Freedom and the arts : essays on music and literature / Charles Rosen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosen, Charles, 1927-2012.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music--History and criticism.

Music.

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Harvard University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work.Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand.Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity-for pleasure-is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.

Contents:

The weight of society

Freedom and art

Culture on the market

The future of music

The canon

Dramatic and tonal logic in Mozart's operas

Mozart's entry into the twentieth century

The triumph of Mozart

Drama and figured bass in Mozart's concertos

Mozart and posterity

Structural dissonance and the classical sonata

Tradition without convention

Felix Mendelssohn at 200 : prodigy without peer

Happy birthday, Elliott Carter!

Frédéric Chopin, reactionary and revolutionary

Robert Schumann, a vision of the future

Long perspectives

The New Grove's dictionary returns

Western music : the view from California

Theodore Adorno : criticism as cultural nostalgia

Resuscitating opera : Alessandro Scarlatti

Operatic paradoxes : the ridiculous and sublime

Lost chords and the golden age of pianism

Montaigne : philosophy as process

La Fontaine : the ethical power of style

The anatomy lesson : melancholy and the invention of boredom

Mallarmé and the transfiguration of poetry

Hoffmansthal and radical modernism

The private obsessions of Wystan Auden

Old wisdom and newfangled theory : two one-way streets to disaster.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674069893

0674069897

9780674065499

0674065492

OCLC:

835640492