Musicosophy 1. Schubert and the master singers

Why begin a history of music with its middle, with Schubert and the second act of Wagner's Die Meistersinger?

Dominique Pagani does not want to follow a linear chronology. He begins with the middle of the nineteenth century, where two exactly inverse cases allow him to go back toward archaism and forward toward the music of today. He first contrasts Schubert with Beethoven, the lyricist against the dramatist: Schubert subverts the sonata form through the lied form, the untied song, the hypnosis of clear water, up to a paradise glimpsed in a clearing, for the individual alone. The second act of Die Meistersinger shows, conversely, the chaos that erupts in the peace of the small German town, written in the form of a fugue, in a work that sums up three centuries of music. This leads him to Nietzsche, to Wagner's antisemitism, and to the unique character of Nazi barbarism, which arises at the heart of civilization. He concludes that Wagner's endless melody synthesizes Schubert's lyricism and Beethoven's drama, and that its omnidirectional character expresses the problem of civil society, the moment of freedom open to the best as to the worst.

Conceptslyricismlied formrepetitionhypnosismediationinfinite melodycontradictionbarbarismprogressbourgeoisiecivil societyfreedomalienation