Music 308 - SEM:MUSIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY

In this seminar on the music of the "long" nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the First World War, we will confront the eternal problem of the relationship between "art" and "life." We will consider how reading composers? articles, letters, memoirs, and tracts might add to our understanding of their purely musical creations; and how purely musical analysis might add to our understanding of the boundaries between creators and their works. Among the documents to be considered: Beethoven?s Heiligenstadt Testament (1802) and his inventive symphonies of the first decade of the century; Berlioz?s lively music criticism and his invention of non-operatic music drama in Romeo et Juliette (1839) and La Damnation de Faust (1846); Wagner?s mind-boggling tracts and treatises and his invention of "the music of the future" in Tristan and Isolde (1859) and Die Meistersinger (1867). In this seminar on the music of the "long" nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the First World War, we will confront the eternal problem of the relationship between "art" and "life." We will consider how reading composers? articles, letters, memoirs, and tracts might add to our understanding of their purely musical creations; and how purely musical analysis might add to our understanding of the boundaries between creators and their works. Among the documents to be considered: Beethoven?s Heiligenstadt Testament (1802) and his inventive symphonies of the first decade of the century; Berlioz?s lively music criticism and his invention of non-operatic music drama in Romeo et Juliette (1839) and La Damnation de Faust (1846); Wagner?s mind-boggling tracts and treatises and his invention of "the music of the future" in Tristan and Isolde (1859) and Die Meistersinger (1867).

Instructor Permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores