In this erudite and elegantly composed argument, Karol Berger uses the
works of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two
groundbreaking claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth
century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the
future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical
time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated
Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of
modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the
modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as
Berger illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music
was simply "in time." Its successive events unfolded one after another,
but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not
central to the way the music was experienced and understood. But after
the shift, as he finds in looking at Mozart's
Don Giovanni, the
experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject
matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. Berger
complements these musical case studies with a rich survey of the
philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists
during this period.
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