Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century
The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven’s heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions – national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual – that filtered not only into ‘classical’ large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music.
The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction
Beate Kutschke and Katherine Butler
Part I. The Configuration of Heroic Music as a Tool for Shaping Moral and Political Identity
1. Holy Heroes: On the Varieties of a Metaphor and its Musical Expression in the Medieval
Historiae
Roman Hankeln
2. The Heroic in Music and the Musicality of the Hero in Late Sixteenth-Century England
Katherine Butler
3.
Virtù eroica: Heroic Music, Social Norms, and Musical Reflections in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy
Berthold Over
4. Handel’s Heroes
Jonathan Rhodes Lee
Part II. Music, its Ethics and Politics – Beyond ‘Beethoven Hero’
5. Design Principles for the Musical Heroic
Lawrence M. Zbikowski
6. Tonal Relationships and Spiritual Heroism in Beethoven’s Late Style
Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska
7. Music, Content, and Context: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Music in the Light of the Romantic Heroic Vision
Csilla Pethő-Vernet
8. The Austro-German Heroic in the Music-Hermeneutical Era: Musical Discourse in the Service of Nationalist-Patriotic Armament between 1887 and the Early 1930s
Beate Kutschke
Part III. Heroic Music and its Moralities in Dictatorships and Post-Heroic Democracies
9. Heroicizing Handel in the Third Reich: Towards the Collapse of Political Propaganda
Juliane Riepe
10. Soviet War Symphonies and the Heroic Russian Epic
Nathan Seinen
11. ‘Someone to Save the Day’: Popular Music, Springsteen, and the Circle of Hero Production
Dietrich Helms
12. Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho, and Heroes of the Twenty-First Century
Judith Lochhead
Afterword
Scott Burnham
Bibliography
Index
Circa l’autore
KATHERINE BUTLER is Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University. She is the author of Music in Elizabethan Court Politics (2015 and 2019).
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