"Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the eighteenth century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. Surprisingly, there has heretofore been no truly extensive, broad-based treatment of the genre, and the best studies to date are now several decades old." "In this five-volume series, A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its eighteenth-century beginnings to the end of the twentieth century. Synthesizing the enormous scholarly literature, Brown presents up-to-date overviews of the status of research, discusses important former or remaining problems or attribution, illuminates the style of specific works and their contexts, and samples early writings on their reception. The Symphonic Repertoire provides an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur." "Although during the mid-nineteenth century the geographic center of the symphony in the Germanic territories moved west and north from Vienna to Leipzig, during the last third of the century it returned to the old Austrian lands with the works of Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, and Mahler. For both Bruckner and Mahler, the symphony constituted the heart of their output; for Brahms and Dvorak, it occupied a less central place. Yet for all them, the key figure of the past remained Beethoven. The symphonies of these four composers, together with the works of Goldmark, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Smetana, Fibich, Janacek, and others, are treated in Volume IV, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony, covering the period from roughly 1860 to 1930."--BOOK JACKET.