European Romanticism gave rise to a powerful discourse equating genres to constrictive rules and forms that great art should transcend; and yet without the categories and intertextual references we hold in our minds, "music" would be meaningless noise.
Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology teases out that paradox.
In case studies from across nineteenth-century Europe engaging with canonical music by Bizet, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, and Brahms, alongside representative genres such as opera-comique and the piano ballade, Matthew Gelbart explores the processes through which composers, performers, critics, and listeners gave sounds, and themselves, a sense of belonging. He examines genre vocabulary and discourse, the force of generic titles, how avant-garde music is absorbed through and into familiar categories, and how interpretation can be bolstered or undercut by genre agreements.