Lateness and Brahms

ISBN-13: 9780195305470 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006

Margaret Anne Notley

Opis

Lateness and Brahms takes up the fascinating, yet understudied problem of how Brahms fits into the culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Brahms's conspicuous and puzzling absence in previous scholarly accounts of the time and place raises important questions, and as Margaret Notley demonstrates, the tendency to view him in neutralized, ahistorical terms has made his music seem far less interesting than it truly is.

In pursuit of an historical Brahms, Notley focuses on the later chamber music, drawing on various documents and perspectives, but with particular emphasis on the relevance of Western Marxist critical traditions.

Recenzje

"In this fascinating book, we learn about Brahms's late instrumental works through a variety of prisms—political, analytical, social, historical, cultural and more—and emerge with an altered understanding of compositions forever important to all who value music at its most elevated. The juxtaposition of Vienna's artistic flowering at the fin-de-siècle with what Notley calls 'coarse politics' in the twilight of Viennese Liberalism makes for an extraordinary tale, here set in the context of her delineation of 'lateness' as the over-arching phenomenon of this repertory. Borrowing from fellow Vienna resident Sigmund Freud, Notley finds that stylistic change was 'overdetermined' in the composer's late years, that the extraordinary harmonic and tonal subtleties of this music are both an expression of their time and alienated from it. The best scholarship makes us hear music differently and know its creators in greater depth, and Notley has done both."—Susan Youens, University of Notre Dame

O autorze

Margaret Notley, an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas, has published widely on a number of topics. Her article "Late-Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music and the Cult of the Classical Adagio" won the 2000 Alfred Einstein Award given by the American Musicological Society.