Hector Berlioz | ScienceGate

Respected as one of four ‘feuilles de qualité’ in nineteenth-century France, the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published articles by some of the most talented writers/critics of its time. In ‘feuilletons’, large articles that ran across the bottom of the first and second pages, these authors gave perceptive critiques in high-quality prose and provided their readers with relief from the political news discussed on the page above. In January 1858 literary critic Hippolyte Rigault asserted that modern criticism communicated not just through forthright judgements but also through innuendo and nuance. A sophisticated readership could then be expected to take up the task of understanding the allusions and filling in the blanks. Like Rigault, Hector Berlioz (music critic of the Débats from 1835 to 1863) and Ernest Reyer (from 1866 to 1898) used both text and subtext to convey their assessments. This study, with the goal of examining how shades of approval and disapproval could be alluded to or directly revealed, traces how they wrote about their younger contemporary Georges Bizet in the years following Rigault's article.

Download Full-text

Richard Wagner: Leitmotiv e Música Dramática

Philosophica: International Journal for the History of Philosophy ◽

10.5840/philosophica2010183620 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 18 (36) ◽

pp. 25-44

Author(s):

Elisabete M. de Sousa ◽

Keyword(s):

Richard Wagner ◽

Robert Schumann ◽

Musical Composition ◽

Musical Language ◽

Program Music ◽

Hector Berlioz ◽

Verbal Language ◽

Present Essay ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

The Impact

The present essay presents the content of the landmarks that punctuate the long dialogue between verbal language and musical language during the 19th Century, by means of examples taken from the critical and theoretical writings of Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner. In the search for the dramatic essence of music, such dialogue took different forms: the possibility of verbal language being translated by musical language, the pre-existence of a musical-poetic idea in any musical composition, eventually contributing to the appearance of program music, and finally, the principles presiding over Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Special emphasis is given to Richard Wagner’s Parisian article De l'Ouverture (1841), as well as to the impact on Soren Kierkegaard.

Download Full-text