The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque

This book explores the 'picturesque' in the music of Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven.

Annette Richards (Author)

9780521027533, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

272 pages, 24 b/w illus. 55 music examples
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.412 kg

'The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque is a major contribution to the study of eighteenth-century music … packed with intriguing insights, appropriate excerpts of music and elegant illustrations. In true picturesque spirit, it keeps the reader curious to find out what unusual perspective will be disclosed on turning over the next page.' Eighteenth-Century Music

A crucial category across all the arts in the late eighteenth century, the picturesque has lost its currency in modern musical criticism, in spite of its rich potential to shed new light on the fantastical elements of instrumental music in general and the genre of the free fantasia in particular. Just as English garden architecture, in which the picturesque found its origins, was changing the landscape of continental Europe, the fantastical elements of irregularity, temporal displacement, ambiguity, interruption, and self-referentiality in the music of Bach, Haydn and Beethoven were both lauded and criticized in terms borrowed from the discourse of the picturesque. This study reaffirms the centrality of the free fantasia and fantastical gesture in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the visual, the literary and the musical.

List of figures
Acknowledgements
1. Framing the musical picturesque
2. C. P. E. Bach and the landscapes of genius
3. The picturesque sketch and the interpretation of instrumental music
4. Haydn's humour, Bach's fantasy
5. Sentiment undone: solitude and the clavichord cult
6. Picturesque Beethoven and the veiled Isis
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Western "classical" music [AVGC]