Varieties of Musical Irony

Michael Cherlin is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota. He has published widely on Schoenberg in particular and is the author of Schoenberg's Musical Imagination (Cambridge, 2007). He also edited Music Theory Spectrum from 2013 to 2015.

• Preface; 1. Irony as a 'master trope'; 2. Varieties of musical irony; 3. Mozart's Figaro; 4. Heine and irony in the Lied tradition; 5. The Jewish face of Mahlerian irony.

'What I prize most of all in scholarly writing on music is the author's ability to make me hear and understand compositions and concepts I thought I already knew in new ways. Irony is a slippery, many-sided subject, but Michael Cherlin deftly disentangles and then categorizes its numerous manifestations both in language and in music: irony at the hinge of change, irony in contrapuntal juxtaposition, ironies of irruption or interruption, and much more.' Susan Youens, University of Notre Dame, Indiana