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E-book Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past : An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics

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Penilaian

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More than two hundred years ago, a theater journal from Hamburg reviewed a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Its author was probably Bernhard Anselm Weber, a composer and music director. The evening’s entertainment left a deep impression on Mozart’s fellow musician:It is just as one would expect from Mozart: great and beautiful, full of new ideas and surprising turns, full of art and fi re and genius. Now beautiful, charming song bewitches us, now a fi ne comic wit and tone make us smile; now we marvel at the naturally executed, masterful plot; now the splendor and magnitude of art overwhelm us.”1To Weber, Figaro looked like an animated thing. It awakened human passion; it extended and enriched life.More than a decade ago, Figaro elicited a different kind of response from a journal, including to its famed penultimate scene, where the Count and Countess reconcile and in that ritual restore and renew a wider community:When the Countess pardons the Count in act 4 of The Marriage of Figaro, it is not that Mozart’s music simultaneously gives voice to some more pro-found statement of or about forgiveness. Rather, it is the fact that there is a Countess, a Count, a specifi c dramatic situation, and ordinary words like “Contessa, perdono” sung out loud that has in quite precise ways predeter-mined the meaning to attach to Mozart’s musical moment. These mundane, visible things feed a conviction that transfi gured forgiveness—that specifi -cally—is being conveyed by some very beautiful noise.2Now, Figaro looks like an inert thing. The concluding “very beautiful noise” concedes a surface appeal, but in the manner of monumental alabaster—immobile and impenetrable to human interest. Where there is art, there is no life Of the many questions crowding in for attention, the main one this essay pursues is: What are the terms of this more modern argument about Mozart’s music? Presupposed in that question is the availability of other vocabularies for describing art, in which case another question immediately intrudes: For whom are these values true? That question, of the durability and reach of what I call a modernist Mozart poetics, is much more diffi cult to answer. Although this essay attends to modernism’s imprint on art criticism in the academy, its quest to resolve creative acts into simpler states extends well beyond that dis-cipline and even that venue.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

780.1 GOE c

Penerbit

London : Boydell & Brewer., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

223 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781787442849

Klasifikasi

780.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Philosophy of Music

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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