Prometheus in Music: Representations of the Myth in the Romantic Era

ISBN-13: 9781138264977 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 388 str.

Paul Bertagnolli

Opis

The ancient Greek myth of Prometheus enjoyed unprecedented popularity during the Romantic era. An international coterie of writers engaged with the legend, while composers such as Beethoven, Reichardt, Schubert, Wolf, Liszt, Halévy, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Parry, Goldmark and Bargiel based works of diverse genres on the fable. Paul Bertagnolli charts the progress of the myth during the nineteenth century, as it articulates an extraordinary variety of issues pertaining to culture, society, aesthetics and philosophy. Individual chapters demonstrate that the legend served as a vehicle to express opinions on diverse and remarkable subjects. Composers often resorted to varied and unorthodox musical techniques in order to reflect such subjects. These striking traits of musical compositions, their literary sources and the criticism that they inspired offer compelling testimony to the impact of the Prometheus myth on the Romantic imagination.

Recenzje

’This timely study is not simply an ambitious account of these composers' engagement with the Promethean figure, but enforces a new way of reading the myth as a whole. The book is, to borrow Heaney's words, "a critical fantasia, a carnival of utterance" about the Promethean myth in nineteenth-century European musical culture....This book will be a musicological landmark since it garners both old and new research. But Bertagnolli's main achievement is to give us a precise sense of Prometheus in nineteenth-century musical culture and it is the aesthetic weight of the ancient Promethean theme that makes it such an interesting and viable musicological study.’ Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland

Spis treści

Contents: Promethean legacies: the myth in literature and music prior to the Romantic era; Gesture and convention in Beethoven's ballet d'action; Three settings of Goethe's Transgressive Ode; Towards a philosophy of history: Liszt's Prometheus music; The French Prometheus; Atheism, Wagnerism, and eroticism in Parry's Scenes from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; Conservatism assimilates the Prometheus myth: concert overtures by Bargiel and Goldmark; Select bibliography; Index.

O autorze

Paul Bertagnolli is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston, USA.