1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910822800503321

Autore

Kivy Peter

Titolo

The possessor and the possessed [[electronic resource] ] : Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the idea of musical genius / / Peter Kivy

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, : Yale University Press, c2001

ISBN

1-281-73474-8

9786611734749

0-300-13511-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource (xiv, 287 p.) ) : ill., ports

Collana

Yale series in the philosophy and theory of art

Disciplina

781/.1

Soggetti

Genius - History

Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) - History

Composers

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-275) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- I. Time out of Mind -- II. Greatness of Mind -- III. Breaking the Rule -- IV. The Saxon or the Devil -- V. The Genius and the Child -- VI. The Little Man from Salzburg -- VII. Giving the Rule -- VIII. An Unlicked Bear -- IX. Mozart's Second Childhood -- X. Odd Men Out -- XI. Beethoven Again -- XII. Gendering Genius -- XIII. Reconstructing Genius -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something other people don't have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable kind of inspiration that permits the artist to exceed his own abilities. It is as if the artist is suddenly possessed, as if some outside force flows through him at the moment of creation. In other cases genius seems best explained as a natural gift. The artist is the possessor of an extra talent that enables the production of masterpiece after masterpiece. This book explores the concept of artistic genius and how it came to be symbolized by three great composers of the modern era: Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. Peter Kivy, a leading thinker in musical aesthetics, delineates the two concepts of genius that were already well formed in the ancient world. Kivy then develops the



argument that these concepts have alternately held sway in Western thought since the beginning of the eighteenth century. He explores why this pendulum swing from the concept of the possessor to the concept of the possessed has occurred and how the concepts were given philosophical reformulations as views toward Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven as geniuses changed in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.