2009 Bach Festival Reading List

by David Gordon

The 2009 Carmel Bach Festival is over! It was an exhausting and deeply satisfying experience. Great audiences, responsive and appreciative. An ensemble working hard, and overtime.

I do lots of different things at the Carmel Bach Festival (most of us do), but this summer my principal activities included 1) twelve Festival lectures, 2) writing and narrating the “Haydn Seek!” concert, 3) translating and reading the Vivaldi sonnets on the Thursday concert, and 4) creating more than 600 new supertitle slides (for Haydn’s Creation, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Brahms’ Nänie, Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42, the “Haydn Seek!” concert, and Best of the Fest).

Lots of people asked me about a reading list. Here are some of the books that helped me this summer!

UPDATE AUGUST 18: since an expanded version of this list is now available for download as a pdf document, I have removed some of the details from this post.

Click this link to download the 3-page pdf bibliography.

IN PRINT Patronize your local bookseller!

The New Grove Haydn
by Jens Peter Larson
WW Norton, New York, 1983

Haydn: The Creation
by Nicholas Temperley
Cambridge University Press, 1991

Haydn Chronicle and Works
Volume III: Haydn in England 1791-1795
H. C. Robbins Landon
Indiana University Press, 1976

The Cambridge Companion to Haydn
by Caryl Clark (Editor)
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 340 pages

Four Seasons, The: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice
by Laurel Corona
Voice Press, 2008, 400 pages

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Other Concertos, Op. 8
by Paul Everett
Cambridge University Press, 1996

OUT OF PRINT BUT AVAILABLE ONLINE

The Girl in Rose
Peter Hobday
Orion Books, London, 2004

A Social History of Music: Middle Ages to Beethoven
Music and Society: since 1815
Henry Raynor
Taplinger Publishing, New York, 1976

London Life in the Eighteenth Century
M. Dorothy George
Harper, New York, 1964

INTERNET RESOURCES

The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn
A selection of Haydn letters
200 Anniversary of Haydn’s Death
Blog and assorted Links
The Website of Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Coming soon: suggested reading for the 2010 Carmel Bach Festival!