This philosophical theory of art, addressed to anyone with a serious interest in the arts, has three main objectives: to shift the focus of aesthetics from the question "What is art?" to the question "What is art for?"; to describe the social and historical situation of art today; and to combine aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. A distinctive feature of the book is its argument that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a particularly revealing fashion.

The main purpose of this book is to clarify the meaning and use of the conventions governing the practice of implied accidentals in vocal polyphony from the early fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century - a problem which has fascinated musicologists for over a hundred years now. Musicians of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance did not think it was necessary to write down all accidentals; since some accidental inflections were implied by the musical context, performers made them whether or not they were notated. This practice imposes on modern readers of early music sources, the task of supplying all such conventionally implied accidental inflections and the successful achievement of this task depends on a knowledge and understanding of the conventions involved. Since the practice of implied accidentals can be understood only in a wider context of compositional, notational, and performing practice of the period, the book attempts to throw light on some aspects of these practices as well.

Karol Berger setzt Wagners Musikdramen in Beziehung zu den philosophischen und kulturellen Ideen seiner Zeit und konzentriert sich dabei in einer ausfuhrlichen und gut verstandlichen Analyse auf die vier Werke, die dieser in der zweiten Halfte seiner Karriere schuf: "Der Ring des Nibelungen", "Tristan und Isolde", "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" und "Parsifal". Der Autor versucht, in das Geheimnis der Grossform von Wagners Musikdramen einzudringen und erzielt uberraschende Ergebnisse wie die Nahe Wagners zur italienischen Oper. Bei seiner Einordnung der Musikdramen auf der ideologischen Landkarte seiner Zeit relativieren sich, ganz gegen des Autors ursprungliche Absicht, viele Einwande von Wagners Kritikern, allen voran Nietzsche.

This philosophical theory of art, addressed to anyone with a serious interest in the arts, has three main objectives: to shift the focus of aesthetics from the question "What is art?"; to describe the social and historical situation of art today; and to combine aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. A distinctive feature of the book is its argument that music exemplifies the current condition of art in a particularly revealing fashion.

Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

"Karol Berger may have gone further than any other scholar before him--and very successfully so--in teasing out the historicity of music in a way that makes his discoveries convergent with the historicity of other media and art forms. In its argumentative brilliance, Berger's approach enhances our aesthetic pleasure in listening to music."--Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guerard Professor in Literature, Stanford University
"This is a major work by a major scholar. Berger is unique; there is something uncanny about his powers of synthesis and his quality of insight. No one else can relate, as he does, the closest technical analysis of music to the broadest questions of philosophy."--Richard Taruskin, author of "The Oxford History of Western Music"
"This book is an event. The musical styles of Bach and Mozart are admirably contrasted to illustrate an epochal shift in the cultural construction of time occurring around 1750. Berger combines careful musical analysis with grand perspectives on the plane of cultural theory and the history of ideas. The intellectual world has long been waiting for musicology to open up to the "cultural turn" that other disciplines of the humanities took long ago: here is a book which can serve as a model."--Jan Assmann author of "Die Zauberflote: Oper und Mysterium"

For most music historians, the modernism of the twentieth century was until recently the only appearance of the "modern" in music. The widely perceived recent decline of musical modernism makes it now possible to see the modernism of the twentieth century as a chapter in a much longer story, the story of musical modernity. The principal purpose of the present book is to encourage a debate over musical modernity; a debate that would consider the question whether, and to what extent, an examination of the history of European art music may enrich our picture of modernity and whether our understanding of music's development may be transformed by insights into the nature of modernity provided by other historical disciplines.

This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on November 9-11, 2001 to honor Professor Reinhold Brinkmann.