Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds
Peter Franklin
Abstract
The title of this book alludes to two German operas by Franz Schreker. The Distant Sound (1912) was about a romantic composer's quest for inspiration at the expense of personal responsibility and relationships. The Singing Devil (1928) was set in a medieval world of monks and rebellious pagan tribespeople; it featured a great monastic organ that frightens the pagan rebels into submission, whereupon they are massacred by the monks. With these visions of music as both inner quest and the authoritarian voice of power and glory, I argue that late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex an ... More
The title of this book alludes to two German operas by Franz Schreker. The Distant Sound (1912) was about a romantic composer's quest for inspiration at the expense of personal responsibility and relationships. The Singing Devil (1928) was set in a medieval world of monks and rebellious pagan tribespeople; it featured a great monastic organ that frightens the pagan rebels into submission, whereupon they are massacred by the monks. With these visions of music as both inner quest and the authoritarian voice of power and glory, I argue that late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex and sometimes perilous course between the private and the public. They also steered a course between modernism and mass culture in the period leading up to the Second World War, when their aim was in some sense (as Rachmaninoff once suggested) to be both popular and to have something serious to say. Composers discussed include Wagner, Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini, and others, including some, like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who scored Hollywood films.
Keywords:
late-romantic music,
symphonies,
operas,
modernism,
mass culture,
Hollywood films
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520280397 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: September 2014 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520280397.001.0001 |
