T410 Fall 2000

Early Romantic Music and Aesthetics (3 cr.)

Prof. R. Hatten
rohatten@indiana.edu

9:05-9:55 a.m. MWF
M267 (Music Library Seminar Room)

This upper-level undergraduate seminar will focus on the creative and critical writings and musical compositions of four quintessential Romantics: E. T. A. Hoffmann (his four-act opera Undine), Carl Maria von Weber (Der Freischütz, Euryanthe), Robert Schumann (selected piano and song cycles; Kreisleriana, Op. 16, Fantasie, op. 17), and Hector Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique, Lelio, Damnation of Faust).

The course will begin with readings in literature exploring primary themes of Romanticism through short works and excerpts by Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Holderin, Novalis, F. Schlegel, Wackenroder, Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Brentano, and others. These ideas will then be related to new musical approaches to form and genre, levels of musical discourse, intertextuality, irony (including Romantic irony), Witz, fragment, arabesque, narrativity, Romantic topics, text/music relationships, and drama (opera in particular). Close analysis and interpretation of works by the four central composers will be complemented by readings of their own music criticism and creative writing.

Assignments will include several short analyses or analytical essays and one major paper (15 pp.) involving interpretation of Romantic elements of structure, form, and expressive meaning in an early Romantic work to be chosen over the first several weeks of the term.

Required book:
Daverio, John. Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology. New York: Schirmer Books, 1993.

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