User:Opus33/Books

This is a partial list of the books I've used in editing on the topics shown.

I recently edited this page and found it humbling to consider the large number of well-known books I have not read. Sigh.

Haydn

Here, the scholarship tends to be quite good -- the scholars don't have to contend with as many sentimental myths.

Geiringer, Karl, in collaboration with Irene Geiringer (3rd ed., 1982) Haydn: A Creative Life in Music. A bit old-fashioned, but helpful. The first edition has the amusing/weird bit about his curatorship over Haydn's skull.
Hughes, Rosemary (1950/1970) Haydn. Not reliable for biography (as she herself notes guiltily in a preface to a later edition), but I think her comments on the music are are really insightful. Charles Rosen admired her work.
Jones, David Wyn (2009) The Life of Haydn. Jones is the best, I think; really thoughtful and careful. This is his short book.
Jones, David Wyn, ed. (2009) Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn. ... and this is his compendium, some of it by other authors, but clearly with lots of editing on his part.
Proksch, Brian (2015) Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century. Boydell & Brewer. The definitive account of Haydn's later reception history, really well done, and needs mining for WP.
Robbins Landon, H. C. and David Wyn Jones (1988) Haydn: His Life and Music. Not as good as Jones alone, but lots of pictures.
Robbins Landon, H. C. Haydn: Chronicle and Works. A huge, expensive, five volume thing. What a mess. Like a real gold mine: you need endless digging and toil (and boredom) to get at the nuggets.
Webster, James and Georg Feder (2002) The New Grove Haydn. Very solid, and the work-list is helpful.
Wigmore, Richard, Haydn -- he's a top reviewer for Grammophone and his comments on the music are very helpful. I only wish the book were longer; sometimes it seems a bit compressed.

Do be very careful about using more recent stuff, most of what I've seen is not good at all.

Mozart

The field of Mozart biography has until recent times been something of a mess. It seems that legend-making and falsification kicked in from the moment Mozart died, and people have enthusiastically leapt in with further legend-making ever since. Only starting in the late 20th century does it seem that hard-headed scholars are making a serious effort to sort it all out.

Abert, Hermann (2007) W. A. Mozart (updated version, with notes by Cliff Eisen, who usefully cautions us on Abert's endorsement of dubious legends.)
Braunbehrens, Volkmar (1990) Mozart in Vienna
Deutsch, Otto Erich (1965) Mozart: A Documentary Biography. A standard, valuable compendium of documents, lightly narrated. Others have followed up, adding to the pile.
Eisen, Cliff and Simon P. Keefe, eds. (2006) The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. Very wide-ranging and valuable; they picked good contributors.
Halliwell, Ruth (1998) The Mozart Family. Gosh. She despises Mozart, which is sort of unpleasant (I don't despise him at all) but she's totally hard-nosed and covers lots of helpful stuff you will not find anywhere else.
Lorenz, Michael. A phenomenal ability to research old archives and find new data. He mostly doesn't do scholarly articles anymore but relies on his blog, a bit tricky from the viewpoint of WP:VER. I believe, but cannot prove, that his Wikipedia edits are under the user name Suessmayr~enwiki.
Solomon, Maynard (1995) Mozart: A Life I used this in editing back early in the century, which was a mistake. A very lively mind, but not really trustable for mainstream applications like Wikipedia. Solomon's work is a fascinating throwback to the era when the work of Freud was intellectually influential; by now Freud seems to have mostly vanished from the scene. Solomon was a big enthusiast, and he applied Freudianism pretty liberally in his biographical work.
Wolff, Christoph (2012) Mozart at the Gateway to his Fortune. Thoughtful, clear, reformist, sometimes a little dull.

Beethoven

Beethoven biography is also a somewhat troubled area, though the problem is different: our view of him is distorted by people whose goal was portray him as a 19th century romantic hero.

William Kinderman -- very thoughtful
Jan Swafford. He's a person (in particular, a composer) and has his own opinions, but they are thoughtful, often very wise opinions. I find it weird that he usually cites other people's biographies for facts; I would have felt more confident if he cited more of Beethoven's letters, his contemporaries' memoirs, etc., keeping the data chain short. But in general he seems really useful.

There is also:

Nicholas Matthew (2012) Political Beethoven. Often-interesting study of the bombastic, emperor-worshipping works Beethoven wrote mostly around the time of the Congress of Vienna. Beethoven's reputation has benefited from posterity's assiduously filtering out the dreck he wrote interspersed among masterpieces; Matthew has the guts to tell us about the dreck and analyze it. Unfortunately, his prose is very bad; as a analogy, imagine reading a basically good and interesting book that smelled faintly of poop ...

Sacred Harp

Cobb, Buell E. (1982) Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music
Jackson, George Pullen (1932) White spirituals in the southern uplands.
Steel, David Warren with Richard Hulan (2010) Makers of The Sacred Harp. This ought to be mined much further.

Historical keyboard instruments

Hubbard, Frank (1967) Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making. Has errors but is brilliant and entertaining.
Kottick, Edward (2003) A History of the Harpsichord. Solid and comprehensive, and also sometimes entertaining.
Pollens, Stewart (1995) The Early Pianoforte. Very helpful. He's written a newer book which I need to read.
Zuckermann, Wolfgang (1969) The Modern Harpsichord. Even wilder than Hubbard, a lot of fun and very informative about a turbulent period of harpsichord history. At the end of the war Zuckermann narrates, the authenticists had totally defeated the industrialists. Zuckermann, with his kits (nice thin soundboards, but factory-made), was somewhere in between, and after he finished this book he hightailed it out of the field to avoid embarrassment.

General

Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Rosen, Charles (1997) The Classical Style. New York: Norton. This book changed my life, probably a lot of other people too.

In cases where I've needed to plug a hole in WP coverage, I've found it especially helpful to visit Google Books (occasionally, Google Scholar), rather than the general Google search engine.

Comments from experts about what sources I ought or ought not to be using are welcome; please visit my Talk page for this purpose.