Laszlo Somfai - Böcker

In this landmark publication, the most comprehensive study written on Haydn's keyboard sonatas, a leading Haydn scholar presents novel ideas, corrects misconceptions, and offers new hypotheses on long-debated issues of early music research. Laszlo Somfai begins with a thorough study of Haydn's keyboard instruments and their development. After recommending instruments appropriate for modern use, he discusses performance practice and style, explains the peculiarities of Haydn's manuscripts in the context of eighteenth-century notation, and provides specific suggestions for playing ornaments, improvising, slurring, and dynamics. He also investigates Haydn's sonata genres within their historical context and discusses the problems of establishing a chronology of their composition. Finally, Somfail analyzes the organization and style of each musical form. The book includes an index listing the sonatas by date of first publication and an extensive bibliography.

In this landmark publication, the most comprehensive study written on Haydn's keyboard sonatas, a leading Haydn scholar presents novel ideas, corrects misconceptions, and offers new hypotheses on long-debated issues of early music research. Laszlo Somfai begins with a thorough study of Haydn's keyboard instruments and their development. After recommending instruments appropriate for modern use, he discusses performance practice and style, explains the peculiarities of Haydn's manuscripts in the context of eighteenth-century notation, and provides specific suggestions for playing ornaments, improvising, slurring, and dynamics. He also investigates Haydn's sonata genres within their historical context and discusses the problems of establishing a chronology of their composition. Finally, Somfail analyzes the organization and style of each musical form. The book includes an index listing the sonatas by date of first publication and an extensive bibliography.

This long-awaited, authoritative account of Bartok's compositional processes stresses the composer's position as one of the masters of Western music history and avoids a purely theoretical approach or one that emphasizes him as an enthusiast for Hungarian folk music. For Bela Bartok, composition often began with improvisation at the piano. Laszlo Somfai maintains that Bartok composed without preconceived musical theories and refused to teach composition precisely for this reason. He was not an analytical composer but a musical creator for whom intuition played a central role. These conclusions are the result of Somfai's three decades of work with Bartok's oeuvre; of careful analysis of some 3,600 pages of sketches, drafts, and autograph manuscripts; and of the study of documents reflecting the development of Bartok's compositions. Included as well are corrections preserved only on recordings of Bartok's performances of his own works. Somfai also provides the first comprehensive catalog of every known work of Bartok, published and unpublished, and of all extant draft, sketch, and preparatory material.His book will be basic to all future scholarly work on Bartok and will assist performers in clarifying the problems of Bartok notation. Moreover, it will be a model for future work on other major composers.