Böcker av Chris Walton

Gordon Jephtas (1943-92) was born into an impoverished, coloured, single-parent family in South Africa. He began piano lessons after being intrigued by the harmonium player at the local church. In his teens he worked as an accompanist with the amateur coloured opera group "Eoan" in Cape Town, then moved to Europe to further his studies. His first big break came in 1972 when the Zurich Opera House appointed him to assist the conductor Nello Santi. Jephtas thereafter established an international reputation as a vocal coach of Italian opera, and Switzerland provided him with a liberal environment where he was free to express his sexuality. Both there and later in the USA, Jephtas worked with the biggest names in the opera world, from Renata Tebaldi to Plácido Domingo, Montserrat Caballé and Luciano Pavarotti. He always longed to be accepted back in South Africa, but his attempts to return culminated each time in disaster because talent and experience meant little in a land where "whiteness" trumped everything. An official offer to be made an "honorary white" merely intensified his inner turmoil. Back in the USA, Jephtas's professional success was tempered by private misfortune. He died in New York in 1992. This book examines the life and career of Gordon Jephtas through the letters that he wrote home to May Abrahamse, a coloured singer with whom he had worked since his teens. They reveal in unique detail the life and achievements of a remarkable musician, but also the psychological damage wrought upon him by apartheid. Jephtas provides a fascinating case study of a gifted South African abroad, struggling with issues of race and sexuality at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The first modern English edition of Richard Wagner's essays on conducting, extensively annotated, with a critical essay on Wagner as conductor: his aesthetic, practices, vocabulary, and impact.

Places the Swiss composer Schoeck, master of a late-Romantic style both sensuous and stringent, in context and gives insight into his increasingly popular musical works.

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An investigation of the considerable influence of Wagner's stay in Zurich from 1849 to 1858 -- a period often discounted by scholars -- on his career.

Presents case studies of "e;inspiration"e; in five composers -- Wagner, Mahler, Furtwangler, R. Strauss, and Berg -- examining how the supposedly extrarational world of creative inspiration intersects with the highly rational world ofmoney and politics.Lies and Epiphanies offers case studies of "e;inspiration"e; in five composers -- Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Richard Strauss, and Alban Berg. Their own tales of their epiphanies played a determining role in the reception history of their works: the finale of Mahler's Second Symphony was supposedly born of a "e;lightning bolt"e; of inspiration at the funeral of Hans von Bulow, while Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was purportedly his direct response to the tragic early death of Alma Mahler's daughter. Chris Walton looks behind these tales to explore instead the composer's dual role as author and self-commentator, laying bare the fissures and inconsistencieswithin these artists' testimonies and revealing how the putatively extrarational world of creative inspiration intersects with the highly rational world of money and politics. As Walton points out, the composer often imposes on the audience an interpretation of a work and its genesis that is as superficial as the score itself is not. This study seeks to show why. Chris Walton teaches music history at the Basel University of Music in Switzerland.He is the author of Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works (University of Rochester Press, 2009) and Richard Wagner's Zurich: The Muse of Place (Camden House, 2007).