Description

In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two groundbreaking 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's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

PRELUDE. L'Orfeo, or the Anxiety of the Moderns

PART I. BACH'S CYCLE

1. The Arrested Procession

Appendix: St. Matthew Passion, opening chorus, full score

2. A Crystal Flying Like a Bullet

3. 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

PART II. MOZART'S ARROW

4. Mozart at Play

5. The Hidden Center

6. Between Incoherence and Inauthenticity: Don Giovanni and Faust

7. Die Zauberflöte, or the Self-Assertion of the Moderns

POSTLUDE. Between Utopia and Melancholy: Beethoven and the Aesthetic State

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About The Author

Awards

Marjorie Weston Emerson Award, The Mozart Society of America

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts at Stanford University. His books include A Theory of Art (2000) .