A provocative re-examination of a major romantic composer, Rethinking Schumann provides fresh approaches to Schumann's oeuvre and its reception from the perspectives of literature, visual arts, cultural history, performance studies, dance, and film. Traditionally, research has focused on biographical links between the composer and his music, encouraging the assumption that Schumann was solitary, divorced from reality, and frequently associated with "untimeliness." These eighteen new essays argue from a multitude of perspectives that Schumann was in fact very much a man of his time, informed not only by music but also the culture and society around him. The book further reveals that the composer's reputation has been shaped significantly by, for example, changes in attitudes towards German romanticism and its history, and recent developments in musical scholarship and performance. Rethinking Schumann takes into account cultural and social-institutional frameworks, engages with ongoing and new issues of reception and historiography, and offers fresh music-analytical insights. As a whole, the essays assemble a portrait of the artist that reflects the different ways in which Schumann has been understood and misunderstood over the past two hundred years. The volume is, in short, a timely reassessment of this ultimately non-untimely figure's legacy. While the essays consider some of Schumann's most famous music (Dichterliebe, Kinderszenen and the Piano Quintet), they also provide crucial adjustment to judgments against the composer's later works by explaining their musical features not as the result of diminishing creative capacity but as reflections of the political and social situations of mid-nineteenth-century German culture and technological developments. Schumann is revealed to have been a musician engaged by and responsive to his surroundings, whose reputation was formed to a great extent by popular culture, both in his own lifetime as he responded to particular poets and painters, and later, as his life and works were responded to by subsequent generations.

Critical essays on the music of the German composer Schumann. Also includes "Chronological list of compositions."

Examines the complicated history of a Jewish cultural organization supported by Nazi Germany

This book presents a collection of the writings of Martin Cooper, chief music critic of the Daily Telegraph from 1954-1976, a well-known broadcaster on the BBC, and author of several books and translations. Topics discussed include nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, opera, literature, philosophy, religion, and the nature of criticism.

Essays originally appeared as broadcast talks, lectures, articles, etc.

Originally published by Duke University Press in 1992, this book examines Strauss's life and work from a number of approaches and during various periods of his long career, opening up unique corridors of insight into a crucial time in German history. Beyond the enlightening introduction by Michael Kennedy, individual essays use Strauss's creative work as a framework for larger musicological questions such as the tension between narrative and structure in program music, the problem of extended tonality at the turn of the century, stylistic choice versus stylistic obligation, and conflicting perspectives of progressive versus conservative music.

This second volume of the two-volume set Rethinking Communication presents examples of the diversity of perspectives and theoretical problems that currently occupy the attention of the field. Each of the 30 chapters exemplify a particular paradigm or perspective by describing a body of work or a particular research project. Seeing the diversity of the field as a response to the realities of an increasingly pluralistic world, the editors hope this and the companion volume will help explain where the field is headed so scholars can seek answers to such questions as how to constitute a scholarly community in the face of existing pluralism, how to construct a coherent educational curriculum, and how to determine standards of evaluation.