Le 1er juillet 2017
de 12h00 à 12h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance - Schumann, Brahms, and Elgar
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Oliver Chandler
I believe that there are four analytical accounts that might be given of Introduction and Allegro, that serve to elucidate the ambiguous nature of its most famous, ‘utopian’ theme: the Welsh Tune. The ‘truth’, if you like, of these readings, is not their individual character, but the ways in which they contradict one another, in what we might call their dialectical mediation. This analytical inbetween-ness articulates something that Raymond Williams calls a ‘structure of feeling’: a type of active yet historical presence that is not reducible to a fixed form. Elgar’s is a structure of feeling specific to the twentieth century, in which an image of the future looms large, in the form of a question: Will it be utopian? Will it be the same? Will it be dystopian; or, will there simply be no future at all? Rarely in history have these possibilities coexisted all at one time. Each of these perspectives is, in and of itself, a reflection of history — something that might best be articulated in an habitual past tense. The musical truth of this work, however, inheres in the contradictions between these readings, reflecting the confusion of a world that was being forced to interrogate its fundamental assumptions about the future. Introduction and Allegro does not present history to us as so many fixed husks, but rather, as a structure of feeling; it does not so much represent history, as re-embody it.
