J. H. Donelan, Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic

James H. Donelan, Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic, CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008.

ISBN-13: 9780521887618

Présentation de l'éditeur

James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer – Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven – developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures – all born in 1770 – developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831.

Table

Preface: the sound and the spirit; 1. Self-consciousness and music in the late Enlightenment; 2. Hölderlin's Deutscher Gesang and the music of poetic self-consciousness; 3. Hegel's aesthetic theory: self-consciousness and musical material; 4. Nature, music, and the imagination in Wordsworth's poetry; 5. Beethoven and musical self-consciousness; 6. The persistence of sound.