1st Edition
The Muse as Eros Music, Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Modern Imagination
By Stephen Downes
Copyright 2006
312 Pages
by
Routledge
312 Pages
by
Routledge
312 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
The Muse has long been figured as a divine or erotically alluring consort to the virile male artist, who may inspire him or lead him to the edge of madness. This book explores the changing cultural expressions of the relationship between the male artist with a beloved, imagined or desired Muse, to offer new and penetrating perspectives on musical representations and transformations of creative... Read more
Contents: Introduction; The Muse as immaculate beloved: Stendhal's 'crystallization' process and listening to Rossini and Beethoven; Schumann, Chopin, the fan of Eros, and the beloved's kiss; The Muse as temptress and redemptress: Sibelius's early symphonic narratives; Mahler's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies: Idyllic fantasies, the sublime, formal mastery, and processes of mourning and reparation; 'She dies': Trauma and erotic elegy in Bartók's pre-First World War music; Names, chords and the 'pale princess' in Debussy's musical language of love; Poulenc's erotics of humour, melancholy, abjection and redemption; Names, chords and Lulu's portrait as Muse; Fetishistic 'Inventions on a Chord': Szymanowski, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Weill and Poulenc; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Stephen Downes is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey, UK.
'A wonderful book. Once the hermeneutic dust had settled, it was inevitable that a book would emerge which would put the New Musicology on solidly analytical foundations. This is that book. In ten richly-packed and eloquent chapters, Downes pursues his Muse from Beethoven and Rossini through to Berg and Poulenc, effortlessly straddling the divide between Romanticism and Modernism, informing his survey of the musical erotic with a seemingly enyclopaedic knowledge. A book which puts the music back into interdisciplinary music studies.' Michael Spitzer, University of Durham, UK
