Romanticism--a concept more easily recognized than defined--dominated the artistic landscape of music from 1830-1890. Like the other volumes in the New Oxford History of Music series, this final volume to be published provides a detailed, scholarly critical survey of the music and composers of its period. Divided among different forms of music, the chapters, written by eminent scholars under the editorship of one of the most respected experts on nineteenth-century music, detail the work of Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, Berlioz, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Gounod, Bizet, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak, Smetana, Faur�, Wolf, Puccini, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, C�sar Franck, and Debussy.

The ten-volume New Oxford History of Music presents a comprehensive survey of music from the earliest times until 1960. This fourth volume covers the golden age of church music, but at the same time, increasing importance was assumed by secular vocal music and the purely instrumental.

Gerald Abraham's reputation as an authority on Russian music has tended to obscure his deep interest in the music of Poland and Czechoslovakia and in the music of the nineteenth-century generally. From a lifetime's devoted scholarship in these fields the author has now selected his best work to make up a volume of exceptional breadth and fascination. The subjects range from the relationship of Slavonic music to the western world to detailed essays on figures such as Chopin, Dvorak, Rubinstein and Mussorgsky. There are two new unpulished essays. A study of realism in Janacek's operas contains a particularly fine analysis of 'From the House of the Dead' and there is an account of the fantastic 'erotic diary' for piano in which Fibich, one of the best, recorded the secrets of his love affair with Anezka Schulzova. This book is welcomed as much by specialists in the field as by the general reader.

The ten-volume New Oxford History of Music presents a comprehensive survey of music from the earliest times until 1960. This eighth volume gives a detailed, critical survey of music during the time of Beethoven, a period of 40 years.