Search results for ""Author Richard Kramer""

Franz Schubert's song cycles, "Die Schone Mullerin" and "Winterreise" are cornerstones of the genre. But, as Richard Kramer argues in this book, Schubert envisioned many other songs as components of cyclical arrangements that were never published as such. By studying Schubert's original manuscripts, Kramer recovers some of these "distant cycles" and accounts for idiosyncrasies in the songs which other analyses have failed to explain. Returning the songs to their original keys, Kramer reveals linkages among songs which were often obscured as Schubert readied his compositions for publication. His analysis thus conveys even familiar songs in fresh contexts that will affect performance, interpretation and criticism. After addressing problems of multiple settings and revisions, Kramer presents a series of briefs for the reconfiguring of sets of songs to poems by Goethe, Rellstab and Heine. He deconstructs "Winterreise", using its convoluted origins to illuminate its textual contradictions. Finally, Kramer scrutinizes settings from the Abendrote cycle (on poems by Friedrich Schlegel) for signs of cyclic process. Probing the farthest reaches of Schubert's engagement with the poetics of lieder, "Distant Cycles" exposes tensions between Schubert the composer and Schubert the merchant-entrepreneur.

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For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes. In Cherubino's Leap, Richard Kramer unmasks such prismatic moments in a range of iconic instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; in the musical engagement with the formidable odes of Friedrich Klopstock; and, on the grand stage of opera, at the intense moment of recognition in Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino's daring escape in Mozart's Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart's Entf hrung inspire a reflection on the tragic aspect of the composer's operatic women. Other players from literature and the arts Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them enrich the landscape of this journey through the Enlightenment imagination.

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Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of “late style.” Here is Vienna, hosting a congress in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the midst of his most prolific year—some 140 songs, four operas, and much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas for the “Hammerklavier,” opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer’s compelling reading, each seemed to be composing “against”—Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination took full flight.From the Ruins of Enlightenment begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects: Schubert’s settings of the poems of Ludwig Hölty in a fragmentary cycle and Beethoven’s engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in their “lonely and singular journeys” through the “rich solitude of their music.”

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