Boydell Press imprint: 128 books

"The new Diana McVeagh book on Elgar is first-rate," wrote Gerald Finzi of her earlier study of the composer, published in 1955. In the completely new Elgar the Music Maker she harvests five decades of thoughts about his music, scrutinizing the biographical details that have since been discovered...

Drawing on many archival findings, this book considers the emerging function and status of orchestral conductors in Britain, and the nature of the opportunities available to them, from the late Victorian era until the outbreak of World War I. It does so by examining and comparing the profiles and...

The Vivaldi Compendium will serve as the most reliable and up-to-date source of quick reference on the composer Antonio Vivaldi and his music. This takes the form of a dictionary listing persons, places, musical works and many other topics connected with Vivaldi; its alphabetically arranged entries...

She was not the 'black sheep' of her family, as often claimed, but a heroic rebel. Friedelind Wagner (1918-1991), Richard Wagner's independent-minded granddaughter, daughter of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, despised her mother's close liaison with Adolf Hitler and was the only member of the Wagner...

A Tanner's Worth of Tune is the first book to be written on the post-war British musical, and the first major assessment of the British musical for a quarter of a century, reviving interest in a vast archive of musicals that have been dismissed to the footnotes of theatrical history. This timely reappraisal...

Out of Silence is a diary of a year in Susan Tomes's life as a performer. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that 'I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in my own way', it aims to show how a working musician mulls over and draws energy from the events...

There is no question that music education is in crisis today. The place of music in the national curriculum is controversial; there have been cuts in the provision of individual lessons; and there have been severe reductions in government funding, with more planned. This book, containing the first...

Described in the Radio Times (27 July 2015) as 'A remarkable, unique institution lying at the heart of British life', the Three Choirs Festival celebrated its three-hundred-year anniversary in 2015. Rotating each summer between the English cathedral cities of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, the...

During the 1930s Arturo Toscanini conducted many concerts broadcast by the BBC from London's Queen's Hall, where he also made some unsurpassed recordings. Drawing on newly researched material in British and American archives, Christopher Dyment reveals how the most renowned and influential conductor...

This dual biography of Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott tells the dramatic story of two geniuses who met at the Royal College of Music in 1911 and formed an unlikely partnership that illuminated and enriched the musical and literary worlds in which they moved. Gurney's poetry and songs have taken their...

Erik Satie's (1866-1925) music appeals to wide audiences and has influenced both experimental artists and pop musicians. Little about Satie was conventional, and he resists classification under easy headings such as "classical music". Instead of pursuing the path of a professional composer,...

To evaluate the familiar, even over-familiar, story of Handel's life could be seen as a quixotic endeavour. How can there be anything new to say? This book seeks to distinguish fact from fiction, not only to produce a new biography but also to explore the concepts of biography and dissemination by...

The image of Vienna as a musical city is a familiar one. Vienna has long been associated with many of the most significant composers in Western music - from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, through the Strauss family, Brahms, Bruckner and Wolf, to Mahler, Lehár, Schoenberg and Webern. Today,...

Conducting for a New Era fills in a lacuna by offering guidance and practical advice for conducting twentieth-century and contemporary repertoire. The book begins with a look at the development of the art of conducting during the first half of the twentieth century. Distinctions are made between conductors...