Pessimism, Ecstasy, and Distant Voices
Pessimism, Ecstasy, and Distant Voices
Listening to Late-Romanticism
Wackenroder's tale “Joseph Berglinger” is used to model the cultural practice of Schumann and his circle, fashioning idealistic notions about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony while scorning bourgeois concert goers and their untutored figurative language of adulation. This separation of “elite” comprehension from social class and power proves to have helped generate creative energies that both commoditized and explored grand orchestral music as an inner, subjective experience. It also conditioned the “decadence” affected by the haughtily expressed idealism of some composers and their critics. Rachmaninoff and Delius are considered as exemplars of Seidl's “New Musical Lyric” style, caught between the cultural character of the symphony concert and the exploration of musical expression at its most refined.
Keywords: Schumann, Beethoven, bourgeois concert goers, decadence, Rachmaninoff, Delius
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
