James H. Donelan, Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
ISBN-13:9780521887618
Présentation de l'éditeur
James H. Donelan describes how two poets, aphilosopher, and a composer – Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven –developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of thenineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: theunderstanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creativemind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four majorfigures – all born in 1770 – developed this idea in both metaphorical andactual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and thepractice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the imageof the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both hismusic and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields ofphilosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how thisdevelopment emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life takingplace between 1795 and 1831.
Table
Preface: the sound and the spirit; 1.Self-consciousness and music in the late Enlightenment; 2. Hölderlin'sDeutscher Gesang and the music of poetic self-consciousness; 3. Hegel'saesthetic theory: self-consciousness and musical material; 4. Nature, music,and the imagination in Wordsworth's poetry; 5. Beethoven and musicalself-consciousness; 6. The persistence of sound.