Revised notes cater specifically to the needs of English-speaking readers, ensuring clarity and accessibility. This adaptation enhances understanding and engagement with the material, making it suitable for a wider audience.
Targeting students and scholars, this book delves into the intersections of music history, theory, opera, and philosophy. It offers insightful analysis and perspectives that enrich understanding of these disciplines, making it a valuable resource for those seeking to explore the complex relationships between music and thought.
Many books have been written about Beethoven. But it is rare to find one that seeks an alternative between the fragmentation found in most specialized studies and the superficial overview typical of popular biography. In this volume, Carl Dahlhaus, one of the century's leading musicologists, combines interpretations of individual works that focus on issues of composition and musical history, with excursions into the musical aesthetics of the period around 1800; an age that was not only a "classical" period in the history of the arts but also one in that aesthetics carved itself a place in the center of philosophical attention. The theme of the book is the reconstruction of Beethoven's "musical thinking" from the evidence in the works themselves and their context in the history of ideas
Carl Dahlhaus, a leading musicologist of the postwar era, has left an indelible mark on the field, as reflected in this newly translated work on tonality's development. Demonstrating his mastery of harmony theory, Dahlhaus reviews key concepts and theories from influential figures such as Rameau, Sechter, Ftis, Riemann, and Schenker. He contrasts chordal composition with the lesser-known intervallic composition, which underpinned polyphonic music during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through numerous quotations from theoretical treatises, he illustrates how early music evolved not through chord progressions but through simple interval progressions. Dahlhaus explores pivotal questions regarding the transformation from intervallic to chordal composition and from modality to tonality. His analyses of works by Josquin, Cara, Tromboncino, and Monteverdi shed light on these transitions. With bold speculations and comprehensive summaries, Dahlhaus showcases his command over eight centuries of music and writings, alongside a profound understanding of European history and culture. This significant work, originally published in 1990, is now available through the Princeton Legacy Library, which aims to enhance access to the scholarly heritage of Princeton University Press's extensive backlist.
A survey of the most popular period in music history details many of the socio-historical influences on music of this period, the impact of Beethoven's death, and the rise of grand opera.
This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today. Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the "demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization and clich . Cherished concepts like Romanticism, tradition, nationalism vs. universality, the musical culture of the bourgeoisie, are put to pointed reevaluation. Always demonstrating the interest in socio-historical influences that is the hallmark of his work, Dahlhaus reminds us of the contradictions, interrelationships, psychological nuances, and riches of musical character and musical life. Nineteenth-Century Music contains 90 illustrations, the collected captions of which come close to providing a summary of the work and the author's methods. Technical language is kept to a minimum, but while remaining accessible, Dahlhaus challenges, braces, and excites. This is a landmark study that no one seriously interested in music and nineteenth-century European culture will be able to ignore.
Carl Dahlhaus here treats Nietzsche's youthful analysis of the contradictions in Wagner's doctrine (and, more generally, in romantic musical aesthetics); the question of periodicization in romantic and neo-romantic music; the underlying kinship between Brahms's and Wagner's responses to the central musical problems of their time; and the true significance of musical nationalism. Included in this volume is Walter Kauffman's translation of the previously unpublished fragment, "On Music and Words," by the young Nietzsche.
With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the larger intellectual framework in which Romantic music found its place, a framework that to a remarkable degree has continued to shape our image of music."—Robert P. Morgan, Yale University Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) is the author of a highly influential body of works on the foundations of music history and aesthetics.