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20 - The End(s) of Musical Romanticism

from Part V - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Sebastian Wedler
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

When did the period of musical Romanticism end? This question is enticingly simple, but the answer is surprisingly difficult. Drawing on the recent developments in the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, this chapter examines some of the categories commonly used to describe this period – late Romanticism, early modernism, maximalism, and Weltanschauungsmusik – and their methodological and epistemological orientations. It will be argued that these categories, far from being merely convenient labels for stylistic categorisation, can be understood as different responses to the complex historiographical challenges arising from the destabilised ontological foundation of the work-concept. Grounded in a discussion of the alienation between Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss between 1909 and 1914, this chapter contends that the question concerning the end(s) of musical Romanticism can thus only be rendered approachable as a heuristic idea, in the way it prompts us constantly to question, challenge, and rethink the historiographical foundations of an era.

Keywords

RomanticismModernismlate RomanticismWeltanschuungsmusikStimmunghistoriographyCarl Dahlhaus
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 343 - 357
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Cook, Nicholas and Pople, Anthony (eds.). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Whittall, Mary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl Foundations of Music History, trans. Robinson, J. Bradford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl Nineteenth-Century Music, transRobinson, . J. Bradford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Danuser, Hermann. Weltanschauungsmusik (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2009).Google Scholar
Franklin, Peter. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harper-Scott, J. P. E. ‘How We Got Out of Music History, and How We Can Get Back Into It’, in Kelly, Michael J. and Rose, Arthur (eds.), Theories of History: History Read Across the Humanities (London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 37–59.Google Scholar
Hepokoski, James. ‘The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources’, 19th-Century Music, 14/3 (1991), 221–46.Google Scholar
Hepokoski, James Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Kramer, Lawrence. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Mauser, Siegfried and Schmidt, Matthias (eds.). Geschichte der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert: 1900–1925 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2005).Google Scholar
Meyer, Leonard B. Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Samson, Jim (ed.). The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid-19th Century to World War I (London, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Early Twentieth Century, volume 4 of The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Treitler, Leo. Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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