I might note that with respect to opera it is a lot easier to get at any political/economic content because there is a text, the libretto, as well as usually some kind of story. Thus, we have textual analysis available when searching out ideological content, whether it is Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Berg, or John Adams.
However for non-vocal music there is a much more difficult problem. Of course, some of the Romantic composers were into "program music" starting with Berlioz and his Symphonie Fantastique. The piece told a story or had a program with it, something more explicit in ballets, which allows more scope for direct interpretation.
But without a libretto or a stated program, interpretation becomes more difficult. We are left with either dedications (Shostakovich dedicating his Seventh Symphony to the heroic citizens of Leningrad in the war, or Beethoven dedicating the Eroica Symphony (No. 3) to Napoleon until he withdrew it after Napoleon's conquest of Vienna and self-declaration of emperorship) or general stated attitudes and associations. Beyond that one gets into the much more difficult analyses: Is a heavy and monotonous beat with a bass "fascist"? Who knows?
BTW, one of my economist friends, Tonu Puu, runs a baroque music festival in Sweden. He also makes violi di gambi. He considers Beethoven to have been the destruction of western civilization, although when he read of a rock concert causing tiles to fall off the roof of the Doge's Palazzio in Venice, this was even worse. Of course, not only did both Lenin and Hitler like Beethoven, but his music got played at the fall of the Berlin Wall. The old boy gets around, ideologically speaking that is, :-). Barkley Rosser On Mon, 14 Dec 1998 13:22:07 -0500 (EST) Michael Hoover <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> wrote:
> interested listers might check out John Bokina's _Opera & Politics: From
> Monteverdi to Henze_, Yale, 1997...I posted a note about this book with a
> table of contents to one or the other of these lists several weeks ago...
> among other things, Bokina
>
> argues that Monteverdi's *Ulisse* glorifies the past of a declining
> republic
>
> views Mozart's Don Giovanni as a 'tragic hero' for his insistence upon a
> libertine life
>
> interprets Beethoven's *Fidelio* as 'an allegory of the French Revolution,
> the supreme example of bourgeois republican virtue' (p. 75)
>
> characterizes Wagner's *Parsifal* as romantic anti-capitalism
>
> sees Strauss's *Elektra* & Schoenberg's *Erwatung* as disillusioned
> retreats from politics
>
> discusses the postmodern 'aesthetic-politics' of Henze's *The Bassarids*
>
> Michael Hoover
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu