Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni - Paperback

by Wye Jamison Allanbrook (Author)

Wye Jamison Allanbrook's widely influential Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart challenges the view that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music was a "pure play" of key and theme, more abstract than that of his predecessors. Allanbrook's innovative work shows that Mozart used a vocabulary of symbolic gestures and musical rhythms to reveal the nature of his characters and their interrelations. The dance rhythms and meters that pervade his operas conveyed very specific meanings to the audiences of the day.

Author Biography

Wye Jamison Allanbrook (1943-2010) was professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music.