Kierkegaard and Music in Paradox? Bringing Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Terms with Kierkegaard’s Religious Life-View
In his essay ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’ in Either/Or, Volume 1, Søren Kierkegaard pseudonymously presents an aesthetic theory of music and a curious misinterpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. My article comprises literary and musicological analyses of this essay to argue th...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2014
|
| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2014, Volume: 28, Issue: 4, Pages: 411-424 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In his essay ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’ in Either/Or, Volume 1, Søren Kierkegaard pseudonymously presents an aesthetic theory of music and a curious misinterpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. My article comprises literary and musicological analyses of this essay to argue that Kierkegaard is intentionally setting forth through his pseudonym a clichéd Romantic distortion of the opera. Thereby I will suggest that Kierkegaard’s aesthetic treatise may be understood negatively as satire against a certain brand of Romanticism that secularises and even vulgarises religious materials, and that through a variety of ironies he might be positively conveying the possibility for music to be a proper medium for expressing what he calls the higher immediacy of religious passion. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frt029 |