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First Nights encourages music lovers to listen to five key masterworks of the Western classical tradition with fresh ears, as if they were attending the premiers themselves. In clear, lively, and engaging prose, Kelly sets the scene for each of these "first nights," discussing the city, the concert hall, the audience, the composer, the musicians, the instruments, the performance, and the popular and critical response. Extracts from contemporary letters, press reports, account books, and other sources accompany the text in sidebars, along with well-chosen illustrations. These and other documents are quoted in full in separate documentary sections, together with guides to further listening and reading. This book is first and foremost a general-interest book, for people who enjoy going to concerts and listening to recordings, although they may have no formal musical training.
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Review:
A successful expansion of his lecture series at Harvard, Thomas Kelly's First Nights chronicles the events leading to the first performances of five enduring masterpieces. He places Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, Handel's venerable Messiah, symphonies by Beethoven and Berlioz, and the Stravinsky ballet The Rite of Spring in the respective contexts of the cities, musical cultures, and performance venues in which they were first heard. Kelly builds his chapters through an accumulation of minute but not trivial detail. The first Euridice in L'Orfeo was a castrato priest; the oppression of Catholics in Handel's Dublin was shocking; the legendary catcalls at The Rite of Spring's premiere began before the curtain went up.
About the Author:
As Kelly gathers these pieces of the puzzle together, we become desperate to find out what will happen, completely forgetting that we already know how the music ultimately triumphed over time. Along the way, there is hilarious information about the audiences (Handel's would not have been out of place at a rodeo, though Monteverdi's was unusually well informed) and reactions from the performers (conductor Pierre Monteux apparently always hated the Rite). There are also many factoids about how the music must have sounded. (Did you know that the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth included a piano?)
Kelly has provocative ideas about performance practice, suggesting that it is really a matter of how adaptable musicians need to be; he feels that musical works themselves, not just our perceptions of them, change over time. A great deal of First Nights is devoted to documents about the works, and the discography is helpfully annotated by Jen-Yen Chen. The book is unusually well designed, and no knowledge of score reading is necessary. --William R. Braun
Thomas Forrest Kelly is professor of music at Harvard University. He has served as president of Early Music America, as a regular commentator for National Public Radio, and as a columnist for the magazine Early Music Magazine.
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- PublisherYale University Press
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 0300077742
- ISBN 13 9780300077742
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages384
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