Unsung Voices

Who "speaks" to us in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in Wagner's operas, in a Mahler symphony? In asking this question, Carolyn Abbate opens nineteenth-century operas and instrumental works to new interpretations as she explores the voices projected by music. The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that "sings" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that "de-center" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.

"Abbate establishes a critical dialogue between music's desire to convey narrative information and its sensual resistance to such signification.... Abbate is the most original writer on Wagner to appear since Dahlhaus.... Her essay `Brünnhilde Walks by Night' is a tour de force of imaginative interpretation."---David Schiff, The New Republic