Critical questions on music and letters, culture and biography, 1940-1980 / Jacques Barzun ; selected, edited, and introduced by Bea Friedland.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barzun, Jacques, 1907-2012.

Contributor:

Friedland, Bea.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music--History and criticism.

Music.

Arts.

Physical Description:

xvii, 269 pages ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [1982]

Summary:

Jacques Barzun has played a prominent role in the academic community and in the larger world of arts and letters for the past forty years. He has made numerous contributions to cultural history and to musicology in particular. To choose but one example of his influence, his pathbreaking study of Berlioz led to a reevaluation by contemporary musicians of this central figure of the Romantic era. It also led to a new sort of musical biography.

The present writings allow the reader a rare opportunity to see this lively, engaging, rich, and original mind at work in several strategic areas of cultural inquiry: music and the musical life, esthetics, biography, criticism, and social commentary. Barzun makes use of a variety of contexts as a forum for evidence and opinion, including essays, program notes, letters, and reviews. And he approaches a wide variety of particular and general questions. What is it like to sit in on a recording session with a great orchestra? What is the role of the piano in Western culture? What is art in relation to objective reality and to the perceiving mind? Can one translate music into words? What is cultural history?

Contents:

The Musical Life

1 Music into Words 3

2 The Indispensable Amateur 30

3 The Passing of a Free Spirit: Erich Kleiber 39

4 The Playwright as Critic

of Music 48

5 Men, Women, and Pianos 53

6 Toward New Musics

Harry Partch and the Moderns 58

A Request for the Loan of Your Ears 63

To Praise Varese 67

7 The Life of Stendhal-Rossini 72

8 The Meaning of Meaning in Music 75

Berlioz

9 Berlioz after a Hundred Years 101

10 Benvenuto Cellini in Wembley 115

11 The Postman Rang Thrice 120

12 Berlioz and the Bard 123

13 Sketch of the Artist as Musician 132

14 The Berlioz Style 136

15 The Misbehavior of Lelio 142

16 Romeo and Juliet in Music 148

Culture and History

17 Romanticism: Definition of an Age 159

18 Liberalism and the Religion of Art 169

19 Truth in Biography: Leonardo and Freud 183

20 Delacroix: Sketch of the Artist in Words 193

21 Biography and Criticism: A Misalliance? 198

22 Let the Artists Decide: An Interview 221

23 The Case for Cultural History 230

24 Philosophy and the Arts 250.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

0226038637 :

OCLC:

8032099