Picture of author.

Jane Glover (1) (1949–)

Autor(a) de Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music

Para outros autores com o nome Jane Glover, veja a página de desambiguação.

5+ Works 334 Membros 13 Reviews

About the Author

Image credit: Uncredited photo at JaneGlover.co.uk

Obras de Jane Glover

Associated Works

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome padrão
Glover, Jane
Data de nascimento
1949-05-13
Sexo
female
Nacionalidade
UK
Educação
Haberdashers' Monmouth School for Girls
St Hugh's College, Oxford (DPhil)
Ocupação
Conductor
Music Scholar
Author
Relacionamentos
Glover, Robert Finlay (father)
Organizações
Royal College of Music
Premiações
Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE)
Pequena biografia
Jane Glover CBE is a British-born conductor and music scholar.

Membros

Resenhas

Dame Jane Glover is renowned for her work as conductor, but she should be equally esteemed as an author. I read her Handel in London just over a year ago, and was utterly enchanted, revelling in the joy with which she wrote about the music and the musicians. The same is true of this book, which paints a vivid picture of the all-too-short life of the prolific composer, and sets his rich oeuvre against the context of his family life.

The basic facts are well known (although I have to confess that, before reading this book, my own understanding of Mozart’s life was formed essentially through the prism of the film Amadeus): the child prodigy who grew into one of the most gifted and prolific composer of his, or indeed any, time. Because of my familiarity with the film, I had known that his father, Leopold, was a major influence on Mozart’s life and output. I had not, however, appreciated how talented his sister, ‘Nannerl’ was, or that the two of them had been touted around Europe. I didn’t even know that the Mozart family had visited England as part of the tour showcasing the two child stars, and lived in London for the greater part of a year. Indeed, I was amused to read that, during an outbreak of plague [with all the stark resonances that brought as a book read during lockdown] while the Mozarts were living in London, they decided to move out to the country, relocating to a house that is now in Ebury Street, Chelsea.

Beautifully written, and (I presume) exhaustively researched, this book is a joy from start to finish: highly informative, but supremely accessible.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
Eyejaybee | outras 8 resenhas | Apr 6, 2021 |
Fab and enormous detail but gave up cos too dense - shame cos brilliant
 
Marcado
MarilynKinnon | outras 3 resenhas | Apr 15, 2020 |
I found this a delightful book. I bought it more on less on a whim, seeing it on display in Daunt Books and succumbing, as I invariably do in those august surroundings, to impulse. I have often had my fingers burned that way, but on this occasion, I earned a rich reward/

I remember as an elven year-old boy being taught about music by Mr Clifford Smith, a flamboyant character markedly different from the rest of the staff at Loughborough Grammar School. Bolstered by a substantial private income, he felt no need to show obeisance to the school’s syllabus and sought instead to teach his pupils matters that he thought a rounded person should simply know. A truly Falstaffian figure, both physically and with regard to the veracity of his immensely entertaining anecdotes, which kept my fellow pupils and I rapt in attention. His stories didn’t necessarily tell us much about music, but we certainly had an insight into aspects of life hitherto shrouded from our view.

One task that I do recall him setting us was the creation of timelines showing the births and deaths of the major composers, the introduction of new instruments and major events to render some wider historical context. As a consequence of that, now forty-five years later I still know that Handel was born in 1685, making him as exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. Although it meant very little to me back then, I also now realise that Handel was born just three years before the Glorious Revolution that saw the removal of King James II, and paved the way for the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century and ultimately for the transition to the Hanoverian dynasty. Interestingly, intergenerational royal strife seemed endemic at that time. Not only had the Princesses (later Queens) Mary and Anne conspired against their father, James II, but both George II, and then his son who would become George III, experienced prolonged and bitter estrangements from their respective fathers.

Jane Glover clearly understands the value of historical context, and her book offers a clear exposition of the political, cultural and industrial trends unfolding in London, and the country more widely. She does this, however, with an elegance and lightness of touch that is informative yet never oppressive.

Georg Friederich Handel was already an established figure in the European musical firmament when he first came to London in 1712. He had earned a reputation as a virtuoso harpsichord player in Halle and Hamburg, and had also shown skill as music tutor to the nobility, and as a composer of religious works. In 1710, he secured the office of Kapellmeister to Prince Georg, the Elector of Hanover, who would, four years later, become King George I of Great Britain and Ireland. After an earlier visit in 1710, in which he experienced considerable success as a performer and composer, Handel moved permanently to London in 1712, and fairly took the city by storm. From his earliest works there, he drew critical acclaim, accompanied by financial patronage, quickly becoming a favourite of Queen Anne, the last monarch of the Stuart dynasty.

It would add little for me to list his astounding musical success here, and, besides, Jane Glover, as an accomplished conductor, musical director and historian, writes far more knowledgeably and engagingly about them. I was unfamiliar with many of the compositions that she describes, and have eagerly been scouring Spotify ever since, and have perhaps come a little closer to fulfilling Mr Clifford Smith’s hopes of a rounded and informed pupil.

This was one of my favourite non-fiction books of the year, and I shall be immersing myself in both Handel’s and Jane Glover’s works wherever I can.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
Eyejaybee | outras 3 resenhas | Dec 20, 2019 |
The context in which I came across this book (a cross-recommendation from Susan McClary's Feminine endings) and descriptions I saw of it rather led me to expect it to be a radical, revisionist, feminist biography. But of course that would be silly - Jane Glover has spent much of her professional life conducting Mozart and confirming his standing as the greatest operatic composer of his time, she's not someone who's likely to rush out and tell that it's all a myth and he was just fronting for his sister. Nor is that a version of events that would make any kind of historical sense.

In real life, this is a collection of three extended essays, written in non-technical terms for the general reader, looking at the role played in Mozart's life, his operas, and his posthumous reputation by a group of extraordinary women, in particular his sister Nannerl, the pianist who inspired all his early keyboard music, and his wife Constanze Weber and her three sisters, all of them highly-talented singers. Lesser parts are played by Mozart's mother (who acted as his business manager on his Paris tour, when his father couldn't leave Salzburg) and by some of the other distinguished singers for whom he wrote parts in his operas.

Glover confesses herself to be a fan of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus and credits Simon Callow with helping her to get started on this book. But she quietly sets aside many of the more romantic myths we cherish about Mozart. Salieri was a personal friend as well as a professional rival, and his mistress Caterina Cavalieri (Constanze, Donna Elvira, the Countess, etc.) was one of the most important singers to work closely with Mozart. In Josef II's Enlightenment Vienna it was not at all the custom to organise splendid funerals and tombstones; the "pauper's grave" story comes from nineteenth-century views of Mozart's death. Count Walsegg-Stuppach's habit of commissioning works anonymously from composers and then passing them off as his own was a standing joke in musical circles, and Mozart was simply playing along with it by describing the count's agent who came with the commission for a Requiem as a "ghostly messenger".

Even Mozart's financial situation wasn't quite as dire as it's usually presented - Constanze had taken things in hand (a little late in the day, admittedly) and spending was under control and a lot of the debts already paid off by the time of Mozart's death. Posthumously, Constanze went back to performing for a while, and showed herself to be a skilled manager of Mozart's reputation, who managed to do well financially out of his manuscripts and biography (left unfinished by her second husband, Georg Nissen, and published under Constanze's control).

I found the account of Mozart's operas to be the most interesting part of the book - this is obviously Glover's bread-and-butter, and she presents interesting practical insights into the way Mozart wrote to take advantage of the particular gifts of the singers he had available to him. And puts his work into context, so that we can see just how radical and innovative he was as a composer. Of course, it's a lot easier to write in non-technical ways about opera than it is about orchestral music, because you have the narrative as a foothold for those who would get lost in key-changes and tempi, but this still struck me as a great example of how you can write about music for the non-technical reader without obviously dumbing things down. Excellent stuff!
… (mais)
1 vote
Marcado
thorold | outras 8 resenhas | Apr 7, 2019 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
5
Also by
1
Membros
334
Popularidade
#71,211
Avaliação
½ 3.5
Resenhas
13
ISBNs
42
Idiomas
3

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