(Ebook) Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner by David Conway ISBN 9781107015388, 1107015383

(Ebook) Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner by David Conway ISBN 9781107015388, 1107015383

David Conway analyses why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures - not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics. His study places this process in the context of dynamic economic, political, sociological and technological changes and also of developments in Jewish communities and the Jewish religion itself, in the major cultural centres of Western Europe. Beginning with a review of attitudes to Jews in the arts and an assessment of Jewish music and musical skills, in the age of the Enlightenment, Conway traces the story of growing Jewish involvement with music through the biographies of the famous, the neglected and the forgotten, leading to a new and radical contextualisation of Wagner's infamous 'Judaism in Music'.