Wagner's Sublime Effects: Bells, Cannon and the Perception of Heavy Sound

For the purposes of crime and punishment, Richard Wagner’s involvement in the violent uprising in Dresden during May 1849 is a matter of historical record. He obtained hand grenades and hunting rifles, had coercive placards printed asking Saxon soldiers ‘Are you with us against the foreign troops?’, liaised daily with the provisional government and spent several days and one night atop the Kreuzkirche as lookout. That Wagner valued the aesthetic experience of the tower, with its elevated audiovisual panorama, is clear from comments in his third autobiography, Mein Leben (My Life), and by the fact that he returned there twice and – in an early form of data sonification – almost certainly used the great bell overhead to signal troop movements to comrades below. Figure 10.1 shows the neoclassical tower in 1788 and the dome in which Wagner resided

Counterfeits, Contraltos and Harmony in De Quincey’s Sublime

What counts as legitimately sublime and what as counterfeit? The question of policing boundaries is internal to the sublime, and particularly fraught insofar as it is defined as transgressing limits of various kinds. If music is included in the sublime – by no means a foregone conclusion in its history – then what sort of music? Must it be violent, shocking or dissonant, transgressing orderly harmony in some obvious way? This chapter examines the fraught status and remit of harmony in the literary-critical discourse of the sublime. When music and musical concepts appear within broader scholarship on the sublime, they are often aligned with dissonance and irresolvability, as part of a construction of modernity likewise aligned with the breaking of old orders and harmonies. The chapter complicates this view through a double study of the late Romantic author Thomas De Quincey and his favourite singer, the Italian contralto Josephine Grassini. It examines both the multifaceted work to which music and harmony are put in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821), and the complexity of Grassini’s performances beyond the limits of the text, including her vocal traits, gendering, roles and repertoire during the Napoleonic wars, leading to reconsideration of sublimity’s relationship to pathos alongside harmony

Sonorous Sublimes: An Introduction

This introduction to the volume provides overviews of theories of the sublime and musicology’s engagement with the sublime, before outlining the fresh perspective brought by this collection. The focus is on historically specific experiences of the sublime: although the centre of gravity is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the well-known centres of intellectual debate on the sublime in Europe, a widened purview considers performers and audiences, as well as composers and works, as agents of power. The authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. A significant cross-temporal finding to emerge from the collection is music’s strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power; this is allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The density of this thematic complex in music is a keynote of the dialogue between the chapters. The volume opens up two avenues for further research, suggested by the adjective ‘sonorous’: a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that has porous boundaries with other sounding phenomena