Music and desire among the Austro-German romantics : Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms, and the Schumanns / Chris Walton.
| Author/creator | Walton, Chris, 1963- |
| Format | Book |
| Publication Info | Rochester : University of Rochester Press, ©2025. |
| Description | xii, 265 pages : illustrations, music ; 24 cm. |
| Subjects |
| Series | Eastman studies in music, 1071-9989 ; 204 Eastman studies in music ; 204. ^A494093 |
| Contents | Introduction -- Hope for Ludwig in Leonore's never-land. Sound the trumpet ; Waving Hermann's baton ; Fidelio the first, second, and third ; Taking liberties ; The adjacent beloved ; Delving deeply ; Hope springs ; No, no, Leonore ; We can be heroes ; "O God, what a moment!" ; Bright star -- The lonely passions of Schubert's winter swagman. Winterreise in composition ; Winterreise in performance ; A landscape of death ; When is a cycle not a cycle? ; Open closure ; Strange friends ; Who is he? ; What ails him? ; "As best he can" ; Wanderer of no return -- Banns of love: Bourgeois longings in Wagner's Das Liebesverbot. The genesis of Das Liebesverbot ; Wagner's Magdeburg repertoire ; The plot ; Anomalous castanets ; The first performance and its aftermath ; The reception history: Wagner, Wagner, and Wagner ; Will the real Liebesverbot please stand up -- The talented Mr. Brahms, Clara's fullest friend. Knocking on Schumann's door ; "Neue Bahnen": magic wands and crashing waves ; Brahms the transgressive? ; Varying Clara ; Enter Brahms ; Backstabbers and non sequiturs ; Socializing in Saxony ; The illness ; Becoming Robert ; Shady ciphers ; And these three are two ; Look back in anguish ; Little Brahmsky ; No ceremony of innocence -- Afterword. |
| Abstract | Scholars have for several decades been devoting increasing attention to aspects of sexuality and desire in the music of the Austro-German Romantics. Undertaking a close analysis of the sources, the four chapters of this book show how our assumptions about what those composers desired are often in fact contingent on what we, their commentators, have wanted them to desire over the course of reception history. Beethoven's Fidelio and Schubert's Winterreise tend to be regarded as a hymn to freedom on the one hand, and an interior monologue of an alienated lover on the other, though in neither case does such a view correspond to what the composer intended. In contrast, Richard Wagner dismissed his own opera The Ban on Love as a youthful indiscretion extolling the 'free love' of the Young German movement; but he was reinterpreting an early work to align it with his later aesthetic. The final chapter examines the chronology of the friendship of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms in order to discern the likely truths about their triangular relationship before and after Robert Schumann's incarceration in a mental asylum. By adhering to the sources and placing them in the social, linguistic and geographical contexts of their time, the author grants all these protagonists a greater agency of desire than has hitherto been the case. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-250) and index. |
| LCCN | 2024058207 |
| ISBN | 9781648251108 hardcover |
| ISBN | 1648251102 hardcover |
| ISBN | electronic book |
| ISBN | electronic publication |