Franziska Sontag News
German stage actor and opera singer (1788-1865)
Commemorations 2025 (Death: Franziska Sontag)
- soprano
- Germany
- stage actor, opera singer
Last update
2024-03-29
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2021-11-08 09:58:10
No interpretation is the correct one. At the same time, with the resources that we have in front of us, it would seem churlish not to make the effort to try to understand what the composer meant
[…] the material differences in instruments, music prior to the 19th century had a very different place in society and set of aesthetic principles to that which is currently has. In his 1767 Dictionnaire de musique, Rousseau quotes Fontenelle’s witty remark on abstract music – “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” (“Sonata, what do you want from me?”), but less than a century later, Schopenhauer describes it as a “direct expression of innermost being”. Our contemporary view (consider Sontag – music is the “most alive of all the arts”) is in many ways highly Romantic, and to get out of our own unexamined mindset is the essential task at hand. With an appreciation and understanding of the evolution of music as a whole we are better able to get inside the mind of any particular composer. We launched the group with a concert of Bach’s St John Passion at our home St Bartholomew-the-Great. […]
2021-11-08 09:58:10
No interpretation is the correct one. At the same time, with the resources that we have in front of us, it would seem churlish not to make the effort to try to understand what the composer meant
[…] the material differences in instruments, music prior to the 19th century had a very different place in society and set of aesthetic principles to that which is currently has. In his 1767 Dictionnaire de musique, Rousseau quotes Fontenelle’s witty remark on abstract music – “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” (“Sonata, what do you want from me?”), but less than a century later, Schopenhauer describes it as a “direct expression of innermost being”. Our contemporary view (consider Sontag – music is the “most alive of all the arts”) is in many ways highly Romantic, and to get out of our own unexamined mindset is the essential task at hand. With an appreciation and understanding of the evolution of music as a whole we are better able to get inside the mind of any particular composer. We launched the group with a concert of Bach’s St John Passion at our home St Bartholomew-the-Great. […]
2020-06-11 07:23:00
Music and the cathartic art of losing control
[…] Norwegian Radio Symphony Orchestra; experience the art of losing control by auditioning the Atomic Symphony via this copyright legal link. With external paths closed, lockdown listening and reading have led me inwards. Sonny Simmons' album was one of the riches discovered on that path, another was The Art of Losing Control, a contemporary guide to the philosophy of human ecstasy by Jules Evans. In the introduction Jules Evans offers a quote from Susan Sontag very relevant to our present pandemic predicament. This warns of the "traumatic failure of modern capitalist society...to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending moments...The need of human beings to transcend 'the personal' is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly". In a thought-provoking chapter on the role of the arts in the search for transcendental ecstasy Jules Evans explains that:The arts, according […]
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ArtsJournal: music
2020-05-05 12:01:26
Colson Whitehead, Jericho Brown, Benjamin Moser, W. Caleb McDaniel, Anne Boyer, Greg Grandin Win Literary Pulitzers
Whitehead received his second fiction Pulitzer for The Nickel Boys; Brown’s The Tradition took poetry honors; the biography prize went to Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work; McDaniel’s Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America took the history category; the general nonfiction prize was shared by Boyer for The […]
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