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17 - Music Staged and Unstaged

from Part IV - Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Sarah Hibberd
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter moves beyond the primarily German, elite context in which E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 was initially received, to consider musical Romanticism in its broader European (and in particular, French) context. In so doing it highlights three expressive modes in which music was understood as operating in partnership with real and imagined visual stimuli: the melodramatic tableau, the unsung voice, and symphonic scenography. These modes pervaded European culture and offer a perspective on musical Romanticism that acknowledges its breadth and the social diversity of its audiences, as well as the variety of listening experiences. Theatre and concert works by Benda, Cherubini, Beethoven, Weber, Meyerbeer, Auber, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Mendelssohn are considered.

Keywords

Romantic operamelodramatableaumusical scenographyunsung voicesvisual imaginationtechnologyMeyerbeer
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 296 - 310
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Brittan, Francesca. Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Charlton, David. ‘Storms, Sacrifices: The “Melodrama Model” in Opera’, in French Opera 1730–1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 1–61.Google Scholar
Dolan, Emily, and Tresch, John. ‘A Sublime Invasion: Meyerbeer, Balzac, and the Opera Machine’, Opera Quarterly, 27/1 (2011), 4–31.Google Scholar
Grey, Thomas S. ‘Tableaux vivants: Landscape, History Painting, and the Visual Imagination in Mendelssohn’s Orchestral Music’, 19th-Century Music, 21/1 (1997), 38–76.Google Scholar
Hambridge, Katherine, and Hicks, Jonathan (eds.). The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Hibberd, Sarah. French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Loughridge, Deirdre. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Sala, Emilio. L’opera senza canto: il mélo romantico e l’invenzione della colonna Sonora (Venice: Marsilio, 1995).Google Scholar
Smith, Marian. Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Waeber, Jacqueline. En Musique dans le texte: Le mélodrama, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005).Google Scholar

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