Scott Messing - Böcker

A richly detailed examination of the historical reception of Franz Schubert in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, with a concentration on fin-de-siècle Vienna.Schubert in the European Imagination: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna examines the composer's historical and cultural reception by Viennese modernists. By 1900, issues of gender had crossed with those of nationalism, especially in thecity that came to consider Schubert as its favorite musical son. As Messing here explains and explores in rich detail, composers, writers, and visual artists manipulated the conventions of the composer and gender in ways that critiqued the very culture that had created this image.In order to expose the hypocrisy of social relationships, painter Gustav Klimt and writers Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Peter Altenberg exploited the collision between innocence and sexuality, and Schubert was a readily familiar sign for the former.The composer Arnold Schoenberg substituted his own formulation of Schubert in place of the older, popular conceptions of the composer, adding him to an illustrious list of figures whose significance he sought to redesign.Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in Music (University ofRochester Press, 1996).

How Franz Schubert and his compositions were viewed in nineteenth-century European criticism, literature, and the visual arts, from Schumann to George Eliot to Whistler.In Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras, Scott Messing examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture.The concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in 1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's Mädchencharakter ("girlish" character), by contrast to the purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. What attracted Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident in some of Schumann's own works that echo those of Schubert's in intriguing ways.Schubert's supposedly feminine quality acted upon the popular consciousness also through the writers and artists -- in German-speaking Europe but also in France and England -- whose fictional characters perform and hear Schubert'smusic. The figures discussed include Musset, Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot, Henry James, Beardsley, Whistler, Storm, Fontane, and Heinrich and Thomas Mann.Over time, Schubert's stature became inextricably entwinedwith concepts of the distinct social roles of men and women, especially in domestic settings. For a composer whose reputation was principally founded upon musical genres that both the public and professionals construed as most suitable for private performance, the lure to locate Schubert within domestic spaces and to attach to him the attributes of its female occupants must have been irresistible.The story told is not without its complications, as this book reveals in an analysis of the response to Schubert in England, where the composer's eminence was questioned by critics whose arguments sometimes hinged on the more problematic aspects of gender in Victorian culture.Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in Music (University of Rochester Press, 1996).

In Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras, Scott Messing examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture.The concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in 1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's Mädchencharakter ["girlish" character], by contrast to the purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. What attracted Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident in some of Schumann's own works that echo those of Schubert's in intriguing ways.Volume 2, Schubert in the European Imagination: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna examines the composer's historical and cultural reception by Viennese modernists. By 1900, issues of gender had crossed with those of nationalism, especially in the city that came to consider Schubert as its favorite musical son. As Messing here explains and explores in rich detail, composers, writers, and visual artists manipulated the conventions of the composer and gender in ways that critiqued the very culture that had created this image.Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in Music (University of Rochester Press, 1996).

Examines the history of musical self-quotation, and reveals and explores a previously unidentified case of Schubert quoting one of his own songs in a major instrumental work.Enthusiasts and experts have long relished Schubert's quotations of his own music. This study centers on a previously unidentified pairing: "Ave Maria," one of his most beloved songs, and the Piano Trio no. 2, a masterpiece that holds a unique position in his career. Messing's Self-Quotation in Schubert interrogates the concept of self-quotation from the standpoints of terminology and authorial intent, and it demonstrates, for the first time, how Schubert's practice of self-quotation relates to prevailing practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Messing goes on to analyze in detail the musical relationships between the two works and to investigate thecircumstances that led Schubert to compose each of them."Ave Maria" is one of the few Schubert songs for which we have documentation of some early private performances, and the trio stood at the heart of Schubert's only public concert devoted to his works. Messing establishes that Schubert sought to convey an associative meaning with this self-quotation, trusting in his contemporaries' familiarity with the original melody and with Walter Scott's poem, a text that carried profound resonances in Catholic Vienna. Scrutinizing this evidence yields the symbolic purpose behind Schubert's allusion to "Ave Maria" in the piano trio: honoring the recently deceased Beethoven andvalidating Schubert as his legatee.SCOTT MESSING is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music Emeritus at Alma College.