Romantic longings

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Walton, Chris

Romantic longings

CHRIS WALTON

Nineteenth-century music: selected proceedings of the Tenth International Conference Edited by Jim Samson & Bennett Zon Ashgate (Aldershot, 2002); xxi, 373pp; L59.50. ISBN 0 7546 0205 2.

Is there a century as pampered today by musicologists as is the nineteenth? It has had its own journal for some thirty years and is about to be accorded yet another (to be published by Ashgate); it has a high-powered, international conference devoted to it every other year; it now has a Centre for the study of it at the University of Durham; and, to cap it all - as if it weren't long enough already - it has been stretched out at either end to include both the French Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War. In theory then, an expert on late Mozart or early Berg can call himself a `nineteenth-century scholar' without ever having to sully his hands with anything between 1800 and 1900. Perhaps this is an inevitable overreaction to a previous state of affairs, for - apart from the never-waning interest in the 'big' names - the study of nineteenth-century music was for many years somewhat non-U. In the present writer's student days, an admission to liking Sterndale Bennett could ruin one's street cred for months, while the music of Wesley, Stanford et al. was considered the preserve of musically-constipated English cathedral organists. Not even musically-- constipated German organists would have touched their minor composers with a thirty-two-foot bombarde. How pleasantly different is today, when it is positively de rigueur to write about Gade, Spohr, Fanny Mendelssohn and their like.

Names big and small, long, short and tall (bless 'em all) are naturally represented in the present volume, which offers (I quote the dust-jacket, as it is admirably succinct) 'a wide crosssection of the papers given at the Tenth International Conference on NineteenthCentury Music held at the University of Bristol in 1998'. Since these conferences bring together (as mentioned above) some of the best musicologists from the Anglo-American scene and not a few from outside it, one can expect the quality of contributions to be high. And indeed it is.

This book is divided into six sections of different lengths. The first is entitled the `Philosophy of music' and is a single chapter by Andrew Bowie, who engages with the philosophical and linguistic searches for meaning in music, concurring at the end with Adorno who `manages to suggest how the ongoing ability of [music and philosophy] to reveal the inadequacies of [each] other constitutes the best framework for philosophical discussion of musical meaning. Part Two is on Wagner, with one chapter each by Roger Scruton, Thomas S. Grey and John Deathridge. While the present writer has long admired the fiercely clever Scruton, he here disappoints by lapsing into descriptive analysis. The chapters by Grey and Deathridge, on the other hand, are among the best in the book. Grey begins with a discussion of the final scene of Act Two of Siegfried and Wagner's

aesthetic fantasy [...] to recuperate, within the artificial context of his `music drama', something of mankind's original relation to language (and hence to nature) by restoring an element of the vivid, 'natural' immediacy that had been lost as language became gradually alienated from its sonorous 'musical' origins' (pp.49-50).

He expands this into a consideration of Wagner's anti-Semitism and draws a convincing parallel between the Siegfried/Mime relationship and that of Wagner and Meyerbeer. Deathridge offers new insights into Wagner's reception of Mendelssohn, particularly those self-reflective moments in the scores of [his] music dramas [...] where his interpretation of Mendelssohn's aesthetics, not only as parody, but also as part of his symphonic ambition, is woven into the musical texture of the dramas, and hence also into the refined ideological complexity of those dramas (p.72).

These two chapters alone make the book worth buying.

Part Three is on Liszt, with no less than five chapters: a consideration by Alexander Rehding of a single song - `Ich mochte hingehn' - in the history of the Tristan chord; more general considerations of programme music and narrative structures from James Deaville and Marta Grab6cz respectively; Anna Harwell Celenza on the genesis of Liszt's Totentanz; and Cornelia Szabo-Knotik on the oratorio St Elisabeth, the staged performances it received in Vienna, and the manner in which it was used to celebrate the Habsburg dynasty.

The last three sections are the most diverse. Part Four - one of the book's highlights - is dedicated to `Mediating music: creating, collecting and publishing in nineteenth-century France'. Annegret Fauser offers a fascinating look into music at the 1889 World Fair in Paris and the manner in which it was used both to instil patriotic fervour and to further the colonialist project - the musics of the East being depicted as exotic (`the acoustic backdrop for a kind of proto-theme park') in order to confirm the supposed superiority of the West. Andrea Musk considers Deodat de Severac's Heliogabale in the context of latinite - the attempt to establish a more Mediterranean identity for things French in contrast to the perceived characteristics of the northern Teutons; Clair Rowden then discusses `Herodiade: church, state and the feminist movement'. In Part Five (`Music and nation'), Bennett Zon discusses the application of the concepts of creationism and evolutionism in music historiography in Britain around 1900, while Friedemann Kawohl elucidates a little-- discussed topic that is nevertheless of crucial importance to music history in Germany, namely the Prussian Copyright Act of 1837. Elizabeth Way Sullivan engages with `German nationalism and the reception of the Czech String Quartet in Vienna' around 1900.