The Tenderness of Silent Minds

Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem

Martha C. Nussbaum (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

296 Seiten

2025
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-756853-8 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Januar 2025)
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The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions.

Offering a reading of Britten's views about the value and beauty of the body that situates these in the context of his thirty-nine year partnership with his lover, the singer Peter Pears, and also surveying pacifist themes in works written both before and after War Requiem, Nussbaum presents a compelling framework for critically assessing Britten's oeuvre. Nussbaum engages with a remarkably wide range of Britten's works, examining his treatment of aggression and its roots in his collaborations with the poet W.H. Auden, offering readings of the value placed on the body in early partnerships with Britten's beloved and singer Peter Pears, and surveying pacifist themes in Britten's earlier works. The analysis throughout is enriched with perspectives from Britten's personal letters and thoughtful study of the social and political backdrop of fear and homophobic disgust in mid-twentieth century Britain.

According to Nussbaum's interpretation, War Requiem confronts listeners with the reality of bodily experience in war, eliciting compassion by its depiction of beauty, vulnerability, and eroticism. Issuing a stern warning, it points the way to hope for postwar reconciliation. Nussbaum's careful analysis of Britten's score and its settings of both the Requiem Mass and Owen's poems, their historic performance at Coventry, and its philosophical commitments, unveils a message of human love in a hostile world that resonates as powerfully today as in post-war Britain.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of emotion and morality, she is the author of The Fragility of Goodness, Creating Capabilities, and Justice for Animals, among others, and has published hundreds of articles of monumental impact on the development of philospohy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

CONTENTS

Part I. Music, Bodies, Vulnerability, War
Chapter 1. Introduction: Britten and Coventry
Chapter 2. Music as Representation of Bodily Striving and Failure
Chapter 3. Britten, Auden, and the Spirit of War: Persecuting Bodies
Chapter 4. Britten and Pears: the Beauty and Nobility of Human Love
Chapter 5. Pacifisms and the Music of Peace
Chapter 6. Reconciliation: Aldeburgh, Wolfenden, Coventry

Part II. War Requiem

Conclusion. The Way Forward

Erscheinungsdatum	13.10.2024
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	137 x 201 mm
Gewicht	431 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
ISBN-10	0-19-756853-X / 019756853X
ISBN-13	978-0-19-756853-8 / 9780197568538
Zustand	Neuware