Studies: Baudelaire, Claudel, Gide, Rameau, Bach, Franck, Wagner

Rivière, Jacques, 1886-1925Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
326K words
Chapters
33

Tags

Foreign Language Books Literary AppreciationMusic Poetry and ThoughtPhilosophical EssayAcademic StudyLiterary CriticismLiterary CriticismCanon ReassessmentAesthetic CriticismMusic CriticismEclectic Reading

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Études: Baudelaire, Paul Claudel, André Gide, Rameau, Bach, Franck, Wagner,Author: Rivière, Jacques, 1886-1925,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jul 6, 2016

Editor's review

This is a collection of essays by the French writer Jacques Rivière, discussing literary figures such as Baudelaire, Paul Claudel, and André Gide, as well as musicians including Rameau, Bach, Franck, and Wagner. The book sets literary criticism alongside musical sensibility, reflecting the early twentieth-century French intellectual interest in fostering dialogue between the two arts. For readers, its value lies not in systematic textbook conclusions but in a critical voice marked by personal judgment, making it useful material for understanding the French literary and musical-critical context of the period. Reading it requires some French and relevant background knowledge; otherwise one may remain at the literal level. It is best read as essayistic criticism, with attention to how the author uses literary language to describe music and how he draws on musical experience to understand writers.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read by figure, and after each piece summarize the author's core judgment in your own words.
  2. When reading the literary sections, consult the relevant writers' works; when reading the musical sections, listen to excerpts of the works mentioned.
  3. Keep a notebook recording the analogies the author draws between literature and music, and review his critical method after finishing.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33

FAQ

How difficult is the French in this book, and is it suitable for beginners? The text consists of French critical essays, with syntax and vocabulary characteristic of early twentieth-century written French; it is not an introductory reader. Readers with intermediate or higher French reading ability will find it easier to grasp; beginners are advised to start with the shorter pieces and use dictionaries and background materials.
Do I need prior knowledge of the writers and musicians discussed? It helps. Baudelaire, Gide, Claudel, Bach, Wagner, and others are keys to understanding the context. Readers may first look up basic biographies and major works before entering the text, which makes it easier to follow the author's comparisons and judgments.
Is this a systematic literary history or music history? No. It is closer to a personal collection of critical essays, developing impressions and judgments around specific figures rather than laying out historical facts chronologically. It suits reading with questions in mind and observing critical method, and is not intended as a textbook or reference work.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Rivière, Jacques, 1886-1925 Author · French · 1886–1925

Jacques Rivière (1886–1925) was a French writer and editor, best known for leading the Nouvelle Revue Française. At the center of French literary and intellectual life in the early twentieth century, he wrote criticism that combined a critic's precision with a writer's sensitivity. The library holds one of his works, Études: Baudelaire, Paul Claudel, André Gide, Rameau, Bach, Franck, Wagner, whose contents span literature and music, with studies of writers such as Baudelaire, Paul Claudel, and André Gide alongside discussions of composers including Rameau, Bach, Franck, and Wagner, reflecting his interest in bridging literary and musical criticism. He also wrote a work on Rimbaud. Publicly available material on his life and intellectual development is limited, so no further detail is given here.