The doctrine or theory according to which the primary determinant of human character and destiny, and the primary object of social and political allegiance, is the particular nation to which an individual belongs. Nationalism is recognized by historians and sociologists as a major factor in European cultural ideology by the end of the 18th century, and it has been arguably the dominant factor in geopolitics since the end of the 19th. Its multifarious impact on the arts, and on music in particular, has directly paralleled its growth and spread.
Nationalism should not be equated with the possession or display of distinguishing national characteristics – or not, at any rate, until certain questions are asked and at least provisionally answered. The most important ones are, first, who is doing the distinguishing? and second, to what end? Just as there were nations before there was nationalism, music has always exhibited local or national traits (often more apparent to outsiders than to those exhibiting them). Nor is musical nationalism invariably a matter of exhibiting or valuing stylistic peculiarities. Nationality is a condition; nationalism is an attitude.
2. Origins and earliest manifestations.
4. Cultural nationalism and German Romanticism.
5. From national to universal.
6. Music and German nation-building: the Vormärz phase.
13. Export nationalism, neo-nationalism.
15. The last of the Herderians and the Cold War.
RICHARD TARUSKIN
Definitions of nationalism depend, of course, on definitions of nation. It is not likely that consensus will ever be reached on their precise meaning, since different definitions serve differing interests. One thing, however, has been certain from the beginning: a nation, unlike a state, is not necessarily a political entity. It is primarily defined not by dynasties or by territorial boundaries but by some negotiation of the relationship between the political status of communities and the basis of their self-description, whether linguistic, ethnic (genetic/biological), religious, cultural or historical.
Defining traits generally occur in combination rather than isolation; within communities there are likely to be tensions and disputes as to how the various factors promoting solidarity are to be ranked and valued. German-speakers, for instance, were (and are) divided by religion, Italian co-religionists by language. Nor can anyone really say what constitutes a shared ‘historical experience’ when that is proffered as a definition of nationhood, since the linguistically and religiously diverse subjects of the Austrian emperor or the Russian tsar surely had a history in common.
But none of these complications has deterred the growth of nationalism as a political movement with cultural ramifications or vice versa: indeed complications have acted as a spur, since vagueness is always a stimulus to theorizing. Modern political nationalism is most often defined as the belief that political divisions between states should accord with the ways in which populations define themselves as communities. Twice in the 20th century the map of Europe was redrawn according to these principles: in 1918–19 in the aftermath of World War I, which destroyed the multinational Austrian and Ottoman empires; and in 1989–92 in the aftermath of the collapse of the multinational Soviet empire. The same idea fuels today’s separatist movements (e.g. Basque, Kurdish, Québecois).
But viewed from the standpoint of the status quo, separatists are minorities; and general theories of nationalism have always foundered on the minorities question, especially after minorities themselves caught the nationalist fever. The most conspicuous case has been that of Zionism, a movement that originated among affluent assimilated Jews of central and eastern Europe who, aping the bourgeois nationalism of their host cultures, claimed modern nationhood for a self-defined community that had never had a contiguous territory or a common vernacular in modern times. The unresolved and perhaps unresolvable questions Zionism has raised for assimilated diaspora Jews ever since was reflected in the small but significant repertory of Jewish nationalist music in the 20th century, torn between the reflection of contemporary ‘reality’ through local folklore and the construction of an artificial orientalist idiom to represent the once and future homeland (see Móricz, 1999).
In the modern historiography of Western art music, the commonly accepted definition of nationalism has been the one promoted by musicology’s ‘dominant culture’, that of the German scholarly diaspora. Willi Apel, the editor of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, gave it a concise and comprehensive articulation in the 1969 edition. The origins of musical nationalism are there assigned to the second half of the 19th century, and the movement is characterized as ‘a reaction against the supremacy of German music’. From this it followed that ‘the nationalist movement is practically nonexistent in Germany, nor has there been much of one in France’. Italian music, too, is exempted, since Italy ‘had an old musical tradition to draw upon and did not need to resort to the somewhat extraneous resources of the nationalist movement’.
Musical nationalism is hence cast willy-nilly as a degenerate tendency that represents ‘a contradiction of what was previously considered one of the chief prerogatives of music, i.e., its universal or international character, which meant that the works of the great masters appealed equally to any audience’. And consequently, ‘by about 1930 the nationalist movement had lost its impact nearly everywhere in the world’. One of the principal achievements of recent musical scholarship has been to discredit this definition and all its corollaries, themselves the product of a nationalist agenda.
It has been argued that the fine art of music as a literate tradition in Europe owes its inception to nationalism, since the earliest musical notations, preserving the so-called Gregorian chant, were the by-product of a political alliance between the Frankish kings and the Roman church, the primary objective of which was the consolidation of the Carolingian Empire. The latter, however, as a dynastic, multi-ethnic entity, did not correspond to the modern definition of a nation. What cements social groups under nationalism is not social rank as instituted by men but ‘higher’, more ‘universal’ principles – blood, soil, language – that are regarded as coming from God or Nature, and to which all humans from the sovereign downwards are therefore subject. Nationalism was, at least originally, an inherently modernizing and liberalizing force driven by mercantilism and by the economic and political interests of the emergent bourgeoisie (see Greenfeld, 1992). Its origins are often associated with those of the ‘early modern’ period itself.
According to one influential recent theory (Anderson, 1983), the origins of nationalism are to be sought in the rise of ‘print culture’ and especially newspapers. These made possible an ‘imagined community’ that went beyond the literate individual’s personal range of acquaintances to encompass a publication’s entire potential readership. This theory links the advance of vernacular literature, and the greatly enhanced speed and range of its dissemination, with the inception of a properly so-called national consciousness.
The history of music offers at least one convincing correlate. The earliest musical genres to be disseminated primarily through print were the vernacular song genres of the early 16th century. Songbooks issued for the local trade, beginning with Petrucci’s first book of frottolas (Venice, 1504) and continuing with Antico in Rome (1510), Öglin in Augsburg (1512) and Attaingnant in France (1528), were the chief moneymakers for all the early music printers.
Vernacular song genres differed markedly, like their languages, from country to country, in contrast with the international ‘Franco-Flemish’ idiom of sacred music. The most dramatic instance was the new ‘Parisian’ chanson style. During the 15th century, the word ‘chanson’ connoted an international courtly style, an aristocratic lingua franca. A French song in a fixed form might be written anywhere in Europe, by a composer of any nationality whether at home or abroad. The age of printing fathered a new style of French chanson – the one introduced by Attaingnant and associated with Claudin de Sermisy – that was actually and distinctively French in the way the frottola was Italian and the Hofweise setting (or Tenorlied) was German. Despite the fact that Sermisy was a court musician, the songs he composed for the voracious presses of Attaingnant were intended primarily as household music (and therefore bourgeois entertainment). The imagined community it served was not only a localized but also a significantly democratized community.
Yet as long as the French nation was symbolized by a dynastic sovereign who could say ‘L’état, c’est moi’, the modern notion of nationalism as a political ideal cannot be said to have taken hold. The first country where (or on behalf of which) such a claim could be made was Britain, where absolutism was literally dealt a death-blow in 1649. An island kingdom with incontestable natural boundaries, post-Restoration Britain was perhaps the earliest nation-state to consider itself a natural community as well as a political one, and to find ideological support for that self-image outside the person of a sovereign. England, the economically and culturally dominant portion of the British Isles, was consequently the earliest country in which the audience for music was a ‘public’ in the modern sense, and so it was in England that modern concert life – i.e. public, collective patronage of musicians – was born.
The zenith of that powerful island community’s musical self-expression was the Handelian oratorio. Recent scholarship has brought into sharper focus the political subtexts that informed the genre, reflecting the surprising extent to which political debate in 18th-century England was carried on in the guise of Old Testament exegesis (see Smith, 1995). The basic premise, according to which Handel’s portrayals of the biblical ‘chosen people’ and their triumphs were read as coded celebrations of their modern British counterpart, was from the beginning openly proclaimed. A letter to the editor of the London Daily Post following the first performance of Israel in Egypt, printed in the issue of 18 April 1739, is a superb early document of musical nationalism. After first marvelling at the spectacle of national unity – ‘a crowded Audience of the first Quality of a Nation, headed by the Heir apparent of their Sovereign’s Crown, sitting enchanted at Sounds’ – it quickly proceeds to the inevitable reverse side of the coin: Did such a Taste prevail universally in a People, that People might expect on a like Occasion, if such Occasion should ever happen to them, the same Deliverance as those Praises celebrate: and Protestant, free, virtuous, united Christian England, need little fear, at any time hereafter, the whole Force of slavish, bigotted, united, unchristian Popery, risen up against her, should such a Conjuncture ever hereafter happen [italics original].
Thus self-definition is practically always accompanied, indeed made possible, by other-definition. Any act of inclusion is implicitly an act of exclusion as well. Nationalism, whatever its democratizing and liberalizing early impact, has always harboured the seeds of intolerance and antagonism. One senses the dark side, too, in the defensive insularity described a hundred years earlier by Athanasius Kircher, otherwise in many ways a forerunner of enlightened universalism, in Musurgia universalis (1650). ‘The style of the Italians and French pleases the Germans very little’, he noted, ‘and that of the Germans hardly pleases the Italians or French’. He then attempted an explanation: I think this happens for a variety of reasons. Firstly, out of patriotism and inordinate affection to both nation and country, each nation always prefers its own above others. Secondly, according to the opposing styles of their innate character and then because of custom maintained by long-standing habit, each nation enjoys only its own music that it has been used to since its earliest age. Hence we see that upon first hearing, the music of the Italians, albeit charming, pleases the French and Germans very little, as being to their suffering ears an unusual style, contrary to themselves and of a particular impetuosity [trans. Margaret Murata].
Because it was cast in national terms, and displayed a high awareness of differing national styles, the Querelle des Bouffons, the pamphlet war in which the defenders of the French tragédie lyrique faced off against the proponents of the Italian intermezzo, is sometimes also cited as an early manifestation of nationalism in music. But of course both sides in that quarrel were French. At issue was not the superiority of this or that particular national character, but the success with which the Italians, in the eyes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and those who agreed with him, were able to portray the universal human nature that it was every artist’s common objective to depict. ‘It is the animal cry of passion that should dictate the melodic line’, said Diderot through his mouthpiece, ‘Rameau’s nephew’; and Frenchmen, Italians and the rest of mankind were all the same animal.
That, if anything, was the principal tenet of 18th-century Enlightenment, and it is reflected in J.J. Quantz’s famous treatise on flute playing (1752), when the author reflects that the virtue of German taste lay in knowing ‘how to select with due discrimination from the musical tastes of various peoples what is best in each’ and blend it all into a higher unity. This definition, contrasting as it did with Kircher’s, paid tribute to the aristocratic liberality of Quantz’s employer and pupil, Frederick the Great, the quintessential enlightened despot, who not only patronized such taste but practised it as well. It was only later that this eclecticism could (and would) be taken, under the rubric of ‘universality’, to be a mark of German superiority.
The 19th century, which saw the rise of nationalism to supremacy among ideologies, fostered it in both its progressive and reactionary guises, and in both its actively political and its passively ‘cultural’ forms. It is precisely because it was actively political that Italian musical nationalism has remained invisible to many observers. As an aspect of Risorgimento culture, Italian opera between the 1820s and the 1850s was stylistically unselfconscious but civically committed. One theory holds that the primary social aim of Risorgimento culture was to ‘raise the level of aggression’ in Italians (Peckham, 1985). This attitude is well corroborated by a contemporary witness, Stendhal, who in his Vie de Rossini tendentiously gave Napoleon the credit for stirring the Italian arts to life (see Walton, 2000). ‘Music only became bellicose’, wrote Stendhal, meaning that it only became genuinely romantic, in Tancredi, of which the first performance did not take place until a good ten years had elapsed since the miraculous feats at Rivoli and at the bridge of Arcola [i.e. Napoleon’s defeat of the Austrians in Lombardy]. Before the echo of those tremendous days came to shatter the age-old sleep of Italy, war and feats of arms had no part to play in music, save as a conventional background to give still greater value to the sacrifices made to love [in opera seria]; for indeed, how should a people, to whom all dreams of glory were forbidden, and whose only experience of arms was as an instrument of violence and oppression, have found any sense of pleasure in letting their imagination dwell on martial images?
By the 1840s, the exemplary musical artefact of Italian nationalism was the big choral unison number that conveyed a collective sentiment in tones not drawn from the oral tradition but destined to become a part of it, the locus classicus being ‘Va, pensiero’, the chorus of slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco (1842). It has been shown that a significant part of the chorus’s nationalistic import was read back on it from the perspective of the united Italy of the 1860s, and that its legendary status proceeded in stages corresponding to that of the Verdi legend itself, which in turn reflected the growing mythology of the Risorgimento (Parker, 1997). And yet myth is not falsehood but an explanatory hypothesis. That Verdi followed up on the success of ‘Va, pensiero’ with similar choruses in his next two operas, I Lombardi and Ernani, shows at the very least that audiences were demanding them. The genre, at once popular and grand in a sense that had formerly connoted only regal pomp, never popular triumph, was as much a political as a musical novelty, and a momentous one for European music.
By comparison, stylistically selfconscious Italian colour was a paltry matter, remaining inconspicuous in Italian music until after 1870, when Verdi, reacting to Wagner, began touting Palestrina as the fount not of ‘Renaissance’ or religious style, but of Italian virtues. Budden (GroveO, iii, 1171) associates the Italian national (as opposed to nationalist) tinta with verismo, with Puccini and with l’Italietta (petty picturesque Italianism). Considering that fewer than half of Puccini’s operas were actually set in Italy or derived from Italian sources, this seems more a commentary on values than on subject matter – and also, perhaps, a reference to Italy’s diminished place in the operatic scheme by the end of the century.
With its celebration of difference or uniqueness in counterpoise to the Enlightened pursuit of universality, Romanticism was nationalism’s natural ally and its most powerful stimulant. The key figure in forging this nexus was the Prussian preacher Johann Gottfried Herder, and the key document Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’, 1772).
Briefly, Herder’s argument ran as follows. It is language that makes humans human. But language can only be learnt socially, that is, in a community. Since there can be no thought without language, it follows that human thought, too, was a social or community product – neither wholly individual nor wholly universal. Herder insisted that each language manifested or (to put it biblically) revealed unique values and ideas that constituted each language community’s specific contribution to the treasury of world culture. Moreover (and this was the most subversive part), since there is no general or a priori scale against which particular languages can be measured, no language, hence no language community, can be held to be superior or inferior to any other. When the concept of language is extended to cover other aspects of learnt behaviour or expressive culture – customs, dress, art and so on – those aspects will be seen as essential constituents of a precious collective spirit or personality. In such thinking the concept of authenticity – faithfulness to one’s essential nature – was born. It became an explicit goal of the arts, not just an inherent property, to express the specific truth of the ‘imagined community’ they served, and assist in its self-definition.
It seems only natural that this theory should first have occurred to a German thinker, the German-speaking lands being then (and to a degree remaining even now) a political and religious crazy quilt. What united all Germans was their linguistic heritage and the folklore that gave that heritage its most autochthonous (or, to use Herder’s word, urwüchsig), hence authentic, expression. What united the Germans, in other words, was the very thing that distinguished them from other linguistic communities, especially the great French monolith they feared, and in whose philosophy of universalism they read condescension. It was in that oppositional thinking that Herder’s Romanticism metamorphosed into German political nationalism.
The romantic linkage of language and nation found immediate reflection in the German arts. The use of the term ‘Nationaltheater’ to designate a theatre where plays and operas were given in the vernacular language actually preceded Herder’s treatise. It first appeared in Hamburg (then a free city without ties to any larger political entity) as early as 1767, and spread from there to Vienna (1776) and Mannheim (1778). The most significant change wrought by Herder was in the value placed on folklore and its artistic appropriation, nowhere more so than in music. Volkstümlichkeit (‘folksiness’) can be found in much 18th-century art music, especially in opera buffa and its French, English, German and (beginning in 1772) Russian vernacular imitations, where it was associated, like all local colour, with peasants or otherwise low-born characters. The use of various local styles for peasants but a musical lingua franca for other characters continued to reflect the old ‘horizontal’ view of society, in which class associations rather than national ones determined a sense of community among the cosmopolitan gebildete Kreise (‘cultivated circles’). Even when stereotyped local colour found its way into instrumental music – Scarlatti sonatas, say, or the trio sections in Haydn’s symphonic minuets – its association was to the peasantry, not to the nation, and it was essentially comic. This applies as well to the portrayal of Simon, Jane and Luke, the trio of rustics in Haydn’s The Seasons, whose idiom is vaguely identifiable as volkstümlich but of indeterminate origin. They are representatives of no nation, but rather of a universalized class.
As soon as folklore was seen by the gebildete as embodying the essential authentic wisdom of a vertically defined linguistic community or nation, its cultural stock soared. It now began attracting artistic imitators interested not in generalization or universalization but in local specifics and idiosyncrasies. Herder himself became one of the earliest collectors of folklore. In his enormous comparative anthology of folksongs from all countries, Stimmen der Völker (‘Voices of the Peoples’, two vols., 1778–9), he actually coined the term Volkslied (folksong) to denote what had formerly been called a ‘simple’, ‘rustic’ or ‘peasant’ song. His collection was followed, and as far as Germany was concerned superseded, by the greatest of all German folksong anthologies, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Youth’s Magic Horn’), brought out by the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano between 1805 and 1808. Verses from this book, which contained no original melodies, were set as lieder by German composers throughout the century and far beyond. Arnim and Brentano were followed by the brothers Grimm, whose collecting efforts, by the middle of the century, had been duplicated in virtually every European country.
The great explosion of published folklore and its artistic imitations did a great deal to enhance the national consciousness of all peoples, but especially those in two categories: localized minority populations, like the Letts (the original object of Herder’s collecting interest), whose languages were not spoken across political borders; and (at the opposite extreme) large, politically divided groups like the Germans, whose languages were widely dispersed across many borders. The boundary between the collected and the created, or between the autochthonous and the artistic, or between the discovered and the invented, was at first a soft one, easily traversed. It was not always possible to distinguish between what was collected from the folk and what was contributed by the editors or their educated informants, most of whom were poets as well as scholars and did not distinguish rigorously between creative and scholarly practice.
The most illustrative case was that of the Kalevala (‘Land of Heroes’), the national epic of the Finns, who in the early 19th century lived under Swedish and, later, Russian rule. First published in 1835, it was based on lore collected from the mouths of peasants but then heavily edited and organized into a single coherent narrative by its compiler, the poet Elias Lönnrot (1802–84). It never existed in antiquity in the imposing form in which it was published and which served to imbue the modern Finns – that is, the urban, educated, cosmopolitan classes of Finnish society – with a sense of kinship and national cohesion. Nor do the ironies stop there. The distinctively incantatory trochaic metre of the poem (the result of the particular accentual patterns of the Finnish language), when translated into English, provided the model for Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855), which purported to provide the USA, a country of mixed ethnicity and less than a century old, with a sort of borrowed national epic that would lend it a sense of cultural autochthony, independent from Europe.
In some ways this ‘discovery of the folk’ was a recycling of an ancient idea, that of primitivism, the belief that the qualities of technologically backward or chronologically early cultures were superior to those of contemporary civilization; or, more generally, that it is those things that are least socialized, least civilized – children, peasants, ‘savages’, raw emotion, plain speech – that are closest to truth. The most dogmatic recent upholder of primitivistic ideas had been Rousseau, whose Le contrat social (1762) began with the ringing declaration that ‘man was born free and is everywhere in chains’. No-one had ever more effectively asserted the superiority of unspoilt ‘nature’ over decadent ‘culture’.
But, as we have seen, the Herder/Grimm phase did contain a new wrinkle, namely the idea that the superior truth of unspoilt natural man was a plural truth. The next step in the Romantic nationalist programme was to determine and define the specific truth embodied in each cultural community. Here is where the motivating resentment or inferiority complex finally began to break the surface of German nationalism. Not surprisingly, the values celebrated in the German tales – the ‘Prince Charming’ values of honesty, seriousness, simplicity, fidelity, sincerity and so on – were projected on to the German language community, which in its political fragmentation, economic backwardness and military weakness (its primitiveness, in short) represented a sort of peasantry among peoples, with all that that had come to imply as to authenticity. It alone valued das rein Geistige, ‘the purely spiritual’, or das Innige, ‘the inward’, as opposed to the superficiality, the craftiness and artifice of contemporary civilization, as chiefly represented by the hated oppressor-empire, France.
The same values of pure spirituality and inwardness were projected by German Romantics on music itself – or rather, on instrumental music, defined in opposition to aesthetically and morally depraved Italian opera – to whose essential nature (eventually encapsulated in Wagner’s term ‘absolute music’) the German nation was consequently credited with possessing the key. The rediscovery of Bach as mediated through Forkel’s chauvinistic biography, to say nothing of Beethoven’s colossal authority as mediated through the exegetical writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann (for whom instrumental music was ‘the only genuinely Romantic art’), A.B. Marx and others had the effect of universalizing the values of German music (Pederson, 1993–4; Burnham, 1995). By the middle of the century, instrumental music was identified in the minds of many Europeans, not just Germans, as being (to quote the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein) ‘a German art’ (his italics).
Thus what began as a philosophy of diversity became, in the case of music, one of hegemony. The programme of German nationalism quickly metamorphosed, for music, into one of German universalism. In the history of no other modern art has nationalism been so pervasive – yet so covert – an issue.
The first nation-specific genre in German music was the lied, originally conceived (by J.F. Reichardt and others) as a setting of volkstümlich verse or imitation folk poetry, of which the most elaborate genre was the ballad, with an eye towards recapturing some of the forgotten wisdom that das Volk had conserved through the ages of cosmopolitanism, hyperliteracy and Enlightenment. It was a neat switch on the concept of the ‘Dark Ages’. The dark, especially in its natural forest habitat, was in its mystery and intuitive ‘second sight’ now deemed light’s superior as conveyor of lore – that is, nation-specific traditional knowledge.
But the specifically German tradition of the ballad was a fiction. The earliest examples were imitations of Herder’s translations (in his Stimmen der Völker) of English and Scandinavian originals. Thus the great German ballads like Goethe’s Erlkönig had no true German folk prototype; in this they resembled the Kalevala as contemporary creations manufactured to supply a desired ancient heritage.
The supreme popularity of Erlkönig, of which dozens of settings were made (see Gibbs, 1995), was no accident. The poem surrounds the horse and riders with a whole syllabus of Germanic nature mythology, according to which the forest harbours a nocturnal spirit world, invisible to the fully mature and civilized father but terrifyingly apparent to his unspoilt son. Thus the romantically nostalgic or neo-primitivist themes of hidden reality, invisible truth, the superiority of nature over culture (or, to put it Germanically, of Kultur over Zivilisation) are clothed in the imagery and diction of folklore to lend them supreme authority.
That stance of artlessness, always present in low comedy, gained a comparable prestige in opera when a Singspiel (albeit one billed as a Romantische Oper), Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), won wide acceptance, both at home and abroad, as the exemplary German opera, a mirror of the nation and an answer to the eternal question, ‘Was ist deutsch?’. Peasants, until now visible on the operatic stage only as accessories (and, as always, representing their class, not their country), formed virtually the entire cast: not just sidekicks and comic relievers but heroes and heroines, villains and all the rest.
Weber’s opera gained its great national significance in part from the circumstances of its première: it was the inaugural musical offering at the newly rebuilt Nationaltheater in Berlin, the Prussian capital. That signals an important theme: the role of reception, alongside or even before the composer’s intentions, as a determinant of nationalist significance. It was the nation, not the composer, who made Der Freischütz a national opera, and it was this prior acceptance by the nation that enabled the more aggressive nationalists of the next generation to load the opera with a freight of ideology never envisaged by the composer.
First among them was Wagner, who, a struggling unknown in Paris in 1841, took the opportunity afforded by the French première of Der Freischütz to send a chauvinistic dispatch to the newspapers back home – one in which, significantly, Weber’s name was never even mentioned, as if to cast the opera as the collective issue of the German Volk: O my magnificent German fatherland, how must I love thee, now must I gush over thee, if for no other reason than that Der Freischütz rose from thy soil! … How happy he who understands thee, who can believe, feel, dream, delight with thee! How happy I am to be a German!
In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, there were many who were now revelling in Germanness and looking forward to its becoming not only a cultural but a political reality. Music could play a part in the cultural unification of the German lands, now seen as the necessary prelude to political unification. Choral music, too, came into its own under the impetus of Romantic nationalism, enjoying a rebirth that contemporary musicians loved to compare with its original ‘birth’ for European music history as the continent-uniting music of the medieval Christian church. That implied trajectory, from Gregorian chant to lied and from church to folk, bespeaks the transformation Romanticism wrought not only in the way one thought about nation but also the way one thought about art. Both concepts were sacralized in the process of their Romantic redefinition.
Romantic choral music was associated in Germany not only with Gemütlichkeit, the conviviality of social singing embodied in Männerchöre (male choruses in volkstümlich style), but also with the mass choral festivals that provided German unificatory nationalism with its hotbed. First organized in 1814, the Rhine festivals had reached grandiose proportions by the 1830s, with throngs of performers holding forth before even bigger throngs of spectators. The primary musical conveyor of the new nation-building ideology, echoing its role in Augustan England, was the refurbished Handelian oratorio, now tellingly hybridized with the Bachian strain following the famous 1829 revival of the St Matthew Passion under Mendelssohn in Berlin.
The specifically Bachian element in the new oratorios was the use of chorales. But since the new oratorios, like Handel’s and unlike Bach’s, were secular works on sacred or sacralized themes rather than service music, the chorale now took on a new aspect associated with the nation rather than the Lutheran Church. The first composer to incorporate chorales into a Rhine festival oratorio was Carl Loewe, a Catholic, and the main site of the Lower Rhine Festival was Düsseldorf, a Catholic city only recently ceded from the Holy Roman Empire to Prussia in the post-Napoleonic settlement of 1815. In short, the Lutheran repertory of chorales was now, in apparent defiance of a sometimes bloody history, considered the common property of all Germans, irrespective of creed.
The most enduring of the new chorale oratorios was Mendelssohn’s Paulus, performed to great acclaim at the Lower Rhine Festival of 1836. Its success cast a new light on the relationship between religious and national German culture as mediated by the oratorio, since (like St Paul himself) the composer was by birth neither Protestant nor Catholic but a Jew. Mendelssohn had already worked a chorale into his ‘Reformation’ Symphony, composed right after the Bach première on commission for the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession. Now at the climax of the final chorus in Paulus, the Lutheran creed ‘Wir glauben All’ an einen Gott’ – the Augsburg Confession itself, originally proclaimed in defiance of the ‘universal’ Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor – is sung as cantus firmus. Thus what had originally been one of the most divisive texts in Reformation history was now enshrined in an oratorio given its first performance before an audience largely made up of Catholics, to consecrate a religious ideal of national union.
Through his ostensibly sacred work, Mendelssohn thus emerges as perhaps the 19th century’s most important civic musician. He was duly recognized and rewarded as such. In 1833 he was appointed Catholic Düsseldorf’s music director. Two years later he became chief conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra concerts, the most prestigious music directorship in all of Protestant Germany. In 1843, Mendelssohn added to his civic duties the role of director of the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory and also became director of the Berlin Cathedral Choir. He did more than any other individual to maintain the greatness of his country’s musical life and its reputation as the ‘music nation’.
Yet less than three years after Mendelssohn’s death, in September 1850, an article appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik – a journal published in Leipzig, Mendelssohn’s own city – that set in motion a backlash against him from which his reputation has never fully recovered, and put a whole new complexion on the idea of German nationalism, indeed of nationalism as such. Signed K. Freigedank (‘K. Free-thought’), the article, called Das Judenthum in der Musik (‘Jewry in Music’), made the claim that Jews, being not merely culturally or religiously but racially – that is, biologically – distinct from gentile Christians, could not contribute to gentile musical traditions, only dilute them. There could be no such thing as assimilation, only mutually corrupting mixture. A Jew might become a Christian by converting (as Mendelssohn had done), but never a true gentile, hence never a German.
As long as nationalism was conceived in linguistic, cultural and civic terms, it could be a force for liberal reform and tolerance. To that extent it maintained continuity, despite its Romantic origins, with Enlightenment thinking. A concept of a united Germany could encompass not only the union of Catholic and Protestant under a single flag, but could also envisage civil commonalty with Jews, even unconverted ones, so long as all citizens shared a common language, a common cultural heritage and a common political allegiance. During the 1830s and 40s, the period now known to German historians as the Vormärz, German musical culture had proved the liberality and inclusiveness of its nationalism by allowing an assimilated Jew to become, in effect, its president.
Mendelssohn, for his part, was an enthusiastic cultural nationalist, even (like Schoenberg after him) something of a chauvinist, as his letters, with their smug if affectionate remarks about the musical cultures of England, France and Italy, attest. The libretto of Paulus, which begins with the story of the stoning by the Jews of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, even betrays an anti-Judaic sentiment. But there is a profound difference between the anti-Judaism of the Paulus libretto and the sentiment displayed in Das Judenthum in der Musik, now called anti-Semitism. That difference, moreover, is directly congruent with the difference between the liberal or inclusive nationalism of the early 19th century and the racialist, exclusive nationalism that took its place in the decades following 1848. A religion may be changed or shed, as a culture may be embraced or renounced. An ethnicity, however, is essential, immutable and (to use the favoured 19th-century word) ‘organic’. A nationalism based on ethnicity is no longer synonymous with patriotism. It has become obsessed not with culture but with nature, for which reason it bizarrely cast itself as ‘scientific’.
Thus, for the author of Das Judenthum in der Musik, even Mendelssohn’s undoubted genius could not save him from the pitfalls of his race. He could not ‘call forth in us that deep, heart-searching effect which we await from Music’, because his art had no ‘genuine fount of life amid the folk’, and could therefore only be ‘reflective’, never ‘instinctive’. In sly reference to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s bedrock romantic tenets, the author denied Mendelssohn, or any Jew, the ability to rise above mere glib, social articulacy and achieve the ‘expression of an unsayable content’ – in other words, the defining criterion of absolute music for which Germans alone possessed the necessary racial (implying moral) endowment. Finally, the author warned, Germany’s acceptance of this musician as its de facto musical president was only the most obvious sign of the Verjudung (‘be-Jewing’) of the nation in the name of enlightened liberality. The Jewish influence had to be thrown off if the nation was to achieve organic greatness, its heroic destiny.
All in all, Das Judenthum in der Musik is the most vivid symptom to be found in musical writings of a change in the nature of nationalism that all modern historians now recognize as a major crux in the history of modern Europe. But of course its most immediately significant aspect was the fact, guessed by many readers in 1850 and admitted by the author in 1869, that ‘K. Freigedank’ was a pseudonym for Richard Wagner, then a political exile from Germany, who as a composer was just then on the point of the momentous stylistic departures that would make him in his own right one of the towering figures in music history. His mature works, particularly Der Ring des Nibelungen, would give direct and compelling artistic embodiment to a radiantly positive expression of the same utopian ethnic nationalism of which his political fulminations were the cranky negative expression. And in those same works, which transcended (or in dialectical terms, synthesized) the distinction between the spirituality (Geist) of absolute music and the sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) of opera, Wagner embodied and (in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) advertised the achievement by Germany of ‘universal art’. By the end of the 1860s, as Carl Dahlhaus has observed, Wagner had become the ‘uncrowned king of German music’ (Dahlhaus, 1971). Comparison of that epithet with the one applied here to Mendelssohn – ‘de facto president of German musical culture’ – is suggestive of the trajectory along which the parallel histories of music and the German nation would proceed over the course of the 19th century.
Even before Wagner’s mature operas were performed, his ‘progressivist’ politics had been adopted as a platform for universalizing German music – that is, for establishing its values and achievements as normative, hence (as a modern linguist would put it) ‘unmarked’. This was in large part the achievement of Franz Brendel, the author of the century’s most widely disseminated general history of music, the explicitly neo-Hegelian Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten an bis auf die Gegenwart (‘History of Music in Italy, Germany and France from the Earliest Christian Times to the Present’), first published in 1852, which by 1906 had gone through nine editions.
It was already symptomatic not only of Brendel’s version of European music history, but also of the one still current today, that its purview was limited to the richest and most powerful countries of western Europe, the ones with the longest histories of secular art patronage and hence the largest stockpiles of artworks in all media. This was already evidence of commitment to a view of history cast in terms of the progressive realization of an essential European spirit (Hegel’s ‘world soul’) of which Italy, Germany and France were collectively the protagonist. Although no-one speaks today of the world soul, the notion of a musical mainstream is still a powerful regulative concept in music historiography, thanks to which composers active since the early 19th century are still classified into four categories: Italian, German, French and ‘nationalist’.
Brendel’s narrative also re-enacts within the musical sphere the Hegelian doctrine that all meaningfully or significantly ‘historical’ change – all change, in other words, that is worthy of representation in the dialectic – has contributed to ‘the progress of the consciousness of freedom’. Beethoven, in his traditional role of musical emancipator, naturally formed the climax, and brought Germany to the fore as the protagonist of musical evolution. The most significant chapter of Brendel’s book was the last, which maintained the narrative of progressive emancipation into the present. Brendel located the latest stage in both the consciousness of freedom and the attainment of organic unity in Liszt, then the court Kapellmeister at Weimar, who in his recently inaugurated series of symphonic poems had (according to Brendel) led music to the stage in which ‘content creates its own form’.
What made it possible for Liszt, neither Italian nor German nor French, to assume historical leadership was not merely his temporary residence in Germany but a new doctrine of Germanness. In a famous speech delivered in 1859 and published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Brendel called for the abandonment of the much ridiculed term Zukunftsmusik in favour of the term Neudeutsche Schule (‘New German School’) to denote ‘the entire post-Beethoven development’. Anticipating the obvious objection that the school’s two elder statesmen, Berlioz and Liszt, were neither of them German, Brendel asserted that it was ‘common knowledge’ that these two had taken ‘Beethoven as their point of departure and so are German as to their origins’. Warming to the subject, he continued: The birthplace cannot be considered decisive in matters of the spirit. The two artists would never have become what they are today had they not from the first drawn nourishment from the German spirit and grown strong with it. Therefore, too, Germany must of necessity be the true homeland of their works.
This remarkable pronouncement testified musically to the new conception of nationhood and nationalism that had arisen in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 among the ‘Young Hegelians’ with whom Brendel was allied. Germanness was no longer to be sought in folklore. One showed oneself a German not ethnically but spiritually, by putting oneself in humanity’s vanguard. The new concept obviously made a far greater claim than the old. Germany was now viewed as the ‘world-historical’ nation in Hegelian terms, the nation that served as the executor of history’s grand design and whose actions led the world (or at least the world of music) to its inevitable destiny.
In work that was in progress at the time of Brendel’s writing, Wagner showed that the older ethnic nationalism could in fact easily co-exist with Brendel’s vanguardism. Indeed The Ring, the Wagner work that was to become the greatest of all standard-bearers for the principle that content must create its own form, was also his most overtly racialist work, committed as it was to the principle of blood-purity as precondition for heroic deeds. And the work that most loudly proclaimed an emancipatory message, namely Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, was also the work that ended with the exhortation, ‘Ehrt euren deutschen Meister!’ so that the national art may for ever be ‘deutsch und echt’.
Nor was adherence to the New German School a prerequisite for aggressive nationalism, especially after the next watershed, that of 1870–71. Brahms, who had protested against Brendel’s proclamation in 1859, composed a cantata 12 years later for performance at Karlsruhe, already a Wagnerian stronghold, in dual celebration of the Prussian victory over France and the proclamation of the united German Empire. The Triumphlied op.55, in three large movements, is despite its present squeamish neglect a major work by any standard, and during the composer’s lifetime one of his most popular. Except for the German Requiem the longest of Brahms’s choral works, it is by far the largest in terms of its sonorous forces, being scored for two antiphonal mixed choruses and the biggest orchestra Brahms ever employed. One of the factors contributing to its size is the use of three trumpets, playing in a style obviously derived from that of Bach’s Magnificat, which shares the Triumphlied’s key of D major, thus putting the cantata squarely in the old Mendelssohnian (and, implicitly, anti-Wagnerian) line. But the text, selected by Brahms from Revelations, is the most blatant example of sacralized nationalism in the whole literature of German music. Not only does it compare Bismarck’s Reich with God’s, but it also manages, in an orchestral theme that fits the rhythm of an unsung portion of the biblical text, to identify defeated France with the Whore of Babylon – a greatly relished open secret.
The next, and crucial, chapter in the history of musical nationalism was written by the defeated French, whose crisis of national identity in the aftermath of national humiliation was played out musically in a number of tellingly contradictory ways.
Before 1871 the only nation against which France had sought to defend itself musically was Italy, not so much in the overpublicized Querelle des Bouffons as in resistance to ‘meaningless’ and ‘unnatural’ instrumental music, epitomized in Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s battle-cry, ‘Sonate, que me veux-tu?’, supposedly uttered in the name of the Académie Royale des Sciences, of which Fontenelle was secretary from 1699 to 1741. The remark was popularized by Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique of 1768, whence it travelled widely in the literature and became an emblem of French rationalism.
After the Revolution, France defined itself musically in civic, generic or institutional rather than ‘aesthetic’ terms. Their sense of political and military supremacy, moreover, made the French singularly tolerant of foreigners in their midst. Frenchness was bigness, as variously embodied in the choral odes and rescue operas of the revolutionary period, the Parisian grand opera (to which Italians were welcome to contribute, and which reached its zenith in the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a German-born Jew), and the huge orchestral compositions of Berlioz. Vocal music, by now in pointed contrast to German taste, was still valued as self-evidently superior to instrumental: Berlioz justified his Symphonie fantastique, in the original version of the programme, as an ‘instrumental drama’ whose five movements corresponded to the five acts of a well-made play or grand opera in which the idée fixe was the leading lady. His Symphonie funèbre et triomphale was in similar fashion an instrumental enactment of a civic ceremonial, in which the voice of the trombone (in the central Adagio) was that of the featured orator.
Berlioz’s later adoption by the New German School was thus a study in irony, as Berlioz himself was acutely and acerbically aware. (He responded to news of Brendel’s famous speech with a resounding ‘Non credo’.) But a greater irony by far was the first attempt, following the Prussian victory, to define musical Frenchness stylistically. No German writer can describe it without a show of glee, not even Dahlhaus, who noted that ‘on February 25, 1871, a few days before the Prussian army marched down the Champs Elysées, Camille Saint-Saëns and some friends of his founded the Société Nationale de Musique; its motto, ars gallica, expressed a cultural self-confidence to counteract France’s setbacks on the political and military fronts’ (Dahlhaus, 1980, trans. 1989, p.283). Yet under that rubric, the society fostered the most thoroughgoing Germanification (or ‘New-Germanification’) French music ever endured. The matter of chief concern was to prove that the Germans, with their absolute music, had no lock on ‘lofty musical aims’, to cite the preamble to the society’s by-laws. The means of proof was to produce a repertory of non-programmatic orchestral and chamber music to rival the German and even surpass it in its demonstrative profundity of content, realized by means of impressive feats of structure like cyclic form, which César Franck and his pupils Chausson and d’Indy elevated to a basic principle of design.
The resulting heaviness and stuffiness in the name of ‘lofty’ psychology and metaphysics, quickly stigmatized as Wagnerian, elicited a backlash that finally ensconced a lasting set of ‘national characteristics’ in French musical consciousness, to which the country’s composers would (eventually) unanimously aspire. The ‘national traditions’ that embodied and guaranteed these characteristics, though touted as ancient, were only decades, not centuries, old. But they had been formulated in the course of reviving an ‘ancient’ heritage – that of la musique classique française, as pre-eminently exemplified by Rameau. And this made it possible to claim that the traditions were revived along with the repertory from which they were educed. The watershed event was the publication, under the general editorship of Saint-Saëns and the musicologist Charles Malherbe, of Rameau’s Oeuvres complètes in 18 volumes, beginning in 1895, with musical texts prepared by a pleiad of eminent composers that included d’Indy, Dukas and Debussy in addition to Saint-Saëns.
As the last great composer of the ancien régime, Rameau was held to have been the last exemplar of those innate French qualities that had recently been obscured by Wagnerism and the unwittingly teutonizing work of the Société Nationale. A short list of these qualities, as described by all the editors (but most enthusiastically by Debussy) – lumière, clarté, classicisme, goût – easily reveals how deliberately they were constructed against the nocturnal Romantic virtues (virtues, above all, of unconscious ‘lore’) that were claimed by the Germans, thus presciently forging a link between French nationalism and what would later be known as neo-classicism (see Suschitzky, 1999).
Even before Rameau became its protagonist, in 1894, the new discourse of French purity had been applied by the founders of the Schola Cantorum – Charles Bordes, Alexandre Guilmant and d’Indy – to the most venerable of all Western musics, the Gregorian chant, just then being resurrected by the Benedictines of Solesmes. Of course, in laying claim to this body of music, which gave licence to employ pentatonic or ‘modal’ melodies in the name of France (harmonized using methods pioneered in Russia by Balakirev), the promulgators of plainchant-nationalism had to ignore a blatant paradox: according to the same theory that associated the chant with the Franks, and hence with France, the origins of the music were held to be Roman. But then (to quote Eric Hobsbawm’s famous paraphrase of Ernest Renan), ‘getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’; and anyway, whether French or Roman, Gregorian chant exemplified ‘latinate classicism’, another universalized discourse that could serve as a locus of covert nationalism.
It is already clear that, as a value-laden question posed within the cultivated or ‘art’ tradition, ‘How German is it?’ was an older question than ‘How French is it?’ or ‘How Italian is it?’. Even more to the point: questions like ‘How Russian?’ or ‘How Polish?’ or ‘How Czech?’ or ‘How Hungarian?’ – and the list goes on, into Spain and Scandinavia, England and the Americas – are questions that not only arose later than ‘How German is it?’ (and in response to it) but also questions that were at least as likely to be asked by Germans, or by those otherwise committed to the Germanic ‘mainstream’, as by Russians or Poles etc.
The case of Russia makes an ideal counterpoint to that of Germany. Both nations conceived of their nationhood, in the modern sense of the word, at around the same time, even though the Russian empire had been for centuries as strong a political monolith as France. Modern national consciousness emerged in Russia, as it did everywhere else, as a consequence of the cosmopolitan thinking of the urban élite – that is (to give it its Russian name), out of ‘westernization’. And therefore all participants in the development in Russia of music as a secular fine art, regardless of the manner or the vehemence with which they may have professed nationalism or patriotic chauvinism, were members of the ‘westernizing’ faction in the Russian cultural debate.
The first writer to define Russia as a nation in the modern sense – that is, as a concept organizing a linguistically defined society ‘vertically’ – was Antiokh Dmitriyevich Kantemir (1709–44), in his Letter on Nature and Humanity, where he asserted that all Russians, noble and serf alike, were united by ‘the same blood, the same bones, the same flesh’. Not by accident, the Moldavian-born Kantemir, the first Russian belletrist in the modern Western sense, was a career diplomat. He spent the last dozen years of his life – his Letter-writing years – abroad as ambassador in England and France of the empresses Anne and Elizabeth; and it was Anne who inaugurated the history of music in Russia as a secular fine art when in 1735 she decided to import a resident troupe of Italian opera singers to adorn her court with exotic and irrational entertainments. That was the beginning in Russia of secular music as a continuous, professional and literate artistic tradition.
But Empress Anne’s early patronage of art music as a foreign import set a precedent that would make for tensions later. One of the main tensions would be that between patriotism and nationalism, a conflict that had no counterpart in western Europe. Russian patriotism, as long as it was defined by the aristocracy, was not necessarily interested in fostering indigenous artistic productivity. It could be satisfied by foreign imports that enhanced Russia’s self-esteem and prestige in the world.
Anne’s original patriotic act in establishing an Italian opera theatre at her court was re-enacted on a much more public scale by Tsar Nikolay I in 1843, when he invited Giovanni Battista Rubini to assemble an all-star company that was to take over St Petersburg’s largest theatre (and effectively banish indigenous Russian opera for a while to Moscow). At a stroke, Nikolay had made his capital one of the operatic centres of Europe, on a par with Paris, Vienna and London; and he had identified himself in the eyes of the world as an enlightened despot. ‘Let’s admit it’, a prominent journalist wrote in enthusiastic endorsement of the tsar’s initiative, ‘without an Italian opera troupe it would always seem as if something were missing in the capital of the foremost empire in the world!’.
The institutional means for maintaining Russian productivity in instrumental music – a resident court-sponsored professional orchestra in St Petersburg (from 1859) and conservatories in St Petersburg and Moscow (1862, 1866) – were achieved through the heroic labours of one man: Anton Rubinstein, a world-class virtuoso and an astoundingly prolific composer who despite his colossal service to the cause of art music in Russia was rightly viewed by the musical nationalists of the next generation with a reserve, bordering on hostility, that has left its mark on his historiographical image.
And yet even if his motives are viewed as cynically as possible (for example, as currying favour with the tsarist court in compensation for his Jewish birth, or securing for himself the bureaucratic rank of ‘free artist’ with all the attendant rights and privileges), Rubinstein was able to succeed in his mission of professionalization because it was seen on high as a patriotic, prestige-enhancing manoeuvre. In that peculiarly Russian manner, Rubinstein’s patriotic zeal, while genuine and passionate, was in no way nationalistic as the term is currently understood. In 1855, as part of his campaign, Rubinstein published a deliberately provocative article in the Vienna Blätter für Theater, Musik und Kunst called ‘Russian Composers’, in which he outlined a Peter the Great-like programme of importing German musicians and music teachers wholesale to colonize his native land. In the process he stigmatized existing amateur musical activity in Russia, including autodidact musical creativity, as so much contemptible dilettantism – a bold insult indeed to the one Russian composer, Glinka, who had succeeded by then in making an international reputation. It inspired at last a genuinely nationalistic backlash among the Russian composers of the next generation.
The best lens for viewing the backlash, and the schism it created between the ‘national’ composers of Glinka’s generation and the ‘nationalists’ of Balakirev’s, would be the creative appropriation of folksong. The Herderian tradition in Russia goes back to Nikolay Aleksandrovich L'vov (1751–1803), a noble landowner and world traveller with multifarious artistic and scientific interests. His supreme passion was collecting and imitating folklore. In 1790 he issued an epoch-making anthology of what he was the first in Russia to call narodnïye pesni (folksongs), directly translated from Herder’s coinage, Volkslieder.
What was epoch-making was the fact that it included not just the texts but the tunes, all conventionally harmonized for piano by a hired assistant, Johann Gottfried Pratsch, a German-speaking Bohemian piano teacher from Silesia, who had settled in St Petersburg in the 1770s. These arrangements have come in for much criticism, by turns Romantic, scientific and Soviet, but they admirably served their Herderian purpose, which was not simply documentary but moral and aesthetic: to return what was the people’s to the people by making the products of oral tradition available to the literate, thereby fostering the new, all-encompassing sense of ‘the people’ as the imagined community of all Russians.
This was far from Glinka’s purpose. His loyalty was always to the international (‘horizontal’) cultivated tradition, and his career is instructive in the present context as an illustration of the way in which the new view of folklore could be accommodated to an old dynastic concept of nation that was infinitely stronger in Russia than it ever was in Germany.
Glinka’s view of himself as a Russian was quite similar to Quantz’s view of himself as a German: a ‘universal’ eclectic who was able to unite within himself the best of the rest. At a time when Germany defined itself musically as the nation of Geist as against Italy, the nation of Sinnlichkeit, and when it had the longstanding reputation of being musically the nation of brains versus beauty, Glinka – uniquely among European composers – decided consciously to acquire both beauty and brains, and to do it on location. From 1830 to 1833 he lived in Milan, where he hobnobbed with Bellini and Donizetti and under their supervision wrote creditable imitations of their work. Then he spent the winter of 1833–4 in Berlin under the tutelage of the famous contrapuntist Siegfried Dehn.
Thus doubly equipped, he returned to St Petersburg to write A Life for the Tsar, the first Russian opera that was truly an opera (not a vaudeville or a Singspiel), and one that showed its composer to be heir to, and master of, the full range of operatic styles and conventions practised in his day. The elaborate first-act cavatina, the multipartite ensembles in the third act, and the same act’s monumental finale, all show his mastery of what Julian Budden has called the ‘Code Rossini’. At the same time, the opera conspicuously exhibits features of the French rescue genre – the genre of Grétry, Méhul and Cherubini, not to mention Beethoven – with its ample choruses, its reminiscence themes and its ‘popular’ tone. And as Berlioz was quick to notice, Glinka’s operatic style was heavily tinged with ‘the influence of Germany’ in the prominence accorded to the orchestra, the spectacular instrumentation, and the ‘beauty of the harmonic fabric’.
Of Russian folklore there is barely a trace, just enough to contrast with the far more explicitly pronounced Polish idiom of the second act and so realize the musical plan that motivated the opera: to represent the Russian–Polish conflict of 1612 by a clash of musical styles. Besides much modified quotations of two – perhaps three – Russian songs, there was an opening chorus cast in contrasting, accurately observed male and female styles of peasant singing; an imitation of balalaikas by the strings, pizzicato; and a girls’ chorus in L'vov’s favourite quintuple metre. Beyond these decorative touches, however, Glinka’s volkstümlich style, even more than its German counterpart, was an invented rather than a discovered idiom.
His folk, moreover, remained the peasantry; and the sacrificial role in which Ivan Susanin, the peasant protagonist, is cast marked the opera as a document of the official nationalism (ofitsioznaya narodnost') promulgated on behalf of Nikolay I by his minister of education, Sergey Uvarov, in 1833. Within this doctrine, narodnost' (nationalism) was the last in a list of three tenets all Russians were expected to espouse, the others being pravoslaviye (Orthodoxy) and samoderzhaviye (autocracy); the list was an explicitly counter-revolutionary answer to liberté, égalité, fraternité .
Even in the first half of the century, then, Russian nationalism was no politically progressive thing. Glinka’s achievement was nevertheless musically progressive, in a manner best caught in a review by the composer’s friend and fellow aristocrat, Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky. By ‘proving’ that ‘Russian melody may be elevated to a tragic style’, Odoyevsky declared, Glinka had introduced ‘a new element in art’. Coming from the mouths of the main characters rather than (as in the earlier Russian Singspiel) from human props, furnishing the stuff of complex musical structures and expressing sentiments any nobleman would recognize as lofty, Glinka’s ersatz Russian melodies were high art – ‘ernste Musik’ (serious music) – as no Russian music had been before. It was music Europe had to respect.
The greatest purely national significance attached itself to the ‘hymn-march’ or dynastic anthem with which Glinka brought the opera’s jubilant epilogue to climax. It was in a recognizable period style, that of the so-called kantï, the homespun late 17th- and early 18th-century partsongs that were Russia’s earliest indigenous repertory of ‘westernized’ literate secular music. They had nothing to do with peasant lore, and neither did Glinka’s hymn. Its emblematic status arose not out of its musical essence but out of its reception; for as one modern commentator has put it, ‘what is accepted as national is national, wherever its roots may be’ (Oramo, 1997). Later ludicrous efforts, by Vladimir Stasov and others, to prove the anthem’s stylistic authenticity valuably demonstrate another important nationalist principle: that reception is apt to be justified ex post facto by prevaricating claims about intentions.
Once only did Glinka manufacture a musical artwork exclusively out of authentic folk materials: Kamarinskaya (1848), one of his three fantaisies pittoresques for orchestra, of which the other two were based on Spanish themes. A brilliant set of ostinato variations with a slow introduction that unexpectedly returns, the work is fashioned out of two folksongs, which (as Glinka discovered while improvising at the keyboard) have a ‘hidden’ melodic affinity that could be exploited as a compositional tour de force. Glinka thought of the piece as a trifle; but in the wake of Rubinstein’s sallies, his adherents Stasov and Balakirev touted it as a model for all authentically national Russian music. Stasov was able to do this only in loudly trumpeted words. Balakirev did it in musical deeds, and in the process created an object lesson in the difference between national and nationalistic art.
Balakirev’s deeds took the form of two overtures on Russian themes (1858, 1864). In the first, the themes came from existing anthologies, including L'vov-Pratsch. The much more elaborate second was based on themes Balakirev himself had collected and was to publish two years later in an anthology that introduced a new style of ‘modal’ (or strictly diatonic) harmonization, wholly Balakirev’s invention, that he and Stasov nevertheless touted as an authentic and autochthonous Russian national product. It was something the peasants never knew, but it achieved a distinctiveness and recognizability that led to its acceptance as generically Russian thanks to its widespread adoption by the more famous members of Balakirev’s circle, the ‘mighty kuchka’ (Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov), and their many imitators. The opposition of Germans both at the St Petersburg Conservatory and abroad, like the Prague professor who in 1867 pronounced Balakirev’s harmonizations ‘ganz falsch’, did its bit to lend them an aura of Urwüchsigkeit – in Russian, svoyeobraznost'.
That prestige and that air of authenticity notwithstanding, what distinguished Balakirev’s overtures (especially the second, which was later twice renamed and reclassified as a symphonic poem), was the ironic fact that unlike Kamarinskaya they are cast formally not as one-off experiments but as orthodox symphonic allegros with introductions; in other words, they were to that extent ‘German’. That gave them another sort of prestige. It took both kinds to achieve a ‘Russian school’ that could compete successfully on the world stage.
But it was only in these early works of Balakirev, the one Russian composer who might fit anyone’s narrowest, most bigoted definition of a nationalist, that the two sources of prestige remained in a sort of idealized balance. Afterwards an inevitable entropy set in. Within Russia the folkloric style, becoming habitual, signified less and less. Composers began to find it more a constraint on their originality than a creative stimulus, and concert audiences under the post-Rubinstein dispensation became increasingly sophisticated and catholic in their tastes.
Musorgsky – swayed by the example of the embittered Dargomïzhsky, frozen out of the Imperial Theatres establishment by the Italians – subscribed to another kind of Russian self-definition vis-à-vis the West: that of jealous omnifarious rejection. Eschewing both Germanic brains and Italianate beauty, he and Dargomïzhsky settled on good character, becoming apostles of ‘truth’. There is surprisingly little in Musorgsky’s work, besides the folkish or churchly set pieces demanded by the settings of his historical operas, that is indicatively Russian in musical style. The psychological realism at which he aimed transcended nation; his model became Russian speech, seen as a particular embodiment of universal human behaviour. (His re-embrace, in his last unfinished opera, Sorochintsï Fair, of what was by then an old-fashioned Volkstümlichkeit was as much an indication of a rightward turn in his politics as it was an aesthetic reorientation.) Yet while not primarily folkloric, Dargomïzhsky’s and Musorgsky’s ‘realism’ was the product of a particular, very emphatic moment in Russian intellectual history.
The same can be said of Rimsky-Korsakov’s later music, chiefly operatic and meant primarily for home consumption. Beginning with Mlada (1892), a mythological opera composed under the impact of the first complete Wagnerian Ring cycles to be performed in Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov found his true métier in fantasy and was increasingly preoccupied in later life with post-Lisztian harmonic explorations, often involving the ‘tone-semitone’ scale (commonly known today as octatonic).
Tchaikovsky paid Kamarinskaya his meed of tribute, both in word (calling it in his diary the acorn from which the oak of Russian music had grown) and in musical deed: the finale of his Second Symphony (1872), which has a first thematic group cast, like Glinka’s fantaisie, as a set of ostinato variations on an instrumental folkdance tune (naigrïsh). This has led to the symphony’s being received in the West, with manifest though condescending approval, as Tchaikovsky’s ‘most fully Russian’ work (Grove6). Yet as this very example illustrates, Tchaikovsky, the very model of the post-Rubinstein composing professional, used folklore only where Brahms or Verdi might have used it (instrumental finales, operatic divertissements). His signal contribution to Russian musical life was the development, through his orchestral suites and his late ballets and operas, of what George Balanchine called the sumptuous ‘imperial style’, marked less with national colouring than by the trappings of dynastic majesty. But that was no less an authentic Russian colouring at a time when Russia was Europe’s last great dynastic autocracy.
Within the purview of German universalism, non-German ‘nationalism’ is received and valued as exoticism. This phenomenon has been aptly called ‘tourist appeal’ in a recent study of Chopin (Parakilas, 1992). It provides opportunities (as it surely did for Chopin who as an exiled patriot in Paris traded heavily on what Schumann called his ‘Sarmatian physiognomy’), but it also fetters, thus creating the dilemma that all ‘peripheral’ composers have had to face since the establishment of Germanic musical hegemony (that is, the discourse of ‘classical music’). It has led to the serious devaluing, or at least the distorted posthumous reception, of two composers in particular: Tchaikovsky and Dvořák. Their plights, in some ways complementary, can be regarded as emblematic.
Tchaikovsky’s difficulties began in Russia, where he was regarded with envy and compensating disdain by the composers of the ‘mighty kuchka’. The issue that divided them was not nationalism but professionalism. Native-born, conservatory-trained, full-time, Tchaikovsky was the first musician to achieve both an international reputation and a position of esteem in Russian society without the advantage of blue blood or a prestigious sinecure, and without being a performing virtuoso. The ‘kuchkists’, by contrast, all needed their day jobs and lacked his entrée to the court musical establishment. They were the last generation of gentry dilettantes, the class that had traditionally provided Russia with its composers.
So of course they created a mythos of authenticity that excluded Tchaikovsky, as it excluded his ethnically suspect mentor, Rubinstein. Stasov was its tribune at home, César Cui (a charter kuchkist despite having by his own admission ‘not a drop of Russian blood’) its propagator abroad. In La musique en Russie (1880), an outrageously partisan survey based on a series of articles for the Revue et gazette musicale, Cui characterized Tchaikovsky most unfairly as being ‘far from a partisan of the New Russian school; indeed he is more nearly its antagonist’.
Playing as it did into Western prejudices about exotic group identities, this remark set the terms for the French (and to a lesser extent the German) reception of Tchaikovsky ever since. By 1903, the composer Alfred Bruneau (in Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France) could dismiss Tchaikovsky outright, despite his continuing pre-eminence at home, for not being Russian enough: ‘Devoid of the Russian character that pleases and attracts us in the music of the New Slavonic school, developed to hollow and empty excess in a bloated and faceless style, his works astonish without overly interesting us’. Without an exotic group identity, a Russian composer could possess no identity at all. Without a collective folkloristic or oriental mask he was ‘faceless’.
At the time of Tchaikovsky’s invited appearance at the inaugural exercises for Carnegie Hall in 1891, he was repeatedly lauded in the American press as being, along with Brahms and Saint-Saëns, one of the three greatest living composers. But while his presence in repertory has remained ineradicable, the universalization of German taste, and the consequent insistence that music from the ‘peripheries’ justify its existence by virtue of exoticism, cast him posthumously into a critical limbo (or more precisely, a ghetto), the victim of a double bind. At its most extreme, this exclusion has taken a bluntly racialist form, as witness the complaint by his most recent British biographer that ‘his was a Russian mind forced to find its expression through techniques and forms that had been evolved by generations of alien Western creators’, a judgment mitigated only to the extent that ‘a composer who could show so much resourcefulness in modifying sonata structure so as to make it more compatible with the type of music nature had decreed he would write was no helpless bungler’ (Brown, 1991; italics added).
The case of Dvořák was in some respects even more keenly unjustified. Unlike the cosmopolitan Smetana, whose first musical allegiance was to ‘New Germany’ via Liszt, and who learnt Czech only as an adult and spoke it imperfectly, Dvořák grew up speaking the Slavonic vernacular and, until its latest phase, made his career entirely at home. Musically, however, he was fully at home with the Germanic lingua franca, fluent in both its ‘classical’ and its ‘New German’ dialects, and, in his symphonies, was one of its virtuoso exponents. His status as a ‘nationalist’ is at least as much one bestowed (or saddled) upon him from the outside as one that he sought to cultivate. He made his early (chiefly Vienna) reputation, it is true, with Slavonic Dances for piano four-hands and Moravian duets for women’s voices, but in this he was acting on the advice (and following the example) of Brahms, who had made his early fame (and, perhaps more to the point, his early fortune) with his Gypsy Songs and Hungarian Dances, spicy popular fare for home consumption. Dvořák’s nonchalance with respect to the authenticity of his folkishness has been demonstrated by Beckerman, who compared Dvořák’s settings of folksong texts with the original melodies and found that Dvořák not only spurned the latter but substituted tunes in a deliberately adulterated style calculated for a broader consumer appeal (Beckerman, 1993). He never sought to erect a monument to Czechness comparable to Smetana’s Má vlast – or not, at any rate, until his last half-decade, when, already an international celebrity, he composed a cycle of symphonic poems on themes drawn from national folklore.
It was not because of his Czech nationalism but because of his being the master of the unmarked mother tongue that Dvořák was invited by Jeannette Thurber in 1892, shortly after Tchaikovsky’s American visit, to direct her National Conservatory of Music in New York. After Dvořák’s return home Brahms, on his deathbed, tried to persuade Dvořák to accept the directorship of the Vienna conservatory to prevent a Brucknerian takeover. That leaves no question about his insider status where ‘greater Austria’ was concerned. The ‘tourist nationalism’ that Dvořák practised (and preached to his American pupils) was a matter of superficially marking received techniques, forms and media with regionalisms (drones, ‘horn’ 5ths, polkas or furianty in place of minuets or scherzos), as one might don a native holiday costume.
The ‘New World’ Symphony, lately shown to be the remains of an unrealized project to compose an opera or oratorio on the subject of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, was intended as a Herderian object lesson to the Americans on how they might achieve a distinctive ‘school’ of composition. As quoted by the critic Henry Krehbiel, Dvořák urged that they submit the indigenous musics of their country, namely native-American (‘American Indian’) melodies and ‘plantation songs’ (alias ‘Negro spirituals’), ‘to beautiful treatment in the higher forms of art’.
But of course higher forms that would justify and canonize the national were themselves covertly national, and Mrs Thurber’s conservatory, like Rubinstein’s (or any other 19th-century conservatory outside the German-speaking lands), was an agency of musical colonialism. Like other colonialisms, this one sought justification in the claim that it could develop local resources better than the natives unaided. Like other colonialisms, it maintained itself by manufacturing and administering ersatz ‘national’ traditions that reinforced dependence on the mother country. But ‘colonialist nationalism’, like tourist nationalism, was another double bind. Dvořák’s Bohemianisms were at once the vehicle of his international appeal and the eventual guarantee of his secondary status vis-à-vis natural-born universals like Brahms. Without the native costume, a ‘peripheral’ composer would never achieve even secondary canonical rank, but with it he could never achieve more.
In Anglo-American music criticism, especially, Dvořák’s ethnicity became a barrier to admission to the company of the great. Having asserted that ‘Brahms is the greatest living composer’, the editor of The Outlook, the organ of the Christian Union, a charitable organization based in New York, asked – in 1894, while Dvořák was living and working in that very city – on behalf of whom such an allegation might be challenged: ‘Dvořák or Rubinstein? Possibly. But these composers, though doubtless very distinguished, reproduce too much of what is semi-barbaric in their nationalities to rival Brahms in the estimation of people of musical culture’. John F. Runciman, in a book of essays on music published in 1899, dismissed Dvořák, ‘the little Hungarian composer’, for an excess of ‘Slav naïveté’ that in his case ‘degenerates into sheer brainlessness’.
If these strictures could be directed at the mentor, what sort of reception might await the Americans whose ‘tradition’ Dvořák purported to establish? That is why many Americans considered Dvořák’s advice well meant but meddlesome, and resisted it. Among them was Edward MacDowell, an American of European stock who had had a thorough training under Raff in Frankfurt, and who resented the implication that he could achieve musical distinction or authenticity only by appropriating a non-European identity in whiteface. Even within the terms implied by Dvořák, however, there were distinctions to be drawn and preferences to be defended. While denying the necessity of a national ‘trademark’ for American composers, MacDowell nevertheless insisted that ‘the stern but at least manly and free rudeness of the North American Indian’ was in any case less undesirable than ‘the badge of whilom slavery’ (Gilman, 1908).
Amy Beach went further. She embarked on her first and only symphony almost immediately after hearing the Boston première of the New World Symphony. In place of the Indian and Negro melodies that Dvořák incorporated or imitated in his work, Beach based the middle movements of her symphony, as well as the closing theme of the first movement, on the melodies of what she called ‘Irish-Gaelic’ folksongs, for which reason the whole symphony bears the title ‘Gaelic’. Thus Beach’s symphony was both a declaration of affiliation with Dvořák’s aims and a correction of his methods. ‘We of the north’, Beach wrote in a letter to the Boston Herald that took explicit issue with Dvořák’s prescriptions, ‘should be far more likely to be influenced by old English, Scotch or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.’
Like many Americans, living in an increasingly multi-ethnic ‘society of immigrants’ that could claim no single identity on the Herderian model, Beach identified culturally not with the country of which she happened to be a citizen, but the country from which she descended ethnically – a conviction reinforced for her, as for many other Bostonians as well as other members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, by the assumption that her ‘Celtic’ blood descent identified her as a sort of Ur-American, an American aristocrat.
It is all the more noteworthy then, if ironic, that the first composer to achieve a style that plausibly represented a generic ‘America’ to classical music audiences both at home and abroad should have been Aaron Copland (the pupil of a Dvořák pupil, Rubin Goldmark), a left-leaning homosexual Jew thus triply marginalized from the majority culture of the land. The style that he created for this purpose, while based to an extent on the published cowboy songs he began mining with Music for Radio (1937) and continued to employ in the ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), was deeply influenced by the music he heard during his later student years in Paris as the pupil of Nadia Boulanger, in particular the ‘neo-classical’ music of Stravinsky. His characteristically wide-spaced, transparently orchestrated ‘polyharmonies’, like the famous one at the beginning of the ballet Appalachian Spring (1943–4), were particularly indebted to Stravinsky’s example. They set the tone for a distinctively Americanist pastoral idiom, shared by such other Boulanger pupils as Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and the younger Elliott Carter.
That idiom, it should be stressed, was as much a personal composerly invention as Balakirev’s manner of harmonizing Russian folksongs. What made it an authentic and sharable national expression was its reception by other composers and its recognition by audiences. (The same can be said of the somewhat earlier British pastoralism of Vaughan Williams and his generation: similarly stimulated, initially, by the example of folklore collectors, it was also, in its mature phase, the product of invented composerly techniques.) In more overtly patriotic wartime works like A Lincoln Portrait (1942) or the Fanfare for the Common Man (1943), Copland’s Americanism was quite comparable to the patriotic works then being composed by Soviet composers under the rubric of Socialist Realism; indeed Copland’s turn to an Americanist style can be seen as part of a widespread ‘anti-fascist’ response to the Soviet call for a ‘popular front’, in which composers with left-wing political sympathies in many countries abruptly turned from a more cosmopolitan modernism to a more specifically national idiom. ‘Communism’, the American popular-front slogan went (drawing on the ‘revolutionary’ founding myth of the USA), ‘is 20th-century Americanism.’
Earlier, in works like Music for the Theater (1925) and his Piano Concerto (1926), Copland had sought to ground an Americanist idiom in jazz, but achieved no comparable resonance. The music was rejected by the high-culture audiences of that time for seeming to degrade the ‘beautiful forms of art’, as Dvořák had put it, with threatening infusions from a non-literate and racially alien domain. George Gershwin’s much greater personal success around the same time with the similarly motivated Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925) and An American in Paris (1928), was at least partly due to the perception that its openly proclaimed ‘sociostylistic’ thrust was in the opposite direction: elevating the low culture rather than profaning the high. But while enduringly popular, Gershwin’s jazz-inflected concert works had scarcely any more impact on the development of musical Americanism than Copland’s. The dominant attitude in America towards the Americanization of ‘classical music’ remained more Rubinsteinian than Balakirevesque, with the transplanted Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky, at the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, playing a midwife’s role somewhat comparable to that played in Russia between 1882 and 1903 by the timber-magnate maecenas Mitrofan Belyayev.
The Belyayev School was the incubator of Stravinsky’s early development. Its watchword was ‘denationalization’, which the Russian composers at the turn of century viewed as their generation’s signal achievement on behalf of Russian music and the mark of its cultural maturity. But of course Stravinsky achieved fame as a composer, and became a force in European music, through Serge Diaghilev’s Paris-based ballet enterprise, which obliged him to write – at first very much against his generation’s principles – in a folkloristic vein. Thus if Chopin’s mature mazurkas and polonaises can be described (after Parakilas) as ‘tourist nationalism’, the style of Stravinsky’s music for Diaghilev was ‘export nationalism’. For a while, the more cosmopolitan Stravinsky’s career became the more Russian his music had to seem.
What saved it from the inauthenticity this paradoxical description might seem to imply was the novel nature of Stravinsky’s musical nationalism, which was modelled more on the example of the painters who now surrounded him than on that of the Russian music in which he had been reared. Art historians call it ‘neo-nationalism’, and it received a classic capsule definition in the art critic Yakov Tugenhold’s review of the Firebird ballet: ‘The folk, formerly the object of the artist’s pity, has become increasingly the source of artistic style’. Neo-nationalism was the catalyst of Stravinsky’s international modernism.
Glinka, Balakirev, Rimsky and the rest, when writing in a folkloristic idiom, sought only thematic material in peasant music, as an academic painter might choose a subject from peasant life, and subjected it to an artistic treatment that was, as we have seen, basically (and increasingly) ‘German’. Stravinsky was the first Russian composer, and the only important one, to follow the painters and use folk music as a means of liberating his music from academic routine. His example had little resonance in Russia, partly because his music, composed for Paris, was little played at home. But Stravinsky’s success in achieving and authenticating his modern idiom through the use of folklore was a powerful inspiration to Bartók, who tended to exaggerate Stravinsky’s reliance on genuine individual folk artefacts (just as Stravinsky, in later life, was mendaciously at pains to disavow it).
Stravinsky was also an inspiration to the musicians of France, with the even more paradoxical result that the emphatic Russianness of his early ballets made him the uncrowned king of French music and its standard-bearer against Germany. Yet Stravinsky was as much co-opted by the French as exalted by them, assimilated to a longstanding French aesthetic (or political) project that eventually served as midwife to the birth of international neo-classicism out of the spirit of French nationalism. Stravinsky became the at first inadvertent, later very committed, protagonist of this evolution.
The first to apply to Stravinsky the discourse of clarté and lumière, and to adumbrate its metamorphosis into purism, was Jacques Rivière (1886–1925), editor of the aggressively nationalistic Nouvelle revue française, who as early as 1913 touted Stravinsky, fresh from the succès de scandale of The Rite of Spring, as an exemplary artist for France. While everyone else was exclaiming at the orgiastic dissonance of The Rite, its âme slave, its sublime terror, Rivière called it ‘absolutely pure’ and ‘magnificently limited’. In contrast to Debussy (whose impressionistic murkiness was rejected as Germanic by the new avant garde), Stravinsky exemplified the age-old, lately forgotten values that the editors of the Nouvelle revue française insisted were essentially and inherently French. ‘Stravinsky has not simply amused himself by taking the opposite path from Debussy’, wrote Rivière: If he has chosen those instruments that do not sigh, that say no more than they say, whose timbres are without expression and are like isolated words, it is because he wants to enunciate everything directly, explicitly and concretely. … His voice becomes the object’s proxy, consuming it, replacing it; instead of evoking it, he utters it. He leaves nothing out; on the contrary, he goes after things; he finds them, seizes them, brings them back. He gestures not to call out, nor point to externals, but to take hold and fix. Thus Stravinsky, with unmatched flair and accomplishment, is bringing about in music the same revolution that is taking place more humbly and tortuously in literature: he has passed from the sung to the said, from invocation to statement, from poetry to reportage.
By adding objectivity to the list of Stravinsky’s virtues, Rivière completed the list of attributes that a decade later would collectively define the aggressively cosmopolitan stance known as ‘neo-classicism’, associated with the ‘retour à Bach’. But Rivière had asserted them as French traits, only by implication as classical ones, and presciently located their musical focal point not in Stravinsky’s neo-classical work but in his great neo-primitivist ballet, with its magnificent rejection (to quote another Parisian celebrator of Stravinskian neo-classicism, the Russian émigré critic Boris de Schloezer) of all merely personal ‘emotions, feelings, desires, aspirations’. Thus another ‘universalist’ stance, constructed in determined opposition to the German universalism of psychological profundity, assumed its place as a covertly expressed nationalist agenda.
The ‘retour à Bach’ by way of Russia was thus an attempt to hijack the father, to wrest the old contrapuntist from his errant countrymen who with their abnormal psychology had betrayed his purity, his health-giving austerity, his dynamism, his detached and transcendent craft, and restore him – and France – to a properly élite station.
The battle of covert nationalisms was very much an open secret. It is what Ravel had in mind (though he characteristically put the question of nationality behind a smokescreen) when he told an interviewer, as early as 1911, that ‘the school of today is a direct outgrowth of the Slavonic and Scandinavian school, just as that school was preceded by the German, and the German by the Italian’. And it is what Schoenberg had in mind when he announced his invention of 12-note technique to Josef Rufer, in 1921 or 1922, by saying, ‘today I have made a discovery that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years’. For the next quarter-century, the world of music would be a battlefield in which two national discourses vied for supremacy under cover of universalism.
That the one represented Germany and the other France was never in doubt. Americans recognized this most clearly. Roger Sessions, writing in 1933, noted with satisfaction that since the Great War, the German music that had once been taken as ‘the voice of Europe’s soul’ had degenerated into ‘mere Vaterländerei’, while the music that mattered internationally now emanated from France, where ‘music began above all to be conceived in a more direct, more impersonal, and more positive fashion’, marked by ‘a new emphasis on the dynamic, constructive, monumental elements of music’. After World War II, Virgil Thomson, a Boulanger pupil who had remained in Paris until 1940, when he assumed the influential position of chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, offered the hope that the Parisian current would now assume the hegemony that had formerly been Germany’s. ‘The latter part of our century’, he predicted, ‘will see the amalgamation of all the modernist musical techniques into a twentieth-century classic style; such an evolution, indeed, has been in progress ever since the First World War.’ And yet he foresaw with some foreboding the likelihood of a Germanic backlash: ‘Whether any of the atonal ways, the most resistant of all to absorption, can be saved for posterity or whether, as many atonalists believe, this style must either kill off all others or wholly die is a matter of passionate preoccupation to musicians’ (Thomson, 1951).
By not-so-subtly casting the intransigent aspirations of the ‘atonalists’ in terms reminiscent of the Nazi drive for Lebensraum, Thomson was playing a dangerous, two-sided game. René Leibowitz, then (despite residence as a ‘displaced person’ in Paris) the most passionate advocate of Schoenbergian hegemony, struck out against the other side in similar vein in a notorious critique of Bartók, in which he accused the Hungarian composer, who in his last works had stepped significantly back from the modernist extreme, of ‘compromise’, using another war-tainted code word (Leibowitz, 1947).
This was a tragic outcome for the one major 20th-century composer whose folkloristic ‘nationalism’ had remained close to the accommodating and non-aggressive Herderian ideal, and who therefore had no need of cloaking it in a discourse of universality or purity. The most telling early symptom of the musical Cold War was the ruthless partitioning of Bartók’s works, like Europe itself, into Eastern and Western zones. At home, and in the rest of the Soviet bloc, the works in which folklorism seemed to predominate over modernism were touted by the cultural politicians as obligatory models and the rest was banned from public performance (see Fosler-Lussier, 1999). The Western avant garde, meanwhile, made virtual fetishes out of the banned works (particularly the Fourth Quartet, read tendentiously as proto-serial: Leibowitz, 1947; Babbitt, 1949) and consigned the rest to the dustbin of history. Bartók’s continued reliance on folklore as an expressive resource was now read as a refusal to participate in the tasks mandated by history.
This Cold War-mandated antagonism towards Bartók’s (or anyone’s) folkloric side, loudly abetted by Stravinsky (Stravinsky and Craft, 1959), had repercussions not only in criticism but in composition. The composers who (it seemed) unexpectedly embraced serial techniques in the 1950s – Stravinsky and Copland prominent among them – now appear to have been seeking sanctuary in the abstract and universal (hence politically safe) truth of numbers rather than the particular (hence politically risky) reality of nation. The situation seems especially clearcut and poignant in the case of Copland, who was targeted for political attack by the American Legion, blacklisted by Red Channels and alarmed when his friends and former associates were called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities between March and June of 1950 (Copland and Perlis, 1989; his own turn to testify, before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, came in 1953), and who completed the Piano Quartet, his first 12-note composition, in the autumn of the same year.
The Cold War maintained in a perpetual tense stalemate, entirely comparable to that of the contemporary geopolitical scene, the rival discourses of national particularity (as opposed to ‘formalism’) on the one hand, governmentally sanctioned and occasionally enforced in the Soviet bloc; and on the other, what Olivier Messiaen ironically dubbed ‘the international grey on grey’, the increasingly academic atonalist avant garde, maintained by the universities in the English-speaking countries and in western Europe by municipal, corporate and sometimes overtly political patronage. Prominent examples of the latter have included the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, founded in 1946 ostensibly with the financial backing of the city government but, behind that, with the cooperation of the Allied Military Government (i.e. the American army of occupation) as channelled by Everett Helm, an American composer who served from 1948 to 1950 as the United States Music Officer for the German state of Hessen (see Beal, 2000); and the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), established in 1977 for Pierre Boulez by the government of President Georges Pompidou (see Born, 1995). Another significant means of support for stylistically ‘unmarked’ avant-garde composition in western Europe came from the state-subsidized radio, which established electronic music studios in Cologne and Milan.
Spokesmen for élite avant-garde composition promoted it, in terms strikingly reminiscent of the New German School a century before, as humanity’s musical vanguard, obedient to the demands of history. Those demands emphatically no longer included Volkstümlichkeit, as unforgettably driven home by Elisabeth Lutyens, one of the earliest British serialists, who in a Dartington lecture contemptuously lumped together the musicians of the ‘English Renaissance’ as constituting the ‘cow-pat school’. Meanwhile, the cultural politicians of the Soviet bloc insisted – in the words of the infamous Resolution on Music of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), promulgated on 10 February 1948 – that composers of contemporary cultivated music were obliged to maintain a ‘deep organic connection with the folk and its musical and vocal art’. Three months later, shortly after the Communist Party had taken power in Czechoslovakia, the same principle was asserted in even stronger terms in the Manifesto (drafted in German by Hanns Eisler) of the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics, held in Prague in May 1948. ‘What is needed’, this document declared, ‘is a style that combines the highest artistic skills, originality and quality with the maximum Volkstümlichkeit.’
Debate about musical nationalism was thus turned topsy-turvy under pressure of postwar geopolitics. Particularly striking was the way in which political organs that based their authority on the writings of Karl Marx – of all 19th-century political theorists perhaps the most hostile to nationalism (regarding it as a false consciousness that served the class interests of the bourgeoisie) and who notoriously insisted that all meaningful social relationships were inherently horizontal and international (as in ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’) – were now imposing from above a theory of art that implied an insular and vertical ordering of society, with aesthetic value flowing upwards, by fiat, from below. Aesthetic debate had dissolved incoherently into the general geopolitical contest. Artistic nationalism, enforced on one side of the Cold War divide and anathematized on the other, could no longer be viewed in terms other than those of competition between hostile hegemonic world systems.
But the demand for Volkstümlichkeit within the encroaching Soviet bloc was subordinate to the general demand that art be universally accessible and ‘infectious’ – a demand that originated not in the theories of Marx, who was generally uninterested in aesthetics, but in the neo-Christian doctrines of Tolstoy, who had tried (in his tract What is Art?, 1898) to erase the distinction between aesthetics and ethics (see Taruskin, 1976). As adopted (and adapted) by the Soviets, Tolstoy’s aesthetic ideas became an instrument for rendering the arts an effective delivery system for political propaganda. Volkstümlichkeit was further discredited in the Soviet Union by the promulgation, during what is now called the zastoy, the Brezhnevite ‘stagnation’, of the so-called novaya fol'kloristicheskaya volna (New Folkloric Wave). This was a sort of state-promoted neo-nationalism, widely read as an alternative modernism that allowed Soviet composers a certain stylistic leeway in return for a ‘voluntary’ eschewal of Schoenbergian atonality (i.e. serialism), tainted by the cosmopolitanism (i.e. the Jewishness) of its founder.
The end of the Cold War in Europe had not, by the end of the century, led to the resurgence or rehabilitation of musical nationalism. The vastly enlarged scope of repertory to which all musicians have access thanks to recording and communications technology has tainted purisms of all kind with a musty air and heightened the sense that the world’s cultures are now ‘an interconnected system’ in which ‘purely national cultures are nowhere to be found’ (Toivanen, 1997). That may be read as a sign of postmodernity, as may the challenge to the prestige of what used to be called ‘serious music’ (after the German ernste Musik) and the concomitant boost in the intellectual prestige of what used to be called the commercial or entertainment genres (Unterhaltungsmusik) in the wake of the protest movements of the 1960s. Within the academy, the combined influence of post-colonial theory and multi-culturalism since the 1980s has led to a shift in the terms of the debate, with the dominant musical culture now increasingly identified as that of American popular music, maintaining hegemony through a global dissemination powered by the international market economy, and resistance identified increasingly in local rather than national terms (Frith, 1996; Taylor, 1997).
The arbiters of contemporary (‘postmodern’) music criticism are increasingly to be found within the world of ethnomusicology, which claims both a global perspective that supersedes the older eurocentric discourse and a critical awareness of local and idiolectal trends (‘micromusics’) that (as McLuhan predicted in the 1960s) now tend, in the sunset of print culture, to overshadow the older discourse of nation. To ‘think globally and act locally’, as the cultural-studies maxim would have it, is to destabilize the concept of nation as primary cultural unit. ‘We are all individual music cultures’, as one contemporary theorist puts it, co-existing now and in the forseeable future in a ‘fascinating counterpoint of near and far, large and small, neighborhood and national, home and away’ (Slobin, 1993). This may as yet be a wishful description, but the world it envisages is in any case a less bloody one than the one that nationalism has bequeathed to us.
Nationalism, §15: The last of the Herderians and the Cold War
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E. Gellner: Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY, 1983)
E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds.: The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)
M. Peckham: Romanticism and Ideology (Greenwood, FL, 1985)
A. Smith: The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford, 1986)
B. Taylor and W. van der Will, eds.: The Nazification of Art (Winchester, 1990)
L. Greenfeld: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992)
E.J. Hobsbawm: Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990, 2/1992)
T. Todorov: On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1993)
J. Gillis, ed.: Commemorations: the Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994)
J. Hutchinson and A.D Smith, eds.: Nationalism (Oxford, 1994)
S. Periwal, ed.: Notions of Nationalism (Budapest and New York, 1995)
G. Eley and R.G. Suny, eds.: Becoming National: a Reader (New York, 1996)
J. Hutchinson and A.D Smith, eds.: Ethnicity (Oxford, 1996)
C. Calhoun: Nationalism (Buckingham, 1997)
E. Gellner: Nationalism (New York, 1997)
T. Nairn: Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London, 1997)
J.A. Hall, ed.: The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge, 1998)
HDM
H. le Blanc: Défense de la basse de viole contre les entreprises du violon et les prétensions du violoncel (Amsterdam, 1740); Eng. trans. by B. Jackson, JVdGSA, x (1973), 11–28, 69–80; xi (1974), 17–58; xii (1975), 14–36
J.J. Rousseau: Lettre sur la musique française (Paris, 1753; Eng. trans. in StrunkSR1), 636–54
D. Diderot: Le neveu de Rameau (MS c1761; Eng. trans., 1965)
J.N. Forkel: Über Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke (Leipzig, 1802/R; Eng. trans., 1820 and 1920/R; Fr. trans., Paris, 1876)
Stendhal: Vie de Rossini (Paris, 1824, 2/1854); ed. H. Prunières (Paris, 1922); Eng. trans., ed. R.N. Coe (London, 1956, 2/1970)
G. Mazzini: Filosofia della musica (Paris, 1836); ed. M. de Angelis (Rimini, 1977)
R. Wagner: ‘Le Freischütz’, 1841, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, ed. and trans. W.A. Ellis, vii (London, 1898), 183–204
A.B. Marx: Denkschrift über Organisation des Musikwesens im preussischen Staate (Berlin, 1848)
R. Wagner: ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’, 1850, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, ed. and trans. W.A. Ellis, iii (London, 1894), 75–122
F. Brendel: Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1852)
F. Brendel: Die Musik der Gegenwart, und die Gesamtkunstwerk der Zukunft (Leipzig, 1854)
M. Glinka: Zapiski [Memoirs] (1870; Eng. trans., 1963)
C. Cui: La musique en Russie (Paris, 1880)
A. Rubinstein: A Conversation on Music (New York, 1892)
‘Johannes Brahms’, The Outlook (1 Sept 1894); repr. in American Brahms Society Newsletter, vi/1 (1988), 1–2
J. Runciman: Old Scores and New Readings: Discussions on Musical Subjects (London, 1899)
A. Bruneau: Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France (Paris, 1903)
L. Gilman: Edward MacDowell (New York, 1908)
R. Rolland: Musciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1908, many later edns; Eng. trans., 1915/R)
O. Sonneck: ‘Das Musikleben Amerikas vom Standpunkte der musikalischen Länderkunde’, IMusSCR III: Vienna 1909, 446–58
C. Forsyth: Music and Nationalism: a Study of English Opera (London, 1911)
‘Maurice Ravel’s Opinion of Modern French Music’, Musical Leader (16 March 1911 ); repr. in A Ravel Reader, ed. A. Orenstein (New York, 1990), 409–10 [interview]
J.-E. Blanche: Cahiers d’un artiste, ii (Paris, 1916)
D. Mason: ‘Folk-Song and American Music: a Plea for the Unpopular Point of View’, MQ, iv (1918), 323–32
C. Debussy: Monsieur Croche antidilettante (Paris, 1921; Eng. Trans., 1927/R)
E. Vuillermoz: ‘Gabriel Faure’, ReM, iii/11 (1921–2), 10–21
G. Adler: ‘Internationalism in Music’, MQ, xi (1925), 281–300
J. Cocteau: Le rappel à l’ordre (Paris, 1926; Eng. trans., 1926)
J. Hayward , ed.: The Letters of Saint Evremond (London, 1930), 205–17
B. Bartók: ‘Mi a népzene? A parasztzene hatása az újabb műzenére: a népzene jelentőségéről’ [What is folk music? The influence of peasant music on contemporary composition], Új idok, xxxvii (1931), 626, 718, 818; Eng. trans. in Béla Bartók: Essays, ed. B. Suchoff (New York, 1976), 340–44
D. Mason: Tune In, America: a Study of our Coming Musical Independence (New York, 1931/R)
A. Schoenberg: ‘National Music’, 1931, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. L. Stein (New York, 1975), 169–74
R. Sessions: ‘Music in Crisis: some Notes on Recent Musical History’, MM, x (1932–3), 63–78
L. Saminsky: Music of the Ghetto and the Bible (New York, 1934)
R. Vaughan Williams: National Music (London, 1934); repr. in National Music and Other Essays (London, 1963)
G. Abraham: A Hundred Years of Music (London, 1938, 4/1974)
E. Newman: ‘Racial theories and Music: Whither is Germany Tending?’, 1938, From the World of Music (London, 1956), 185–88
L. Schrade: Beethoven in France: the Growth of an Idea (New Haven, CT, 1942/R); see also review by P.H. Lang in Romanic Review, xxxv (1944), 73–82, and xxxvi (1945), 78–80
I. Stravinsky: Poétique musicale (Cambridge, MA, 1942; Eng. trans., 1947)
M. Bukofzer: ‘The New Nationalism’, MM, xxxiii (1946), 243–7
R. Leibowitz: ‘Béla Bartók ou la possibilité de compromis dans la musique contemporaine’, Les temps modernes, xxv (1947), 706–34
M Babbitt: ‘The String Quartets of Bartók’, MQ, xxxv (1949), 377–85
L. Saminsky: Living Music of the Americas (New York, 1949)
V. Thomson: Music Right and Left (New York, 1951)
A. Weisser: The Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music (New York, 1954)
Z. Lissa: ‘Du style national des oeuvres de Chopin’, Annales Chopin, ii (1957), 100–78
I. Stravinsky and R. Craft: Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City, NY, 1959)
S. Finkelstein: Composer and Nation (New York, 1960)
H.J. Moser: Die Tonsprachen des Abendlandes (Berlin, 1960); see also review by R.L. Crocker, JAMS, xv (1962), 99–102
Z. Gardonyi: ‘Nationale Thematik in der Musik Franz Liszts bis zum Jahre 1848’, Liszt-Bartók: Budapest 1961, 77–87
Z. Lissa: ‘Über die nationalen Stile’, BMw, vi (1964), 187–214
B. Szabolcsi: ‘Die Anfänge der nationalen Oper im 19. Jahrhundert’, IMSCR IX: Salzburg 1964
A. Ringer: ‘On the Question of “Exoticism” in 19th Century Music’, SMH, vii (1965), 115–23
F. Howes: The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1966)
H.W. Hitchcock: ‘Nationalism and Anti-Nationalism in American Music Histories’, Yugoslav-American Seminar on Music: Sveti Stefan 1968, 199–208
F. Jonas, trans.: Vladimir Vasil'yevich Stasov: Selected Essays on Music (London, 1968)
S. Krebs: Soviet Composers and the Development of Soviet Music (New York, 1970)
C. Dahlhaus: Richard Wagners Musikdramen (Velber, 1971; Eng. trans., 1979)
J. Kerman: ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, Beethoven Studies, ed. A. Tyson (New York, 1973), 123–57; repr. in J. Kerman: Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley, 1994), 173–206
R. Rosengard: Popularity and Art in Lortzing’s Operas: the Effects of Social Change on a National Operatic Genre (diss., Columbia U., 1973)
C. Dahlhaus: Zwischen Romantik und Moderne: vier Studien zur Musikgeschichte des späteren 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1974; Eng. trans., 1980)
H. Becker, ed.: Die ‘Couleur locale’ in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1976)
R.R. Subotnik: ‘Lortzing and the German Romantics: a Dialectical Assessment’, MQ, lxii (1976), 241–64
R. Taruskin: ‘Current Chronicle: Molchanov’s The Dawns are Quiet Here’, MQ, lxii (1976), 105–15
C. Donakowski: A Muse for the Masses: Ritual and Music in an Age of Democratic Revolution 1770–1870 (Chicago, 1977)
M.S. Daitz: ‘Grieg and Bréville: “Nous parlons alors de la jeune école française …”’, 19CM, i (1977–8), 233–45
R. Subotnik: ‘The Historical Structure: Adorno’s “French” Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 36–60
P. Pirie: The English Musical Renaissance (New York, 1979)
C. Porter: ‘The New Public and the Reordering of the Musical Establishment: the Lower Rhine Music festivals, 1818–67’, 19CM, iii (1979–80), 211–24
C. Dahlhaus: Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1980; Eng. trans., 1989)
B. Zuck: A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor, 1980)
M. Brown: ‘Native Song and National Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music’, Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. T. Stavrou (Bloomington, IN, 1983), 57–84
A. Levy: Musical Nationalism: American Composers’ Search for Identity (Westport, CT, 1983)
T. Marco: Historia de la música española: siglo XX (Madrid, 1983; Eng. trans., 1993)
S. Karlinsky: ‘Russian Comic Opera in the Age of Catherine the Great’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 318–25
R. Taruskin: ‘Some Thoughts on the History and the Historiography of Russian Music’, JM, iii (1984), 321–9
P. Weiss and R. Taruskin: Music in the Western World: a History in Documents (New York, 1984)
M. Moore: Yankee Blues: Musical Culture and American Identity (Bloomington, IN, 1985)
B. Tischler: An American Music: the Search for an American Musical Identity (Oxford, 1986)
M. Beckerman: ‘In Search of Czechness in Music’, 19CM, x (1986–7), 61–73
G. Tomlinson: ‘Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera; an Essay in their Affinities’, ibid., 43–60
M. Brown and M. Mazo, eds.: Introduction to N. Lvov and I. Prach: A Collection of Russian Folk Songs (Ann Arbor, 1987)
J. Fulcher: The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987)
J.A. Herd: Change and Continuity in Contemporary Japanese Music: a Search for a National Identity (diss., Brown U., 1987)
G. Stanley: ‘Bach’s Erbe: the Chorale in the German Oratorio of the Early Nineteenth Century’, 19CM, xi (1987–8), 121–49
S. Messing: Neoclassicism in Music from the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor, 1988)
J. Tyrrell: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988)
J. Campbell: V.F. Odoyevsky and the Formation of Russian Musical Taste in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1989)
A. Copland and V. Perlis: Copland: Since 1943 (New York, 1989)
P. Franklin: ‘Audiences, Critics and the Depurification of Music: Reflections on a 1920s Controversy’, JRMA, cxiv (1989), 80–91
J. Frigyesi: Béla Bartók and Hungarian Nationalism: the Development of Bartók’s Social and Political Ideas at the Turn of the Century (1899–1903) (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1989)
A. Groos: ‘Return of the Native: Japan in Madama Butterfly/Madama Butterfly in Japan’, COJ, i (1989), 167–94
M. and S. Harries: A Pilgrim Soul: the Life and Work of Elisabeth Lutyens (London, 1989)
M. Steinberg: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, NY, 1989)
P. Gossett: ‘Becoming a Citizen: the Chorus in Risorgimento Opera’, COJ, ii (1990), 41–64
R. Taruskin: ‘Christian Themes in Russian Opera: a Millennial Essay’, ibid., 83–91
D. Brown: Tchaikovsky: the Final Years, 1885–1893 (London, 1991)
J. Rosselli: Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Portland, OR, 1991)
C. Applegate: ‘What is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation’, German Studies Review, xv (1992), 21–32
A. Arblaster: Viva la Liberta! Politics in Opera, (London, 1992)
A. Ivashkin: ‘The Paradox of Russian Non-Liberty’, MQ, lxxvi (1992), 543–56
J. Parakilas: Ballades Without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR, 1992)
M. Beckerman: ‘Dvořák’s New World Largo and The Song of Hiawatha’, 19CM, xvi (1992–3), 35–48
A. Groos: ‘Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger’, ibid., 18–34
J. Parakilas: ‘Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera’, ibid., 181–202
M. Beckerman, ed.: Dvořák and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1993)
J. Bellman: The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (Boston, 1993)
M. Brody: ‘“Music for the Masses”: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory’, MQ, lxxvii (1993), 161–92
J. Hepokoski: Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge, 1993)
S. Pederson: ‘On the Task of the Music Historian: the Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven’, Repercussions, ii/2 (1993), 5–30
M. Slobin: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH, 1993)
R. Stradling and M. Hughes: The English Musical Renaissance, 1860–1940: Construction and Deconstruction (London, 1993)
R. Taruskin: Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, NJ, 1993)
M. Weiner: Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative (Lincoln, NE, 1993)
M. Notley: ‘Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna’, 19CM, xviii (1993–4), 107–23
S. Pederson: ‘A.B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity’, 19CM, xviii (1993–4), 87–107
R. Taruskin: ‘Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology’, 19CM, xviii (1993–4), 286–302
K. Berger: ‘Chopin’s Ballade Op. 23 and the Revolution of the Intellectuals’, Chopin Studies 2, ed J. Rink and J. Samson (Cambridge, 1994), 72–83
S. Campbell: Russians on Russian Music 1830–1880: an Anthology (Cambridge, 1994)
B. Diamond and R. Witmer, eds.: Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity (Toronto, 1994)
M. Stokes, ed.: Ethnicity, Identity and Music (Oxford, 1994)
C. Gibbs: ‘“Komm, geh’ mit mir”: Schubert’s Uncanny Erlkönig’, 19CM, xix (1994–5), 115–35
G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995)
S. Burnham: Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ, 1995)
S. Floyd: The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (Oxford, 1995)
C. Hamm: ‘Dvořák in America: Nationalism, Racism and National Race’, Putting Popular Music in its Place (Cambridge, 1995), 344–53
P. Laki, ed.: Bartók and his World (Princeton, NJ, 1995)
S. Pederson: Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850 (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1995)
R. Smith: Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995)
M. Weiner: Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE, 1995)
P. Mercer-Taylor: ‘Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony and the Music of German Memory’, 19CM, xix (1995–6), 68–82
S. Rumph: ‘A Kingdom Not of This World: the Political Context of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Beethoven Criticism’, 19CM, xix (1995–6), 50–67
Repercussions, v/1–2 (1996) [nationalism and music issue; incl. articles by G. Dubinsky, B. Levy, K. Móricz, D. Schneider, L. Sprout, R. Taruskin]
D. Beveridge, ed.: Rethinking Dvořák: Views from Five Countries (Oxford, 1996)
R. Crawford: ‘Edward MacDowell: Musical Nationalism and an American Tone Poet’, JAMS, xlix (1996), 528–60
D.B. Dennis: Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven, CT, 1996)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA, 1996)
C. Porter: The Rhine as Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music (Boston, 1996)
R. Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley, 1996)
L. Arkin and M. Smith: ‘National Dance in the Romantic Ballet’, Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, ed. L. Garafola (Hanover, NH, 1997), 11–68
J. DeLapp: Copland in the Fifties: Music and Ideology in the McCarthy Era (diss., U. of Michigan, 1997)
D. Fanning: Nielsen: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge, 1997)
M. Frolova-Walker: ‘On Ruslan and Russianness’, COJ, ix (1997), 21–46
T. Mäkelä, ed.: Music and Nationalism in 20th-Century Great Britain and Finland (Hamburg, 1997) [incl: I. Oramo: ‘Beyond Nationalism’, 35–43; E. Toivanen: ‘The Allure of Distant Strains: Musical Receptiveness of the Anglo-Saxon’, 53–6]
M. Notley: ‘Volksconcerte in Vienna and the Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony’, JAMS, l (1997), 421–53
R. Parker: Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton, NJ, 1997)
D.E. Schneider: Expression in the Time of Objectivity: Nationality and Modernity in Five Concertos by Béla Bartók (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1997)
A. Suschitzky: ‘Ariane et Barbe-Bleue: Dukas, the Light and the Well’, COJ, ix (1997), 133–61
R. Taruskin: Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ, 1997)
T. Taylor: Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York, 1997)
C. Applegate: ‘How German Is it? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century’, 19CM, xxi (1997–8), 274–96
J. Frigyesi: Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley, 1998)
M. Frolova-Walker: ‘“National in Form, Socialist in Content”: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics’, JAMS, li (1998), 331–71
A. Gerhard: The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1998)
P. Potter: Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT, 1998)
D. Beller-McKenna: ‘How deutsch a Requiem? Absolute Music, Universality, and the Reception of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem’, 19CM, xxii (1998–9), 3–19
D. Fosler-Lussier: Bartók Reception in Hungary and the Transition to Communism, 1945–55 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1999)
J. Fulcher: French Cultural Politics & Music: from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York, 1999)
K. Móricz: Jewish Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Music (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1999)
A. Suschitzky: Opera and National Identity in fin-de-siècle France (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1999)
B. Milewski: ‘Chopin's Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk’, 19CM, xxii (1999–2000), 113–35
A. Beal: ‘Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946–56’, JAMS, lii (2000)
K. van Orden, ed.: Music and the Cultures of Print (New York, 2000)
B. Walton: Romanticisms and Nationalisms in Restoration France (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 2000)
A. Shreffler: Ideologies of Serialism: Aspects of Music and Politics 1945–65 (forthcoming)
L. Sprout: New Music and State Support for the Arts in France, 1938–1945 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, in preparation)