The 'marche funebre' from Beethoven to Mahler.
Item
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Title
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The 'marche funebre' from Beethoven to Mahler.
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Identifier
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AAI9130297
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identifier
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9130297
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Creator
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Burke, Richard N.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Blum
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music
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Abstract
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Funeral marches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were primarily functional: they were composed either for specific occasions or as representations of such occasions on the stage. Two of these in particular, the march from Sarti's Giulio Sabino and Gossec's Marche lugubre, stand out because of their reported influence on the marcia funebre of Beethoven's "Eroica." Sarti's influence is often overlooked in favor of Gossec's, but neither march is so important to Beethoven's work as his own earlier funeral marches from the Sonata Op. 26 and the Variations Op. 34, or as eighteenth-century heroic music.;Beethoven's funeral marches demonstrate the change in the function of genre that took place in the nineteenth century. Many funeral marches by Schubert, Weber, Dussek, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and their contemporaries are essentially character pieces which negated the original function of the genre. Operatic marches of the same period also affected the genre's function and form, and altered the heroic context in which it traditionally thrived. Almost every major composer of the century contributed to the literature of the marche funebre, especially Liszt, whose frequent and varied use extended its meaning while restoring its heroic context, and Mahler, for whom it was a cornerstone of symphonic structure.;Attempting to show that there is a funeral-march tradition distinct from that of the march, the dissertation traces the use and development of the funeral march in nineteenth-century music, the paradox of the genre's programmatic connotation and inclusion in absolute genres, and the richness of meaning which it acquired through the century. Two aspects of the history of the funeral march are of particular interest to this study: its formal evolution from simple military origins through the appearance of the march-with-trio and its later incorporation into larger forms; and the way in which the genre was affected by changes in nineteenth-century aesthetics and by the shifting view of the heroic as a quality of the singular individual, the nation, and the artist.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
