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The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy

Online ISBN:
9780199345007
Print ISBN:
9780199736119
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy

Jason Geary
Jason Geary

Associate Professor

University of Michigan
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Published online:
16 April 2014
Published in print:
3 February 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199345007
Print ISBN:
9780199736119
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book uncovers a largely forgotten chapter in music history by considering the intersection of music and Hellenism in nineteenth-century Germany. Drawing on research from the fields of musicology, history, classical studies, and theater studies, it explores the trend of combining music and Greek tragedy that began in 1841 with Felix Mendelssohn’s wildly popular score for the groundbreaking Prussian court production of Sophocles’ Antigone and that later included productions of Euripides’ Medea, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King with music by Wilhelm Taubert, Mendelssohn, and Franz Lachner, respectively. Staged at royal courts in Berlin and Munich, these productions reflect an effort by the rulers who commissioned them to appropriate the legacy of Greece for the creation of a German cultural and national identity, while the music involved seemed at the time to mark the advent of an entirely new Romantic genre. This study also reassesses Wagner’s reception of the Greeks, highlighting the degree to which he was reacting against works such as Mendelssohn’s Antigone when he called for the creation of a music drama rooted in the spirit of Attic tragedy and arguing that the Ring cycle can be understood as the composer’s attempt to reclaim the mythic significance of the Oedipus myth in the service of his own aesthetic aims. Viewed within a framework of Germany’s longstanding obsession with Greece, these developments attest to the enduring significance of antiquity as a powerful trope that helped to shape the European cultural and artistic landscape of the nineteenth century.

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