Musicology

Der Aufsatz untersucht Liszts "Album d'un voyageur" und seine Überarbeitung im ersten Jahr der "Années de pèlerinage" aus einer kulturhistorischen Perspektive. Liszts Reise durch die Schweiz und seine musikalische Realisierung wird vor dem Hintergrund seiner Biographie und seiner literarischen Vorbilder (Byron, Senancour , Dumas etc.) betrachtet. Die "Années des Pèlerinage. première année. Suisse", in denen Liszt einige Stücke aus dem "Album" übernimmt und überarbeitet, werden als Ergebnis seines veränderten Umfelds interpretiert: eine Schweiz, die in seiner Weimarer Zeit noch mehr die Züge einer literarisch konstruierten Landschaft trägt.

Aging of the New Musicology«. 2 Siehe die Ausführungen weiter unten in diesem Beitrag. 3 Für die theoretischen Modelle der deutschen Musikwissenschaft von Otto Jahn bis Friedrich Blume vgl. die Beiträge in Gerhard (Hg.), Musikwissenschaft-eine verspätete Disziplin?. Erwähnenswert sind außerdem die innovativen Anregungen, die in den 70er und 80er Jahren von den in Berlin tätigen Musikwissenschaftlern Rudolf Stephan und besonders Carl Dahlhaus ausgingen. Beide brachten u. a. ein verstärktes Forschungsinteresse für die Musik des 19. und 20. Jh.s in das Fach. Zu Dahlhaus siehe weiter unten in diesem Beitrag.

Sposalizio, the piece opening the “Italian year” of Franz Liszt's Années de pèlerinage (first published in 1858), is one of the most analyzed and interpreted compositions in this piano cycle. Much attention has been paid to its connection with the painting of the same title by Raphael, which was printed as an internal title page for the piece's first edition at the explicit request of the composer. This connection has inspired many studies on the relationship between image and music, reinforcing the notion of Sposalizio as a musical realization of Raphael's painting as seen by Liszt for the first time in February 1838 at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Adopting a critical view of the hermeneutical tradition, which has an impact on the interpretation of the piece still today, and assuming that its composition began in Weimar only around 1848, the article proposes an alternative reading of the piece. By connecting pictorial and musical elements, Sposalizio seems to evoke...

The dramma per musica Andromeda liberata, the favola pastorale Euridice, and the azione teatrale Armida placata, all performed for the first time in Vienna at the Theater nächst der Burg in 1750, are, as pasticci, quite exceptional for the Viennese opera repertory of the Theresian Age. Their singularity resides not only in the high number of composers involved, but also in that they are mentioned explicitly at the top of individual vocal numbers in the manuscript scores. In this article we shed new light on the making of these operas by identifying twenty of the borrowed arias, showing how they were not the products of a simultaneous collaboration among all those composers, as early researchers often implied. Their creation was in all probability coordinated by Wagenseil, involved local librettists as well as other composers of the Viennese court, and required a substantial amount of pre-existing music, partly brought to Vienna by some of the singers, probably due to a lack of opera...

For the past 100 years, scholarly engagement with the monumental, politically oriented works that Beethoven composed during the Congress of Vienna has typically confined itself to the contentious
debate over their proper interpretation within his biography and artistic development. Biographers and critics have usually felt compelled to take one of two sides on the issue: either these works represent a debased form of Beethoven’s heroic style put to use for dubious political ends, or they are dated byproducts of a genuinely felt patriotism at a difficult period in European history. Neither view casts this phase of Beethoven's career in a particularly favorable light, forcing us to see him as either a willing producer of imperial propaganda or as a temporarily washed-up creative artist on the wrong side of history. Adherents of both views must grapple with a disquieting fact: the most monumental among these, Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick, immediately won their composer not only unprecedented popularity but also near-unanimous critical acclaim. Or to put it another way, contemporary listeners felt themselves in the presence of great musical art and expressed this awe in very similar terms as modern listeners tend to react to Beethoven’s most revered masterworks.

This heated debate over the canonicity of Beethoven’s political music, which has been thoughtfully summarized in recent years by Nicholas Cook and Nicholas Mathew, has overshadowed a singular achievement that these works embody. Beethoven, a self-professed composer for the connoisseur, this time aimed squarely for the crowd, and hit. As many contemporary composers who have tried their hand at film scoring or popular music can attest, the art of writing for a broader audience is extraordinarily difficult and only underestimated at the composer’s peril. It requires both a sophisticated understanding of a wide range of tastes and a sure sense of style that allows room for expressive authenticity, even at the height of rhetorical simplification.

With a close reading of "Der glorreiche Augenblick" as its centerpiece, this paper will explore the musical reasons for Beethoven’s unprecedented success. The popular style he employs in the cantata will be re-embedded in its stylistic context, seen especially through musical topoi, key characteristics, and their development in the late-Enlightenment opera and oratorio that audiences during the Vienna Congress were still familiar with. In parallel, Beethoven’s unique approach to text-setting in the Lieder of the 1810’s will provide an often-overlooked context. What is at stake is less an attempt at rehabilitating the political works into the canon, as it is at seizing the opportunity to hear what, stylistically, Beethoven and his largest audiences might have had in common, and what, when he later aimed for the "Millionen," he assumed they would be able to hear.

A rich source for the musical life of Bonn toward the end of the Electoral period, the exceptionally large and relatively well-preserved music library contains hundreds of thousands of pages of manuscript material. Offering a first systematic study of this corpus, this paper uses codicological evidence to put the various paper-types in chronological order. In the process, several of Beethoven's early works, which he dated himself, have turned out to be considerably later than he claimed them to be. Contains photographs of many watermarks of Swiss and Swabian music papers from the late 18th century.

El libro finaliza con una amplia y nutrida reseña bibliográfica, junto con un completo catálogo sobre la obra del compositor. Este incluye doscientas composiciones ordenadas cronológicamente, con indicación de los correspondientes autores de los textos, junto con información relevante acerca de sus intérpretes, contexto y lugar de ejecución. Asimismo, como una sección complementaria, Silvia Herrera hace referencia a 73 composiciones adicionales, las que están sin fecha de creación. Con todo, esta publicación no solo permite adentrarse en la vida, pensamiento y obra del compositor, sino también en una parte importante de la historia musical, política y social de Chile. Se trata de un libro amplio, completo e integrador, que merece estar en las bibliotecas de diferentes escuelas, institutos y conservatorios nacionales e internacionales, en especial en aquellos lugares que consideran a la investigación musical como un campo fértil y relevante de trabajo, en pro del mayor desarrollo y enriquecimiento de nuestro patrimonio.

Die lebhafte Korrespondenz zwischen Herzog Albrecht von Brandenburg-Preußen, bis 1525 Großmeister des Deutschen Ordens und einer der ersten weltlichen Herrscher, die den reformatorischen Glauben annahmen und unterstützten, und Ludwig Senfl respektive Angestellten der Münchner Hofkapelle ist der wissenschaftlichen Forschung seit Moritz Fürstenaus Veröffentlichung von vier Briefen Senfls im Jahr 1863 bekannt. 1 Fürstenaus Publikation war jedoch nicht die erste, die auf diese Briefe einging, verwies er doch auf einen Artikel von Johann Voigt, in dem dieser bereits 1852, und damit elf Jahre früher, auf den Briefverkehr Senfls mit Albrecht aufmerksam gemacht hatte. 2