Listening to Reason

"[Steinberg's] analyses--music not as closed art form but as permeable cultural phenomenon--elicit some fruitful and unexpected results... [A] deeply rewarding book."--Peter Quinn, Times Literary Supplement "Michael P. Steinberg's subject is the vast change that came over music in the 19th century, from something couched in public terms--religious or ceremonial--to something that feels essentially private, even when it happens in public. It's a familiar idea, but what makes this book original is the way he complicates it with other historical currents."--Ivan Hewett, BBC Music Magazine "With Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and NIneteenth-Century Music, Michael P. Steinberg offers a provocative, intermittently brilliant rooting of nineteenth-century music ... in contemporaneous cultural and intellectual history. Few major German composers of the era go unexamined, and few readers are likely to walk away from the book with their understanding of this repertoire, and the culture from and for which it speaks, unrevised."--Peter Mercer-Taylor, Notes "Listening to Reason is a work of high integrity; it has a great deal to teach. Indeed, it's a book of importance."--Richard Leppert, Beethoven Forum "Michael P. Steinberg has not only made a simultaneous contribution to the fields of cultural history and musicology, he has authoritatively illustrated the importance of their interaction, or the close connection between the questions, theoretical approaches, and methodologies with which they are mutually engaged... Steinberg has made a truly major contribution to our understanding of how musical meaning, values, and creativity in the Austro German sphere were intertwined with the ambient ideological and political tensions."--Jane F. Fulcher, Journal of Modern History