Description
Book SynopsisA free ebook version of this title is available throughLuminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visitwww.luminosoa.orgto learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics,Middlebrow Modernismuses Benjamin Britten's operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the great divide between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten's works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.
Trade Review“…an insightful study on the elusive concept of the middlebrow in the critical reception of Benjamin Britten’s stage works. … Importantly, Chowrimootoo confronts the ambiguities inherent in conceptions of the middlebrow, yet he does not seek to resolve them. Instead, he accepts that Britten identified as both a composer who valued accessibility and public service, and as one who advocated for the serious study and interpretation of his music.” * North American British Music Studies Association Reviews *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments 1. Middlebrow Modernism
2. Sentimentality under Erasure in Peter Grimes
3. The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring
4. The Turn of the Screw, or: The Gothic Melodrama of Modernism
5. The Burning Fiery Furnace and the Redemption of Religious Kitsch
6. Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of Sublimation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
