Michael P. Steinberg Livres

The book explores the significant influence of music on European modernity from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, highlighting how musical works and culture shaped societal debates about identity and power. Michael Steinberg examines a wide range of composers, from Mozart to Mahler, and addresses both sacred and secular music, including opera and symphonic pieces. This work illustrates how music not only mirrored contemporary issues but also actively critiqued and engaged with the prevailing social and political structures of the time.

Austria's Salzburg Festival has long grappled with cultural identity, particularly in light of its complex twentieth-century history. This tension became evident in 1999 when the Austrian president criticized the festival's direction under Gerard Mortier, advocating a return to the ideals of its founder, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This sparked a renewed debate about the Festival's future, mirroring broader discussions about Austria's identity. The controversy intensified later that year when Joerg Haider's right-wing Freedom Party formed a coalition with the conservative People's Party, igniting backlash from Austria's European Union partners. Michael P. Steinberg's insightful examination of the Salzburg Festival traces its origins from the aftermath of World War I and the Habsburg Empire's collapse. He highlights the Festival's connection to significant issues in Austrian and German ideology, particularly the concept of "nationalist cosmopolitanism," which has influenced German and Austrian culture since the Enlightenment. Steinberg explores how the Festival embodies this paradoxical tradition and addresses contemporary cultural conflicts in Austria. His work serves as both a detailed history of a vital cultural institution and a profound analysis of the intricate relationship between culture and politics in early twenty-first-century Europe.

Engages the lengthy debate over the ivory-bill woodpecker’s status by examining reported sightings and extensive efforts to find the rare bird in Louisiana.

"In The Afterlife of Moses, Steinberg addresses the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics, of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Motivated in part by this recent period of reactionary insurgency in the US, Europe, and Israel, this work of intellectual history articulates the way in which a critique of myths of origin as a principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship has equal relevance in these places and equal fragility"--

This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident. Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.