Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music.
The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.
Introduction Beate Kutschke and Katherine Butler Part I. The Configuration of Heroic Music as a Tool for Shaping Moral and Political Identity 1. Holy Heroes: On the Varieties of a Metaphor and its Musical Expression in the Medieval Historiae Roman Hankeln 2. The Heroic in Music and the Musicality of the Hero in Late Sixteenth-Century England Katherine Butler 3. Virtù eroica: Heroic Music, Social Norms, and Musical Reflections in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy Berthold Over 4. Handel's Heroes Jonathan Rhodes Lee Part II. Music, its Ethics and Politics - Beyond 'Beethoven Hero' 5. Design Principles for the Musical Heroic Lawrence M. Zbikowski 6. Tonal Relationships and Spiritual Heroism in Beethoven's Late Style Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska 7. Music, Content, and Context: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Music in the Light of the Romantic Heroic Vision Csilla Pethő-Vernet 8. The Austro-German Heroic in the Music-Hermeneutical Era: Musical Discourse in the Service of Nationalist-Patriotic Armament between 1887 and the Early 1930s Beate Kutschke Part III. Heroic Music and its Moralities in Dictatorships and Post-Heroic Democracies 9. Heroicizing Handel in the Third Reich: Towards the Collapse of Political Propaganda Juliane Riepe 10. Soviet War Symphonies and the Heroic Russian Epic Nathan Seinen 11. 'Someone to Save the Day': Popular Music, Springsteen, and the Circle of Hero Production Dietrich Helms 12. Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho, and Heroes of the Twenty-First Century Judith Lochhead Afterword Scott Burnham Bibliography Index
BEATE KUTSCHKE is Privatdozent in Music at the University of Salzburg. Katherine Butler is Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University. KATHERINE BUTLER is Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University. She is the author of Music in Elizabethan Court Politics (2015 and 2019). BEATE KUTSCHKE is Privatdozent in Music at the University of Salzburg. Katherine Butler is Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University. KATHERINE BUTLER is Senior Lecturer in Music, Northumbria University. She is the author of Music in Elizabethan Court Politics (2015 and 2019).
