Rethinking Hanslick

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Rethinking Hanslick

Author : Nicole Grimes
Publisher : University Rochester Press
ISBN 13 : 1580464327
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Rethinking Hanslick by : Nicole Grimes

Download or read book Rethinking Hanslick written by Nicole Grimes and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression is the first extensive English-language study devoted to Eduard Hanslick--a seminal figure in nineteenth-century musical life. 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. The essays embrace ways of thinking about Hanslick's writings that go beyond the polarities that have long marked discussion of his work such as form/expression, absolute/program music, objectivity/subjectivity, and formalist/hermeneutic criticism. This approach takes into consideration both Hanslick's important On the Musically Beautiful and his critical and autobiographical writings, demonstrating Hanslick's rich insights into the context in which a musical work is composed, performed, and received. Rethinking Hanslick serves as an invaluable companion to Hanslick's prodigious scholarship and criticism, deepening our understanding of the major themes and ideas of one of the most influential music critics of the nineteenth century. Contributors: David Brodbeck, James Deaville, Chantal Frankenbach, Lauren Freede, Marion Gerards, Dana Gooley, Nicole Grimes, David Kasunic, David Larkin, Fred Everett Maus, Timothy R. McKinney, Nina Noeske, Anthony Pryer, Felix Wörner Nicole Grimes is Marie Curie Fellow at University College Dublin (UCD) and the University of California, Irvine. Siobhán Donovan is a college lecturer at the School of Languages and Literatures, UCD. Wolfgang Marx is a senior lecturer at the School of Music, UCD.

Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context

Author : Alexander Wilfing
Publisher : Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
ISBN 13 : 3990128299
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context by : Alexander Wilfing

Download or read book Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context written by Alexander Wilfing and published by Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context" umfasst Beiträge von internationalen ExpertInnen, die sich mit Eduard Hanslick und seinen Schriften unter vielfältigen Gesichtspunkten auseinandersetzen. In den Essays wird der Kontext zwischen Hanslicks zentraler Abhandlung "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen" und möglichen Vorläufern (Leibniz, Michaelis, Nägeli etc.) sowie umliegenden Diskursen untersucht. "Close Readings" des Traktats machen wesentliche Begriffe (Arabeske, Form, Schönheit) und Konzepte (Aufführung, Performanz, Funktionalität) zum Thema. Zudem erforschen und analysieren die BeiträgerInnen Hanslicks Verhältnis zur Musikpsychologie und Kunstgeschichte, sein Verständnis des Religions-Begriffes sowie seine Vorlesungen. Mit Beiträgen von Mark Evan Bonds, Thomas Grey, Nicole Grimes, Andrea Korenjak, Christoph Landerer, Manos Perrakis, Anthony Pryer, Lee Rothfarb, Andrea Singer, Markéta Štědronská , Werner Telesko, Alexander Wilfing und Nick Zangwill

Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful

Author : Lee Rothfarb
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190698209
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful by : Lee Rothfarb

Download or read book Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful written by Lee Rothfarb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-SchÃ¶nen, 1854), written and published before the author turned 30, is a watershed document in the history of aesthetics, and of thought about music generally. The notion of "absolute music," which lies at the heart of the treatise, is now more than ever at the center of discussions about music, particularly that of the Classic and Romantic eras. Rothfarb and Landerer's translation includes three introductory essays offering fresh perspectives on Hanslick, and on the origins, publications, and translation history of his treatise, as well as its central concepts and philosophical underpinnings. The volume also includes thorough annotations, a readers' guide, a glossary of important terms and concepts, and an appendix, which comprises the original opening of Chapter 1, substantially rewritten in subsequent editions, as well as the original ending of the treatise that was excised by Hanslick in later editions. The book's ideas, cogently and often wittily expressed, are mandatory reading for anyone interested in eighteenth and nineteenth-century music and its cultural and intellectual background.

Defining Deutschtum

Author : David Lee Brodbeck
Publisher : New Cultural History of Music
ISBN 13 : 019936270X
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Defining Deutschtum by : David Lee Brodbeck

Download or read book Defining Deutschtum written by David Lee Brodbeck and published by New Cultural History of Music. This book was released on 2014 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brodbeck offers a nuanced look at the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political ideology in Liberal Vienna by examining music-critical writing about Carl Goldmark, Antonín Dvořák, and Bedřich Smetana, Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans. The critical reception of the three reveals a continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood. The book thus offers insight into how educated German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood their relationship to the 'non-Germans' in their midst.

The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel

Author : Sonja Boos
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030828166
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel by : Sonja Boos

Download or read book The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel written by Sonja Boos and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain revises the dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel’s development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience, the emergence of which is coterminous with the rise of the novel form. In particular, it asks how the novel’s formal properties—stylistic, narrative, rhetorical, and figurative—correlate with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse, and how the former may have assisted, disrupted, and/or intensified the medical articulation of neurological concepts. This study poses the question: how does this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree does it owe its existence to literature?

The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna

Author : David Wyn Jones
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009276492
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna by : David Wyn Jones

Download or read book The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna written by David Wyn Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The music of the Strauss family – Johann and his three sons, Johann, Josef and Eduard – enjoys enormous popular appeal. Yet existing biographies have failed to do justice to the family's true significance in nineteenth and early twentieth-century musical history. David Wyn Jones addresses this deficiency, engagingly showing that – from Johann's first engagements in the mid-1820s to the death of Eduard in 1916 – the music making of the family was at the centre of Habsburg Viennese society as it moved between dance hall, concert hall and theatre. The Strauss industry at its height was, he demonstrates, greater than any one of the individuals, with serious personal and domestic consequences including affairs, illness, rivalry and fraud. This zesty biography, spanning over a hundred years of history, brings the dynasty brilliantly to life across a large canvas as it offers fresh and revealing insights into the cultural life of Vienna as a whole.

Liszt Recomposed

Author : Nicolás Puyané
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1837650470
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (376 download)

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Book Synopsis Liszt Recomposed by : Nicolás Puyané

Download or read book Liszt Recomposed written by Nicolás Puyané and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision as the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces. Franz Liszt (1811-86) is mostly known for his virtuosic piano works, but his compositional achievements in the genre of song have so far been neglected. Many of Liszt's Lieder exist in multiple versions, sometimes radically altered, and many with equal claims to 'authenticity'. This has sometimes been viewed as a barrier to performance and a hindrance to scholarly scrutiny. Nicolás Puyané now redresses this imbalance and draws attention to this rich and varied corpus of works. Liszt's songs contain a myriad of intertextual links, not just with the songs of other composers, but also with Liszt's own works in other genres and his own revisions. By focusing on the multi-version songs, the book uncovers how these intertextual relationships have evolved over time. Introducing the concept of "textual fluidity", the book explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision, interpreting the work as being the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces: for instance, the contemporaneous reception of Liszt's early Lieder, or the change in Liszt's performing and compositional environments from his virtuoso to his Weimar years. The book then offers close readings of selected songs, including the Goethe and Schiller Lieder, by applying the concept of textual fluidity. Its findings will impact the way in which we see Urtext editions, arguing instead for an online fluid-text edition as an ideal resource with which to study Liszt's multi-version compositions.

Absolute Music

Author : Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019938472X
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Absolute Music by : Mark Evan Bonds

Download or read book Absolute Music written by Mark Evan Bonds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.

The Beethoven Syndrome

Author : Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190068477
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis The Beethoven Syndrome by : Mark Evan Bonds

Download or read book The Beethoven Syndrome written by Mark Evan Bonds and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Beethoven Syndrome" is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. This was a radically new way of listening that emerged only after Beethoven's death. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general--and not just Beethoven--in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the paradigm of expressive objectivity gave way to one of subjectivity in the years around 1830. The framework of rhetoric thus yielded to a framework of hermeneutics: concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. In the wake of World War I, however, the aesthetics of "New Objectivity" marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high modernist aesthetic that dominated the century's middle decades. Masterfully citing a broad array of source material from composers, critics, theorists, and philosophers, Mark Evan Bonds's engaging study reveals how perceptions of subjective expression have endured, leading to the present era of mixed and often conflicting paradigms of listening.

Musical Vitalities

Author : Holly Watkins
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022659470X
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Musical Vitalities by : Holly Watkins

Download or read book Musical Vitalities written by Holly Watkins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-21 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does it make sense to refer to bird song—a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate—as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest? Redefining music as “the art of possibly animate things,” Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.

Reviving Haydn

Author : Bryan Proksch
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1580465129
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Reviving Haydn by : Bryan Proksch

Download or read book Reviving Haydn written by Bryan Proksch and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1840s Joseph Haydn, who died in 1809 as the most celebrated composer of his generation, had degenerated into the bewigged Papa Haydn, a shallow placeholder in music history who merely invented the forms used by Beethoven.In a remarkable reversal, Haydn swiftly regained his former stature within the opening decades of the twentieth century. Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century examines both the decline and the subsequent resurgence of Haydn's reputation in an effort to better understand the forces that shape critical reception on a broad scale. No single person or event marked the turning point for Haydn's reputation. Instead a broad resurgence reshaped opinion in Europe and the United States in short order. The Haydn revival engaged many of the music world's leading figures -- composers (Vincent d'Indy and Arnold Schoenberg), conductors (Arturo Toscanini), performers (Wanda Landowska), critics (Lawrence Gilman), and scholars (Heinrich Schenker and Donald Tovey) -- each of whom valued Haydn's music for specific reasons and used it to advance particular goals. Yet each advocated for a rehearing and rereading of the composer's works, calling for a new appreciation of Haydn's music. Bryan Proksch is Assistant Professor of Music History at Lamar University.

The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven

Author : Erica Buurman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108852564
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven by : Erica Buurman

Download or read book The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven written by Erica Buurman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The repertoire of the early Viennese ballroom was highly influential in the broader histories of both social dance and music in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet music scholarship has traditionally paid little attention to ballroom dance music before the era of the Strauss dynasty, with the exception of a handful of dances by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. This book positions Viennese social dances in their specific performing contexts and investigates the wider repertoire of the Viennese ballroom in the decades around 1800, most of which stems from dozens of non-canonical composers. Close examination of this material yields new insights into the social contexts associated with familiar dance types, and reveals that the ballroom repertoire of this period connected with virtually every aspect of Viennese musical life, from opera and concert music to the emerging category of entertainment music that was later exemplified by the waltzes of Lanner and Strauss.

The Operetta Empire

Author : Micaela Baranello
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520401220
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis The Operetta Empire by : Micaela Baranello

Download or read book The Operetta Empire written by Micaela Baranello and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 "When the world comes to an end," Viennese writer Karl Kraus lamented in 1908, "all the big city orchestras will still be playing The Merry Widow." Viennese operettas like Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow were preeminent cultural texts during the Austro-Hungarian Empire's final years. Alternately hopeful and nihilistic, operetta staged contemporary debates about gender, nationality, and labor. The Operetta Empire delves into this vibrant theatrical culture, whose creators simultaneously sought the respectability of high art and the popularity of low entertainment. Case studies examine works by Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán, Oscar Straus, and Leo Fall in light of current musicological conversations about hybridity and middlebrow culture. Demonstrating a thorough mastery of the complex early twentieth-century Viennese cultural scene, and a sympathetic and redemptive critique of a neglected popular genre, Micaela Baranello establishes operetta as an important element of Viennese cultural life--one whose transgressions helped define the musical hierarchies of its day.

Liszt and the Symphonic Poem

Author : Joanne Cormac
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316857859
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (168 download)

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Book Synopsis Liszt and the Symphonic Poem by : Joanne Cormac

Download or read book Liszt and the Symphonic Poem written by Joanne Cormac and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz Liszt was preoccupied with a fundamental but difficult question: what is the content of music? His answer lay in his symphonic poems, a group of orchestral pieces intended to depict a variety of subjects drawn from literature, visual art and drama. Today, the symphonic poems are usually seen as alternatives to the symphony post-Beethoven. Analysts stress their symphonic logic, thereby neglecting their 'extramusical' subject matter. This book takes a different approach: it returns these influential pieces to their original performance context in the theatre, arguing that the symphonic poem is as much a dramatic as a symphonic genre. This is evidenced in new analyses of the music that examines the theatricality of these pieces and their depiction of voices, mise-en-scène, gesture and action. Simultaneously, the book repositions Liszt's legacy within theatre history, arguing that his contributions should be placed alongside those of Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner.

Arabesque without End

Author : Anne Leonard
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000461505
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Arabesque without End by : Anne Leonard

Download or read book Arabesque without End written by Anne Leonard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring multidisciplinary research by an international team of leading scholars, this volume addresses the contested aspects of arabesque while exploring its penchant for crossing artistic and cultural boundaries to create new forms. Enthusiastically imported from its Near Eastern sources by European artists, the freely flowing line known as arabesque is a recognizable motif across the arts of painting, music, dance, and literature. From the German Romantics to the Art Nouveau artists, and from Debussy’s compositions to the serpentine choreographies of Loïe Fuller, the chapters in this volume bring together cross-disciplinary perspectives to understand the arabesque across both art historical and musicological discourses.

Women in Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture

Author : Anja Bunzel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1003833608
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis Women in Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture by : Anja Bunzel

Download or read book Women in Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture written by Anja Bunzel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-23 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the circumstances of women’s music-making in the vibrant and diverse environment of the Czech lands during the nineteenth century. It sheds light on little-known women musicians, while also considering more well-known works and composers from new woman-centric perspectives. It shows how the unique environment of Habsburg Central Europe, especially Bohemia and Lower Austria, intersects with gender to reveal hitherto unexplored networks that challenge the methodological nationalism of music studies as well as the discipline’s continued emphasis on singular canonical figures. The main areas of enquiry address aspects of performance and identity both within the Czech lands and abroad; women’s impact on social life with a view to different private, semiprivate, and public contexts and networks; and compositional aesthetics in musical works by and about women, analysed through the lens of piano works, song, choir music, and opera, always with the reception of these works in mind.

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art

Author : Laurie McManus
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019008328X
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Brahms in the Priesthood of Art by : Laurie McManus

Download or read book Brahms in the Priesthood of Art written by Laurie McManus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion) and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or "priest of music," with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms's bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could suit the bachelor Brahms but leave the composer open to speculation. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in a more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological framework that questioned the composer's physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art, but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.