E-Book Overview
Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, Ruth A. Solie examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. Her essays, giving voice to "what goes without saying" on the subject—that cultural information so present and pervasive as to go unsaid—fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history.This much-anticipated collection, bringing together new and hard-to-find pieces by an acclaimed musicologist, mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people—English and others—experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. Solie's essays start from topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes—including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility—and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas.
E-Book Content
ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION Music in America Imprint Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others. california studies in 19th-century music Joseph Kerman, General Editor 1. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by Mary Whittall 2. Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, by Walter Frisch 3. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After, by Lawrence Kramer 4. The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory, by Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter 5. Nineteenth-Century Music, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by J. Bradford Robinson 6. Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker 7. Music at the Turn of Century: A 19th-Century Music Reader, edited by Joseph Kerman 8. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900, by Lawrence Kramer 9. Wagner Nights: An American History, by Joseph Horowitz 10. Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes, by Katherine Bergeron 11. Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert’s Impromptus and Last Sonatas, by Charles Fisk 12. Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations, by Ruth A. Solie 13. Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera, by Mary Ann Smart 14. Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works, by Stephen Rumph Music in Other Words Edward Burne-Jones, The Golden Stairs. © Tate, London 2002. Music in Other Words Victorian Conversations ruth a. solie University of California Press berkeley los angeles london The following publishers have generously given permission to reprint excerpts from copyrighted works: a version of chapter 1, from Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie, 1–42 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1988); portions of chapter 3, “Gender, Genre, and the Parlor Piano,” The Wordsworth Circle 25 (1994): 53–56; portions of chapter 5, from Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 45–46 (1998): 87–104; and a version of chapter 6, from The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed.