Description
Book SynopsisReveals the pivotal role of music - musical works and musical culture - in debates about society, self, and culture that forged European modernity through the 'long nineteenth century'. This book argues that from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, music not only reflected but also embodied modern subjectivity.
Trade Review"[Steinberg's] analyses--music not as closed art form but as permeable cultural phenomenon--elicit some fruitful and unexpected results... [A] deeply rewarding book."--Peter Quinn, Times Literary Supplement "Michael P. Steinberg's subject is the vast change that came over music in the 19th century, from something couched in public terms--religious or ceremonial--to something that feels essentially private, even when it happens in public. It's a familiar idea, but what makes this book original is the way he complicates it with other historical currents."--Ivan Hewett, BBC Music Magazine "With Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and NIneteenth-Century Music, Michael P. Steinberg offers a provocative, intermittently brilliant rooting of nineteenth-century music ... in contemporaneous cultural and intellectual history. Few major German composers of the era go unexamined, and few readers are likely to walk away from the book with their understanding of this repertoire, and the culture from and for which it speaks, unrevised."--Peter Mercer-Taylor, Notes "Listening to Reason is a work of high integrity; it has a great deal to teach. Indeed, it's a book of importance."--Richard Leppert, Beethoven Forum "Michael P. Steinberg has not only made a simultaneous contribution to the fields of cultural history and musicology, he has authoritatively illustrated the importance of their interaction, or the close connection between the questions, theoretical approaches, and methodologies with which they are mutually engaged... Steinberg has made a truly major contribution to our understanding of how musical meaning, values, and creativity in the Austro German sphere were intertwined with the ambient ideological and political tensions."--Jane F. Fulcher, Journal of Modern History
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix Preface xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE Staging Subjectivity in the Mozart/Da Ponte Operas 18 Staging Subjectivity 18 Don Giovanni and the Scene of Patricide 23 Le nozze di Figaro and the Scene of Emancipation 39 Cosi'fan tutte and the Scene of Instruction 51 CHAPTER TWO Beethoven: Heroism and Abstraction 59 Heroism and Abstraction 59 Heroism and Anxiety 67 Fidelio 73 The Symphony No.9 84 CHAPTER THREE Canny and Uncanny Histories in Biedermeier Music 94 Biedermeier Music 94 Mendelssohn's Canny Histories 97 Schumann's Uncanny Histories 122 Back to Schubert 131 CHAPTER FOUR The Family Romances of Music Drama 133 The Family Romances of Music Drama 133 Siegmund's Death 142 Subjectivity and Identity 153 CHAPTER FIVE The Voice of the People at the Moment of the Nation 163 People and Nations 163 Brahms, 1868 174 Verdi, 1874 178 Dvorak,1890 186 CHAPTER SIX Minor Modernisms 193 Music Trauma, or, Is There Life after Wagner? 193 Three Fins de Siecle 202 The Road into the Open 220 CHAPTER SEVEN The Musical Unconscious 226 Index 237
