Romantic Voices

Listening to Nineteenth-Century Music

Douglass Seaton

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9798855804348, 9798855804331
• eBook ISBN: 9798855804355
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: 19th Century History

Illuminates how Romantic aesthetic principles manifest themselves through musical sound and structure.

In Romantic Voices Douglass Seaton explores the underlying subjectivism whereby nineteenth-century musical works depend on and manifest the ideology and epistemology of Romanticism. Listeners and students have often imagined in a too-casual way that Romantic music reveals the inner biographies of composers. That easy assumption, however, leads to misunderstandings of both the biographical composers and the actual but fictive personas who do express themselves in the music. In a dozen studies of works by major Romantic composers, in genres ranging from instrumental solos to symphonies and from songs to opera, Seaton presents new ways to understand these works within the context of the Romantic movement. The book demonstrates how a discerning approach to this music can unveil the fictive personalities who express themselves in each piece. Seaton embraces transmethodological approaches that harmonize close attention to the sound and structure of individual pieces, their cultural and social history, and what composers, critics, and listeners have said about them. Among the works included are Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata, Schubert's Heine Songs, Berlioz's Harold in Italy, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, Liszt's "Vallée d'Obermann," Verdi's Otello, and MacDowell's "Keltic" Sonata.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Hearing Voices: A Termino-Methodological Prolegomenon
• 2 The Voice of the Genius: Interruption in Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata
• 3 Nonchronological Narrative in the Song Cycle: Schubert’s Heine Songs
• 4 Prima Donna or Composer: Opera Variations and Chopin’s Op. 2
• 5 Onstage and Off: Performing Berlioz’s Harold en Italie
• 6 The Voice and the Listener: Applying Mendelssohn’s Aesthetics
• 7 The Poet Speaks in the Song Cycle: Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis
• 8 Feminine Voices in Instrumental Music
• 9 Finding a Voice in the Symphony: Quotation in Schumann’s Symphony in C, Op. 61
• 10 Traveler and Pilgrim: Epigram and “Vallée d’Obermann” from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage
• 11 “The Real Author of the Drama”: Deconstruction in Verdi’s Otello
• 12 The Painter Sings: Historicity in Wolf’s “Auf ein altes Bild”
• 13 Representing the Narrator’s Voice: MacDowell’s “Keltic” Sonata
• 14 Recognizing Romantic Voices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover