Berlioz's Requiem

— —

Jennifer Walker (Assistant Professor of Musicology, Assistant Professor of Musicology, West Virginia University)

Berlioz's Requiem

Jennifer Walker (Assistant Professor of Musicology, Assistant Professor of Musicology, West Virginia University)

$181.95

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Oxford University Press Inc
03 June 2025

Music reviews & criticism; Romantic music (c 1830 to c 1900)

Series: Oxford Keynotes

Hector Berlioz's Requiem (Grande Messe des Morts, 1837) remains a fixture in the repertoire of choirs and orchestras today. Since 2003, it has been performed in its entirety over one hundred times and has appeared on concert programs spanning the globe: from Russia to the United Kingdom, Finland to the United States, and many locations in between. These performances have, for the most part, been received positively but critics have not always been this kind to Berlioz and his Requiem. Romantic grandiosity, empty dramatic effect, religious insincerity: such are the descriptors that undergird many modern understandings of Berlioz's now-canonic work. Nineteenth-century critics and audiences, however, heard the Requiem in different and compelling ways. This book presenting a broad new musical and social context for understanding the Requiem as Berlioz conceived it and his contemporaries heard it. It asks what, if anything, did nineteenth-century listeners find to be notable about the work, and why? The answers to these questions lie in detailed explorations of Berlioz's relationship to the aesthetics of French sacred music, the theological sublime, and aural architecture. Theatrical as they may have appeared, Berlioz's innovative orchestrations and colossal choral configurations in the Requiem may now be heard as an embrace of the aural possibilities offered by the sounding of the sacred sublime, the physical architecture of French churches, and the interplay between the sacred and the secular.

By: Jennifer Walker (Assistant Professor of Musicology Assistant Professor of Musicology West Virginia University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 13mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 210mm
Weight: 250g
ISBN: 9780197688809
ISBN 10: 0197688802
Series: Oxford Keynotes
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 03 June 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jennifer Walker is Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at West Virginia University. Her research focuses on music's intersections with religion and politics, the musical press, and gender in opera. She is the author of Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third-Republic Paris (2021), which was the winner of the 2022 H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award from the American Musicological Society.