Showing papers in "Nineteenth-century music review in 2009"

Encouragement from an Unexpected Source: Louis Antoine Jullien, Mid-Century American Composers, and George Frederick Bristow's Jullien Symphony

Abstract: In the spring of 1856, the critic Emile Girac published a review of George Frederick Bristow's Symphony No. 2, the Jullien Symphony, in The Albion. What he wrote is revealing; it reads in part:But do you know how much is expressed by those two little words the Jullien Symphony? They mean simply that Jullien did more for Concert music in three months, than the Philharmonic Society has accomplished since Mr. U.C. Hill created it and brought it before the world. [Jullien] gave us Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, as we have never heard them interpreted in New York. He taught us the art of shades and effects in music …. He [also] revealed to us the powers of Bristow, Fry, and Eisfeld, and did far more for their reputation than was ever done by the Society, which owed so much at least to the first and last of these noble and courageous musicians. … [T]his is the true meaning of Bristow's symphony.

Too Close for Comfort: Henry James, Richard Wagner and The Sacred Fount

Abstract: In April 1880, one of the most intriguing lost opportunities in musical-literary history took place. Henry James and Richard Wagner were staying in Posilippo, near Naples. James was beginning a two-month visit to Italy, whilst Wagner was living in the Italian town with his family, working on essays including ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1880) and preparing the staging for Parsifal (1882). A mutual friend, Paul von Joukowsky, suggested to James that he and Wagner meet but the offer provoked an emphatic rejection from the American novelist. It would have taken place amid the heady bohemianism, homosexuality and obsessive aestheticism of Wagner's Italian circle of which Joukowsky was a part. No doubt their meeting would have been stilted and strained, suffused with various forms of social awkwardness, yet, as we shall see, James's explanation of his refusal has the overtones of a justification. Despite – or because of – the aborted meeting, James repeatedly returned to this unrealized encounter in his writing. He referred to the composer or his works in more than a dozen of his novels and short stories from the 1880s to the early twentieth century; these muted but resonant references suggest an informed and engaged response to Wagner and his works. It is as if, though these allusions, James re-imagined this event, composer and novelist encountering each other in numerous texts over a period of 20 years

Poetry, Music and Fremdartigkeit in Robert Schumann's Hans Christian Andersen Songs, op. 40

Abstract: On 1 October 1842, Robert Schumann sent Hans Christian Andersen a copy of his recently published Funf Lieder op. 40, a song collection consisting of settings of four poems by Andersen as well as an anonymous ‘Neugriechisch’ poem, all translated into German by Adelbert von Chamisso. Although Clara Schumann had become acquainted with the poet earlier that year during a concert tour that took her through Copenhagen, Robert had yet to meet him, and the letter included with op. 40 was the first time that he addressed Andersen directly.

Harmonizing the Nation: Margaret Fuller and the Music of Antebellum America

Abstract: In August of 1846, Margaret Fuller – one of the most influential feminist intellectuals in American history – sailed from New York City to Europe prepared to continue her work as the lead columnist for the New-York Tribune. As it was planned by Fuller and Horace Greeley – the Tribune's editor – while abroad, Fuller would work as an international correspondent and send to the Tribune letters of her travels that recorded her thoughts about Europe, which she did from late 1846 until late 1849, with her final piece appearing in the 6 January 1850 edition of the paper. In ‘Letter No. XI’ (1847) of Fuller's more than 30 European dispatches to the Tribune, she recounted for her readers several of the operas that she attended while in Paris. After first reviewing Robert le Diable, Guillaume Tell, L'Elisire d'Amore and Semiramide in this 31 March letter, Fuller turned her attention to a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Fuller assessed Don Giovanni differently from the other operas in her letter. Rather than highlight the merits of the singers or staging, she prefaced her review with an account of her decision to take ether in an attempt to alleviate the pain she had been suffering as a result of toothache. In some depth, Fuller described the pleasurable sensations that she had experienced because of the ether. As she noted, however, the treatment had not stopped her discomfort. This troubled her on more than one level. For one, she was in acute pain; but Fuller was also worried that her suffering might make it difficult for her to sit through the entirety of Don Giovanni. Fuller had long wanted to attend this opera, so despite her concern she went. Her choice to go would delight her, for as Fuller wrote in her letter, once Don Giovanni began, ‘the music soothed the nerves’ of her toothache ‘at once’. But even more wonderful than this, she explained, was that, after hearing Mozart's music, the pain from her toothache ‘left [her] from that time’ on.

William Henry Fry's Leonora : The Italian Connection

Abstract: On 7 June 1845, the New York Herald published a letter by an ‘occasional correspondent’ from Philadelphia concerning William Henry Fry's first grand opera, Leonora, which premiered three days before at the Chestnut Street Theatre. The letter contained the following remark: All were delighted with the music, it was so much like an old acquaintance in a new coat; indeed some of ‘the cognoscenti’ said that it was a warm ‘hash’ of Bellini, with a cold shoulder of ‘Rossini,’ and a handful of ‘Auber’ salt – whilst others congratulated Mr. Fry upon his opera being so much like Norma…

Truth in Art, and Erik Satie's Judgement

Abstract: It is certainly true that Satie, in his later years, did not tire of repeating that there is ‘no Truth in Art’; and in saying so, he was doubtless very much in tune with the spirit of his artistic milieu, which included, after all, such aesthetic anarchists as Picabia and Tzara, as well as the great artistic revolutionaries of the time, Picasso and Stravinsky, for whom he had unbounded admiration. And every time he did so, he was careful to attribute the erroneous belief that there is a Truth in Art to that class of writers whom he variously called ‘critiques’, ‘pedagogues’, ‘Pontifes’, ‘pions’: people of the serious persuasion, who think it is possible to teach or describe what makes a piece of art good or bad. Attacks against this tribe are, in fact, the staple of Satie's writings. It might appear sensible to infer from this that it would be foolish for a critic to look for Truth in Erik Satie's writings about art. Nonetheless, that is what I shall be doing in this article. I shall argue that, while there may, for Satie, be no truth in art, there are truths about art, susceptible of at least indirect expression, which Satie himself maintained with remarkable adroitness. Whether those truths are peculiar to the aesthetics of Satie's writings; whether they are relevant to the way we might appreciate his music; and whether they have echoes in the thought of his artistic companions (especially those mentioned above) – these are questions that will remain open; but I would like at least to suggest that they are worth asking.

Musical Chairs: the Construction of ‘Music’ in Nineteenth-Century British Universities

Abstract: Music occupied an ill-defined place in the universities of nineteenth-century Britain. The endowment of a Professorship at Edinburgh, and thorough-going reforms at Oxford and Cambridge, prompted fundamental questions about the form and place of musical study. As the universities sought to occupy their professors, what exactly they might offer, and how this should sit with the academic and social ideals of the institutions, was subject to debate. Using documents associated with the applications to professorships at Edinburgh and Cambridge during 1839-75, this article discusses how the academic subject of Music was first defined and developed in British universities. As part of a bid to assimilate musical study to university ideals and render it appropriate for systematised teaching and examination, ‘scientific’ approaches were proposed for the study of history and analysis, acoustics, and composition. Aspects of general education, religion and character were as important as musical qualifications in establishing a place for music in academia, and election documentation from both institutions is rich in social commentary. Conflicts arising from the status of music as profession and amateur occupation, practical and academic study, also shaped the form of music in academic institutions. Early British ideas of musicology were not constructed according to abstract paradigms, but operated in line with narrow, institutionalised ideas of what was appropriate for a specific class of students, the academic environment and professional interest. The concerns discussed here intersect with problems of national identity, historiography and gender, which pervaded composition, performance and scholarship throughout the period.

Putting Words in the Master's Mouth: Anton Strelezki's Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt

Abstract: The annals of music history are filled with minor musicians whose fame was ephemeral or whose influence was negligible. Among those who have rated barely a line in the standard reference works is the pianist and composer Anton Strelezki (1858–1906). Like Anton Schindler, who made his reputation as the ‘Ami de Beethoven’, Strelezki attempted to burnish his reputation through association with a famous musical contemporary. His 21-page pamphlet entitled Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt, published after the death of its subject, purports to chronicle a close relationship with Franz Liszt over a period of decades, recounting lengthy conversations and reproducing extensive quotations from his famous contemporary. Because the book contains anecdotes not documented elsewhere in the Liszt literature, it demands close scrutiny for what it tells us about Liszt. It will be shown that Strelezki's story is suspect at best and probably completely fallacious, making the source unreliable for scholars of Liszt and related nineteenth-century musicians.

Introduction to the Issue

Abstract: The history of music in nineteenth-century America, and the place of music within American culture of the period, is an area of scholarly inquiry that recently has received increased attention. It is also, as the varied articles collected in this issue illustrate, a complex topic and an area ripe for much additional research. The four articles deal with different aspects of nineteenth-century American music history and culture; in each, however, there are also areas of overlap and intersection. All four authors use as a starting point issues that have already been the subject of some scholarly attention, and examine these topics either more thoroughly or from a new theoretical or contextual point of view. The resulting aggregate should help readers to understand better a complicated and under-explored world, for all four articles highlight the complexity of musical life in America and explore some of the many ways that cultural life in the United States reflected and resonated with that of Europe. All four authors, furthermore, either hint at or explicitly mention areas that are ripe for further research.

Jeremy Barham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). xxiv + 342pp. £48

Abstract: In 1960, the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth spawned a renaissance of the composer’s works including a spate of performances, new recordings, books and analyses devoted to his music. In light of the approaching centenary of Mahler’s death in 1911, the Cambridge Companion to Mahler (henceforth CCM) has the distinction of becoming the first collection written with that event in mind. Editor Jeremy Barham of the University of Surrey brings together leading scholars from the field of Mahler research to assess Mahler’s relevance for the twenty-first century, essentially to answer the question, ‘Does Mahler matter?’, as Barham posits in his introduction (p. 1). He stresses the need to constantly re-evaluate and re-hear the composer’s music to avoid simply accepting it or relegating it to the world of the commonplace, a trend becoming increasingly apparent in today’s world of readily available recordings. Has the opportunity to hear and re-hear Mahler’s works through technological advances trivialized the experience of his music, which was originally considered deviant, even shocking? The authors assembled in the CCM endeavour to show that, for all purposes, Mahler really does matter and, moreover, there remains much to be investigated in his music in the twenty-first century. This book proves a fitting addition to the ever-growing collection of Cambridge Companions to Music.1 Like its brethren in the series, the CCM is organized in four discrete parts, each dealing with a particular aspect of Mahler scholarship: biography, musical analysis, influence and reception. Although I initially doubted the claims of comprehensiveness touted on the back cover and elsewhere, the essays in this collection do deal with all of the composer’s output, as well as his conducting career and many of the current debates surrounding his music (narrativity, historicism, socio-cultural issues, and so on). While the broad coverage of topics offered in the CCM gives it an apparent advantage over other popular collections of essays such as The Mahler Companion or Mahler Studies (not to mention Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, which Barham also edited),2 the authors have been limited in some ways by the constraints of space. Nowhere is this drawback more apparent than in the second part of the book, ‘Mahler the Creative Musician’, where each contribution covers a number of works, limiting the depth of the analyses. Despite this shortcoming, they still provide many insightful observations. The CCM can truly claim to be the first collection to cover all of Mahler’s works plus contemporary issues surrounding his music, in as much detail as realistically possible for a book of its size. The CCM begins with a chronology, presumably assembled by Barham, which addresses key historical and cultural events and people alongside Mahler’s

Catherine Parsons Smith, Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). xiv + 376 pp. $35

Abstract: In the manner of scholars such as Karen Ahlquist and Lawrence Levine, Catherine Parsons Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular examines how concert music and opera in nineteenthand twentieth-century America transformed from popular, democratic entertainment into elite art forms.1 Professor Smith, who has written biographies of Los Angeles-based composers as well as numerous articles about the city’s musical institutions, is an expert on Southern California’s musical history.2 The regional focus of Smith’s latest book enables her to follow the (sometimes obscure) stories of events, institutions and individuals that formed and fostered musical life in the city between 1880 and 1940. Case studies in her social history include amateurs and professionals of different genders and backgrounds that performed, promoted, composed and chronicled popular music.3 Practitioners and audiences of ‘high’ art music were remarkably abundant thanks to the high rate of musical literacy and the concentration of musical progressives in the city.4 Contrary to historians who believe that opera and concert music in America lapsed into elitism well before the age of mass-produced commercial music, Smith contends that music-making as a widespread, popular activity extended well into the twentieth century.5 The author reveals ‘some previously unexplored, even deliberately ignored, connections (and disconnections)’ between the ‘genteel’ American romantic tradition and musical modernism (p. 1). Despite the seeming disparity of these two musical styles, Smith argues, ‘the gaps between them reflect changing ideas and practices about class, gender, age and ethnicity’ (p. 2). After an introductory chapter that outlines the book’s thesis and structure, Smith divides her study into three chronological stages. The first, ‘Music for the

Hugh Macdonald, Beethoven's Century: Essays on Composers and Themes (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008). xii + 255pp. $80

Abstract: Beethoven’s Century: Essays on Composers and Themes is a collection of 20 essays written by Hugh Macdonald over a period of 30 years. Most are revised and updated versions of previously published essays, and some were originally in French or German. The first part of the book’s title is perhaps misleading. The author himself comments on the ‘miscellaneous nature’ of his work, explaining that he chose the title because Beethoven’s ‘presence and his shadow were undoubtedly felt by almost everyone mentioned’ within his book (p. ix). However, the theme of a ‘Beethoven Century’ is neither explicit nor implicit throughout. Rather, the collection is far more diverse in both content and approach than Macdonald acknowledges, delving into composers, music, performance practice and history from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Although the book is separated into two parts, ‘Composers’ and ‘Themes’, the division appears to have been made as an attempt to organize a vast amount of material rather than because it occurs naturally. While threads run through many of the essays, there is perhaps only one unifying theme: the web was spun from the mind of Hugh Macdonald. Topics stretch from Skryabin and Massenet to G major and the geography of Paris. The range and poignant insight present a bold and interesting journey into the thoughts of another, which is simultaneously both a strength and weakness of the collection. With a knack for giving a fresh twist to well-trodden ground, Macdonald appropriately opens the book with an essay about Beethoven’s style.1 He deftly weaves his interpretation out of a comment about the master’s improvisations written by Czerny. Through Beethoven’s Phantasie, Macdonald shows how the composer delighted in baffling and deceiving his audience. He counters the idea that ‘order, logic, unity and organic growth are the mainsprings of Beethoven’s genius’ (p. 5). Instead, he focuses on the opposite aspects of his musical style – the ‘elements that are disorderly, illogical, disunified, inorganic, anticlassical, disruptive and so on’ (p. 5). His music is simultaneously powerful, beautiful and cruel. Macdonald has a gift for dissecting issues others pass over. This is especially the case in ‘Repeats’, which is a significant contribution to the performance practice literature.2 ‘To disregard repeats has become a habitual part of our thinking’ (p. 146). They are mysteriously absent from most discussions about form and are often omitted in performances. Macdonald examines repeats as ‘an intrinsic element of the music’ (p. 145). They can, in fact, double the length of a piece. Through numerous musical examples, Macdonald illustrates that the contemporary practice of omitting repeats for the da capo is likely incorrect. Composers carefully notated when they did not want repeats; thus, when there are repeats, they were likely observed. The book also includes several essays relating to opera. Two specifically address libretti. In ‘The Prose Libretto’, Macdonald explores why and how composers set

Barbara Owen, The Organ Music of Johannes Brahms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). xii + 184pp. £21.99

Abstract: betrays not only his own preference for a Protestant aesthetic of representation, but also, perhaps, the inherently Protestant character of his notion of modernity This does not mean that there is no ‘musical modernity’, only that as a narrative of ‘musical modernity’ Berger’s is unconvincing. His book would have profited from taking into account two prior attempts to wrestle with the question of music’s contribution to modernity: Rose Subotnik’s Developing Variations (1991) and Michael Steinberg’s Listening to Reason (2004).4 Berger explicitly avoids any discussion of the causal relationship between music and Zeitgeist; he is content simply to ‘register the structural homology between the shapes of the historical and musical times, and note its consequences’ (p. 9). Subotnik and Steinberg, by contrast, insist on a sophisticated critical intertwining of music, philosophy and history. They challenge the reader to imagine music not simply as corresponding to a philosophical, political or historical era, but as providing the terms that define that era in the first place. They present the compelling possibility that modernity must look for its origins in music – or, to incorporate Berger’s concern with temporality, that it is only via music that an understanding of the time of modernity becomes possible.

John Esputa, John Philip Sousa and the Boundaries of a Musical Career

Abstract: From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, the breadth of John Philip Sousa's career seems remarkable and unprecedented. His marches, of course, continue to dominate concert band programmes around the world. But Sousa was also a notably profitable composer of dances, songs and descriptive works that were once performed not only by bands, but also by orchestras, soloists and parlour musicians. His successful run as a theatre violinist, operetta composer, novelist and commentator made the Sousa name omnipresent in late nineteenth-century American cultural life. Given his considerable breadth and remarkable fame, it is hardly surprising that Sousa's name is found in seven of the 20 chapters that comprise the recent Cambridge History of American Music (second only to Charles Ives).

Susan Youens, Heinrich Heine and the Lied (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). xxx + 378pp. £55

Abstract: In this wide-ranging study, Susan Youens synthesizes poetic, musical, philosophical, political and social strands placing Heinrich Heine as one of Germany’s leading Romantic poets. Youens also brilliantly explores the essence of the nineteenth century’s complex relationship with the poet and the lieder his poetry inspired. Heine burst onto the bourgeoning Romantic literary scene in the 1820s, pleasing some by trotting out well-worn ‘sentimental versifiers’ deliberately to ‘undermine them’, and shocking many with his ‘boldness’ in ‘truth-telling about bourgeois sexual codes, outworn poetic language and institutional hypocrisy’ (p. 2).1 Hordes of composers were attracted by Heine’s verse (as Youens points out approximately 8,000 settings to date!): some are painfully aware of Heine’s dripping sarcasm and cynical mockery (Schubert, and Schumann, who seemed less pained than Schubert by Heine), but others, especially towards the end of the century, proffer misreadings infused with the ‘sickly-sweet’ nostalgia of a bygone era (p. 285). As Youens perceptively argues, however, this nostalgia is not solely related to misunderstandings of the poetry, but can be traced to an ambivalence Heine himself seemed to embody, ‘As a latecomer to Romanticism, Heine from the beginning to end would find himself torn by his – inability? refusal? – to relinquish the longing for what cannot be realized in mortal existence merely because he recognized that it was impossible’ (p. xviii). Why else, she argues, would composers generally select only a few poems out of Heine’s vast output to set? To delve into these various strands Youens proceeds essentially chronologically from Schubert’s Schwanengesang settings, through two lesser-known (but should-be known) composers Franz Lachner and Johann Vesque von Püttlingen (who managed to set all of Heine’s Die Heimkehr), through ballads by Robert and Clara Schumann (‘Die beiden Grenadiere’ and ‘Belsatzar’ for Robert, ‘Loreley’ for Clara) to little-known composers near the fin de siècle. Across the expansive nineteenth century, Youens confronts nagging questions. Some are specific: why did Schubert set only six of Heine’s poems? And others are more generally implicated in part of the critical negotiation between song and society: ‘What words could be set to music, in what way, to what audience? What codes of conduct, what avenues of feeling, did these songs uphold, undermine, or engender?’ (p. 89). From an even wider perspective, as the inner and outer boundaries of the lied incorporated shifting musical and poetic terrain, the impact of Heine on this ever-changing topography, we learn, inspired some of the most radical and innovative works in the first half of the century. This in itself, Youens tells us, is not only what contributed to difficulties in defining the lied, but is also why Heine is immensely important to music history. As one bores into these layers even further (by way of analogy within analogy, ‘Heine

Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). xv + 349pp. £50

Abstract: Among the intended audience of the Cambridge Companions series, ‘the student, the performer and the music lover’,8 undoubtedly there will be some who read this book from cover to cover, and others who simply plumb it for specific details on a work or a research topic. I would highly recommend a coverto-cover reading, particularly since Barham has so carefully emphasized the connections between the articles in his introduction. One cannot miss the explicit connections, not only in the themes of the collection in general, but in the direct conversations between the authors of adjacent articles. Mahler’s music inspires a passionate interest not only in performers and music researchers, but in music lovers in general who wish to find out as much as they can about his works. This book will appeal to all three.