F0511 Music and Literature

The rise of Western music to its 19th-century heights was interwoven with its new meanings for philosophy and literature. To the German Romantics \"song\" evoked the deep past, the dream of a coherent world, as well as the authentic history encoded in folksongs. For ETA Hoffmann, reviewing an early performance of Beethoven\'s Fifth Symphony, the abstract intensity of symphonic music raised it above all other art-forms; Schopenhauer then argues that music is a representation of the primal Will, or life-force. Purity, power, comprehensiveness: these imagined qualities impel both literary images of music and the actual ambitions of composers. We will read texts by Novalis, Eichendorff and Hoffmann; then focus on the \"total works of art\" of the later 19th century: Tristan and Isolde, by Wagner (who died in Venice), and Verdi\'s Otello, set in Cyprus during the Venetian Empire. No prior musical knowledge is required.The power of music is increasingly viewed by the early 20th-century modernists as a social phenomenon shaping human dreams, discontents, even everyday self-understanding. We will read stories on this theme by Thomas Mann (Tristan), James Joyce (The Dead), Kafka, D\'Annunzio, and Virginia Woolf. In the 1920s the social became radically political: we will study Alban Berg\'s Wozzeck both in its political immediacy and its relation to its source, an 1837 drama by Georg Büchner. And from the Italian 1920s comes the little known opera Doktor Faust, by Ferruccio Busoni, whose libretto is a consciously fragmented version of Goethe\'s Faust.