Michael P. Steinberg is Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Professor of History and Music at Brown University. He is the author of Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival; Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (both from Cornell); and Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music.
Steinberg is intent on probing just what the festival's founders saw themselves as celebrating and how their original vision can be understood against the background of forces and demands within fin de si cle Austria. . . . He shares his methods with many cultural historians and utilizes these methods with an impressive command, making his book an excellent example of what such an approach can accomplish. -Opera Quarterly