Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide

Christopher Chowrimootoo

Open Access Published by University of California Press 2018

Middlebrow Modernism

Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide

Christopher Chowrimootoo

Volume 24 in the series California Studies in 20th-Century Music

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780520970700

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Chowrimootoo Christopher :

Christopher Chowrimootoo is Assistant Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and in the Department of Music at the University of Notre Dame.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. Middlebrow Modernism Open Access Download PDF	1
2. Sentimentality under Erasure in Peter Grimes Open Access Download PDF	30
3. The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring Open Access Download PDF	63
4. The Turn of the Screw, or: The Gothic Melodrama of Modernism Open Access Download PDF	88
5. The Burning Fiery Furnace and the Redemption of Religious Kitsch Open Access Download PDF	117
6. Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of Sublimation Open Access Download PDF	147
Notes Open Access Download PDF	177
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	215
Index Open Access Download PDF	221

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 244

eBook

Published: October 9, 2018
ISBN: 9780520970700