Showing papers in "Nineteenth-century music review in 2020"

Luciaand the Auscultation of Disease in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ ofLucia di Lammermoorwas not popular in the several years that followed the premiere in 1835. In fact, audiences, critics and publishers of opera selections for the salon preferred the love duet of act 1 or the final scene of the opera when Edgardo kills himself upon hearing the news that Lucia is dead. In this article, I explore early nineteenth-century notions of hysteria, a disease that manifested with both physical and emotional symptoms. If undiagnosed, the individual suffering from the disease would experience muscle contractions, pupil dilations, delusions, cardiac arrest and eventual death. One of the seminal studies of hysteria in the first half of the nineteenth century was written by the French physician and medical historian Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (1799–1873), who published in 1833Histoire philosophique de l'hypochondrie et de l'hystérie, a 500-plus page investigation into the cause and cure of hysterics and hypochondriacs. Through an investigation of the diagnosis of hysteria in d'Amiens's work and the sound and look of hysteria in Donizetti's opera, now made more acute through familiarity with the newly invented stethoscope (1816, René Laennec) and its ability to deliver the internal sounds of the body, we can see how close the opera comes to mirroring the look and sound of the disease, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm and in some cases outright hostility to Lucia's fall into madness in the early reception of the work in France.

Saint-Saëns's First String Quartet, Cyclic Form and the Aesthetics of Charm

Abstract: From the 1850s, Saint-Saens regularly employed cyclic form: the practice of establishing large-scale relationships (especially in symphonies, chamber works, etc.) by reintroducing materials from earlier movements in later ones. Nonetheless, he became weary of such procedures following the Third Symphony (1886) for cultural-political reasons: Franck's most important cyclic works date from the 1880s, d'Indy declared la forme cyclique a historically determined canon, and period writers considered cyclic form a franckiste hallmark – all while Saint-Saens's relationship with Franck's followers deteriorated.In this essay, I argue that Saint-Saens's First String Quartet (1899) ‘misreads’ his rivals’ approaches to cyclic form as exemplified by d'Indy's Second Quartet of 1897 (in which a four-note cell suffuses most themes) and Franck's Quartet (in which themes from previous movements climactically accumulate in the final coda). Saint-Saens's themes abound with miniscule motivic connections, which catch listeners’ ears but seem too fleeting and insubstantial to register as binding elements comparable to d'Indy's pellucid cell. Such relationships straddle the threshold of apprehensibility, and they produce a distinctive affective quality: where d'Indy fosters perceptions of genetic relationships, Saint-Saens elicits a sensation of deja entendu. The final coda similarly teases by reintroducing fragments from the slow introduction, encouraging anticipation of a Franck-like apotheosis. What follows is a mirage of one: timbres and textures of previous movements return, but incipient citations of themes dissolve. Where Franck delivers a full-blooded synthesis, Saint-Saens follows through with trompe l'oreille.Saint-Saens's misreadings of franckiste technique point to broader aesthetic conflicts. D'Indy enlisted cyclic form as a means to monumentality, which served the enseignement he esteemed as art's purpose. Deja entendu and trompe l'oreille, on the other hand, register as classicising attributes which diverge from d'Indy's didactic objectives and which Saint-Saens grouped under the rubric of ‘charm’, a conduit to what he considered an ideologically neutral ‘aesthetic sense’.

Composing the Crisis: From Mesmer's Harmonica to Charcot's Tam-tam

Abstract: Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

British Listeners c. 1780–1830

Abstract: Evidence from diaries and correspondence shows how 44 individual listeners experienced music in Britain during the years c.1780 – 1830. The individuals were not united by social class, but each of them had the financial resources to gain access to operas, concerts and other performances enjoyed by the wealthiest in society. Crucial to an understanding of these listeners’ reactions to music is an evaluation of their personal documents which demonstrates how their evidence is shaped by genre, readership and a variety of cultural factors. Their descriptions of performances are used to show how London audiences, characterised in general by noise and commotion, contained a wide variety of listeners from those who appear to have attended largely for social reasons to those who reacted deeply to the music they heard. The evidence shows how those who listened intensely found greater satisfaction in more exclusive, private performances. It also shows how some listeners were deeply moved by what they heard, sometimes expressing their emotions through tears, in keeping with the culture of sensibility which thrived throughout the period. Other themes that emerge from the evidence include the role played by reminiscence in intensifying listeners’ listening, and the strong reactions that were often elicited by the experience of novelty or otherness. Some listeners are shown to have had different reactions to music according to the social context in which it was heard, or the repertoire that was performed.

Hearing and Believing: Listening Experiences as Religious Experiences in Nineteenth-Century British Methodism

Abstract: This article uses Jeff Astley’s concept of ordinary theology (Jeff Astley, Ordinary Theology: Looking, Listening and Learning in Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)) to examine and interpret listening experiences from nineteenth-century Methodist sources. It argues that the participatory experiences of singing together with fellow believers were crucial to the development and sustenance of personal faith, and that believers shared accounts of such experiences in ways that they knew would be understood by their readers as indicative of the depth and sincerity of their spirituality. It further contends that the widely-recognized importance of hymnody in Methodism demands attention to its practice as well its content, and that while the lyrics of hymns set out Methodist theology and doctrine, the participative experience of communal singing was itself invested with meaning and value by many lay Methodists. Ordinary theology provides a framework through which common features of these accounts are identified and discussed, emphasizing the importance of various forms of life writing in understanding the ways in which religious practice shaped the lives and interactions of individual believers. The article also explores differences between different types of published and unpublished life writing. While examples are drawn from different branches of nineteenth-century Methodism, it is argued that hymnody’s potential for creating spiritually intense experiences was commonly recognised and affirmed across them. This article contributes to the wider discussion of the significance of listening experiences by emphasizing music’s vital role in the construction and communication of meaning between individuals on matters of deeply personal value.

Introduction Listeners in Music History: Studying the Evidence

Abstract: This themed issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review focuses on the study of listeners in history. The articles address the personal responses to music of ‘ordinary listeners’ – that is, people whose experiences of music are recorded in personal documents and third-party descriptions (as opposed, say, to music critics who wrote about music in order to influence the ideas and tastes of a public readership). This overview essay proposes that the testimony of ordinary listeners can cast new light on musical practices, the way music has been heard and its role in past societies. It points to a perceived gap in historical musicology, whereby the evidence left by listeners in the past has been the subject of little targeted research, and has generally been relegated to a supporting role. The themed issue emerges from work conducted as part of the Listening Experience Database project, a research project set up to address that gap, and focuses on empirical historical research. This overview essay discusses the types of evidence on which the articles are based and some of the issues and cautions they raise, and sets out to demonstrate the unique quality and value of the evidence through the exploration of five topics in the history of British music in the long nineteenth century. The approach they exemplify has potential to shed light on music as part of the experience of ordinary people, often in contexts and places that have not featured prominently either in nineteenth-century music history or in musicological study generally.

‘Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation’: the Welsh working classes and religious singing

Abstract: The title quotation from Under Milk Wood encapsulates a widely held belief in the innate musicality of the Welsh and its religious roots. These roots were put down very largely during the nineteenth century, in a huge expansion of choral and congregational singing across Wales and particularly in the industrial communities. This development has been described as ‘a democratic popular choral culture rooted in the lives of ordinary people’, and central to it was the cymanfa ganu, the mass hymn-singing festival. Choral and congregational singing, typified by the cymanfa ganu, underpinned the perception of Wales by the Welsh and by many non-Welsh people as ‘the land of song’. Alongside this phenomenon ran the tradition of the plygain, a Welsh Christmas carol service. While the cymanfa developed in nonconformist chapels in the mid to late nineteenth century, and on a large – often massive – scale, the plygain is a tradition dating from a period much further back when Welsh Christianity was Catholic; it belonged to agricultural workers rather than the industrial communities; and the singers sang in much smaller groups – often just twos or threes. This article describes the nature and origins of these contrasting traditions, and looks at the responses of listeners both Welsh and non-Welsh, and the extent to which they perceived these practices as expressive of a peculiarly Welsh identity. It also considers some of the problems of gathering evidence of working-class responses, and how far the sources give an insight into working-class listening experiences.

The Electrician, the Magician and the Nervous Conductor

Abstract: Berlioz's essay ‘Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art’ (1855) was among the first and most widely disseminated attempts to describe the art of modern conducting. Drawing together technical with literary and scientific language, it aimed to capture the relationship between leaders and players and, more broadly, the modes of animation underpinning nineteenth-century orchestral performance. Central to the essay are notions of electricity – animal, artificial and mesmeric. For Berlioz, the conductor's job is no longer simply to marshal his orchestral troops but to galvanize them: ‘his inner flame warms them, his electricity charges them.’ Here, I examine the medical and physical technologies that underpinned these descriptions – the ways in which podium conducting became newly intertwined with theories of bioelectricity, notions of spiritual or metaphysical ‘spark’, and emerging forms of electrical communication that rewired European conceptions of the body politic. In Part I, I examine the ‘electric baton’ which allowed Berlioz to control the enormous orchestral forces of his 1855 Exposition Universelle concerts, generating a quasi-telegraphic network with imperialist resonances. Part II examines the role of nervous electricity in Berlioz's accounts of conducting, and his conception of music itself as a charged substance. Part III draws technological and medical discourses into conversation with magical cultures, showing how notions of nervous power (and peril) united Berlioz, Mesmer and the famous Robert-Houdin. The new romantic conductor, as I conclude, was a figure poised at the intersection of medicine, electric technology, and a newly charged spirituality.

Public military music and the promotion of patriotism in the British provinces c.1780-c.1850

Abstract: The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles. It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power. Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?

Reassessing Ferdinand Ries in Vienna: Ramifications for Beethoven Biography

Abstract: Ferdinand Ries was one of Beethoven's most important piano pupils. In 1838 he published a book, together with Franz Wegeler, which contained a wealth of information on the composer. It comprised such topics as Beethoven's loss of hearing, his dealings with publishers, his working methods, and the genesis of some of his compositions. Today, Ries's book is still regarded as a crucial source for Beethoven scholarship.

Is There Any Scope for Another Edition of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas?

Abstract: Beethoven's piano sonatas have appeared in innumerable editions – most of them in more than one hundred, as the collection in the library of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn reveals. The sources for these works have also never been as readily available as they are now, as most first editions can be viewed on the Beethoven-Haus website, which also hosts scans of many important manuscript sources, as well as links to images of source materials on the websites of other archives. Thus, the question must be asked: Is there any scope for another edition of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas?

Joanne Cormac, Liszt and the Symphonic Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). xiv + 366 pp. £94.99, $126.00.

Abstract: The historical importance of the 12 symphonic poems that Franz Liszt composed as Kapellmeister in extraordinary service to the Weimar court (1848–1861) is indisputable. Theymarked a new degree of sophistication in orchestral programmemusic’s ongoing development. Their explicit connections with salient themes of European literature and art, coupled with attendant formal innovations, provoked vitriolic responses from advocates of absolute music. They also directly motivated composers of diverse nationalities to contribute to the genre, including Saint-Saëns, Smetana and Borodin. Nevertheless, they are surprisingly underserved in scholarly discourse. Indeed, the lone English-language book on the subject with any pretensions to comprehensiveness was until now Keith T. Johns’ The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt, graciously edited by Michael Saffle and posthumously published over 20 years ago. Several German monographs on the subject, some billed as concert guides, date fromLiszt’s day through the 1930s. Articles in periodicals or edited collections are more numerous, but in general they either cursorily survey the symphonic poems or examine a single work in the series. Not only are existing studies of the symphonic poems scarce, but they also often adopt restricted perspectives. Whereas Johns’ investigations of each score dwell on contemporary reviews and straightforward identifications of musical topics, other analyses of individual pieces typically emphasize Beethoven’s influence or seek to relate Liszt’s distinctive musical structures to normative sonata forms. Such preoccupations frequently yield disagreements over the locations of structural boundaries and overlook insights that Liszt’s programmes offer into the relationship between a work’s expressive gestures and its unique unfolding. By contrast, Joanne Cormac provocatively contends and persuasively demonstrates that Liszt’s symphonic poems are most fruitfully understood as products of their original contexts at the Weimar court, where they crucially involved theatrical performances or the inspiration of Liszt’s theatrical experiences. To support her contention, Cormac closely integrates a dizzying array of ancillary subjects and methodologies: theatre history, contemporary reception, Hegelian philosophy, archival excavation, manuscript studies, performance practice, sonata theory, topical analysis, principles of the visual arts and more. The result is that Liszt and the Symphonic Poem is not merely a welcome addition to a sparse secondary literature, but instead offers cohesive, intriguing views of Liszt as aman of the theatre, of his symphonic poems asworks of astonishing ambition and breadth and of his pivotal position as an innovator in the tradition of nineteenth-century orchestral music. Critical to Cormac’s argument is that Liszt’s immersive theatrical activities not only influenced his symphonic poems, but also represented significant contributions to German theatrical history. As Cormac’s introduction and opening chapter

Nancy November, Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017). x + 252 pp. £60.00.

Abstract: Vienna’s vibrant musical scene around 1800 remains a popular subject for academic study. As we are nearing the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, several monographs dedicated to his chamber music have been appearing, drawing our attention to these important compositions. Beethoven’s time and place, and the culture that inspired his instrumental compositions, provide the general background also to this monograph. But the present work also sets itself apart. Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven’s Vienna is about the music that audiences exposed to Beethoven’s string quartets would have heard, known and appreciated. Some of that music came from composers with whom today’s concertgoers are generally unfamiliar, including Paul Wranitzky, Emanuel Aloys Förster, Adalbert Gyrowetz and Friedrich Ernst Fesca, all of whom are discussed in this book. These non-canonical figures appear in ‘snapshots’ that attempt to break the tradition of writing ‘grand narratives’ (p. 21). By investigating lesser-known composers in relation to well-known ones – including Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert –November offers new insights on Viennesemusical culture. As interpretive tools for the many repertoires under investigation she engages concepts anchored in the culture of the time, which are often overlooked, among them theatricality, amateur music practices and mixed ensemble practices. Although similar research topics have been investigated, November’s book fills a gap. Vienna as amusical place has been featured inDavidWyn Jones’s two books The Symphony in Beethoven’s Vienna (Cambridge, 2006) and Music in Vienna 1700, 1800, 1900 (Woodbridge, 2016), but Jones’s book was clearly focused on genre and on the musical metropolis Vienna through the centuries. Similarly, William Weber’s recent work explores concert programming from Haydn to Brahms but is less occupied with Viennese musical culture at large and with those many Viennese instrumental music composers whose music was highly regarded by contemporaries but is today overshadowed by the giants. November’s 2017 monograph includes an introduction, eight chapters, an epilogue and front and back matter. More than a dozen illustrations and two dozen musical examples illustrate her main points and arguments. The primary sources – most of them in German – are translated into English, with the original-language

‘Habitually Embodied’ Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry

Abstract: This article reads Thomas Hardy's many musical instrument poems as the meeting point for the concerns of several critical fields: material culture, memory studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of musical haptics. Close readings illuminate not only their relevance to such enquiries, but also how Hardy's manipulation of poetic form engenders a tactile musicality or ‘poetics of touch’ (as Marion Thain puts it). This article focuses on the aspects of these poems which have undergone least exploration: the depiction of the bodily effort involved in music-playing. While some of the poems are critical favourites (‘Old Furniture’) many of those studied here are routinely overlooked.A mnemonically-minded poet, Hardy wrote about the memories objects hold and the memories that may be mediated through them. For Hardy, the history of objects is inseparable from that of their now-dead owners: person and thing are tied together in memory. This is in part due to an object's inherent tangibility, and musical instruments are particularly tactile objects, benefiting from the further mnemonic of music itself.The core of the article considers Hardy's late poem ‘Haunting Fingers: A Phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments’, which hears instruments speak out their memories of being touched, and through memory feel ‘old muscles travel/Over their tense contours’. Revisions to the manuscript show Hardy removing ‘death’ and privileging instead the immediacy of remembered touch.Paying attention to the reading and note-taking Hardy did within nineteenth-century science, this article traces Hardy's imaginative explorations of the processes involved in playing musical instruments back to discoveries about the workings of the unconscious. Saleeby, James, Maudesley and Bastian informed Hardy's knowledge of the science behind music-playing, while musical haptics helps this study unpack why Hardy attends to the interactions which take place at the point of mechanical contact: finger to key, and to string.

Franz Liszt's Heir: Ferruccio Busoni and Weimar

Abstract: When Franz Liszt died, the world lost an innovative composer, mentor, and pianist. Although his influence did not die with him, few of his successors can claim to have walked in his footsteps – to have lived and taught in the same rooms – and to have shared many of his ideals. Ferruccio Busoni did just that when the Grand Duke Carl Alexander invited him to hold piano master classes in Weimar in 1900 and 1901, just as he had invited Liszt to do nearly two decades earlier (1881–1885).This article shows how Liszt's activities in Weimar as Pedagogue and as Kapellmeister (1848–1861) became models for Busoni as he sought to position himself as a prominent ‘musical polymath’ at the turn of the century. Yet Busoni not only emulated Liszt, he also promoted him in an age when the older composer was considered of only tangential importance.By producing authoritative editions of Liszt's music, and perhaps more significantly, by emulating Liszt's activities as a transcriber and composer, Busoni enhanced piano sonority while extending Liszt's ideas about the future of music. In that way, he shared attitudes associated with the Zukunftsmusik movement, and his outlook was rooted in Liszt's compositions, as opposed to Richard Wagner's. At the same time, he helped foster a lineage of young musicians who patterned their careers and music after Liszt.Drawing on surviving memoirs, letters, scores, essays and concert programmes, this article thus explores Liszt's impact on Busoni and his mentees. It reveals a musician not only emulating Liszt, but also expanding upon his ideas and promoting them to others.

‘Appeasing the unstrung mental faculties’: listening to music in nineteenth-century lunatic asylums

Abstract: Listening to music found a new context during the early nineteenth century, in the shape of large, closed institutions set up to house and treat the insane. In response to social reform as well as a growing problem of mental health, lunatic asylums for paupers were set up across Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Replacing the previous practices of restraint and containment, a system of ‘moral management’ dominated the new asylums. Patients’ lives were kept busy and ordered, with careful attention given to their employment, their diet and their recreational activities. Music played an important part in establishing the routine of the new institutions. Formal dances offered a social occasion, and a controlled environment within which the two sexes could meet. Both dances and concerts were used as a reward for patient behaviour, encouraging the kind of self-control which was seen as crucial to recovery and rehabilitation. Musical events acted as a diversion from the grim realities of institutional life, and played an important role in allowing patients to engage with religious observance. Musical experience could be active or passive; patients might engage by dancing or making music of their own, and their music might be symptomatic of illness or wellbeing. Using documents including formal records, patient notes and newspaper reports, it is possible to investigate some of the ways in which listening to music played a therapeutic role, and the particular place of musical experience in the lives of asylum patients.

Tracing Jewish Music beyond the Synagogue: Charles Garland Verrinder's Hear my cry O God

Abstract: On 1 September 1887, the Musical Times printed a list of pieces published during the previous month by Novello, Ewer and Co. As Novello's house journal, with a wide circulation across Britain, the Musical Times regularly listed new publications in the knowledge that such advertisements would reach a large and enthusiastic readership. In this particular issue, one of the pieces advertised was an anthem titled Hear my cry O God, composed by Dr C.G. Verrinder (see Fig. 1, highlighted). To anyone unfamiliar with Verrinder, his name blends in with the other composers on the list – one of the now largely forgotten majority of Victorian composers trying to make a living through writing sacred works or parlour music. The most renowned figure here is probably Ignaz Moscheles (listed here as ‘J. Moscheles’), whose work Domestic Life featured posthumously in one of Novello's collections of piano pieces; another name of note is that of Rosalind F. Ellicott, one of the era's more prominent female composers and particularly striking here among so many men.