The symphony and the novel – a harmonious couple?

The symphony and the novel evolved in tandem for two centuries. Music moved on after modernism, but whatever happened to fiction?The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the securely comfortable end of the emotional spectrum we have those zeniths of song, the German lieder tradition, and high opera. In the best examples of both forms words and music appear utterly ...

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