Ernest Newman

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Ernest Newman , actually William Roberts (born November 30, 1868 in Liverpool , † July 7, 1959 in Tadworth , Surrey ) was an English music critic .

Life

William Roberts was the son of Welsh master tailor Seth Roberts and his wife Harriet. He attended St Savior's School in the Everton neighborhood of Liverpool. After studying the humanities at Liverpool College and University College Liverpool , he wanted to join the Indian Civil Service , but had to refrain from doing so as he was not suitable for the tropics . Instead, he became an employee of the Bank of Liverpool in 1889. In his free time he learned nine languages ​​and wrote articles on religious, philosophical, literary and musicological topics for various magazines as well as his first two books on Christoph Willibald Gluck and Richard Wagner . He published his books (with one exception, see below) under the pseudonym under which he became known: Ernest Newman . However, he never changed his official name to William Roberts .

In 1894 Ernest Newman married Kate Eleanor Woollett. After 14 years as a bank clerk, he became a teacher of singing and music theory at a music school in Birmingham in 1903 . In 1905 he became a music critic for the Manchester Guardian . In 1919 he moved to London and became a music critic for the Observer .

A year later, Ernest Newman moved to the Sunday Times , whose music critic he remained until his death for almost four decades.

Works of music history

Newman published monographs on great late Romantic composers, including Franz Liszt , Richard Strauss , Hugo Wolf and Edward Elgar . He dealt most extensively with the life and work of Richard Wagner.

Criticism of Social Darwinism

In addition to books on music history, the free thinker and Darwin admirer Roberts also published the work Pseudo-philosophy at the End of the Nineteenth Century under the pseudonym Hugh Mortimer Cecil in 1897 . An irrationalist trio: Kidd-Drummond- Balfour . In it Newman attacked social Darwinism - especially social Darwinism as it was represented by Benjamin Kidd and Henry Drummond - because of the mixture of ideas of evolution with ideological-religious notions of progress and teleological content. Newman declared social Darwinism to be a pseudoscience .

Fonts

  • 1895 Gluck and the Opera. A study in Musical History
  • 1897 Pseudo-philosophy at the End of the Nineteenth Century. An irrationalist trio: Kidd-Drummond-Balfour
  • 1899 A Study of Wagner
  • 1904 Wagner
  • 1904 Richard Strauss . With a personal note by A. Kalisch
  • 1905 Musical Studies
  • 1906 Elgar ( digitized version )
  • 1907 Hugo Wolf
  • 1908 Richard Strauss
  • 1914 Wagner as Man and Artist (modified new edition 1924)
  • 1919 A Musical Motley
  • 1920 The Piano-Player and Its Music
  • 1923 Solo Singing
  • 1925 A Musical Critic's Holiday
  • 1927 The Unconscious Beethoven
  • 1928 What to Read on the Evolution of Music
  • 1931 Fact and Fiction about Wagner. A Criticism of the "Truth about Wagner" by PD Hurne and WL Root
  • 1934 The Man Liszt. A study of the tragi-comedy of a soul divided against itself.
  • 1933-47 Life of Richard Wagner. 4 volumes
  • 1940 Wagner (in the Novello's Biographies of Great Musicians series )
  • 1943 Opera Nights
  • 1949 Wagner Nights
  • 1954 More Opera Nights
  • 1956-58 From the World of Music . 3 volumes
Translations into English
  • 1906 On Conducting by Felix Weingartner (new edition 1925)
  • 1911 JS Bach by Albert Schweitzer
  • 1912ff. Libretti by Richard Wagner:
    • The flying Dutchman (The Flying Dutchman)
    • Tannhauser
    • The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen)
    • Tristan and Isolde
    • The Master Singers of Nuremberg (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg)
    • Parsifal
  • 1929 Beethoven the Creator by Romain Rolland

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Hans Rudolf Vaget: Against the "stagnant waggon". Ernest Newman, Thomas Mann, Adorno . In: Udo Bermbach, Hans Rudolf Vaget (ed.): Baptized on music . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, pp. 353–372, here p. 354.
  2. ^ Hugh Mortimer Cecil (that is: Ernest Newman): Pseudo-philosophy at the End of the Nineteenth Century. An irrationalist trio: Kidd-Drummond-Balfour . University Press, London 1897 ( digitized version ).