Tenderness of Silent Minds - Benjamin Britten and His War Requiem

The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions.

Offering a reading of Britten's views about the value and beauty of the body that situates these in the context of his thirty-nine year partnership with his lover, the singer Peter Pears, and also surveying pacifist themes in works written both before and after War Requiem, Nussbaum presents a compelling framework for critically assessing Britten's oeuvre. Nussbaum engages with a remarkably wide range of Britten's works, examining his treatment of aggression and its roots in his collaborations with the poet W.H. Auden, offering readings of the value placed on the body in early partnerships with Britten's beloved and singer Peter Pears, and surveying pacifist themes in Britten's earlier works. The analysis throughout is enriched with perspectives from Britten's personal letters and thoughtful study of the social and political backdrop of fear and homophobic disgust in mid-twentieth century Britain.

According to Nussbaum's interpretation, War Requiem confronts listeners with the reality of bodily experience in war, eliciting compassion by its depiction of beauty, vulnerability, and eroticism. Issuing a stern warning, it points the way to hope for postwar reconciliation. Nussbaum's careful analysis of Britten's score and its settings of both the Requiem Mass and Owen's poems, their historic performance at Coventry, and its philosophical commitments, unveils a message of human love in a hostile world that resonates as powerfully today as in post-war Britain.

List of contents

• CONTENTS


• Part I. Music, Bodies, Vulnerability, War


• Chapter 1. Introduction: Britten and Coventry


• Chapter 2. Music as Representation of Bodily Striving and Failure


• Chapter 3. Britten, Auden, and the Spirit of War: Persecuting Bodies


• Chapter 4. Britten and Pears: the Beauty and Nobility of Human Love


• Chapter 5. Pacifisms and the Music of Peace


• Chapter 6. Reconciliation: Aldeburgh, Wolfenden, Coventry


• Part II. War Requiem


• Conclusion. The Way Forward

About the author

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of emotion and morality, she is the author of The Fragility of Goodness, Creating Capabilities, and Justice for Animals, among others, and has published hundreds of articles of monumental impact on the development of philospohy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Summary

The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions.

Offering a reading of Britten's views about the value and beauty of the body that situates these in the context of his thirty-nine year partnership with his lover, the singer Peter Pears, and also surveying pacifist themes in works written both before and after War Requiem, Nussbaum presents a compelling framework for critically assessing Britten's oeuvre. Nussbaum engages with a remarkably wide range of Britten's works, examining his treatment of aggression and its roots in his collaborations with the poet W.H. Auden, offering readings of the value placed on the body in early partnerships with Britten's beloved and singer Peter Pears, and surveying pacifist themes in Britten's earlier works. The analysis throughout is enriched with perspectives from Britten's personal letters and thoughtful study of the social and political backdrop of fear and homophobic disgust in mid-twentieth century Britain.

According to Nussbaum's interpretation, War Requiem confronts listeners with the reality of bodily experience in war, eliciting compassion by its depiction of beauty, vulnerability, and eroticism. Issuing a stern warning, it points the way to hope for postwar reconciliation. Nussbaum's careful analysis of Britten's score and its settings of both the Requiem Mass and Owen's poems, their historic performance at Coventry, and its philosophical commitments, unveils a message of human love in a hostile world that resonates as powerfully today as in post-war Britain.

Report

With this study of Britten's music, centrally focused on his War Requiem, Martha C. Nussbaum has given readers a beautiful and many-sided book. It is simultaneously an insightful study of a great composer, an informed and sensitive interpretation of one of his masterpieces, and a deep philosophical reflection on attitudes to war. No previous book has demonstrated the philosophical significance and complexity of a body of musical works in so convincing a way. It is a model for future philosophical writing about music, and, in Nussbaum's dialogue with Britten's pacifism, an illuminating response to the horrors of war.. Philip Kitcher, Columbia University (Emeritus)

Product details

• Authors: Martha C Nussbaum, Martha C. Nussbaum, Martha C. ( Nussbaum
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.11.2024
• EAN: 9780197568538
• ISBN: 978-0-19-756853-8
• No. of pages: 296
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Monographs; Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups, MUSIC / Individual Composer & Musician, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, Philosophy: aesthetics, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Composers and songwriters