Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow

by Berger, Karol

• ISBN13: 9780520250918
• ISBN10: 0520250915
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-15
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two ground breaking 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 worldview. 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'sDon Giovanni,the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger's case studies range widely to include Monteverdi and Beethoven. His singular contribution is to expand the argument by looking into the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period. The result, as described in the preface, is the eloquent "story of the emergence of human autonomy and the resulting transformation in the fundamental experience and understanding of how time is shaped."

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Prelude

L'Orfeo, or the Anxiety of the Moderns

Bach's Cycle

The Arrested Procession Appendix: St. Matthew Passion, opening chorus, full score

A Crystal Flying Like a Bullet

There Is No Time Like God's Time Interlude

Jean-Jacques contra Augustinum: A Little Treatise on Moral-Political Theology Augustine

The Birth of Autonomy Rousseau The Christian and Modern Outlooks Compared

The Emancipation of Time From Cosmos to History

Mozart's Arrow

Mozart at Play

The Hidden Center

Between Incoherence and Inauthenticity: Don Giovanni and Faust

Die Zauberflouml;te, or the Self-Assertion of the Moderns Postlude

Between Utopia and Melancholy: Beethoven and the Aesthetic State

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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