Modern German Music
Recollections and Criticisms

Lively descriptions of the musical life of German cities, and extended essays on Spohr, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn.

Henry Fothergill Chorley (Author)

9781108001601, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

432 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm, 0.8 kg

Henry Fothergill Chorley was music critic of The Athenaeum for over thirty years, and published several books on the state of contemporary European music, including Music and Manners in France and Germany (1841) and Thirty Years' Musical Recollections (1862), both reissued in this series. In the two-volume Modern German Music, published in 1854, he revisits many of the topics and places discussed in the 1841 volume, but views them from the other side of the Year of Revolution, 1848, which, he argues, changed the cultural as well as the political atmosphere of the German states significantly and permanently. Lively descriptions of German cities, their culture and especially their music festivals are accompanied by extended essays on Spohr, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn, but Chorley is by no means an uncritical observer, and his comments on the rise of nationalism and militarism in the German states after 1848 now seem prophetic.

Part I. Weimar and Leipsic: 1. Leipsic in 1839–40
2. Traces of Bach
3. Musical journalism
Part II. Dr Spohr's Music: 1. A criticism
Part III. A Glance at Vienna: 1. Traditions of Vienna
2. Down the Danube
3. Autumn music and dancing
4. The Leopoldstadt theatre and Mozart
5. Austrian influences on art
6. Schubert and his music
Part IV. Music in the Rhineland: 1. Rhine scenery
2. The opera at Frankfort, 1844
3. The Beethoven festival at Bonn, 1845
4. Beethoven's music at Bonn
5. Beethoven as an influence
6. Music at Liege and Cologne
7. Mademoiselle Lind in opera
Part V: The Last Days of Mendelssohn
1. The last days of Mendelssohn.

Subject Areas: Classical music [c 1750 to c 1830 AVGC4]