World-renowned composers and famous compositions

Author: Feng Zikai
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2000-10-01
Features: World Great Composers and Famous Works is an introductory book on world-class musical works written by my father, Feng Zikai. The twelve chapters were first published over seventy years ago (1929) in the magazine General. In May 1931, these articles were compiled into a book by the Ayi Press in Shanghai, after which it went out of print. The original book introduced 12 great composers and their 117 famous works to music enthusiasts. During this revision, it was discovered that the author's description of Mozart's C major sonata was overly literary and contradicted his musical appreciation perspective, standing out like a discordant note in the entire book. Therefore, it was removed to avoid misleading readers. As a result, the total number of works introduced in the book became 116. Corrections were made to the names of these 116 works, numbering for some of them, and dividing the movements of certain pieces. The original book occasionally mentioned specific record versions of certain works, which have since become outdated and were naturally removed. Fortunately, in today's rich information environment, readers no longer face difficulties in purchasing and collecting records. Since the writing and publication of this book took place over seventy years ago, the names of foreign figures, places, and some musical terms included in the text inevitably appear outdated. My main task was to replace these old names with the currently accepted translations. Additionally, some musical instrument names and tempo terms in the original book were still presented in foreign languages, which was unavoidable during the early stages of modern ancient music education in China. For the convenience of readers, these terms were revised according to current translations, either by placing the foreign terms in parentheses after the Chinese names or by directly replacing them with Chinese translations. As for individual non-professional foreign phrases already enclosed in parentheses, they were removed to avoid clutter. The book includes foreign languages such as English, French, German, Italian, etc., and there are mixed instances of these languages, which is related to the global nature of music and is therefore not conducive to enforcing uniformity in a single language. Some names and terms in foreign languages appear repeatedly across the various chapters, which is determined by the relative independence of each chapter and thus did not require deletion. For important composers and key musical terms mentioned in the book, I compiled an alphabetical name comparison table and included it at the end for reference by readers.