The Aesthetics of Form, the Aesthetics of Expression and ‘Absolute Music’ : Aesthetics of music in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Pritchard

ABSTRACTThe terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Körner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Karol Berger

The music-dramatic core of the book is framed by sections designed to place Wagner’s late works within the context of the political and ethical ideas of his time. The Prologue offers a genealogy of the principal worldviews available to Wagner and his contemporaries and shows how they related to one another. The options I describe are of diverse age, some with roots going as far back as the antiquity (the Judeo-Christian religious outlook), some characteristic of the modern age (the Enlightenment), some arising even more recently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the main currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that proceed under the banners of History, Nation, and Will). Deposited at different times, they all actively shaped the landscape in which Wagner found himself and left traces on his music dramas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-172
Author(s):  
Michael A. G. Haykin

Andrew Fuller was the most influential Baptist theologian of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is often remembered for his friendship and support of William Carey, but he also needs to be remembered for his theology, known in his own day as ‘Fullerism’. It was formed by his rebuttal of the Hyper-Calvinism that dogged far too many Particular Baptist communities and is encapsulated in his treatise The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. This controversy, which at its heart was about divine sovereignty and human responsibility, led to Fuller’s instructive involvement in other key conflicts of his day, namely, the debates with Socinianism, Deism, and Sandemanianism. Fuller’s importance as a pastor-theologian, though, is not limited to these controversies, but is also evident in a quintessential evangelical piety that is focused on the cross.


2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari

This chapter explores the use of monster metaphors in framing “terrorist” actors since the French Revolution. While acknowledging that these metaphors effectively present the “terrorist” as an abject “other,” it argues that the main purpose of the use of monster imagery in framing “terrorists” is to highlight their unmanageability, which may be instrumental in securing popular backing for specific types of rule-breaking behavior in counterterrorism. It presents these arguments while reviewing examples drawn from the origins of modern terrorism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the gorgon Medusa, which appears for instance in relation to Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” and the many-headed hydra—one of the oldest metaphors for representing unruly behavior that proves unmanageable. It then introduces another type of unmanageable monster that would become particularly popular to frame terrorists—Frankenstein’s monster—and its use in the late nineteenth century to frame Irish nationalism.


Author(s):  
Marcin Wodziński

This chapter asks what we know about the golden/classical period of Hasidism and when it ended. It demonstrates that long before the Holocaust, it was the First World War that brought a major crisis, from which Hasidism in the Old World never recovered. It discusses in turn the human and material losses suffered by the Hasidim, changes in the movement’s geography and their consequences, and ideological and political transformations Hasidism experienced after 1918. The chapter thus shows how the golden age of Hasidism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed from what emerged in the wake of the First World War and from what we know as Hasidism today. More generally, this chapter provides a model of the interrelation between the geopolitical, economic, or cultural context of the outside world and the ethos, doctrine, and cultural models of Hasidism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci

The Introductory chapter discusses the overarching question of the book: how did it all begin? Since when did the self-defined Great Powers of the nineteenth century––Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia––come to assume responsibility for providing security in the Levant. Why? The Introduction traces the answer of these questions to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and maintains that Great Power interventions in the nineteenth-century Levant need to be considered not only in reference to their immediate causes, theatres, and implications. It is essential to take into account the continuity that European and Levantine actors saw in regional affairs from the late eighteenth century through until at least the mid-nineteenth. There is a need to foreground the persistent patterns or cultures of security within which violence was generated and sustained, and how the quest for security acted as an organizing principle of international relations. It also discusses the importance of considering these interventions in the fabric of the Eastern Question. It invites the readers to view the latter not only as a European question, as the existing literature has us believe, but also as an Ottoman question, whereby the agency of the Ottoman ministers and other local actors was more central than has been documented.


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