Temple of Fame and Friendship

Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

609 kr

Beställningsvara. Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar. Fri frakt för medlemmar vid köp för minst 249 kr.

This book examines the renowned portrait collection assembled by C. P. E. Bach, J. S. Bach’s second son. One of the most celebrated German composers of the eighteenth century, C. P. E. Bach spent decades assembling an extensive portrait collection of some four hundred music-related items—from oil paintings to engraved prints. The collection was dispersed after Bach’s death in 1788, but with Annette Richards’s painstaking reconstruction, the portraits once again present a vivid panorama of music history and culture, reanimating the sensibility and humor of Bach’s time. Far more than a mere multitude of faces, Richards argues, the collection was a major part of the composer’s work that sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historical study.The Temple of Fame and Friendship brings C. P. E. Bach’s collection to life, giving readers a sense of what it was like for visitors to tour the portrait gallery and experience music in rooms thick with the faces of friends, colleagues, and forebears. She uses the collection to analyze the “portraitive” aspect of Bach’s music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a mode of cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach’s domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-09-20
Mått180 x 257 x 23 mm
Vikt817 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor336
FörlagThe University of Chicago Press
ISBN9780226806266

Tillhör följande kategorier

Musikböcker inom Kultur

Annette Richards is Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and university organist at Cornell University, where she is also professor of music and director of the Cornell-Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is the author of The Free Fantasiaand the Musical Picturesque; the editor of C. P. E Bach Studies; coeditor, with Mark Franko, of Acting on the Past; and the founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives.

IntroductionChapter 1 Exhibiting: The Bach Gallery and the Art of Self-FashioningChapter 2 Collecting: C. P. E. Bach and Portrait ManiaChapter 3 Speculation: Likeness, Resemblance, and ErrorChapter 4 Character: Faces, Physiognomy, and TimeChapter 5 Friendship: Portrait Drawings and the Trace of Modern LifeChapter 6 Feeling: Objects of Sensibility and the “Portrait of Myself”Chapter 7 Memorializing: Portraits and the Invention of Music HistoryAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“In this vividly drawn portrait of C. P. E. Bach’s gallery, Richards has illuminated much more than the art and act of collecting, and the range and recognition of Bach’s circle in Enlightenment arts and letters. She has reconstructed the shades of feeling animating musical character portraits, reimagined the resonances of playing and hearing music in a space filled with faces, and resituated the genius of Bach in a trans-European and transhistorical context that is nonetheless boldly particularized. Her demonstration that Bach’s collection was materially implicated in the self-conscious invention of music history toward the turn of the nineteenth century is one of the book’s most astonishing revelations.”