Benedict Taylor | ‘Ein sonderbar Ding’: Music, the Historical, and the Problem of Temporal Representation in Der Rosenkavalier

Event details

Speaker: Benedict Taylor (University of Edinburgh)

Date: 27 January 2021

Time: 4.15-5.45 pm

Online

About this seminar

'Der Rosenkavalier' is an opera which foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing, and ultimately death for the ageing Marschallin, and also contrasts this with a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick, the intersection of the temporal with the eternal, associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie.  It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, the composer supposedly retreating from the modernity of Salome and Elektra towards a more conservative idiom.  The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's 'Der Zauberberg'. In this self-styled 'novel of time', Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music.  Disputing the contention made by the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot 'narrate time', I show that Strauss's music in fact perfectly exemplifies music's capacity to express 'the historical in time', in this way using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art.  I argue that 'Der Rosenkavalier' – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways 'an opera about time': the temporal and the eternal, the historical, and what I will call the 'meta-historical'.

Biography

Benedict Taylor's profile page`` 

Links

Salzburg Festival production of Der Rosenkavalier conducted by Herbert von Karajan — available to staff and students only on Medici TV, via Discover Ed

Covent Garden production of Der Rosenkavalier conducted by Georg Solti, on YouTube (external link)

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