welcomed . . . as one of the most important and perceptive books on Berg to appear for many years."—Nicholas Baragwanath, Music and Letters"These translations alone make this a valuable contribution to our understanding of Berg the man as well as to Berg the composer."—Contemporary Review Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice. The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics. Paperback392 pagesPrinceton University Press, 2010 6 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780691148564Music, Biography, Vienna, Essays

Alban Berg and His World

By Harvey SachsA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2023 “[A]n immensely valuable source for anyone desiring an accessible overview of this endlessly controversial and chronically misunderstood giant of 20th-century music.” —John Adams, New York Times Book ReviewAn astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers.In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.Hardcover272 pagesLiveright, 20236.4 x 1 x 9.4 inchesISBN 9781631497575Biography, Austrian Composer

Schoenberg: Why He Matters

By Peter Jelavich “In Peter Jelavich’s important work, the study of cultural history moves beyond the sphere of textual interpretation to analyze the complex interplay of multiple media in the making of modern German culture.”—History: Reviews of New Books"Jelavich’s study provides rich documentation of the 'death of Weimar culture,' drawing on archival documents of the Weimar government, the trade press of the broadcasting and movie industries, the daily press, and specialized literary journals of the time. Much of this background has been marshaled before by German scholars, but rarely has it been set out in English and never in such a readable, compelling story around the fate of a single literary text."—Journal of Modern History"Jelavich has written a fascinating study of mass media and censorship in the Weimar Republic, using Alfred Doblin's work as a case study."—German Studies Review This fascinating exploration of a work that was the epitome of German literary modernism illuminates in chilling detail the death of the Weimar Republic's left-leaning culture of innovation and experimentation. Peter Jelavich examines Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a novel that questioned the autonomy and coherence of the human personality in the modern metropolis, and traces the radical discrepancies that came with its adaptation into a radio play (1930) and a film (1931). Jelavich explains these discrepancies by examining not only the varying demands of genre and technology but also the political and economic contexts of the media—in particular, the censorship practices in German radio and film. His analysis culminates in a richly textured discussion of the complex factors that led to the demise of Weimar culture, as Nazi intimidation and the economic strains of the Depression induced producers to depoliticize their works. Jelavich's book becomes a cautionary tale about how fear of outspoken right-wing politicians can curtail and eliminate the arts as a critical counterforce to politics—all in the name of entertainment. Paperback320 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20096 x 0.8 x 8.9 inchesISBN 9780520259973German History, Film, Literary Criticism

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture

Original Price: $20.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By John Fuegi "[An] enormous, fascinating biography."—The New Yorker "One of the most important critical studies of the century."—New York MagazineThe result of twenty-five years of research on three continents, Brecht and Company is a revolutionary portrait of one of the world's greatest theater artists—and the people upon whom he built his reputation. A noted Brecht scholar, John Fuegi traces the evolution of Brecht's parasitic relationships and aggressive ambition through close analysis of diaries, letters, and drafts of the literary works, revealing a man who was personally dazzling, a genius at assembling and directing the plays created in his workshop, but ultimately lacking in literary stamina, for which he depended on his lovers. A landmark study about the life and times of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater, Brecht and Co. will forever change our understanding of Brecht and his oeuvre. Paperback752 pagesGrove Press, 20026.02 x 1.65 x 9.03 inchesISBN 9780802139108Biography

Brecht & Co.: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama

Original Price: $39.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Joy H. Calico “[An] illuminating way to reconsider opera in the post-Brecht era.”—Opera“Demonstrates an astonishing breadth of familiarity with the critical literature, and is able to apply insights from it to her own investigations with uncommon lucidity. [Calico] has also done some excellent archival sleuthing.”—Stephen Luttmann, Notes Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis. Paperback300 PagesUniversity of California Press, 20086 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520314269Music, Opera, Theater

Brecht at the Opera

By Oliver Hilmes Translated by Stewart Spencer “A compelling and critical picture of a clever and powerful woman . . . well-documented [and] absorbing.”—Library Journal"More than everything you ever needed to know about Cosima Wagner, this well-written book (translated brilliantly—as ever—by Stewart Spencer) offers a clear and scrupulous insight into how she created and stoked the peculiar mania that infected the Wagner cult."—Della Couling, Classical Music“Bastard daughter of touring music celebrity, unfaithful wife of great conductor, marries genius and becomes one of the leading influences on Western culture. As the Aussies say, you couldn’t read about it. But, here in the pages of Cosima Wagner, you certainly can. And the story is enriched by the author’s access to available documentation at Bayreuth.…This [is] illuminating work”—Robert Giddings, TribuneSelected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010 in the Music category. In this meticulously researched book, Oliver Hilmes paints a fascinating and revealing picture of the extraordinary Cosima Wagner—illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, then mistress and subsequently wife of Richard Wagner. After Wagner’s death in 1883 Cosima played a crucial role in the promulgation and politicization of his works, assuming control of the Bayreuth Festival and transforming it into a shrine to German nationalism. The High Priestess of the Wagnerian cult, Cosima lived on for almost fifty years, crafting the image of Richard Wagner through her organizational ability and ideological tenacity. The first book to make use of the available documentation at Bayreuth, this biography explores the achievements of this remarkable and obsessive woman while illuminating a still-hidden chapter of European cultural history. Paperback400 pages | 30 black-and-white illustrationsYale University Press, 20116 x 9 inchesISBN 9780300170900Biography, Music

Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth

Edited by Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph WolffContributions by Milton Babbitt, Reinhold Brinkmann, Hermann Danuser, Peter Gay, Bryan Gilliam, Lydia Goehr, Stephen Hinton, David Josephson, Kim H. Kowalke, Walter Levin, Bruno Nettl, Pamela M. Potter, Alexander L. Ringer, Anne C. Sjreffler, and Claudia Maurer Zenck "This is a long overdue and brilliant contribution to our understanding of the intellectual migration from Europe. The essays in this volume illuminate in new ways the experiences of musicians and scholars who fled Europe."—Leon Botstein, Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra"With a sweep and coherence very rare in essay collections, this volume immediately takes its place as one of the most important publications on twentieth-century music. The range of source materials is dazzling: anecdotes, letters, memoirs, interviews, newspaper articles, musical scores, films, and archival documents. Handled with deft scholarship, they add up to a balanced yet deeply moving account of how figures of exile experienced and transformed American culture."—Walter Frisch, author of The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg The forced migration of artists and scholars from Nazi Germany is a compelling and often wrenching story. The story is twofold, of impoverishment for the countries the musicians left behind and enrichment for the United States. The latter is the focus of this eminent collection, which approaches the subject from diverse perspectives, including documentary-style newspaper accounts and an exploration of Walt Whitman's poetry in the work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.The flood of musical migration from Germany and Austria from 1933 to 1944 had a lasting impact. Hundreds of musicians and musicologists came to the United States and remained here, and the shaping power of their talents is incalculable. Several essays provide firsthand insights into aspects of American cultural history to which these émigrés made essential contributions as conductors, professors, and composers; other essays tell of the traumatic experience of being exiled and the difficulties of finding one's way in a foreign country. While the migration infused the U.S. with a distinctly European musical awareness, at the same time the status and authority of its participants tended to intervene in the development of a genuinely American cultural voice. The story of the unprecedented migration that resulted from Nazism has many dimensions, and Driven Into Paradise illuminates them in deeply human terms. Hardcover386 pages6 x 1.1 x 9 inchesUniversity of California Press, 1999ISBN 9780520214132German History, Music, Essays

Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration From Nazi Germany to the United States

Foreword by Wolf Eiermann and Lisa Felicitas MattheisText by Lisa Felicitas Mattheis, Kristina Jaspers, Marek ZydowiczHow expressionism crossed genres in pursuit of the total artwork, from Nolde to MurnauAs a revolutionary cultural movement, Expressionism endeavored to join art and life and diminish the separation between the arts. The Gesamtkunstwerk—the total artwork—became the ideal for artists. Expressionism in Art and Film traces this crossing of genre boundaries, outlining mutual influences between painting, graphics and film. Exaggerated figures, strong contrast and distorted perspective pervaded all three mediums, reflecting the tremendous angst of the early 20th century’s social upheavals. Social critique also figured centrally in the movement, in caricatured depictions of modern men and women. This volume highlights these elements of Expressionism, drawing parallels between art and film. Artists Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Alexander Kanoldt, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Mueller figure here, as well as directors Robert Wiene, F.W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch.Hardcover240 pages | 130 color imagesText in English and GermanSilvana Editoriale, 20229.5 x 1 x 11 inchesISBN 9788836650361Expressionism, Art and Film

Expressionism in Art and Film

By Ian Roberts "An extremely accessible study of the major works associated with German expressionist cinema. The book provides lucid accounts of several prominent films coupled with illuminating background information about the filmmakers." —Brad Prager, University of Missouri"The book certainly achieves its goal, which is to reveal the contours of Weimar cinema... Recommended." —ChoiceBefore Hollywood's golden age, German expressionist film was arguably the most important cinematic movement in the medium's history. These 'symphonies of... iridescent movement' of Weimar cinema provide some of cinema's most iconic images, and its vivid contrasts and dark spaces constitute a major influence on Hollywood classics such as CITIZEN KANE (1941) and SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). This volume also offers insights into the technical and thematic developments of the Weimar film. Covering classics such as THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI (1920) and NOSFERATU (1922) as well as under-appreciated examples such as ASPHALT (1929), this volume forms an essential introduction to one of cinema's most historically important movements. Paperback144 pages Wallflower Press, 20086 x 0.5 x 8 inches ISBN 9781905674602 Film, Expressionism

German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow

By Walter Frisch "In a brilliant and original synthesis of developments in music, art, and literature, German Modernism offers an important new reading of the years of transition between Romanticism and Modernism. Frisch's study is essential reading for anyone interested in why and how twentieth-century music developed as it did." —Joseph Auner, editor of A Schoenberg Reader"German Modernism is impressive for the author's wide-ranging historical treatment, which encompasses political, social, and cultural history with sovereign skill. With distinction, Walter Frisch reveals central aspects of the era between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which music historiography has increasingly ascribed a special profile as 'modern.' No less notable are the focused musical analyses that illuminate works from many different genres. In contrast to cultural history that remains ignorant of music, and musical analysis that pays no attention to social and historical context, this blend of interdisciplinary comprehensiveness and detailed musical analysis makes an exemplary impression." —Hermann Danuser, Professor of Music, Humboldt University, BerlinIn this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker.Frisch explores "ambivalent" modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the past—the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Paperback332 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20076 x 0.8 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9780520251489Music Criticism, Essays, Modernism

German Modernism: Music and the Arts

Original Price: $60 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERSBy Timothy O. BensonA multifaceted interpretation of Richter’s career as a filmmaker, artist, and writer, examining his pioneering work —with a special emphasis on film—in the context of his collaborations with some of the most important figures in 20th-century art.Hans Richter was a central figure in the avant-garde for more than 50 years. Born in Berlin in 1888, he joined the Zurich Dada group in 1916 and within a few years was producing some of the first abstract films ever created. In the 1930s he made commercial and propaganda films for both communist and capitalist interests—a phase of his career that has been, until now, little examined. After moving to the United States in 1940, Richter taught at the City College of New York, serving as a mentor to numerous participants in the New American Cinema movement. He worked alongside a virtual “Who’s Who” of the avant-garde, including Arp, Bowles, Cage, Calder, Cocteau, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Ernst, Léger, Lissitzky, Malevich, Mies van der Rohe, Schwitters, and Tzara. This book examines the ways in which these “encounters”—to use Richter’s own term—with other artists engendered creativity, originality, and meaning throughout his career. Including a chronology and Richter’s first complete filmography in English, this volume sheds light on the relationships between modernism’s most experimental artists, movements, and generations. Hardcover224 PagesPrestel Publishing, 20148.27 x 0.98 x 10.04 inchesISBN 9783791352688 Film, Avant-Garde

Hans Richter: Encounters

Edited by Michael Beckerman "This series of essays serves to confirm Janacek's place in the pantheon of great composers."—Library Journal "I would recommend this book to anyone interested in music or in exploring the development of the nationalistic movement in music. Part I not only gives insight into Janacek the man and composer, but also Part II delves into Janacek the writer and his genuine attempts to comprehend the relationship between musical phenomena and human thought and language. Part II, 'Janacek's Writings,' has numerous musical examples to allow one to follow the composer's creative process."—Carol Ann Modesitt, Opera JournalOnce thought to be a provincial composer of only passing interest to eccentrics, Leos Janácek (1854-1928) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and original creative figures of his time. Banned for all purposes from the Prague stage until the age of 62, and unable to make it even out of the provincial capital of Brno, his operas are now performed in dynamic productions throughout the globe. This volume brings together some of the world's foremost Janácek scholars to look closely at a broad range of issues surrounding his life and work. Representing the latest in Janácek scholarship, the essays are accompanied by newly translated writings by the composer himself.The collection opens with an essay by Leon Botstein who clarifies and amplifies how Max Brod contributed to Janácek 's international success by serving as "point man" between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. John Tyrrell, the dean of Janácek scholars, distills more than thirty years of research in "How Janácek Composed Operas," while Diane Paige considers Janácek's liason with a married woman and the question of the artist's muse. Geoffrey Chew places the idea of the adulterous muse in the larger context of Czech fin de siècle decadence in his thoroughgoing consideration of Janácek's problematic opera Osud. Derek Katz examines the problems encountered by Janácek's satirically patriotic "Excursions of Mr. Broucek" in the post-World War I era of Czechoslovak nationalism, while Paul Wingfield mounts a defense of Janácek against allegations of cruelty in his wife's memoirs. In the final essay, Michael Beckerman asks how much true history can be culled from one of Janácek's business cards.The book then turns to writings by Janácek previously unpublished in English. These not only include fascinating essays on Naturalism, opera direction, and Tristan and Isolde, but four impressionistic chronicles of the "speech melodies" of daily life. They provide insight into Janácek's revolutionary method of composition, and give us the closest thing we will ever have to the "heard" record of a Czech pre-war past-or any past, for that matter.Paperback 328 pages Princeton University Press, 20036.1 x 0.8 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9780691116761Music, Theater, Opera, Essays

Janáček and His World

Original Price: $32.50 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Edited by Alexander Horwath and Michael Omasta "These images show that Sternberg was already at the absolute zenith of his shimmery mise-en-scène powers...and that should be enough to embolden readers to plummet into these dreamy pages with the conviction they're going to a better place."—Guy Maddin, Film Comment"A must for any serious film library."—H-Net"The treasure trove goes on and on, attractively and cleanly displayed."—Sight & Sound In his 1929 Hollywood production The Case of Lena Smith, director Josef von Sternberg vividly brought to life his youthful memories of Vienna at the turn of the last century. Critic Dwight Macdonald called it “the most completely satisfying American film I have seen”. But only a short fragment survives—Lena Smith is one of the legendary lost masterpieces of the American cinema. Assembling 150 original stills and set designs, numerous script and production documents and essays by eminent film historians, the book reconstructs Sternberg’s drama about a young woman fighting the oppressive class system of Imperial Vienna. It also includes essays by Janet Bergstrom, Gero Gandert, Franz Grafl, Alexander Horwath, Hiroshi Komatsu and Michael Omasta, a preface by Meri von Sternberg, as well as contemporary reviews and excerpts from Viennese literature of the era. Paperback304 pagesOsterreichisches Filmmuseum, 2008Text in English and German7 x 1.3 x 8 inchesISBN 9783901644221Film, Photography, Biography, Criticism

Josef von Sternberg: The Case of Lena Smith

By Maria Riva "Gossipy, elaborately detailed, and greatly entertaining. Riva leaves no sequin unturned."—The New York Times"Riva has a remarkable good eye. [Her book] completes the portrait of Marlene Dietrich."—The Baltimore Sun"Entertaining. The Dietrich image remains fabulous."—The Independent, London"Dietrich has remained, in the public mind, an alluring legend. What remains when the myth is stripped away? Dietrich wanted her daughter to write her biography. [It is] the only biography to rely on her diaries and letters."—PeopleThe 25th anniversary edition of the landmark biography that tells the full-scale, riveting, and untold story of Marlene Dietrich. Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds and thieves.Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexuality—wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity. She would play vulgar roles but maintain her elegance; startle the world but still maintain the aloofness of an aristocrat.As Riva herself remembers, "At age three, I knew quite definitely that I didn't have a mother, I belonged to a queen." Marlene Dietrich comes alive in these pages in all of her incarnations: as muse, artistic collaborator, bonafide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother.Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom. There were rich artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noel Coward, and Cole Porter, and her heady romances. In her final years, she would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend.Maria Riva's biography of her mother has the depth, range, and resonance of a novel and captures the conviction and passion of its remarkable subject.Hardcover794 pagesPegasus Books, 20176.4 x 2 x 9.3 inchesISBN 9781681775029Biography, Film

Marlene Dietrich: The Life

By Patrick Mackie “Erudite, ambitious and elegantly written . . . Mackie’s assertions about the ways Mozart’s identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful . . . His writing is fresh and imaginative, showing feeling for the musical character and dramatic narrative of a piece.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times Book Review “Mackie’s approach is to situate the composer as an avatar of modernism, facing a fragmented high culture—caught between dry, ritualized forms of courtly music and the ‘hedonistic levity’ betokened by Enlightenment individualism. By laying such tensions bare, Mackie achieves for Mozart what Mozart himself did for music, time and time again: to make the old new, and intelligible as such.” —Robert Erickson, The New Criterion In exhilarating, transformative prose, the poet Patrick Mackie reveals a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive. Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand about his music, and what can it reveal to us about the great composer? Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death, from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments, from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer’s life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics, and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent that threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing himself to extraordinary feats of musicianship. In Mozart in Motion, we are returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century and hear Mozart’s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being. Paperback368 pagesPicador, 20245.65 x 0.95 x 8.7 inchesISBN 9781250335715Biography, Austrian Composer

Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces

By Thea von Harbou This city of the future encompasses two worlds: that of the hedonistic ruling class and that of a segregated subculture, toilers in a mechanized underworld who labor to provide the rich with their pleasures. When a charismatic leader arises, she seeks a savior to unite the disparate social orders. "Between the brain that plans and the hands that build," she declares, "there must be a mediator―the heart."Thea von Harbou, creator of the screenplay for Fritz Lang's iconic 1927 film, wrote this novel to expand upon the movie's ideas and concepts. Vivid in description, rich in characterization and symbolism, the story draws upon ancient myths to form a compelling vision of the future. Noted science-fiction authority Forrest J. Ackerman hailed the book as "a work of genius," and a century after its initial publication Metropolis continues to captivate readers.Paperback224 pages Dover Publications, Reprint edition, 2015 5.12 x 0.39 x 7.87 inchesISBN 9780486795676Literature, Film, History

Metropolis

By Andreas Huyssen “This book will serve as an invaluable guide to the wide variety of miniature writings that emerged in the modern age. Huyssen’s close readings of these literary gems highlight the ways in which they responded to new modes of sensory experience. A brilliant study of literature in the era of visual media.”—Anthony Kaes, University of California, Berkeley“Miniature Metropolis provides a methodology for others who wish to consider the seemingly incidental writings of Modernists that have so often been eclipsed by less modest parts of their oeuvres. With original arguments and meticulous analyses, this fine study deepens our knowledge of familiar authors, and through the light it casts on its subject, it also brings into focus the current challenges to the literary mode posed by digital media and new related social practices.”—Elaine Morley, The Times Literary Supplement“This is a unique, deeply thought, and important work that brings new insights into the literary forms of modernism, and their relations to other media.”—Anthony Vidler, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper UnionIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe’s modernizing metropolises offered a sensory experience unlike anything that had come before. Cities became laboratories bubbling with aesthetic experimentation in old and new media, and from this milieu emerged metropolitan miniatures—short prose pieces about the experiences of urban life written for European newspapers. Miniature Metropolis explores the history and theory of this significant but misrecognized achievement of literary modernism.Andreas Huyssen shows how writers from Baudelaire and Kafka to Benjamin, Musil, and Adorno created the miniature to record their reflections of Paris, Brussels, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Contesting photography and film as competing media, the metropolitan miniature sought to capture the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression that defined urban existence. But the form did not merely imitate visual media—it absorbed them, condensing objective and subjective perceptions into the very structure of language and text and asserting the aesthetic specificity of literary language without resort to visual illustration. Huyssen argues that the miniature subverted the expectations of transparency, easy understanding, and entertainment that mass circulation newspapers depended upon. His fine-grained readings open broad vistas into German critical theory and the history of visual arts, revealing the metropolitan miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism. Hardcover368 pagesHarvard University Press, 20156.2 x 1.5 x 9.8 inchesISBN 9780674416727Photography, History, Urban Studies

Miniature Metropolis; Literature in an Age of Photography and Film

By Michael HaasA Financial Times Best Book of 2023: Classical Music“A deeply thoughtful, intensely detailed and clearly argued exploration. . . . This is not only a fascinating book, but an essential one, which will hopefully inspire further studies.”—Jessica Duchen, Engelsberg Ideas“Michael Haas is absolutely brilliant. His devotion to giving voice to the many creators who were brutally silenced during World War Two is inspiring and essential work. He does this with passion and knowledge.”—Marin Alsop“With great curiosity and empathy, Michael Haas illustrates climactic moments as these Jewish refugees lingered between worlds, lost countries and roots, and searched for new and old identities.”—Ute LemperWhat happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience?In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler’s Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile—composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today’s repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape—and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.Hardcover416 pages | 15 black-and-white images6.12 x 9.25 inchesYale University Press, 2023ISBN 9780300266504Jewish History, Music History

Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers who Fled Hitler

By Cristina Massaccesi Devil's Advocates Series Nosferatu A Symphony of Horror, directed by German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau in 1922, is not only regarded as one of the most intriguing and disquieting films to have been produced during the years of Weimar cinema but is also a key step in establishing the vampire as a cinematic figure and in shaping its connection with our subconscious fears and desires. In her analysis of this hugely influential film, Cristina Massaccesi unravels the never-ending fascination exercised by the film over generations of viewers and filmmakers whilst at the same time providing the reader with a clear guide about the films contexts, cinematography, and possible interpretations, covering the political and social context of the Weimar Republic and its film industry, the German Expressionist movement, the films production, reception and difficult initial release. The book also includes the results of a lengthy interview between the author and E. Elias Merhige, director of the Nosferatu homage, Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Paperback128 PagesAuteur Publishing, 20165.3 x 0.3 x 7.5 inchesISBN 9780993238451Film, Expressionism, Criticism

Nosferatu; A Symphony of Horror

By Theodor AdornoTranslated by Douglas RobertsonDelves into Theodor W. Adorno’s lesser-known musical career and successful music criticism.Theodor W. Adorno is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most prominent social theorists. Though best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adorno began his career as a composer and successful music critic. Comprehensive and illuminating, Orpheus in the Underworld centers on Adorno’s concrete and immediate engagement with musical compositions and their interpretation in the concert hall and elsewhere. Here, Adorno registers his initial encounters with the compositions of the Second Viennese School, when he had yet to integrate them into a broad aesthetics of music. Complementarily essays on Bela Bartók, Jean Sibelius, and Kurt Weill afford insight into his understanding of composers who did not fit neatly into the dialectical schema propounded in the Philosophy of New Music. Additionally, essays on recording and broadcasting show Adorno engaging with these media in a spirit that is no less productive than polemical and focused as sharply on their potentialities as on their shortcomings. Orpheus in the Underworld offers a captivating exploration of Adorno’s musical compositions, shedding new light on his understanding of influential composers and his critical perspectives on recording and broadcasting. Hardcover300 pagesSeagull Books, 20246 x 9 inchesISBN 9781803093222 Music Philosophy, Essays

Orpheus in the Underworld: Essays on Music

Edited by Cindy Keefer and Jaap Goldemond The German-American filmmaker Oskar Fischinger is one of the main protagonists in the history of animation and abstract cinema. From the 1920s onward, this pioneer of visual music coupled abstract images with music and rhythms, long before the arrival of the music video. Fischinger was a true virtuoso who created complex animated patterns that develop dynamic rhythms, harmonies, and counterpoints. He played an important and influential role in the development of early abstraction in film during the interwar period, amid artistic movements such as Orphism (Kupka, Delaunay), Neo-Plasticism (Mondrian, Van Doesburg), Suprematism (Melevich), and Futurism (Marinetti, Boccioni). In 1926 he began working with multiple-projector performances, creating some of the earliest cinematic immersive environments. The book examines his animation and painting, his use of music, his experiences in Hollywood, and his influence on today's filmmakers, artists, and animators, and features previously unpublished documents including essays by Fischinger himself.Paperback240 pages200+ illustrationsThames & Hudson, 20138.3 x 0.5 x 10.3 inchesISBN 9780500970515Film, Music, Abstraction

Oskar Fischinger: 1900-1967

By Naomi DeCelles"A crucial intervention into at least three fields: Weimar cinema studies, feminist and queer theory, and film history. Naomi DeCelles carefully and critically explores Lotte Eisner's best and least known work, situating it in history and reclaiming it for our own time."—Patrice Petro, editor of Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s"With both its balanced approach to relevant biographical details and its masterly critical analysis of Lotte Eisner’s writings, this is an excellent, comprehensive, and original study of her contributions to film history and film criticism."—Mila Ganeva, author of Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold WarRecollecting Lotte Eisner provides the first in-depth examination of the remarkable transnational career of film journalist, archivist, and historian Lotte Eisner (1896–1983). From her early years as a film critic in interwar Berlin to her escape from prison in occupied France and from her role as chief curator at the Cinémathèque française to that as the mythic "collective conscience" of New German Cinema, Eisner was a prolific writer and lecturer and a pivotal voice in early film and media studies. Situated at the juncture of feminist media historiography and disciplinary intellectual history, this groundbreaking book is based on extensive multilingual archival research and the excavation of a rich corpus of previously overlooked materials. Introducing samples of Eisner's writing in translation, this volume makes some of the most important contributions of a foundational scholar in the field of film studies accessible for the first time to an English-language readership. Paperback238 pagesUniversity of California Press, 20226 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780520388130Film History, Media Studies

Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive

By Frank WedekindTranslated by Jonathan Franzen “Spring Awakening is the best play ever written about teenagers, and Jonathan Franzen's fraught yet buoyant translation is the best I've ever read. In a culture where lies about adolescence prevail, this funny and honest play is more relevant than ever. Spring Awakening is essential reading.”—Christopher Shinn First performed in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's controversial play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid charges of obscenity and public outrage. For the better part of the twentieth century Wedekind's intense body of work was largely unpublished and rarely performed. Yet the play's subject matter—teenage desire, suicide, abortion, and homosexuality—is as explosive and important today as it was a century ago. Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.Today, one hundred years after the play's first performance, a new musical version of this essential modern masterpiece is being hailed as the "best new musical . . . in a generation" (John Heilpern, The New York Observer). Franzen's version of the text—for so long poorly served in English—is unique in capturing the bizarre and inimitable comic spirit that animates almost every line of this unrelentingly tragic play. There couldn't be a better time for this thrilling, definitive new translation. Paperback112 pagesFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007Originally published in 18915.5 x 0.3 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780865479784Play

Spring Awakening: A Play

Part of our upcoming Filmbar series By Ödön von Horváth Ödön von Horváth (1901-1939) is one of the most important theatre writers in the 1930s. His reputation rests largely on the four plays in this collection, which he called Volksstucke (popular plays), although he had no desire to embrace this tradition uncritically. Reflected in these plays is the sympathy for the situation of the exploited classes, as well as the concern for the way language is used for deception and self-deception. The hollow characters come across as potentially receptive to fascism. A latent brutality is unmasked, a lack of genuine feeling—all lying hidden under a veneer of facile sentimentality. Paperback243 pagesAriadne Press, 20025.75 x 0.75 x 8.75 inchesISBN 9781572411081Literature, Theatre

Tales From the Vienna Woods & Other Plays

By Mel Gordon The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of a notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s. In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber‘s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine. Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. Among those Anita Berber claimed as members of her vast sexual harem were Marlene Dietrich, Magnus Hirschfeld (the founder of modern sexology and gay liberation), Klaus Mann, Conrad Veidt, Lawrence Durrell, and the King of Yugoslavia. Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and starred in the silent epic, Lucifer. Even Leni Riefenstahl credits Berber for inspiring her controversial career. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of 29. The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including over 150 photographs and drawings that recreate Anita’s enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.” Paperback200 pagesFeral House Books, 20067 x 0.5 x 10 inchesISBN 9781932595123Biography, Film, Theater

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity

By Albrecht Dümling Translated from the German by Diana K. Weekes About 9,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany settled in Australia between 1933 and 1945, a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands who fled. Although initially greeted with a mixed reception as "enemy aliens", some of these refugees remained and made a significant impact on multicultural Australia. This book traces the difficult journey of the orchestral performers, virtuoso soloists, singers, conductors and composers who sought refuge on a distant continent. A few were famous artists who toured Australia and stayed, most notably the piano virtuoso Jascha Spivakovsky and the members of the Weintraubs Syncopators, one of the most successful jazz bands of the Weimar Republic. Drawing on extensive primary sources—including correspondence, travel documents and interviews with the refugees themselves or their descendants—the author depicts in vivid detail the lives of nearly a hundred displaced musicians. Available for the first time in English, this volume brings to light a wealth of Jewish, exilic and musical history that was hitherto unknown. Paperback571 pagesPeter Lang AG, 20165.8 x 1 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9783034319515History, Music

The Vanished Musicians: Jewish Refugees in Australia

By Siegfried Kracauer "Kracauer's profound theoretical investigation revealed film as the form that best captured the new modes of experience that characterize modernity. Miriam Hansen's brilliant introduction chronicles the work's genesis and transformation through Kracauer's conversations with Adorno and Benjamin, his flight from the Nazis, and his uneasy assimilation into the Cold-War United States."—Tom Gunning, University of Chicago"Just as new translations of Kracauer's early works have begun to reveal aspects of his intellectual project previously unavailable to readers of English, this most welcome new edition of Kracauer's magnum opus of media aesthetics will cast a new interpretative light on his later work, thanks especially to Miriam Hansen's highly illuminating introductory essay."—Thomas Y. Levin, Princeton University Siegfried Kracauer's classic study, originally published in 1960, explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. The book takes its place alongside works in classical film theory by such figures as Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin, among others, and has met with much critical dispute. In this new edition, Miriam Bratu Hansen, examining the book in the context of Kracauer's extensive film criticism from the 1920s, provides a framework for appreciating the significance of Theory of Film for contemporary film theory. Paperback364 pagesPrinceton University Press, 1997Originally published in 19605.8 x 1.2 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780691037042Film, Theory, Criticism

Theory of Film

By Arnold Schoenberg Translated by Roy E. Carter "Schoenberg’s largest and most important treatise. . . . brilliant, wide-ranging yet well focused, expansive yet reflective, eclectic yet comprehensible . . . this book will come as a joy, a revelation.”—Notes Frisch puts Schoenberg's masterpiece into historical and ideological context, delineating the connections between music, theory, art, science, and architecture in turn-of-the century Austro-German culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), renowned Austrian and American composer, musical theorist, painter, and teacher of composition, pioneered compositional and critical approaches to atonality that were landmarks in twentieth century musical thought. Paperback472 pagesUniversity of California Press, 2010Originally Published in 19117 x 1.1 x 10 inchesISBN 9780520266087Music, Theory

Theory of Harmony: 100th Anniversary edition

By Mel Gordon When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. It is the visual scrapbook and inspired design source of hit television series, Babylon Berlin.Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” This edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”). Paperback300 pagesFeral House, 20088 x 0.8 x 11 inchesISBN 9780922915965German History

Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

By Alex Ross"Capacious and enthralling . . . In Wagner’s operas, sums up Ross, 'we see the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled.' In Wagnerism, however, those impulses—aesthetic, sexual, philosophical and political—are deftly untangled, then enticingly presented for the general reader. The result is a superb example of cultural history and, given its themes, a work surprisingly relevant to this plague-ridden, watershed year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington PostAlex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now.In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world. Paperback784 pagesPicador, 20215.38 x 1.25 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781250800084German History, Music History

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music [paperback]

By Noah Isenberg A Los Angeles Times bestseller A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” SelectionCasablanca is “not one movie,” Umberto Eco once quipped; “it is ‘movies.’” Film historian Noah Isenberg’s We’ll Always Have Casablanca offers a rich account of the film’s origins, the myths and realities behind its production, and the reasons it remains so revered today, over seventy-five years after its premiere.Hardcover336 pagesW.W. Norton & Company, 20176.5 x 1.2 x 9.6 inchesISBN 9780393243123 Film History

We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie [Hardcover]

Edited by Professor Noah Isenberg "Weimar Cinema is the volume on this fascinating era of international film history."—Gerd Gemünden, Bookforum"This superb collection... [is] an excellent overview of the critical frameworks of German film studies... Essential."—Choice"A well-constructed and welcome introduction to a number of classics."—Philipp Stiasny, German History"With its detailed filmography and intelligently organized index, this work could easily serve as the primary textbook for a survey of Weimar film."—Glenn R. Cuomo, German Studies Review Taken as a whole, the sixteen remarkable films discussed in this provocative new volume of essays represent the brilliant creativity that flourished in the name of German cinema between the wars. Encompassing early gangster pictures and science fiction, avant-garde and fantasy films, sexual intrigues and love stories, the classics of silent cinema and Germany's first talkies, each chapter illuminates, among other things: the technological advancements of a given film, its detailed production history, its critical reception over time, and the place it occupies within the larger history of the German studio and of Weimar cinema in general. Readers can revisit the careers of such acclaimed directors as F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst and examine the debuts of such international stars as Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, and Marlene Dietrich. Training a keen eye on Weimer cinema's unusual richness and formal innovation, this anthology is an essential guide to the revolutionary styles, genres, and aesthetics that continue to fascinate us today. Paperback 376 pagesColumbia University Press, 20096 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780231130554Film, Essays

Weimar Cinema; An Essential Guide to Films of the Era

By Jeremy EichlerA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES, NPR • WINNER OF THREE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS • Finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction • A stirring account of how music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the wartime past • SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARIn 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.”When it comes to how societies remember these increasingly distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of history books, archives, documentaries, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time’s Echo, the award-winning critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler makes a passionate and revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.With a critic’s ear, a scholar’s erudition, and a novelist’s eye for detail, Eichler shows how four towering composers—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten—lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music, scores that echo lost time. Summoning the supporting testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and everyday citizens, Eichler reveals how the essence of an entire epoch has been inscribed in these sounds and stories. Along the way, he visits key locations central to the music’s creation, from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to the site of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Time’s Echo proposes new ways of listening to history, and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today.Hardcover400 PagesKnopf, 2023 6.56 x 1.38 x 9.55 InchesISBN 9780525521716Music, History

Time's Echo

By Walter BenjaminIntroduction by George SteinerTranslated by John Osborne"He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe."—Susan Sontag"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener"Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century."—George SteinerThe Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.Paperback256 pagesVerso Publishers, 20235 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781804290460Literary Theory

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By Robert Musill Translated by Genese GrillAlthough known principally for his modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1880-1942) was also a playwright and drama critic. Musil's plays and theatrical investigations, written between 1921-1929, are inseparable form his later literary work and from his life-long commitment to art as a social and cultural activity. His brilliant plays and critical writings are not minor aspects of his artistic life, but essential works, preparing the way for and intrinsically connected to his great, unfinished novel.In the theater of the fraught period between the two world wars, Musil recognized a crisis that was symptomatic of larger social, political, and aesthetic problems. In seeing Art as a social and cultural stimulus, he leveled piercing critiques at the commodification and conformism of the Culture Industry of his time and pointed the way toward a living, transformative theater.As an observer and researcher of the psychology of aesthetic experience, a student of anthropology and mysticism, and a writer who sometimes practiced the art of literature like an essayist and scientific experimenter, Musil saw in theater the ideal testing ground for questions about perception, reality, and the effects of ritual practices like formal variation, repetition, and the suspension of normal consciousness. In contrast to the mostly shallow entertainment on offer, Musil saw the potential of theater and all of art as a force that could incite existential shattering of received ideas and a renewal of "motivated" existence.Theater Symptoms constitutes not only the first volume in English of Musil's finished plays and a selection of play fragments with a large body of previously untranslated critical work, including manifestoes of his utopian theatrical vision. His theoretical essays and reviews elucidate the symptoms of and possible cures for the dangerous decline, not only of theater or art, but also, in Musil's view, of social relations: a descent from an ethico-aesthetic and "motivated" conduct of life to that of an uncritical, ethically lazy, aesthetically insensitive, and consumer-driven society. Musil's reviews of Stanislavski's Moscow Troupe, cabaret performances of Yvette Guilbert, the Yiddish theater, Expressionist stage innovations, productions of Shakespeare, Shaw, Schnitzler, Chekhov, and others, reveal Musil as a perceptive and visionary analyst of what theater was and what it could be.Paperback622 pagesContra Mundum Press, 2020‎5 x 1.38 x 7.99 inchesISBN 9781940625416Theater, Essays

Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama

By Ferdinand BrucknerTranslated by Laurence SenelickTwo Plays of Weimar Germany offers new translations, by the renowned theater scholar and translator Laurence Senelick, of popular works by the playwright Ferdinand Bruckner: Youth Is a Sickness (Krankheit der Jugend) and Criminals (Die Verbrecher). Though his fame was later eclipsed by peers such as Bertolt Brecht, Bruckner was the celebrity dramatist of his time, and a new generation of readers is discovering his groundbreaking plays known for their strong cultural critique and unflinching portrayals of social ills, outcasts, and misfits. Youth Is a Sickness (1924) explores the lives of Germany's "lost generation," those who grew up during and after the cataclysm of the First World War, devoid of hope and ideals, lost in a haze of sex and drugs. Criminals (1926) traces several court cases about a failed double suicide, theft, abortion, and homosexual blackmail, controversial topics for the audience of its time and even today. Its innovative staging and interwoven storylines illuminate the imposed social tensions and legal injustice faced by the characters.In this expert translation, readers can see Bruckner as a public intellectual, a man committed to commenting on the fate of Germany; humane values; and the past, present, and future in his work. With an introduction by the translator, this volume will be the definitive version for readers, actors, playwrights, and scholars.Paperback296 pagesNorthwestern University Press, 20185 x 8 inchesISBN 9780810137721 Plays, Theatre

Two Plays of Weimar Germany: Youth is a Sickness and Criminals

Original Price: $9.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Bertolt Brecht “I think The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage are the great plays of our time.”—Lillian HellmanThe Threepenny Opera broke box-office records in its original Berlin run, 1928-1933, and has had many extremely successful runs in the United States ever since. There have been several English adaptations. The present “book” of Desmond Vesey’s renders every word of the German, including Bertolt Brecht’s Notes. Eric Bentley’s lyrics are also faithful to the German, though they are, of course, written to be sung to the famous Kurt Weill’s music. Kurt Weill’s widow, the great actress and chanteuse Lotte Lenya, has written the introduction, telling the story of how The Threepenny Opera came into being.Paperback128 pagesGrove Press, 1971Originally published in 19284.25 x 0.5 x 7 inchesISBN 9780802150394 Playwriting, Berlin Theater

The Threepenny Opera

By Robert WalserTranslation by Daniele Pantano and James Reidel This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser’s work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser’s plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.Paperback294 pagesSeagull Books, 20185 x 8 inchesISBN 9781803090498 Literature, Drama

Robert Walser Comedies

Edited by Florence Ostende with Lotte Johnson “At a time when many richly researched tomes are liberally produced on all manner of 20th century avant-garde art and design, this is on my 2019 list as one of the best.” —Design Observer This thrilling book explores the role of cabarets, clubs, and cafés in modern art. These creative spaces were incubators of radical thinking, in which artists could exchange provocative ideas. They were welcoming environments for artists, dancers, designers, writers, and musicians pushing the boundaries of cultural and social norms. Spanning the decades from the 1880s to the 1960s, this unique and multi-faceted illustrated history of alternative artistic spaces covers four continents and includes both famed and little-known sites of the avantgarde. Organized by city, it features painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and archival material emanating from over a dozen cabarets, clubs, and bars that were home to the likes of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Loie Fuller, Josef Hoffmann, Giacomo Balla, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Theo Van Doesburg, Jeanne Mammen, Jacob Lawrence, Ramón Alva de la Canal, and Ibrahim El-Salahi. It includes photographs of the interiors of the Chat Noir in Paris, the Café L’Aubette in Strasbourg and the Mbari Club in Nigeria; a cocktail menu from the Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna; a 1930s night club map of Harlem; posters and invitations advertising performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and Mexico City’s Café de Nadie; and countless artworks that emerged from these spaces conveying the energy and excitement of the time. A series of enlightening essays explore how each space fostered and stimulated new forms of artistic expression. Hardcover344 pages with 400 color illustrationsPrestel Publishing, 20199.4 x 1.3 x 12.4 inchesISBN 9783791358888Avant-Garde, Dadaism, Cabaret

Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art

By Arthur SchnitzlerTranslated by G.J. WeinbergerThis volume contains the last three dramas written by Schnitzler. The first work, In the Play of Summer Breezes, was the last of his plays to be published and performed during his lifetime. The remaining two works The Word and Procession of Shades troubled Schnitzler, and even though he worked on them for over twenty years, he remained unsatisfied and would not approve their publication. These posthumous plays provide variations on a number of his favorite subjects and fit into the thematic progression of his work.These plays are important works, because they add further thematic dimensions to his artistic range and thus enrich our understanding of Schnitzler as a man and writer. Paperback289 pagesAriadne Press, 19965.5 x 0.8 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9781572410299Plays

The Final Plays

By Bryan GilliamRichard Strauss' successful conducting and composing career spanned one of the most fascinating stretches of modern German history, from oil lamps to atomic energy, from a young empire to a divided Germany. This biography covers Strauss' early musical development, his emergence as a tone poet in the late nineteenth century, his turn to the stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, the successes and misfires of the post-World War I era, the turbulent 1930s, and the period of the Second World War and its aftermath. Paperback212 pagesCambridge University Press, 19995.5 x 0.53 x 8.5 inches9780521578950 ISBNMusic, Biography

The Life of Richard Strauss

By Christian Rogowski This study analyzes Musil's contribution to the praxis and poetics of drama by placing his dramatic efforts in the context of what Peter Szondi has described as the "crisis of modern drama." Musil's plays address such issues as the problem of dramatic mimesis and the question of whether there can be a modern form of tragic drama appropriate to the experience of modernity. Close readings of his texts explore how any drama prefigures the interaction between text/reader and performance/audience by means of self-referential devices. Such an investigation not only reveals a special facet of Musil's oeuvre, but also offers a contribution towards a theory of reading drama, a reading of the printed play as a prefiguration of an enacted event. Hardcover313 pagesAriadne Press, 19936 x 9 inchesISBN 9780929497594Literary Criticism, Drama

Implied Dramaturgy: Robert Musil and the Crisis of Modern Drama

By C.W. Gortner "Cinematic in both scope and story, this sweeping reconception of the professionally and personally captivating Dietrich will appeal to both film buffs and fans of historical fiction."—Booklist, starred review"Gortner skillfully evokes the cross-dressing, sexually fluid atmosphere of the seedy nightclubs that helped Marlene define her unique appeal; the scenes are lively and authentic."—Kirkus Reviews A lush, dramatic biographical novel of one of the most glamorous and alluring legends of Hollywood’s golden age, Marlene Dietrich—from the gender-bending cabarets of Weimar Berlin to the lush film studios of Hollywood, a sweeping story of passion, glamour, ambition, art, and war from the author of Mademoiselle Chanel. Raised in genteel poverty after the First World War, Maria Magdalena Dietrich dreams of a life on the stage. When a budding career as a violinist is cut short, the willful teenager vows to become a singer, trading her family’s proper, middle-class society for the free-spirited, louche world of Weimar Berlin’s cabarets and drag balls. With her sultry beauty, smoky voice, seductive silk cocktail dresses, and androgynous tailored suits, Marlene performs to packed houses and becomes entangled in a series of stormy love affairs that push the boundaries of social convention. For the beautiful, desirous Marlene, neither fame nor marriage and motherhood can cure her wanderlust. As Hitler and the Nazis rise to power, she sets sail for America. Rivaling the success of another European import, Greta Garbo, Marlene quickly becomes one of Hollywood’s leading ladies, starring with legends such as Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Cary Grant. Desperate for her return, Hitler tries to lure her with dazzling promises. Marlene instead chooses to become an American citizen, and after her new nation is forced into World War II, she tours with the USO, performing for thousands of Allied troops in Europe and Africa. But one day she returns to Germany. Escorted by General George Patton himself, Marlene is heartbroken by the war’s devastation and the evil legacy of the Third Reich that has transformed her homeland and the family she loved. An enthralling and insightful account of this extraordinary legend, Marlene reveals the inner life of a woman of grit, glamour, and ambition who defied convention, seduced the world, and forged her own path on her own terms. Paperback432 pagesWilliam Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition, 20165.3 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780062406071Biographical Fiction

Marlene: A Novel

By Arthur SchnitzlerTranslation by G.J. WeinbergerStudies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation SeriesSchnitzler's one-act plays represent as great an accomplishment as his full-length plays. The works in the present volume, several appearing for the first time in English translation, deal with some of Schnitzler's favorite themes: the intermingling of illusion and reality in The Green Cockatoo (1899) and Paracelsus (1899), and man as puppet in the Marionettes sequence.Paperback 220 pagesAriadne Press, 1995 5.8 x 0.8 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9780929497969Plays

Paracelsus and Other One-Act Plays

By Pamela Katz “Katz restores the women to their proper place in the story, with levity, strong characterization, and beguiling descriptions of an interwar German milieu crackling with politics, art, and a sense of possibility.”—The New Yorker“[Katz’s] work as a novelist and screenwriter helps her keep the pacing swift and the prose dynamic—the chapters on the creation of The Threepenny Opera are almost unbearably suspenseful. . . . She offers a real and empathetic sense of how Brecht and Weill walked and spoke and dressed.”—The New York Times“Katz richly conjures the domestic, class, social, and political environs in which Brecht and Weill developed. . . . Through Katz’s insightful and penetrating prose, they all blaze and dazzle as they did in life.”—BooklistThis fascinating portrait of two of the most brilliant theater artists of the twentieth century—and the women who made their work possible—is set against the explosive years of the Weimar Republic.Among the most outsized personalities of the sizzling, decadent period between the Great War and the Nazis’ rise to power were the renegade poet Bertolt Brecht and the avant-garde composer Kurt Weill. These two young geniuses and the three women vital to their work—actresses Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigel and writer Elisabeth Hauptmann—joined talents to create the theatrical masterworks The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, only to split in rancor as their culture cracked open and their differences became irreconcilable. The Partnership is the first book to tell the full story of one of the most important creative collaborations of the last century, and the first to give full credit to the women who contributed their enormous gifts. Theirs is a thrilling story of artistic daring entwined with sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic’s most fevered years, a time when art and politics and society were inextricably mixed.Paperback470 pagesAnchor Books, 2015 5.2 x 1.3 x 8 inchesISBN 9780307744166German History, Literature, Theater, Women's Studies

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