Britten Essays, Letters and Opera Guides

This volume was published for Britten’s centenary in 2013. It contains a large selection of the best of Keller’s writings on Britten, an illustrated study of Keller’s and Britten’s relationship through their correspondence (with their letters reprinted in full for the first time), a reprint of Keller’s long out-of-print handbooks on The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, and an ‘Operatic Sketchbook’ of Milein Cosman’s drawings from life.

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Hans Keller and Internment: The Development of an Emigré Musician 1938-48

This book examines the effect of exile and internment on the intellectual development of the young Hans Keller, setting his personal story in the context of what is still a too-little-remembered part of British wartime history. It includes several important Keller texts, including that of his famous broadcast describing his escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna, together with his letters from British internment camps, set within the wider story of what was going on outside, where an intense political debate was taking place during Britain’s ‘finest hour’ about the rights of the individual in times of national emergency. The final section of the book shows the profound effect on Keller of his enforced change of language and culture, as he rediscovered his Viennese heritage through the very different culture of 1940s London.

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Film Music and Beyond

Film Music and Beyond

Film Music and BeyondDuring the 1940s and 1950s, Keller was the most outspoken voice in British film music. He argued passionately for ‘the need for competent film music criticism’, laid out the main topics of the day, and studied the contribution of all the main British composers and many others besides. In particular he championed William Alwyn, Arthur Benjamin and Alan Rawsthorne as well as the more established names of Auric, Bernstein, Britten, Thomson, Vaughan Williams and Walton. In 1959 he also devoted a column to ‘television music’.

This volume collects together all Keller’s writings on film music. It forms a vital complement to the contemporary Composing for the Film by Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno and provides an invaluable and unparalleled account of a great age for film music. Includes line drawings by Milein Cosman.

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Hans Keller and the BBC: The musical conscience of British Broadcasting, 1959-79

This study of Keller’s BBC work is a vivid portrait of the changing face of British broadcasting seen through the work of one of its most significant personalities.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, much of which has never been previously examined, this book paints a striking picture of Keller’s personality in combination with the BBC’s turbulent inner workings, showing the effect of one remarkable individual on the most powerful musical institution in 20th-century Britain.

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The Jerusalem Diary: Music, Society and Politics, 1977 and 1979

The Jerusalem Diary

The Jerusalem DiaryHans Keller wrote his Jerusalem Diary in 1977 and 1979 during two visits that he and Milein Cosman made to the Mishkenot Sha’ananim, a residence for writers and artists. This Diary, which he described as an ‘anti-journal’, was initially a reaction to Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back. But the result is far more than a topical riposte: at a time of renewed turbulence in the Middle East, it is a sharp and insightful record of the artistic, social and political life of Israel at a crucial juncture in its history.

Wonderfully illustrated by Milein Cosman’s drawings, this book won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Book of the Year prize for 2001.

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Essays on Music

This is the first large selection of Keller’s essays to be published after his death. The first part of the book addresses psychological issues relating to critics, listeners, players and composers; the second analyses music by a wide range of composers from Haydn to the late twentieth century; and the third propounds Keller’s new theory of music, with essays on unity and contrast, motifs, themes, keys, timbre and rhythm, plus the full score of Keller’s Functional Analysis of Mozart’s piano sonata in A minor. The volume concludes with a magisterial account of what Keller deemed to be ‘the principles of composition’.

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Criticism

Criticism

CriticismThis brilliant and controversial book is Keller’s assault on ‘criticism’ and the ‘phoney professions’ of the music critic, the broadcaster, the musicologist, the conductor, the politician, the psychoanalyst, the teacher and the editor. That Keller himself was active in most of these fields at one time or another was an irony of which he was well aware.

The Great Haydn Quartets: Their Interpretation

The Great Haydn Quartets: Their Interpretation

The Great Haydn Quartets: Their InterpretationAlthough many composers have written string quartets, only a few have possessed an intrinsic mastery of the medium. Of these Haydn was the first and, thought Keller, in one definable sense the greatest.

Written primarily from the view of the player, this classic book is a profound and detailed examination of Haydn’s 45 greatest quartets, the fruit of a lifetime’s devotion to these works.

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