Showing papers in "Nineteenth-century music review in 2007"

Victorian Fairies and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream in England

Abstract: In art, literature, theatre and music, Victorians demonstrated increased interest in the supernatural and nostalgia for a lost mythic time, a response to rapid technological change and increased urbanization. Romanticism generated a new regard for Shakespeare, also fuelled by British nationalism. The immortal bard's plays began to receive theatrical performances that more accurately presented their original texts, partially remedying the mutilations of the previous century. The so-called ‘fairy’ plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, were also popular subjects for fairy paintings, stemming from the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. In such a context, it is no wonder that Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was so overwhelmingly popular in England and that his style became closely associated with the idea of fairies. This article explores how the Victorians’ understanding of fairies and how the depiction of fairies in the theatre and visual arts of the period influenced the reception of Mendelssohn's music, contributing to its construction as ‘feminine’. Victorian fairies, from the nude supernatural creatures cavorting in fairy paintings to the diaphanously gowned dancers treading lightly on the boards of the stage, were typically women. In his study of Chopin reception, Jeffrey Kallberg has interpreted fairies as androgynous, but Victorian fairies were predominantly female, so much so that Lewis Spence's 1948 study, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, includes an entire section on fairy gender intended to refute the long-standing notion that there were no male fairies. Thus, for Mendelssohn to have composed the leading musical work that depicted fairies contributed to his increasingly feminized reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.

The Diaries of Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann: A Study in Contrasts

Abstract: Clara Schumann, nee Wieck (1819–1896), and Fanny Hensel, nee Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1805–1847), were among the outstanding women musicians of their time. Both kept diaries that still exist, and from these we can learn a great deal about the inner and outer lives of the two women. Fanny Hensel's diaries were originally used by her son Sebastian for his book Die Familie Mendelssohn, 1729–1847. He gave us her life story as seen through his eyes, and furnished the major information available about his mother until the recent publication of her diaries: Fanny Hensel, Tagebucher. This book was based on the diary manuscripts acquired by the Mendelssohn Archive of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek in 1969, 1970 and 1999. Fanny Hensel's Tagebucher cover the years 1829 to 1847, thus from the year of her marriage to the year of her death.

Fanny Hensel's Op. 8, No. 1: A Special Case of ‘multum in parvo’?

Abstract: In my experience, everyone among my acquaintances, friends, family members, students and colleagues who has encountered Fanny Hensel's ‘Song without Words’ [Song for Piano] op 8, no 1 in B minor, has recognized its special character – perhaps responding above all to its sense of ‘multum in parvo’, or ‘much in a small space’ This article offers some reflections on what it is that makes this piece so special and gives it this particular effect As well as paying attention to the patterns, relationships and textures created by the notes, it seeks to suggest that one way of ‘reading’ the music may lie in its author's personality and circumstances

A Bicentennial Reflection: Twenty-five Years with Fanny Hensel

Abstract: This paper originated in the keynote address delivered at the Fanny Hensel bicentenary conference organized by the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music and held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 22–24 July 2005. As its title suggests, it marks a quarter-century acquaintance with Fanny Hensel. Although in recent years my research has expanded into opera on film, and that has obviously taken me into very different terrain, still Hensel continues to exert a special fascination. Preparing the edition of her letters to Felix Mendelssohn brought me into her private world, a world she assumed would remain private. I came to admire, and even love, her intelligence, her wit and her musical sophistication. It is not unusual for researchers to be enthusiastic about the person they are studying or to identify with them – this may be one reason for choosing that person in the first place, and is undoubtedly a reason why we chose to celebrate Fanny Hensel's bicentenary with the Oxford conference. In short, Fanny Hensel fascinates us.

Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel's 'Scottish' Sonata in G Minor (1843)

Abstract: The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘ruhrend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

Leipziger Straβe Drei: Sites for Music

Abstract: We are accustomed to seeking the ‘music itself’ in the musical text. The actual and spiritual spaces that are inscribed in music, and the people connected to these sites, are thereby in danger of being left out of consideration. In my view, place and people are part of the music. It is thus against a background of an understanding of music that does not only mean the opuses in the sense of the written musical texts, but also implies all aspects of life connected with the production, reproduction and reception of music, that I offer this enquiry into the meaning of the Leipziger Straβe Drei for the artistic works emanating from Fanny Hensel.

Biography and Symbol: Uncovering the Structure of a Creative Life in Fanny Hensel's Lieder

Abstract: The bicentenary year of Fanny Hensel's birth generated a welcome degree of renewed attention to her life and music Viewing these against the backcloth of debates about the relationships between women and the culture to which they contribute (and which they also consume) suggests a tension between, on the one hand, the image of a female composer in conflict with a patriarchal order and, on the other hand, the impression of a composer for whom considerable creative power lay in the cultural environment that she inhabited While it is true that Hensel faced social and cultural barriers because of her sex, in order to understand her music it is essential that we consider the ways in which she could be seen to overcome those barriers, or even destroy them, through the expression of her personal voice in her compositions Hensel's life demonstrates how closely bound up together biography and aesthetics really are The way in which her life is portrayed can be seen to colour listeners' judgement of her music

Fanny Hensel's Op. 6, No. 1 and the Art of Musical Reminiscence

Abstract: At first glance, Fanny Hensel's Andante espressivo in A♭ major – the first of the Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte op. 6, published in June 1847 just weeks after her death – impresses as a concise example of a textless, nocturne-like song cut from the cloth of her short piano character pieces and occasionally, but just occasionally, reminiscent of her brother's more celebrated Lieder ohne Worte. The 61 bars of the Andante show the gifts of an accomplished songwriter as they unfold an uninterrupted, ‘singing’ soprano melody, at times euphonious and lyrical, at times poignant and passionate, above a gently rippling accompaniment of arpeggiated triplets. The basic structure of the composition is clear enough. We hear in succession: 1) the melody in the tonic and a modulation (10 bars) to 2) a statement on the dominant (13 bars); 3) a retransition and dominant pedal point (9 bars) leading to 4) the return of the opening in the tonic (16 bars), further supported by 5) a coda, drawn once again from the melody (13 bars). The compositional plan is thus one of statement, departure and return, a familiar sequence Hensel employed in the majority of her short piano pieces, and yet a deceptively simple strategy that afforded her considerable latitude, within the circumscribed, epigrammatic realm of the piano miniature, to explore a wide emotional range of colours, textures and musico-poetic ideas.

‘Old Wine in New Bottles’: Renaissance Polyphony in the English Catholic Church during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract: In the early nineteenth century there were three main styles of music performed in the English Catholic Church. First, there was plainchant, mainly that copied by John Francis Wade in the previous century and then refracted through arrangements by Samuel Webbe the elder, Samuel Wesley and Vincent Novello. Second, there was a native and, for its day, a fairly up-to-date style associated again with the two Webbes, Wesley and Novello. Third, there were Continental imports, especially grand masses, composed by Viennese Classical masters such as Mozart and Haydn, or Hummel and Weber. All three styles were developed and remained popular throughout the nineteenth century; but increasingly they were challenged by a revived interest in Renaissance-style polyphony, especially music composed between 1551 and 1650. This paper examines that development looking at, first, the general factors that encouraged it; second, the main stages in its revival; and third, the extent and effects of its influence and achievement.

Brahms, Dvořák, Suk

Abstract: This recording offers a remarkably diverse selection of music, all of it composed for cello and piano between 1862 and 1896. With the pieces by Dvořák and Suk, Brahms’s two sonatas make a well-balanced programme of late-nineteenthcentury music for this combination of instruments; moreover, the performances by the cellist Steven Isserlis and the pianist Stephen Hough for the most part are splendid. Character is a useful concept in approaching this music. The works by Dvořák and Suk form a contrasting group of character pieces; each of Brahms’s seven movements is distinct in character from the others. Although character is more associated with late-eighteenth-century than late-nineteenth-century aesthetics, Arrey von Dommer’s 1865 revision of Heinrich Koch’s musical dictionary includes a lengthy discussion of ‘Character’. Dommer’s edition also offers definitions for qualities such as amoroso and angenehm. The entry ‘Character’ emphasizes the wide range of possibilities but also notes the connection between certain genres and ‘characteristic’ features that allow us to recognize musical pieces as belonging to those genres.1 Character thus encompasses both the particular and the typical. Surprisingly, Dommer does not include a separate entry for the important nineteenth-century genre ‘Characterstück’. Dvořák’s Waldesruhe exemplifies the kind of Characterstück that comes most readily to mind: a programmatic title suggests a specific character (here, sylvan quiet). The names of the other short pieces on the recording indicate genres with traditional characteristics: the declamatory quality of Suk’s ballade, the popular sound of his serenade, the quadratic tunefulness of Dvořák’s rondo theme. Brahms’s sonatas likewise include a rondo, along with a scherzo, a fugue, an adagio qualified as ‘affettuoso’, and – evoking an obsolete genre – an Allegretto quasi Menuetto. The two first movements, moreover, are sharply differentiated from each other; therein lies a possible link between the sonatas. Brahms’s E minor Cello Sonata is the earliest work on this recording: the first two movements date from 1862 and the finale from 1865. It is one in a series of 146 Nineteenth-Century Music Review

On the Nature of Structural Framing

Abstract: Structural framing is the reference to initial material at the end of a formal unit; this formal unit might be a theme, section, movement or even a multi-movement work. Structural framing is a special kind of thematic restatement that is fundamentally distinct from recapitulation or apotheosis. Whereas a recapitulation associates the beginning of one section with the beginning of another section, a structural frame associates the beginning of one section with its end. Thus a recapitulation is a re-beginning, an apotheosis is a triumphant arrival, and a structural frame is a closing gesture – a parting ‘adieu’ that assists the listener in the conceptual encompassment of a formal unit.

Simon Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 193 pp. $85

Abstract: consistently examines the notion of revision within the shifting contexts – whether historical, cultural or musical – of the works themselves. Each of the six chapters is scrupulously researched (the bibliography is refreshingly current) and carefully conceived, with an equitable division of musical analysis and historical context, accessible not only to scholars, but also to serious music students. The length of the book is also judiciously concise (perhaps also given its genesis as individual lectures) yet the author does not sacrifice the depth or force of his arguments. The ultimate significance of Parker’s contribution is, in his own words, that of ‘destabilization’; that is, it implores the reader to cast aside the long-held notion that revision is only a singular act on the road to perfection. Rather, we must be willing to set aside traditional ideas about the existence of a single Urtext and/or definitive authorial transmission truly to view any opera in an informed light.

The Enchantress and Problems of Pacing in the Operas of Tchaikovsky: An Informal Interview with David Lloyd-Jones

Abstract: In June and July of 2004, Grange Park Opera gave the first professional stage performances in the United Kingdom of Tchaikovsky's The Enchantress ( Charodeyka ). David Lloyd-Jones conducted and was responsible for the performing version. The following article is based on an interview with him taped between the sixth and seventh performances. A retired Syracuse University music librarian, is the author of two published Tchaikovky studies: ‘The Tchaikovsky Fifth: a symphony without a programme’ (1991) and, in collaboration with Mark Elder, ‘The Dramaturgy of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa’ (1988). He was for many years a contributor of record reviews and interviews to Fanfare magazine.

The ‘Power of Class’ in a New Perspective: A Comparison of the Compositional Careers of Fanny Hensel and Josephine Lang

Abstract: In her article ‘The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel’, Nancy Reich draws attention to the significance of social station as a constraint on Fanny Hensel’s musical career. While she acknowledges the existence of other barriers (such as religion, family traditions, and the influence on the Mendelssohns of Enlightenment philosophy), Reich emphasizes the role of contemporary expectations for upper-class women in limiting the scope of Hensel’s public musical activity. The identification of the ‘power of class’ as a factor in the careers of nineteenth-century women composers is an important contribution that deserves further investigation. Reich suggests a productive avenue for the exploration of this topic when she briefly compares Hensel’s career to those of two pianist-composers of lower social standing: Clara Schumann and Marie Pleyel. In this article, I pursue this avenue by comparing Hensel's career to that of another contemporary woman composer of a class lower than hers, namely Josephine Lang.

Theorizing ‘Death’ The Meaning of Negation as a Hegelian Inheritance in Richard Wagner's Musik als Idee

Abstract: If the phenomenon of, or even ‘obsession’ with, the aestheticization of ‘death’ in nineteenth-century German culture was central to Schopenhauer's philosophy, its firm roots lay in Hegel's philosophy.Hegel is the first thinker to recognize the force of negation; for him negativity creates a positive action: it is brought into presence carried forward by the dialectical activity of the Spirit. It is within this context, as I shall argue in the present article, that Wagner's notion of ‘negativity’, or the ‘utopian celebration of nothingness and death’, appears in his work. Consequently, it is within this framework of thought that Wagner's music acts – or is intended to act – as Musik als Idee.