Review of the work: Cantar el infinito, De Juan, I.

Infinity of romantic imaginery

Abstract

First publication by Irene de Juan, whom we know from her enriching programs on Radio Clásica, with a very clear objective, to capture the essence of Romanticism in the syncretism of the arts or how this interdisciplinary phenomenon flooded the artist's feelings during the nineteenth century. The pages of this book run along the same lines as her radio work, with a good dose of erudition, but in a direct and simple style that rightly avoids grandiloquence. Through eight chapters and an epilogue, from Beethoven to Mahler, a whole great century in which the Romantic spirit is born, develops and, as is the destiny of all beautiful things, dies "in the death throes of the bombs of the First World War" (p. 260), between the "armed peace", the "Belle époque" or the "world of yesterday" of Zweig, as the author recalls.