Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism

Twelve authors probe the mind of the Romantic era in its thinking about music. They provide a searching examination of writings by music theorists, critics, aestheticians, philosophers, and commentators from 1800 to 1875. In doing so, they wield new critical tools as well as old, casting fresh light, for example, on familiar problems of musical form by inspecting eighteenth-century rhetoric and nineteenth-century gendered discourse; exploring Schubertian modulation and Wagnerian motif with the insights of cognitive science; reinterpreting pianistic finger exercise by way of Michel Foucault and Frankenstein and so on. The impact of Hegel and Schelling on music theory occupies an important place, as does Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics on analysis and criticism. The brilliant group of young historians of theory, represented here, provides an array of approaches, from detailed music analysis, through close reading of texts, through critical discourse, to philosophical enquiry.

• The history of music theory is a new and burgeoning field • Discusses the music of Beethoven, Weber, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner and many other important nineteenth-century figures • Written by a new and outstanding generation of young scholars

Part I. Cultural and Philosophical Frameworks: 1. The mechanics of sensation and the construction of the Romantic musical experience Leslie David Blasius; 2. F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst: an emergent semiology of music Ian Biddle; 3. Fétis and emerging tonal consciousness Thomas Christenden; 4. Romantic music under siege in 1848 Sanna Pederson; Part II. Hermeneutics, Analysis, Criticism: 5. Second immediacies in the Eroica Brian Hyer; 6. Plato – Beethoven: a hermeneutics for nineteenth-century music? Ian Bent; 7. Intersubjectivity and analysis: Schumann’s essay on the Fantastic Symphony Fred Everett Maus; Part III. Rhetoric, Metaphor, Musical Perception: 8. The concept of développement in the early nineteenth century Peter A. Hoyt; 9. A. B. Marx and the gendering of sonata form Scott Burnham; 10. ... wie ein rother Faden: on the origins of ‘Leitmotif’ as critical construct and musical practice Thomas Grey; 11. Musical invariance as a cognitive structure: ‘multiple meaning’ in the early nineteenth century Janna K. Saslaw and James P. Walsh; Index.

‘These tightly-focused essays complement the considerable achievement of Ian Bent in bringing 19th-century music theory to the attention of musicology.’

– Julian Rushton, Musical Times