The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
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Works of art have been compared to icebergs: what is visible is but a small part of the whole. An artwork might seem to exist in splendid isolation, but that impression is misleading. Cultural products inevitably arise from a context, a submerged landscape that is often not easily accessible. It is an undertaking of research to bring such things to light...
1. Mozart’s Second Thoughts
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The popular image of Mozart’s music as having sprung into existence fully formed as the miraculous product of genius, as is conveyed in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus and in Milos Forman’s film of the same title, is seriously misleading. While Mozart did not make nearly as many sketches and drafts for his works in progress as did Beethoven, he nevertheless...
2. Beethoven’s Unfinished Piano Trio in F Minor from 1816
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The subject of this chapter is a piano trio that would have become one of Beethoven’s major chamber works had it been completed. On 1 October 1816 the composer wrote to publisher Robert Birchall in London concerning various publication arrangements...
3. Schumann, Beethoven, and the “Distant Beloved”
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We turn now to a much-discussed composition by Robert Schumann, a piece that lies at the center of his innovative cluster of piano works from the 1830s and that was conceived in 1836 at the stressful nadir of his struggle for the hand of Clara Wieck, the brilliant young pianist who became his wife four years later. Perhaps no other work by Schumann underwent a more fascinating genesis. As originally conceived, the composition...
4. Aesthetics of Integration in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony
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The intertwining of song and symphony so characteristic of Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn years did not end with his purely orchestral Fifth Symphony but assumed another form. Unlike the preceding three symphonies, which include both song quotations and texted movements, the Fifth Symphony contains no vocal setting; instead...
5. Folklore Transformed in Bartók’s Dance Suite
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In his book The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig looked back at the land of his youth and early manhood, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the pre–World War I era, as a “world of security” in which “everything had its form, its appropriate measure and weight.” Zweig observed...
6. Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Hommage à R. Sch.
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Like Franz Schubert’s Winterreise cycle, György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, op. 24 (1985–86), centers on the archetypal theme of wandering, the seeking of a path that remains profoundly elusive. Certain of the trenchant texts extracted by Kurtág from Kafka’s...
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About the Author, Production Notes, Back Cover
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Page Count: 248
Publication Year: 2012