Robert Greenberg has narrated 25 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.9★ across 334 ratings. The most-rated is How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition.
Concert Masterworks
Summary
Have you ever thought about the creative process that boiled inside geniuses like Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorák, Strauss, Brahms, Mendelssohn, or Liszt - or any composer, for that matter? What goes through a composer's mind when a musical composition is being set to paper? Are those magical weeks or months spent in an agonizing creative blur of ideas first tried and then discarded, or is it a matter of pure inspiration? Does the composer hear the music in his head before even picking up a pen, or does the music in fact begin on that blank sheet of staff paper? Most important, can lay listeners like us, untrained in music's technicalities, learn how to open our ears to a composer's creative intentions? Happily, the answer is a resounding "yes!" And in this series of 32 lectures, a professional composer and accomplished teacher will give you a new level of sophistication as a music listener - using as his teaching tools some of the most memorable works in all of music, by geniuses whose work has not only withstood time, but transcended it. Through listening to these lectures, you'll gain a new grasp of the intricacies of musical purpose, structure, and narrative content that you will then be able to hear in any piece of music. And though this is a demanding course, with a deeper look into musical structure than untrained listeners are likely to have experienced, it is not an intimidating one. Professor Greenberg vividly positions each composition and its composer in the social and musical fabric of its period, so you can understand the music in its proper societal and artistic context and feel its emotional power in the same way as did its original audiences. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©1995 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)1995 The Great Courses
The Symphony
Summary
From its humble beginnings in the 17th-century Italian opera overture and the Baroque ripieno concerto, the symphony has evolved into one of the longest lived, and perhaps the most expressively inclusive, genres of instrumental music. Along the way, it has embraced nearly every trend to be found in Western concert music. In this series of twenty-four 45-minute lectures, Professor Greenberg guides you on a survey of the symphony. You'll listen to selections from the greatest symphonies by many of the greatest composers of the past 300 years. You'll also hear selections from some overlooked works that, undeservedly, have been forgotten by contemporary audiences. Your tour of the symphony includes an examination of how the simultaneous development of the orchestra and the opera were crucial to the birth of the symphony as a genre; a look at the earliest true symphonies that were exponents of the galant style that emerged in the period between the High Baroque and Viennese Classicism; an exploration of Haydn and Mozart, the titans of the Classical age; the sublime and iconoclastic Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony; a study of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, which combined the extreme emotions and drama of the opera house with an explicit, intimately autobiographical narrative; and national developments in France, Russia, Vienna, Bohemia, Scandinavia, America, and Great Britain. The course concludes with an investigation of Dmitri Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, which became, in Professor Greenberg's words, "a model for what the new, post-Stalin Soviet music might aspire to be-a more personally expressive, less explicitly programmatic work, one that both engaged and challenged its listeners." PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2004 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2004 The Great Courses
Great Masters: Haydn - His Life and Music
Summary
Almost from the moment it was first set to paper, the music of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) - technically superb, rich in quality, and widely imitated - has exemplified the Classical style, creating not only the Classical-era symphony but setting the standard, through his own 68 string quartets, against which that form has ever after been judged. And yet Haydn, despite the influence left by more than 1,000 works, seems to no longer get his due, often thought of as an aged figure surpassed and overshadowed by Beethoven and Mozart, who actually credited Haydn, the only contemporary he admired, and with whom he formed a lasting and artistically fruitful friendship, with teaching him how to write string quartets. Even Beethoven, whose relationship with his compositional teacher was troubled and stormy, would never have been able to write his triumphant Ninth Symphony without the influence of Haydn's crowning achievement, the towering 1798 oratorio, Creation. Now, in a series of eight vivid lectures, you can learn to understand and appreciate the music of one of the most original and influential composers of all time as you explore his origins, influence, and greatest works.
©2000 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2000 The Great Courses
Great Masters: Brahms-His Life and Music
Summary
Johannes Brahms was a man of contrasts. His serious Teutonic music was balanced by joyful dance music. His miserliness with himself by exceeding generosity with family and associates. His kindness to working people with a biting, malicious wit reserved for those he encountered in artistic and aristocratic circles. He was not an easy man to know, destroying a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years even collecting his letters from friends so that he could consign them to the flames. Yet you can know this enigmatic genius through this 8-lecture series, which uses biographical information and musical commentary to link the complexities of Brahms the man with the electrifying music of Brahms the composer.You'll learn how Brahms found unique ways of combining the rigor and formal complexity of older Classical and even Baroque genres and forms with the melodic inventiveness, harmonic sophistication, and expressive richness so prized in the Romantic age. And how his fanatical perfectionism led him to write, rewrite, and ultimately destroy more than 20 string quartets before publishing a pair of exceptionally exquisite pieces at the age of 40, breathing new life into the old bones of this exacting chamber music form. "His legacy," notes Professor Greenberg, "is a lifetime of extraordinary craft and artistic beauty without an inferior piece in the collection."
©2002 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2002 The Great Courses
Great Masters: Stravinsky - His Life and Music
Summary
Stravinsky composed what is arguably one of the two most important musical compositions of the twentieth century, The Rite of Spring. He forged a new "musical language" to portray the sense of the ballet's primitive and earthy theme. More than a dozen excerpts of Stravinsky's works are examined. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2000 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2000 The Great Courses