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“If screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs are in fact unthinkable today, it is because we mistrust high feeling,” writes cultural historian Joseph Horowitz in Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin de Siècle (University of California Press, 265 pages, $39.95). “Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions.” Moral Fire is Horowitz’s latest scholarly opus, and in it he returns to one of his favorite themes: the zeal and idealism with which European classical music was promoted and debated in America [...]
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