Kelvin H. F. Lee

The Sonata Moment: Dialectical Form and Symphonic Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Monograph in progress
J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843). © The Tate Gallery, London
About

This book presents a comprehensive study of the music-theoretical implications of dialectical thought by scrutinising, via the lens of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Theodor W. Adorno, the dialectical properties exhibited in the interaction between motivic process, tonal procedure and formal syntax in symphonic works ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven to Richard Strauss. Special attention is given to the concept of Augenblick, or the ‘moment’. I argue that the Augenblick serves as an important epistemic turning point in sonata form that enables the distinction between different types of formal-dialectical processuality and their historical specificities. By uniting the aesthetics of the moment with the dialectical tradition of formal thinking, I nominate three key phases that chart the historical development of formal-dialectical thought in the long nineteenth century. This dialectical history in turn leads to the formulation of an original model of ‘dialectical form’, through which I attend to the problem of tonicity in fin-de-siècle music by proposing an alternative understanding of sonata teleology based on the dialectic between chromatic tonality and sonata form. The model is then put into practice in case studies of works by Gustav Mahler, Franz Schmidt, Franz Schreker, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. The theoretical conversations ultimately pave the way for a renewed historical understanding of fin-de-siècle symphonic music, whereby I posit the Augenblick as both the musical and historical moment that exposes the material truth of sonata form, a condition which, considered in light of Adorno’s and Martin Heidegger’s ideas of truth, attests to the emergence of early musical modernism.

Contents (tentative)

List of illustrations
List of abbreviations
Preface

  1. Dialectics, Formenlehre and the Fin-de-Siècle Turn
  2. The Time-Space Moment of Beethoven-Hegelianism
  3. Star Clusters and Mahler’s Final Word on the Breakthrough
  4. Schmidt’s Second Symphony and Time Travelling in Dualistic Space
  5. New Formalism and Ekkehard’s Redemption
  6. Dialectics of Everything in Pelleas und Melisande
  7. An Existential Journey through the Alpen(sinfonie)
  8. The Modernist Moment and the Truth of Form

Bibliography
Index