Wagner, Nietzsche, Dahlhaus: Debate on Words and Music

 

Listening:

Mozart’s “La Ci Darem” from Don Giovanni (1787) [ Text and translation ]

Excerpt [link corrected now!] from Mendelssohn’s Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (1829), demonstrating a “Romantic” update of Mozart’s style that extends Mozart’s entertainment form into a Romantic “error.” [ Score ]

Excerpt “Credi, Ninfa gentile…” from Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600, with additional music by Rinuccini) [ Text and translation ]

 

Reading:

From the Introduction to Wagner’s On Opera and Drama : begin in sections 34 & 35 (explained in brief in seminar); then skim or skip to section 43

From Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, translated by Mary Whitall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)—”The Twofold Truth of Wagner’s Aesthetics: Nietzsche’s Fragment ‘On Music and Words’”—

{ Note: in this pdf I’ve included the Dahlhaus chapter (pdf pp 1-11) and an appendix (pdf pp 12-14) of excerpts from Nietzsche’s notebooks that Dahlhaus cites. }