19th Century Germany
1/14/2010 - 3/4/2010
Thursday 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
This interdisciplinary course will place Bruckner, Wagner, and other 19th-century Austrian and German composers within the context of their own turbulent time. Bruckner’s monumental symphonies and Wagner’s visionary conception of opera and revolutionary harmonies were formed at the same time as the German state; this course will explore the relationships between music and politics. Topics will include the Franco-Prussian War, Metternich and conservative reaction, the German bourgeoisie, and Bismarck and the Second Reich.
Syllabus
Week 1: Revolution and Political Romanticism
Beethoven Part 1
- Funeral Cantata for Joseph II
- Gellert Lieder
- Egmont
Week 2: Beethoven from the Congress of Vienna to the 9th Symphony
9th Symphony
Week 3: Profound and Bourgeois, Nationalist and Universal
The strange case of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger
Week 4: From Utopia to Dystopian Chaos
- Wagner’s Ring and its incoherence
Week 5: Bruckner, Medievalism, Mysticism and the Catholic Ecstatic Vision
- Mass in B Minor
- 5th Symphonie
Week 6: History As Seen Through Music
Criticism: Schumann, Hanslick, Liszt, Wolf and Karl Krauss
Week 7: Brahms the Progressive; Brahms the Reactionary; Brahms as Aesthetic Arbitor
- Rinaldo
- Triumphlied
- 4th Symphony
Week 8: Union of Poetry, Philosophy & Music in Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra
