Rethinking Schubert - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190874139 ISBN 13: 9780190874131

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

In Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years.

With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven.

What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national, and complex.

About this title

Review:

Deeply thoughtful and hugely challenging, insightful and inciteful, these essays throw brilliant prismatic light on Schubert's indispensable oeuvre. They untangle the thorny paradox of an individual style that furnished the pivot for a crucial juncture in music history." - Scott Messing, author of Schubert in the European Imagination and Marching to the Canon: The Life of Schubert's Marche militaire

This stirringly diverse collection of essays brings the recent surge of Schubert scholarship to its first full flood. With an international and intergenerational abundance of perspective, Rethinking Schubert encourages the sense that we are just now beginning to discern the impact and range of this miraculously multidimensional composer." - Scott Burnham, Princeton University

Inspired by the music of Schubert and the man himself, the contexts and riddling controversies promised in the title of this rich collection are engaged here in a range of brilliant rethinkings, from a brace of fresh theoretical constructs to the seasoned insights of time-honored Schubertians. A signal contribution among the busy competition." Richard Kramer, Author of Unfinished Music and Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song

About the Author:

Lorraine Byrne Bodley is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research at the Department of Music, Maynooth University. She is the first woman in Ireland to have conferred on her a D.Mus. in Musicology, a higher doctorate awarded for published work (NUI, 2012). She also holds a Ph.D. in Music and in German from University College Dublin (2000). Her numerous other awards include a Gerda-Henkel Foundation Scholarship (2014); two DAAD Senior Academics Awards (2010 and 2014); an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Scholarship (2001-03) and the Goethe Prize of the English Goethe Society (2001). She has published 12 books including: A Community of the Imagination: Seóirse Bodley's Goethe's Settings (Carysfort Press, 2013); Goethe and Zelter: Musical Dialogues (Ashgate, 2009); The UnknownSchubert (Ashgate, 2008); Proserpina: Goethe's Melodrama with Music by Carl Eberwein (Carysfort Press, 2007) and Schubert's Goethe Settings (2003). Julian Horton is Professor of Music and Head of Department at Durham University. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught at University College Dublin and King's College, London. He is the author of Bruckner's Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, 2004) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (2013). In 2012, he was recipient of the Westrup Prize; in 2014, he was elected President of the Society for Music Analysis.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0190874139
• ISBN 13: 9780190874131
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 552
• Editor: Bodley Lorraine Byrne, Horton Julian