Gabriel Fauré's mélodies offer an inexhaustible variety
of style and expression that have made them the foundation of the
French art song repertoire. During the second half of his long
career, Fauré ...composed all but a handful of his songs within six
carefully integrated cycles. Fauré moved systematically through his
poetic contemporaries, exhausting Baudelaire's Les fleurs du
mal before immersing himself in the Parnassian poets. He would
set nine poems by Armand Silvestre in swift succession (1878-84),
seventeen by Paul Verlaine (1887-94), and eighteen by Charles Van
Lerberghe (1906-14). As an artist deeply engaged with some of the
most important cultural issues of the period, Fauré reimagined his
musical idiom with each new poet and school, and his song cycles
show the same sensitivity to the poetic material. Far more than
Debussy, Ravel, or Poulenc, he crafted his song cycles as
integrated works, reordering poems freely and using narratives, key
schemes, and even leitmotifs to unify the individual songs. The
Fauré Song Cycles explores the peculiar vision behind each
synthesis of music and verse, revealing the astonishing imagination
and insight of Fauré's musical readings. This book offers not only
close readings of Fauré's musical works but an interdisciplinary
study of how he responded to the changing schools and aesthetic
currents of French poetry.
Beethoven after Napoleon Rumph, Stephen; Rumph, Stephen
2004., 20040716, 2004, 2004-08-15, Letnik:
14
eBook
In this provocative analysis of Beethoven's late style, Stephen Rumph demonstrates how deeply political events shaped the composer's music, from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution to his ...later entrenchment during the Napoleonic era. Impressive in its breadth of research as well as for its devotion to interdisciplinary work in music history, Beethoven after Napoleon challenges accepted views by illustrating the influence of German Romantic political thought in the formation of the artist's mature style. Beethoven's political views, Rumph argues, were not quite as liberal as many have assumed. While scholars agree that the works of the Napoleonic era such as the Eroica Symphony or Fidelio embody enlightened, revolutionary ideals of progress, freedom, and humanism, Beethoven's later works have attracted less political commentary. Rumph contends that the later works show clear affinities with a native German ideology that exalted history, religion, and the organic totality of state and society. He claims that as the Napoleonic Wars plunged Europe into political and economic turmoil, Beethoven's growing antipathy to the French mirrored the experience of his Romantic contemporaries. Rumph maintains that Beethoven's turn inward is no pessimistic retreat but a positive affirmation of new conservative ideals.
In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and ...language theory. Illuminating his discussion with French, British, German, and Italian writings on signs and language, Rumph analyzes movements from Mozart's symphonies, concertos, operas, and church music. He argues that Mozartian semiosis is best understood within the empiricist tradition of Condillac, Vico, Herder, or Adam Smith, which emphasized the constitutive role of signs within human cognition. Recognizing that the rationalist model of neoclassical rhetoric has guided much recent work on Mozart and his contemporaries, Rumph demonstrates how the dialogic tension between opposing paradigms enabled the composer to negotiate contradictions within Enlightenment thought.
Fauré and the Effable Rumph, Stephen
Journal of the American Musicological Society,
09/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Gabriel Fauré plays a leading role in Vladimir Jankélévitch's influential critique of musical hermeneutics, La musique et l'ineffable (1961). For the French philosopher, Fauré's works epitomized ...music that resists verbal interpretation and demands absorption in temporal experience. Yet, like many French composers, Fauré drew upon theatrical song in his mélodies, introducing a performative element that encourages distance as well as absorption. These hybrid mélodies invite both singer and audience to listen critically, savoring the performance within the performance; indeed, these songs offer up music itself as an object of reflection. This article reassesses Jankélévitch's idea of ineffability in light of Fauré's use of diegetic song, questioning the apparent claim that musical experience is incompatible with critical reflection. An introductory analysis of La musique et l'ineffable explores the crucial role of Henri Bergson's philosophy of mind, especially his theory of perception, and demonstrates the inseparable role of both metaphysical cognition and representation in Bergsonian phenomenology. The following song analyses illustrate the need for both reflective and immersive listening. An examination of two settings from Théophile Gautier's La comédie de la mort reveals how Fauré responded to the poet's writerly play between lyric and performative modes, while a longer analysis of the song cycle La chanson d'Ève, based upon a stage ballad, demonstrates how Fauré exploited theatrical song to portray Eve's fall into self-consciousness. Finally, the conclusion proposes a musical hermeneutics compatible with Jankélévitch's idea of ineffability, one informed by the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Nancy November proposes a valuable new framework in "Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets," noting that all five works fall squarely within Beethoven's most intense period of theatrical composition: Op. ...59 immediately follows his work on "Fidelio," while Opp. 74 and 95 coincide with work on the incidental music to Goethe's "Egmont." November explores the theatrical elements in Opp. 59, 74, and 95, not ony identifying specific resonances with stage works, but also arguing that Beethoven "staged" various dialectical confrontations between genres, affects, and stylistic registers. Her book brims with original insights and offers refreshing alternatives to the overtaxed critical lexicon of Beethoven's "heroic" period. A chapter-by-chapter analysis is provided.
