Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book explores the idea of expression and meaning in Mahler's music by examining its plural voices—their tone, manner, and historical resonance. Ranging across all the symphonies and songs, it considers how these works foreground the idea of artifice and irony while at the same time presenting themselves as acts of authentic expression and disclosure. While this music is shaped by strategies of calling forth its own mysterious voice—as if from nature or the Unconscious—at other times it reveals itself as something constructed, often self‐consciously assembled from familiar and well‐worn materials. It plays constantly with different musical genres and styles, moving between them in a way that often bewildered audiences. The result is that Mahler's symphonies exacerbate to breaking point their own inherited ideals of symphonic unity, narrative struggle, and transcendent affirmation. Their quality of radical self‐critique creates a link between the late‐18th‐century idea of romantic irony and the late‐20th‐century idea of deconstruction. But Mahler's music is not easily subsumed by either idea. While it acknowledges the conventionality of all its voices, at the same time, through the intensity of its tone, it speaks “as if” what it said were true. The urgency of this act, bound up with the Viennese modernism that Mahler prefigured, remains powerfully resonant for our own age.

Focusing on the music of the great song composers--Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss--Poetry Into Song offers a systematic introduction to the performance and analysis of Lieder.

Almost fifty years after the original event, Willibald Alexis’s historical novel Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht (1852) commemorated a musical performance that had taken place on October 16, 1805, at Berlin’s Nationaltheater. According to both Alexis’s reimagining and contemporary reports, after the closing “Reiterlied” of Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager a new war song was sung by audience and actors. The sensation this caused—in a city awaiting its troops’ departure for war against Napoleon—established Schiller’s play as a privileged site for political singing in Berlin and across German lands for the next decade. In this article, I account for this first occasion, its unusual press reception, and its influence by contextualizing it within a growing early nineteenth-century discourse on public communal singing, arguing that Berliners were self-consciously enacting French patriotic behaviors. As well as indicating longer-term continuities, I distinguish the political role attributed to war songs in this period from the more familiar Bildung-orientated discourse on choral singing and folk song. In contrast to established accounts that locate the emergence of popular political song in the volunteer movements of the Wars of Liberation and the national politics of the Burschenschaften and male-voice choirs, I suggest that these early performances show the official imposition of public political singing—as a kind of “defensive modernization”—in response to the Napoleonic threat. I thus revise our understanding of the establishment of singing as a modern political tool in German lands, and of the role of singing in the development of political agency and national sentiment more broadly.