Samuel Rousseau News
French composer (1853-1904)
Commemorations 2024 (Death: Samuel Rousseau)
- opera
- France
- composer, music critic, opera composer, conductor
Last update
2024-03-29
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2024-03-25 23:45:00
Der Ring des Nibelungen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 18, 19, 21, and 24 March 2024
[…] the once ‘natural’ ash tree, though it is probably too late already. No one else, though, seems to know or care. For perhaps the key question as the drama develops is who is in charge, who is running these experiments. It might first seem to be Wotan and the gods, yet ultimately, like serious (non-naïve, non-liberal) political philosophy in general, there seems to be something and/or someone beyond those we thought was ruling the roost. Rousseau’s problem of the Legislator returns—but so ultimately does his inability to answer the questions he set himself in The Social Contract. Questions of agency come to the fore, just as they do with respect to Wotan and his ‘great idea’, announced at the end of Das Rheingold and torn to shreds by Fricka. What are we to make, when we reach Götterdämmerung, of the institute carrying on more or less before, but with still […]
2022-02-07 14:06:00
R.I.P. Hans Neuenfels, 1941-2022
[…] did not hear the word Führer when Lohengrin introduced his successor, Gottfried (‘Seht da den Herzog von Brabant! Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt!’) Schützer, the ‘Protector’ employed earlier for Lohengrin, was used instead. Perhaps the abiding question with which we were left related to who was actually running the experiment? Who was on the outside? It is, in a sense, a variation upon a perennial problem of political philosophy, never more so than in Rousseau: who is the Legislator? ‘A superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed.’[3] The audience, perhaps? It was certainly not the sickly, flawed, proto-Amfortas figure of King Henry the Fowler, as much a pawn as anyone else – an aspect granted added resonance when one considers the historical King Henry, founder of the Ottonian dynasty, and the Romantic as well as National Socialist view of him […]
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
[…] perform music by a range of composers from different places and periods. In a nutshell, historical performance is contextualisation – music is best understood by understanding its development, both in terms of instruments and ideas, across time and place. Beyond 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 […]
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
[…] perform music by a range of composers from different places and periods. In a nutshell, historical performance is contextualisation – music is best understood by understanding its development, both in terms of instruments and ideas, across time and place. Beyond 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 […]
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