Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music

“Peter Franklin brings a new perspective to a repertory long shunned and neglected in musicology… His revision honors listeners as it examines both their reactions and the arguments that led to the repertory’s marginalization by the Modernists.”
—Susan McClary, author of Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

"Franklin is direct about his own love of late-romantic music; he sets off to explain, in part to us, in part to and for himself, why. In the process, he ranges widely into historical music criticism, the history of musicology, performance history, and social and cultural politics. He examines this music from the perspective of its own time, as well as ours, and along the way he astutely and in detail speaks to the music’s rhetorics: how and why it pleases. Not least, he meets head-on the implicit and explicit class consciousness informing discourses about musics of mass appeal. He pays particular attention to the fear, paranoia even, among modernists of many stripes throughout most of the last century that if audiences--mass audiences especially--liked such music then its aesthetic shortcomings were perforce the more certain. Franklin has sorted through impressive piles of print criticism, producing an enormously insightful archeology of this unfortunate ideology. The writing is fresh and focused; the insights are both original and important."
—Richard Leppert, author of The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body