Overview

The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions.Offering a reading of Britten's views about the value and beauty of the body that situates these in the context of his thirty-nine year partnership with his lover, the singer Peter Pears, and also surveying pacifist themes in works written both before and after War Requiem, Nussbaum presents a compelling framework for critically assessing Britten's oeuvre. Nussbaum engages with a remarkably wide range of Britten's works, examining his treatment of aggression and its roots in his collaborations with the poet W.H. Auden, offering readings of the value placed on the body in early partnerships with Britten's beloved and singer Peter Pears, and surveying pacifist themes in Britten's earlier works. The analysis throughout is enriched with perspectives from Britten's personal letters and thoughtful study of the social and political backdrop of fear and homophobic disgust in mid-twentieth century Britain. According to Nussbaum's interpretation, War Requiem confronts listeners with the reality of bodily experience in war, eliciting compassion by its depiction of beauty, vulnerability, and eroticism. Issuing a stern warning, it points the way to hope for postwar reconciliation. Nussbaum's careful analysis of Britten's score and its settings of both the Requiem Mass and Owen's poems, their historic performance at Coventry, and its philosophical commitments, unveils a message of human love in a hostile world that resonates as powerfully today as in post-war Britain.

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9780197568538

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Reviews

With this study of Britten's music, centrally focused on his War Requiem, Martha C. Nussbaum has given readers a beautiful and many-sided book. It is simultaneously an insightful study of a great composer, an informed and sensitive interpretation of one of his masterpieces, and a deep philosophical reflection on attitudes to war. No previous book has demonstrated the philosophical significance and complexity of a body of musical works in so convincing a way. It is a model for future philosophical writing about music, and, in Nussbaum's dialogue with Britten's pacifism, an illuminating response to the horrors of war.. * Philip Kitcher, Columbia University (Emeritus) * A critic of formidable range and historical awareness, Nussbaum leads musical exegesis into wider political, legal, and moral spheres. Her study of Britten's monumental War Requiem and the composer's lifelong pacifist convictions is by turns meditative, passionate, and true to the inner life of each arriving musical gesture. This is a work of rare intelligence and insight. * Philip Rupprecht, Duke University, and author of Britten’s Musical Language * With clarity and generosity, Nussbaum argues that Britten's music has something essential to tell us about violence, compassion, and the pursuit of peace. Listening closely to the War Requiem and an array of other works, while anchoring them in the composer's shared life with Peter Pears, she draws out an idea of embodied love as a source of hope that animates both life and art. * Heather Wiebe, author of Britten’s Unquiet Pasts *

Author Information

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of emotion and morality, she is the author of The Fragility of Goodness, Creating Capabilities, and Justice for Animals, among others, and has published hundreds of articles of monumental impact on the development of philospohy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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