Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mozart, Genius, and the Possibilities of Art

Mozart, Genius, and the Possibilities of Art

Goehring, Edmund J.

Hardcover

Classical MusicGeneral MusicMusic Reference

ISBN10: 1648250947
ISBN13: 9781648250941
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: Sep 17 2024
Pages: 378
Weight: 1.48
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Demonstrates that the concept of genius is as vitally needed as ever and can illuminate the workings of Mozart's creative imagination.

Much recent, distinguished Mozart criticism has set out a critique of the concept of genius. Whether following the scientist seeking greater objectivity, the postmodernist proclaiming the death of the author, the historian concerned about anachronism, or the critic who warns about making despotic claims, this demystifying literature has taken the weakening of genius's accumulated cultural authority as an indispensable step in arriving at a clarified Mozart.

Mozart, Genius, and the Possibilities of Art advances a contrary claim. It proposes that anti-Romantic accounts of Mozart's genius themselves get lost in both the infinitely big--in utopianism and millenarianism--and the infinitesimally small--in materialism and process. Throughout, the book buttresses this argument with probing readings from contemporary documents ranging from ephemeral periodical literature to Kant's Third Critique, along with original analyses of the music itself.

Goehring's book goes on to detail a contrasting Romantic portrait of Mozart's genius, one that allowed for ambiguity, embraced experience, and did not scorn reason. In Mozart's day, the term genius spoke to the unquantifiable and unpredictable in human inventiveness. And it continues to do so today. Goehring shows how the persisting fascination with an ingenious Mozart wells up from the middle of things, from the particularity of human beings--their genie--and the visible yet complex world of human intention and action.

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