Why are some of the most beloved and frequently performed works of the late-romantic period—Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini—regarded by many critics as perhaps not quite of the first rank? Why has modernist discourse continued to brand these works as overly sentimental and emotionally self-indulgent? Peter Franklin takes a close and even-handed look at how and why late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex course between modernism and mass culture in the period leading up to the Second World War. The style’s continuing popularity and its domination of the film music idiom (via work by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and their successors) bring late-romantic music to thousands of listeners who have never set foot in a concert hall. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music sheds new light on these often unfairly disparaged works and explores the historical dimension of their continuing role in the contemporary sound world.
Peter Franklin is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. His books include Mahler: Symphony no.3 (1991), The Life of Mahler (1997), and Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Score (2011).
“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
224 pp.6 x 9
9780520280397$60.00|£50.00Hardcover
Feb 2014