Cherubino’s Leap

‘This is a book of snapshots’, Richard Kramer writes at the beginning of Cherubino’s Leap, and indeed the monograph provides numerous fascinating insights into short segments of more or less well-known musical works from the second half of the eighteenth century. Kramer is able both to elucidate these segments through detailed musical analysis and connect them to larger aesthetic contexts. The unifying aspect of the moments Kramer has chosen for his analysis is the condition of a surprise, an unexpected shift in the musical qualities of the composition under consideration, in which ‘the composer’s ear turns inward, beneath the elegant surface ... to some less comfortable recess, beyond convention’ (p. 10). In the opening chapter, Kramer provides a few non-musical analogues to the musical moments, for example, Joseph Lange’s famous unfinished portrait of Mozart invisibly playing an absent piano. From the aesthetic treatises of the Enlightenment, Kramer selects Moses Mendelssohn’s concept of Überraschung (surprise) and Johann Gottfried Herder’s idea of Anerkennung (recognition) to explain better the specific qualities in the musical works discussed. These concepts are certainly present in all of the works analysed throughout the book and allow the author to come up with striking new readings and insights into late eighteenth-century music.

Art · Art history · Convention · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · MOZART · Musical · Piano · Portrait · Sociology · Surprise · Communication · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology