Stories of Symphonic Music

Lawrence Gilman was one of America's most influential music critics, and he was spectacularly wrong about some now-cherished masterpieces. This book collects his analyses of the great symphonic works from Beethoven through the early twentieth century, offering a fascinating window into how music criticism shaped and sometimes missed the canon. Gilman writes with precision and passion about symphonies, overtures, and tone-poems, illuminating their structure, emotional logic, and historical context. What makes this book endure is not just its musical insights but its witness to a pivotal era when musical traditions were being overturned and the battles over what constituted 'great' music were being fought in real time. For anyone who loves classical music and wants to understand how the canon formed, this is essential reading.