Modernism and the Cult of Mountains

Adopting and transforming the Romantic fascination with mountains, modernism claimed the Alps as a space both of resistance and of escape. This new 'cult of mountains' reacted to the symptoms and alienating forces associated with modern culture, defining and reinforcing models of subjectivity based on renewed wholeness and an aggressive attitude to physical and mental health. The arts were critical to this project, nowhere more so than in music, which occupied a similar space in Austro-German culture: autonomous, pure, sublime.In Modernism and the Cult of Mountains, opera serves as a nexus, illuminating the circulation of contesting ideas about politics, nature, and aesthetics. Yet opera repeatedly explores the possibilities and tests the limits of interaction between its constituent media. In this sense it becomes reflexive, performing its own aesthetic premises and inviting comparison with related genres. In the historical and cultural environment that is the focus of the book, the very question of music's identity is repeatedly restaged, and Morris argues that opera and related genres (like operetta) are critical to this process.The role of cinema in the mountain cult has already been the subject of scholarly enquiry, but Morris highlights music's role in the so-called Bergfilm (mountain film). That this filmic tradition inter-relates importantly with music theatre is reflected in his treatment of Lehár's Endlich allein/Schön ist die Welt, and in the chapters on the operatic and film versions of Tiefland. By using music and the ideology of mountains to illuminate aspects of each other, Morris makes an original and valuable contribution to the critical study of modernism.