Todd - Böcker

An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant, based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, saccharine works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works. Here are engaging analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the zestful Octet, puckish Midsummer Night's Dream, haunting Hebrides Overtures, and elegiac Violin Concerto in E minor. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in subtle, coloristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. He also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness of his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and prolific composer, his avocation as a painter and draughtsman, and his remarkable, polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time. Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood composer and gain new perspectives on one of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time.

Unlike its predecessors, this systematic survey of the law of Athens is based on explicit discussion of how the subject might be studied; and it incorporates topics like the democratic political system and social structure, which are too often regarded as being outside the scope of law. At its heart lies an attempt to reshape our understanding of how the Athenian legal system operated; but it also deals extensively with subjects such as slavery, inheritance, maritime trade, and patterns of land-holding. The author draws primarily on the hundred or so surviving law-court speeches of the Attic orators, but also uses Athenian comedy, public inscriptions, and various historical and philosophical texts. Technical and legal terms, ancient and modern, are explained in a comprehensive glossary. This book should be accessible to those interested in social history and the anthropology of law, as well as to historians of the ancient world.

This major survey of the history and culture of Roman Britain spans the period from the first century BC to the fifth century AD. Major survey of the history and culture of Roman BritainBrings together specialists to provide an overview of recent debates about this periodExceptionally broad coverage, embracing political, economic, cultural and religious lifeFocuses on changes in Roman Britain from the first century BC to the fifth century ADIncludes pioneering studies of the human population and animal resources of the island.