Karol Berger – författare

This philosophical theory of art, addressed to anyone with a serious interest in the arts, has three main objectives: to shift the focus of aesthetics from the question "What is art?" to the question "What is art for?"; to describe the social and historical situation of art today; and to combine aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. A distinctive feature of the book is its argument that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a particularly revealing fashion.

What, if anything, has art to do with the rest of our lives, and in particular with those ethical and political issues that matter to us most? Will art created today be likely to play a role in our lives as profound as that of the best art of the past? A Theory of Art shifts the focus of aesthetics from the traditional debate of "what is art?" to the engaging question of "what is art for?" Skillfully describing the social and historical situation of art today, author Karol Berger argues that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a radical, acute, and revealing fashion. He also uniquely combines aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. Offering a careful synthesis of a wide breadth of scholarship from art history, musicology, literary studies, political philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics, and written in a clear, accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the arts.

A new analysis of Mahler’s symphonies, placing each within the context of his musical way of being in and experiencing the world.Between 1888 and 1909 Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies and the orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde; his tenth symphony was left incomplete at his death in 1911. Mahler’s Symphonic World provocatively suggests that over his lifetime, the composer pursued a single vision and a single, ideal symphony that strived to capture his personal outlook on human existence. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, when all trust in firm philosophical and spiritual foundations had evaporated, Mahler’s music reflected a deep preoccupation with human suffering and transience and a search for sources of possible consolation.In Karol Berger’s reading, each of the symphonies follows a similar trajectory, with an opening quest leading to the final unveiling of a transcendent, consolatory vision. By juxtaposing single movements—the opening Allegros, the middle movements, the Finales—across different works, Berger traces recurring plotlines and imagery and discloses the works’ multiple interrelationships as well as their cohesiveness around a central idea. Ultimately, Mahler’s Symphonic World locates Mahler’s music within the matrix of intellectual currents that defined his epoch and offers a revelatory picture of his musical way of being in the world.

In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian world view. Until this historical moment, as Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion", music was simply 'in time'. Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's "Don Giovanni", the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow.Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.

Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

Beyond Reason relates Wagner’s works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

The main purpose of this book is to clarify the meaning and use of the conventions governing the practice of implied accidentals in vocal polyphony from the early fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century - a problem which has fascinated musicologists for over a hundred years now. Musicians of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance did not think it was necessary to write down all accidentals; since some accidental inflections were implied by the musical context, performers made them whether or not they were notated. This practice imposes on modern readers of early music sources, the task of supplying all such conventionally implied accidental inflections and the successful achievement of this task depends on a knowledge and understanding of the conventions involved. Since the practice of implied accidentals can be understood only in a wider context of compositional, notational, and performing practice of the period, the book attempts to throw light on some aspects of these practices as well.

For most music historians, the modernism of the twentieth century was until recently the only appearance of the "modern" in music. The widely perceived recent decline of musical modernism makes it now possible to see the modernism of the twentieth century as a chapter in a much longer story, the story of musical modernity. The principal purpose of the present book is to encourage a debate over musical modernity; a debate that would consider the question whether, and to what extent, an examination of the history of European art music may enrich our picture of modernity and whether our understanding of music's development may be transformed by insights into the nature of modernity provided by other historical disciplines. This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on November 9-11, 2001 to honor Professor Reinhold Brinkmann.