Content area
Full Text
Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema. By Christopher Morris. Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 203. Cloth $100.78. ISBN 978-0754669708.
Over the course of the last decade, in what can be identified as a second phase of inquiry following groundbreaking works such as Rainer Amstädter's Der Alpinismus. Kultur-Organisation-Politik (1996), Christian Rapp's Höhenrausch. Der deutsche Bergfilm (1997), Dagmar Günther's Alpine Quergänge. Kulturgeschichte des bürgerlichen Alpinismus, and Helmut Zebhauser's Alpinismus im Hitlerstaat. Gedanken, Erinnerungen, Dokumente (both 1998), more specialized studies such as Matthias Schirren's Bruno Taut. Alpine Architektur. Eine Utopie (2004), Peter Mierau's Nationalsozialistische Expeditionspolitik. Deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933-1945 (2006), Ursula Schreiber's Politische Berge. Alpinismus und Alpenverein im Spannungsverhältnis mit der Politik (2008) and, most recently, Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann's coedited volume Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012) have greatly enhanced our understanding of the various cultural and political representations of mountains in Germany over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Christopher Morris's Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema adds to this now quickly expanding body of knowledge by investigating the heretofore barely researched musical representation of mountains in the first half of the twentieth century. Morris, author of Reading Opera Between the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg (2002) and Professor of Music at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, bases his monograph on the observation that "judged by the sheer volume and range of cultural output associated with the mountains, or the philosophical seriousness of the rhetoric produced on its behalf, the German cult of mountains occupied a unique space" (3) and subsequently approaches the Alps as "one of the principle sites at which the struggle with modernity would be waged, metaphorically and literally" (2) with a special eye to the representation of...