This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is
an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and
politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world
today.
Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830,
the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the
"demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences
of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic
appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and
Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization
and cliché. Cherished concepts like Romanticism, tradition, nationalism
vs. universality, the musical culture of the bourgeoisie, are put to
pointed reevaluation. Always demonstrating the interest in
socio-historical influences that is the hallmark of his work, Dahlhaus
reminds us of the contradictions, interrelationships, psychological
nuances, and riches of musical character and musical life.
Nineteenth-Century Music contains 90 illustrations, the collected
captions of which come close to providing a summary of the work and the
author's methods. Technical language is kept to a minimum, but while
remaining accessible, Dahlhaus challenges, braces, and excites. This is
a landmark study that no one seriously interested in music and
nineteenth-century European culture will be able to ignore.
