scholarly journals A Critical Inferno? Hoplit, Hanslick and Liszt’s Dante Symphony

2012 ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Nicole Grimes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
Extended Essay

The question of how to distinguish between form with a spiritual dimension and hollow form preoccupied Eduard Hanslick throughout his career as a writer on music aesthetics and as a music critic. His grappling with this issue was not confined to Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. It was manifest in his critical output, where he famously and consistently for many years singled out the music of Liszt as lacking a spiritual dimension. Hanslick has been noted for his views on Liszt since the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, Markus Gärtner has inestimably enhanced our understanding of the nature of the controversy between the two figures. Yet, although we now have a greater understanding of what Hanslick found deplorable in Liszt’s music, we are no closer to understanding why he considered it to lack a spiritual dimension. In other words: Hanslick represents the true dilemma of the critic in this area in that he interprets a lack of spiritual dimension but cannot quantify it. Excerpts of Richard Pohl’s extended essay on Liszt’s Dante Symphony, originally written in 1858, were included in the programme note Hanslick received at the Vienna Philharmonic’s performance of that work in 1881. These passages brought together in Hanslick’s mind the issues and controversies of the 1850s. Drawing both on Pohl’s essay and Hanslick’s review, this article explores what the lasting issues were in Hanslick’s critical reception of Liszt. It further questions what can be meaningfully said in relation to the spiritual dimension of a work, and the nature of Hanslick’s ontological enquiry.

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Franko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Critical Discourses

This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905–1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses analyzed indulged in flights of poetic fancy a distinction is made between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947–1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar’s collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. The discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; then track the baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Accounting, greed, and beliefs in a nineteenth century communal religious society

2021 ◽  
pp. 103237322110323
Author(s):  
Tonya K Flesher ◽  
Dale L Flesher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Accounting System ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
Accounting History ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Harmony Society

The availability of the accounting and other records of a religious communal society (the Harmony Society) provides for a study that adds to the literature on accounting in religious organizations, a need highlighted in Carmona and Ezzamel’s article in Accounting History that discusses: (1) the unique spiritual dimension of religious institutions and its impact on accounting, and (2) the ‘sacred/profane divide’ (p. 122). The Harmonists’ communal beliefs were derived from Biblical interpretations and were necessitated by the need for shared labor and resources. Harmonists’ accounting records were sophisticated but did not account for labor costs provided by members. The interplay of these beliefs and the greed of the leaders impacted the group’s accounting system and created a spiritual/profane divide. The study explores the interplay between the role of accounting and the community’s beliefs and goals.

scholarly journals Iphigénie à Paris: Positioning Gluck Historically in Early Twentieth-Century France

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
William Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Unusual Event ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Vincent D'indy

In December 1907, Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Aulide was produced in Paris at the Opéra-Comique, the last of his major operas to be revived in France. The ensuing critical reception pitted Vincent d'Indy, who harshly criticized the production, against its director, Albert Carré; d'Indy further responded by conducting the overture to Iphigénie only a few weeks later as a musical corrective to the performance at the Opéra-Comique. This unusual event highlights the historiographie problem Gluck presented to early twentieth-century critics in France: did his music look backwards to the tragédies lyriques of Lully and Rameau, or did it prefigure the Wagnerian music-dramas of the nineteenth century? The 1907 Opéra-Comique production of Iphigénie and its aftermath encapsulate the struggle to incorporate Gluck into newly developing and often competing narratives of music history.

scholarly journals The Menagerie or the Visitor’s Pass? Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia and Praskov’ia Bakunina on Russian Women Writers

2007 ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Diana Greene
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Social ◽  
Innovative Work ◽  
Literary Exchange ◽  
Literary Movements

This article examines an 1842 literary exchange between Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia (1805-1867) and Praskov’ia Bakunina (1810-1880?) concerning the place of women writers in nineteenth-century Russian literature. It is followed by a translation of the exchange itself. Zrazhevskaia’s “Zverinets” (The Menagerie), a formally innovative work of literary criticism addressed in part to Bakunina, challenged the social norms that discouraged women’s writing, as well as the men literary critics who enforced them. In a verse epistle response, Bakunina repudiated Zrazhevskaia’s ideas, maintaining that Russian men critics will extend hospitality and courtesy to women writers who comport themselves as guests in the men’s club of Russian letters. The exchange raises questions about the critical reception of women writers in mid nineteenth-century Russia, women as literary critics, and the gendering of nineteenth century literary movements and aesthetics, which are discussed in relation to the wider pan-European literary climate of the time.

Realism and the Institution of the Nineteenth-Century Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-68
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Margaret Oliphant ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Walter Scott

This chapter argues that establishing an origin for what we now call ‘British realism’ or ‘the Irish novel’ is both an institutional and an anachronistic endeavour: the stories that we tell about novels are actually stories about the cultural institutions that study novels. Considering the formal and political divisions of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent alongside its changing critical reception, the chapter demonstrates how ‘British realism’ is an anachronistic formation and offers a new origin story where ‘British realism’ and ‘the Irish novel’ are not separate traditions or forms, but rather dynamically intertwined. Castle Rackrent, long thought to be an exemplary Irish novel precisely because it is not realist, develops realist contradictions that are taken up by later nineteenth-century Irish, Scottish and English novelists like Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Anthony Trollope.

The silencing of Lucia

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Smart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Mad Scene ◽  
Mental Decline

In Act III of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, the chaplain Raimondo appears at the wedding celebrations to tell the assembled guests that Lucia has murdered her husband Arturo. While the chorus expresses shock, Lucia enters, dishevelled and deranged; the crowd turns towards her, murmuring ‘Par dalla tomba uscita!’ This image of a figure emerging from the grave, certainly apt by nineteenth-century poetic standards, also suggests itself as a contemporary metaphor: a shift in critical reception. Traditionally, a noisy chorus of operatic critics has regarded Lucia with a mixture of fascination and horror, emphasising the sepulchral aspects of her madness. Recently, however, a rather surprising resurrection has been effected through the notion, popular among some feminist critics, that Lucia's mental decline could be interpreted as positive, even liberatory. This view has been expressed most flamboyantly by Catherine Clément, for whom madness is one of the few ways an operatic heroine can escape the near-inevitable plot process of seduction and death. Her effusions on Lucia's mad scene illustrate this position vividly: ‘Lucia dances with her desires: listen how joyful, airy and peaceful it is. Who says anything about unhappiness? Madwomen's voices sing the most perfect happiness’

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document