Books by Stephen Rumph

"A highly important reconsideration. Nobody before has properly addressed the intensity of Fauré's engagement with literature and poetry, particularly in terms of showing how it operates musically."--Roy Howat, author of The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier "This book offers an excellent, at times brilliant, contribution to the understanding of Fauré as a singularly inventive composer of song cycles, and a sophisticated compositional 'reader' of poetry."--David J. Code, Reader in Music, University of Glasgow

In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and language theory. Illuminating his discussion with French, British, German, and Italian writings on signs and language, Rumph analyzes movements from Mozart's symphonies, concertos, operas, and church music. He argues that Mozartian semiosis is best understood within the empiricist tradition of Condillac, Vico, Herder, or Adam Smith, which emphasized the constitutive role of signs within human cognition. Recognizing that the rationalist model of neoclassical rhetoric has guided much recent work on Mozart and his contemporaries, Rumph demonstrates how the dialogic tension between opposing paradigms enabled the composer to negotiate contradictions within Enlightenment thought.