Fin-de-siècle Music Lecture, Beethoven Frieze, the Hause der Musik, and the Lieder Concert

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Tuesday 08/08/06

Today was a very musical day! We had a lecture on fin-de-siècle music, we saw Beethoven Frieze form the Secession building, we went to the Hause der Musik, and a bunch of us went to the lieder concert. It was an amazing day! I felt that I knew most of what was discussed with the music and that was neat.

It was really interesting to hear the harmonic development between the composers and how different they can be.

I thought it was cool to see FdS [fin-de-siècle] values delineated through the study of music. I thought the topics of psychology, politics, sexuality, and multiethnicity fit really well with the people and events we studied during this period. It reinforced previous connections we’ve already noticed/been told like that of Schnitzler and Freud. I thought it was intriguing they were using art to discuss topics that were politically incorrect to discuss openly. To me, using art seems like a very public display of issues as opposed to a secretive one.

After talking about works such as Salome in both music lectures it’s interesting to see what a profound effect the psychology of the time had on the piece. The opera is not so much plot driven as a study of the human psyche. This reminds me of in one of our books we read that discusses people thinking of man as a psychological being instead of merely rational. It shows that exploration of a person’s mind and emotions interacting was not only worthy of Freud’s interest but of the general opera attending public. Art often reflects society and in this case society dictates what subjects are worthwhile to be treated in an artwork.

I really enjoyed the Hause der Musik. It was awesome to see the consilience of art, science, and history in one museum’s study of music of Vienna. I love to see how everything is connected and so it was neat to see how the science of sound production and reception is linked to music. I also liked seeing how the biography of individual composers affected their music and how the composers affected and were affected by the history. For example, reading about the struggles of Beethoven’s early life and his interactions with historical figures like Mozart made his music make much more sense. I thought it was neat to read about one of the composers, I think it was Schubert, whose teacher was actually Salieri that we had seen in the Amadeus movie. It’s so neat to see how interconnected things are.

It was also fun to go to the lieder concert and hear music from so many of the people we had just seen and read about. The concert had Mozart, Schumann, Mahler, and Brahms. It was really interesting to hear the harmonic development between the composers and how different they can be. It was especially interesting because Brahms and Mahler both did a lot with Volk songs and still sounded completely different. Brahms sounded very traditional and as if he had just slightly reworked a common person’s song. Mahler used a lot of chromaticism and non-traditional harmonic progressions to give the songs a very unique flavor. It was so neat to hear those differences with the historical context of these men.