Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-1-316-50181-8
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 27, 375 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 648 g

Reihe: New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism

The centrality of fantasy to French literary culture has long been accepted by critics, but the sonorous dimensions of the mode and its wider implications for musical production have gone largely unexplored. In this book, Francesca Brittan invites us to listen to fantasy, attending both to literary descriptions of sound in otherworldly narratives, and to the wave of 'fantastique' musical works published in France through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie fantastique, and pieces by Liszt, Adam, Meyerbeer, and others. Following the musico-literary aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann, they allowed waking and dreaming, reality and unreality to converge, yoking fairy sound to insect song, demonic noise to colonial 'babbling', and divine music to the strains of water and wind. Fantastic soundworlds disrupted France's native tradition of marvellous illusion, replacing it with a magical materialism inextricable from republican activism, theological heterodoxy, and the advent of 'radical' romanticism.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brittan, Francesca

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik Geschichte der Musik: Romantik (ca. 1830-1900)
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Einzelne Komponisten und Musiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musiktheorie, Musikästhetik, Kompositionslehre
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: hearing fantasy; 1. The fantastique moderne; 2. Melancholy, monomania, and the monde fantastique; 3. Le retour à la vie: natural magic and the ideal orchestra; 4. Grammatical imaginaries; 5. Listening in hell; 6. Fairyology, entomology, and the Scherzo fantastique.

Über Autor(innen)

Brittan, Francesca
Francesca Brittan is Assistant Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio. Her work focuses on music of the long nineteenth century, and has been published in a range of scholarly journals including 19th-Century Music, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She was the 2012 winner of the American Musicological Society's Alfred Einstein Award.