First Nights: Five Musical Premieres

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A successful expansion of his lecture series at Harvard, Thomas Kelly's First Nights chronicles the events leading to the first performances of five enduring masterpieces. He places Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, Handel's venerable Messiah, symphonies by Beethoven and Berlioz, and the Stravinsky ballet The Rite of Spring in the respective contexts of the cities, musical cultures, and performance venues in which they were first heard. Kelly builds his chapters through an accumulation of minute but not trivial detail. The first Euridice in L'Orfeo was a castrato priest; the oppression of Catholics in Handel's Dublin was shocking; the legendary catcalls at The Rite of Spring's premiere began before the curtain went up.

As Kelly gathers these pieces of the puzzle together, we become desperate to find out what will happen, completely forgetting that we already know how the music ultimately triumphed over time. Along the way, there is hilarious information about the audiences (Handel's would not have been out of place at a rodeo, though Monteverdi's was unusually well informed) and reactions from the performers (conductor Pierre Monteux apparently always hated the Rite). There are also many factoids about how the music must have sounded. (Did you know that the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth included a piano?)

FROM OUR EDITORS

Fans of opera will delight in the opportunity presented in First Nights: a chance to experience the premiere performances of five operatic masterpieces. Kelly compliments his own prose re-creation of each evening with various bits of periphery detail, such as newspaper clippings, ticket counts, illustrations, interviews, and recommendations for further listening. First Nights is an inspired flight of musical fancy.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This book takes us back to the first performances of five famous musical compositions: Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607, Handel's Messiah in 1742, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824, Berlioz's Symphonic faulaslique in 1830, and Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps in 1913. Thomas Forrest Kelly sets the scene for each of these premieres, describing the cities in which they took place, the concert halls, audiences, conductors, and musicians, the sound of the music when it was first performed (often on instruments now extinct), and the popular and critical responses. He explores how performance styles and conditions have changed over the centuries and what music can reveal about the societies that produce it.

FROM THE CRITICS

Tim Page - Washington Post Book World

Kelly . . . is something of a rarity-an academic who can tell a good story. . . . Kelly's inclusion of relevant documents-letters, newspaper clippings, long-ago interviews, ticket counts-and the list of recommended recordings help make First Nights a book that should prove engrossing to general reader and specialist alike.

Library Journal

This is a unique and extremely attractive account of the premieres of five musical masterpieces spanning from 1607 to 1913: Monteverdi's opera Orfeo, Handel's oratorio Messiah, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, and Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps. The focus of each essay is the actual premiere, but Kelly, who teaches a course called "First Nights" at Harvard, first places each event in its broader historical and cultural setting and then proceeds to fill in the scene with numerous interesting details and asides. One of North America's most prominent musicologists, Kelly paints a vivid and fascinating picture of each premiere by combining information taken from a number of sources, including letters, archival documents, and observations of the music itself. This should appeal to all music lovers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--Timothy J. McGee, Univ. of Toronto Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Jonathan Keates - The New York Times Book Review

A brilliant essay in synthesis, continuously alert to those extramusical pressures . . . that added their burdens of stress to the birth of these musical masterpieces.

Judith Weir - Times Literary Supplement