Brahms's ““Sinfonie-Serenade”” and the Politics of Genre

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-403
Author(s):  
Michael Vaillancourt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Stylistic Development ◽  
German School ◽  
First Maturity ◽  
Interpretive Mode

Abstract Brahms's First Serenade, op. 11, has played a relatively minor role in scholarly accounts of Brahms's stylistic development, which often depict the work as a tentative step toward the composer's ““first maturity”” or as one of several failed attempts to create a symphony. By contrast, the earliest reviewers of the Serenade heard the piece as a crucial turning point in his career, and they interpreted his choice of genre as a bold statement in the emerging debate on the future course of German music. In this view, the genre of the orchestral serenade forged a link with an idealized Viennese classicism, thereby representing a denial of the ideals of Franz Brendel's ““New German”” school. By reading Brahms's Serenade in terms of genre, we can begin to assess the qualities that informed its contemporary reception. Approaching genre as an interpretive mode allows us to understand the composer's provocative juxtaposition of numerous topics of discourse——the symphonic, the pastoral, the sublime, as well as the reinterpretation of specific classical gestures——as a key to the musical meaning of the piece. Brahms's extensive references to music by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven go beyond simple allusion to embrace the reinterpretation of compositional techniques that situate the piece within the tradition of instrumental Nachtmusik. Heard through genre, the Serenade thus emerges as a pointed response to mid nineteenth-century theories of radical modernism.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kopec
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Panama Canal ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Social Violence ◽  
Erie Canal ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Internal Improvements ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Verse Novel

Abstract This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.

The Spanish Translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures: An Early Anglo-Hispanic Canon

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
María Eugenia Perojo Arronte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Cultural Dominance ◽  
Intense Debate ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics

The Spanish translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) at the turn of the nineteenth century was one of the most remarkable literary events of the period in Spain. It appeared at a crucial time of shifting cultural paradigms and provoked an intense debate on some literary issues that were key in the transition to a new Romantic aesthetics, by introducing a view of the creative process based on pre-Romantic versions of the concepts of genius, the imagination and the sublime. But in its adaptation to the Spanish context Blair's work underwent a singular nationalization process. It also helped disseminate an Anglo-Hispanic canon that advanced the shift from French cultural dominance to an increasing Anglophilia that became noticeable in many Spanish authors and critics in subsequent decades. Thanks to the official adoption of the Lecciones as a rhetorical and literary handbook in schools and universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, the pre-Romantic canon established through Blair's work may have even contributed to the consolidation of literary eclecticism in Spain.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Big Business and the Failure of Right-Wing Catalan Nationalism, 1901–1923

1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 901-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Big Business ◽  
Electoral Success

The rise of modern Catalan nationalist sentiments dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In essence, these sentiments reflected a growing political, intellectual and, to a lesser extent economic resentment within the region of Catalonia against the Restoration regime which was imposed upon Spain in 1875. The breakthrough of Catalan nationalism, or regionalism as it is sometimes called, to become a significant force in Spanish politics followed the victory of four Catalanist candidates in the elections to the Cortes of 1901. Shortly afterwards the groups responsible for that electoral success came together to establish what was, with the possible exception of the Socialists (P.S.O.E.), the first modern political party of Spain, the Lliga Regionalista. Significantly, the foundation of the Lliga marked a turning point in the nature of Catalan nationalism, or at least its dominant strain. Of the four candidates elected in 1901, all for Barcelona seats, three represented economic interests. Indeed, much more than that, they were, or had been, presidents of three of the most powerful big business organisations of the region.

Shepherding in Colonial Australia

Rural History ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN PICKARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Good Productivity ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Productivity Gains ◽  
Wool Industry

AbstractShepherds were a critical component of the early wool industry in colonial Australia and persisted even after fencing was adopted and rapidly spread in the later nineteenth century. Initially shepherds were convicts, but after transportation ceased in the late 1840s, emancipists and free men were employed. Their duty was the same as in England: look after the flock during the day, and pen them nightly in folds made of hurdles. Analysis of wages and flock sizes indicates that pastoralists achieved good productivity gains with larger flocks but inflation of wages reduced the gains to modest levels. The gold rushes and labour shortages of the 1850s played a minor role in increasing both wages and flock sizes. Living conditions in huts were primitive, and the diet monotonous. Shepherds were exposed to a range of diseases, especially in Queensland. Flock-masters employed non-whites, usually at lower wages, and women and children. Fences only replaced shepherds when pastoralists realised that the new technology of fences, combined with other changes, would give them higher profits. The sheep were left to fend for themselves in the open paddocks, a system used to this day.

Longinus, on Sublimity

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 43-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Heath
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the treatise On sublimity was universally attributed to the third-century critic, rhetorician and philosopher Cassius Longinus. Weiske's edition, first issued in 1809, marked a turning-point in the trend of scholarly opinion, and Longinus' claim to authorship is now generally rejected, often summarily. A variety of alternative attributions have been canvassed; most commonly the work is assigned to an anonymous author of the first century A.D. But a minority of scholars have resisted the consensus and defended Longinus' claim to authorship. This paper will argue that they were right to do so.To avoid ambiguity, I shall follow Russell in using the symbol ‘L’ as a non-committal way of designating the author of On sublimity; by ‘Longinus’ I shall always mean Cassius Longinus. So the question before us is whether L is Longinus. I begin by explaining why manuscript evidence (§2) and stylistic comparison with the fragments of Longinus (§3) fail to resolve the question. I then try to find a place for the composition of the treatise within Longinus' career (§4). This leads to a consideration of the final chapter, widely regarded as inconsistent with a third-century date; I shall argue that there is no inconsistency (§5). If so, the way lies open to a reassessment of the case in favour of Longinus' claim.

The Lament and the Rhetoric of the Sublime

1998 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda M. Austin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Sublime

The appearance of melodramatic language and gesture in nineteenth-century lyric poetry was underwritten by two theories of ecstasis, the sense of losing oneself or going beyond the limits of comprehension. The first kind of ecstasis belonged to the sublime reaction, as Kant and Burke had imagined it. The second sort belonged to the picture of the disordered mind in the medical literature. A rhetoric of shock and loss in the melodramatic lyric bears the remains of the inchoate language and wild gestures in ancient lamentation but also refers to more recent performances of overpowering emotion on stage. Conventional reactions to sublime landscapes in painting, for example, employ expressions and gestures inventoried both in Longinus's treatise on the sublime and in acting manuals for tragedians. Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Lament" (1821) and Richard Harris Barham's "Epigram" (1847) are performances of the sublime confrontation with the idea of death. Both poems were attempts to record ecstasis and to transcribe melodramatic acting. "Epigram," moreover, alludes to another interpretation of ecstasis in the lately popular Romantic ballet. This revolutionary technique created an illusion of bodilessness-a vision of the body losing itself and fading into nothing. The reformulations of the sublime in philosophy and medicine thus enabled a set of signifying practices that appear in transcriptions of lamentation and in dance. Both are efforts to perform the sublime moment.

Feminist Revolutionary Music Criticism and Wagner Reception

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
German School

Abstract Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto's lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women's rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women's journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women's movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women's rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.

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