Intent

This is not a book solely about irony, nor is it one about musical irony per se. We have, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, few large-scale studies to consult; those addressing irony itself come from relatively recent times, and none pertain significantly (if at all) to music. The present inquiry, therefore, does not attempt to define, sort, or “scale” past and present efforts in using words to write about music, writing about music that incorporates words, trying to write about words as music or—however intriguing—variations thereof. Rather, in view of the phenomenon's slim profile concerning music and its long-acknowledged influence upon literature (or, for that matter, philosophy, art, and life in general), it traces—indeed courts—irony as an attributed, underlying element of one composer's musical style, along with attendant ironies that come to the foreground of stylistic and historical reconsideration. Aspiring to the late Dennis John Enright's model of “practical” rather than theoretical criticism, it is indebted to many others, among them, of course, Harold Bloom, who, in his earlier and more complicated work, also used the phrase “practical criticism,” and to as many previous and original sources as is possible to address and acknowledge within a single, more focused study.