Mid-nineteenth-century critical responses to the Brontës

ABSTRACTAlthough Eugen d’Albert’s later works were a staple of new opera during the Weimar Republic, they have since been considered at best partially successful attempts to adapt his earlier and more successful ‘verismo’ idiom to the new post-war aesthetics. His 1926 opera Der Golem, however, helps to challenge this reputation. Its similarities to one of the most famous early German films, Robert Wegener’s 1920 Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, point to an intriguing relationship with one of musical modernism’s most controversial nemeses: the cinema. An analysis of critical responses to d’Albert’s opera, read in the context of characteristic early twentieth-century debates about popularity, shows how Der Golem encouraged more complex responses to mass appeal than the clear rejection often attributed to better known figures of modernism. Although the opera both flirts with and problematises different modes of audience appeal – most notably in an early scene, which has a direct parallel in Wegener’s film – its reception avoids easy alignment with mass culture. Der Golem’s unmistakeable debt to its modernist context suggests that narratives of modernism should be able to account for d’Albert’s post-war works, rather than treating them as a throwback to the nineteenth century.

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John Philip Sousa's ‘Red Indians’: A Case Study of Race in Music

Nineteenth-Century Music Review ◽

10.1017/s1479409800000355 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 73-88

Author(s):

Michael V. Pisani

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Race And Ethnicity ◽

Upper Class ◽

Musical Language ◽

Critical Responses ◽

The Way

To discover that one of popular music's most famous and enduring composers wrote a march-characteristic called ‘The Red Man’ immediately arouses curiosity about the nature and substance of such a work, the reasons for writing it, and how audiences received it. John Philip Sousa composed ‘The Red Man’ in 1910 for his world tour and, like much of his music, it is still played and recorded today. I will attempt to answer these questions by examining this lesser-known but highly distinctive Sousa composition in detail. That necessarily involves seeing the piece through a variety of lenses. Since the way in which audiences listen to music has fundamentally changed in a hundred years, the closest we can come to hearing the piece through ears of 1910 is to explore a variety of critical responses from the time published in newspapers in different countries. Since these accounts are written in a stylistic language considerably different from the way modern critics write about music, the responses need to be seen in context. Many were rooted in notions of race and ethnicity prevalent among the middle- and upper-class audiences for which Sousa composed. Moreover, Sousa's audiences listened with a host of associations that accrued during the nineteenth century and are lost to us today. This was enhanced by the type of programmes on which ‘The Red Man’ was performed, which encouraged the perception of music through a national or exotic lens, or through the filter of a narrative. The musical language of this ‘Indian’ piece is hardly unique, since it owes many of its metaphors to Sousa's contemporaries. For all his originality, Sousa was also an expert assimilator. There isn’t space here to examine every derivation in this work, but by exploring a few of them we can learn much about his music and his audiences.

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The Supernatural as the Author's Sphere: Jinghua Yuan's Reprise of the Rhetorical Strategies of Honglou Meng

T oung Pao ◽

10.1163/156853206778553234 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 92 (1) ◽

pp. 129-161

Author(s):

Ying Wang

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

Vernacular Literature ◽

Artistic Creativity ◽

Late Qing ◽

Critical Responses ◽

Honglou Meng ◽

Cao Xueqin ◽

Li Ruzhen

AbstractThis study investigates the similarities between Li Ruzhen's nineteenth-century novel Jinghua yuan and Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century masterpiece Honglou meng in terms of their artistic experimentation, by its focus on Li's appropriation of Cao's rhetorical strategies. It places the two novels in the context of vernacular literature in the mid- and late Qing period and attributes the disappearance of the "pseudo-oral" narrator in both novels to the dramatization of the narration and the establishment of a supernatural realm as the sphere of the author. The rhetorical strategies employed in Honglou meng, and subsequently evoked in Jinghua yuan, are not, as this study intends to show, the sporadic engagements of the supernatural seen in earlier novels. Instead, they are sophisticated mechanisms at work in both the model and its imitation. In comparing the similarities of rhetoric in these two novels, this essay emphasizes Li Ruzhen's artistic creativity by highlighting his critical responses to Honglou meng and his ingenuity in re-using Cao Xueqin's techniques. Cette étude examine les similitudes entre deux romans, le Jinghua yuan composé au 19e siècle par Li Ruzhen et le chef-d'œuvre de Cao Xueqin, le Honglou meng, qui date du siècle précédent, concernant leurs aspects expérimentaux dans le domaine artistique; pour ce faire elle se concentre sur la façon dont Li Ruzhen s'est approprié les stratégies rhétoriques de Cao Xueqin. L'article replace les deux romans dans le contexte de la littérature vernaculaire d'au milieu et de la fin des Qing, et attribue la disparition du narrateur "pseudo-oral" dans les deux œuvres à la dramatisation de la narration et à l'instauration d'un domaine surnaturel constituant la sphère de l'auteur. Comme entend le montrer cet essai, les stratégies rhétoriques employées dans le Honglou meng et reprises plus tard dans le Jinghua yuan ne se limitent pas à des interventions sporadiques du surnaturel comme dans les romans plus anciens. On a au contraire affaire à des mécanismes sophistiqués mis en œuvre tant dans le modèle que dans son imitation. La comparaison des similitudes rhétoriques dans les deux romans permet de mettre l'accent sur la créativité artistique de Li Ruzhen en mettant en lumière sa réponse critique au Honglou meng et l'ingéniosité avec laquelle il reprend à son compte les techniques de Cao Xueqin.

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