UID:
almahu_9947414148402882
Format:
1 online resource (xix, 397 pages) :
,
digital, PDF file(s).
ISBN:
9780511470301 (ebook)
Series Statement:
New perspectives in music history and criticism ; 3
Content:
This book is a study of the prose writings of Richard Wagner and their relevance to an understanding of his music and drama, as well as their relation to music criticism and aesthetics in the nineteenth century in general. As a by-product of Wagner's many-faceted career as musician, conductor, cultural critic and controversial ideologue, the writings are documents of undisputed interpretative value. This study focuses on Wagner's words on music, and interprets them in the light of the musical, aesthetic and critical contexts that generated them. Professor Grey considers Wagner's ambivalence concerning the idea of 'absolute music' and the capacity of music to project meaning or drama from within its own system of referents. Particularly relevant are Wagner's appropriation of a Beethoven legacy, the metaphors of musical 'gender' and 'biology' in Opera and Drama and the critical background to ideas of 'motive' and 'leitmotif' in theory and practice.
Note:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
,
Wagner and the problematics of "absolute music" in the nineteenth century:
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Ideas of absolute music ;
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Questions of autonomy ;
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Content and/or/as form ;
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Absolute music and "ideas: a new determinacy? --
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Beethoven reception and the hermeneutic impulse: "poetic ideas" and new forms:
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Beethoven's "poetic ideas": notes on the genesis of a critical tradition ;
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Poetics, heroics, funérailles ;
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Fear of the Fifth: the uncanniness of instrumental speech ;
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Beethoven's "sketches" (poetic intentions and musical consequences) --
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Engendering music drama: Opera and Drama and its metaphors:
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Metaphors of gender, and others;
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Natural sciences: reproductive biology and a theory of "evolution";
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Music mastered, poetic reason (nearly) seduced: allegory and antithesis --
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The "poetic-musical period" and the "evolution" of Wagnerian form:
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Periode and Entwicklung ;
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"Evolving" period-complexes and Wagner's evolution: three dialogues --
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Endless melodies:
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Wagner and his critics around 1860 (Wagner's melody--all or none?) ;
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Melody, origins, and utopias of regression (melody as the origin of speech and poetry in Opera and Drama) ;
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Melody as form --
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Motives and motivations: leitmotif and "symphonic" drama:
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Warum? (motives to musical form) ;
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The birth of the music drama from the "labor-pains of program music" ;
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Motif, motive, Motiv: dramatic motivations and "symphonic form" ;
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Delirium and death as transgressive motives: "dramatic symphony" and "symphonic drama" ;
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Dénouements (motivic threads, dramatic plots, musical knots and resolutions).
Additional Edition:
Print version: ISBN 9780521417389
Language:
English
URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511470301
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