Liszt's Musical Monuments

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Rehding
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Standard Procedure ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Symphonic Poems ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Historical Model

The music topic of "apotheosis" is examined in the context of Liszt's artistic biography. While the effect of the final apotheosis is familiar as a standard procedure in his symphonic poems, a prominent critical strand suggests that the overwhelming effect of the apotheosis may merely conceal a fundamental vacuity. Nietzsche in particular develops an incisive critique of this kind of monumentality, which he links with a historiographic model of what he calls "monumental history." Nietzsche's historical model is probed against an episode from Liszt's career, in which the apotheosis topic first entered his orchestral music: the Cantata for the inauguration of the Bonn Beethoven monument (1845). In this cantata, Liszt chooses a quotation from Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio for the apotheosis. In this way, the cantata pits a musical kind of monumentality against the physical Beethoven movement, not dissimilar from attempts by Schumann and Jean Paul to theorize nineteenth-century monumentality. Moreover, with this "secular sanctus" Liszt forges an artistic link between the dead composer and himself. This episode, by means of which Liszt succeeded in consolidating his fame as Beethoven's rightful heir, turns out to be crucial for his subsequent career when he settled in Weimar as a self-consciously great composer (and wrote his symphonic poems). The events surrounding Liszt's engagement in the Beethoven monument are used as an exemplar of a notion of nineteenth-century musical monumentality that thrives on the interplay between the musical structure, the events amid which the performance took place, and the biographical background of the (genius-)composer.

Donizetti's Gothic Resurrections

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melina Esse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead

Abstract The preponderance of gothic themes in Italian operas of the early nineteenth century is often cited as one of the few ways essentially conservative Italian composers flirted with the Romantic revolution sweeping the rest of Europe. By 1838, the very ubiquity of these tropes led the Venetian reviewer of Donizetti's gory Maria de Rudenz to plead ““exhaustion”” with the ever-present ““daggers, poisons, and tombs”” of the contemporary stage. Based on the French melodrama La Nonne sanglante, Donizetti's sensational opera is almost a litany of gothic tropes. The most disturbing of these is the female body that refuses to die: Maria herself, who rises from the dead to murder her innocent rival. This fleshy specter is musically rendered as a body that is too receptive to emotion, particularly to (imaginary) cries of longing or grief. Significantly, Donizetti's foray into the gothic was also distinguished by a spate of self-borrowing; his 1838 revision of the earlier Gabriella di Vergy borrows material from Maria de Rudenz. Exploring the connections between the trope of gothic resurrection and Donizetti's borrowings highlights how the two works represent a characteristic approach to the gothic, one that mingles a corporeal orientation with more familiar themes of ghostly immateriality.

The Melville Monument and the Shaping of the Scottish Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarisse Godard Desmarest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Grid Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Cairns Craig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
World War ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Second World

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.

Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich (1829–1903)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George M. Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Common Task ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Academic Philosopher ◽  
Life Work

Like many other major figures in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of speculation, Fëdorov was not an academic philosopher, but an unsystematic religious thinker who sought working answers to the fundamental questions of life. Fëdorov’s basic question was: ‘Why do the living die?’ His answer, in short, was that we die because we neglect our God-given duty to regulate nature. Fëdorov’s life work was to formulate an activist approach to the problem of death, a ‘common task’ in which all people living on earth, all religions and all sciences would eventually be united in a universal project to resurrect all the dead.

Commentary: Necromance

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-839
Author(s):  
Irvin J Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Romantic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Cooperative Economy ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract This article reconsiders the recent turn in political theory to love as a countercapital affect, helping us endure when hope has lost its salience. The article offers the concept of “necromance” to attend to the ways the popular configuration of love as life-giving often overlooks how in the history of slavery and liberal empire love operates as life-taking. Distinct from necromancy, necromance is not a process of reviving the dead but of bringing subjects in ever closer proximity to the dead. Grounded in a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s romantic novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), particularly its vision of a cooperative economy and its response to the evolving meaning of love in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century, necromance is both a structure of feeling and a form of writing. As a resource for activism indebted to the creative powers of melancholic attachments, necromance contests the common conception that in order for grievances to become social movements or collective insurgencies they must be framed to create feelings of outrage, not of grief. By working inside existing conditions of irrevocable loss, necromantic love registers the feeling that the revolution is already here.

Henry James’s Black Dresses

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-538
Author(s):  
Shari Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Dead

Shari Goldberg, “Henry James’s Black Dresses: Mourning without Grief” (pp. 515–538) While scholars have carefully discerned how nineteenth-century modes of mourning differ from Sigmund Freud’s later model, the distinction between mourning and grief, in texts of the period and beyond, tends to be collapsed. This essay argues that Henry James disentangles the two terms by insisting on mourning’s association with ritualistic, social behavior, most iconically the wearing of a black dress. In James’s writing, to be “in mourning” generally means to be physically within such a dress, without reference to one’s emotional state. His use of the phrase, particularly in “The Altar of the Dead” (1895) and “Maud-Evelyn” (1900), thus offers ways of thinking through responses to death apart from grief. One is that the black dress can obscure, rather than advertise, the wearer’s feelings. Another is that such garments may facilitate ongoing relationships with persons now dead. Such processes of mourning without grief are nearly impossible to recognize after the advent of psychoanalysis, yet this essay concludes by finding evidence of their circulation in today’s political resistance.

Landscapes of memory: The nineteenth-century garden cemetery

2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Tarlow
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Landscape Design ◽  
Characteristic Appearance ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

During the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, garden cemeteries were founded in most cities in Britain. Their characteristic appearance owes much to a British tradition of naturalistic landscape design but has particular resonances in the context of death and mourning in the nineteenth century. This article considers some of the factors that have been significant in the development of the British landscape cemetery, including public health, class relationships and foreign influences (particularly that of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris). It is argued that none of these things explains the popularity of this particular form of cemetery in Britain; rather, the garden cemetery offered an appealing and appropriate landscape for remembering the dead and mediating the relationship between the dead and the bereaved.

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