Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Randall, Annie Janeiro

Titel

"And art shall say 'let there be light'": Religious imagery and the nineteenth-century musical imagination

Ist Teil von

• Bucknell review, 2002, Vol.46 (1), p.84

Ort / Verlag

Lewisburg: Associated University Presses

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Even the bodies of composers are exhumed; hair samples are snipped and fetishized in much the same way as saints' hair and clothing are made into holy relics.1 Musicians perform the sacred texts in ritual fashion, wearing black, as do religious orders, and subject themselves to grueling hours of disciplined music practice, comparable to the hours spent by religious acolytes kneeling in prayer or spent in careful scriptural study.2 And like acolytes, aspiring musicians are led by a class of learned practitioners who hold the status of priests: the greater the skill and learning of our musical priests, the more likely he or she will ascend the hierarchy and be held in even greater esteem as a high priest or priestess, a master teacher or virtuoso performer of national or international repute. Zelter, founder of the Berlin Singing Academy, and Felix Mendelssohn, the first director of the Leipzig Conservatory, are important in this discussion for at least two reasons: while Liszt and Wagner forged an indelible connection between music and religion in the public's mind via the newspapers and performing spaces of European capitals, the Mendelssohns and Zelter brought the religious sensibility to the sphere of music education and are largely responsible for institutionalizing it and embedding the idea of music as sacred text into the conservatory curriculum. [...]Zelter and the Mendelssohns were responsible for reviving J. S. Bach's music, rescuing it from obscurity, and successfully transferring his works from the church to the concert hall, thus beginning his secular deification. [...]the link between religion and art music became institutionalized by the founders of these establishments and even fueled a missionary like zeal to create satellite institutions in their image.