Bringing together eminent scholars from several disciplines, this volume examines Hanslick's contribution to the aesthetics and philosophy of music and looks anew at his literary interests.

Bringing together eminent scholars from several disciplines, this volume examines Hanslick'ss contribution to the aesthetics and philosophy of music and looks anew at his literary interests.

Bringing together eminent scholars from several disciplines, this volume examines Hanslick's contribution to the aesthetics and philosophy of music and looks anew at his literary interests.

In her novel Spring (2019), the third instalment in her seasonal quartet, the Scottish author, Ali Smith weaves Beethoven into the narrative as just one strand in a richly intertextual fabric that she then positions around the critical edges of the global refugee crisis. These novels, which are recognized as belonging to “BrexLit,” provide a critical, artistic, and ethical meditation on our time and our treatment of refugees. They forward the argument of how fiction and the novel today can help us make sense of the human condition. The very act of engaging with the Beethoven song “An die Hoffnung” presented in Spring allows us to consider anew the question of humanity as it relates to Beethoven’s music, and, perhaps more importantly, the degree to which Beethoven’s music can put us in touch with our own humanity. The approach to Beethoven in this article is set against the backdrop of a critique of the dominant ideologies that have been associated with his music since his lifetime, as espoused in the literary novel as just one of many intellectual and literary outlets. I propose that there is a resonance to be found in our engagement with Beethoven in Ali Smith’s Spring in that, by conflating a poem, a song, and a character, she seems to make us more alert, and more alive to the ethical and moral choices put before us in this book.

DescriptionContentsResourcesCoursesAbout the Authors Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture. Investigates Brahms's literary preoccupations and incorporates much information gleaned from the composer's library, to establish his cultural context Explores the philosophical dimensions of Brahms's music and will appeal to those interested in the intersection of music and philosophy A significant amount of source material is translated into English for the first time which will benefit those interested in the cultural context of Brahms's music but are unable to read the original German texts

The ending to Brahms's Schicksalslied confounds scholars for two reasons: his setting of Hölderlin's ostensibly despairing poem ends with an orchestral section that evokes comfort and reconciliation, and the postlude transposes the material of the introduction down to C major, ending in a key other than its opening. This represents ‘a rare instance of a composer not merely placing an arbitrary interpretation on words but explicitly contradicting a poet's statement’ (Petersen, 1983). Daverio (1993) and Reynolds (2012) hold similar views, seeing Hölderlin's poem as if divorced from the novelHyperion.Although the poem marks the chronological endpoint of the novella, it is intricately bound up with levels of time, and it serves a continuous engendering function. The recollection of music in an altered key in Brahms's postlude is apposite to Abrams's notion of ‘the ascending circle, or spiral’. Drawing on musical and hermeneutic analysis, on evidence from Brahms's personal library, and on newly discovered correspondence from Hermann Levi, I argue that Brahms's ‘eccentric path’ – like Hölderlin's – leads us away from the original unity of the work in order to restore it in a heightened manner. The postlude prompts reflection and realization on the part of Brahms's listener akin to that of Hölderlin's reader.