Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Strauss's Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895) may be read as the composer's credo of a new, antimetaphysical musical modernism that resonated with aspects of Nietzschean philosophy. In the immediately preceding years Strauss had taken a decisive philosophical-aesthetic turn away from the metaphysical assertions of Schopenhauer and Wagner and toward a more individualistic, palpably material conception of music. As was recognized by some writers of that period, the provocations and unstoppable laughter apparent in the tone poem could be understood as brash dismissals of one "sacred" tenet of the institution of art music after another. The seemingly gemutlich wit represented by Till (a metaphorical stand-in for Strauss himself) masked a more subversive agenda: on the one hand, a mocking of the metaphysical pretensions that then underpinned the art-music enterprise; on the other, the proclaiming of a new aesthetic staging itself as exhilaratingly emancipated from the overly inflated "Spirit of Gravity" still dominating that cultural sector of the musical world. These subversions are perceptible not only in the piece's program but also in its local musical details and overall formal construction. Several larger issues are at stake in such considerations. Strauss's personal move away from the metaphysics of music provides one of the earliest, most urgent alarms from within the high-prestige cultural system that its fundamental axioms were now corroding away, no longer sustainable by authoritarian fiat, in a rapidly modernizing and secularizing world. In turn, this suggests that such a reframing of Strauss's (and others') projects could encourage historians to approach the separate subhistories of musical modernism with a more problematized complexity and nuance. Finally--as all commentators on Till Eulenspiegel have noted--a significant part of the piece's impact resides its flamboyant, high-technical compositional display (a leading sign of its "modernism"). From this perspective the requisite framing is grounded in our recognition of its brazenly confrontational dialogue with established musical styles and practices. Non-normative formal patterning and architectonic layout are substantial components of Strauss's (Till's) musical subversion. In the reading proposed here, Till Eulenspiegel is processed as a radicalized sonata-rondo deformation with telling hermeneutic and social connotations, some of whose essential clues are located in the piece's prologue and epilogue. I interweave this analytical interpretation with remarks about the concept of sonata (and sonata-rondo) deformations as applied to music of the late nineteenth century.</jats:p>

<jats:p>E. T. A. Hoffmann spoke with the conviction of one who thought to reveal the essence of music. However, the bold and emphatic character of his words masked the subtleties and the variations of his positions. This article examines their nuances from two perspectives. It first examines the literary techniques he used to present his ideas and to give them substance. He presented his ideas in alternately enthusiastic and satirical tones. He used words connotatively, and he dealt different positions to different narrators and characters. Second, the article discusses the course of his career and the cast of his writings. After he received critiques of his high-handed attitudes in the Fantasiestucke (1814) and after he rejoined the Prussian bureaucracy, he changed the tenor if not the foundations of his positions. In its appendix, the article offers the first English translation of the most striking of the critiques: Jean Paul's preface to the Fantasiestucke.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The article advances a new case for a coherent tonal and narrative structure of Schumann's Dichterliebe, op. 48. Based on a map of key relations by Gottfried Weber, the hermeneutic analysis follows Dichterliebe's tonal path along a double trajectory of major keys and their relative minor keys, whose progression through tonal space is understood as occurrences in event space. A comparison between Dichterliebe and its original version, 20 Lieder und Gesange, shows how the tonal and narrative paths pertain to both. The hermeneutic analysis demonstrates a slippage between story and narrative as well as reality and illusion, whereby Schumann responds to Heine's irony, creating a tonal and narrative structure that is both circular and cyclical, both whole and fragment.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In the past, "the" Bruckner problem had to do with producing editions that reflected his intentions, insofar as these could be determined from extant autograph materials. Since then, musicologists have singled out other Bruckner problems. Thus many scholars see the need to create a more believable image of the composer than that of the pious na&amp;#x95;f who appears in much of the traditional literature. As the scope of Bruckner scholarship widened in the past three decades, the opposition between Catholic liturgical music and Wagner's operas, both crucial in Bruckner's development as a composer, inspired semantic interpretations of his symphonies that have been subjected to increasingly close and critical scrutiny. In sum, much recent research focuses on creating a firmer factual basis for understanding his life and works. Yet musicologists have also recognized the significance of the cliches of Bruckner reception, which can be attributed in part to the volkisch worldview shared by many of his earliest supporters. Contemporary Viennese politics is an important topic because of questions not only of reception but also intent. Bruckner greatly enhanced the demagogic and cultic appeal of the Beethovenian symphony; scholars have accordingly focused on how he altered the type, as well as on how it was perceived. Recent treatments of the Eighth Symphony suggest the analytical potential of the metrical numbers Bruckner wrote in his scores while also showing that "the" Bruckner problem persists. Many distinguished conductors continue to choose the "wrong" version of the symphony (prepared by Robert Haas in 1939) over the first and second versions of the symphony as edited by Leopold Nowak after World War II. Rigorous and at the same time imaginative approaches are needed for the problems Bruckner scholarship poses.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Almost a decade ago, Sanna Pederson observed that the heroic in the posthumous reception of Beet-hoven's life and music functions as a sign of the composer's unassailable masculinity. What Pederson did not explore, however, is how the construction of the heroic in Beethoven's works courts androgyny and so exhibits flexibility in precisely the realm of sex/gender that ossified after his death. In Beethoven's dramatic music, cross-dressed heroines move center stage, and their music courts a mixture of masculine and feminine signs that is not simply descriptive of their transvestism. Admittedly, female heroism in Beethoven's dramatic music is associated with conjugal fidelity (Leonore in Fidelio) and with the nationalist defense of Prussia against French invasion (Leonore Prohaska in Beethoven's incidental music of that name), but it also functioned as an allegory of the semiautonomous male artist and of transcendent authorship. Precisely because women were subject to severe constraints on their public actions, heroines who broke through those constraints were emblems of freedom. At the boundary of the real and the symbolic, women who transgressed sexual and gendered norms could serve as epitomes of transcendence in the aesthetic sphere. A case study of Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's Egmont traces a metonymic chain linking the lead female character Kl&amp;#x8a;rchen to music, heroic overcoming, and authorship. Much of the music Beethoven composed for the play was for, or associated with, Kl&amp;#x8a;rchen, who comes to embody music and its production. Through music, Egmont is lulled to sleep in the concluding dungeon scene. And in this sleep, Kl&amp;#x8a;rchen appears to him as "Liberty," hovering on a cloud above the stage to a shimmering A-major-seventh chord. Communicating to the dozing hero through wordless musical pictorialism, she offers a glimpse of what in contemporary idealist aesthetics was music's otherworldly source.</jats:p>