Kadenz und Gegenwart

This volume offers a uniquely in-depth and historically grounded analysis of Froberger’s music, using the allemande—a genre central to his oeuvre—as its focal point. For it is precisely dance music that appears, in Froberger’s work, to be spiritualized in a previously unimagined way. And so the examination of his allemandes leads through the thicket of their elaborate compositional technique, past compositional questions of temporal structure, to the deciphering of their existential dimension—the subjective experience of time and temporality. From the perspective of the experience of time, the phenomenon of “tonality” is reexamined, and a bridge is built between the history of composition and intellectual history, making Froberger’s music appear present in a double sense: for in that it, to use Hannah Arendt’s words, “created a presence for itself,” it is at once timeless and still relevant today.

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