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9 - A Kingdom Not of This World: Music, Religion, Art-Religion

from Part II - Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

The secularisation paradigm, the notion that religion faded into irrelevance in the post-Enlightenment era, has long defined perceptions of Romantic religiosity and religious art. From this perspective, art – in particular, the phenomenon of art-religion – served to fill the void left by the retreat of religion, offering new secularised forms of transcendence to replace those once offered by conventional religious art. This chapter aims to overhaul our received picture by arguing that rather than usurping the place of religion, art-religion serves as its dynamic continuation. It reveals the porous nature of the boundaries between religious art and art-religion in early Romantic thought, examining key texts by Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, and Tieck. It then demonstrates how a similar logic of recuperation and reinvention is at work in Romantic music, drawing on examples ranging from quasi-liturgical music to the monuments of absolute music. The chapter culminates with an exploration of what are arguably the most complex, multilayered examples of Romantic art-religion in the musical sphere, Liszt’s Christus and Wagner’s Parsifal.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Bruhn, Siglind (ed.). Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representations of Religious Experience (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl. The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, Roger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Garratt, James. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Gockel, Matthias. ‘Redemption and Transformation: Making Sense of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal’, Religion and the Arts, 20 (2016), 419–41.Google Scholar
Grewe, Cordula. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2009).Google Scholar
Kinderman, William, and Syer, Katherine R. (eds.). A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005).Google Scholar
Koerner, Joseph Leo. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009).Google Scholar
Meier, Albert, Costazza, Alessandro, and Laudin, Gérard (eds.). Kunstreligion: Ein ästhetisches Konzept der Moderne in seiner historischen Entfaltung, 3 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011–14).Google Scholar
Merrick, Paul. Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Oechsle, Siegfried, and Sponheuer, Bernd (eds.). Kunstreligion und Musik: 1800–1900–2000 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2015).Google Scholar
Weidner, Daniel. ‘The Rhetoric of Secularization’, New German Critique, 41/1 (2014), 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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