Middlebrow Modernism Brittens Operas and the Great Divide [Paperback]

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

"Ranging widely across literary, theatrical, musical, and religious debates, Christopher Chowrimootoo painstakingly traces how modernist values were negotiated in everyday critical practice, revealing how they unraveled in the very act of articulation. In the process, he offers sophisticated and compelling new readings of Britten’s operas, showing us how they register twentieth-century art’s paradoxical position in a market-driven society."—Heather Wiebe, author ofBritten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction

"Arnold Schoenberg may have claimed that the middle road is thel³&