Chapter 15 details Goethe’s commitment to Greek and Roman art, demonstrating that it pervades all his activity, including his literary work. His interest was primed by his years as a student in Leipzig, but his Italian journey of 1786–8 was the turning point, for it enabled him to connect the theory which he had learned with his own creative practice. Moreover, Italy gave him access to both Roman and Greek heritage. The chapter also examines neoclassical tenets in Goethe’s writing on art and closes with an analysis of his characterisation of Winckelmann.

Bernstein’s fame, reputation, and personality have for the most part been seen as excessive and problematic. This perception militated from the start against his position in time, place, and tradition as a serious composer being influential or even accepted. Yet from the golden moment of opportunity for American composers in which he grew to adulthood to his barely noticed final works, he was following a diligent route of creative output that may yet bear fruit at greater distance from the man himself, though it would be difficult to claim that, taken as a whole, it has yet done so.

The section’s closing chapter discusses the polemic between Classics and Romantics, which, despite local differences and its lack of traction in Britain, helped crystallise Romanticism in many countries both as a national and as a pan-European cultural phenomenon. Beginning with contradictory statements by Stendhal and Goethe, it argues that the Classic-Romantic nexus not only contributed to the meaning of ‘romantic’ but also of ‘classic’. The first did not replace the other, but instead complexified it by re-appropriating texts from antiquity. The chapter first shows how eighteenth-century philology informed discussions of modern culture in critical texts by F. Schlegel and Schiller, and in A.W. Schlegel’s lectures. These in turn informed Staël’s influential statements in De l’Allemagne and in her letter on translation, which fired up Romanticism in Italy, as well as Stendhal’s ‘Racine et Shakespeare’, which did the same in France. The author touches on the ideological role of translation, but also of Romantic philology and of philhellenism, showing how the Romantics in Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Poland, and Russia re-appropriated the classics. The chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of Hölderlin’s Hyperion to show Romanticism’s reluctance to differentiate the classic from the modern.

This chapter focuses on the life and writings of Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815) and provides one way through which to map out the shifts and transformation of the cosmopolitan ideal in an age of growing patriotism. Napoli Signorelli wrote and lived between the intellectual and political worlds of two connected peripheries of Europe, Italy and Spain, and one of its intellectual centres, France. The Bourbon courts in Madrid and Naples provided the political thread for these debates and the Neoclassical tradition the background for them. The querelle between the ancients and moderns remained central, as writers searched within and outside of the Neoclassical tradition to stake their claims. Knowledge of the shared ground of the Neoclassical canon bound enlightenment writers together but also provided the fodder to drive them apart. Napoli Signorelli’s work and life illuminates a crisis or reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism, specifically at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Neoclassical underpinnings of cosmopolitanism were unsettled by emerging patriotic identities within Europe.

This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

A summary of the book’s conclusions regarding Elliott Carter’s late music, on his fusing of technical and expressive concerns, the patterns of harmonic, rhythmic, and textural change in his music, and his engagement with modernist poetry and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, as well as the comic elements in his late compositions.

The Introduction delineates a shared set of concerns animating both artistic practices and scientific discourses at the turn of the nineteenth century, which were deeply invested in the human body’s ability to secure the relationship between reality and illusion, and between seeing and knowing. It first reevaluates historical accounts of the decline of neoclassicism and rise of Romanticism, and particularly the waning pictorial supremacy of the idealized nude body. It then lays out the importance of “popular science” and “Enlightenment empiricism” for the cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Britain and Continental Europe, revealing how the scientific authority of the human body was undergoing intense scrutiny. Recognizing such developments as interlocking rather than parallel enables us to think more critically about how artworks interrogated some of the visual and structural features of popular scientific discourses and, ultimately, the empirical framework that undergirded them.

Chapter 6 turns to the disintegration of the political unity of the Iberian World, and addresses the role of the classical rhetorical tradition in spreading new and even revolutionary ideas in both the Atlantic and the Pacific (c. 1750–1850). It begins by showing that new Enlightenment wine was frequently put in post-humanist bottles, focusing on the orations delivered in the Patriotic Economic Societies (sociedades de amigos del país) in Spain and the Philippines. It then shows that a similar pattern can be seen in the oratory of the Age of Revolutions in Mexico. While the public ceremonial oratory of the early Mexican Republic is often portrayed as having arisen spontaneously to fulfill the needs of the new nation, this chapter argues that this was merely the last in a long line of applications in the Iberian World of a tool of social ordering inherited from Mediterranean antiquity.

“The slaveholders,” Frederick Douglass said in 1849, “are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes.” American readers in the 1850s were captivated by such apocalyptic imagery. As the crisis over slavery developed—from the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) to the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854) to the Dred Scott decision (1857)—many became increasingly convinced that their world would, like Pompeii in the first century, come to a fiery, apocalyptic end. But debates arose about how and why the United States might come to an end and whether this end could be prevented. While abolitionist writers often described slavery as a sin, others thought of slavery as a national pathology that might be cured or, at the very least, managed. This chapter explores the apocalyptic dimensions of the period that has long been called the American Renaissance.

In a way, Igor Stravinsky’s turn to Greek antiquity as a source of inspiration came about as a gift to the man who arguably played the most important role in the composer’s artistic development: Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). Indeed, Stravinsky’s very first work on a Greek theme, the opera-oratorio Oedipus rex (1926–7; rev. 1948), materialised as an anniversary present to the Russian impresario for the twentieth season of the Ballets Russes, in 1927.1 The fact that Diaghilev disliked what he described as ‘un cadeau très macabre’ (a very macabre present), says very little about the significance of this work – or, in fact, of Stravinsky’s subsequent works on ancient Greek topics – in the composer’s artistic evolution.

More than any other twentieth-century composer, Stravinsky stands out within ballet modernism. He wrote more scores for dance or for theatre events with a significant dance element (eighteen in total) than any other major composer of his time. It was dance too, primarily Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which gave Stravinsky the key platform from which to launch his career, including the opportunity to work with the modernist choreographer George Balanchine (1904–83). Together, Stravinsky and Balanchine formed the most celebrated composer–choreographer collaboration of the century.

This chapter examines in three stages the surprisingly vital place of the Classical literatures of Greece and Rome in the development of the Gothic. First, Horace Walpole and his contemporaries Edward Young and Richard Hurd irreverently reimagined Classical antiquity not as a model of propriety and decorum, but as a grotesque realm of monsters and ghosts. Second, Clara Reeve challenged the social prejudice that accorded prestige to the masculine zone of Classical texts but not to popular literature; The Old English Baron blends a Gothic narrative with motifs from Classical historiography in order to challenge the artificial hierarchy separating the two modes. Third, writers of the Romantic age presented Rome as a haunted city, recasting the influence of Greece and Rome in spectral terms. The Gothic, it shows, is no simple departure from the Classical. Rather, the tension between the two is sustained throughout the history of the genre as one of its basic elements, and we need to restore a sense of that tension in order to understand the full force of the Gothic in the literary and aesthetic consciousness of the long eighteenth century.