Enfilade

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Annette Richards, The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,) 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0226806266, $55.

One of the most celebrated German composers of the eighteenth century, C. P. E. Bach spent decades assembling an extensive portrait collection of some four hundred music-related items—from oil paintings to engraved prints. The collection was dispersed after Bach’s death in 1788, but with Annette Richards’s painstaking reconstruction, the portraits once again present a vivid panorama of music history and culture, reanimating the sensibility and humor of Bach’s time. Far more than a mere multitude of faces, Richards argues, the collection was a major part of the composer’s work that sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historical study.

The Temple of Fame and Friendship brings C. P. E. Bach’s collection to life, giving readers a sense of what it was like for visitors to tour the portrait gallery and experience music in rooms thick with the faces of friends, colleagues, and forebears. She uses the collection to analyze the ‘portraitive’ aspect of Bach’s music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a mode of cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach’s domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling.

Annette Richards is Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and university organist at Cornell University, where she is also professor of music and director of the Cornell-Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is the author of The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque; the editor of C. P. E Bach Studies; coeditor, with Mark Franko, of Acting on the Past; and the founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Exhibiting: The Bach Gallery and the Art of Self-Fashioning
2  Collecting: C. P. E. Bach and Portrait Mania
3  Speculation: Likeness, Resemblance, and Error
4  Character: Faces, Physiognomy, and Time
5  Friendship: Portrait Drawings and the Trace of Modern Life
6  Feeling: Objects of Sensibility and the ‘Portrait of Myself’
7  Memorializing: Portraits and the Invention of Music History

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Richard Kramer, From the Ruins of Enlightenment: Beethoven and Schubert in Their Solitude (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 9780226821634, $50.

Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of ‘late style’.

Here is Vienna, hosting a congress in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the midst of his most prolific year—some 140 songs, four operas, and much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas for the “Hammerklavier,” opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer’s compelling reading, each seemed to be composing ‘against’—Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination took full flight.

From the Ruins of Enlightenment begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects: Schubert’s settings of the poems of Ludwig Hölty in a fragmentary cycle and Beethoven’s engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in their “lonely and singular journeys” through the “rich solitude of their music.”

Richard Kramer is distinguished professor emeritus of music at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of the award-winning Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song, as well as Unfinished Music and Cherubino’s Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment.

C O N T E N T S

Preamble: 1815 and Beyond

In the Silence of the Poem
1  Hölty’s Nightingales, and Schubert’s
2  Herder’s Hexameters, and Beethoven’s
3  Whose Meeres Stille?

Toward a Poetics of Fugue
4  Gradus ad Parnassum: Beethoven, Schubert, and the Romance of Counterpoint
5  Con alcune licenze: On the Largo before the Fugue in Op. 106

Sonata and the Claims of Narrative
Beethoven
6  On a Challenging Moment in the Sonata for Pianoforte and Violoncello, Op. 102, No. 2
Schubert
7  Against the Grain: The Sonata in G (D 894) and a Hermeneutics of Late Style

Last Things, New Horizons
8  Final Beethoven
9  Posthumous Schubert

Postscript: . . . and Beyond

Acknowledgments
List of Tables, Examples, and Figures
Works Cited
Index