The free fantasia and the musical picturesque
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The free fantasia and the musical picturesque
(New perspectives in music history and criticism)
Cambridge University Press, 2006
- : pbk
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Note
"First published 2001"--T.p. verso
"This digitally printed first paperback version 2006"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references (p. 232-248) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A crucial category across all the arts in the late eighteenth century, the picturesque has lost its currency in modern musical criticism, in spite of its rich potential to shed new light on the fantastical elements of instrumental music in general and the genre of the free fantasia in particular. Just as English garden architecture, in which the picturesque found its origins, was changing the landscape of continental Europe, the fantastical elements of irregularity, temporal displacement, ambiguity, interruption, and self-referentiality in the music of Bach, Haydn and Beethoven were both lauded and criticized in terms borrowed from the discourse of the picturesque. This study reaffirms the centrality of the free fantasia and fantastical gesture in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the visual, the literary and the musical.
Table of Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Framing the musical picturesque
- 2. C. P. E. Bach and the landscapes of genius
- 3. The picturesque sketch and the interpretation of instrumental music
- 4. Haydn's humour, Bach's fantasy
- 5. Sentiment undone: solitude and the clavichord cult
- 6. Picturesque Beethoven and the veiled Isis
- Select bibliography
- Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"