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Books by Jonathan Kregor

The history of programme music stretches back centuries, but only in the nineteenth century did i... more The history of programme music stretches back centuries, but only in the nineteenth century did it enter into widespread use. Indeed, seminal compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin to Arnold Schoenberg and Jean Sibelius have helped programme music to secure a position within the artistic pantheon, albeit not without bringing a significant amount of controversy in tow. Yet despite its ubiquitous presence in the nineteenth century, scholarship has not adequately articulated the full extent of programme music’s range and impact. This volume explores the diverse ways in which programme music was defined, historicized, practiced, disseminated, and judged. It considers how biography, tradition, and function informed the compositional approaches taken by Beethoven, Joseph Joachim, Ethel Smyth, and Zygmunt Noskowski, among others. It draws on extra-musical elements—novels, poems, lithographs, and other forms of creative expression—to determine the ontological profile of works by Chopin, Franz Liszt, Antonio Pasculli, Piotr Tchaikovsky, and Leoš Janáček. It situates compositions by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Sibelius, and Schoenberg within the ongoing discourse around Hanslickian absolute and Lisztian programme music. And it visits major European cities to highlight the critical streams of reception toward the end of the century. Throughout, it repeatedly engages with questions of generic identity (with special attention given to the symphonic poem), issues of narrativity and topicality, and considerations of form and structure.

Program music was one of the most flexible and contentious novelties of the long nineteenth centu... more Program music was one of the most flexible and contentious novelties of the long nineteenth century, covering a diverse range that included the overtures of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, the literary music of Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt's symphonic poems, the tone poems of Strauss and Sibelius, and compositions by groups of composers in Russia, Bohemia, the United States, and France. In this accessible Introduction, Jonathan Kregor explores program music's ideas and repertoire, discussing both well-known and less familiar pieces by an array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers. Setting program music in the context of the intellectual debates of the period, Kregor presents the criticism of writers like A. B. Marx and Hanslick to reveal program music's growth, dissemination, and reception. This comprehensive overview features numerous illustrations and music examples and provides detailed case studies of battle music, Shakespeare settings, and Goethe's Faust.

Franz Liszt's colleagues considered him to be one of the most accomplished and innovative practit... more Franz Liszt's colleagues considered him to be one of the most accomplished and innovative practitioners in the field of musical reproduction, a reputation for which he is still admired today. Yet, while his transcriptions are widely performed, few studies have investigated the role that transcriptions played in Liszt's artistry, to say nothing of the impact they had on the music-making experience of his day. Using a host of interdisciplinary methods and primary source materials, this book provides a comprehensive survey of Liszt's lifelong involvement with the transcription, in which he assumed the roles of composer, collaborator, propagandist, commemorator, philosopher, and artist while simultaneously disseminating - often critically - the music of Beethoven, Berlioz, Schubert, Wagner, and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers. By recognizing transcription as an extraordinarily flexible tool for Liszt and his contemporaries, Liszt as Transcriber provides numerous musical, cultural, and historical contexts for this fundamentally important practice of the period.

Articles by Jonathan Kregor

Journal of Musicological Research 34 no. 3, Jul 28, 2015

The long nineteenth century is bounded by conflicts that significantly altered the relationship b... more The long nineteenth century is bounded by conflicts that significantly altered the relationship between war and music. One musical genre to benefit early on was the instrumental battle piece, whose decline in popularity most scholarship assigns to around 1815. In fact, it can be argued that it survived for another century, transformed from a conveyor of heroic mythology to a politicized palimpsest of national and personal trauma through a process of disavowal, in which authors consciously projected chaos and disorder. Most battle pieces famous in the early nineteenth century, such as Kotzwara’s The Battle of Prague and Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg, feature a set of common ingredients that were poeticized and de-historicized toward mid-century in works such as Spohr’s Fourth Symphony. The tokenistic appearance of the traditional battle elements in Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture, Bartók’s Kossuth, and Debussy’s En blanc et noir suggests a widespread ontological subversion of the battle-music narrative in the generation leading up to the First World War.

Studia Musicologica 54, no. 2, 2014

Musical artists in the 1830s were intrigued by the Niccolò Paganini, with pianists being especial... more Musical artists in the 1830s were intrigued by the Niccolò Paganini, with pianists being especially interested in transferring his music and style to their instrument. This article focuses on Paganini-inspired compositions by Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, which focus on various aspects of the violinist’s artistry, including his performance style, his flair for the dramatic, pathetic, and unexpected, and his technical wizardry. Altogether these and other such works from the early 1830s provide a deeper context—arguably even a tradition—for Franz Liszt’s experimental compositions from the 1830s, particularly the “Clochette” Fantasy and the first version of the “Paganini” Etudes. Not only technically and performatively brilliant, these pieces also help establish the medium of mimesis as artistically valid. Liszt argued that this type of orientation was indispensable for the “artist of the future,” in which “virtuosity is a means, not an end.” Somewhat paradoxically then, after his death Paganini becomes the benchmark by which the transcendent artistry of composer-pianists is measured, and a baseline for further artistic experimentation. Thus Liszt’s return to Paganini in the 1840s and 1850s constitutes an ongoing effort to refine virtuosity in order to bring about artistic unification among musicians, regardless of instrumental specialty.

Liszt’s Legacies, ed. Michael Saffle and James Deaville, 2014

Liszt et la France, eds. Malou Haine, Nicolas Dufetel, Dana Gooley, and Jonathan Kregor , 2012

Journal of the American Liszt Society 61–62, 2011

Through selected case studies, Liszt's approach to songwriting from 1870 until his death in 1886 ... more Through selected case studies, Liszt's approach to songwriting from 1870 until his death in 1886 can be better understood. A study of Und wir dachten der Toten (LW N66) introduces Liszt's conception of harmonic and gestural phrasing. The influence of Sigismond Thalberg can be observed in Liszt's piano transcriptions, such as his transcription of Schumann's Frühlingsnacht (LW A264a/1) and Lieder von Robert und Clara Schumann (LW A264a-b). When working with lieder by German composers, Liszt focused on melody. However, while working with non-German music, Liszt chose to explore other musical elements, such as in his transcription of Anton Rubinstein's Der Asra ('Täglich ging die wunderschöne') (LW A329). In the Bodenstedt Lieder, consisting of Einst (LW N73), Gebet (LW N72) and An Edlitam (LW N74), Liszt uses larger cyclic organization to allow for more fragmentation within individual lieder. Liszt's lieder have been marginalized in academic discourse, due to their use of layered or veiled intertextuality and citation. This use of intertextuality across genres, mediums and time is demonstrated in Weihnachtsbaum (LW A267).

The Wagner Journal 5, no. 1, 2011

The Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 3–4, 2009

An examination of Franz Liszt’s late style (early 1860s–1886) by way of selected solo piano trans... more An examination of Franz Liszt’s late style (early 1860s–1886) by way of selected solo piano transcriptions. Liszt’s development as a composer has largely been considered to follow a preordained stylistic teleology in the manner of Beethoven, yet many aspects of his late style have their roots in some of Liszt’s early compositional experiments from the 1830s, particularly the Apparitions and the first version of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. Around the same time that Liszt began this new stylistic orientation in the early 1860s, his approach to transcription changed as well. Whereas his early arrangements generally reduce a work by replicating its attendant form and style, Liszt’s late transcriptions consciously strive to dissociate form from style. Many of the resulting structures and stylistic juxtapositions articulated within these late arrangements—-including César Cui’s Tarantelle, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, and the “Agnus Dei” from Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem—-were designed to accommodate the directions of his late style and exhibit them in a marketable medium. Indeed, in his later years Liszt would make significant use of the music of his contemporaries by way of transcription in order to disseminate what was increasingly becoming a challenging and publicly unpopular compositional style.

The Journal of Musicology 24, no. 2, 2007

Liszt's transcription of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique has long been recognized for its innovat... more Liszt's transcription of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique has long been recognized for its innovative approach to musical reproduction—that is, its remarkable ability to recreate the sonic nuances of its model. However, the 1830s were a period of intense artistic and professional collaboration with Berlioz, and the genesis of the Symphonie fantastique transcription can thus also be interpreted as emblematic of this developing relationship. In particular, a gestural analysis of the work's content, as it can be recreated in part through Liszt's meticulous performance notation, indicates that the transcription served to reinforce a public perception of Berlioz as composer and Liszt as performer, whereby Liszt guides his audiences through Berlioz's enigmatic compositions by means of kinesic visual cues. Investigation of manuscript materials suggests that this dynamic was further emphasized in Liszt's other renderings of Berlioz's orchestral works from the period. For various reasons, the transcription's inherently collaborative nature failed to impress audiences outside of Paris, and concert performance of the work became less frequent as Liszt embarked in earnest upon a solo career toward the end of the decade. Indeed, when Liszt revised the transcription in the 1870s, he eliminated many of extraordinary collaborative elements found in the 1834 version, thereby disassociating it from the arena for which it was created.

Nineteenth-Century Music Review 4, no. 2, 2007

Review article of Franz Liszt and His World (ed. Gibbs and Gooley) and The Cambridge Companion to... more Review article of Franz Liszt and His World (ed. Gibbs and Gooley) and The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (ed. Hamilton).

Papers by Jonathan Kregor

Introduction: the visible transcriber 1. Models and methods 2. Collaboration and content 3. Compo... more Introduction: the visible transcriber 1. Models and methods 2. Collaboration and content 3. Compositional fantasies 4. Monuments and mythologies 5. Opera and drama 6. Stylistic reconstructions Bibliography.

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets, 2011

Music

Clara Schumann, née Wieck (b. 1819–d. 1896), ranks among the most important musical artists of th... more Clara Schumann, née Wieck (b. 1819–d. 1896), ranks among the most important musical artists of the 19th century. As composer, she published twenty-one numbered compositions—including a piano concerto, piano trio, songs, and Lieder—in an era when it was uncommon for women to do so. As pianist, she was one of the first to consistently program the music of J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and her husband, Robert Schumann. And with a career that spanned more than half a century—from her solo debut in Leipzig at the age of eleven until her death sixty-six years later in Frankfurt—she came into contact with most of the major and minor artists of the day, including Woldemar Bargiel, Frédéric Chopin, Niels Gade, Joseph Joachim, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, and Richard Wagner. Yet, despite these activities and associations, prior to about the 1980s she was rarely the subject of sustained scholarly study, except in cases where she provided context ...

Journal of Musicological Research 34 no. 3, Jul 28, 2015

Studia Musicologica 54, no. 2, 2014

Liszt’s Legacies, ed. Michael Saffle and James Deaville, 2014

Liszt et la France, eds. Malou Haine, Nicolas Dufetel, Dana Gooley, and Jonathan Kregor , 2012

Journal of the American Liszt Society 61–62, 2011

The Wagner Journal 5, no. 1, 2011

The Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 3–4, 2009

The Journal of Musicology 24, no. 2, 2007

Nineteenth-Century Music Review 4, no. 2, 2007

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets, 2011

Music

Nineteenth-Century Music Review

As the Western world celebrated the dawn of its third millennium, devotees of nineteenth-century ... more As the Western world celebrated the dawn of its third millennium, devotees of nineteenth-century art music started to prepare for a spate of bicentennials. By 2013, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner had been honoured with symposia, concerts, exhibitions and premieres the world over. These events offered opportunities for participants to take stock of who these composers once were, who they are now, and how they might endure to the next milestone anniversary.

Notes

PROGRAM MUSIC Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music. By Matthew Bribit... more PROGRAM MUSIC Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music. By Matthew Bribitzer-Stull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xxiv, 331 p. ISBN 9781107098398 (hardcover), $120; ISBN 9781316161678 (e-book), Cambridge Books Online.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index."Leitmotif" is one of the few terms in music's technical vocabulary to have left the confines of its discipline and entered common parlance. Its ubiquity has come with a trade-off, however, as the original intentions and intendant nuances behind the term attached to Richard Wagner since the 1870s have become at best obscured, at worst unintentionally misused and intentionally abused. Recognizing that such a phenomenon is an inherent property of any popular term, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull does not seek to return the leitmotif to the circumscribed environment of Wagnerian music drama. Rather, in Understanding the Leitmotif: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music, he explodes it by showing how the leitmotif-and, more accurately, leitmotivic procedures-has adapted to the needs of established and new media over the last one hundred fifty years. In doing so, he hopes to demonstrate that "the idea of leitmotif," which Bribitzer-Stull believes has been debilitated by wave after wave of critical onslaught over the last century, remains "a valuable component of musical understanding" (p. xix).Uncovering key features of Wagner's leitmotivic practice begins in chapter 1. Bribitzer-Stull emphasizes the importance of "accumulative association" (p. 4; emphasis in the original), which allows the viewer not only to recall earlier themes, but also to track how those themes change according to various semantic, emotional, and dramatic cues. Association is, in fact, the defining feature of the leitmotif, which BribitzerStull also supplements with developmental (p. 14ff.) and structural (p. 18ff.) components. Given that these features are not unique to the leitmotif, the author concludes the chapter by examining the problematic ways in which scholars, especially beginning with Hans von Wolzogen in 1877, have applied them to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.Following the taxonomy laid out in the first chapter, Bribitzer-Stull divides his book into three parts: "Musical Themes" (chaps. 2-3), "Musical Association" (chaps. 4-6), and "Leitmotifs in Context" (chaps. 7-9). Chapter 2 continues the methodology established earlier, in that it attempts to arrive at a leitmotivically-appropriate definition of "theme" by exclusion. A theme is not, according to Bribitzer-Stull, "a unit of musical form" (p. 41) like a phrase, nor need it have the same linear basis that gives melody its singability (p. 44). And motives often convey important, deep structural information that themes-with their penchant for expressive, "explicit extra-musical dramatic narrative"-cannot (p. 50; emphasis in the original).Chapter 3 sheds light on thematic identity by advancing a model in which "the listener, hearing multiple repetitions and variations of a theme, forms an abstract prototype of it" (p. 65). Bribitzer-Stull argues for the prototype model, since it works both at the contingent and conceptual levels, and with this foundation he begins to move the leitmotif out of the territory of theme or motive by affirming its developmental nature. Chapter 4, drawing on "understandings of expression, signification, referentiality, topic theory, and subjectivity" (p. 83), tries to pinpoint a leitmotif's level of associativity, which Bribitzer-Stull defines as "the forging of a connection between two separate ideas such that one may evoke or recall the other" (p. 100). Leitmotivic associativity is at its strongest when memory, emotion, and meaning align, as Bribitzer-Stull demonstrates in a pregnant example from Gotterdammerung (p. 95ff.) that also conveniently foreshadows the book's later forays into the world of film. A fascinating discussion of the hermeneutics of associativity follows (pp. …

Journal of Musicology, 2007

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2005