Introduction: Music and Biography

Abstract

Musical biography is a topic that is constantly referred to in scholarship but rarely interrogated sufficiently critically. However, it has particular relevance to the study of nineteenth-century music. The Romantic construction of a genius-composer figure and the transcendence of the musical work are powerful and enduring concepts that are grounded in nineteenth-century musical biography. Perhaps more significantly, both nineteenth-century music and biography take the exploration of the subjectivity of the individual as a point of creative departure, encouraging readers and listeners to conceive of life and work as related. Yet this relationship has been a source of contention as much as fascination to musicologists and biographers. 1 The last decade or so has seen a revivified interest among scholars in tackling the unique problems and opportunities presented by musical biography: the focus of this special issue.The fascination with the self as a literary subject, or rather the emergence of modern autobiography, began in the later eighteenth century. It coincided with the rise of romanticism, and the related concerns of the exaltation of genius, the development of modern individualism, and the newfound importance placed on subjective experience. 2 These aesthetic concerns also affected ways of listening to music in the first half of the nineteenth century. Listeners began to hear music as a form of autobiographical expression, and writings about music began to read life into work and vice versa. 3 At the same time, composers experimented with strategies that

Bel canto among the barricades: Rossini, his music, and history

“…Almost all his Paris music was unpublished, written for himself alone, a means of self-expression, the hallmark of 19th-century music. So says Richard Crocker: “If we were to articulate the primary concept of nineteenth-century music as received from that century itself, it would (I think) be that music is self-expression …” (Crocker, 1977: 182; Cormac, 2020: 61–66). We finally may have an answer to the question of the relationship between Rossini's music and the politics of the day, particularly the Restoration.…”