It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’a ‘pure noise’. The fact tha... more It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motorcycles and wagons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenological evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide the springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (NewYork, 1962), 207).
criticism from roughly the same period). D’Ortigue’s writing often has energy and passion and dra... more criticism from roughly the same period). D’Ortigue’s writing often has energy and passion and draws the reader in simply through the strength of his conviction. Yet it is also at times rather pedestrian and laboured—he was not a natural stylist like Berlioz, nor did he have Berlioz’s gift for irony. There have been recent rumblings against the hegemonic position that Berlioz holds as critic today (Cormac Newark, ‘Metaphors for Meyerbeer’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127 (2002), 23–43, and Mark Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze: The Poetics and Reception of French Opera’, in Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading (Oxford, 2001), 86–108). Everist suggests intriguingly that one of the reasons that we value Berlioz so highly is that his ideological position regarding the work of art was close to that held at the present time. Comparing Berlioz’s and Castil-Blaze’s attitudes to Gluck, Everist argues that Castil-Blaze, while scorned today for his arrangements of works such as Der Freischütz and Don Giovanni, nevertheless consistently held to his conservative pragmatics throughout his life, whereas Berlioz often had to compromise his ideological principles regarding the inviolate and transcendent work of art. Everist implies that the position of consistency is preferable. There has also been discussion recently about the perceived privileging of critics with a musical background such as Castil-Blaze, Berlioz, Fétis, and d’Ortigue (I am talking about French music criticism) over the so-called amateurs or literary critics with little or no musical training. Benjamin Walton and Katharine Ellis, in their essays on the ‘amateur’ critics Vitet and Geoffroy respectively in Reading Critics Reading, show convincingly why the work of these early nineteenth-century literary critics needs revaluating. Other critics with primarily literary backgrounds also need reassessment. Although Rossini scholars have acknowledged the value of Stendhal as critic for many years now, Théophile Gautier still suffers from being seen as a musical illiterate. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many interesting critics whose work, virtually unknown today, informed and influenced French musical culture. Walton discusses the music criticism of the Globe in the period prior to 1830, yet it continued to produce fascinating criticism during its period as a SaintSimonian house journal (Oct. 1830–Apr. 1832), with critics such as Adolphe Guéroult. Other names to follow for the first half of the century are Édouard Monnais, Henri Blanchard, Charles and Paul Merruau, Louis Desnoyers, and, later, the Escudier brothers, Oswald François, Oscar Comettant, Théodore de Banville, Daniel Bernard, Henri Blaze (Blaze de Bury), Victorin de Joncières, Ernest Reyer, and so on; this list is very partial and includes critics with both musical and literary backgrounds. Some of these names are well known from other publications, but they were also all important critics. Anyone using the press as a resource needs information on critics and on the journals or newspapers to which they contributed. Such information is often difficult and time-consuming to assemble. However, numerous scholars have had to do it for their own particular projects. Once again to cite Lesley A. Wright’s Dossier de presse for Carmen, she provides invaluable information on all the critics whose reviews she has reproduced, and information on their papers or journals. She enlivens her descriptions with material drawn from Émile Zola’s article ‘La Presse parisienne’, originally published in the Messager de l’Europe in 1877. There are also many nineteenth-century sources that have information on critics buried in them. What is urgently needed, however, is a central resource that draws all the scattered information into one place. We also need more collections, preferably online, of the critical writings of many of these critics. One final point. Berlioz’s criticism should not, in my opinion, be privileged over the criticism of other writers. All the many critical voices of the century deserve to be known and heard. However, not all these critics wrote with, to use Katharine Ellis’s phrase, Berlioz’s ‘imaginative richness’ or indeed his humour, and at the risk of being seen to reinforce Berlioz’s hegemonic position, I would claim that Berlioz’s criticism is often read as much for aesthetic enjoyment of its language as for its content (the same is true of the criticism of Théodore de Banville). Joseph d’Ortigue lacks Berlioz’s flair as a writer, but his criticism is nevertheless a fund of information on a myriad of topics, many of them not covered elsewhere in the press. I hope that one day his complete criticism becomes available, but in the meantime Sylvia L’Écuyer is to be thanked for publishing this splendid collection. KERRY MURPHY doi:10.1093/ml/gci171
In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that t... more In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern's claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’. By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed...
As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer'... more As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer's approach to atonality, or as a means whereby he can preserve the essential hierarchies of tonality itself in a context of pervasive chromaticism. For Schoenberg, the expansion of tonality was a process which did not stop until tonality had been ‘exploded’, chromaticism ousting diatonicism just as new types of chord ousted major and minor triads. For Bartók, as, later, for Britten, tonality could survive even without the triad, without fundamental diatonicism. The use of tonal centres—a tonality of single notes—is the hallmark of Bartók's third string quartet, and the tonal centres control the chromaticism, harmonic progressions functioning non-systematically but logically in terms of the schemes of tonal conflicts and relationships appropriate to the work.
The premiere of Britten's TV opera Owen Wingrave ... Arnold Whittall's books include Th... more The premiere of Britten's TV opera Owen Wingrave ... Arnold Whittall's books include The music of Britten and Tippett: studies in themes and techniques (2nd edition, Cambridge UP, 1990). ... 1. Most recently the 1995 Glyndebourne ...
At the heart of the Music, Art and Literature symposium is an eighty-seven-page tour de force: Ph... more At the heart of the Music, Art and Literature symposium is an eighty-seven-page tour de force: Philip Weller's translation (printed alongside the original French) of L'Âme en bourgeon, the extraordinary poetic hymn to the yet-to-be-born composer by his mother ...
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 1979
IN 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten'... more IN 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten's achievement widi this comment: 'Whoever tries to discover the intrinsic quality of die music of Britten and his generation must take ...
and 1920 draw on verses by various poets, including Wehrli himself. In their late-romantic inspir... more and 1920 draw on verses by various poets, including Wehrli himself. In their late-romantic inspiration and charm, these songs are worthy companions to six of Othmar Schoeck’s Lieder, the earliest written in Schoeck’s teens, the latest taken from his profound Eichendorff volume, op. 30, of 1917–18. Vettergren’s warm voice, radiant in the upper register, displays a remarkable maturity. Enterprisingly, the young mezzo-soprano and her Swiss accompanist frame Wehrli and Schoeck with aesthetically congenial Swedish songs from the first half of the 20th century. Schoeck’s near-contemporary Ture Rangström, who had a Germanic teacher in Hans Pfitzner, strikes out on individual tonal paths in six wellchosen songs, five based on Nordic poetry by Bo Bergman. In Hjärtats sånger – settings of love lyrics by Pär Lagerkvist – Gunnar de Frumerie (1908–1987) captures emotional nuances with a delicately handled colour palette.
Style, in music where pitch alone is serialised, stems from decisions about repetition. The set c... more Style, in music where pitch alone is serialised, stems from decisions about repetition. The set can be used in such a way that, even if restatements of one particular form are frequent, a different register, rhythm and timbral distribution will make it difficult to hear the restatement as repetition, at least before close analysis. Serial composers who retain the essentially traditional, pre-serial method of melodic or motivic identity are perhaps more likely to use repetitions which possess a clear similarity of shape as well as an explicit element of variation. Such a method can ensure the audibility of the evolving structure of a serial work, and also enable a composer to use designs involving tonal emphases without recourse to triadic formulae.
a¤ rka at twice that, has the most). These have been photocopied from the existing piano-vocal sc... more a¤ rka at twice that, has the most). These have been photocopied from the existing piano-vocal scores and although clefs and key signatures have been artfully added where necessary, the characters singing are not identified unless their names happen to come within the excerpt included. Location of the examples is not shown either. References to specific passages described rather than illustrated by music examples are particularly unhelpful since these are identified by bar numbers, a feature lacking in the printed piano-vocal scores. The text is divided into chapters setting the scene (Fibich himself, the 1890s, concepts of nationalism, Wagnerianism, and Czechness) and biographical sketches of the main players in this period of Fibich’s life: his wife Betty, his mistress and librettist Anežka Schulzova¤ , his other librettist of the period Jaroslav Vrchlicky¤ , his publisher Frantis› ek Augustin Urba¤ nek, and a few others. Then follow substantial chapters on the four operas of the 1890s: The Tempest (1895), Hedy (1896), S a¤ rka (1897), and Pa¤ d Arkuna [The Fall of Arkona] (1900; staged less than a month after Fibich’s death). Of these four operas only one (S a¤ rka) is based on a Czech subject (and in this case this was one of the conditions for the competition for which it was submitted). The Tempest is after Shakespeare, Hedy is after Byron, and The Fall of Arkona is Schulzova¤ ’s own invention, based on the interaction of Christianity with the Baltic Slavs on the island of Ru« gen. Such an outwardlooking approach was atypical for Czech composers of the period, but not surprising for Fibich, whose training and orientation was European rather than narrowly Czech. Fibich in fact was looking for success beyond a Czech public but sadly never found it. The historical sections are the most successful. This is partly because Kopecky¤ has more to offer with his use of new sources (letters, contemporary newspapers, and journals), and shows greater confidence in assessing his source material critically and advancing the debate than in dealing with music. None of these sections is particularly long, either: their eighty-four pages of text are divided into ten separately headed sections or chapters, and so the focus remains keen. However, the 200 pages that follow are subdivided only by each opera and thus take up an average of fifty pages per opera (admittedly the text amounts to rather less than this since these pages include many music examples). The chapters are impressive in their presentation of existing sources (as a whole the book is scrupulously referenced) and general conscientiousness: for instance, in comparing Vrchlicky¤ ’s redaction of the Tempest text with the original Shakespeare, and then Fibich’s redaction of Vrchlicky¤ in his musical setting. But as a whole these chapters lack purpose. They give the impression of four stand-alone essays presenting useful topics but not advancing any overall thesis. One gets little sense of how Fibich’s operas differed from what else was going on at the time (the sudden comparison on pp. 261^2 of The Fall of Arkona with Goldmark’s Die Ko« nigin von Saba and Heinrich Hofmann’s mysterious Edith come as a huge surprise), and little comment on how Fibich developed as an opera composer over the period. Furthermore, the usefulness of the information assembled is compromised by its being buried in long chapters without subheadings. The S a¤ rka chapter, for instance, deals with date of composition and choice of subject, feminist aspects, mythic aspects, differences from other literary treatments of the subject, Shakespearian echoes and literary intertextual references, verse forms, other musical settings (e.g. Jana¤ › cek’s S a¤ rka), general structure and contrasts, Smetana influences, Wagnerian references, nature of the main character (femme fatale or femme fragile?), use of chorus, word-setting and melody, leitmotifs, harmony (briefly), first performance, and reviews. How useful it would have been for some of this to be signalled with separate headings! If this was done for all chapters, readers could have made a few comparisons between similar sections for themselves in the absence of anything more summative by the author. While any future study of these works and of the final decade of Fibich’s life will need to start with Kopecky¤ , it is a missed opportunity that he was not able to present more effectively and develop the information so carefully assembled. JOHN TYRRELL Cardiff University
ARNOLD WHITTALL explores aspects of the modern ... T HE SEVENTH and last of York Holler's sh... more ARNOLD WHITTALL explores aspects of the modern ... T HE SEVENTH and last of York Holler's short Tagtraume (Daydreams) for violin, cello and piano, of 1994 (ex.1), is not only marked to be played 'in the tempo of Schubert's "Der ...
It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’a ‘pure noise’. The fact tha... more It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motorcycles and wagons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenological evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide the springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (NewYork, 1962), 207).
criticism from roughly the same period). D’Ortigue’s writing often has energy and passion and dra... more criticism from roughly the same period). D’Ortigue’s writing often has energy and passion and draws the reader in simply through the strength of his conviction. Yet it is also at times rather pedestrian and laboured—he was not a natural stylist like Berlioz, nor did he have Berlioz’s gift for irony. There have been recent rumblings against the hegemonic position that Berlioz holds as critic today (Cormac Newark, ‘Metaphors for Meyerbeer’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127 (2002), 23–43, and Mark Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze: The Poetics and Reception of French Opera’, in Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading (Oxford, 2001), 86–108). Everist suggests intriguingly that one of the reasons that we value Berlioz so highly is that his ideological position regarding the work of art was close to that held at the present time. Comparing Berlioz’s and Castil-Blaze’s attitudes to Gluck, Everist argues that Castil-Blaze, while scorned today for his arrangements of works such as Der Freischütz and Don Giovanni, nevertheless consistently held to his conservative pragmatics throughout his life, whereas Berlioz often had to compromise his ideological principles regarding the inviolate and transcendent work of art. Everist implies that the position of consistency is preferable. There has also been discussion recently about the perceived privileging of critics with a musical background such as Castil-Blaze, Berlioz, Fétis, and d’Ortigue (I am talking about French music criticism) over the so-called amateurs or literary critics with little or no musical training. Benjamin Walton and Katharine Ellis, in their essays on the ‘amateur’ critics Vitet and Geoffroy respectively in Reading Critics Reading, show convincingly why the work of these early nineteenth-century literary critics needs revaluating. Other critics with primarily literary backgrounds also need reassessment. Although Rossini scholars have acknowledged the value of Stendhal as critic for many years now, Théophile Gautier still suffers from being seen as a musical illiterate. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many interesting critics whose work, virtually unknown today, informed and influenced French musical culture. Walton discusses the music criticism of the Globe in the period prior to 1830, yet it continued to produce fascinating criticism during its period as a SaintSimonian house journal (Oct. 1830–Apr. 1832), with critics such as Adolphe Guéroult. Other names to follow for the first half of the century are Édouard Monnais, Henri Blanchard, Charles and Paul Merruau, Louis Desnoyers, and, later, the Escudier brothers, Oswald François, Oscar Comettant, Théodore de Banville, Daniel Bernard, Henri Blaze (Blaze de Bury), Victorin de Joncières, Ernest Reyer, and so on; this list is very partial and includes critics with both musical and literary backgrounds. Some of these names are well known from other publications, but they were also all important critics. Anyone using the press as a resource needs information on critics and on the journals or newspapers to which they contributed. Such information is often difficult and time-consuming to assemble. However, numerous scholars have had to do it for their own particular projects. Once again to cite Lesley A. Wright’s Dossier de presse for Carmen, she provides invaluable information on all the critics whose reviews she has reproduced, and information on their papers or journals. She enlivens her descriptions with material drawn from Émile Zola’s article ‘La Presse parisienne’, originally published in the Messager de l’Europe in 1877. There are also many nineteenth-century sources that have information on critics buried in them. What is urgently needed, however, is a central resource that draws all the scattered information into one place. We also need more collections, preferably online, of the critical writings of many of these critics. One final point. Berlioz’s criticism should not, in my opinion, be privileged over the criticism of other writers. All the many critical voices of the century deserve to be known and heard. However, not all these critics wrote with, to use Katharine Ellis’s phrase, Berlioz’s ‘imaginative richness’ or indeed his humour, and at the risk of being seen to reinforce Berlioz’s hegemonic position, I would claim that Berlioz’s criticism is often read as much for aesthetic enjoyment of its language as for its content (the same is true of the criticism of Théodore de Banville). Joseph d’Ortigue lacks Berlioz’s flair as a writer, but his criticism is nevertheless a fund of information on a myriad of topics, many of them not covered elsewhere in the press. I hope that one day his complete criticism becomes available, but in the meantime Sylvia L’Écuyer is to be thanked for publishing this splendid collection. KERRY MURPHY doi:10.1093/ml/gci171
In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that t... more In The Path to the New Music, Anton Webern's main purpose was to convince his audience that the twelve-note method was the natural outcome of an evolutionary process; that since ‘we compose as before’, the new was a reinterpretation of the old, not its rejection. Nothing could have been more soberly practical than the aspiration expressed in Webern's claim that ‘we want to say “in a quite new way” what has been said before’. By contrast, it has long been argued that the agenda of the post-1945 avant-garde, with Pierre Boulez a leading member, might be summarized thus: ‘we want to say, in as new a way as possible, what has not been said before’. Adorno based his 1955 critique of the new music around that ‘levelling and neutralization’ which, he believed, were the direct result of the technical obsessions of ‘total’ serialism: ‘the effort to rationalize music completely has something useless and frantic about it; it applies to a chaos that is no longer chaotic’. Adorno claimed...
As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer'... more As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer's approach to atonality, or as a means whereby he can preserve the essential hierarchies of tonality itself in a context of pervasive chromaticism. For Schoenberg, the expansion of tonality was a process which did not stop until tonality had been ‘exploded’, chromaticism ousting diatonicism just as new types of chord ousted major and minor triads. For Bartók, as, later, for Britten, tonality could survive even without the triad, without fundamental diatonicism. The use of tonal centres—a tonality of single notes—is the hallmark of Bartók's third string quartet, and the tonal centres control the chromaticism, harmonic progressions functioning non-systematically but logically in terms of the schemes of tonal conflicts and relationships appropriate to the work.
The premiere of Britten's TV opera Owen Wingrave ... Arnold Whittall's books include Th... more The premiere of Britten's TV opera Owen Wingrave ... Arnold Whittall's books include The music of Britten and Tippett: studies in themes and techniques (2nd edition, Cambridge UP, 1990). ... 1. Most recently the 1995 Glyndebourne ...
At the heart of the Music, Art and Literature symposium is an eighty-seven-page tour de force: Ph... more At the heart of the Music, Art and Literature symposium is an eighty-seven-page tour de force: Philip Weller's translation (printed alongside the original French) of L'Âme en bourgeon, the extraordinary poetic hymn to the yet-to-be-born composer by his mother ...
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 1979
IN 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten'... more IN 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten's achievement widi this comment: 'Whoever tries to discover the intrinsic quality of die music of Britten and his generation must take ...
and 1920 draw on verses by various poets, including Wehrli himself. In their late-romantic inspir... more and 1920 draw on verses by various poets, including Wehrli himself. In their late-romantic inspiration and charm, these songs are worthy companions to six of Othmar Schoeck’s Lieder, the earliest written in Schoeck’s teens, the latest taken from his profound Eichendorff volume, op. 30, of 1917–18. Vettergren’s warm voice, radiant in the upper register, displays a remarkable maturity. Enterprisingly, the young mezzo-soprano and her Swiss accompanist frame Wehrli and Schoeck with aesthetically congenial Swedish songs from the first half of the 20th century. Schoeck’s near-contemporary Ture Rangström, who had a Germanic teacher in Hans Pfitzner, strikes out on individual tonal paths in six wellchosen songs, five based on Nordic poetry by Bo Bergman. In Hjärtats sånger – settings of love lyrics by Pär Lagerkvist – Gunnar de Frumerie (1908–1987) captures emotional nuances with a delicately handled colour palette.
Style, in music where pitch alone is serialised, stems from decisions about repetition. The set c... more Style, in music where pitch alone is serialised, stems from decisions about repetition. The set can be used in such a way that, even if restatements of one particular form are frequent, a different register, rhythm and timbral distribution will make it difficult to hear the restatement as repetition, at least before close analysis. Serial composers who retain the essentially traditional, pre-serial method of melodic or motivic identity are perhaps more likely to use repetitions which possess a clear similarity of shape as well as an explicit element of variation. Such a method can ensure the audibility of the evolving structure of a serial work, and also enable a composer to use designs involving tonal emphases without recourse to triadic formulae.
a¤ rka at twice that, has the most). These have been photocopied from the existing piano-vocal sc... more a¤ rka at twice that, has the most). These have been photocopied from the existing piano-vocal scores and although clefs and key signatures have been artfully added where necessary, the characters singing are not identified unless their names happen to come within the excerpt included. Location of the examples is not shown either. References to specific passages described rather than illustrated by music examples are particularly unhelpful since these are identified by bar numbers, a feature lacking in the printed piano-vocal scores. The text is divided into chapters setting the scene (Fibich himself, the 1890s, concepts of nationalism, Wagnerianism, and Czechness) and biographical sketches of the main players in this period of Fibich’s life: his wife Betty, his mistress and librettist Anežka Schulzova¤ , his other librettist of the period Jaroslav Vrchlicky¤ , his publisher Frantis› ek Augustin Urba¤ nek, and a few others. Then follow substantial chapters on the four operas of the 1890s: The Tempest (1895), Hedy (1896), S a¤ rka (1897), and Pa¤ d Arkuna [The Fall of Arkona] (1900; staged less than a month after Fibich’s death). Of these four operas only one (S a¤ rka) is based on a Czech subject (and in this case this was one of the conditions for the competition for which it was submitted). The Tempest is after Shakespeare, Hedy is after Byron, and The Fall of Arkona is Schulzova¤ ’s own invention, based on the interaction of Christianity with the Baltic Slavs on the island of Ru« gen. Such an outwardlooking approach was atypical for Czech composers of the period, but not surprising for Fibich, whose training and orientation was European rather than narrowly Czech. Fibich in fact was looking for success beyond a Czech public but sadly never found it. The historical sections are the most successful. This is partly because Kopecky¤ has more to offer with his use of new sources (letters, contemporary newspapers, and journals), and shows greater confidence in assessing his source material critically and advancing the debate than in dealing with music. None of these sections is particularly long, either: their eighty-four pages of text are divided into ten separately headed sections or chapters, and so the focus remains keen. However, the 200 pages that follow are subdivided only by each opera and thus take up an average of fifty pages per opera (admittedly the text amounts to rather less than this since these pages include many music examples). The chapters are impressive in their presentation of existing sources (as a whole the book is scrupulously referenced) and general conscientiousness: for instance, in comparing Vrchlicky¤ ’s redaction of the Tempest text with the original Shakespeare, and then Fibich’s redaction of Vrchlicky¤ in his musical setting. But as a whole these chapters lack purpose. They give the impression of four stand-alone essays presenting useful topics but not advancing any overall thesis. One gets little sense of how Fibich’s operas differed from what else was going on at the time (the sudden comparison on pp. 261^2 of The Fall of Arkona with Goldmark’s Die Ko« nigin von Saba and Heinrich Hofmann’s mysterious Edith come as a huge surprise), and little comment on how Fibich developed as an opera composer over the period. Furthermore, the usefulness of the information assembled is compromised by its being buried in long chapters without subheadings. The S a¤ rka chapter, for instance, deals with date of composition and choice of subject, feminist aspects, mythic aspects, differences from other literary treatments of the subject, Shakespearian echoes and literary intertextual references, verse forms, other musical settings (e.g. Jana¤ › cek’s S a¤ rka), general structure and contrasts, Smetana influences, Wagnerian references, nature of the main character (femme fatale or femme fragile?), use of chorus, word-setting and melody, leitmotifs, harmony (briefly), first performance, and reviews. How useful it would have been for some of this to be signalled with separate headings! If this was done for all chapters, readers could have made a few comparisons between similar sections for themselves in the absence of anything more summative by the author. While any future study of these works and of the final decade of Fibich’s life will need to start with Kopecky¤ , it is a missed opportunity that he was not able to present more effectively and develop the information so carefully assembled. JOHN TYRRELL Cardiff University
ARNOLD WHITTALL explores aspects of the modern ... T HE SEVENTH and last of York Holler's sh... more ARNOLD WHITTALL explores aspects of the modern ... T HE SEVENTH and last of York Holler's short Tagtraume (Daydreams) for violin, cello and piano, of 1994 (ex.1), is not only marked to be played 'in the tempo of Schubert's "Der ...
Uploads
Papers by arnold whittall