Ferruccio Busoni and the “Halfness” of Frédéric Chopin

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-280
Author(s):  
Erinn E. Knyt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Frederic Chopin ◽  
Complete Cycle ◽  
Ferruccio Busoni ◽  
Concert Programs

Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) championed Frédéric Chopin’s music. Yet his performances often elicited responses of shock or amusement because they rebelled against the prevalent sentimental style of interpretation associated with an “effeminate” Chopin. Even some of his staunchest admirers had trouble appreciating his unprompted repeats of measures or structural wholes in the preludes or etudes, his registral alterations, and his overly intellectualized approach. Also unusual was his choice to program the preludes as a complete cycle. Scholars have documented Busoni’s interpretive eccentricities, but the rationale behind them and their significance for the evolution of Chopin interpretation in the twentieth century remains largely unexplored. Through analyses of recordings, concert programs, recital reviews, and Busoni’s little-known and unpublished essay from 1908 titled “Chopin: Eine Ansicht über ihn,” I connect Busoni’s unconventional Chopin interpretations to an idiosyncratic perception of Chopin’s character. In the nineteenth century Chopin and his music were commonly viewed as effeminate, androgynous, childish, sickly, and “ethnically other.” Busoni’s essay indicates that he, too, considered Chopin’s music “poetic,” “feminine,” and “emotive.” But this was problematic for Busoni, who was obsessed with “manliness” in an age in which gender roles were gradually changing. He discovered “half-manly” and “half-dramatic” elements in the music and in Chopin’s character—that is, a heroic, monumental side. In striving to portray the “whole” of Chopin and his music while distancing himself from the gendered “halfness” of earlier writings, Busoni became a pioneer of bolder Chopin interpretation and of monumentalist programming. His portrait of Chopin reveals how cultural ideas inform the evolution of performers’ interpretations.

Nijinska, Bronislava (1891–1972)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Garafola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Many ◽  
Gender Boundaries

The premiere female ballet choreographer of the first half of the twentieth century, Bronislava Nijinska experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and discovered untapped creative powers in the chaotic moments that followed it. Rejecting the ‘‘acrobaticism,’’ and what she perceived as the stale conventions of nineteenth-century Russian ballet, she was an architect of twentieth-century neo-classicism and an early exponent of the plotless ballet. Although ballet technique remained the foundation of her work, she augmented it with movements originating in other forms, energized it with rhythms of modernity, minimized narrative, and insisted that movement alone constituted the primary material of dance. She brought a woman’s sensibility to her choreography, evident in Les Noces (The Wedding) (1923), her greatest work, and Les Biches (also known in English as The House Party, 1924), both produced for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and many of her works rested on gender ambiguity, the probing of gender boundaries, and a mistrust of conventional gender roles. A key figure of Russia Abroad, she contributed to the many diasporic or émigré companies, including her own short-lived ensembles, which dotted the ballet landscape of the interwar years, and through her career as a freelance choreographer played a crucial role in the international dissemination of modernism. She choreographed the original versions of several modernist scores, introducing them to the ballet repertoire. In her multiple roles as teacher, choreographer, and ballet mistress she influenced the careers of numerous dancers and choreographers, including Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois. Finally, she was an articulate writer and the author of an acclaimed volume of memoirs, in addition to a major treatise on movement.

scholarly journals Religious Affects and Female Subjects in the Altarpieces of the Finnish Artist Alexandra Frosterus-Såltin

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-26
Author(s):  
Ringa Takanen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Mary Magdalene ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Evangelical Lutheran Church ◽  
Evangelical Lutheran ◽  
The Church

Before the mid-nineteenth century there were few subjects in the altarpiece tradition of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in which the central figures accompanying Christ were female. Seldom used or new motifs involving female characters now emerged behind the altar. Most of the altarpieces with central women figures were painted in Finland at the turn of the twentieth century by the artist Alexandra Frosterus-Såltin (1837–1916). In the nineteenth century Frosterus-Såltin was the only artist in Finland who realized the motif of ‘Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene’ in her altarpieces. In her final representation of the theme, the altarpiece in the church of the Finnish Jepua commune, she chose an unusual approach to the motif. My interest in the subject lies in the motif’s affective nature – the ways in which altarpieces in general have been actively used to evoke feelings. Moreover, I consider the influence that Alexandra Frosterus-Såltin, a significant agent in Finnish sacral art, had on consolidating the position of women’s agency in the Finnish altarpiece tradition. I examine the motif in relation to the cultural and political atmosphere of the era, especially the changing gender roles and the understanding of women’s social agency as the women’s movement emerged.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Songs of the spirit from Dufftown

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Shelagh Noden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Liturgical Music

Following the Scottish Catholic Relief Act of 1793, Scottish Catholics were at last free to break the silence imposed by the harsh penal laws, and attempt to reintroduce singing into their worship. At first opposed by Bishop George Hay, the enthusiasm for liturgical music took hold in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the fledgling choirs were hampered both by a lack of any tradition upon which to draw, and by the absence of suitable resources. To the rescue came the priest-musician, George Gordon, a graduate of the Royal Scots College in Valladolid. After his ordination and return to Scotland he worked tirelessly in forming choirs, training organists and advising on all aspects of church music. His crowning achievement was the production, at his own expense, of a two-volume collection of church music for the use of small choirs, which remained in use well into the twentieth century.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.

Socialism and the Flow of  Time in Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Flow Of Time

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 505-526
Author(s):  
Eileen J. Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
American Drama ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
Rachel Crothers ◽  
Susan Glaspell

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.

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