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Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. At approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy half of a concert, yet it is too fraught to easily share the bill with anything else. A cultural history of postwar Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide comes into focus when viewed through the lens of A Survivor. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe between 1948 and 1968 in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The details are specific to each, but common themes emerge in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces.

Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he wrote for keyboard are among the greatest, most influential, and best-loved works in all of Western music. They have long been the foundation of the keyboard repertory, played by beginning students and world-famous virtuosi alike. This book discusses the author's favorite Bach keyboard fugues—some of them among the best-known fugues and others much less familiar—and reveals the inner workings of these pieces, linking the form of the fugues with their many different characters and expressive qualities, and illuminating what makes them particularly beautiful, powerful, and moving.

This book examines works by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as the author illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply “in time.” Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. However, after the shift, as the author finds in looking at Mozart's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. The book complements these musical case studies with a survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.

It is well known that Béla Bartók had an extraordinary ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe. What this study makes clear is that, contrary to much prevailing thought about the great twentieth-century Hungarian composer, Bartók was also strongly influenced by the art-music traditions of his native country. Drawing from a wide array of material, including contemporary reviews and little known Hungarian documents, the author presents a new approach to Bartók that acknowledges the composer's debt to a variety of Hungarian music traditions as well as to influential contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. Putting representative works from each decade beginning with Bartók's graduation from the Music Academy in 1903 until his departure for the United States in 1940 under a critical lens, the author reads the composer's artistic output as both a continuation and a profound transformation of the very national tradition he repeatedly rejected in public. By clarifying why Bartók felt compelled to obscure his ties to the past and by illuminating what that past actually was, the book dispels myths about Bartók's relationship to nineteenth-century traditions and at the same time provides a new perspective on the relationship between nationalism and modernism in early-twentieth century music.

This book is an analysis of Beethoven's late style, demonstrating how deeply political events shaped the composer's music, from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution to his later entrenchment during the Napoleonic era. It challenges accepted views by illustrating the influence of German Romantic political thought in the formation of the artist's mature style. The author argues that Beethoven's political views were not quite as liberal as many have assumed. While scholars agree that the works of the Napoleonic era such as the Eroica Symphony or Fidelio embody enlightened, revolutionary ideals of progress, freedom, and humanism, Beethoven's later works have attracted less political commentary. The author contends that the later works show clear affinities with a native German ideology that exalted history, religion, and the organic totality of state and society. He claims that as the Napoleonic Wars plunged Europe into political and economic turmoil, Beethoven's growing antipathy to the French mirrored the experience of his Romantic contemporaries. The book maintains that Beethoven's turn inward is no pessimistic retreat but a positive affirmation of new conservative ideals.

This study of the works of Luigi Boccherini uses knowledge gleaned from the author's own playing of the cello as the keystone of her approach to the relationship between music and embodiment. In analyzing the striking qualities of Boccherini's music—its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette of melancholy affects—the book develops an historicized critical method based on the embodied experience of the performer. In the process, it redefines the temperament of the musical Enlightenment as one characterized by urgent, volatile inquiries into the nature of the self.

This book looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.

The Castrato is the first book to explore in depth why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth century and late nineteenth century. It shows that although the practice formed the foundation of Western classical singing, it was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires—public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice, as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satires, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin, Pulcinella. Sacrifice in Italy also encompassed a logics of reproduction, involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives. Yet what lured audiences and composers, from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Gluck, Mozart, and Rossini, were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices. The phenomenon was ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality, which castrati failed to survive. But their musicality and vocality, central to this study, persisted long after their literal demise in traditions that extend to bel canto repertories and beyond.

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, she also links images of desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, absolutist courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality—was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this book is a study of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. The author explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestitism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. The book begins by examining contemporary Venetian writing about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts—by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus—form the background for an analysis of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).