JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music. tone with which it embarks into some of the most politically charged and turbulent waters of 1990s musicology and theory. For the rapids that such a study must negotiate include not only the current defining polarity of our discipline-that between critical musicology, on the one hand, and positivistic musicology and theory-based analysis, on the other-but also a number of disputes in recent Wagner scholarship. Among the latter are controversies involving the relation between word and tone in the operas; the merits of the notion of symphonic form in the Wagner operas, and especially of the Dahlhausian concept that form in the operas is more of a "symphonic web" than it is conventional, static "architecture"; the viability of Schenkerian analysis for Wagner's music; the semiotic and structural functions of Leitmotiv and key; and, on a more positivistic note, the veracity of the claims of Wagner himself and of some of his scholarly apologists regarding his compositional inspirations and compositional process. Not that, on the face of it, an ostensibly objective and straightforward account of the genesis and structure of a major work should by its very existence be controversial-indeed, a few years ago, it would not have been. But given our current heightened sensitivities to ideological agendas, the undertaking of such a task can no longer count for the innocent and disinterested pursuit that it once did. Now to frame Darcy's book in such agonistic terms may seem perverse. After all, is not the study simply the latest monograph in a respected musicological series, Oxford's Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure, which has already produced a number of first-rate and politically noncontroversial contributions by distinguished scholars? To be sure, it is. But the disciplinary landscape has changed radically since the series was established in the 277 This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 18:59:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH CENTURY MUSIC late 1980s.
The inception of the series coincided in time precisely with the rise of the new critical paradigms of musicology-a musicology explicitly hostile to work-centered, positivistic values that privilege manuscript study and analysis over interpretation and criticism.Paradoxically, had the series begun a decade or so earlier, it would have cut across the then predominant polarity in American musical scholarship, that between historical musicology and post-1950s music theory, and would have offered a welcome and forward-looking reconciliation between the two. As it is, the s...
