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?)

Kelly has provocative ideas about performance practice, suggesting that it is really a matter of how adaptable musicians need to be; he feels that musical works themselves, not just our perceptions of them, change over time. A great deal of First Nights is devoted to documents about the works, and the discography is helpfully annotated by Jen-Yen Chen. The book is unusually well designed, and no knowledge of score reading is necessary. --William R. Braun


From 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Keates
First Nights is a brilliant essay in synthesis, continuously alert to those extramusical pressures, exerted by everything from snobbery and bureaucracy to sex and ambition, that added their burdens of stress to the birth of these musical masterpieces.


From Booklist
In his discussions of the premieres of five of the most significant musical works of the past four centuries, Kelly considers the composer, the cultural milieu, the production, and the reviews of each. The five are Monteverdi's Orfeo, a chamber opera mating poetry and music; Handel's Messiah, the first theatrically presented oratorio based on Scripture; the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, culmination of his career and the first symphony to end in choral song; Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, romantic music following an autobiographical program; and Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, which introduced "primitive" idioms in dance and music to staid Parisian audiences. Each created a stir at its premiere, for instead of today's ritual of listening without comment, premieres of yesteryear drew applause, jeers, and demands to encore favorite parts during performance. Kelly describes why each masterpiece was composed, who sponsored it, who first heard it, and how its composer anticipated the future while being influenced by his own current culture. Aided by a wealth of pictures and documents, Kelly limns these five epoch-making debuts in engrossing detail. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Jonathan Keates, New York Times Book Review
"A brilliant essay. . . . this is the kind of book that has us crying, 'Oh, that we were there!'"


Judith Weir, Times Literary Supplement
"First Nights presents a mass of technical information in an unusually accessible way. The book is always enjoyable."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This lively book takes us back to the very first performances of five famous pieces of music: Monteverdi￯﾿ﾽs Orfeo in 1607, Handel￯﾿ﾽs Messiah in 1742, Beethoven￯﾿ﾽs Ninth Symphony in 1824, Berlioz￯﾿ﾽs Symphonie fantastique in 1830, and Stravinsky￯﾿ﾽs Sacre du printemps in 1913. Thomas Forrest Kelly brings to life the fascinating details of these premiere nights—the cities, concert halls, audiences, conductors, musicians, the sound of the music, and the responses of audiences and critics.

Author Biography: Thomas Forrest Kelly is professor of music at Harvard University.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Keates

A brilliant essay. . . . this is the kind of book that has us crying, ￯﾿ﾽOh, that we were there! —New York Times Book Review

A smart and lively book . . . replete with precious nuggets of information through which Kelly indulges our (and his impulse to be there then knowing what we know now, to view history as it was being made. . . . Kelly has a talent for colorful narrative and lucid prose that conjures up the palpable excitement as well as the artistic birth-pains that attended many of these premieres. —The New Republic

Judith Weir