German Modernism: Music and the Arts / Edition 1

by Walter Frisch

Overview

In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker.

Frisch explores "ambivalent" modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the past—the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251489
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/01/2007
Series:	California Studies in 20th-Century Music , #3
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University. He is the author of Brahms: The Four Symphonies (2003), The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893-1908 (California, 1993), and Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (California, 1984).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Ambivalent Modernism: Perspectives from the 1870s and 1880s
2. German Naturalism
3. Convergences: Music and the Visual Arts
4. Bach, Regeneration, and Historicist Modernism
5. Ironic Germans
6. Dancing in Chains: Strauss, Hofmannsthal, Pfitzner, and Their Musical Pasts

Notes
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index