The muse as eros
Subtitle: music, erotic fantasy, and the male creativity in the romantic and modern imagination
By: Stephen Downes.
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT
Language: eng
Number of pages: 300
Subjects: Music -- Psychological aspects; Musical analysis; Music and erotica
Description: "This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative masculine subjectivity, and important aspects of the shift from the styles and aesthetics of Romantic Idealism to Modernist Anxiety in music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. The muse as eros and masculine creative anxiety ; Locating musical evocations of the erotic muse ; Eroticism, imagination, and fantasy ; Erotic fantasy in Liszt, Wagner, and Scriabin : an interpretive exemplar; title: The muse as immaculate beloved : Stendhal's 'crystallization' process and listening to Rossini and Beethoven; title: Schumann, Chopin, the fan of eros, and the beloved's kiss; title: The muse as temptress and redemptress : Sibelius's early symphonic narratives; title: Mahler's fifth and sixth symphonies : idyllic fantasies, the sublime, formal mastery, and processes of mourning and reparation; title: 'She dies' : trauma and erotic elegy in Bartók's pre-First World War music; title: Names, chords, and the 'pale princess' in Debussy's musical language of love; title: Poulenc's erotics of humour, melancholy, abjection, and redemption; title: Names, chords and Lulu's portrait as muse; title: Fetishistic 'inventions on a chord' : Szymanowski, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Weill, and Poulenc.