Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 1/21/2010
EAN 9780521110549, ISBN10: 0521110548
Hardcover, 306 pages, 24.4 x 17 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Challenging received views of music in nineteenth-century German thought, culture and society, this 2010 book provides a radical reappraisal of its socio-political meanings and functions. Garratt argues that far from governing the nineteenth-century musical discourse and practice, the concept of artistic autonomy and the aesthetic categories bequeathed by Weimar classicism were persistently challenged by alternative models of music's social role. The book investigates these competing models and the social projects that gave rise to them. It interrogates nineteenth-century musical discourse, discussing a wide range of manifestos championing musical democratization or seeking to make music an engine for the transformation of society. In addition, it explores institutions and movements that attempted to realize these goals, and compositions - by Mendelssohn, Lortzing and Liszt as well as Wagner - in which the relation between aesthetic and social claims is programmatic.
Introduction
1. Liberalism, autonomy and the social functions of art
2. Radical and social aesthetics in the Vormärz
3. Speaking for the Volk
music, politics and Vormärz festivals
4. Revolutionary voices
blueprints for an aesthetic state
5. Music and the politics of post-revolutionary culture
6. The song of the workers
idylls and activism
Bibliography.