Romantic Music Aesthetics
Creating a Politics of Emotion

Reassesses the political motives and consequences of Romantic music aesthetics and gives nuance to our understanding of its relationship to emotion.

Matthew Pritchard (Author)

9781009491648, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 November 2024

276 pages
25 x 17.6 x 2.1 cm, 0.64 kg

This book reassesses the place of politics and emotion within Romantic music aesthetics. Drawing together insights from the history of emotions, cultural history, and studies of philosophical idealism, 'affective relationality' – the channelling of emotion through music's social and cultural synergies – emerges as key to Romantic aesthetic thought. Now familiar concepts such as theatrical illusion, genius, poetic criticism, and the renewed connection of art to mythology and religion opened new spaces for audiences' feelings, as thinkers such as Rousseau, Herder, Germaine de Staël, Joseph Mainzer, Pierre Leroux and George Sand sought alternatives to the political status quo. Building on the sentimental tradition in eighteenth-century art and politics, the Romantics created ways of listening to music imbued not just with melancholic longing for transcendence but also with humour, gothic fantasy, satire, and political solidarity. The consequences have extended far beyond the classical concert hall into numerous domains of popular culture from melodrama, romances and political songwriting to musical theatre and film.

Table of contents
Figures
Music examples
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Staging sentimentality
2. The legacy of Rousseau
3. The composer as genius
4. Idealist aesthetics and the music critic
5. Picturing the musical Absolute
6. Between idealism and realism I: the French socialists
7. Between idealism and realism II: after Hegel
8. From Hanslick to the twentieth century
Conclusion: The fate of feeling
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Music reviews & criticism [AVC]