Search results for ""author karol berger""

Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

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In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian world view. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion", music was simply 'in time'. Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's "Don Giovanni", the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.

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Karol Berger setzt Wagners Musikdramen in Beziehung zu den philosophischen und kulturellen Ideen seiner Zeit und konzentriert sich dabei in einer ausführlichen und gut verständlichen Analyse auf die vier Werke, die dieser in der zweiten Hälfte seiner Karriere schuf: „Der Ring des Nibelungen“, „Tristan und Isolde“, „Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg“ und „Parsifal“. Der Autor versucht, in das Geheimnis der Großform von Wagners Musikdramen einzudringen und erzielt überraschende Ergebnisse wie die Nähe Wagners zur italienischen Oper. Bei seiner Einordnung der Musikdramen auf der ideologischen Landkarte seiner Zeit relativieren sich, ganz gegen des Autors ursprüngliche Absicht, viele Einwände von Wagners Kritikern, allen voran Nietzsche.

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For most music historians, the modernism of the twentieth century was until recently the only appearance of the "modern" in music. The widely perceived recent decline of musical modernism makes it now possible to see the modernism of the twentieth century as a chapter in a much longer story, the story of musical modernity. The principal purpose of the present book is to encourage a debate over musical modernity; a debate that would consider the question whether, and to what extent, an examination of the history of European art music may enrich our picture of modernity and whether our understanding of music's development may be transformed by insights into the nature of modernity provided by other historical disciplines. This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on November 9-11, 2001 to honor Professor Reinhold Brinkmann.

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