Freedom and the Arts : : Essays on Music and Literature / / Charles Rosen.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012
• VerfasserIn: Rosen, Charles,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (410 p.) :; 51 music examples

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Freedom and Art -- Chapter 2. Culture on the Market -- Chapter 3. The Future of Music -- Chapter 4. The Canon -- Chapter 5. Dramatic and Tonal Logic in Mozart's Operas -- Chapter 6. Mozart's Entry into the Twentieth Century -- Chapter 7. The Triumph of Mozart -- Chapter 8. Drama and Figured Bass in Mozart's Concertos -- Chapter 9. Mozart and Posterity -- Chapter 10. Structural Dissonance and the Classical Sonata -- Chapter 11. Tradition without Convention -- Chapter 12. Felix Mendelssohn at 200: Prodigy without Peer -- Chapter 13. Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter! -- Chapter 14. Frédéric Chopin, Reactionary and Revolutionary -- Chapter 15. Robert Schumann, a Vision of the Future -- Chapter 16. The New Grove's Dictionary Returns -- Chapter 17. Western Music: The View from California -- Postscript: Modernism and the Cold War -- Chapter 18. Theodor Adorno: Criticism as Cultural Nostalgia -- Chapter 19. Resuscitating Opera: Alessandro Scarlatti -- Chapter 20. Operatic Paradoxes: The Ridiculous and Sublime -- Chapter 21. Lost Chords and the Golden Age of Pianism -- Chapter 22. Montaigne: Philosophy as Process -- Chapter 23. La Fontaine: The Ethical Power of Style -- Chapter 24. The Anatomy Lesson: Melancholy and the Invention of Boredom -- Chapter 25. Mallarmé and the Transfiguration of Poetry -- Chapter 26. Hofmannsthal and Radical Modernism -- Chapter 27. The Private Obsessions of Wystan Auden -- Chapter 28. Old Wisdom and Newfangled Theory: Two One-Way Streets to Disaster -- Credits -- Index of Names and Works