This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the
Carl Dahlhaus here treats Nietzsche's youthful analysis of the contradictions in Wagner's doctrine (and, more generally, in romantic musical aesthetics); the question of periodicization in romantic an
This book is an introduction to the esthetics of music. Aesthetics, which were of prime importance in thinking about music in the nineteenth century, are today sometimes suspected of being idle speculation. Yet judgments about music and every sort of musical activity are based on aesthetic presuppositions. Carl Dahlhaus gives an account of developments in the aesthetics of music from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. He combines a historical and systematic approach. Central themes in music are grouped together to illustrate both the historical course of events and a systematic unity of the essential elements in the aesthetics of music. For this edition, the late Carl Dahlhaus provided an annotated bibliography. William Austin has added books for the English-speaking reader, and has also supplied notes to the text to help the student.
This book is the first thoroughgoing study in any language of the philosophy of music history. Drawing on competing philosophies of history throughout the ages, from the Enlightenment to the French structuralists, from the German idealist tradition to Russian formalism, the late Carl Dahlhaus applies the thoughts of these various schools to the specialist requirements of music history and assesses their advantages and shortcomings. Special attention is given to an appraisal of whether Marxist critiques are still viable and where they stand in need of rethinking. For this English edition, the author provided an extensive annotated bibliography.
With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints."Essential reading for anyone interest
Previous studies of Wagner's operas have tended to approach the works as chunks of autobiography, philosophical speculations or historical-political comments on the age in which they were written. Pro
