State University of New York Press Romantic Voices: Listening to Nineteenth-Century Music

In Romantic Voices Douglass Seaton explores the underlying subjectivism whereby nineteenth-century musical works depend on and manifest the ideology and epistemology of Romanticism. Listeners and students have often imagined in a too-casual way that Romantic music reveals the inner biographies of composers. That easy assumption, however, leads to misunderstandings of both the biographical composers and the actual but fictive personas who do express themselves in the music. In a dozen studies of works by major Romantic composers, in genres ranging from instrumental solos to symphonies and from songs to opera, Seaton presents new ways to understand these works within the context of the Romantic movement. The book demonstrates how a discerning approach to this music can unveil the fictive personalities who express themselves in each piece. Seaton embraces transmethodological approaches that harmonize close attention to the sound and structure of individual pieces, their cultural and social history, and what composers, critics, and listeners have said about them. Among the works included are Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata, Schubert's Heine Songs, Berlioz's Harold in Italy, Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis, Liszt's "Vallée d'Obermann," Verdi's Otello, and MacDowell's "Keltic" Sonata.