Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics [Hardcover]

In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and language theory. Illuminating his discussion with French, British, German, and Italian writings on signs and language, Rumph analyzes movements from Mozarts symphonies, concertos, operas, and church music. He argues that Mozartian semiosis is best understood within the empiricist tradition of Condillac, Vico, Herder, or Adam Smith, which emphasized the constitutive role of signs within human cognition. Recognizing that the rationalist model of neoclassical rhetoric has guided much recent work on Mozart and his contemporaries, Rumph demonstrates how the dialogic tension between opposing paradigms enabled the composer to negotiate contradictions within Enlightenment thought.

Stephen Rumphis Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Washington and the author ofBeethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works(UC Press).

List of Music Examples

Introduction

1. From Rhetoric to Semiotics
2. The Sense of Touch in Don Giovanni
3. Topics in Context
4. Mozart and Marxism
5. A Dubious Credo
6. Archaic Endings

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index

InMozart and Enlightenment Semiotics, Stephen Rumph shifts the ground of interpretation for late eighteenth century European music by reinstating the semiotics and language theory of the period. In so doing, Rumph challenges and reappraises current orthodoxies. These challenges are extremely valuable, bravely offered, and intuitively right as well as convincingly argued.

Matthew Head, author ofOrientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music



Stephen Rumphs book is, to my knowledge, the first successful attempt to lÓ5