Download or read book Wagner Et La France written by Revue Musicale La and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1977-10-21 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Claiming Wagner for France written by Rachel Orzech and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines the shifting attitudes toward Wagner reflected in the Parisian press during the period of the Third Reich. Paradoxically, during one of the darkest periods of French history, as the German threat grew more tangible and then manifested in the Nazi occupation of France, Parisians chose to see in Wagner a universality that transcended his Germanness. As Franco-German diplomatic relations gradually worsened in the 1930s, Wagner became an increasingly integral part of French musical culture. Parisians were unwilling to surrender Wagner to German exclusivist claims. In previous decades the French had used Wagner to symbolize a diverse array of political arguments and positions, from right-wing nationalism to left-wing humanism and egalitarianism, In the 1930s, however, the Parisian press depicted him as a universalist. Although Wagner had stood in for German nationalism and chauvinism in recent periods of Franco-German conflict, in the 1930s Parisians refused this notion and attempted to reclaim his role in their own national history and imagination. Even once war was declared in 1939 and a ban on the performance of Wagner's music was implemented, commentators insisted that it was simply a temporary measure designed to avoid public disturbance. Simultaneously, they maintained that 'music has no borders,' and that 'it is childish to mix art and politics.' The Wagner discourses that emerged from the 1930s Parisian press paved the way for the dominant Wagner discourse in the German-controlled Occupation press: Collaboration through Wagner. By a great irony of history, the concept of Wagner the universalist that had been used to resist the Nazis in the 1930s was transformed into the infamous collaborationist rhetoric promoted by the Vichy government between 1940 and 1944"--
Download or read book Mallarm Wagner Music and Poetic Language written by Heath Lees and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges and replaces the existing view of Mallarm mission to 're-possess' music on behalf of poetic language. Traditionally, this view focused on only the last fifteen years of the poet's life, and sprang from a belief in Mallarm 'sudden awakening' to music during an all-Wagner concert in Paris, in 1885. Professor Heath Lees shows that Mallarm early knowledge and experience of music was much greater than commentators have realized, and that the French poet actually began his writing career with the explicit aim of making music's performance-language of 'effect' the ground of his poetic expression. Integral to the argument is Mallarm reaction to the work and ideas of Richard Wagner, whose impact on France came in two waves: the first broke during the tempestuous 1860s days of the Paris Tannhäuser, while the second arrived in the mid-1880s, and gave birth to the Revue Wagn enne. In refuting the critical literature that focuses on only the second of these waves, Lees shows that Mallarm xhibited a highly informed Wagnerian background during the first wave, and that his grasp of the composer's gestural motives and flexible musical prose led him towards a new kind of self-expressive, gestural rhythm that aimed musically to reinvent poetic language. In support of this, the book examines closely what Wagner 'really' said in the prose works that were becoming known in Paris by the 1860s, in particular, Wagner's important French text, the Lettre sur la musique. It also re-examines Baudelaire's classic Wagner-brochure, and reveals its author's surprisingly firm grasp of Wagner's musico-poetic fusion. In musically informed commentary, Professor Lees surveys the four decades of success and failure that resulted from Mallarm repeated attempts to draw out the musical gestures and resonances of words alone. In the process, he throws new light on many of Mallarm best-known texts, hitherto judged 'difficult' by those who have failed to
Download or read book Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth Century French Literature written by Seth Whidden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheavals. Chapters consider the breakdown of authorial presence across different constructions of authorship, including the numerous cenacles of the Romantic period; collaborative ventures in poetry through the practice of the "Tombeaux" and as seen in the Album zutique; the interplay of text and image through illustrations for literary works; the collective ventures of literary journals; and multi-author prose works by authors such as the Goncourt brothers and Erckmann-Chatrian. Interdisciplinary in scope, these essays form a cohesive investigation of collaboration that extends beyond literature to include journalism and the relationships and tensions between literature and the arts. The volume will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, and more generally, any scholar interested in what's at stake in redefining the role of the French author
Download or read book The Pulse of Modernism written by Robert Michael Brain and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.
Download or read book The Nabis and Intimate Modernism written by KatherineM. Kuenzli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late nineteenth-century French painters, this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for twentieth-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890-1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul S?sier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She shows that the Nabis were engaged, nonetheless, with issues that are always at stake in accounts of nineteenth-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism is a rigorous study of the intellectual and artistic endeavors that inform the Nabis' decorative domestic paintings in the 1890s, and argues for their centrality to painterly modernism. The book ends up not only re-positioning the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism's development from 1860 to 1914, but also challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority.
Download or read book Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press written by William Weber and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold application of the concept of canonical works to the development of French operatic and concert life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Download or read book The Composer As Intellectual written by Jane F. Fulcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Composer as Intellectual, musicologist Jane Fulcher reveals the extent to which leading French composers between the World Wars were not only aware of but also engaged intellectually and creatively with the central political and ideological issues of the period. Employing recent sociological and historical insights, she demonstrates the extent to which composers, particularly those in Paris since the Dreyfus Affair, considered themselves and were considered to be intellectuals, and interacted closely with intellectuals in other fields. Their consciousness raised by the First World War and the xenophobic nationalism of official culture, some joined parties or movements, allying themselves with and propagating different sets of cultural and political-social goals. Fulcher shows how these composers furthered their ideals through the specific language and means of their art, rejecting the dominant cultural exclusions or constraints of conservative postwar institutions and creatively translating their cultural values into terms of form and style. This was not only the case with Debussy in wartime, but with Ravel in the twenties, when he became a socialist and unequivocally refused to espouse a narrow, exclusionary nationalism. It was also the case with the group called "Les Six," who responded culturally in the twenties and then politically in the thirties, when most of them supported the programs of the Popular Front. Others could not be enthusiastic about the latter and, largely excluded from official culture, sought out more compatible movements or returned to the Catholic Church. Like many French Catholics, they faced the crisis of Catholicism in the thirties when the church not only supported Franco, but Mussolini's imperialistic aggression in Ethiopia. While Poulenc embraced traditional Catholicism, Messiaen turned to more progressive Catholic movements that embraced modern art and insisted that religion must cross national and racial boundaries. Fulcher demonstrates how closely music had become a field of clashing ideologies in this period. She shows also how certain French composers responded, and how their responses influenced specific aspects of their professional and stylistic development. She thus argues that, from this perspective, we can not only better understand specific aspects of the stylistic evolution of these composers, but also perceive the role that their art played in the ideological battles and in heightening cultural-political awareness of their time.
Download or read book Composing the Citizen written by Jann Pasler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jann Pasler's remarkable Composing the Citizen reaches well beyond what any book concerned with music in society has ever attempted. Concentrating on France of the Third Republic, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, she demonstrates convincingly how music--whether new, old, popular, or élite, whether performed at institutions of state (such as the Opéra), the Folies Bergère, concert halls, or the zoo--helped to redefine what it meant to be French under evolving political circumstances. Equally adept in the languages of history, sociology, political science, reception history, and music analysis, Pasler establishes music's cultural significance and implicitly illuminates the role it can still play in countries like the United States."--Philip Gossett, The University of Chicago and University of Rome, La Sapienza "Composing the Citizen offers nothing less than a new paradigm for the study of musical cultures. Rather than forcing French music into the moulds developed for the Austro-German canon, Pasler simply studies the social uses of music in fin-de-siècle France. Her painstaking archival research allows her to present an astonishingly detailed account of musical practices, tastes, and activities; new names and genres come to the fore to engage in a variety of dynamic artistic scenes most of us never knew--or only thought we did by virtue of having read Proust. A masterwork of a scholar at the very peak of her career."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow 1995 and author of Georges Bizet: Carmen and Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madgrigal "Utilité publique: a common-sense republican notion of sweeping consequence. In this greatly anticipated volume Jann Pasler uses it as touchstone, showing how and why musical life so mattered in Third-Republic France: layer after layer of it, in a journey that takes us past the Opéra and Conservatoire to the pops concerts, department stores, the zoo, the world's fairs, the overseas colonies. Companionable as a well-worn Baedeker, seductive as Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, this exquisitely styled and paced achievement is also a compelling read."--D. Kern Holoman, author of Berlioz and The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828-1967
Download or read book Ariane Bluebeard written by Matthew Brown and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Maeterlinck described his libretto Ariane et Barbe-bleue as "a sort of legendary opera, or fairy [opera], in three acts." In 1907, Paul Dukas finished setting Maeterlinck's libretto to music, and the opera's Paris premiere was lauded as a landmark in operatic history. Ariane & Bluebeard: From Fairy Tale to Comic Book Opera offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary look at this historic opera, including its structure, reception, and cultural implications. This lively collection juxtaposes chapters from experts in music, literature, the visual arts, gender studies, and religion and philosophy with vibrant illustrations by comic artist P. Craig Russell and interviews with performers and artists. Featuring material from newly discovered documents and the first English translation of several important sources, Ariane & Bluebeard allows readers to imagine the operain its various incarnations: as symbolist show, comic book, children's fairy tale, and more.
Download or read book Wagnerism written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
Download or read book Mallarm nd Wagner Music and Poetic Language written by Heath Lees and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges and replaces the existing view of Mallarm? mission to 're-possess' music on behalf of poetic language. Traditionally, this view focused on only the last fifteen years of the poet's life, and sprang from a belief in Mallarm? 'sudden awakening' to music during an all-Wagner concert in Paris, in 1885. Professor Heath Lees shows that Mallarm? early knowledge and experience of music was much greater than commentators have realized, and that the French poet actually began his writing career with the explicit aim of making music's performance-language of 'effect' the ground of his poetic expression. Integral to the argument is Mallarm? reaction to the work and ideas of Richard Wagner, whose impact on France came in two waves: the first broke during the tempestuous 1860s days of the Paris Tannh?er, while the second arrived in the mid-1880s, and gave birth to the Revue Wagn?enne. In refuting the critical literature that focuses on only the second of these waves, Lees shows that Mallarm?xhibited a highly informed Wagnerian background during the first wave, and that his grasp of the composer's gestural motives and flexible musical prose led him towards a new kind of self-expressive, gestural rhythm that aimed musically to reinvent poetic language. In support of this, the book examines closely what Wagner 'really' said in the prose works that were becoming known in Paris by the 1860s, in particular, Wagner's important French text, the Lettre sur la musique. It also re-examines Baudelaire's classic Wagner-brochure, and reveals its author's surprisingly firm grasp of Wagner's musico-poetic fusion. In musically informed commentary, Professor Lees surveys the four decades of success and failure that resulted from Mallarm? repeated attempts to draw out the musical gestures and resonances of words alone. In the process, he throws new light on many of Mallarm? best-known texts, hitherto judged 'difficult' by those who have failed to
Download or read book French Musical Life written by Katharine Ellis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explicitly or not, the historical musicology of post-Revolutionary France has focused on Paris as a proxy for the rest of the country. This distorting lens is the legacy of political and cultural struggle during the long nineteenth century, indicating a French Revolution unresolved both then and now. In light of the capital's power as the seat of a centralizing French state (which provincials found 'colonizing') and as a cosmopolitan musical crossroads of nineteenth-century Europe, the struggles inherent in creating sustainable musical cultures outside Paris, and in composing local and regionalist music, are ripe for analysis. Replacement of 'France' with Paris has encouraged normative history-writing articulated by the capital's opera and concert life. Regional practices have been ignored, disparaged or treated piecemeal. This book is a study of French musical centralization and its discontents during the period leading up to and beyond the "provincial awakening" of the Belle Époque. The book explains how different kinds of artistic decentralization and regionalism were hard won (or not) across a politically turbulent century from the 1830s to World War II. In doing so it redraws the historical map of musical power relations in mainland France. Based on work in over 70 archives, chapters on conservatoires, concert life, stage music, folk music and composition reveal how tensions of State and locality played out differently depending on the structures and funding mechanisms in place, the musical priorities of different communities, and the presence or absence of galvanizing musicians. Progressively, the book shifts from musical contexts to musical content, exploring the pressure point of folk music and its translation into "local color" for officials who perpetually feared national division. Control over composition on the one hand, and the emotional intensity of folk-based musical experience on the other, emerges as a matter of consistent official praxis. In terms of "French music" and its compositional styles, what results is a surprising new historiography of French neoclassicism, bound into and growing out of a study of diversity and its limits in daily musical life.
Download or read book Renegotiating French Identity written by Jane F. Fulcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Renegotiating French Identity, Jane Fulcher addresses the question of cultural resistance to the German occupation and Vichy regime during the Second World War. Nazi Germany famously stressed music as a marker of national identity and cultural achievement, but so too did Vichy. From the opera to the symphony, music did not only serve the interests of Vichy and German propaganda: it also helped to reveal the motives behind them, and to awaken resistance among those growing disillusioned by the regime. Using unexplored Resistance documents, from both the clandestine press and the French National Archives, Fulcher looks at the responses of specific artists and their means of resistance, addressing in turn Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen, among others. This book investigates the role that music played in fostering a profound awareness of the cultural and political differences between conflicting French ideological positions, as criticism of Vichy and its policies mounted.
Download or read book French Political Travel Writing in the Interwar Years written by Martyn Cornick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spectrum. It examines not only those whose political sympathies with the extreme right or extreme left were already publicly known, but also non-aligned intellectuals who were interested in political models that offered an apparently radical alternative to the French Third Republic. This study shows how travel writing provided a space for reflection on the lessons France might learn from the radical political experiments of the inter-war years. It argues that such writing can usefully be read as a form of utopian thinking, distinguishing this from colloquial understandings of utopia as an ideal location. Utopianism is understood neither as a fantasy ungrounded in the real nor as a dangerously totalitarian ideal, but, in line with Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricœur, and Ruth Levitas, as a form of non-congruence with the real that it seeks to transcend. The utopianism of French political travel writing is seen to lie not in the attempt to portray the destination visited as utopia, but rather in the pursuit of a dialogue with radical political alterity.
Download or read book Art History and the Senses written by Gabriel Koureas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form.
Download or read book French Cultural Politics Music written by Jane F. Fulcher and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that French musical meanings and values in the years from 1898 to 1914 are best explained not in terms of contemporary artistic movements, but rather in terms of the political culture, which was undergoing subtle but profound transformation as nationalist leagues enlarged the arena of political action. Applying recent insights from French history, sociology, political anthropology, and literary theory, the book reveals how nationalists used critics, educational institutions, concert series and lectures to disseminate their values through a discourse on French music; and it demonstrates how the Republic and Left responded to this challenge through their own discourses on French musical values. Against this background Fulcher traces the impact of this politicized musical culture on composers such as d'Indy, Charpentier, Magnard, Debussy, and Satie.
