Read more
This book explores the intersection of music and Hellenism in nineteenth-century Germany.It shows how productions such as that of the Prussian court of Sophocles'
Antigone with music by Felix Mendelssohn reflect an effort by the rulers who commissioned them to appropriate the legacy of Greece for the creation of a German cultural and national identity.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Ancient Greece and the German Cultural Imagination
- 2. Mendelssohn's Antigone and the Rebirth of Greek Tragedy
- 3. The Reception of Antigone and the Aesthetics of Appropriation
- 4. The Growth of a Genre: Taubert's Medea and the Greek Stage
- Revival in Berlin
- 5. Mendelssohn and Oedipus in the Age of Christianity
- 6. Lachner and the Emergence of a New Athens
- 7. The Wagnerian Turn
- 8. Epilogue: The Decline of a Genre
- Bibliography
About the author
Jason Geary is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan. He earned his Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University and also holds degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of Michigan. His research interests center primarily on the music of the nineteenth century, in particular that of Felix Mendelssohn, and he has published several articles and book chapters exploring the intersection of music and Hellenism. He has also been the recipient of many prestigious grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright Grant and membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Summary
This book explores the intersection of music and Hellenism in nineteenth-century Germany.It shows how productions such as that of the Prussian court of Sophocles' Antigone with music by Felix Mendelssohn reflect an effort by the rulers who commissioned them to appropriate the legacy of Greece for the creation of a German cultural and national identity.
Additional text
Gearys monograph is well researched and engagingly written, and his painstaking approach to interpretation makes it a model of this kind of scholarship ... it is by far the most useful point of access to this intriguing and significant body of music currently available, and will command the interest of classicists and cultural historians as well as musicologists.
