The Muse as Eros
Subtitle: Music, Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Modern Imagination
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9781351218382
Subjects: Music; Psychological aspects; Musical analysis; Music and erotica; Musique; Aspect psychologique; Analyse musicale; Musique et érotisme
Description: "The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. 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. Each of the chapters begins with explorations into male artists' relationships with their Muse, and moves to analysis and interpretation which uncovers cultural constructions of masculine artistic inspiration and production, and their association with creatively inspiring and erotically charged relationships with a Muse. New insights are offered into the musical meaning and cultural significance of selected works by Rossini, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Sibelius, Mahler, BartÃ³k, Scriabin, Szymanowski, Debussy, Berg, Poulenc and Weill."--Provided by publisher
Table of contents: title: Chapter 1 Introduction  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 2 The Muse as Immaculate Beloved --; title: Stendhal's 'crystallization' process and images of artistic creation in Rossini and Beethoven  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 3 Schumann, Chopin, the fan of Eros, and the beloved's kiss  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 4 The Muse as Temptress and Redemptress --; title: Sibelius's early symphonic narratives  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 5 Mahler's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies --; title: Idyllic fantasies, the sublime, formal mastery, and processes of mourning and reparation  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 6 'She Dies' --; title: Trauma and erotic elegy in Bartók's pre-First World War music  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 7 Names, chords and the 'pale princess' in Debussy's musical language of love  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 8 Poulenc's erotics of humour, melancholy, abjection and redemption  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 9 Names, chords and Lulu's portrait as Muse  -- Stephen Downes; title: chapter 10 Fetishistic 'Inventions on a Chord' --; title: Szymanowski, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Weill and Poulenc -- Stephen Downes.