"First Nights," [Yale University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-300-07774-2 $29.95]
by Professor Thomas Forrest Kelly is an expansion of his lectures from a
popular course he has taught for a number of years at Harvard.  He takes as
his subject five great, groundbreaking works (Monteverdi's "Orfeo" [1607],
Handel's "Messiah" [1742], Beethoven's Ninth Symphony [1824], Berlioz's
"Symphonie fantastique" [1830], and Stravinsky's "Le sacre de printemps"
 [1913]) and provides exhaustive details about the culture of the time, the
composer's effort to get the piece written and performed, the rehearsals,
the instruments used, the halls, the musicians, the audiences, the popular
and critical reactions.  He uses contemporaneous sources for each "First
Night", bringing to light such facts as that a piano was used in the
orchestra in Beethoven's Ninth's premiere, that a castrato priest sang
Eurydice in "Orfeo", that the demonstration against "Sacre" began even
before the curtain went up.

He discusses such things as Beethoven's use of the valveless horn to play
an amazing, and odd, C-flat major scale in the slow movement of the Ninth,
which emphasized, because of the hand-stopped notes in the natural horn,
the mystery of that particular moment in the score.

And he writes in a manner that, even though you know "how it turned out" in
the long run, makes you breathless to learn more, to keep turning the page.

Most of all, he keeps foremost that each of the pieces was "in the present"
of their premieres.  He lets us feel what it must have been like to have
been there, to have heard them for the first time.

I strongly recommend the book for those who want to scrape away the
encrustations on these over-familiar works so that they can hear the afresh.

Scott Morrison