Music

Moore, Jane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5412-846X 2024. Music. Morrison, Robert, ed. The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose, Oxford University Press, pp. 485-500. (10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198834540.013.26)

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Abstract

‘Music’, writes Thomas De Quincey, ‘is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the temperament of him who hears it.’ This chapter attends to writing about music in the Romantic period, from the growing print subculture of journalism and reviewing, notably of classical music and the opera, to sociable music-making such as musician Vincent Novello’s ‘exquisite evenings of Mozartian … music’ attended by such notables as John Keats, Leigh Hunt, the Lambs, and the Shelleys, through to the manner in which Romantic writers such as De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and Felicia Hemans engaged imaginatively and intellectually with music, virtuosity, and performance. It demonstrates how Hunt straddles reviewing culture with theorizing, seeing for instance, a ‘union’ of ‘passion and feeling’ with ‘science’ as ‘consti[tuting] the style of Mozart and the other great German composers’. Music, in this interpretation, is, in Charles Lamb’s phrase, an ‘alembic strain’, a spark to fire the imagination.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISBN:	9780198834540
Last Modified:	05 Jul 2024 13:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/170253

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