Freedom and the arts
Subtitle: essays on music and literature
By: Charles Rosen
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 438
ISBN-13: 9780674047525
Subjects: Literature; Music; History and criticism
Description: "Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state.

When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart's bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand. Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity - for pleasure - is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence."--Pub. website.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: The weight of society; title: Freedom and art; title: Culture on the market; title: The future of music; title: The canon; title: Dramatic and tonal logic in Mozart's operas; title: Mozart's entry into the twentieth century; title: The triumph of Mozart; title: Drama and figured bass in Mozart's concertos; title: Mozart and posterity; title: Structural dissonance and the classical sonata; title: Tradition without convention; title: Felix Mendelssohn at 200 : prodigy without peer; title: Happy birthday, Elliott Carter!; title: Frédéric Chopin, reactionary and revolutionary; title: Robert Schumann, a vision of the future; title: Long perspectives; title: The New Grove's dictionary returns; title: Western music : the view from California; title: Theodore Adorno : criticism as cultural nostalgia; title: Resuscitating opera : Alessandro Scarlatti; title: Operatic paradoxes : the ridiculous and sublime; title: Lost chords and the golden age of pianism; title: Montaigne : philosophy as process; title: La Fontaine : the ethical power of style; title: The anatomy lesson : melancholy and the invention of boredom; title: Mallarmé and the transfiguration of poetry; title: Hoffmansthal and radical modernism; title: The private obsessions of Wystan Auden; title: Old wisdom and newfangled theory : two one-way streets to disaster.