Musicians as Idols

Musical figures and in particular composers constitute a multifaceted topos in literature. Since sentimentalism and romanticism, they often represent the existence of the ultimate artist, the will for expression and ingenious creativity, but also eccentricity and a detachment from life – up to madness and death.

While around 1800 the focus lay on the crisis of artistic subjectivity, in modern times the image of the musician would become the embodiment of culture par excellence. Here, radical cultural criticism meets mythicizing tendencies to the point of an exaggeration of an artistic ’heroism’. This lecture outlines this development and provides a framework for the discussion on the individual contributions to the symposium: on George Bernhard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Egon Friedell and Stefan Zweig.

Lecture in German · Admission free