The Persistence of Voice: Instrumental Music and Romantic Orality

The Persistence of Voice

National Cultivation of Culture Edited by Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam) Editorial Board John Breuilly – Ina Ferris – Patrick J. Geary Katharine Ellis – Tom Shippey – Anne-Marie Thiesse

VOLUME 14

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc

John Neubauer (Budapest 1933 – Amsterdam 2015)

The Persistence of Voice Instrumental Music and Romantic Orality By

John Neubauer

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Illustration: Ein Matinee bei Liszt, engraving by Joseph Kriehuber, 1846. (Wikimedia Commons.) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Neubauer, John, 1933-2015 author. Title: The persistence of voice : instrumental music and romantic orality / by John Neubauer. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Series: National cultivation of culture ; Volume 14 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010573 (print) | LCCN 2017013282 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004343368 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004343351 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Music--19th century--History and criticism. | Music and language--History--19th century. | Musical criticism--History--19th century. Classification: LCC ML196 (ebook) | LCC ML196 .N48 2017 (print) | DDC 780.9/034--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010573

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1876-5645 isbn 978-90-04-34335-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34336-8 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface IX Words of Thanks X List of Abbreviations XI List of Illustrations XII Introduction 1 Retelling the Fifth 1 Absolute or Emancipated Music? 2 Part 1: The New Discourses 6 Part 2: Romantic Orality 8

Part 1 New Discourses about Music Introduction to Part 1 17 1 The Music Journals 19 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (amz) 22 Friedrich Rochlitz 23 Gottfried Wilhelm Fink 25 A.B. Marx and the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (bamz) 26 Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (rgm) 34 Maurice Schlesinger 35 Jules Janin 39 Hector Berlioz 40 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM) 45 2 From Poetry to Music Novels 48 Gulden/Fiorino, Hildegard von Hohental, Heinrich von Ofterdingen 50 Le neveu de Rameau 55 Hegel’s Spirit 58 Ritter Gluck 65

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3 Failing Musicians, Failed Education 72 The Berglinger Stories 72 Miseducation or Music Madness 77 “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” (1804) 77 “Der arme Spielmann” 82 4 Serialized Novellas 89 Hoffmann in Germany 91 Hoffmann in France and in Fiction 93 Janin’s Hoffmann 94 Opera Fiction 96 Opera in Balzac’s “Gambara” and “Massimilla Doni” 97 Historical Musicians in Fiction 99 5 Narrating Listeners, Narrating Instruments 104 Listeners Narrate 104 Instruments Narrate 111 Berlioz 116 “Harold en Italie” (1834) 117 “Roméo et Juliette” (1839) 120 Schumann 128

Part 2 Romantic Orality 6 From Journals to Battles 137 Battle Drums at Dresden, Leipzig, and Wellington 139 Waltzing in Vienna 144 7 Music Histories: From Gossip to Nationalism 146 Anecdotes, Gossip, and Obituaries 146 Stendhal – A Biographer? 149 Voice and Instruments in History 151 Thibaut’s Musical Past and Legal Present 153 Schumann and Thibaut 159 F.-J. Fétis: The Glory of the Low Countries? 166 8 Speech and Song 179 Michel Foucault 179 Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp 181

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Wilhelm von Humboldt 183 Johann Christoph Adelung 187 The Mother’s Voice and Pestalozzi 189 Der goldne Topf 195

Vocal Authenticity? 198 Ossianism 198 Herder on Ossian 200 Forgeries, Opera Adaptations, Plagiarisms, and Copyrights 202 Authentic Folk Songs? 204 Whose Wunderhorn? 208

“Write as You Speak” – in Serbian 213 Kopitar, the Networker 213 Karadžić, the Voice of the Volk 215 Jacob Grimm, the Patron 217 Fauriel, the Professor 219 Parry and Bartók: Secondary Orality 222



Contrafacts from the British Isles 225 Scott (Re)turns to Ulster 226 Byron on Jordan’s Banks 233 Schumann as Saul 239 Vernacular Operas 244

Epilogue 254 References 257 Index 285

Preface After his benchmark works on music (The Emancipation of Music from Language, Yale up 1986) and on the transnational history of literary culture (History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, ed. with Marcel Cornis Pope, 4 vols.: John Benjamins 2004–10), John Neubauer tackled the intertwined crosscurrents between music and literary culture in the Romantic 19th century. The book grew into a rich and varied survey, shot through with sharp singlecase analyses, of little-explored and rarely-connected fields such as musical criticism, musical novellas, the romanticization of the driven virtuoso, musiccritical historicism in the period of nationalizing states, and the callenges posed to the Romantic composers by the idealization of the oral bedrock of vernacular-national cultures. The book was near completion when the author, until then the ideal type of robust physical and intellectual vigour, was confronted with a fatal medical diagnosis: he was suffering from motor neuron disease. With a fortitude than awed his friends and colleagues, he made preparations to bring the book as close to completion as possible in the little time that he had left. It proved to be shorter than anticipated: in October, a mere three months after the diagnosis, he died. John Neubauer had entrusted a group of chosen colleagues, who together covered some of the expertise that he combined in such sovereign polymath mastery, with the task of curating his book for publication. His instructions and suggestions reached us until the very eve of his death. Our task was an honourable one and, given the advanced stage of completion of the book, not a very heavy one. Having given the manuscript the few stylistic and bibliographical copyediting retouches that it needed, we can present John Neubauer’s final book to the public. Not only does it provide a ground-breaking survey and analysis of the complex interactions between music and literary culture in the century of national romanticism; it also stands as a fitting memory to a great scholar and an admirable, inspiring friend and colleague. We dedicate this book to Ursula. Mieke Bal, Maria Kager, Joep Leerssen, Sabine Lichtenstein, Vivian Liska1 1 With thanks to Stefan Poland, who corrected and aligned the bibliography and source references.

Words of Thanks With Janos’ strength dwindling and his voice already seriously affected by the rapidly progressing als disease, he literally finished The Persistence of Voice two days before he died, in an act of sheer willpower and suspension of natural laws: it was his last great marathon. On the sidelines he was cheered on by his colleagues and friends, encouraging him with mails, calls and spontaneous visits. Janos died fully trusting their “guardianship” of his last work. Without them this book would not have appeared. Infinite thanks are due to Joep Leerssen who volunteered to be the coordinator and principal caretaker. To Maria Kager, who generously agreed to be the guardian/coordinator for the last version text. To Sabine Lichtenstein who, as close friend, had been for years an amiable debater of all musical matters. She was responsible for combing through the manuscript for musicological inaccuracies. Larger issues of interpretation and content were entrusted to Janos’ most valued friends Mieke Bal and Vivian Liska. By closely reading individual chapters Maud Peereboom-Engelberts and Krisztina Lajosi offered an immediate echo to his ideas, enhancing his confidence and their mutual friendship. Endre Bojtar, challenged János during many visits to Hungary on matters of nation and voice. These selfless efforts in generosity and time majorly helped to have my ­husband’s voice persist. Ursula Neubauer

List of Abbreviations amz Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung bamz Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung cam Correspondance des amateurs musiciens dm Deutsches Museum gm Gazette Musicale mgg  Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Laurenz Lüteken (2nd ed., 29 vols.; Kassel & Stuttgart: Bärenreiter & Metzler, 1994–2008; www.mgg -onlne.com) NZfM Neue Zeitschrift für Musik rgm Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris rm Revue Musicale

List of Illustrations 3.1 Musical notation of Karl’s piano playing in the madhouse (Rochlitz, “Besuch im Irrenhause,” amz 6 (1804): 649–650) 78 7.1  Musical soirée at Professor Thibaut’s, watercolour by Jakob Götzenberger, c. 1829 161 11.1 Carolan, the celebrated Irish bard, engraving by J. Robins 230 11.2 Beethoven, Irische Lieder nr 1: “Heimkehr nach Ulster” 232

Introduction

Retelling the Fifth

A hilarious pantomime of Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray enacts a violent marital clash to the first six-minutes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.1 The alternatingly angry and friendly silent gestures on the YouTube video faithfully follow the rise and fall of the music, exemplifying thereby how new media open new possibilities to impose a story on plotless instrumental music. The pantomime extends a remarkable history of setting to text Beethoven’s instrumental music, especially the Fifth symphony. Another example is Balzac’s novel César Birotteau (1837), which concludes the first part with a narratorial daydreaming: A radiant fairy springs forward, lifting high her wand. We hear the rustle of the violet silken curtains which the angels raise. Sculptured golden doors, like those of the baptistery at Florence, turn on their diamond hinges. The eye is lost in splendid vistas: it sees a long perspective of rare palaces where beings of a loftier nature glide. The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches! We feel ourselves beloved; we are happy as we breathe a joy we understand not, as we bathe in the waves of a harmony that flows for all, and pours out to all the ambrosia that each desires. We are held in the grasp of our secret hopes which are realized, for an instant, as we listen. When he has led us through the skies, the great magician, with a deep mysterious transition of the basses, flings us back into the marshes of cold reality, only to draw us forth once more when, thirsting for his divine melodies, our souls cry out: “Again!” balzac, [1837] 1977: 179–180

The “rare moment in the glorious finale” of Beethoven’s Fifth is to convey the victorious intoxication that César and his wife experienced after the conclusion of a grand ball, which they considered as immensely successful. Alas, the ball inaugurates César’s slide to bankruptcy, from which he recovers only at the 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9QSvGnDd4m4 Published on May 12, 2012.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_002

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end of the second part. The call for “again” ironically materializes at the end of the novel, when family and friends reunite to greet César salvaged from bankruptcy. As he reenters his home, “the heroic measure in the finale of the great symphony rang forth in his head and heart. Beethoven’s ideal music echoed, vibrated, in many tones, sounding its clarions through the membranes of the weary brain” (311). The grand finale now marks the end of the merchant, who collapses and dies. Balzac may have been familiar with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s first great verbalization of the Fifth, which reads the dramatic transition to the last movement with a shift from terrifying sounds to brilliant light: Why Beethoven continued the kettledrum C to the end despite its dissonance with the chord is explained by the character he was striving to give the whole work. These heavy, dissonant blows, sounding like a strange and dreadful voice, arouse a horror of the extraordinary, of ghostly fear. […] With the splendid, exultant theme of the final movement in C major we hear the full orchestra, with piccolos, trombones, and contrabassoon now added, like a brilliant shaft of blinding sunlight suddenly penetrating the darkness of night. hoffmann, 1989: 247–248

Sid Caesar and Balzac provided fiction to music, whereas Hoffmann wrote a path-breaking piece of music criticism and analysis. Do narration and music criticism overlap? Music scholars Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Carolyn Abbate think so. When Nattiez noted in “The Concept of Plot and Seriation Process in Music Analysis” (1985) that musical analyses must be embedded in some historical sequence, Abbate responded that musical analysis itself may have been born of a narrative impulse to create fictions about music, “to explain where no other form of explanation works” (1989: 228). One of my aims is to trace these two remarks to their historical foundations and to show that musical analysis and narrative readings of instrumental music are roughly coeval. They both reacted to the opacity of the new instrumental music, an abstract art form that preceded abstraction in the fine arts by more than a century.

Absolute or Emancipated Music?

Narrative and metaphorical interpretations of pure instrumental music have been vigorously opposed, however, by some advocates of “absolute music,” who believe that the primary meaning of sonatas, symphonies, and chamber

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music lies in their form, and reading it via stories or emotional histories denigrates them. Peter Kivy, for example, rejects all verbal, emotional, or visual representations of instrumental music. For him, music is a “cognitive object” that asks for a “purely musical experience” (1990: 91). While he regards even “mindless” tapping as a conceptual response, he sneers at narrative or visual translations of pure music: […] to put an interpretation on a piece of music alone is to close oneself off from one of the most satisfying and engrossing experiences the arts have to offer us. … there are many people who cannot enjoy pure instrumental music without making up stories, without interpreting it, which, of course, is to say that they cannot enjoy pure instrumental music at all, since what they enjoy is not the work of pure music but another work, a work of interpreted music, which they have produced in collaboration with the composer. kivy, 1990: 200–201

Kivy takes the motto of his book from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, in which Mrs. Munt, her nieces Margaret and Helen, and her adolescent nephew, Tibby, attend a performance of (what else?) Beethoven’s Fifth, which Forster regarded as “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.” Mrs. Munt surreptitiously taps with her feet when she hears a tune, Helen sees heroes and shipwrecks in the first movement, and Margaret “can only see the music.” Versed in counterpoint and perhaps recalling Hoffmann, Tibby holds a score on his knee and implores the others to watch out for the drum in the transition to the last movement. However, Helen, who saw goblins and elephants in the third movement, hears the transition as Beethoven’s personal intervention. Her vision, like that of César Birotteau, is told by the narrator in free indirect discourse: […] the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they [the goblins] returned and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right. Her brother raised his finger: it was the transitional passage on the drum. For, as if things were going too far,

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Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then – he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all burst before the girl, and she even stretched out her gloved hands as if it was tangible. forster, [1910] 1989: 46–47

Helen has a glowing imagination. Ought she to be reprimanded for envisioning an animation that has no objective meaning even if she invokes the authority of Beethoven? Kivy regards her vision as an inadequate “collaboration with the composer,” but I suggest that creative responses to the loss of text in pure instrumental music vitally contributed not only to the development of journalistic, critical, and philosophical discourses about music, but also to the emergence of narrative listening experiences, music biography, music history, and, last but not least, music fiction. Even ideas about “absolute music” contributed to the discourses about instrumental music that filled the void of the alleged “absolute.” What did emerge at the end of the eighteenth century was not absolute music but the idea that the arts, above all music, were autonomous. However, autonomy did not mean, as Dahlhaus claims, a dissociation from extra-musical functions and programs (Dahlhaus, [1978] 1989: 5). Ludwig Tieck’s essay “­Symphonien” (1799), one of the early standard texts about pure music, happens to exemplify it with lengthy paraphrases of compositions by Johann Friedrich Reichardt, who never fully grasped Beethoven’s last sonatas and quartets. Dahlhaus should have perhaps titled his impressive book “ideas about absolute music,” for it convincingly shows that each new German text meant something new with the term. While certain forms of pure instrumental music were composed throughout all of music history, the sonatas, symphonies, and chamber music of the late eighteenth century challenged traditional aesthetic, moral, and educational expectations. The ensuing theoretical debates finally led to the inversion of the inherited hierarchy, giving music without words the highest rank, and establishing it even as a model for all the other arts. Nevertheless, it was seldom understood as absolute. In spite of repeated formalist objections, most composers, critics, philosophers, historians, and dilettante listeners stubbornly continued to attribute metaphors, similes, allegories, plots, and religious ideas to instrumental music, reassigning thereby referential meaning to wordless music. The new music was “instrumental” also in furthering verbal and visual interpretation.

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It was Richard Wagner who casually and backhandedly introduced in 1846 the catchy phrase “absolute music” when he praised as an epitaph the “recitative” of the cello and the double bass at the opening of the last movement in Beethoven’s Ninth for “almost abandoning absolute music” (Wagner, 1983, ix: 24). Six years later, in Oper und Drama, he wrote that the Ninth revived the voice after Beethoven “blundered” with instrumental music, as Columbus did by misidentifying the new continent: “The boundless riches of music are now revealed to us via Beethoven’s mighty mistake” (ix: 72). Of course, Wagner regarded Beethoven’s reintroduction of the voice in the Ninth as an anticipation of his own later concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, but this conveniently ignored that Beethoven went on to compose his last string quartets, some of the most superb instrumental music ever. Since Wagner frequently redefined but never abandoned the term absolute music, Dahlhaus came to regard it as the leading idea of “the classical and ­romantic era in music esthetics,” and as the “esthetic paradigm of German musical culture in the nineteenth century” ([1978] 1989: 9). Though my ­Emancipation of Music from Language (1986) profited much from Dahlhaus (who wrote a kind review of it shortly before his death), I did not regard absolute music as “the dominant idea of the classic-romantic age” or as a new paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s sense. To an imaginary interlocutor I replied: [T]he history of music aesthetics, and intellectual history in general, is not constituted of epochs defined by a single paradigm. […] In general the flux of ideas on any subject cannot be forced into longer cohesive periods separated by shorter revolutionary upheavals. Models of this kind, whether indebted to the notion of zeitgeist in Geistesgeschichte, Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, or Foucault’s notion of epistèmes, fabricate coherent systems by excluding or ignoring whatever resists coercion and by paying undue attention to ruptures. In a more comprehensive and accurate vision, the homogeneous and cohesive structures of history dissolve into groups of conflicting ideas, resilient competing strands of tradition that reach across the presumed revolutionary ruptures by undergoing ­frequent transformation but seldom, if ever, disappearing completely. neubauer, 1986: 8–9

As Claudio Guillén writes, a historical period “should not be monistically understood as an undivided entity, a bloc, a unit, but as a plural number or ­cluster of temporal processes, ‘currents,’ ‘durations,’ rhythms or sequences.” If we ­conceive of history as a succession of periods, it should not be difficult to ­accept the idea of split periods (Guillén, 1971: 464). In this sense, this book tells two

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stories about the “classic-romantic age”: the first part gives an account of the printed new discourses on instrumental music in music journals, while the second one shows that the resurgence of vocal music was part of a revival of orality.

Part 1: The New Discourses

Music performances gradually shifted in the eighteenth century from churches and courts to public opera houses and concert halls. While opera houses had a longer architectural history (the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, opened already in 1637), urban concert halls were relatively new. The famous Leipzig Orchestra started in 1743 with performances in private homes, then moved to the tavern “Three Swans,” and finally, in 1781, to the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a former garment market. Next to physical spaces, music around 1800 also opened new discursive ones. Who wrote these discourses? Rameau and Gluck were the only major composers who wrote about music in the eighteenth century. According to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, overwhelming obligations prevented his father, Johann Sebastian, from indulging “in lengthy written exchanges” (David and Mendel, [1972] 1998: 400). C.P.E. and others like Johann Joachim Quantz wrote performance manuals. Even the “Viennese Classics” wrote little: Haydn left a few professional and amorous letters behind, as well as a diary about his second visit to London; Mozart was a sharp and witty correspondent but he made mostly aphoristic comments on music performances and his own work; Beethoven wrote some remarkable personal letters and comments, but he was reluctant to expose his inner life and wrote no major interpretations of music. In contrast to their predecessors, Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, and other nineteenth-century composers felt a need to communicate about music in writing and speaking, even through fiction. Their thoughts filled the music journals, not unlike twentieth-century art found its forum in the “artworld” of the art journals (Danto, 1964). As Dahlhaus recognizes, the critical, fictional, historical, and theoretical discourses were so important that musical romanticism belongs “to the history of composition and to the history of ideas. It was a holistic cultural phenomenon, which was formed almost as much by the aesthetic theories, or theoretical fragments, of Wackenroder and E.T.A. ­Hoffmann […] as by the works of Schubert and Weber” (Dahlhaus, [1980] 1989: 170; emphasis in text). The development of an autonomous (but not absolute) musical idiom was part of a general trend towards independent artistic and philosophical ­expressions. The emergent concept of “literature” advocated that poetic

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­discourse should be emancipated from science, religion, morality, and history, while Kant liberated aesthetics, moral philosophy, and epistemology from metaphysics. The fledgling fields of music criticism, history, theory, and philosophy rapidly filled the allegedly absolute space of instrumental music with interpretations that attributed autonomy to it. Paradoxically, issues pertaining to music’s autonomy generated new music disciplines. However, while the texts in vocal music provided a priori meanings, these a posteriori discourses tended to shift from statements to dialogues, stressing thereby music’s interpretability. Part 1 of this book follows the new narrative and fictional discourses in the music journals, which attempted to attract readers also with music anecdotes, reports on musicians, performances, and other mundane information from all over Europe. Though instrumental music asked for new approaches to music and the arts, it never dominated the period, and the new music journals did not advocate it exclusively. Writers like Novalis, Wackenroder, Tieck, Hoffmann, Balzac, and Stendhal had deep affinities with vocal music. Next to commercial items and gossipy news about the stars, the journals churned out reviews of opera performances in the cities, as well as essays on the clashing national operatic traditions and the pedagogy of singing. The model journal became the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (amz), published in Leipzig between 1798 and 1848 – roughly the historical period covered in this book. The first important French music journals were launched in the new commercial environment of the July Monarchy. Most important among them was Maurice Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette Musicale (rgm), which aimed at introducing the Parisian public to the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven but, for commercial reasons, it tended to devote even more attention to vocal music, especially to the Italian opera and the emerging French Grand Opéra of Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Auber. Schlesinger commissioned Janin, Berlioz, Dumas, Balzac, Sand, and even Wagner to write music fiction. Chapter 1 gives an overview of these musical journals, their editors and contributors. The early decades were dominated by German publications like the amz. Robert Schumann launched in Leipzig his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM) in 1834, the same year that Schlesinger started the Gazette musicale, which, after merging with François-Joseph Fétis’s Revue musicale, became the rgm in 1835. The brief second chapter is devoted to the music novels that initiated the fictional approach to music in the last decade of the eighteenth century but virtually disappeared with the rise of the music novellas. While artistic and intellectual novels could readily adopt the Bildungsroman as a genre, music and musicians were apparently found unfit for such a novelistic ­treatment. The novellas adopted, however, aesthetic and rhetorical elements from the novels.

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Chapter 3 reads Hegel’s Phenomenology and Hoffmann’s “Ritter Gluck” as “Illegitimate Children” of Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau – illegitimate because they did not acknowledge their debt to the French work that appeared in Goethe’s translation in 1805. The nephew in Diderot’s work was only metaphorically a bastard, but he became literally one in Jules Janin’s La Fin d’un monde et du “Neveu de Rameau” (1861). The fictive nephew had, however, also a larger legitimate line of descendants, consisting of musicians who deviate for personal, aesthetic, or religious reasons so much from the social norms that they are regarded as oddballs and even lunatics. The mad musician became something of a cliché. I am more fascinated by two remarkable and apparently unrelated stories, Rochlitz’s Besuch im Irrenhause (Visit in a Madhouse; 1804) and Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann (The Poor Minstrel; 1847), which invert the premises: usually, artistic brilliance isolates the musician from society, but in these stories the miseducation of youngsters leads to a passionate religious love for music that they are unable to express on their instruments. Chapter 5 offers a chronological and thematic survey of music novellas, shows the paramount popularity – not just in Germany – of the Hoffmann stories. His stories, and the fictionalization of his allegedly intoxicated figure, stimulated the emergence of the French music-oriented contes fantastiques. By the mid-1830s, the generic designation went out of fashion. In the last temporal phases of the genre, realistic and historical stories became dominant. The final chapter of the first part puts two kinds of texting of instrumental music next to each other. The first broadens the examples given in the introduction with material from the amz and with George Sand’s remarkable texting of a Liszt composition in the rgm. The second explores how two of the most important composers-writers of the period, Berlioz and Schumann, tried to introduce forms of narration into instrumental music. While Beethoven sought to structure his music by means of the sonata form and other purely musical structures, both Berlioz and Schumann turned to words and images to propel the sounds, though they tried to avoid literal mimesis.

Part 2: Romantic Orality

The revival of vocal music in a broader European social, political, and nationalist context is the subject of the second part of this book. Reform pedagogy, historical linguistics, folksong revivals, and language renewals (based on the slogan “write as you speak”) – they all participated in the new cultivation of spoken and sung words.

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The new orality flourished within a print culture. Aleida Assmann’s article on the medial history of cultural memory, “Zur Mediengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses” (2004), helps clarify the social and historical perspectives on the oral and musical revivals, by outlining the broader historical dimensions of “cultural memory” – a concept developed by Aleida and her husband Jan, among others. Cultural memory can acquire an active, structuring function in religion, history, and the arts: At issue are texts, actions, and artefacts from much earlier epochs, which either had remained valid over changing historical contexts or have been preserved beyond their period of validity for an unspecified future. In this dimension of culture, individuals grow beyond their own time by reaching back for former messages, artefacts, and practices. assmann, 2005: 47

Materials preserved in archives may be revived and turned into a functional memory (Funktionsgedächtnis) that differs from mere stored memory (Speichergedächtnis). Memory engages in selection, mediation, animation, and adoption, via individuals who actively remember rather than passively adhere to tradition. One of Assmann’s three cases shows how scholarly reflection participated in the revival of cultural memory around 1800: new interest in the distinctions between oral and written cultures led to discomfort about printing technology and a “writing crisis” (Schrift-Krise), which resulted in a renewed interest in utopian concepts of oral culture (49). Assmann’s main referent is Robert Wood, whose Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1769), an early proponent of the idea that the Homeric epics emerged from an oral culture (49–50). The second part of my book may be read as a refashioning of functional memory (in Assmann’s sense). The Napoleonic wars and romantic orality constitute the framework for my cultural approach to music. As in ­Assmann’s article (49), my memory sites will be family, school, theater, and concert hall, all of which fueled the revival of national oral cultures. Instrumental and vocal music cohabited a European cultural-political space that gradually became divided by national trends. Kiesewetter, an important early music historian, labeled the period 1800–1832 the “epoch of Beethoven and ­Rossini” ([1834] 2010: 98–101), while Dahlhaus distinguishes a “duality of styles” that emerged from a deep rift between Italian opera and German instrumental music ([1980] 1989: 8). Indeed, instrumental music came to be regarded as a German and Austrian national product, while vocal music was unanimously attributed to Italy. Stendhal and other French critics tended to

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Introduction

a­ ssign an intermediate position to the Grand Opéra. English music culture acquired a German hue via enthusiastic receptions of Händel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. Hoffmann’s dialogue between a poet and a composer (“Der Dichter und der Komponist,” amz 15: 793–806, 809–817) excellently illustrates the shift from instrumental music to the broader historical, cultural, and political perspectives of vocal music. Written in Dresden during the months following Napoleon’s victory there, the essay weaves a military pandemonium into aesthetic issues. The composer Ludwig, who is completing in the attic a symphony that will speak the “divine language” of Beethoven, is oblivious to the explosions outside, until a cannonball rips the roof and he must follow his screaming property owner into the cellar, clutching his score under his arm. Forced to share with others the crowded cellar, the isolated instrumental composer rejoins a human community. When he finally exits, he recognizes his old friend, the poet Ferdinand, in the troops marching towards the front. The formerly soft and quiet poet of romantic songs is in uniform now, and, lashing out with his sword, he greets his friend with ferocious shouts. The timid composer is taken aback, but he reluctantly accepts his friend’s proud nationalism and readiness to die for the fatherland, which he had already displayed when he was wounded in a battle. After a pleasant meal, the friends engage in a dialogue that sets the aesthetics of symphonic music against the idea of a romantic opera. Since I will discuss the aesthetics issues later, I note here only that Ludwig submits in the end to Ferdinand’s views on voice, fairy-tale opera, nationalism, and war, though he still believes that the “wonderful mystery of music” releases its “inexhaustible stream of expressive resources” only “when our clumsy words dry up” (Hoffmann, 1989: 206). He is willing to participate in Ferdinand’s plan for a romantic opera based on a folk tale. The conclusion of this fictional discussion anticipates Hoffmann’s own opera Undine (1816), the first German romantic opera, based on a libretto that Motte Fouqué adapted from his own fairy tale. Neither Undine nor Hoffmann’s other works adopted Ferdinand’s military disposition, but the dialogue shows that just a few years after his “ode” to Beethoven’s Fifth Hoffmann became preoccupied with writing a German opera. He was aware that the Direction of the Viennese Opera announced on March 22, 1812 a competition for a dramatic and a comic German opera that could entertain even educated people (­ Hoffmann, 1967–69, I: 334; for recent studies on Hoffmann’s ideas for a German opera, see Markx 2015 and van Kooten 2016). The announcement implied that foreign (especially Italian) works were trivial entertainments; the competition was to save the honor of the German genius in opera. German operas had to become “the most perfect work of the performing arts.”

Introduction

11

In accordance with this turn from printed text to voice and context, I devote Chapter 7 to music in war and peace during the years 1810–16. Musical culture resonated in these years with Napoleon’s Russian campaign, his demise in the Völkerschlacht of Leipzig (October 16–19, 1813), and his hundred-day “resurrection” that ended with the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The Viennese Congress (1814–1815) was supposed to establish a new European order, but as Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne sarcastically quipped, Le congrès danse beaucoup, mais il ne marche pas: the congress did much social waltzing instead of marching forward. The post-Napoleonic bickering between the allies finally led in Paris to the First and Second Treatises (Zamoyski, 2007: 197, 524) and the founding of the Holy Alliance between the Austrian Emperor, the Russian Tsar, and the Prussian King on September 26, 1815. Beethoven was the only major composer who directly contributed music to the political and diplomatic events, but Vienna was in these years a key site of national vocal culture. Schubert set Ossian’s poetry to music, some of Körner’s patriotic songs, as well as a short play Der vierjährige Posten; Beethoven arranged Irish songs; and Karadžić worked from the city, together with his mentor, the Slovenian ­philologist Jernej [Bartolomäus] Kopitar. Chapter 8 divides the early music histories into “bottom up” and “top down” variants. The first part is devoted to anecdotes, gossip, and obituaries that filled many pages of the music journals and provided unreliable material for the first biographies of composers. The second half presents two case studies on constructing music history from “top down.” Thibaut became the main representative for integrating the widely differing German codes in the post-Napoleonic period, losing the battle with the deeply traditional and national Berlin law professor Friedrich Karl Savigny. While Thibaut pleaded for a future law, he was deeply engaged in reviving older church music, which he credited with greater purity than the music of his own age. My other case study, on the 1824 prize competition of the Royal Netherlands Institute, exemplifies the role of nationalism and theory in constructing music history. I suggest that the competition was announced to establish that the Dutch played a glorious role in developing modern polyphony, and it shows that Fétis, who won the second prize, developed in the aftermath a four-stage theory of music history, which foresaw the emergence of atonal music. The scheme undermined the alleged Dutch glory in music history and ultimately clashed with Fétis’s own theoretical conservatism that made him blind to Berlioz, Wagner, and others. The ­related national issues of music history remained highly controversial ­until deep into the twentieth century. Chapter 9 gives an account of the new linguistic and pedagogical theories that gave foundations to romantic orality. In linguistics, I show that two major

12

Introduction

trends attributed new, fundamental significance to spoken language. The first case is related to the interpretation of Sanskrit, which opened up the field of comparative linguistics. The ancient Sanskrit rules of morphology, syntax and semantics survived in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, a foundational text of the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of Vedic religion. It established almost 4000 sutras (rules). Franz Bopp, the leading Sanskrit scholar of the early nineteenth century, confronted the formalized and permanent linguistic rules with the dynamics of a spoken vernacular. He attributed the beauty of ancient Sanskrit to everyday spoken language rather than to the written texts of scholar and priests: “the beauties of the Sanskrit language are not the work of the learned or of the priesthood, as some might be inclined to suppose; … they really were in daily use in the mouth of the people, and were so strongly impressed upon their minds, that they did not forget them in their transmigrations beyond distant mountains and seas” (Bopp, [1820] 1974: 14). This perspective on Sanskrit strongly parallels Johann Christoph Adelung’s adage “write as you speak” (1782: 34), which became the guiding idea of Vuk Karadžić new Serbian grammar based on the living spoken language. The Serbian reform wanted to revitalize clerical and scholarly writing. Spelling and grammar had to be freed from the formal but dead linguistic rules and be guided by the living spoken language of the common people. Karadžić adopted Adelung’s adage and this became exemplary for Jacob Grimm. A similar shift from written to spoken language occurred in early nineteenthcentury pedagogy. As Kittler has shown in his Discourse Networks ([1985] 1990: 25–69), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Heinrich Stephani, and other reform pedagogues advised that mothers should use their own voice to teach their children to speak and write. Hans Georg Nägeli used the theory for a new pedagogy of singing. Chapter 10 deals with the reviving of ancestral voices. Search for a vernacular and its poetry propelled national unification in Germany, Italy, and Eastern Europe, whereas it encouraged revivals of dialects and regional cultures in Great Britain and France, which were already centralized. These culturally and politically motivated revivals of orality searched for lost authentic traditions, always raising questions about the allegedly authentic findings. As the fake Ossian songs, reconstructions of ancient “authentic” languages and songs were precarious. They often yielded adaptations, hybrids, and forgeries with p ­ rofound aesthetic, cultural, and social impacts. The last section shows that notions of the folk song were controversial and differed from country to country. My account of the South-Slavic folk-song collecting and language reform in Chapter 11 first introduces Jernej Kopitar, Karadžić’s mentor and

Introduction

13

“­ publicity manager.” The central section is devoted to Karadžić’s work in both ­folksong-collecting and language reform, followed by an account of the support that Jacob Grimm gave to him, especially in underwriting the priority he gave to the spoken language of everyday life. The final section is devoted to Claude Fauriel and his Sorbonne lectures of 1831–32, devoted to a comparison of Greek and Serbian folk songs. Fauriel’s university lectures, like those of his contemporary Hegel, were orally delivered and only later recuperated in print. An epilogue to the chapter shows how Bartók transcribed the music that Parry had recorded. In Chapter 12 I take Beethoven’s arrangements of Irish folk songs (1814), Byron’s and Isaac Nathan’s two-volume Hebrew Melodies (1815–16), and Schumann’s song “Mein Herz ist schwer” (1840) to show that folk-song melodies and texts were seldom authentic or ancient. Of the three, only the Byron/ Nathan songs originated in a search for genuine ancient songs, and the authentication failed even here. Beethoven’s arrangements were deprived of all ethnic authenticity, because the editor, George Thomson of Edinburgh, stripped most Irish songs of their original texts and replaced them by poems of contemporary poets. In my example, Walter Scott contributed the poem “Return to Ulster” and Beethoven composed an arrangement for an original Irish song, of which he only knew the title. The final chapter reviews the extended international debates on vernacular operas. Given their slow birth, I had to go beyond my time frame of 1798–1848: I start with the famous Querelle des Bouffons of 1752–53; and I give an account of the extensive Austrian and German efforts to create vernacular Singspiels and operas, which culminated in the staging of Hoffmann’s Undine (1816) and Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821). I see the so-called “national” operas of Eastern Europe as the final products of a multi-phase European move towards vernacular operas. Language, rather than allegedly national musical forms, defines national operas. How much romantic orality survives in the secondary orality of the new media that McLuhan (1962) and Ong (1982) have outlined? Are we not living, after all, in another visual culture, as most people believe? Film, television, and computer have so immensely expanded the range, possibility, and manipulability of images that our daily life has become saturated with them. However, foregrounding these images tends to understate the equally crucial verbal and musical cultures that these media have made possible. The screen images and their derivatives usually portray communication and are seldom without verbal explanation. In contrast, music can easily dispose of words and images, and is more readily capable of accompanying us while we engage in other activities. While Benjamin questioned the appreciation of auratic art by pointing

14

Introduction

to the divided attention that pedestrians pay to a­ rchitecture, the division in our post-modern attention is perhaps better indicated by the ­radios that blast music at construction sites or the ear buds and headphones that ­embellish the heads of pedestrians, runners, or just idle loafers. Surrounded by images, writing has remained essential and the technologies of the new media have revived and even privileged the voice as speech and singing. Today’s aural culture is rooted in the early nineteenth century, which did not yet benefit from the new media and technologies but displayed the voice in fields ranging from national and ethnic consciousness, through pedagogy and linguistics, all the way to the very heart of the arts.

part 1 New Discourses about Music

∵

Introduction to Part 1 Corinna Caduff’s Die Literarisierung von Musik und bildender Kunst um 1800 gives more attention to shifts within language and literature than to the changes in music and the visual arts. She acknowledges the epochal significance of new instrumental music, but fails to integrate this into a ­differentiated interart comparison. In her view, the breakthrough of classical instrumental music meant the emergence of a “musical language,” which leveled the difference between the two media and allowed to speak reflectively of music (26). This seems to invert the actual historical events. If (instrumental) music became a theme in prose and poetry, this was mainly because of its “emancipation from language” and its differentiation from verbal expression. The growth of the novel, and narratives in general, created a prose that incorporated all other literary genres, but the key parallel to the development of autonomous music was the birth of the concept “literature,” which allowed the “belles lettres” also to move towards autonomy. The concept “literature” distinguished itself from nonfictional prose in history, philosophy, science, and other fields. In the fine arts, William Turner’s late paintings also indicated a move towards autonomy, but the radical departure from mimesis occurred only a century later. As Nikolaus Harnoncourt argued in Musik als Klangrede (1982), conversation became around 1800 a metaphorical account of interaction between instruments. In my view, dialogues became also important in thematizing music, but not because music became understood as a form of language. Just the opposite, the major arguments were either that music communicated only its form or that it had no precisely definable semantics. Still, or perhaps precisely because of this, music was regarded superior to literature as a mode of expression. We could speak, more precisely, of two rapprochements between language and music: a thematization of music in fiction and a fictionalization of instrumental music. The new ties between music and prose narratives could not be easily integrated into the much-discussed romantic “poetics of music,” which was part of an envisioned poeticization of the world. The disappearance of language from instrumental music forced composers, musicians, and listeners to give more attention to the elements of music and made the hermeneutics of music interpretation much more difficult. Since only few listeners learned to master the complexities of formal analysis, most of them continued to ascribe representational content to instrumental music, by guessing at the composer’s alleged intentions, linking the composition to some biographical facts, or by interpreting the music in terms of some

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Introduction to Part 1

c­ ultural-historical event. Musical analysis focused on the formal and structural ­features of the composition, and some such formal observations were even used to construct metaphoric and narrative musical discourses, in which “emancipated” listeners often gave free reign to their imagination.

chapter 1

The Music Journals The publisher builds as pretty a cradle as he can, the editor places the embryo in it, and as soon as the tiny creature begins to stir he asks suitable godparents, just like real godparents, to provide the infant with the necessities of life, care, and upbringing. The thing may now develop and thrive according to its nature right under the eyes of the invited guests. There is an extended christening feast, and it is the responsibility of the hosting godparents to ensure that the food remains elegant and tasty, and that the drink never lacks fire and spirit; then the guests will not stay away, and the little one sitting at the front also eating and drinking will enjoy nourishing and palatable food and will continue to grow into a healthy adult. hoffmann, 1989: 425

∵ This lively simile of Hoffmann’s essay “Casual Reflections on the Appearance of this Journal” (Zufällige Gedanken bei dem Erscheinen dieser Blätter) appeared in Franz Stöpel’s Allgemeine Zeitung für Musik und Musikliteratur (1820), which did not reach such healthy adulthood, and closed with the second issue. No copy of the original publication of this essay seems to have survived World War ii, but Cäcilia reprinted it still in 1825 (3: 1–13). Such were the fortunes and vicissitudes of music journals in the early nineteenth century. In Chapter 5 we shall follow the next phase in the fortunes of Hoffmann’s article. Who were these publishers? In Germany, the oldest publishing house of music was founded in 1719 by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf in Leipzig. Renamed as Breitkopf & Härtel when Gottfried Christoph Härtel took it over in 1795, it came to play a major role in further enhancing Leipzig’s leading role in Germany’s music culture. Bernhard Schott founded in 1770 a publishing house named after him in Mainz, another mid-sized German city, whose music culture could not compete, however, with that of Leipzig. Berlin’s first major music publisher became Adolph Martin Schlesinger. Italy’s first music publisher, Giovanni Ricordi, learned the techniques of engraving and printing at Breitkopf & Härtel in 1807. Returning the following year, he founded in Milan his Ricordi house. As the primary publisher of operas © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_003

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by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi, Ricordi helped shaping Italy’s operatic culture. The corresponding London institution is the still-existing Novello publishing house, founded in 1811 by Vincent Novello and expanded by his son J. Alfred Novello, who took it over in 1829. Vincent issued sheet music on a subscription basis from his own house. J. Alfred gave up publishing by subscription and introduced inexpensive sheet music, which became particularly popular with England’s burgeoning oratorio singing societies. Publishers of sheet music had to work with technically more complex and expensive printing techniques than the text printers, who used movable types. Music was printed as of 1581 with engraved metal plates and, after Alois Senefelder’s discovery of lithography in 1798, with prepared limestone. The music journals were also used to advertise the publisher’s sheet music, which was constantly endangered by illegal reproductions. Adolph Schlesinger, for instance, complained already two years after publishing Der Freischütz that it had been pirated three times, and he asked the King for help after losing two court cases. Fighting piracy became Schlesinger’s major obsession, and the law that Prussia finally established in 1837 came to incorporate many of his complaints. His son Maurice also fought, and profited from, piracy (see also Szendy, 2001, Ch. 1). In contrast to modern glossy art magazines, which are sustained by a rich art market, the music journals had limited budgets and bankruptcy was frequent. In Germany, short-lived music journals flourished in the late eighteenth century but declined in the 1790s.1 The powerful survivor and great model became the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (amz), launched in 1798 by Breitkopf & Härtel. In 1824, Schott started Cäcilia in Mainz and Schlesinger the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (bamz). Schlesinger’s son Maurice, who became a Parisian music publisher, launched in 1834 the Gazette musicale (rgm), and Ricordi launched in 1842 the Gazzetta musicale di Milano. In some cases, musicians and music critics took the initiative. Richard Mackenzie Bacon founded in 1818 London’s Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review; François-Joseph Fétis started in 1827 the Parisian Revue musicale, while Robert Schumann launched in 1834 the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM) in Leipzig. Paris became the home of Le Ménestrel (1833), and the La France musicale (1837), and London of Alfred Novello’s The Musical World (1836). Soon every major European and North- and South-American city had its own music journal, though most of them soon had to close down for financial or personal reasons.2 1 See Mary Sue Morrow’s study of the early German music journals (1997), especially her lists on pp. 101 and 142. 2 Reliable basic information about the journals may now be found at the website R[épertoire] i[nternational] de la p[resse] m[usicale]: www.ripm.org.

The Music Journals

21

Most of these music journals are now available on the internet, and have become of interest to social and cultural historians. I gratefully make selective use of these new digitized archives. Leaving aside reviews of performances and sheet music, news about the musical life in cities, reports on stars, as well as articles on the invention and technological improvement of musical instruments, I concentrate on such new discursive genres as dialogues, ­fiction, emplotments of instrumental music, quasi-fictionalized biographies, and dialogized music criticism. I am primarily interested in tracing the impact of instrumental music and its relationship to narrative forms in music discourses. Fiction and dialogues problematize the status of the statements and the identity of speakers, which is further complicated by the very high percentage of articles and news items that were unsigned or signed with a pseudonym. Presumably, this was to grant critics freedom and protection, but it also linked up with the literary practice initiated by Macpherson’s Ossian poems, of assuming a mask, a false identity, or simply faking. Thus, Schumann routinely used fictional masks taken from his literary model, the Jean Paul novels, to engage in a highly perspectival music criticism that fulfilled also his personal need for identity diffusion. Schumann’s father-in-law, the overbearing Friedrich Wieck perpetrated a less attractive identity confusion by filling the diaries of his daughter Clara with his own entries. Blurring the speaker’s identity blurred also the generic boundaries between fiction, criticism, and history, as evident already in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. In the new discourses on music, blurring the speaker’s identity was related to problems in interpreting instrumental music. The music journals were launched to satisfy diverse musical, cultural, and economic needs. They employed criticism, fiction, theory, and history to explore what instrumental music was, how one could enjoy it, and how it should be understood. Writers of varied backgrounds mobilized diverse strategies and genres, including anecdotes, biographies, and lively accounts of a city’s musical life, music theory, aesthetics, and music fiction. The partisans of instrumental and vocal music continued to confront harmony with melody, German with Italian music, and sensuous pleasure with intellectual reflection. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven composed new sonatas, symphonies, and chamber music when “archivists” revived Händel’s and Bach’s vocal music, Rossini emerged as the darling of opera lovers, and the aged Haydn himself composed his e­ pochal choral works, Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten. To gain audiences, the new journals dedicated much of their space to the staging of operas, the most popular music genre. It was hardly accidental that the very first anonymously written article of the amz was titled “Gedanken über die Oper.” The music journals which gave most space to the debates on instrumental vs. vocal music and which were most deeply involved with the development

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of new musical discourses, particularly of music fiction where principally the ones already mentioned in the previous pages: the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (especially during its first editor Friedrich Rochlitz), the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (under the editorship of Adolf Bernhard Marx), Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and the the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (and the two source periodicals out of which it emerged). The rival French journal Le Ménestrel (The Minstrel) was launched in 1833. Occasionally I shall also refer to the mentioned Cäcilia, which printed seven music novellas, and to the Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst (1830–41), which the most ruthless music critic in Germany, poet Ludwig Rellstab, edited almost singlehandedly. His arrogant though witty critical tone found an equally witty retort by Florestan, Schumann’s alter ego, in the very first issue of his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Rellstab attacked Spontini and his Berlin coterie so viciously that in 1837 he landed in jail (Pederson, 1995: 94–95). Much music criticism appeared in newspapers and general journals. Hoffmann shifted to the Vossische Zeitung and Der Freimüthige when he moved to Berlin in late 1814, and Castil-Blaze, a pioneer of French music criticism, began to champion the Viennese composers from 1820 onward in the Journal des débats (Ellis, 1995: 27–32). Let us look now at the organization, the history, and the personalities of the four most important new music journals, focusing on the new discourses and, among them, on the music novellas.

Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (amz)

Christoph Härtel, by 1798 the sole owner of Breitkopf & Härtel, regarded the journal launching as part of his company refurbishing. According to the editorial plan published in the “Intelligenz-Blatt” of amz’s first issue (October 3, 1798), the journal intended to print short philosophical or historical papers, passages from the most important and recent studies about music, reviews of new compositions, and general news about music culture. The latter was to include short biographies of outstanding composers and brilliant ­performers, interesting anecdotes about them, information about the ruling taste in German and foreign cultural centers, and news about musical institutions. Furthermore, the journal planned to report on projects, performances of excellent compositions, and inventions that improve the music instruments. The heading “feuilleton,” introduced later, was exclusively for news items. The ­publication of music fiction had not been foreseen. The Intelligenz-Blatt was to bring sheet music of short compositions, as well as “announcements,” which actually contained advertisements for the publishing house and outsiders.

The Music Journals

23

amz’s initial edition of 800 copies was raised the following year to 1000, but the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath brought this down to 550. Though the economic conditions improved as time went on, the print runs of amz did not increase, and this, due to the journal’s declining quality, led to its termination in 1848 (Bruckner-Bigenwald, 1934: 29–33). Leipzig was chosen for the publishing office because Breitkopf and Härtel had its seat there. The editors admitted that Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Dresden had livelier music cultures, but they claimed that in science and commerce Leipzig was “a sort of collection depot and warehouse for everything literary in Germany.” “Literary” seems to mean here both literature proper and everything printed, particularly related to the university and the Leipzig book fair. The publishing house was proud and supportive of the Gewandhausorchester. It honored Bach by featuring his portrait on the cover for the first volume, and profited from the living tradition of the Thomaskirche. The opera culture of Leipzig was at a relatively low level around the turn of the century, The amz’s initially hesitant approach to Beethoven took a turn with Hoffmann’s extraordinary review of his Fifth Symphony, but the journal did not become an exclusive champion of instrumental music.

Friedrich Rochlitz

A former member of Thomaskirche’s famous boys’ choir, Rochlitz was a twentynine year old writer and journalist with relatively few and minor accomplishments in music when Härtel engaged him as Schriftleiter of the amz – a term usually translated as editor, though it suggests a lesser status. His name was not prominently displayed as editor, perhaps because he himself preferred, whenever possible and appropriate, to work anonymously. Rochlitz once made a tentative claim that the journal was his initiative, but this seems untrue. He was hired as a less than prominent person, and the editorial statements were signed in the plural. However, he succeeded in assembling within a few years more than hundred-thirty competent music critics and journalists, mostly as reporters about current events. Of course, the journal was eager to publish also respected composers, scholars, and intellectuals like the music scholar Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the philosophers W.T. Krug and Chr. Fr. Michaelis, the philosopher and music historian J.A. Wendt, the physicist E.F.F. Chladni, the music pedagogue and historian Hans Georg Nägeli, as well as the composer and theoretician D.G. Turk. Rochlitz’s own contributions were always well written and entertaining but seldom tightly argued or genuinely innovative. He tended to raise issues for reflections rather than proposing theses. Thus, when he opened the first issue

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of the amz with an unsigned serialized essay on the opera (1: 1–9, 33–38), he immediately cautioned his readers not to expect too much. Indeed, most of the essay is dedicated to three hypotheses about the origin of opera, which Rochlitz regarded, next to church music, the highest musical achievement (1: 5). The chatty article made no specific comments or analyses, and promised a future installment that did not appear. Rochlitz’s first longer contribution to the journal consisted of Mozart anecdotes in six installments. The hybrid genre of anecdotes, which always mingles facts and fiction, inclined here towards the latter. As it was discovered later, Rochlitz added to the anecdotes received from Mozart’s widow several that were his own invention, and he has been accused even of have faked a Mozart letter (Ridgewell, 2010: 44–45). William Stafford claims that Rochlitz was a “highly suspect” Mozart witness because Breitkopf & Härtel printed Mozart’s scores and “wanted some good publicity to boost sales” (Stafford, 2001: 202), but, to my knowledge, there is no hard evidence that Rochlitz furthered this way the firm’s commercial interests, which were generally held in a low key in the amz. Engaging E.T.A. Hoffmann to write fiction as well as reviews was undoubtedly one of Rochlitz’s major contributions to the amz, though he claimed inordinate credit for it in his Hoffmann obituary (see Chapter 7 below). Hoffmann, the journal’s best contributor of reviews and fiction, published between 1809 and his move to Berlin in 1814, forty-one articles and music fictions, mostly anonymously – some cases are still not certain. Of great significance were his five Beethoven reviews, initiated by the famous one on the Fifth Symphony (1810). He was asked to review all Beethoven symphonies but did not get to the other ones. However, he did review three other works of his, as well as Mozart’s Don Juan and Zauberflöte, and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Armide. It was Rochlitz himself who introduced music fiction in the amz and music journals in general. He started in 1799 and 1802 with fictive notes and letters about the education of young composers, and followed these up with “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” (1804), which became the ancestor of a long line of stories about odd musicians, from Hoffmann’s “Ritter Gluck” all the way down to Franz Grillparzer’s “Der arme Spielmann” and Theodor Storm’s “Ein stiller Musikant.” Among Rochlitz’s many stories on other subjects, his diary about the Battle of Leipzig is most famous, but it was published separately due to its length. Compared to Rochlitz’s literary achievements, his music criticism is moderate, but he revived in 1823 the important fictional sub-genre of dialogues on instrumental music, which F.L. Bührlen continued in 1827 (see Chapter 6). As late as 1835, Rochlitz also published a satire on Cherubini (37: 589–599, 605–628). Apart from these and three weak music novellas by others, the amz

The Music Journals

25

published no music fiction after 1814.3 Still, music fiction was in my view one of amz’s significant innovations that added to its popularity. This has not been recognized by music scholars: Bruckner-Bigenwald (1934) and, more recently, Ole Hass (2009), completely ignore it. The amz generally declined after Hoffmann stopped sending contributions and Rochlitz stepped down as editor in 1818 (20: 908). Härtel personally took over the editorship and continued Rochlitz’s low-key approach by writing no editorial statements and refraining even from announcing that he was the new editor. He also refrained from writing contributions. The journal now gave more space to trivial information about new publications, announcements and reports about concerts everywhere, the lives of musicians, music festivals, and appointments to musical posts. It offered many obituaries of minor figures, gave more attention to dilettantes, brought fewer long essays and studies, and more short announcements and accounts by anonymous local reporters. In sum, reporting of facts, gossipy news about personalities, and commercially motivated texts crowded out reflection, while advertisements became bigger and fatter.

Gottfried Wilhelm Fink

Things got even worse when Härtel died in 1827 and in the following year was succeeded by the historian, composer, and Lutheran minister Fink, who stayed until he was dismissed in 1841. In contrast to Rochlitz and Härtel, he signed all his contributions and he put himself up front with arrogant and combative editorials. Introducing himself in 1828, he already accused the newer journals of bantering and mockery, which he resented because, he claimed, they stimulated wide criticism of the amz (30: 33). By the following January, he became both more defensive and more assertive. Though he promised not to introduce any change in the journal, he felt the need to defend the inflated rubric of news reports (31: 1–4). Fink’s New-Year editorial for 1831 was unusually satirical (33: 1–6), but by 1834 it became obvious that the publishing house no longer supported his thinking and style. That year, Breitkopf & Härtel turned down Schumann’s request to publish his new NZfM; by 1843 the publishing house changed its mind, but by now the journal was no longer available. In January 1835, Mendelssohn turned down the publisher’s invitation to serve as editor 3 J.C. Lobe, “Wie muss ein Instrumental-Werk beschaffen seyn, wenn es einen vollkommenen Kunst-Eindruck hervorbringen soll?” amz 32 (1830): 261–269; S.H.G., “Gesang der Engel” amz 32 (1830): 365–373, 380; and K. Stein [G.A. Keferstein], “Mittheilungen aus den nachgelassenen Papieren des Studenten Anselmus” amz 34 (1832): 33–37, 49–53.

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of the amz (Bruckner-Bigenwald, 1934: 27). Fink’s opening editorial “What we must, want, and do not want,” for 1835 (37:1–6), still spoke in the plural but contained an angry personal polemic with aspects of the amz tradition itself. He now regarded the “grammar,” the aesthetics, the history, and the institutions of music as the core, and he made fun, with unmistakable reference to Rochlitz, of texts that took a historical person and linked him via some well-known anecdotes to fashionable ideas. He defended his journal against the accusation that it stood for an “old order,” by claiming it merely wanted order, whether old or new. Fink now became a man of “law and order” who regarded the new music generation as chaotic and rebellious: “the only thing we do not want is the drivel of ignorant shouting that belittles every law of which it is ignorant. Advocates of uncertainty condemn everybody who does not agree with them.” Fink mentioned in this context only the radical poet Ludwig Börne (37: 1–6). His reluctance to write favorably on Mendelssohn became one of the reasons for his dismissal eight years later (Hass, 2009: xliv). Fink did not take kindly to his dismissal, though declared he was proud to have enemies at a time when war dominated in the “region of harmony” (43: 1135–1136). The closing words of the amz in 1848 did not put the blame on the new political and economic situation. Instead, they claimed that productivity in music was liveliest and highest in quality when the journal had been launched. Mozart had just passed away, but Haydn was still highly creative and the young Beethoven just started his career. In retrospect, the original idea of the journal was to distribute among music experts and lovers the products of this period, to work towards its better understanding and appreciation, and to educate the music-loving public. However, the journal’s publications show no decisive advocacy of Viennese classical music. The retrospective view allowed the publisher to blame the present: in 1848, there was no comparable new and great music that needed enlightened discussion and propagation. Both the productivity and the creativity of music composition were lower, splintered, and diffuse: “in such a swirl there is no longer any place for a general music journal. Local papers and journals for music history and music scholarship are more suitable” (50: 859–860). One is inclined to add that this obituary both misstated the original mission of the journal and failed to recognize that the contemporary music of Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner also needed a powerful forum.

A.B. Marx and the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (bamz)

Adolph Martin Schlesinger used his home as a bookstore and multilingual lending library for fifteen years. In 1810, he opened a store, but he could turn

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this into an officially authorized book and music store only after the Prussian Edict on the Emancipation of Jews on March 11, 1812. His first published scores included selections from Friedrich Reichardt’s opera Der Taucher, Cherubini’s Chant sur la Mort de Haydn, and a piano arrangement of music from Spontini’s La Vestale. A contract with Carl Maria von Weber brought a financial breakthrough. By the end of 1812 Schlesinger had already published a piano arrangement of Weber’s opera Silvana, and made his great success with Der Freischütz. The other great (and at times problematic) client was Beethoven, who made some angry, even anti-Semitic remarks about him.4 However, the relations improved after Adolph’s son Moritz/Maurice travelled to Vienna to negotiate with him in 1819. In the end, Beethoven published his Schottische Lieder (op. 108) with Schlesinger in Berlin,5 as well as his last three sonatas, and the quartets op. 132 and 135. A.B. Marx edited for Schlesinger in 1830 Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. After Adolph Schlesinger’s death in 1838, his son Heinrich took over the business; he sold it in 1864 to Robert Emil Lienau, who moved it later to Frankfurt. Schlesinger ran four journals to make an impact on Berlin’s cultural life. The bamz grew out of a supplement to one of them, Der Freimüthige oder Unterhaltungsblatt für gebildete, unbefangene Leser, which was founded by A. v. Kotzebue in 1803 and taken over by Schlesinger in 1821. Hoffmann published in it a few of his last essays. In 1823, Schlesinger asked the twenty-eight-year old A.B. Marx to become editor of an independent new music journal, the bamz. What credentials did this junior barrister have to edit a music journal? His only relevant publication was an article he wrote in 1823 on Hoffmann as musician (“Zur Beurteilung Hoffmanns als Musiker”). It was Hoffmann’s friend Julius Eduard Hitzig, also a lawyer, who asked him to sort out Hoffmann’s music papers,

4 In a letter to Diabelli of 1823, Beethoven called him once “a beach-peddler and rag-and-bone Jew” (Beethoven, 1961, iii: 1047), and he complained in 1826 to the publisher Peters that Schlesinger paid him a dirty Jewish trick (ii: 952). Peters had previously asked Beethoven not to offer Schlesinger his Missa Solemnis, because “a Christian Mass composed by Beethoven cannot come into the hands of a Jew, and especially such a Jew” (Albrecht, 1996, ii: 212). According to Burnham, we owe to A.B. Marx “perhaps the most self-effacing words Beethoven ever directed to a music critic.” Writing to Schlesinger on July 19, 1825, Beethoven expressed his fervent hope that “Marx would continue to reveal the higher aspects of the true realm of art” (Burnham, 1990: 183). Two months later Beethoven playfully requested that Marx should “let him off the hook once in a while.” 5 When A.B. Marx told Schlesinger senior that he was taken by the Scottish songs and often advertised them in the bamz, Schlesinger answered that they did not sell and he let the engraved copper plates be melted down (Marx, 1865, ii: 83).

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and this yielded the article, which Hitzig included then in his own Hoffmann biography. Marx pleaded here for music criticism rather than a study of music according to rigid norms, anticipating thereby a music scholarship that would be innovative rather than dogmatic. He found Hoffmann non-dogmatic and flexible (Marx, 1865, i: 85–86), and this is how Marx presents himself in his anecdote about his first encounter with Schlesinger. Listening to Gluck’s Armida with his good friend Gustav Nicolai, Marx heard forbidden parallel fifths. Nicolai could not believe it and dragged him next morning to Schlesinger’s store to look at the score, and, to his amazement, he found them (ii: 50–51). Within a few hours, Nicolai returned to Marx with Schlesinger’s offer to run the magazine. Marx’s good ear and his bold discovery of forbidden parallels by a great composer made the decisive impression on Schlesinger. Taking a liberal view of the parallel fifths was not accidental, for Marx’s teacher of harmony, Daniel Gottlob Türk in Halle, was also inclined to accept them though he feared the traditionalists (i: 50). The first issue of the bamz appeared on January 7, 1824, with Ludwig Rellstab’s allegorical poem “Ihre Jünger der Göttin” at its head. A music critic responds here to the charges of Cäcilia, the patron saint (or, in this poem, the tutelary deity) of music, that mortals are incapable of understanding her art. Marx’s own opening reflections about “the demands of our age on music criticism” and on a new journal, moved from myth to social and historical reality. He presented the journal as a liberal forum where music critics may disagree among themselves and even with him. The contributors will express personal views and the journal will offer music criticism that will help readers to broaden and raise their horizon. To achieve this, Marx wanted contributions that present their subject in a historical context. Having said this, Marx interrupted his introductory reflections and printed, almost as evidence of his liberal policy, a letter to the editor, the shrill chauvinism of which seems to overrule Marx’s sober intellectuality. The correspondent introduces himself as a German music lover whose nationalism was awakened by Napoleon’s invasion. He scorns everything foreign, and his national pride is roused every time he listens to a German musical masterpiece. He expects the journal to pursue patriotic aims and never neglect German works due to a preference for foreign ones. The journal should teach German readers to prefer home products rather than some French or Italian ones that were also produced for a home market and cannot be fully understood by foreigners. The editor will surely not tolerate a Frenchification or Italianizing of his fellow countrymen. The traditional mistake of the German people had been to admit things foreign, instead of asking for typical home products. This is incredible,

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especially since Germany had been often warned to draw its borders, just the way its neighbors had done. Only in this respect should Germany learn from its neighbors. The correspondent claims he has forged a plan (not printed in the bamz) to imitate Napoleon by isolating German art. He expects the journal to act as a customs officer (1: 5–7). A shocking chauvinistic rhetoric that uncannily anticipates more recent xenophobias? Marx remained cool. Instead of responding, he inserted after the letter a long and favorable review of Andreas Kretzschmer’s 1822 German translation of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (see Chapter 12 below). Did many readers realize that placing the chauvinistic letter between Marx’s editorial reflections and his review of English/Jewish songs was an indirect response to it? Those who missed the point must have seen the light if they read on and found three more nationalist letters in the editor’s mailbox (1: 11–12). The Italian one regarded the Italians as champions of music. Italian melodies and singers were superior; their melodies expressed feeling and nature whereas northern harmonies were artificial. The French correspondent regretted the lack of esprit in contemporary music. Composers ought to use correct declamation and singers ought to sing the way one speaks. Once he learned this in France, Gluck became an immortal French musician, and thus Germans should learn from the French. The final contribution from abroad was a hilarious letter from a modest Englishman, who admitted that his mercantile mind could neither grasp music nor utilize it. In order to make the bamz meaningful in England, he donated 600 pounds to export naturalizable German musicians to England. He also announced a prize for the invention of an orchestra that would be driven by steam. This would yield great savings and allow the employment of musicians on ships and in commercial offices. The grotesquely patriotic letters were obviously parodies written by Marx himself, as an extension of his editorial.6 Placing his review of the Hebrew Melodies between the nationalist letters to the editor brilliantly indicated Marx’s strategy. Instead of confronting chauvinism head on, he ridiculed it elegantly and ingeniously, reconfirming thereby his (baptized) Jewish cosmopolitanism. Marx’s subtle editorial declaration also escaped Sanna Pederson’s attention, who asserts in “A.B. Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity” that Marx’s approach to music was an “exclusionary ideology directed at other

6 The first year of the bamz (1824) closed with Marx’s retrospective, the “Andeutungen des Standpunktes der Zeitung (Als Epilog)” (444–448). His point of reference was Leipzig, with Johann Sebastian Bach’s contrapuntal music and the amz.

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­ ations” (Pederson, 1994, 89). Yet, Marx’s invented nationalistic letters indicate n that his only exclusionary view was his dislike of chauvinism. Had he written only fake Italian, French, and English letters, he could be accused of rejecting only the chauvinism abroad, but since the German letter is the most chauvinistic of them all, this does not hold. His attitude towards chauvinism was inclusive, for he disliked them all. Unaware that Marx precisely refused the fake German correspondent’s call to become a customs officer, Pederson claims that the bamz erected a “paper blockade” against Rossini (90). Marx’s writings do reveal a moderate nationalism, based on his admiration for German instrumental music and his childhood experience of the French occupation in Halle. To disentangle this we ought to take a broader look at his notions of instrumental and vocal music. Pederson errs when she indiscriminately categorizes Marx’s theory as privileging “absolute music,” for even a cursory look at his Beethoven interpretation reveals that he touted this music as broadly referential. Marx’s firm assumption was, according to Scott Burnham, “that the spiritual elevation of Beethoven’s works is directly proportional to their ability to portray very specific extramusical content” (Burnham, 1990: 189). Marx’s faith in unity “constrains him to base his entire aesthetics on the assumption that music can and must represent things extramusical” (191). Similarly, Dahlhaus thinks that Marx found the essence of a symphony in a firmly outlined “characteristic” mode (Dahlhaus, [1978] 1989: 14) and Arno Forchert carefully argues that Marx sees at the heart of music always “spiritual values” in the world.”7 Marx did, indeed, believe that the autonomous (though not absolute) instrumental music of the Viennese classics was more valuable than the vocal music of his time, but he did not claim that other nations could not excel in it. His programmatic introduction merely indicates that to aspire for a higher and more comprehensive perspective “it is apparently appropriate for our time and for our fatherland (which is in the middle of Europe, as of its heart) to have the task to adopt everything that originates among its neighbors and bring it to a higher spiritual maturity. To develop this perspective will be an outstanding tasks of our journal” (bamz 1: 19). Though the passage does assign a central role to Germany in Europe, I for one cannot follow Pederson’s conclusion (1994: 93) that Marx was an “emphatically 7 Forchert, 1980: 391, 397. Forchert associates this representational view of music with Arnold Schering’s narrative interpretations of music (1980: 391) and Apel’s article in the amz (397), which I discuss in Chapter 6 below. I shall show later that Marx’s view on music is much closer to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language. Pederson 1994 mentions Forchert and Burnham but fails to respond to them.

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German critic,” who “portrayed his chauvinism as ultimately benevolent, as something of a disinterested stance that would further European civilization.” Absolute music and disinterestedness have different functions in Marx’s music theory. He found negative examples for them in Rossini’s catchy melodies, which had nothing to do with the libretto, the plot, and the characters. Reviewing a performance of La gazza ladra in the Berliner Theater, Marx noted that the trivial libretto could not stimulate high-quality music (bamz 2: 22–23, 36–37), and Rossini played, therefore, with sounds and formulas, offering physical but no intellectual pleasure. This view roughly corresponds to Kant’s generally low rating of music. Stendhal, who favored operas to instrumental music, put the same label on Rossini’s music, but sheer physical pleasure was, for him, highest praise. Marx, in turn, would have agreed with Wagner that Rossini composed philosophically and historically outdated “absolute melodies,” whose roots were in the air (Wagner, 1871–73, iii: 89, 100). Marx did not impose his disdain for Rossini’s music on all bamz publications. While he himself consistently wrote devastating critiques of Rossini (whom he considered highly talented), he tolerated in the journal, albeit reluctantly, laudatory, and even raving, reviews of Rossini performances in German opera houses (e.g. a review of L’italiana in Algeri performed in the theater called Königstadt: 4: 134). The bamz radiated more than just “fervor against the popularity of Rossini” (Pederson, 1994: 90), which also shows that Marx did not impose his views on the bamz as strictly as Forchert seems to think (Forchert, 1980: 386). Indeed, the bamz gave much more space to Rossini than the amz. Marx merely amplified the reservations about Rossini that others, occasionally even Stendhal, voiced. What was Marx’s view of Italian music and opera in general? He did rank the instrumental music of his time higher than vocal-dramatic music. His intellectual curiosity that the physical pleasure offered by Rossini could not satisfy was based on Beethoven’s instrumental music. He rejected Rossini out of intellectual disdain, and he considered as one of his most important tasks to make Beethoven’s music better understood in Italy, France, Austria, as well as Germany. However, Marx did not belittle opera as a genre, he merely wished to raise its quality. He admired Gluck and was a close friend of Spontini. Comparing the bamz with the amz after the first year of his journal (1: 444–448), Marx noted that the rival had started when melody had reached its peak with Mozart, implying that the amz relied on achieved standards and did not yet fully grasp Beethoven (1: 445). Marx’s inventory of the subsequent new and more contradictory age lists not only the rich sounds of Beethoven’s symphonies, the depth of his ideas, and the boldness of his modulations, but also the hitherto unheard passions in Spontini’s operas, the bold “characteristic” of Weber, and

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even the opulent sensuousness of Rossini and the witty works of the French (1: 447). However, Marx admitted that he had difficulty recruiting external reporters who were in tune with bamz’s new orientation (1: 448). Did Marx and his bamz further German cultural nationalism with a strategy to glorify the symphony and to posit as its ‘other,’ foreign opera? Did he champion the symphony “as a national treasure” (Pederson, 1994: 89)? Marx did, indeed, write that the German response to symphonies is necessarily positive because they rouse a spirit “slumbering”; that awareness of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven was a precondition for recognizing “our age and ourselves” (bamz 3: 422). Other music would not have this power, while other nations could not respond deeply to German works particularly to the symphony: “The more light-minded nations, for example, the French and the Italians, have never produced anything substantial in the entire genre [of the symphony] – they could never grow to like and understand it; among other things, therefore, they have fallen far behind the Germans, for whom the symphony is characteristic” (bamz 1: 444). Marx went so far as to declare that symphonies “could be identified as virtually the exclusive property of the Germans” (bamz 1: 163; Pederson, 1994: 96). Pederson rightly suggests that Marx’s championing of symphonic music was innovative but detrimental to entertaining music (106). She cites the amz report, according to which there was more interest in Berlin by 1830 for symphonies but less for lighter quartets (32: 45). The report also says that Gluck had disappeared and Mozart operas were seldom performed in Berlin – which confirms Forchert’s observation that the bamz had much less influence on the opera schedule than on the symphonic one. Berlin’s musical life was in no sense more conservative than that of Leipzig. In Marx’s view, instrumental music reached a high point and opera had to be developed further (Forchert, 1980: 392–394). The achievements of the two genres were unequal, but, to my knowledge, Marx never considered Beethoven’s instrumental music as unsurpassable. Had Marx believed that instrumental music could not go beyond Beethoven’s achievements, he would have denied historicity in music. However, as a child of the Enlightenment, Marx deeply believed in historical progress, and this historicity in his thought has sent scholars in search of key influences on him. Kurt-Erich Eicke (1966: 94–95) claims that Marx himself made no basic distinction between the two roots of his thinking, namely Pestalozzi and Hegel; Forchert (1980: 387–389) regards Marx as a Hegelian and Lotte Thaler (1984, 66–76) finds the roots of Marx’s thinking in Hegel and Goethe’s theory of plant metamorphosis. Thaler admits that Goethe’s organicism and Hegel’s theory of history do not match (73–75) and rightly points out that a universal growth of the spirit (Hegelian or not) is actually incompatible with Goethe’s view of

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organic development, which is limited to the life-cycle of a plant and explicitly distances itself even from Lamarck’s evolutionary ideas (see Neubauer, 2009; Burnham, 1989). Actually, Marx does not mention Hegel in the bamz and in his autobiographical Erinnerungen. To link the two of them just because both worked at the University of Berlin (after Marx’s editorship) is insufficient. We ought to be aware that Marx wrote his most important music studies after he was no longer editor of the bamz (1824–30), and will return to this in Chapter 9. In the Appendix of his Beethoven book, Marx does offer some organicist principles of composition: Every musical creation develops, like the organisms of nature, from a germ. This, like the cellular blastulae [Keimbläschen] in flora and fauna is a unification of two or more elements (sounds, chords, rhythmical formations) and must already be an organism in order to become an origin for organisms. Such a blastula is called motif; every composition is based on one or more motifs. marx, 1863, ii: 361

Thus, musical motives possess an inner potential to grow and broaden into a full-fledged composition, though this does not necessarily define the compositional process. Both Thaler (1984: 66–73) and Burnham (1989: 248–260) give a detailed account of how Marx lets musical form develop from elementary particles, culminating in the sonata, but while Thaler tries to associate each element and each phase of growth with Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants, Burnham leaves out the growth and its terminology within Marx’s musical context, avoiding thereby also a Hegelian or other philosophical interpretation (264). Going beyond a theory of composition, we can say that Marx believed, like Hegel, in a global progress of the human spirit, but there is no evidence that he placed the arts beneath religion in the last phase of the spirit. Considering the role of fiction in the bamz, we note that Marx was a sober scholar, with a less lively prose than that of the imaginative but often inaccurate Rochlitz. Marx refrained from writing fiction himself, and, apparently, he did not go out of his way to recruit music fiction by others. During its sixyear existence, the bamz published only six music stories. The longest one, “Theodor, eine musikalische Skizze,” is a rather lugubre story by Rellstab. It is about a professional and amorous jealousy between two young composers/ piano players, leading to the murder of the one during the first night of his stupendously successful opera. Since the pianist plays for the haute volée and the other one is a new star in the opera, the confrontation also involves a rivalry between instrumental and vocal music. Indeed, endless debates between

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Italian lovers of Rossini and German opponents of him are at the center of Rellstab’s lengthy “Julius, eine musikalische Novelle,” which he published in Cäcilia in 1827. Debates between a German conductor, a painter, and a poet about Italian opera are the subject of a story in the opening year of the bamz; similar fictional debates about a concert by the pianist Hummel and about poor Rossini overtures are the subject of a story two years later.8 The anonymously published dialogues may well be by the same author. The last music novellas in the bamz, in 1827, were two stories by Carl Klingemann, which treat voice and instrument within social contexts. In the first one, “Provincialismen,” the peace of a village is disturbed when somebody marries a young woman from the capital who superbly sings Italian arias. The local players of rural instruments feel crowded out but peace is reestablished in the end. In the second one, “Oehrmann,” a middle-aged piano teacher gives piano lessons to the daughter of a paint manufacturer, but when he manages to get the girl emotionally involved via Beethoven’s Farewell Sonata, the father terminates the lessons that seem useless to him.

Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (rgm)

Two recent studies have excellently covered the rgm: Katharine Ellis’s Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France and Matthias Brzoska’s Die Idee des Gesamtkunstwerks in der Musiknovellistik der Julimonarchie. I shall gratefully use them to follow my own line of inquiry about the theoretical and practical issues in the new music discourses, taking thereby an integrated view of the French and German journals. The first important French music journal was the Revue musicale (rm) that François-Joseph Fétis launched in 1827. It took a scholarly and restricted view of the Parisian music culture, and gave much space to Fétis’s own theoretical and historical conceptions, as developed for instance in his Paris lectures “Cours de la philosophie musicale et d’histoire de la musique” (1832).9 Though Fétis did not care for music fiction, he did publish a number of Hoffmann translations. Born in Mons, today’s Belgium, Fétis became Professor at the Paris Conservatory in 1821, and Director of the Conservatory in Brussels in 1833. ­According to 8 “Einige Gelegenheits-Bemerkungen über das italienische Theater, aus Gesprächen abgehorcht, gehalten von einem Deutschen Kapellmeister, einem Maler und Dichter” bamz 1 (1824): 207–211, 215–216 and “Szenen aus dem Leben eines jungen Komponisten” bamz 3 (1826): 285–288, 294–296. 9 rm 6 (1832): 131–133, 139–141, 155–158, 160–164, 169–171, 177–179, 185–187, and 196–198. Printed between May 26 and July 21, 1832, in third-person extracts.

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Brzoska (1995: 33–38), the rm listed from 1831 onward Schlesinger’s p ­ ublishing house as the official subscription office, and Schlesinger told Meyerbeer on January 5, 1833, prior to the launching of his own Gazette, that he participated in the publishing of the rm and even had the right to intervene in the editing (Meyerbeer, 1960–85, ii: 275; Brzoska, 1995: 33). On April 27, 1833, the rm informed its readers that the editorship was transferred to Fétis’s son Edouard, but a year later, when Edouard anonymously attacked the literary ambitions of the gm, his father stepped in to excuse the rudeness. After other conflicts, father Fétis pushed for the merger and consented to write from then on exclusively for the new journal, officially renamed Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (rgm). Schlesinger had his own historical agenda, but the merger with Fétis’s rm in 1835 gave the former gm important new theoretical dimensions. Schlesinger and Fétis disagreed not so much on the importance of history but on the desired style for writing history and theory. Schlesinger preferred easy, accessible, and artistic ways to Fétis’s academic approach. The main source of potential conflict was Fétis’s hostility towards several contemporary ­composers, especially Berlioz. In 1840, Fétis serialized in the rgm his revised Paris lectures, the Esquisse de l’histoire de l’harmonie considérée comme art et comme science systématique, which found its final formulation in his theoretical/historical opus magnum, the Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l’harmonie (1844).10 From 1836 onward, Fétis was listed as a co-editor of the rgm, together with Berlioz, Dumas, Halévy, Janin, Liszt, and A.B. Marx. Schlesinger called himself manager (gérant), sometimes director. By 1841, the Germans Ludwig Rellstab, Robert Schumann, and Richard Wagner were added, but Fétis, formally just one of the editors, kept a decisive role in the journal’s later direction. We shall ­re-encounter him in Chapter 8.

Maurice Schlesinger

Maurice (Moritz) Schlesinger, son of Adolph Martin, publisher of the bamz, launched in Paris the rgm in 1834. He had worked for his father, fought in ­1814–1815 against Napoleon, reached Paris with the Prussians in 1815, and settled there (Devriès, 1980: 126). While working for a bookstore, he started to publish sheet music in cooperation with his father as early as 1821, and he published the first French editions of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and quartets between 1822 and 1827 (see Tyson, 1963). However, the French Ministry of the Interior first rejected his application for permissions to publish, nominally 10

rgm 7 (1840): 69–73, 157–160, 189, 295, 335, 447, 535, 570, 575, 607, 615, 631, 640, 651–656.

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b­ ecause he was an alien but apparently because of a police report that he was close to Jacques Lafitte, the liberal banker and politician who briefly headed the government that assumed power in 1830 and put Louis Philippe on the throne (Devriès, 1980: 126). Schlesinger launched the rgm in 1834, when the French cultural and political climate greatly differed from the German one in 1798, the year that Breitkopf & Härtel had launched the amz. During the July Monarchy of the 1830s, commercialism, romanticism, and journalism pervaded literature and the arts. Subtitling her article on the first important French arts journal L’Artiste as “The New Cultural Journalism in the July Monarchy,” Nancy Ann Roth notes how astute bourgeois businessmen had quickly realized after July 1830 “that a journal could be a successful commercial enterprise, and literature could be treated as a commodity. Suddenly, it was popular authors who were in demand, those whose name could be traded on, who offered up for exploitation, in Balzac’s phrase, ‘une surface commerciale’” (Roth, 1989: 36). Balzac powerfully criticized this commercialization of French poetry and the arts in his novel Illusions perdues (1837–43). Commercialism often cohabited with the work-centered aesthetics that Balzac formulated most vividly in “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,” published twice in the first year of L’Artiste, first under the title “Maître Frenhofer” and then, with a revised text, under the title “Catherine Lescault, conte fantastique.” Balzac’s genre definition “conte fantastique” alludes to Hoffmann’s writing (see Castex, 1951). His story is about a painter and his painting, and, indeed, the fine arts received more attention than music in the early 1830s, just as Goethe’s and Wackenroder’s writing about painting and sculpture preceded the turn to music in the 1790s. L’Artiste, “perhaps the richest single source of contemporary commentary on artists, exhibitions and trends,” was launched in 1831 with a frontispiece depicting the “fraternity of the arts” (Roth, 1989: 35, 37).11 But the first night of Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable on November 21 that year inaugurated the Grand Opéra, and the gm became financially possible because Schlesinger had a great commercial success with the acquisition of the publication rights of the score and Liszt’s piano arrangement of it. He was proud to display his merchandise and thought that music deserves as much publicity as literature. Music printing had the same foundations as other printing (rgm August 6, 1843, 270–272) – even if it required a more complex technology. Within a couple of years, music journals flooded the market. By 1833–34, Paris had a number of short-lived music journals, including Le Dilettante, Le Pianiste, L’Encyclopédie pittoresque de la musique, Le Troubadour provençal, and La Romance. Le Ménestrel and the Abeille musicale focused on publishing 11

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k19956f.r=1831.langEN.swf.

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music scores. Music was a frequent topic also in L’Artiste and the literary magazine Revue de Paris. The rgm lined up with L’Artiste without fraternizing with it. An “Avis de l’éditeur” of L’Artiste, probably written by Janin, stated that the journal preferred an “alliance of color and design” (Roth, 1989: 36), while the instrumental music that the rgm took up (next to the new opera), carried no intrinsic meaning, message, or political ideology either. L’Artiste sought an independent position in a politically charged post-revolutionary atmosphere (Janin, [1838] 1881; Roth, 1989: 36), which corresponded to a-political reflections on modern composers in the rgm. Still, Schlesinger was suspected by the police for his republican sentiments. Schlesinger’s traditional image as champion of German music needs to be softened, for only police records show him as an agent of foreign infiltration. He not only publicized, sold, and even supported French contemporary composers like Berlioz and Halévy, but also sided with Fétis in resurrecting older music. In his very first editorial, he claimed that the frivolity and mediocrity of fashionable musicians had corrupted the enthusiasm for true art in the last ten years. He promised not only reasoned evaluations of new art, but also “a clear and conscientious appreciation of the classical works of more or less distant centuries” (gm January 5, 1834; 1: 1). The reference to “more or less distant centuries” is vague but “classical” surely does not mean here works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The supplement to gm’s second issue printed the notes of an “Improperia” by Palestrina (1: after 16). Schlesinger specified the meaning of this remark in his editorial of April 3, 1836 (3: 105–106). He admitted here that modern performances had crowded out the religious, dramatic, chamber, and symphonic music of earlier ages in the rgm. Hence, he proposed to broaden the journal’s scope by treating the musicians and critics of all nations and all periods (3: 105). Writers should help this enterprise by participating in a “Revue retrospective,” in which “beautiful productions of all ages should be produced every year, just as the Louvre exposes the works of Raphael, Correggio, Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt (3: 106). Indeed, we find in the next years a strong turn to earlier composers and performers, not only in Paulin Richard’s study of an essay by André Maugars (4: 149–151), or in Jean-François Lesueur’s historical notes on Lully (4: 207–210, 215–219), but, even more pronouncedly in a wave of serialized novellas about such earlier composers and musicians as Dufay, Josquin, Bassani, Corelli, Cafarelli and others (a checklist is annexed to the bibliography). Schlesinger’s own advocacy of a “historical turn” complemented Fétis’s systematic studies of music history. In the first year of the rgm, Schlesinger combined commercial goals with a ­project of democratic popularization by setting up a “Société pour la publication de musique classique et modern à bon marché” with printers, paper

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­ anufacturers, and publishers. The goal was to produce cheap sheet music for m the “greatest ­possible number of amateurs.” This project, which Liszt regarded as amazingly progressive (3: 4–5), resembled literary undertakings labelled ­Panthéon littéraire. However, the music project stumbled: it had to be restarted ­financially in 1836, and it closed down for good in 1839 (Devriès, 1980: 128–129). Still, Schlesinger’s publishing house continued to put out many reasonably priced ­collections and albums containing songs, waltzes, and instrumental music for the young. Though Schlesinger was a commercial genius, the rgm was no financial success and often brought him close to bankruptcy. Probably because of his debts, he finally sold the journal and the publishing house to Louis-Lazare Brandus in 1846 (Devriès, 1980: 128, 134). Why did he dance on the edge of a precipice if he was shrewd, often aggressive, ruthless, and even devious as to copyrights? Probably, because he was as inconsistently extravagant in his business as in his private life and “threw gold pieces out of the window and lowered himself to pick up a sou.”12 He was a republican who frequented Parisian revolutionary clubs in 1848, and this may have been one reason why he left France in 1852, after Napoleon iii took over. He died in 1878 impoverished in Baden, Germany. Maurice’s flamboyant human networking tended to support his business, but occasionally damaged it. He held on to Chopin, Stephen Heller, Ignace Moscheles, Meyerbeer, Halévy, Berlioz, and many others. His friendship with Heinrich Heine went through stormy weather but he visited him on his Parisian “mattress-grave” on August 24, 1854. Heine found it a positive example that Schlesinger continued to support Halévy when his popularity was fading (Devriès, 1980: 130), but he remembered with disgust how famous musicians prostrated themselves at Schlesinger’s feet, fawning over him in order to be praised in his journal (Randier-Glenisson, 1991: 39). The case with Wagner was special. Schlesinger employed him between 1840 and 1842 to make piano arrangements from Donizetti’s La Favorite and Halévy’s La Reine de Chypre, and he readily published some of Wagner’s early critical and fictional writings (see Chapter 7). As Wagner wrote to Ferdinand Heine on January 18, 1842 about a benefit concert for Carl Maria von Weber’s widow, Schlesinger “has influence and never stops when he starts something” (Breig, 1994: 210). However, Wagner seems to have found cultural commercialism embodied in Schlesinger, and some critics believe that this may have fueled 12

“C’était un brasseur d’affaires qui avait les mains dans vingt operations à la fois, dirigeant à Paris une importante maison de commerce, flairant les truffes de loin et abandonnant sa femme pour courir après le premier cotillion qui tournait au coin des rues, passé maître en fait de réclames, jetant les pieces d’or par les fenêtres et baissant pour ramasser un sou” (du Camp, [1882–1883] 2002, ii: 336–345).

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his anti-Semitism. However, there is no direct evidence for this. It was rather Clara Schumann who made anti-Semitic remarks about him, in spite of the fact that he published Schumann’s Carnaval as a rgm supplement in July 1837. Schlesinger was a shrewd businessman, sometimes fraudulent, sometimes charming, as well as a patron of the arts.13 He had no compunction directing the journal’s attention to music published by his firm, and he did develop an unsavory reputation for exploiting talent and cajoling and pressuring writers to contribute music fiction. He himself did not write fiction and he wrote no substantial music criticism either. Indeed, he had apparently not received any advanced training in music theory or in playing an instrument ­(Randier-­Glenisson, 1991: 38).

Jules Janin

The forgotten journalist and fiction writer Janin was a key figure of L’Artiste, the theater reviewer for the Journal des débats between 1831 and 1873, and, according to Saint-Beuve, “the prince of critics, who never made an enemy” (a praise that many would contest).14 Janin had a major role in introducing feuilletons in the journals, and he regarded the journals themselves as the sovereign masters of this new world.15 Schlesinger must have also been intrigued by Janin’s review of the 1833 Salon, which found the exhibited sculptures more innovative than the paintings (Holt, 1979: 323–324), though it was critical of romantic sculptures inspired by Victor Hugo, and generally skeptical about literature’s impact on sculpture: [t]he theories developed recently and dogmatically formulated by Victor Hugo have tended to make the treatment of the ugly and the grotesque a necessity … However, I believe that such theories will collapse when they are applied to sculpture. I cannot conceive of a great work of sculpture depicting only moral or physical deformities like Han d’Islande, Quasimodo or Triboulet, et cetera.

13 14

15

Maurice’s perhaps most disconcerting entanglement with his colleagues was over the publication rights of Rossini’s Stabat Mater (Szendy, 2001: 48–51). Cited in Holt, 1979: 320. Janin succeeded to Sainte-Beuve’s chair in the Académie Française. Brzoska (1995: 244–248) analyzes Janin’s novel L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée (1829). See Bailbé’s reeditions of Janin’s novels and his monograph on him. “le journal est le souverain maître de ce monde; c’est le despote inflexible des temps modernes, c’est la seule souveraineté inviolable” (cited in Bailbé, 1969: 22).

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We feel compelled to warn against the dangerous influence of this literature on sculpture holt, 1979: 330

This was no warning against commercialism, but a rather conservative critique of decadence in ugly and grotesque sculptures. It echoed Lessing’s Laokoon, which had argued that ugliness and contortion are acceptable in poetry but not in the Laokoon sculpture and the fine arts in general. But Janin was not consistent: his popular novel L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée (1829) combined shocking realism with a conte fantastique. Schlesinger presumably thought that ugliness was acceptable in music, for he championed Weber, who did not shy away from “ugly music.” In any case, he surely welcomed Janin’s advocacy of feuilletons and the title of his book Contes fantastiques et littéraires (1832). To be sure, Janin admitted later that he used the fashionable term contes fantastiques (see Castex, 1951) merely as a trap to gain attention. During the first two years of the rgm Janin contributed seven new music novellas, which actually attempt to go beyond Hoffmann and his fantastique (see Brzoska, 1995: 70–86; I shall analyze his “Le Dîner de Beethoven” and “Hoffmann” in Chapter 5). His 1837 essay glorified the rise of the rgm from a desperate situation that according to Janin discouraged even Fétis and Castil-Blaze (rgm 9: 69–71). The critical task was to show that music was the new art of France, its new passion, its national pride. Music replaced sculpture, painting, and the other fine arts, becoming “a universal soul” through the Opéra, excellent orchestras, the revival of old masters, and the introduction of Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, Haydn’s, and Grétry’s music. Without naming Schlesinger, Janin portrays how everybody came to offer help and to meet at the journal. They agreed that “musicians should write like poets, and poets think like musicians” (9: 70), and, thus, Berlioz came to compose like Alexandre Dumas, and Dumas came to write like Berlioz. The rgm brought the most diverse talents to a center of science and poetry; it gave a common aim to all the efforts in the great art of music; it brought together artists and critics, musicians and poets. The journal thus became the “official organ” of music. The praise must have warmed Schlesinger’s heart, and Janin remained an editor of the rgm as long as Schlesinger owned it.

Hector Berlioz

Berlioz was a customer of Schlesinger’s music shop well before the launching of the Gazette musicale, and it is via Schlesinger that his emotional life reached a dramatic peak at the second performance of his Symphonie fantastique on

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December 9, 1832 (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: Ch. 44). Just back from his fellowship year in Italy, Berlioz was stunned to discover that his great love Harriet Smithson was back in Paris. Schlesinger had the brilliant idea of sending her a ticket to the concert, and the nosy “matchmaker” could not resist the temptation to visit Harriet in her box during the performance. After the performance, Berlioz also entered to introduce himself to the lady with whom he had been enamored for some five years already. As to Harriet, she realized only when seeing Berlioz’s Lélio on stage that the text named the Shakespearean heroines she used to perform: this was the composer who was known to be in love with her. The Mémoirs tell with great dramatic skill how the amorous encounter in one box of the theater ran parallel to the brewing of a darker professional confrontation, related to the following words in the second scene of Lélio, “Choeur d’ombres”: These young theorists of eighty, living in the midst of a sea of prejudices and persuaded that the world ends with the shores of their island; these old libertines of every age who demand that music caress and amuse them, never admitting that the chaste muse could have a more noble mission; especially these desecrators who dare lay hands on original works, subjecting them to horrible mutilations that they call corrections and perfections, which, they say, require considerable taste. Curses on them! They make a mockery of art! At issue were the “corrections” that Fétis made in the edition of Beethoven’s symphonies that the publisher Troupenas was preparing. When Berlioz was asked to give the score a final review, he was outraged that Fétis wanted to correct alleged mistakes, for instance in the clarinet line in the Andante movement of the Fifth symphony.16 Under his pressure, Troupenas dropped Fétis’s interventions. Some musicologists defend Fétis by pointing out that editors and conductors often made deliberate changes in music scores (Bloom, 1972/73: 81), but Fétis’s “corrections” were not concessions to the public. Fétis allowed for an unlimited number of tonal systems, and he permitted ever-greater and subtler modulations, foreseeing even the emergence of “omnitonal” compositions. Nevertheless, Fétis’s retained a preference for older, more “disciplined” ways of using tonality. Hence, he criticized works that daringly loosened tonality: Much as Fétis respected Beethoven, he admitted that the last quartets tire rather than satisfy him.17 As Bloom writes: 16 17

See Berlioz, [1870] 1966: 192–195. The remark refers to the Op. 131 (rm vol. 7 [2nd ser. i] 274–286; see Wangermée, 1951: 280).

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[Fétis insisted] on the necessity of tonal unity, the one and only principle “which can rule the relationships of sounds” […] the feeling for a tonal center must never be lost or even obscured by a particular harmonic progression; extended tonal ambiguity as an expressive device is viewed with extreme disfavor. It is Fétis’s adherence to this aesthetic principle that informs most frequently his negative critical reactions to aspects of the music of Beethoven (79). Fétis realized that the Lélio words were directed against him, but he did not mention this in his devastating review of the concert (rm 12: 365–367), which departed from his earlier critical but not unfriendly reviews. He had plenty of criticism of the concert in May 1828, but found genius and a most happy disposition in the composer (rm 3: 423). Reviewing the Berlioz concert on November 18, 1829 (rm 6: 348–351), he remarked that he undeniably harboured a devil in the body, a quality without which, Voltaire assures us, one cannot do anything in the arts (348). On October 30, 1830, when listening to Berlioz’s Prix-de-Rome-winning cantata Sardanaple, he thought that Berlioz had his shortcomings but still seemed destined as an artist to open new avenues. Within four to five years, he would become recognized and ready to be assessed.18 However, by the end of 1832, Fétis refused to call Berlioz a “musician,” for he was ignorant of musical rules, his harmonies were incorrect, and his music phrases lacked melodies (366). On February 1, 1835, he added to this a devastating analysis of Liszt’s piano transcription of the Symphonie fantastique (Cone, 1971: 215–220). Berlioz joined the gm at the outset, first with an ironic report about his 1830 winning of the Prix-de-Rome and his subsequent Italian trip (1: 35–37), followed by two music novellas, “Le Suicide par enthousiasme” and “Un Bénéficiaire et Rubini à Calais.” He had a good working relationship with Schlesinger and took over the journal management when Maurice went on trips, while the chief editor consistently supported him as a musician. However, perhaps because most of their contact was personal, Schlesinger is hardly visible in Berlioz’s correspondence and Mémoires. Since Schlesinger was stingy with honorariums and Berlioz had to support himself primarily with income from

18

“me semble être un de ces artistes que la nature destine à ouvrir de nouvelles routes dans l’art qu’il cultive. … Son harmonie laisse désirer plus de correction; sa mélodie est quelquefois bien sauvage; mais à force d’écrire, il, deviendra plus sévère avec lui-même; et celui qui a trouvé le chant elegant et neuf: Venez, Bayadères charmantes, ne sera point dépourvu de mélodie quand il ne la dédaignera pas. Attendons, encore quatre ou cinq ans pour connaître et juger M. Berlioz” (rm vol. 9 [2nd ser. iii] 1830: 391–392).

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reviews he hated to write, Berlioz’s later review income came mainly from the Journal des débats, where his friend Janin had great influence. The confrontations between Berlioz and Fétis foreshadowed trouble for merging rgm with the rm, but their polemic did not spill unto the pages of the rgm. Fétis devoted his attention to reviving older music and to developing his theory of music history. Berlioz failed to mention in his Mémoires that Fétis placed students and orchestral material at his disposal when he gave a concert in Brussels in the fall of 1842; but he did note that they had dinner together in March 1855 (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: 508–510). The frequently cantankerous Schlesinger managed to steer his journal between hazardous cliffs of music critics and criticism. In Ellis’s words, Schlesinger molded with greatest success “the work of numerous contributors of differing critical quality and persuasion into a journal which had clear ideals without being narrowly partisan.” In turn, the Belgian musicologist became the “strongest unifying element of the Gazette’s critical history.” His early connections with the journal may have been antagonistic, but he was “intellectually inescapable” (Ellis, 1995: 241). Berlioz’s foreword to his short novella “Idylle” illustrates the easy and yet problematic friendship between the two. Addressing Schlesinger as “Maurice,” Berlioz remarks that the editor “absolutely wanted” a story from him, even if his mind was elsewhere: When you want something one has to satisfy you without delay, otherwise one runs the risk of undergoing all sorts of disagreements, above all if one is, like me, at your discretion. I recognize that you are my boss [maître], you have a hold on me … Hence, I submit and tell your subscribers a simple and rather mild, quite pastoral story, of quite rosy color, which occurred to me a few years ago. A veritable story, in which one will not find even the minutest irony, perfectly free of romanticism, of fanaticism, and freneticism – a kind of flower, shepherd like, in sum an idyll. (rgm 10: 47) A story without the minutest irony? The “Idylle” tells about reusing in a performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz the cadaver of a person who whistled during the much earlier staging of the inauthentic version of the opera titled Robin des Bois. Maurice, this lover of music fiction, became himself a fictional figure of selling – art objects. The inspiration for the transformation was Gustave Flaubert’s lasting infatuation with Maurice’s wife, Elisa, which started in August 1836, when Alexandre Dumas (who had reported on Halévy’s “La Juive” in the rgm

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of 1835), brought the couple to the still undeveloped coastal town of Trouville. Maurice bought there later the Hotel Bellevue.19 The Schlesingers regularly returned subsequently to Trouville and bonded with the young Flaubert, who kept his infatuation a secret. The three went boating together or listened to music, and Gustave delighted in going off with Maurice, spending long hours with him, smoking cigars or galloping their horses along the beach (Flaubert, 1973–2007, iii: 386). Flaubert continued to see the couple during his law studies in Paris and his relation to the often loud, vulgar, showy, exploitative, and yet lovably chummy “Père Maurice” was almost as remarkable as to Elisa. As late as 1861, Flaubert would write to Ernest Feydeau that Schlesinger was “a very good chap” (C’est un très bon bougre).20 He was deeply fond of him because he could be warm and affectionate. Maurice had many relations with women – Wagner called him a “horny rake” (“geiler Bock”)21 – but he loved his wife in his own way, and the two men kept in touch after Maurice’s return to Germany. Maurice even visited Flaubert in March 1869. Maurice invited Flaubert to the wedding of his daughter Marie in 1856, but Flaubert did not go, perhaps because he saw too often how hostile Marie was to Elisa. This had a reason of which Flaubert was unaware. When Schlesinger met Elisa, she was already married to the French officer Emile Judée, who was serving in Algeria. Since Marie was born when the husband was still alive, she had to be officially registered as “father unknown.” When Elisa married Schlesinger the following year, Maurice converted from Judaism to Catholicism;22 she remained a pious Catholic full of guilt, which may have been the main reason why she apparently never had a sexual relation with Flaubert. The fine arts dominate music in L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), though Flaubert himself was apparently an opera fan with particular love for Mozart’s 19 20

21 22

Flaubert recalls in his letter to Elisa on October 2, 1856, how Maurice brought them in 1838 a melon from Honfleur, some five kilometers away. (see Flaubert, [1838] 2001). He asked on November 24, 1853: “What became of that good office of La Gazette musicale where one said such strong remarks between four and six in the afternoon?” While writing the novel, Flaubert asked Maurice on April 2, 1867 whether he could give an exact account of the role he played in Le Club des femmes one evening. He wanted to have his recollections. Letter to G.E. Anders dated February 1, 1846. (see Randier-Glenisson, 1991: 40). Marie married a German architect Christian in 1856; Flaubert attended the marriage of her brother Emile in 1872, a year after Maurice had died. The children quarreled about the will in the Trouville hotel, which finally became German property. Elisa, totally dependent on her daughter, ended in a Baden insane asylum, and died eight years after Flaubert (Bart, 1967: 388–389). Flaubert visited Elisa in Chartres in July 1866, in Baden ­(Gérard-Gailly, 1932: 81 ff), and in Croisset on November 7, 1871.

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Don Giovanni and Meyerbeer’s The Prophet (Bart, 1967: 187, 236). Maurice, the passionate music lover and businessman of music becomes Arnoux, a publisher of art magazines and dealer in art objects. Appropriately, for Frédéric’s subdued and hesitant approach to Mme. Arnoux corresponds to distanced contemplations of art objects rather than to volcanic eruptions of sexual desire in music. In Madame Bovary, listening to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor drives the protagonist into the arms of her later lover Léon. Frédéric becomes speechless at crucial moments, and Flaubert distanced himself from the romantic belief that music can speak when language fails. As the Goncourt brothers note in their journal on December 17, 1873, when the long-adored woman finally appears in Frédéric’s apartment, he senses that she has finally softened and surrendered to him, but instantaneously leaves (Goncourt, 1959, ii: 956). Schlesinger, the melopoetic womanizer, would have moved in rather than away.

Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZfM)

Robert Schumann launched his music journal in 1834 under the title Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik, perhaps to challenge the older Leipzig journal, the amz. In an autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1840, he recalls that the idea of the journal was born in discussions with friends, especially Ludwig Schunke (Erler, 1887, i: 230). The editors were listed on the journal’s front page as members of a Society of Artists and Friends of the Arts. Their list roughly agreed with the membership of Schumann’s Davidsbündler association, which included Friedrich and Clara Wieck, Julius Knorr, and Ludwig Schunke. However, Schunke died in 1834 and Knorr turned out to be incompetent. When the publisher C.H.F. Hartmann also became impossible, Schumann bought the NZfM at the end of 1834 and became its sole editor with the new publisher J.A. Barth. As of the second year, “Leipzig” was dropped from the official name and the subtitle Das Magazin für neue Töne was added. The editorial signature now stated “Published in Association with several Artists and Friends of the Arts under the Responsibility of R. Schumann.” Like the biblical David, the journal set out to fight the Philistines, which included not only the petty-bourgeois but also Rellstab, whom Schumann called in a letter to Franz Brendel the “philistine par excellence.”23 The new poetic age was to transcend national ­boundaries and

23

On February 20, 1847. The immediate occasion was the poor Vienna performance of Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri. Rellstab’s review, which also included praise, objected to the scarcity of recitatives and the continuous interlinking of the musical parts, which Schumann actually regarded as positive innovations (Jansen, 1883: 192).

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overcome tyranny. For Schumann, Chopin’s works were canons hidden amidst flowers (“unter Blumen eingesengte Kanonen” NZfM 4: 138). The NZfM also announced in the first issue its planned offerings, most of them adopted from existing journals: “Theoretical and Historical Articles,” “Criticism” (but with a preference for piano music), “Miscellaneous Notices,” “Correspondent Reports,” and “Chronicles” (of performances, travels etc.). Unusual was, however, the category “Belletristik,” listed right after the introductory articles. Planned for this rubric were short music stories, fantasy pieces, scenes from life, humorous items, and poems “that are especially suited for compositions.” The first item became a review of the just published GoetheZelter correspondence. The NZfM was highly successful in its first years, particularly in circles that looked for more poetry and less theory or information. Compared to the amz, in its first years it brought many more short reviews of music publications, and reports about the musical life of major cities in Germany as well as abroad, including Eastern Europe. Since Schumann was at that time most interested in piano music, Heinrich Marschner repeatedly referred to the planned journal as “romantic piano newspaper” (Jansen, 1883, 218). However, Schumann started to compose vocal music by 1840, and this gave the journal a more balanced profile. The NZfM also published longer and polemical articles on contemporary music and music history, but it published relatively few contributions on music theory. Unlike the amz, it published virtually nothing on the research and the technical development of music instruments. The journal’s engagement for youth and revolution in the arts lost its momentum after a few years, and Schumann, its heart and soul, became gradually dissatisfied with the burden of editorship. In September 1838, he went to Vienna to see whether he could move there with Clara and the NZfM after their wedding. In January 1839, he still thought that “Vienna remains the best and most probable place” (Schumann, 1994–2002, ii: 24), and he apparently started to negotiate with Maurice Schlesinger, in spite of Clara’s warning in February that “Schlesinger is Jewish, and one shouldn’t do business with Jews” (ii: 79).24 She was for a while in favor of moving back to Leipzig, where Schumann had a chance to assume the editorship of the amz (ii: 78). By December, back from the concert tour in Paris, she urged Schumann from Berlin to settle there: “we’ll have to move here, Robert; everyone is pointing out to me how favorable

24

The editors of the Complete Correspondence (1994–2002) assume that all “Schlesinger” in the letters refer to Maurice, although several of the later ones evidently mean his father or brother in Berlin.

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the circumstances are. [Father] Schlesinger will take over the journal and will probably make it even more successful; he would have to pay you considerably more. But don’t frown like that!” (ii: 504).25 However, the couple returned to Leipzig after their wedding. 1840 became Robert’s Lieder year. He started to contribute less to the journal, and in 1844 he transferred the editorship to the music historian Franz Brendel, who advocated a New German School, a Zukunftsmusik of program and drama (Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz!). He published many articles along this line; among them was unfortunately also Wagner’s “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (1850). It must be added that Wagner had already written in 1842 to Schumann that Meyerbeer was a “deliberately sly deceiver.”26 Even prior to that, in 1837, Schumann himself had written a devastating review of Meyerbeer’s Hugenotten (NZfM 7: 73–75), finding it morally and religiously outrageous. Considering Schumann’s love of literature and his newly established “Belletristik” column, music fiction could have played an important role in the NZfM. The journal regularly published poems and headed each issue with a literary motto, but it brought relatively few stories, most of them written by the artist, writer, and music critic Johann Peter Lyser, who became something like an “in house novelist” of NZfM with pleasant anecdotal stories about historical composers. Under the pseudonym Dr. Seidel, he published in 1834 the stories “Vater Doles” (about Johann Friedrich Doles), “Beethoven,” and “Händel,” the last of which was translated and printed still that year in the gm. Furthermore, he published stories about Gluck in 1836, about Hamlet in the opera in 1838, about the eighteenth-century music theorist Abt Vogler in 1839, a long tripartite publication on Luther and music in 1840, and one about the sons of Mozart and Carl Maria von Weber in 1844. Next to Lyser’s eight stories, NZfM published only four additional ones: one short but good story by Schumann himself (1837), two by the obscure writer W. Schüler, and, perhaps the best of them all, select passages from Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl’s novel Das Musikfest oder die Beethovener (1838), which told about clashes between Beethoven enthusiasts who want to perform two Beethoven symphonies at a concert and dilettants who do not care about him. Five years later, Griepenkerl went on to publish a very positive book about Berlioz.

25 26

According to Daverio, both Schumanns “disclose a troubling streak of anti-Semitism” (1997: 197), but Worthen finds their anti-Semitism harmless (2007: 204). [Halévy] ist offen und ehrlich und kein absichtlich schlauer Betrüger wie Meyerbeer. Dass Sie aber auf diesen nicht schimpfen! Er ist mein Protektor und – Spass beiseite – ein ­liebenswürdiger Mensch.” (Wagner, 1911–16: xvi: 58).

chapter 2

From Poetry to Music Novels In oral cultures, singing and narrating are deeply linked, and singers play central roles in the oldest written records. Musicians like Orpheus, Amphion, Arion, or even the Sirens, populate Greek mythology while Jubal (Genesis 4:21), the father of all who play the harp or flute, and David, who plays his harp to calm and cure Saul (1 Samuel 16:23), are featured in the Bible. Melody and rhythm so decisively shape lyrical language that poetry has been regarded as a sister to music throughout Western history. Studies on the relation have taken two main approaches: music and poetry, as exemplified by James Anderson Winn’s Unsuspected Eloquence (1981), and music in poetry, which John Hollander has studied within English poetry in The Untuning of the Sky (1961). According to Hollander, “the canonical Medieval Christian view that all human music bears a definite relation to the eternal, abstract (and inaudible) ‘music’ of universal order” became “completely de-Christianized” in late ­seventeenth century poetry, leading to “decorative” metaphors and mere turns of wit. Abstract musical mythology and concrete practical considerations of actual vocal and instrumental music gradually disconnected (1961: 19) – a process that Walter Benjamin would regard as a loss of aura. Hollander has used for his title John Dryden’s line “And musick shall untune the sky” from his “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687), in reference to the Last Judgment. Händel based his Alexander-Fest (1736) on Dryden’s poem, but Hollander interprets it as a metaphor for trivializing eloquent poetry. As we shall see, concern about the degradation of musical poetry revived in the early nineteenth century, when the commercialization and popularization of music was seen by many as infecting its sublimity. Early modern prose fiction and drama no longer posted musicians as heroes. To be sure, Cervantes’s Don Quixote or various Shakespeare plays glorify music, but here, and elsewhere, music became a discussion topic or a mode of socialization rather than the very focus of plot. Musician protagonists returned around 1700 in the short-lived German satirical novels called Musikerromane. As Stephen Rose (2008) has shown, these novels reused chapbooks that featured street musicians like “Jan Tambour” (the drummer), “­Leyermatz” (hurdy-gurdy man), or “Polnische Sackpfeiffer” (Polish bagpiper). These musician fictions also profited from the picaresque novels of Johann Jakob G ­ rimmelshausen, especially Der seltzame Springinsfeld (1670), which features a traveling entertainer, first as a military musician and then a d­ emobilized ­fiddle-player

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_004

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with a wooden leg in streets and taverns. Wolfgang Kaspar Printz in Phrynis Mitlenaeus, oder Satyrischer Componist (1676–79) and Johann ­Kuhnau in Der musicalische Quack-Salber (1700) refashioned this stereotype (see Rose, 2008). Printz became also the author of the anecdotal first history of music: Historische Beschreibung der edlen Sing- und Klingkunst (1690). Painters (and sculptors) were of greater interest than musicians were when the arts entered fiction towards the end of the eighteenth century. Herder’s dialogue between the muses gives them equal weight (Herder, 1785: 133–164), but this was not the case in the first fictions on artists. In Wilhelm Meisters L­ ehrjahre (1795–96) Goethe placed the emblematic music figures of Mignon and the Harper as tragic “outsiders,” while the emblem of Wilhelm Meister himself is a mysterious painting of his childhood about a sick son of a king in search of the amazons. Hans-Jürgen Schings reads this painting as an image narrative (Bildergeschichte), in which each item captures a phase in Wilhelm Meisters Bildung (1984: 159–162). Music fiction entered first a few novels, then Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s stories, and finally the amz. Early attempts to write a Bildungsroman about a musician’s education were rather unsuccessful, partly because there seemed to be no formula for the education of a good musician, partly because the novel did not appear to have the right format for it. The theme of (mis)educating young musicians moved over to the novella, and soon flourished as serialized narration in music journals. Fiction about music became a key discourse about a music that had lost its voice. Interpreting instrumental music was not just a rational enterprise but inevitably also a creative venture, for which fiction seemed appropriate. Furthermore, fiction about music proved to be a good way to popularize and explain music for the new urban middle-class audience that had little or no music education. It coexisted with various non-fictional narratives about musicians, such as musical anecdotes, biographical narratives, travel narratives, and historical narratives, which used so frequently fictional and rhetorical means that the borderlines are difficult to draw. Early music novels do not yet thematize the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau, partly a dramatic dialogue and partly told by an external narrator, was probably written in 1761 and 1774 but remained unpublished some thirty years until Goethe published a German translation of it in 1805. Friedrich Reichardt’s Leben des berühmten Tonkünstlers Heinrich Wilhelm Gulden, nachher genannt Guglielmo Enrico Fiorino (1779), Novalis’s, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), and Carl Maria von ­Weber’s Tonkünstlers Leben, Fragmente eines Kunstromans (1809–1820) remained unfinished, while Wilhelm Heinse’s Hildegard von Hohenthal ­(1795–96)

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g­ lorified the music aesthetics of Italian vocal music. Heinrich von Ofterdingen is structured by songs and singers but its protagonist is a budding poet rather than a musician. With the exception of Le neveu de Rameau, these are works by German authors, and even Diderot’s work was first published in German­ – in Goethe’s translation, 1805, which was in turn retrotranslated into French in 1821. (Only in 1891 did an original French ms come to light which has since served as the standard version.) Except for Rameau’s nephew, the protagonists are also ­German, though Reichardt’s Gulden symbolically converts his name from ­Gulden to Fiorino when he manages to free himself from his father’s greediness.

Gulden/Fiorino, Hildegard von Hohental, Heinrich von Ofterdingen

As a song composer, Reichardt had set poems by Goethe and Schiller to music, but his early and incomplete fictional music biography of Heinrich ­Wilhelm Gulden harks back to the musician novels of Kuhnau and his colleagues around 1700, rather than that they anticipate Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Reading the extant hundred-and-fifty pages of Reichardt’s story one understands why he stopped. Heinrich Wilhelm’s brutal and greedy father plays in a village pub and often participates in drunken rampages. He expects his son to make a career that would provide for him in old age. The satire sharpens when the father takes his son on a tour to enchant some rich music lovers. The first sequence of disasters culminates in the boy’s sexual abuse by a rich Abbot. Heinrich is too shy to tell his father what happened but he refuses to stay with the Abbot. He consents to accompany his father to the court of a rich Polish nobleman near Warsaw, where a highly talented young musician would become his mentor. The Wunderkind is exposed on the way to rural savagery, to Church corruption, to impoverished whimsical noblemen, and to Danzig decadence. As a contrast, the second part recounts the highly idealized R ­ ousseauesque education of Heinrich’s future mentor Hermenfried, whose wise and liberal father allows his son to find his own way. The narrator’s satirical social criticism now turns into an exaggerated admiration of enlightened education. Reichardt satirizes the authoritarian paternal education of young musicians, which was widespread in the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond. Mozart and Beethoven also had dominating fathers. Two generations later, Schumann (who had a liberal and supportive father and a demanding mother), saw a disturbing paternal dictatorship in the Wieck family, even ­before he clashed with Clara’s father. On September 18, 1831, he noted in his

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diary that papa Wieck was “Jewish” because he forced his daughter to ­practice piano, already counting the money the child’s concerts would bring him (Schumann, 1971–83, i: 362). Three days later, Schumann witnessed how Wieck cruelly mistreated his son for messing up his piano playing. “Meister Raro, I recognize you,” Schumann addressed Wieck in his diary: “your way of doing things is Jewish, your enthusiasm would vanish if you could not jiggle a coin in your pocket; your restless fiery eye is squinting towards the cash office, and even your love for Zilia [Clara] is impure.”1 Meister Raro became for Schumann Meister Allesgeld (Mister All-Money). Indeed, papa Wieck, like Heinrich ­Gulden’s father, cultivated rich potential listeners, managed Clara’s concert trips, automatically pocketed her honorarium, and expected that she will provide for him when he gets old. These expectations explain why the greedy and jealous Wieck attempted to block so viciously Clara’s marriage to Robert. Reichardt’s enlightened but conservative music aesthetics is evident in some of the narrator’s comments on Heinrich’s education. When the father is surprised that Heinrich often imitates his own music playing, the narrator remarks in the spirit of Rousseau’s Emile that the father was unaware that children understand things through sense impressions, not via proofs and explanations (Reichardt, [1779] 1967: 5). Good educators do not involve the child’s mind (6). The narrator disapproves of Heinrich’s very successful violin virtuosity after the performance of a tragedy (43). Heinrich’s minuet contains loveless instrumental imitations: Now one heard a little whistle of children, now a traverse flute, now a reed flute, now a bagpipe, now a bass-viol, now a couple of bugles, now trumpets and hundreds of other things, but no violin; then one heard a donkey’s neighing, a rooster’s crowing, a cat’s meowing, a horse’s whinnying, and thousands of other imitations of natural sounds, but none of love. (my trl., 42) The point is, of course, that only the human voice can convey genuine human emotions. Similarly devastating is the satirical description of how the little boy had to be lifted unto a table to be seen when playing a silly popular song to an ecstatic audience (43). The father happily takes the opportunity to explain the inestimable advantages of artistic virtuosity: counts, kings, and emperors will 1 “Meister Raro! ich erkenne dich – dein Treiben ist weiter nichts als ein jüdisches Benehmen, deine Begeisterung nichts, wenn sie kein Viergroschenstück in der Tasche herumdrehen kann, dein feuriges Auge ist nicht ruhig u. schielt nach der Geldkasse, selber (sic) deine Liebe zu Zilia ist nicht rein” (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 364).

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hold him dear and allow him everything, for an emperor can create hundreds of counts and princes but no virtuoso. While great generals would sometimes have to sleep in open fields on straw, a virtuoso could always stretch himself in a silken bed until noon (57). Aware of this public image of virtuoso musicians, he regularly introduces his son as spoiled by kings and emperors (59). In contrast, the right kind of Wunderkind, Hermenfried, motivates himself to learn the most difficult pieces of Bach and Händel, even if they do not appeal to kings and princes. He loses his way only temporarily, when he concentrates on full harmony and exact rhythm at the cost of song and expression (134). His music education follows Rousseau, who placed melody, voice, and song above harmony and instruments. Reichardt held on to these preferences, and could not do much with the new sonatas and symphonies. The first longer European fiction on music was, arguably, Wilhelm Heinse’s novel Hildegard von Hohenthal, now all but forgotten, which follows the physical and musical maturation of the young aristocratic woman from a dilettante to a ravishing soprano (see Neubauer, 1986: 163–166). Her tutor Lockmann, a young bourgeois conductor, observes her naked from a distance upon arrival, leads endless discussions with her family about music and its history, but is incapable of exploiting his occasional chances to fire up her sensuous body. Hildegard resists music’s enormous erotic power by insisting on maintaining a social distance. E.T.A. Hoffmann remarked that Lockmann is rather indecently enamored with his aristocratic student but he lectures her so pedantically about the mathematics of musicology that one cannot understand how she could tolerate him (Hoffmann, 1963: 345). It is her sensuous body, not music, which fuels the novel’s eroticism. We are far yet from music’s seductive power in Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889). Just as Lockmann is incapable of seducing by means of music, so too, Heinse’s music aesthetics has no erotic power. The strict imitation of nature that Heinse expects from all the arts inevitably leads to a subordination of music to language. Everybody in the novel admires Italian vocal music, mostly of the eighteenth century. According to Eduard Hanslick’s quotation from Heinse novel, true music “serves as a means to transmit the sense of the words and of the emotion to the listener in such a light and pleasant way that one does not notice its music. Such music endures; it is natural because one passes immediately from the sound to the sense of the words” (Hanslick, [1854] 1976: 79). Hanslick commented that the aesthetic registration of music implied just the opposite: one directly becomes aware of beauty by noticing and giving ­attention to it. Heinse’s old architect Reinhold thinks differently: “music without words is a language of pure vowels, which is much inferior to any other ­language in imitating or representing nature. … Pure instrumental music is

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a tickling of the ear, a waste of time and playing around, a rope dancing with sounds. What it is supposed to mean remains unsaid, and when it is said, seldom can another, save the composer, say wherein it is to be found.”2 No wonder that Hanslick, who admired Heinse’s brilliant naturalism, found him vastly overestimated in matters of poetry and music (79). Novalis conceived his Heinrich von Ofterdingen (destined to remain unfinished) as a response to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre. Goethe’s protagonist had failed to make a career in theater and settles in an economically fruitful life, while Novalis outlines the education of a poet; Meister’s youth can be traced through visual images and unfortunate singers, while Heinrich’s education is marked by a sequence of songs that function like opera arias, for they interrupt the plot to express emotions and to characterize the fictional figures. A battle cry of crusaders (Novalis, [1802] 1977: 231–234) is set against the laments of the captive Zulima (234–35), followed by songs of a miner (247–50), of a hermit (254–55, 272–75, 323–24), of Schwaning (272–74), and the drinking song of Klingsohr (274–75). The figures in the embedded fairy tales also sing: the transformative power of Arion’s song is captured by the narrator (212–13); similarly, the songs towards the end of the Atlantis story bring about an almost miraculous happy ending (225–27, 227–28). In Ginnistan’s story, Fabel, the spirit of poetry, sings twice (302–303, 315), but we also hear a bird singing (292). Ginnistan’s own song (297–98) sets the shattering sound of a horn in motion (298). The unfinished second part opens with Astralis’s poem (317–19), followed by a sung dialogue: unidentified cheerful (children?) voices coming “as if from a deep, underground distance” (321) are answered by the pilgrim’s song (323–24). The ubiquity of songs in Ofterdingen is striking, because, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Neubauer, 1978), Novalis developed in his theoretical notes a concept of combinatorial mathematical music and transferred this to poetry, which was the first adaptation of instrumental music to poetry. ­Novalis conceived the music as a network of non-referential sounds that acquire meaning when “syntactically” combined. Could it be said, then, that N ­ ovalis structured his novel according to vocal music (songs and operas), whereas he brought “genuine” poetry close to wordless instrumental music? The question 2 “Und die bloße Instrumentalmusik in Konzerten ist nun weiter gar nichts als Zeitvertreib und Spielerey: eine Seiltänzerey von Tönen. Man sagt nicht, was sie bedeuten soll; und wenn man es sagt, so kann selten ein Andrer, als der Komponist, finden, worin es stecke” (Heinse, [1795–96] 1903: 230). “Musik überhaupt ohne Worte ist eine Sprache in lauter Vocalen, und steht an Nachahmung oder Darstellung der Natur weit unter jeder Sprache … bey einem an Sprache reichem Volk ist sie bloßer Luxus. … Bloße Instrumentalmusik ist oft nichts mehr als ein leerer Ohrenkitzel, wie Taback für Nasen und Zungen” (239, 240).

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has not been raised yet and should not be answered schematically. Let me note here merely that abstract structuring is a key feature of Ofterdingen as well, for Novalis gives very little attention to realistic details and descriptions. Not the external physical world but contrasting internal dispositions are at the heart of the novel, which is indicated also by the reduced significance of narrator texts. The bulk of the texture consists of dialogues and embedded songs as well as stories that are often fairy tales. Instrumental music manifests itself in the very structure of the novel, which can be characterized as a musical texture of conversation (Neubauer, 1978: 147–161). I know of no other novel that would embody so powerfully a contrast between vocal and instrumental conceptions of music – without ever making this a subject of critical reflection. Indeed,­ ­Ofterdingen is perhaps the only novel that effectively utilizes songs in structuring a novel. In the absence of a Bildungsroman about educating a musician, Novalis’s Ofterdingen came to provide the prototype for a novel that integrated music, not thematically but by incorporating songs at key moments. Within a few years, German novels became so populated with singers and their songs that we may speak of a hybrid new genre of poetry and prose, an exemplification of Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of a comprehensive Universalpoesie. Schlegel’s much-quoted Athenäum-Fragment nr. 116 limits itself to forms of verbal discourse and does not name music (nor, for that matter, the fine arts), but it does include critical and philosophical reflections that have implications for other aesthetic subjects. As a final piece of these music novels, which are all unfinished except for Hildegard von Hohenthal, we may in passing mention Carl Maria von Weber’s unfinished Tonkünstlers Leben, Fragmente eines Kunstromans (“A Musician’s Life: Fragments of an Art Novel”), which Steven Paul Scher reads in terms of Friedrich Schlegel’s concepts of the fragment and the arabesque ([1978] 2004:  127–142). Weber’s novel is indeed a fragment, but it is questionable whether he deliberately used Schlegel’s concept, for his own defining aesthetic idea was that of organic forms. While some of the serialized music novellas, such as Sand’s Consuelo, swelled to book length, I know of no major nineteenth-century writers who set out to write a coherent Bildungsroman of a musician. It was only in the ­twentieth century that music novels revived with Romain Rolland’s Jean C ­ hristophe (1903–1912), Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1948), and lived on in the works of Richard Powers, Margriet de Moor, Vikram Seth, and many others. They are often adapted to the screen, where actual musical sounds are not just a ­background but vital parts of the plot.

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Le neveu de Rameau

Due to its unique philological fate, Diderot’s text, with its complex dialogue between a moi and a lui, played a delayed role in history. Written probably in 1761–62 and 1773–74, it remained an obscure manuscript until Goethe published his German translation in 1805. (As mentioned above, the initial French editions, from 1821 on, were retrotranslations of Goethe’s German; only in 1891 did the French original come to light.) Foucault noted in his Histoire de la folie (1961) that the attitude towards madness underwent a fundamental change between its writing and first publication: The eighteenth century could not exactly understand the meaning expressed in Le Neveu de Rameau. Yet something had happened, just when the text was written, which promised a decisive change. A curious thing: the unreason that had been relegated to the distance of confinement reappeared, fraught with new dangers and as if endowed with a new power of interrogation. … The eighteenth century might not have recognized itself in Rameau’s Nephew, but it was entirely present in the I who served him as interlocutor … amused yet reticent, and with a secret anxiety: for this was the first time since the Great Confinement that the madman had become a social individual; it was the first time that anyone entered into conversation with him, and that, once again, he was questioned. foucault, [1961] 1967: 199–200

Foucault thinks that moi is amused, reticent, and anxious because lui, who would formerly have been put into a madhouse now becomes a “social individual.” However, while lui may be odd and occasionally crazy, neither the previous age nor the new mentality could label him clinically mad. He cannot be regarded as an emblem of the madman who walks out of his “Great Confinement” to become a “social individual.” The cultural and epistemic rupture that Foucault posits around 1800 in his Les mots et les choses (1966) does fit music history, and falls right between the writing and the German publication of Diderot’s book: instrumental music was still considered an inferior genre at the time of its writing, but when it was first published Mozart was already dead, Haydn was only four years from passing away, and Beethoven was entering the glorious middle phase of his composing career. This does not imply that Diderot’s text was musically outdated by 1805; it only assumed new meanings and implications in a new musical, national, and political climate, which we have to take into account when we look at its first

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German receptions. Goethe himself referred to this basic shift in the section “Musik” of his comments on Diderot’s text ([1805] 1991: 669–672), though his view was rather askew. He distinguished between two forms of new music: the first, independent one develops and realizes itself from within. It is for the external refined senses, composed by Italians. Italian music was, for him, in a special sense autonomous. The second one involves intellect, sensitivity, and passion, and is composed by the French, the Germans, and all the Nordic countries (669). However, in one of the paragraphs that follow this typology, Goethe does regard instrumental music as German. The Germans regarded it for a while “also as an independent art, perfected it technically, and practiced it in a lively manner almost without further relation to the emotions.” This meant deepening the harmony and raising it to a model for all nations (670). Hegel and Hoffmann adapted Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s text, which was curiously contextualized, in addition, through Goethe’s own comments. Diderot’s Horatian motto, Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis (“born under the scowling change-gods, whatever their number”) foregrounds already “changes” that the text displays in a various forms of disassembling. The motto is usually applied to the nephew (lui), a corrosive figure that inconsistently undermines the “wisdom” and moral values of the Enlightenment, alternatingly revealing himself as dilettante and genius. The motto itself is taken back when lui asks at the end, “Isn’t it true, Herr Professor, that I am always the same?” – to which moi responds “Yes, indeed, unfortunately.” Of course, the motto was not chosen by moi, but by a narrator who introduces and repeatedly interrupts the dialogue between lui and moi. While this narrating “I,” is close to moi, its perspective necessarily differs: Diderot’s hybrid text itself is formally and structurally “Vertumnal,” because it breaks through the traditional generic categories of literature. Moi wants to stem the tide of disintegrating values and beliefs, yet he is repeatedly compelled to admit that the scintillating lui is often right and uses a powerful rhetoric even when he is wrong. Lui is a sycophant who performs questionable services for the rich in order to profit from their dinners and other favors. He is unable and unwilling to be self-sufficient, but uncovers the rotten underbelly of pre-revolutionary French society; he questions the notion of artistic genius, and he parodies the music of the time by miming, mixing, and performing it in grotesque ways. I refrain from quoting fully lui’s most striking performance, of which I have given a fuller interpretation in The Emancipation of Music from Language (­Neubauer, 1986: 115–118). Nevertheless, I must indicate its main features because it is at the very heart of the German adaptations and it raises basic questions about the frequent association of music with madness. Lui is in more than one way an inversion of the genius composer of romantic fiction. Diderot’s text

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offers only satirical glimpses of Jean-Philippe Rameau, the musical genius, for this figure is filtered through his envious nephew. Diderot did not like the uncle in real life either. Nevertheless, the nephew’s mediocre talent has its genial moment of creativity when it erupts in a strange singing that jumbles thirty airs in different languages, styles, and voices, but imitates each voice with astonishing power (cf. Goethe’s “Rameau’s Neffe,” [1805] 1991: 633–634). His genius seems to lie in enacting grotesque parodies. Moi almost imperceptibly switches his role from a dialogue partner into an observant narrator when he remarks: “He piled up and confused thirty arias, Italian and French, tragic and comic ones.” The chess players of the court abandon their boards to break out into shattering laughter, but the nephew goes on undisturbed. During the performance of Jomelli’s Lamentazioni, lui was kept “in the grip of some mental possession, an enthusiasm so close to madness that it seemed doubtful whether he would recover. He might have to be put into a cab and be taken to a padded cell.” Yet, when he repeats with “precision, truth [!] and incredible warmth” the most beautiful passage, no eye remains dry. The listeners are overwhelmed: “He took hold of our souls and kept them floating in the most wonderful situation I have ever experienced. Did I admire him? Yes, I did. Was I moved and compassionate? I was moved and compassionate, though a derisive streak merged into these feelings and deprived them of their naturalness.” This ironic streak intensifies when lui moves from imitations of vocal emotions to grotesque and ridiculous imitations of strings and piccolos, ballerinas and dancers, and even of whole orchestras (634). This performance may be odd, even crazy, but calling lui simply a “musically gifted madman” or “mad musician” (Hamilton, 2008: 80) denigrates him too much. Neither can he be read as an advocate of Gluck’s operatic vocal music, as Safranski suggests in his Hoffmann biography (1992: 209–210). His sharp observations and his cynical criticism of Parisian society are so much to the point that moi is reduced to short utterances of approval: he is right and his remarks show reason. The momentary lunacy of his performance is so contagious that it sweeps the spectators and listeners from their feet, so that they all, including moi, come to share his madness. The passage is all too often misread as lui’s madness that leaves moi’s “classical” values intact, perhaps even reinforced, but lui’s strange madness repeatedly deflates moi’s sanity and unified identity as well. As we shall see, in Rochlitz’s visit to the madhouse, in Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck, or in Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann the narrators are not infected this way. They remain compassionate, but detached observers. The mad-musician prototype of nineteenth-century fiction was Rochlitz’s Karl rather than ­Diderot’s lui – though few people were aware of this. The confrontation in Diderot’s text is even more corrosive than in romantic literature,

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because madness and alienation are not rectified by reference to some vague transcendental world, which, to be sure, has no secure ontological status in romanticism either. Lui’s mind-boggling musical performance is particularly astonishing because it adheres to a Rousseauistic aesthetics of mimeticism and is totally ignorant yet of the questions that the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and, above all, Beethoven raised about the aestheticism of vocal music. It is history’s justified irony that Le neveu should reach the public when instrumental music had already a most decisive impact on listeners and was already a “hot” social and aesthetic issue. Had Diderot’s text been published in France several decades earlier, it would not have been adapted so eagerly and immediately as Goethe’s German translation in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) and Hoffmann’s novella Ritter Gluck (1809) – neither of which explicitly acknowledges its debt to Diderot.

Hegel’s Spirit

Is it justified to include a philosophical essay, Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, in a section on German music novellas? I believe so, not only because its section on the “self-alienated spirit” alienated passages from Diderot’s Le neveu, but also because the essay focuses on the history of a general anthropomorphic entity called Geist, whose features have much in common with fictional characters. Literature is a major subject of Hegel’s first philosophical study, and its form is narrative rather than logical and systematic. I have decided to include it here, not just because it is an important adaptation of Le neveu. Its key narrative and fictional features bring the voice of the spirit in Section vi to life, in good measure in terms of lui’s personal critique of the French manners, customs, and beliefs in the early part of Diderot’s text. Last but not least, Hegel’s adaptation of Goethe’s adaptation constructs a period of cultural history. Diderot’s name occurs only eight times in all of Hegel’s writings. He never explained when and why he parasitically ingested passages from Goethe’s translation in his text on the alienated spirit, without even acknowledging his source. In the absence of direct comments we have to rely on circumstantial evidence related to the writing of the Phänomenologie. According to Walter Kaufmann’s account, Hegel had been promising to publish his first book for some six years, but its actual idea and content shifted several times. By 1806 he found himself under enormous internal and external pressure to fulfill his promise. He used the term “Phenomenology” for the first time in the

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a­ nnouncement of lectures for the winter semester 1806–07, and his contract with the publisher projected a printing by Easter 1806, but he had the greatest difficulty actually writing the book (Kaufmann, 1966: 90). On February 5, he was hit by a highly disturbing event, the birth of his illegitimate son L­ udwig, which further muddled his financial, and, presumably, his moral status – a matter that Hegel scholars ignored or suppressed for a very long time (91–95). His friend Niethammer guaranteed the publisher in a written contract that he would personally pay for the printing if Hegel failed to submit the manuscript by October 18, 1807, and Hegel submitted the first half of the manuscript on October 8. However, in the next days Napoleon soundly defeated the Prussians in the Battle of Jena and occupied the city. Hegel had to finish his manuscript amidst a battle he considered “the end of history”: human societies were no longer evolving towards a “universal homogeneous state” (Rosenkranz, [1844] 1969: 227–230). Hence, the “work of a tormented spirit” (Kaufmann, 1966: 90) was confronted from outside with a crisis of the Enlightenment, for which the discovery of lui’s words and performances in the newly published Goethe translation must have been most relevant, especially in the crucial section “Der sich entfremdete Geist. Die Bildung” (“The Self-alienated Spirit. Bildung”; Hegel, [1807] 1977: 359 ff). The unacknowledged father, Diderot, became there the crucial voice. Studies on Hegel have generally neglected his adaptation of Le neveu. ­Rosenkranz mentions it briefly in his Hegel biography ([1844] 1969: 209); Diderot was Karl Marx’s favorite prose writer (Marx and Engels, 1972: 179), and later Marxist attacks on idealist Hegel interpretations routinely claimed that Diderot and French materialism had a decisive impact on him.3 Hegel read lui’s critique as observations on a general crisis of an alienated spirit of Bildung in the Enlightenment, but he took his crucial quotes from the nephew’s musical performance, turning it thus, not unlike Foucault, into an expression of a radical malaise in the spirit’s history, without saying anything about music as such. The matter needs interpretation. We have seen that three voices speak in Diderot’s text: moi, lui, and the narrator. Moi becomes in Hegel’s text the “tranquil” and “honest” voice, while lui is the torn one (zerrissene). However, Hegel regards the torn voice as historically authentic: its mad and torn existence represents truth, the true voice of the spirit’s historical self-alienation: “The spirit of tornness” is “the perfect language and the true existing spirit of this whole world of Bildung” (Hegel, [1807] 3 See Marx to Engels, July 20, 1852 (mew 28: 92) and April 15, 1869 (mew 32: 303–304). See also Mougin (1946) and Stiehler (1964). Hamilton’s section “Hegel’s Reading of le Neveu” (2008: 87–95) is a short but good recent addition.

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1977: 384).4 Nevertheless, Hegel does not quote lui’s torn but true language; he only uses the narrator’s voice (all in the section “Spirit”). In a key passage quoted below, Hegel splices and comments on three passages, in which the narrator observes and reacts to lui’s performances.5 Ignoring potential differences between moi and the narrator, Hegel calls the voice of the narrator/moi the “tranquil (sometimes called ‘noble’) consciousness”; the discourse of the torn spirit (i.e., of lui) is filtered through this observer: The content of the spirit’s discourse about and above (?) himself is thus the inversion of all concepts and realities, the general deceiving of himself and others; and the shamelessness, to acknowledge (say?) this deceiving is, just for this reason the greatest truth. This speech is the derangement of the musician, “who heaped up and mixed together thirty arias, Italian and French, tragic and comic, for all sorts (of characters); now he descended with a deep bass into hell, then, contracting his throat, he rented with a falsetto the height of the airs […] alternatingly raging, becalmed, imperious and mocking.” – To the tranquil consciousness, which, in its honest way, takes the melody of the Good and True to consist in the evenness of the notes, i.e. in a single note (unison?), this talk appears like a babble of wisdom and folly, “a medley of as much shrewdness as baseness, of as many right as wrong ideas, of as total a perversity of sentiment and as perfect shamefulness as seldom openness” and truth. It will not be able to refrain from entering into these tones, and from running up and down the entire scale of feelings from the profoundest contempt and dejection to the highest admiration and emotion. In these “a tinge of ridicule will be blended with the latter that will deprive them of their nature” hegel, [1807] 1977: 387; the quotations inside this passage are taken from Goethe’s Rameaus Neffe and referenced as such by Hegel.

Hegel’s crucial intervention here is to introduce the quotations with the phrase “greatest truth” and to insert “truth” after quoting from Goethe ([1805], 1991: 586). Diderot’s moi and narrator occasionally also use the word, but mean only approvals of specific remarks or an appreciation of a performance as 4 “Die Sprache der Zerrissenheit” [ist] “die vollkommene Sprache und der wahre existierende Geist dieser ganzen Welt der Bildung” (Hegel, [1807] 1977: 384). 5 Hulbert claims to have found “a dozen or so points in the Phenomenology at which Le neveu is read or is read from” (1983: 278), All of them are in Hegel’s chapter “Geist.” For the additional direct quotations, see Hegel, [1807] 1977, 364 f (= Goethe, [1805] 1991: 639) and 403 (= Goethe, 632).

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“genuine.” However, “truth” acquires in Hegel’s text a much more general and historical meaning: it implies that the very tornness and dislocation of lui and his performance is true because they express a coming historical shift that moi experiences only when exposed to “lui.” The very being of lui conveys a historical truth: Diderot’s balanced dialogue acquires in Hegel’s transmutation a historical thesis. James Hulbert’s excellent article “Diderot in the Text of Hegel” notes that in 1828 Hegel had listed Diderot among the modern masters in Plato’s tradition: according to Hegel, Diderot employed in his dialogues dominating interlocutors who used their partners merely to lead them to their own notion of truth. Such interlocutors force the partners to acquiesce in every detail of the dialogue’s progress (Hulbert, 1983: 276). Was Diderot (or moi) in Le neveu a master of a dialogical discourse that marshals all voices towards his final truth? Although some critics do read Le neveu as a “guided tour” towards a historical conclusion, Hulbert rightly claims that it contains no such conclusion: “the dialectic of the Phenomenology presents itself as having an end, telos, and finis, one telos and one finis in a single end. Le neveu, however, does not and cannot, as long as it remains dialogical, dialogue and text” (290). Hegel thus converts a Bakhtinian dialogical text into a dialectical one. In his adaptation, lui becomes the dominating figure of Diderot’s three dialogical voices. He deconstructs moi’s conventional ethics, and his musical performance disassembles the identities of figures in operas. This non-Bakhtinian reading of Diderot’s text serves as the crucial point in Hegel’s dialectics, namely that the historical evolution of the Geist involves its undermining and destruction: the spirit (lui) shamelessly utters a general deception, which is, just for this reason, “the greatest truth” (Hegel, [1807] 1977: 387). It is the lowly and sycophant lui that speaks the truth, not the “good” moi. What relevance, if any, does Hegel’s text have to music? Relatively little. Hegel uses Le neveu basically to establish general historical diagnoses based on the lui figure, but he focuses on passages where lui grotesquely performs music, and disregards his cynical social criticism. However, the musical pieces of Pergolesi, Campra, Destouches, Rameau, and Duni that lui preforms, now sentimentally now mockingly, were mostly forgotten in Germany by the time Hegel came to read Le neveu – which was the one reason why Goethe felt compelled to write such extensive notes to Diderot’s text. Unfortunately, Goethe’s translation also contained some serious errors that affected the image of music in the translated text, most notably in the phrase “Nachahmung der leidenschaftlichen Akzente, der Naturakzente” ([1805], 1991: 631) for D ­ iderot’s “l’imitation des accents de la passions ou des phénomènes de la nature.” Diderot’s “ou” recognizes musical imitations of nature as well as of passions, whereas the

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c­ omma between the two in Goethe’s translation identifies the two with each other and only allows the imitations of passions but no imitations of natural sounds. As in a letter to Adalbert Schöpke dated February 16, 1818, Goethe takes the position that Beethoven claimed for his Sixth: he was not portraying sounds of nature, only their emotional impact on human beings. The nephew’s remarks on music do not indicate any doomsday scenario; indeed, his ideas on music rely heavily on Rousseau’s music philosophy. His mimesis is accurate, “always in the tone, rhythm, and sense of the words, of the characters, and of their attitudes” (Goethe, [1805], 1991: 633). He does imitate some instruments, but is primarily concerned with the human voice. In short, Hegel misuses lui’s musical ideas and performances to represent the spirit’s historical and social alienation. When he wrote the Phänomenologie, the issues of music were already fundamentally different. Hegel never developed a love and a rationale for the instrumental music that was up and coming when Diderot wrote his Le neveu. Ten years after publishing his Phänomenologie, Hegel held his first course on aesthetics in ­Heidelberg. He gave five more courses on the subject in Heidelberg and Berlin, but his published Ästhetik was posthumously put together from many student notes by Heinrich Gustav Hotho, first in 1835, and in revised form in 1842. Its lengthy chapter on music (Hegel, [1835] 1965, ii: 258–326) links up with Hegel’s mature philosophy of history, and we ought to ask the seldom raised question, what connections, if any, there are between his reception of Le neveu and his later music philosophy.6 Since the Phänomenologie says nothing important about music and uses Le neveu only to indicate a historical self-alienation of the spirit, we need to compare the historical situation of music in Diderot’s work with that in Hegel’s aesthetics. The historical frame of his Ästhetik is his well-known tripartite scheme, based on the shifting relation between the Idea and its outward shape (Hegel, [1835] 1965, i: 82–88). In symbolic art, the still indistinct and obscure Idea is unable to express itself in natural phenomena, leading thus to “bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless” expression (i: 84). The classical form overcomes the incongruity of Idea and object: “it is the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape that … is peculiarly appropriate to the Idea itself,” namely 6 In his afterword to the Ästhetik, Georg Lukács parenthetically speaks of Hegel’s “detailed analysis” of Diderot’s masterwork, though he admits that this analysis only concerns questions of social morality: “Diderot figures here as representative of the French Enlightenment that prepared the Revolution; that Diderot was, precisely in this work, also a great artist he says nothing” (Hegel, [1835] 1965, ii: 596). See also the relevant passage in Lukács’s Der junge Hegel (1948: 607–608).

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the human form (i: 84–85). This perfect classic harmony of Idea and embodiment is destroyed, however, in the romantic art forms (starting with the Middle Ages), because the advanced spirit can no longer find adequate expression in the concrete sensuous object of the external world. In this third stage, the object of art becomes the inwardness of the free concrete spiritual being: “The world of inwardness celebrates its triumph over the outer world, i.e. humanity triumphs over nature, which means that in the romantic sphere the Idea “has to reveal itself in the medium of spirit and feelings as perfected in itself” (i: 87). As a result, external existence becomes contingent. The “external element no longer has its notion and significance, as in classical art, in its own sphere, and its own medium. It has come to find them in the feelings” (i: 87). In the developing absolute sphere of the spirit, art can no longer serve as an adequate expression. This becomes philosophy, and, according to Hegel’s famous dictum, art will come at one point to an end. The main question becomes then how Hegel defines music against the other arts, and how he perceives the music of his time in light of his historical scheme. While architecture and the fine arts are spatial and object-related, music is essentially temporal and intimately subject-centered. Compared to the materials of the fine arts, musical sounds are quite abstract (Hegel, [1835] 1965, ii: 261), and this abstraction became further pronounced when the musical sounds had cut their association with language and made themselves independent. Music offers the possibility to give up not only verbal reference but reference altogether. For Hegel this was a loss rather than gain, for he regarded pure sounds as spiritually empty signs that have no hold on inwardness.7 Independent (autonomous) music frees itself from language and becomes purely instrumental. Hegel gives little attention to it, partly because he believes that only experts understand its structure, whereas vocal music is accessible to a wide audience of laypersons. Though music has its own rules, Hegel fears that uncoupling it from language leads to arbitrariness, of wild and irregular breaks (ii: 219–323). Thus, Hegel had apparently no deep affinity with the new piano, ­chamber, and symphonic music of his time. As Julian Johnson remarks, “the logocentricity of his thought militates against any real understanding of purely 7 (Hegel, [1835] 1965, ii: 271).“In neuerer Zeit besonders ist die Musik in der Losgerissenheit von einem für sich schon klaren Gehalt … in ihr eigenes Element zurückgegangen, doch hat dafür auch desto mehr an Macht über das ganze Innere verloren, indem der Genuß, den sie bieten kann, sich nur der einen Seite der Kunst zuwendet – dem bloßen Interesse nämlich für das rein Musikalische der Komposition und deren Geschicklichkeit” (ii: 269). (for Hanslick’s critique see Hanslick, [1854] 1976: 173).

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i­nstrumental music, especially the abstract music of contemporary Viennese classicism” (1991: 152), and this “logocentricity” pushed Hegel’s music philosophy historically backward, towards the “Expressivism” of a Baroque Affektenlehre, which worked on a musical “vocabulary” associating specific musical forms with specific emotions.8 These reservations did not yet manifest themselves in Hegel’s adaptation of lui’s performance. Did the alienation of the spirit that he ascribed to the nephew’s confusingly jumbled vocal performance found any expression in his Ästhetik? It did, namely in his criticism of the accompaniment of operas or church music (Hegel, [1835] 1965, ii: 306–319). Johnson seems to think that this criticism applies to Viennese instrumental music as well, but Hegel clearly means here only music that accompanies words (or images): Today’s dramatic music often seeks its effect in violent contrasts, by forcing opposite passions artistically battling into one and the same musical move (Gang). It expresses, for instance, cheerfulness, wedding, glittering feasts, and presses into it also hatred, revenge, and animosity, so that next to pleasure, happiness, and dance music simultaneous heavy quarrels and most nauseous divisions rage. Such contrasts of being torn ­(Zerrissenheit), which toss us from one side to another without giving us any unity, are all the more opposed to the harmony of beauty to the extent that they bring opposites together in a sharper characterization, from where there can be no question of pleasure and the return of the inner life into itself in a melody. (ii: 316) Did Hegel recollect these words from his reading of lui’s performance? Probably not, but the passage shows that what he read earlier as a general alienation of the spirit later became a specific objection to much early nineteenth-century music. The earlier social and political implications disappeared in light of the spirit’s gradual progress and the spirit’s alienation now turned into psychological and moral objections to tumultuous, all too emotional compositions. Seeking unity and order, Hegel attributed to melody a crucial integrating force, which must be sustained and never allowed to disintegrate into conflicting fragments, especially since music, among all the arts, is most prone to fragmentation (ii: 316–317). Peace of mind (or rather spirit) is what characterizes 8 Johnson 158. I agree with Johnson that such music is static and unsuited to emotional dynamics. However, I do not find in Hegel an “essential connection between the temporal organization of music and the structuring of subjectivity in time” (Johnson, 1991: 159). On the Affektenlehre see Neubauer, 1986: 51–59.

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the vocal music of composers for whom Hegel had a high regard: Palestrina, Durante, Lotti, Pergolesi, Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart. Great emotions must be brought under control (ii: 308), and since Hegel found in Weber’s operas only raw and uncontrolled expressions, he disliked them. Affective melodies were, for him, highest music, because they can raise us above raw pleasures and pains: “The free sounds of the soul in music emerge with melody” (ii: 298–299). Hegel ends his brief historical overview with praise for Rossini: his melodies made his music highly emotional, witty, with powerful effects on the mind and the heart – even if they did not satisfy “strict German musical reason” (ii: 317) – which may well be a jab at A.B. Marx’s “German” rejection of Rossini.

Ritter Gluck

Gluck was not only one of the most important opera composers of the ­eighteenth century but also a key figure in the movement to improve librettos and their integration with music. It comes therefore as a surprise that in Ritter Gluck the most important performed music of his operas consists of instrumental music.9 Surely, this cannot be an accident, especially if we remember that Ritter Gluck is a fictional recollection, not only because of its puzzling subtitle “A Recollection from 1809,” but also because it remembers and adapts Diderot Le neveu, switching, however, away from the nephew’s singing. The innocent switch to instrumental music in Ritter Gluck attains even great significance if we link this instrumental music to the Ritter’s metaphysical vision. Did Hoffmann deliberately smuggle in a new transcendental aesthetics of instrumental music via Gluck’s operas? As we shall see, the question can be answered with both yes and no. Hoffmann adopts Diderot’s basic scheme of meeting an odd character, who finally calls himself Ritter Gluck, at a public place in a major city. The narrator, here unnamed, engages the Ritter in a conversation, who tells him about mysterious music “performances.” The contrasts to Diderot’s text are equally evident: social criticism is absent, the identity of the partner is mysterious until the end, and Gluck’s “performed” pieces are mostly instrumental overtures. Explicit references to Diderot’s work abound in Hoffmann’s other fiction, but Ritter Gluck remains silent about its parentage. Scher and Weisstein have illuminated aspects of the family connection. Scher has assembled a battery 9 The exceptions are when the Ritter innovatively sings the chorus from Iphigenie in Tauris and the final scene of Armida (Hoffmann, 1967, i: 12, 19).

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of parallel passages comparing Le neveu and the description of the overture of Iphigenie in Aulis (1968: 67–71), while Weisstein (1991) has noted in a detailed comparison of the two works both the common dialogical structure and the salient differences. I want to show how imitations and adaptations undermine the metaphysics of the Ritter’s aesthetics. The Ritter induces the wretched musicians next door to a Berlin street café to play the overture to Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis. He accompanies their performance with a pantomime. Subsequently he tells the narrator a myth of musical redemption but abruptly breaks it off and disappears. Several months later, the narrator reencounters the Ritter while passing a theater in which Gluck’s Armida is being performed, and this time he gets invited to the Ritter’s room to listen to his rendering of Armida on the piano. After playing a variation on the Armida-overture from empty sheets of music and giving an impressive rendition of something derived from the closing scene of the opera, the man reveals himself as “Ritter Gluck.” The story’s subtitle fixes the date of the encounter twenty-two years after the composer’s death. As Christa Karoli notes (1976: 344), critics have offered two main resolutions of the puzzle: most regard the Ritter a psychotic impersonator, while some consider him a revenant. Since Hoffmann is always ambiguous about the supernatural, the revenant-interpretation cannot be substantiated. Better to say that the Ritter is in one way a parasite on the historical Gluck, much as the nephew is on Rameau. The Ritter is thus an inauthentic supplement, and this already undermines the authenticity of the strange monologue he tells about composing and his aesthetic vision. Starting from the observation that there are thousands ways to learn to compose, he envisages masses of would-be “initiates” jostling on a broad highway leading to the ivory gate of the “Realm of Dreams.” Few reach it, even fewer enter it, and of those who do many get lost in dreams. However, some wake up, cross the realm of dreams, and “get to the truth, the highest moment, a touch with eternity, the ineffable! Look at the sun: it is the triad from which the chords shoot down like stars and enshroud you with threads of fire. You lie there cocoon-like until the psyche swings high into the sun” (Hoffmann, 1967, i: 13; my translation throughout). The triadic chord that shoots out of the sun is wordless but the visual threads prevent calling it absolute. Ritter follows this myth of musical transfiguration with an account of his own experiences. The wordless sounds are continually linked to images, which consistently limit the creative power of music. Ritter sneers at the clumsiness of the Berlin musicians, yet authenticity and originality are also absent from his pantomime of the poor orchestra next door and his later piano playing in a room equipped with a “broad and heavy mirror” (i: 17). In the performance at

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home, the bound score of Gluck’s Armida contains only empty staffs. What the narrator hears are adaptations of Gluck’s music: the initial Tempo di Marcia is “almost faithful to the original,” the Allegro is “only interwoven with Gluck’s main ideas.” There are “many new, brilliant turns,” modulations that are melodic and striking without becoming showy. “Artful” melismas attach themselves to Gluck’s rejuvenated “simple main ideas.” About halfway, the narrator’s attention shifts from the music to the performer: His face glowed; now his eyebrows knotted and a long delayed anger wanted to burst forth; soon his eyes swam in tears of deep melancholy. Sometimes, while both hands were working at artful melismas, he would sing the theme with a pleasant tenor voice. Then, he knew in a remarkable way to imitate the muffled sound of the kettledrum. (i: 18). The narrator considers Ritter’s performance original. Yet, though the performance is more original than performances read from the score, it remains one of mimesis and repetition. Ritter’s music remains parasitic on Gluck’s, and his remark that he composed this when he returned from the Realm of the Dreams reveals that the apparent improvisation is a replay: “I betrayed the holy to the unholy and an icy hand seized my glowing heart! It did not break, but I was damned to walk like a departed spirit among the unholy – shapeless, so that nobody should know me until the sunflower would lift me again to the eternal” (i: 18 f). The performance is now dominated by singing, most clearly when the Ritter vocally imitates a rumbling drum (shades of Rameau’s nephew). To the narrator, the Ritter’s “modified music sounded as the Gluck-scene raised to a higher power,” but he also hears it as impersonation: “His Voice seemed like that of a youth, for it swelled from muffled depth up to penetrating strength” (i: 19). Weisstein rightly remarks that it would be hermeneutically irresponsible to read the Ritter’s inspired improvisations only as pathological (1991: 510). Does this mean “that a score contains only directions for application”? Does the Ritter conclude that it is permissible and possible to “enliven the ‘dead’ matter of the score, deepen the composition, and give the music new rhythmic and melodic impulses” (510)? The Ritter’s performance shows, after all, no new ideas or formal structures. As Weisstein himself admits, the Ritter’s art could not offer anything that Hoffmann would have regarded as “progressive” around 1809 (510). Hoffmann’s story is a narrative mediation of music: the Ritter’s adaptation of Gluck’s music is translated into language and integrated into a fictional structure. How does that actually work? Describing the performance of A ­ rmida,

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the narrator eschews those technical descriptions of music that abound in ­Hoffmann’s professional music reviews. The cited passage refers only vaguely to modulations and variations and Gluck’s “Tempo di Marcia” and “Allegro.” The longest and most impressive part describes the Ritter’s voice and face, i.e. the performer rather than what is performed. We gain further insight into Hoffmann’s verbal imitations of music by taking a look at the performance of Gluck’s Iphigenie in Aulis overture at the café. Hoffmann employs here with consummate skill a different “verbal music” for each section of the overture.10 Describing the opening Andante passage, the narrator focalizes on the Ritter: With half-closed eyes, resting his folded arms on the table, he listened to the andante. Softly moving his left foot, he marked the entry of the voices. He raised his head – quickly glanced around – and he raised his right hand, while his left one rested with spread fingers on the table as if he were playing a chord on a piano. He was a conductor indicating the orchestra a new tempo – his right hand drops and the allegro begins! hoffmann, 1967, i: 11

The miserably performed Gluck music is not just translated into language but imitated with mimicry, the Ritter’s would-be conducting. The narrator follows the gestures of his strange partner, and we get, instead of a music description, a highly focalized study of personality, in which references to the music move the plot. The middle section re-focalizes the personality study: A burning glow flushes his pale cheeks; his eyebrows get knitted on his wrinkled forehead; an inner fury inflames the wild gaze with a fire that gradually wipes off the smile that still hovered around the half-open mouth. Now he leans back, up go the eyebrows, the muscle-play on the cheeks returns, the eyes lit up, a deep inner pain resolves in a voluptuousness that seizes all fibers and convulsively shakes them – he draws a deep breath from his lungs; drops are on his forehead; he marks the entry of the tutti and other major passages; his right hand holds on to the beat, with his left one he fetches his handkerchief and wipes his face. (i: 11). 10

Scher defines “verbal music” as “any literary presentation (whether in poetry or prose) of existing or fictitious musical compositions: any poetic texture which has a piece of music as its ‘theme.’ In addition to approximating in words an actual or fictitious score, such poems or passages often suggest characterization of a musical performance or of subjective response to music” (Scher, 1968: 8).

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The text marks the musical transition from Andante to Allegro with a shift from past to present tense and a re-focalization from the Ritter’s gestures to his facial expressions and emotions. Although the hands are not completely lost out of sight, we now observe the Ritter’s pain and pleasure, his feverish frenzy and exaltation. The shift to the present tense indicates the narrator’s involvement, his momentary identification – not with the music itself, but with the Ritter’s emotional state produced by the music. The final section shifts the focus once more: Thus he enlivened with flesh and colors the skeleton of the overture played by the few violins. I heard the soft, melting lament of the rising flute when the storm of the violins and the double bass is spent and the thunder of the drums falls silent; I heard the softly swelling tones of the cello and the bassoon, which fill the heart with inexpressible melancholy; the tutti returns, the unisono strides on like an exalted and majestic giant, the muffled lament dies away under his crushing steps. (i: 11). Empathy with the Ritter seems to offer in this final section a “direct” access to the music itself, to the sounds of the flutes, the drums, the cello, the bassoon, and the tutti. But we cannot ignore the repeated introductory phrase “I heard,” which foregrounds the listener and his listening experience. The shift away from the Ritter’s gestures and emotions focalizes on the narrator’s listening experience, not the music itself. The subjectivity of that experience is displayed by the appearance of such richly expressive metaphors as “soft, melting lament,” “storm of the violins,” or “thunder of the drums,” which culminate in the simile: “the unisono strides on like a sublime and majestic giant, the muffled lament dies away under his crushing steps.” The music gains prominence as the Ritter fades and the narrator’s listening experience is foregrounded. His grey personality filters the music more mildly than the powerful oddity sitting across him. But he is not bringing to life the actual sounds played next door, for his vivid metaphors refer to instruments not represented in the skeleton orchestra. Scher suggests in Verbal Music that the words refer to a Platonic idea: The true subject of the description is an ideal performance of the “­ Iphigenia” overture accessible and comprehensible only to Ritter Gluck’s ill-balanced imagination. The narrator, the literary medium, can reproduce only a “reflection” of the ideal; and one might suspect that he presents a Platonic “semblance” of the music that is “true.” scher, 1968: 77

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The narrator’s verbal account of Gluck’s music is, indeed, a mediated “reflection,” but the mediation occurs via an “internal” first-person narrator who has no access to the Ritter’s mind and even less to a Platonic idea. We are not privy to “an ideal performance of the Iphigenia overture.” The words must refer to things in the narrator’s own mind. Could this rather dull and unimaginative narrator have access to a Platonic ideal? The discrepancy between the poorly played music and the narrator’s state of excitement, which results in a text that “exceeds” its stimulus, may be explained on pragmatic, musicological, and psychological grounds: the narrator must refer to sounds he hears with his inner ear, approximately the way Hoffmann himself heard Beethoven’s Fifth when he prepared his review by inadequately playing the piano arrangement of the score. In the story, the narrator’s listening pleasure is enhanced by the silent and now invisible pantomime of the Ritter, which puts “flesh and color” on the skeleton music of the violins next door. The examples discussed here fall into three general types of music descriptions. The words may refer to the music itself, to the listening experience, or to the genetic (historical and biographical) background of the music. All three of these modes are essentially metaphoric discourses about music, though music can also be represented in a technical-analytical discourse that minimalizes the employment of metaphors. Hoffmann’s professional reviews tend in this direction, at least in their descriptive parts (see Neubauer, 1987). References to the composer and the creative process, often considered as hallmarks of romantic aesthetics, are all but absent in these reviews, and characterizations of the listening experience are relatively rare compared to direct descriptions of the music itself. Considering this range, “Ritter Gluck” uses a limited number of well-chosen musical descriptions. The narrator all but ignores technical terms referring to the chords, rhythms, modulations, motifs, and structure of the music. Like the music reviewer Hoffmann, he makes no references to the composer or the composition process. Weisstein believes that Rameau’s nephew is a socially degraded genius, whose identity and historical existence is “from the very beginning above any doubt” (1991: 504), while Hoffmann’s Ritter is an original genius who remains incognito until the end (509). This is true for readers today, but at the time of writing Ritter Gluck Hoffmann did not yet know that lui had a historical model. Believing that the nephew was a figment of Diderot’s imagination, Hoffmann followed, rather than deviated from, his intertext by projecting an imaginary protagonist into a realistic and historical urban setting. To what extent the historical nephew was talented is all but irrelevant (by all indications he was not). In Diderot’s text, lui is possessed by an “anxiety of influence,” the k­ nowledge that he can only imitate, but not rise to the original creativity of his uncle. He

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tries to overcome his anxiety by developing a mimic and pantomimic talent in music imitation. But this too is imitation, and moi’s occasional admiration is colored by his own uncertainties. Some critics are setting lui against moi, thereby implicitly exonerating Diderot from all the dirt that attaches to his fictional lui. I join those who believe that Diderot let his fictional figure say things (against the composer Rameau, against the anti-encyclopedist Palissot, against the reigning morality of his age) that he himself would not dare to utter in public. Instead of putting the matter in terms of authorial intention I follow Weisstein, who acknowledges that Diderot’s moi and lui cannot be neatly separated for their discourses infect each other, whereas Hoffmann’s narrator is “a sort of registrar,” who is “pushed into the role of listener and spectator and hardly contributes to the increasingly monological dialogue” (504). I would add that this absence of an intratextual diffusion of the interlocutors is compensated by the Ritter’s intertextual diffusion, his dependence on lui as model. The Ritter’s intertextual imitation underscores the mimetic element in both his art and his personality. While nothing can be decided for sure on the literal level, the network of imitation and intertextuality enshrouds and effectively neutralizes the originality of the Ritter’s aesthetic vision and personality. The myth of transcendental art is undermined by the series of extended metaphors for representing the inaccessible: they include the Ritter’s performance that accompanies the music, the narrator’s verbal imitation of it, and Hoffmann’s use, here and elsewhere, of Diderot’s Le neveu. Do these metaphors and intertextual references not undermine the musical creativity that remained ­Hoffmann’s lifelong burden of anxiety? As a postscript, we should mention one other novel that was inspired by Diderot’s Le neveu, Jules Janin’s La Fin d’un monde et du “Neveu de Rameau” (1861), which continues the dialogue in a strictly eighteenth-century context but from a nineteenth-century perspective.

chapter 3

Failing Musicians, Failed Education The romantic-cliché musician is incapable of developing his full genius because he is suppressed by those in power and dependent on the taste of dilettantes. The two most important prototypes for this failing musician are Joseph Berglinger (Wackenroder and Tieck) and Johannes Kreisler (Hoffmann). The following analysis of the Berglinger stories aims to show that it is misleading to interpret them in terms of “absolute music.” Subsequently, I set this type against the neglected figure of the poor musician who never aspired to become a great musician and was not trained in music either but became enamored by it after his failed childhood education. The two outstanding examples of this type are Rochlitz’s Karl in “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” (1804) and Grillparzer’s Jakob in “Der arme Spielmann” (1847). Their stories, with astonishingly common features, appeared at the beginning and the end of what may be called the life cycle of the music novellas.

The Berglinger Stories

The music stories in Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) and Phantasien über die Kunst (1799) were the most important music texts prior to the appearance of the amz. Within these volumes they introduced a double aesthetic break: shifts from the fine arts to music and from the past to the present. The Herzensergiessungen contains stories and essays about Renaissance paintings and ­painters, except for the story about Joseph Berglinger, a recently deceased modern musician, told by his friend, the friar who “pours his heart out.” The essays and stories that Berglinger entrusted to the friar take up about half of the Phantasien. Scholars have spent much time on the still vexing question, which of the two authors wrote one or the other text.1 But they have neglected the narrators: the friar speaks in the Herzensergiessungen while Berglinger himself speaks in the Phantasien texts. Since the music texts are 1 Most critics now believe that a letter and a “fragmentary” letter by Berglinger, as well as “A Miraculous Oriental Fairy Tale about a Naked Holy Man” (“Ein Wunderbares morgenländisches Märchen von einem nackten Heiligen”), are by Wackenroder, while the essays on music in the second half of the volume were written by Tieck.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_005

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filtered through the speakers, they should not be read, as virtually all commentators do, as direct statements by Wackenroder or Tieck. Furthermore, the friar’s report about his friend should not be equated with Berlinger’s own perspective. Berglinger’s music education is patterned after the father-son conflict in Reichardt’s Heinrich Wilhelm Gulden. (Reichardt, it should be mentioned, was Wackenroder’s music teacher.) Whereas Gulden’s virtuoso violin technique rattles coins in the mind of his greedy father, Berglinger’s physician father opposes his son’s melomania so violently that Joseph finally runs away from home. He becomes professionally successful, but when we reencounter him as the conductor of a bishop’s orchestra, he is unhappy because of restrictions on his devotion to music. As he writes in a letter, he rejects the theory that all melodies and music sentiments are based “on a single obligatory mathematical law” and that sensibility and artistic sense have become unfashionable. Though his post is enviable, his childhood love of music has been spoiled by petty jealousies, restrictive customs, and dictates from above. His dearest wish is to run away again to lead a solitary life in the mountains. According to the compassionate friar, who also leads a secluded life: “He got the idea that an artist must be an artist just for himself, for his own outpourings and for one or a few human beings that understand him” (Wackenroder, [1797] 1967: 128). At issue here is not yet the autonomy of art, only the autonomy of the composer. When he is called to his father’s deathbed, pangs of guilt hasten his own death. The friar’s final comment is that he was perhaps made for enjoying rather than creating art, for enjoyment is a purely internal process, whereas true creative powers constantly conflict with the world (131). The Phantasien contains Berglinger’s legacy. He speaks directly here, without the mediation of the friar/editor, but his much-quoted music statements and stories do not constitute a theory of “absolute music.” Instead of congealing into a consistent theory, they cover a wide spectrum of contradictory approaches. We should not read them as enunciations of a new paradigm, even if we occasionally find in them striking praise of instrumental music. His first paper is an oriental fairy tale about a naked saint (Wackenroder, 1799: 197–202) who is tortured by what one may irreverently call a “metaphysical tinnitus,” a painful noise he experiences from being roped to the wheel of time. One night, however, he is redeemed: he sees two lovers floating down the rivulet in front of his cave and he hears an ethereal song that does not seem to emanate from them: “With the first sound of music and of the singing the naked saint was freed from the rumbling wheel of time” – and he rises to heaven (201). The singing redeems him, but he can only record the poem, not the melody. Can evanescent music be called absolute if it leaves a text behind?

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The next essay, “The Wonders of Music” (203–208), calls instrumental m ­ usic wondrous, because drilled wood and strings made of intestines produce a “wretched” web with numerical proportions. The “natural harmony” has divine power, and is capable of establishing emotional communication between human beings (205). The mathematics of music that Berglinger resented as a student seems to regain here a new life. In the next article (209–214), B ­ erglinger praises the different genres of vocal church music but he remarks that he loves dance music equally well (211). Indeed, the next piece, a B ­ erglinger letter (215–217), leads into the open, where people are entertained with dance music. Berglinger comments that “this kind of music seems to speak the most significant and concrete language and must be the primary, oldest, and original music” (215). As a dancer/listener, he seems to break through his isolation. The next article on the inner essence of music and the spiritual meaning of its contemporary form (218–228) is Wackenroder’s longest and best argued myth of instrumental music. It elaborates a myth on music’s emergence from its twin foundations, light and color: [Wise men descended into the] oracle caves of the most secret science, where all-productive nature itself revealed to them the primal laws of sound. From these secret-laden vaults they brought to daylight the new teaching, written in recondite numbers, and assembled a firm and wise order out of the variety of individual sounds. The masters of most varied tonalities draw from this source. (218–219) The crude sounds of nature were thus brought together into a supple and refined system that allows emotional communication among human beings. Berglinger even ventures to say that the system has become a “rich and pliant machinery [!] to represent human sentiments” (219). He suggests that modern instrumental music is more sensitive than nature’s original sounds and he traces this greater sensitivity and flexibility to an underlying mathematical machinery: “all sonorous affects are ruled and guided by the dry, scientific number system, as if by the strange miracle-conjuring formulas of an old and fearsome magician” (224). Just when Berglinger’s texts seem to reach a point where mathematics enables instrumental music to communicate emotions, the discourse suddenly breaks down: his letter to the friar (229–233) opens a frightening chasm between his selfish devotion to music and his social conscience. The argument stops just when it had declared that instrumental music is the best means of communicating emotions. Thus, the texts remain disparate and momentary

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records. Since the friar has no consistent view on music either, he is unable to edit, order, and unify the Berglinger archive. The last two Berglinger papers, “Die Töne” (241–248) and “Symphonien” (249–258), generally attributed to Tieck, go furthest in glorifying instrumental music – but they do so inconsistently. When Berglinger regards “resounding and animated” instrumental music an “old language” that we once understood and will grasp again in the future (242), he seems to deviate from the view that the Pythagorean numerical system (“machinery”) has arranged natural sounds into a human order. And yet, a few pages later, he emphasizes just how this difference between natural and instrumental sounds: “these sounds, which art have miraculously discovered and pursued along the greatest variety of paths, are of a completely different nature [from the direct sounds of nature itself]. They do not imitate and do not prettify; rather, they constitute a closed and autonomous world” (245). Berglinger turns to instrumental music in the last essay and regards it as superior to vocal music, which is limited to “heightened declamation and speech” (254). Instrumental music is “independent and free,” for “it prescribes its own rules all by itself; it daydreams playfully and without purpose, and yet it satisfies and reaches what is highest; it completely follows its dark drives and expresses with its triflings what is deepest and most wonderful” (254). Piano and chamber music are mere “school exercises” to perfect orchestral symphonies, which alone are able to portray all human affections and represent a colorful and complex drama that poets are unable to offer. Symphonies can represent, according to Berglinger, a colorful, many-sided, confused, and beautifully developed drama that surpasses what poets are able to create. For do they not speak mysteriously, without need for plausibility or for consistent plot and character (255)? He exemplifies such narrative symphonies with a detailed interpretation of the Macbeth Symphony (belittling called overture) that Tieck’s teacher Reichardt composed in 1787 (255–257). Berglinger was so taken by the music that it continued to live on as an allegory that kept projecting for him powerful images from the dramatic plot. The impression was so deep that the scenes of the drama that followed appeared empty to him. Time and again he remembered the music while watching the stage action. The music should have been performed after the play, as a kind of recapitulation (256–257). In conclusion, Berglinger glorifies Goethe’s drama Egmont (1788) because of the hero’s controversial final apotheosis in prison (Goethe, [1788] 1990: ­328–329). Goethe’s stage directions repeatedly refer to music of drums, trumpets, and other instruments – which his composer acquaintance Philipp ­Christoph Kayser was unable to deliver but Beethoven would compose in

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1­809–1810. ­Berglinger (Tieck) knew only Goethe’s apotheosis text, which ­Schiller, for one, called a “salto mortale in an opera world” (for Schiller’s review see Goethe, 1985–94, III.1: 848). Berglinger regards this verbal music as a completion of the whole drama: “the play concludes, a march that has announced itself earlier already, enters, the curtain falls and a victory symphony concludes the sublime stage play” (Wackenroder, 1799: 258). Berglinger’s inspired language puts flesh and blood on the imagined pure instrumental music that is allegorical. Far from being absolute or even autonomous, this music enacts a highly charged stage drama. After Wackenroder’s early death, Tieck could not work out Berglinger’s visions, just as he was unable to finish the novel he jointly started with ­Wackenroder. The unfinished Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798) was to become a Bildungsroman of a painter. Tieck’s later music novella, “Musikalische Leiden und Freuden” (1824), all but repudiated Berglinger’s glorification of instrumental music” (see Chapter 5). After Wackenroder and Tieck, it was Rochlitz who picked up the theme of music education with two unfinished texts in the early volumes of the amz.2 The first consisted of disconnected fictional letters that do not form a plot. They merely contain remarks and recommendations on haphazard topics such as the representation of ghosts in operas, the elimination of piano from orchestras, the simultaneous conducting and piano playing, and the mixing of comic and dramatic elements in an opera like Mozart’s Don Giovanni (amz 2: 169). Rochlitz also recommended that melomaniacs should not spoil their enjoyment by studying music theory. Quoting from a (fictional?) letter he wrote to his deceased sister, he argues that a dilettante does a disservice to herself by aspiring to become a learned expert. Only composers should master the rules, and even they should avoid theoretical intrusions into their inspiration. It seems that the very notion of “dilettante” had a gender color in Rochlitz’s mind. The story of Ferdinand’s education in Rochlitz’s next unfinished piece harks back to Reichardt and his early-eighteenth-century predecessors. The text schizophrenically splits between a gothic plot and Ferdinand’s detailed description of Händel’s Messiah, based on Mozart’s reworking of the orchestration, four pages of which were attached to the story in the amz. While the young man’s account of Händel’s work is clear, his life is shrouded in gothic mysteries. His guardian sent the reluctant Ferdinand to a town with a music school and a mysterious princely court. Ferdinand disagrees with the cold 2 “Bruchstücke aus Briefen an einen jungen Tonsetzer” (amz 2: 1–5, 17–20, 20–22, 57–63, 161– 170, 177–183) and “Bruchstücke aus dem noch ungedruckten Buche Ferdinand, ­Geschichte der Bildung eines Tonkünstlers” (5: 1–18, 41–52, 57–70, 73–85, 89–100).

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music school director over Carl Heinrich Graun’s popular Tod Jesu (1755), but in the evening he meets with Francesco, an Italian-looking man, who is the father of a highly talented soprano and the music teacher of the widowed princess. In Francesco’s “gothic” house, Ferdinand sees a portrait of a noble woman with an angry mask and black harness, a memory instantaneously flashes on his mind. His guardian asks whether the portrait had a scar on her left breast and pearls in her hair. She does not, but Ferdinand discovers later that a veil had been put on the original painting. Inspired by Francesco and his daughter, Ferdinand composes a few Scottish ballads and canzonets, but when he performs one of these in the castle he inexplicably offends everybody. It is about a boy that tells his mother that a ghost emerged from his bride’s grave, revealing to him that she was murdered by his mother. The line induces a series of mysterious events that never get resolved in the story. Did Rochlitz know how to go on?

Miseducation or Music Madness

Having introduced a range of miseducated musicians, we now turn to ­Rochlitz’s “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” (1804) and Grillparzer’s “Der arme Spielmann” (1847), two remarkable stories about young men who became enamored with music after a miserable upbringing, After publishing his unfinished stories about confused young musicians, Rochlitz shifted gears and wrote a story about an inmate in an insane asylum. Though the basic pattern was retold in Grillparzer’s story, I have found no evidence that Grillparzer knew Rochlitz’s story, nor any scholarly publication that would link them, formally or historically. “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” (1804) Rochlitz’s narrator jots down music notes while listening for the first time to the piano playing of the madman, which he initially assumes to come from a piano tuner in the adjoining room: The narrator then sees the musician: a young man in rapture, raising his eyes to heaven when he hits a “pure” chord. According to the warden, the young man, called Karl, has had no musical training, is no musician, and knows too little of notes and standard musical phrases (amz 6: 646). After a slow section, Karl plays an Allegro with such growing wild enthusiasm that it sends “ghastly” shivers down the narrator’s spine, especially when he hears that Karl accompanies himself with loud but inarticulate whispers. There are, incidentally, numerous critics (Hamilton, 2008: 177 is but one of them) who trace an influence from Rochlitz’s “Besuch im Irrenhause” to

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Illustration 3.1 Musical notation of Karl’s piano playing in the madhouse (Rochlitz, “Besuch im Irrenhause,” amz 6 (1804): 649–650)

­ offmann’s tale of Ritter Gluck. To be sure, Hoffmann submitted Ritter Gluck H to the amz on January 12, 1809 he mentioned to Rochlitz that he had found in the journal “similar things,” for instance the “highly interesting report about a madman,” who improvises in a strange (wunderbare) way on the piano (Hoffmann, 1967–69, i: 261). I read this, however, as an innocuous attempt to please his potential editor. Hoffmann’s term, wunderbare, may be understood

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as “wonderful” or “strange.” This should not, however, distract us from the overriding influence on Ritter Gluck by Diderot. Insane asylums attracted much attention around 1800. Rochlitz’s narrator goes to the madhouse with the disturbing medical aim to examine living people like anatomists do dead ones. Why should one not grasp a genuinely important soul “with a pair of forceps and bring it under a microscope” (645)? What follows is a pre-Freudian exploration of the protagonist’s childhood and youth to explain his strange infatuation with music. In spite of his pathological interests, the narrator hardly interprets. He jots down what Karl tells about his life in several sessions (653 f), leaving it to the readers to disentangle it. Karl was the unwanted child of a marriage contract that excluded sexual relations (!), but due to the father’s “overhastiness” (Übereilung) the wife had to give in. Karl was then farmed out to foster parents who mistreated him, just as his first tyrannical tutor did after his parents readopted him at age seven. According to the visitor, he looks not like a madman but like a “human greenhouse plant” (647). First communion was Karl’s first spiritual experience, which allowed him to identify with Christ’s suffering when listening to Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words” without words (666). Though his mother came to like him, they could not communicate. He is sent away again, this time for a commercial training, but he fails and returns a year later. He says he was initiated into some “wretched mysteries” that damaged his health, confused his mind, emptied his heart, and worsened his self-contempt. The disappointed parents put him into a small room where he is fed and left alone; he loves silence so much that he does not even speak to the servant who brings his food. He is proud and disdains most people. He loves to read the Bible and believes that God makes everything possible. The puzzled narrator asks why such devotion did not inspire him to compose (671). The decisive experience comes in the spring of Karl’s seventeenth year, when he sees from his window a pretty young girl feeding and petting her birds in the building across (677). Karl livens up, is allowed to take a walk with his servant, and he climbs alone to the top of the green hill across the village pub. For the first time, he recognizes life everywhere and hears instead of language the sounds of nature that human beings do not understand (679). In an epiphany, he hears a voice uttering from above pleasant sounds he immediately understands: love everybody, even your enemies (681). Sensuality now tightens its grip on Karl. Returning home, he notices for the first time that his still beautiful mother is flimsily dressed. She registers his light shudder and invites him to eat dinner together. Karl accepts it “with a flame of voluptuousness” (682) that is further fanned when the friendly and blossoming girl from across brings to his room flowers from his mother. Lottchen turns out

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to be an orphan who now works for his mother. Later in the evening, he hears for the first time “harmonic sounds” from his open window: Lottchen plays the guitar, repeatedly modulates, and sings little songs with a­ ppoggiaturas (683–684). Karl falls passionately, but in a “truly pious” manner, in love. He pours his emotions into undelivered daily letters; he asks for a piano and starts to play on it; he listens to her songs, convinced that they are meant for him (693). By the fall, his passion prevents him from eating, writing, or playing. He wants to commit suicide, carries around his farewell letter to her for two weeks, and finally deposits it into Lottchen’s knitting. She pleads with him to give up the idea of suicide (694–695). The mother, who notices his agitation, pressures Lottchen to tell a bit of the letter. Karl wants to follow Lottchen’s advice to go on living, but by accident he is prevented from telling this to her. He collapses and becomes seriously ill, and when he recuperates, Lottchen is gone. Karl’s second musical epiphany comes when his mother goes with him to the same pub upon the suggestion of a psychologist. He climbs the same hill, and becomes especially agitated when the Sunday organ music pours out of the church (700). From now on, he understands music as God’s “language.” He disdains speaking and merely wants to be left alone to play the piano. He wants no music instruction, reads several theoretical studies about it, but retains only a smattering of what he read. With music and the Bible, Karl attains a contented life (701). Karl’s mother dies two years later and his father puts him into the madhouse. From there he sends letters to all rulers and important people. In the one he sent to Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia (702), Karl argues that music allows us to reach God but we need language for earthly matters in everyday life. The sounds of an organ and a harp call to God (703). The base triad represents  the Trinity. The dissonant minor seventh, symbol of earthly life, leads back to the “octave” that generated it (704–705). Language and music are like water and fire; children ought to learn them simultaneously. All this may sound like romantic gibberish but it is a rich source for historical and theoretical reflections on music and beyond. I shall consider three areas of relevance: (1) the nature of Karl’s music, (2) the indices in his life that suggest what went wrong, and (3) the implications for Rochlitz’s conception of music. Karl’s chords have no rhythm or progression. When his playing becomes passionate he starts to hiss and whisper rapidly (651, 706). The narrator cannot translate these into words or musical sounds and he is unable to say whether they were produced accidentally or as expressions of a subconscious intention to communicate in a new language with imaginary figures. More decisive is

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his preference for abstractions pregnant with meaning. Before acquiring skills to communicate with sounds and chords, his favorite play was to gaze at the veins of marbled wallpapers until they became landscapes and other images that metamorphosed into each other (670). Lottchen’s singing draws him to music, but he suppresses her voice and hears only appoggiaturas on the guitar that solidify in his mind as chords. One would expect him to fall in love with her voice, but this is not the case. The narrator thinks that Karl was “converted” to sheer musical chords only later, at the first night, when the open space carried the guitar appoggiaturas better than the voice and Lottchen’s voice melted with the instrument sounds. Karl, who could not understand the words, took everything as chords on the guitar (684). However, Karl dislikes songs and never sings himself (653 f); he ignores church singing just as he fails to register Lottchen’s singing. In order to explain Karl’s love for mere chords, we ought to distinguish his deep religiosity from his physical attraction to Lottchen. The narrator claims that Karl’s Herzensergiessungen (surely adopted from Wackenroder) are purely Platonic, but this negates the story’s repeated allusions to carnality, which includes the father’s “overhasty” sex with his wife, the “wretched mysteries” of Karl’s youthful commercial training (which may refer to child abuse, homosexual experience, or venereal disease), and Karl’s shudder at seeing his flimsily dressed mother. Karl’s intoxication with the divine differs from his erotic earthly sensations. Karl’s obsession with music should not be seen as the cause of his madness. His inhuman general upbringing drowned his verbal communication and pushed him towards instrumental sounds. Rochlitz tells about a failed Bildung, and though his narrator withholds his comments the story seems to agree with Pestalozzi and others that the education of children was oppressive. Karl falls in love with music because his general education failed to teach him how to communicate through words. Distrust in language leads him to disregard church songs and Lottchen’s singing. Once his family and social environment fails to communicate to him love and support by means of language, it becomes almost inevitable that he should instinctively regard voiced music as a contamination of more pure musical communication. Neither music itself, nor some intrinsic madness in Karl should be blamed for his unfortunate failure to communicate. The primary cause is his flawed education, and his “mad” preoccupation with music is merely an attempt to compensate for this. We cannot draw from his story the conclusions that music, whether vocal or instrumental, has a destructive impact on language. Rochlitz preferred vocal music, but he surely did not want to suggest that it is mad to revel in sheer instrumental music. Karl knows nothing about Haydn,

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Mozart, or Beethoven; his disconnected and a-rhythmical chords do not constitute an alternative compositional language. Instrumental music was perceived in many music novellas as a metaphysical communication. “Der arme Spielmann” Grillparzer was apparently unaware that the life of his unfortunate music player was an uncanny replay of a story that Rochlitz wrote almost fifty years earlier. The novella is usually read autobiographically, or else in terms of ­Viennese society, or else in the framework of its reception history. I shall read it retrospectively, linking it to “Der Besuch im Irrenhause.” If Rochlitz’s internal narrator has the curiosity of an anatomist to drag a soul to a microscope with “forceps” (amz 6: 645), Grillparzer’s internal narrator has a “psychological curiosity” ([1847] 1930: 80) and an anthropological voracity (41). He loves humanity in crowds that unite individuals (39). Given his preference for social individuals, it is surprising that he should be “shaking of desire” (42) and “lusting for” (51) more information about the poor and lonely fiddler he accidentally encounters in the crowd of a Viennese festival. Listening to his pathetic violin playing, he ironically calls him a Spielmann, a term used once for medieval itinerant minstrels. The Spielmann Jakob tells his life story during the second encounter at his modest abode (50–77). Like Karl, he tells a sad story about his miseducation and of a neighboring simple girl’s singing that awakens his love for music and an erotic attraction to her. He transforms the failed relationship into a religious devotion to his instrument and to a special kind of music. The final section of the Spielmann’s story (78–81) is more complex and compassionate than Rochlitz’s epilogue. When the narrator returns from a trip a few months later, an old female gardener in the neighborhood tells him that Jakob drowned in a great Danube flood while saving the lives of others. The girl he loved keeps his heritage, the violin, in order to continue the music lessons that Jakob gave her untalented son. Most striking are the parallels between the music philosophies and practices of these musicians, who are both “poor” because they are “pitiable,” financially deprived, and deficient performers. Rochlitz describes Karl’s music via the narrator and Karl’s autobiographical recollections. Grillparzer also presents Jakob’s playing and reflections on music from a double perspective, but his speakers quote directly from yet others and the text ends with a third speaker, the old gardener (79). The remarks on music cannot be separated here neatly into external reports and internal self-examinations. After giving a broad panorama of a folk festival in Brigittenau on the outskirts of Vienna, Grillparzer’s narrator takes a closer look at the beggar musicians (40). Among these, he gives most attention to a man around seventy in

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a neat but threadbare Moltonüberrock (40), who plays a badly cracked violin to his apparent satisfaction. The man marks the rhythm with his whole body, not just with his feet, but “all these efforts to bring unity into his performance were in vain, for what he played sounded like an unconnected sequence of sounds without measure and melody” (41). Neither this nor the laughter of the people standing around seems to disturb him. He plays, unlike the others, from a note stand with some dirty sheets of music on it. The Spielmann is finally disappointed in his lack of success, and when the narrator tries to console him that kids only know waltzes today, it turns out that this is what he played (42). He obviously does not see himself like others do. Indeed, his accusation of the other musicians as faulty and sloppy could well be applied to his own playing, in spite of his efforts to play neatly, note for note what the composer meant (44). People often note that he “scratches” with his violin (46, 58, 63). As the narrator passes his abode, he hears what the man has called “fantasizing”: the sound of a single note rises, falls, and rises again to utmost shrillness, played, apparently, with pleasure (49). Subsequently, he shifts to the intervals of a fourth, a third, and, finally, to a fifth, “now with a trembling extended sound like a quiet crying, then in whirling speed eternally repeated, always the same relations, the same tones” (46–47). When the narrator visits the Spielmann a few days later, he hears the musician “practicing” but he refrains from describing the “hellish concerts” he hears (48). Listening for a while he believes he discovered the musician’s “method in madness”: instead of following the sense and rhythm of the music, he lingers over soothing notes and harmonies and accelerates when coming to dissonances (49). When Jakob (whose name is first mentioned almost at the end of the story) starts to tell his story, readers of “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” immediately recognize the analogies. Jakob, just as Rochlitz’s Karl, fell in love with music by listening to the singing of a young lower-class woman, called Barbara this time. Jakob finds the song so simple, moving, and rightly accented “that there was no need to hear the words.” He believes that “words spoil the music” (54). When he is unable to repeat the girl’s song, he reaches for his neglected violin, and when he now succeeds in catching the melody he falls on his knees and starts to pray (55). This quasi-religious experience encourages him to play notes on the violin that open for him transcendental experiences that are as incoherent as Karl’s sounds on the piano. Both are uninterested in learning the intricacies of music theory and both of them find words superfluous. As Jakob says, most people disturb the “breathing” of music by adding spoken words, which interconnect people on earth but do not link them with heaven: “speech is as necessary for human beings as food, but one should keep the drink that comes

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from God also pure” (55). Listening to a simple song in both cases produces an epiphany, leading to an adoration of pure music as divine gift. Not always. Considerably later, when they do have daily personal contact, she comes to sing the song like a warbling bird and he gets so aroused that he embraces her – and she slaps him (68–69). Grillparzer shared Jakob’s preference for wordless music, while Rochlitz had reservations about instrumental music. The different relations between the authors, their fictional narrators, and their protagonists reflect different attitudes with respect to both music and madness. Karl is officially declared mad in Rochlitz’s story because his preference for instrumental music signals an inability/unwillingness to communicate orally in language (although he does write letters!). Rochlitz himself was somewhat frustrated that he could not pick up the communicative thread in Beethoven’s late piano and chamber music. Grillparzer was notoriously shy in communicating and sustaining human relations, and for this reason he must have seen himself as somewhat of an oddity, though certainly not as a madman. Jakob and his narrator are emotionally attached to each other, while Karl and his narrator are not. Neither Karl nor Jakob play genuine instrumental music. They cling to individual sounds and simple chords, the building blocks of complexity. In terms of music history they are abandoning the humanist seconda prattica of the early baroque, which prioritized voice over the sounds produced by means of animal guts. The chords of harmony establish “vertical” or transhuman connections, not horizontal ones, to other human beings. The narrators do have psychological human interests, though these are not identical. While the narrator telling the story of Karl would prefer some intervention to drag a soul to a microscope with “forceps,” Jakob’s narrator goes to the great Viennese ­Brigittenau on the outskirts to watch how social differences temporarily disappear during the great yearly festivity (35). The Spielmann is a lonely figure, who manages to function in public as an oddity – Hamilton inappropriately calls him “Grillparzer’s mad violinist” (2008: 122) – whereas Rochlitz’s Karl is locked up and kept in isolation as a madman. These differences in their socio-mental labels are not simply due to shifts in the societal treatment of madness. Since Grillparzer published only this story on music, his unpublished diary notes and essays about music can shed some further light on it. He did receive a musical training, composed some pieces, frequented concerts (even ­Kiesewetter’s old-music performances), and wrote poems on music and music performances. Indeed, he was among the most consistent critics of vocal music. Grillparzer’s posthumously published notes on music enthused Eduard Hanslick, who lived for decades in Grillparzer’s Vienna but never got to know

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him personally though they must have rubbed shoulders at concerts. When Hanslick obtained from Kathi Fröhlich, Grillparzer’s eternal bride and the executor of his will, Grillparzer’s unpublished texts on music, he wrote his article “Grillparzer und die Musik” (1876) and inserted extensive notes into the sixth edition of his main work, Vom musikalisch-Schönen. According to Hanslick, he wrote on music as lovingly and seriously as Rousseau, and expressed deeper and more original ideas about music than any other poet ([1876] 1885: 331). Hanslick was jubilant about his discovery because he found in Grillparzer’s writings ideas for which he himself came under heavy attack. However, as Thomas Horst (1991) has shown, Hanslick overlooked some crucial differences. According to an autobiographical sketch from 1822, sounds tended to prickle his nerves until his imagination engaged in a play with musical images. Sound combinations unaffected by a text or a feeling were magic to him: “Music as such, which follows only the laws of its own essence and the influences of an enthusiasm without concepts, has always meant for me something infinitely holy and supernatural. Therefore, I prefer instrumental music to any other kind” (Grillparzer, 1909–48, I.16: 15).3 This preference for wordless sounds and constructs agrees with the disposition of Rochlitz’s fictional Karl and anticipates Grillparzer’s own Jakob. In an early poem, the eyes of queen music flash madness, though her forehead is beaming and her mouth emits loving sounds.4 I wish to show that he found instrumental music as dangerous as wonderful, and that his view of vocal music was determined by his preference for poetry over prose. Grillparzer glorified Clara Wieck’s Viennese performance on January 7 of Beethoven’s Appassionata, 1838 with a poetic fable about instrumental music, which Schumann found the most beautiful ever written about her (1886: 273): a dissatisfied magician locks up all his djins in a chest, throws the key into the sea, and dies. A young shepherdess looks at the key hunt, haphazardly reaches 3 “[w]as mich in der Musik vorzüglich ansprach, eigentlich der Ton, der Klang war, der als Nervenreiz Gemüt und Phantasie aufregt, wäre es auch nur, um sie dann dem Spiel mit ihren eigenen Bildern zu überlassen. Ebenso magisch als der Ton an sich, wirkte von jeher auf mich die Verbindung der Töne nach ihrem eigenen Gesetze, das ist nicht nach der Bestimmung eines von außen Hinzugekommenen, als eines Textes, der gegebenen Aufgabe des Ausdrucks dieser oder jener Empfindung oder Leidenschaft. Für mich hat die Musik als solche, bloß den Gesetzen ihrer Wesenheit und den Einflüssen einer begrifflosen Begeisterung gehorchend, immer etwas unendlich heiliges, überirdisches gehabt. Ich ziehe daher auch die Instrumentalmusik eigentlich jeder andern vor” (Grillparzer, 1909–48, I.16: 15). 4 “Sey mir gegrüßt, o Königinn! / mit der strahlenden Herrscherstirn / mit dem lieblich tönenden Munde / und dem Wahnsinn sprühenden Blick” (Grillparzer, 1909–48, I.2.5: 112). The poem, titled “Musik,” was written in 1812.

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into the waves, finds the key, opens the chest and releases thereby spirits that start to work for her. She leads them with white fingers, “sensibly thoughtless, as girls are.”5 Obviously ignorant that Clara’s artless art was instilled by father Wieck’s ruthless teaching method, Grillparzer praises, thus, Clara’s serendipitous play with no mental or physical effort. It seems to be guided by external spirits. By praising Clara’s playful performance, Grillparzer intimates that pure music was to be light, transparent, harmonious, and unified by melody (1909– 48, I.10: 169), best exemplified by his admired Mozart. Grillparzer’s speech at Beethoven’s funeral (I.14: 49–50) and his recollections of Beethoven (1844–45) give a different image of instrumental music. He admired the composer, though he never set to music the libretto “Melusine” that Grillparzer wrote for him; he regarded him a genius that composed unified music in fragmented times, and showed enthusiasm when the spirit became impoverished (884). But this “enthusiasm without concept”, “this pure uncontrolled passion” threatened the equilibrium of Grillparzer’s classicist 5 “Clara Wieck und Beethoven (F-moll Sonate)” (Grillparzer, 1909–48, I.10: 169). Ein Wundermann, der Welt, des Lebens satt, Schloß seine Zauber grollend ein In festverwahrten, demantharten Schrein, Und warf den Schlüssel in das Meer und starb. Die Menschlein mühen sich geschäftig ab, Umsonst! kein Sperrzeug löst das harte Schloß, Und seine Zauber schlafen wie ihr Meister. Ein Schäferkind, am Strand des Meeres spielend, Sieht zu der hastig unberufnen Jagd. Sinnvoll gedankenlos, wie Mädchen sind, Senkt sie die weißen Finger in die Flut Und faßt, und hebt, und hats. – Es ist der Schlüssel! Auf springt sie, auf, mit höhern Herzensschlägen, Der Schrein blinkt wie aus Augen ihr entgegen, Der Schlüssel paßt. Der Deckel fliegt. Die Geister, Sie steigen auf und senken dienend sich Der anmutreichen, unschuldsvollen Herrin, Die sie mit weißen Fingern, spielend, lenkt. In her book on Clara, Eva Weissweiler reports about Moritz Gottlieb Saphir’s positiv and subtle but not uncritical review of the concert, which neither father nor daughter Wieck ever mentioned again, though it fueled her anti-Semitism (1992: 95). It seems more than likely that Grillparzer’s poem responded to Saphir’s review, which speaks of shackled spirits in the notes waiting for liberation. Clara frees them, not unintentionally (as in Grillparzer), but with axe and shovel, hitting, digging and hoeing until she can “industriously and forcefully” drag the spirits from their imprisonment. Grillparzer did react to Castelli’s negative review of the poem in two epigrams from 1838.

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ideal. His daring combinations, and his all too frequent shrieking sounds and shouting threatened the delicacy and exactitude of musical hearing. His leaps endangered the order, interconnection, and unity of a piece. By disregarding the rules too often, he made them dispensable, though they were invaluable for a healthy and unprejudiced mind. He gradually sacrificed beauty to a growing interest in strong, shocking, and intoxicating effects that were more damaging in music than in the other arts (II.9: 171–172). Grillparzer frequently criticized vocal music for employing prose instead of poetry. In the early allegorical poem “The Sisters” (“Die Schwestern”) God sends the sister angels prose and poetry to the earth. Poetry floats in the air, prose fails to steal poetry’s light wings and is dragged down by her heavy limbs. The conclusion is a call: “German prose, return to safe ground / German poetry, take off again!” (Grillparzer, 1909–48, I.10: 163)6 Opera librettos, written in low-level poetry, presented a special problem for Grillparzer, and he did not like that Weber and Wagner moved towards through-composed operas (i.e. without the stop-start structure of recitativo punctuated by arias). Given his preference for instrumental music, he vehemently rejected the subordination of music to libretto. If operas are judged via poetry, all dramatic-musical compositions are senseless. Operas should be understood as musical images with explanatory texts written beneath them. (Grillparzer, 1909–48, II.7: 242–243)7 Hence, Grillparzer readily allowed composers to “betray” their texts, as long as this bolstered the organic development and structuring of music. He found it intolerable when opera composers followed the libretto words, thereby setting them to music that was broken, unmelodious, and inorganic: word-dominated music was inorganic and mechanically constructed (II.7: 242–243). He claimed he was not in favor of neglecting the text, only, as in the case of Mozart, for occasional deviations from it. Composers must stick to the scene but are allowed to deviate from the text if the music, mostly the melody, asks for it (II.7: 312). Melody was for Grillparzer not only the great unifying power of pure music but also a mediator between text and music.8 6 “Kehr, deutsche Prosa, rück zur sichern Erde / Nimm wieder Flügel, deutsche Poesie” ­(Grillparzer, 1990–48, I.10: 163). 7 “Als Grundsatz gelte: Keine Oper soll vom Gesichspunkte der Poesie betrachtet warden, – von diesem aus ist jede dramatisch-musickalische Komposition Unsinn, – sondern vom Gesichtspunkte der Musick; als ein musickalisches Bild mit darunter geschriebenem er­ klärendem Texte. Ballet-Musick wäre eigentlich der Triumph der Tonkunst” (Grillparzer, 1909–48, II.7: 242–243). 8 See the high-minded but unconvincing remark: “Wer deine Kraft kennt, Melodie! … wird die Musik nicht zu Nachtreterin der Poesie machen: er mag der letztern den Vorrang ­geben

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On these grounds, Grillparzer was receptive to Rossini’s “childish dalliance” (kindisches Getändel) (II.7: 312).9 Around 1820, he wanted to respond to Lessing’s Laokoon with an essay which would have defended, like Stendhal, the dominance of melody in the Rossini operas. The Italian composer exemplified in his eyes “how senseless it was to turn opera music into a mere slave of poetry, and to demand that music should deny its typical effectiveness, by limiting itself to an inadequate stammering repetition of what language clearly speaks in terms of concepts” (II.7: 242). For Italians, words are hardly more than a “caption” to the composer’s sound image (II.7: Tgb. 808, 898). But why was Grillparzer so vehemently against “musical prose” if the libretto words were just captions (projected in our days unto a screen above the stage) accompanying the music? He objected to placing prose above poetry (he wrote drama and poetry) and words above music. Though he was forced to admit that Gluck was a “truly great” composer, he was uneasy about his “rehabilitation” of words, and degraded all of his operas to a singspiel (II.7: Tgb. 820, 899).10 This explains Grillparzer’s violent and ironic notes on Weber’s operas and on a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture (I.13: 149).11 In 1822, he wrote, but did not publish, a parodistic announcement of a “brilliant” invention: each note in a composition should be replaced by a letter, following the existing a, b, c, in designating notes in a scale (I.13: 98–100).

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… aber er wird auch der erstern ihr eignes, unabhängiges Reich zugestehen” (Tgb. 834: ­Grillparzer, 1909–48, II.7: 326–317). Grillparzer attacked Ignaz Franz Mosel, the main Viennese critic of Rossini (Tgb. 820: Grillparzer, 1909–48, II.7: 312–313), and he also disliked recitatives, where words dominate. Danuser (1975: 36–37) relates this to A.B. Marx’s later remark in Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (1845), which also acknowledges that in recitatives melody cannot have an autonomous form ([1837–47] 1852, iii: 388). Hanslick also wanted a radical separation between spoken drama and opera. In his view, Gluck (and Wagner) regarded opera as mere intensified declamation ([1854] 1976: 36–37) Mozart actually disagreed with Gluck (51). Hanslick had similar reservations about recitatives and prose dialogues in operas. Hegel had a more balanced approach (Hegel, [1835] 1965, ii: 311–312). “Der Freischütze” (probably after Nov. 3, 1821; Grillparzer, 1909–48, I.14: 33–36); Euryanthe 888–889; Tgb 1315–1316 = 2.8: 128–129.

chapter 4

Serialized Novellas Music novellas were written, and mostly serialized, between 1797 and 1848. They appeared in a handful of German, Austrian, and French journals. I could not come up with good explanations why this literary approach to music was not cultivated in Italy, England, and other countries. The French music novellas followed the German ones almost thirty years later. The time gap roughly corresponds to the later launching of the French music journals. Though genuine differences existed between the German and French cultural conditions that gave rise to these writings, the writings themselves were interlinked through ideas, translations, and intertextual networks. Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s Le neveu inspired Hoffmann’s first music novella, while the récit musical originated from a veritable Hoffmann craze in France from 1828 onward. Hoffmann’s narrative style, irony, and approach to music continued to challenge French writers, from Janin to Balzac. Translated stories of Tieck, Rellstab, Wagner, and Carl Maria von Weber were published in France, but no French music novellas were immediately translated into German.1 Instrumental music stimulated the music novellas and music journals accommodated them. Prior to the launching of the amz, only the pioneering Josef-Berglinger stories were significant, while after 1848 the amz no longer existed and the rgm lost interest in fiction. The three most important music novellas published after 1850, Eduard Mörike’s “Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag” (1855), Theodor Storm’s “Ein stiller Musikant” (1875), and Leo Tolstoy’s 1 A flurry of new studies has emerged in recent decades covering the German as well as the French musico-literary field : Karl Prümm (1986), Ruth E. Müller (1989), Barbara ­Naumann (1990), Christine Lubkoll (1995), and Corina Caduff (2003) about the German and M ­ atthias Brzoska (1995) and Katharine Ellis (1995) and (2004) about the French tradition. Surprisingly, these interdisciplinary studies tend to have a national scope. Pursuing the concept of ­Gesamtkunstwerk, Brzoska (1995) systematically studied only the French novellas, while Ellis analyzed the rgm (1995). Recent German studies focus on the period around 1800 and tend to restrict the German dimension to the writings of Wackenroder/Tieck and ­Hoffmann, which they label “absolute music.” This leads to the view that music literature was “­mythologized” (see Lubkoll, 1995; Prümm, 1986; Naumann, 1990), which neglects its social, and national dimensions. As Brzoska has argued, the social issues were, indeed, more alive during the July Monarchy in France, but they were not wholly absent in Germany in the early ­nineteenth century. The female voice does receive attention in the mentioned studies, above all in ­Theilacker’s work.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_006

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“Kreutzer Sonata” (1889), were not serialized. In this chapter I shall examine the major shifts within the genre, but I shall disregard a number of literary adaptations of musical themes and forms. Thus, I shall ignore attempts to adopt the sonata, the fugue, or the canon as literary form. I shall also ignore accidental or episodic appearances of music in fiction, of which Joseph-Marc Bailbé found more than seven-hundred instances in French prose works published between 1830 and 1848. The main figures of Balzac’s novel Béatrix (1839), for instance, are based on George Sand, Franz Liszt, and his partner Marie d’Agoult, but music itself has no central function in the novel. Ambiguities about the moral, intellectual, and social value of music must have been one reason why this art did not inspire Bildungsromane until the twentieth century. Virtually all the stories about the education of young ­German musicians remained unfinished and portrayed failures. They include Reichardt’s story about Gulden, the just discussed Berglinger stories, and Rochlitz’s two serialized fragmentary stories. In contrast to music novels, the music novellas did not and could not cover a complete education or career, and formally fitted rather into the feuilletons of the upcoming music journals.2 When and where were music novellas serialized? Mary Sue Morrow’s thorough study of German Music Criticism in the Late Nineteenth Century (1997) finds no fiction in the many short-lived music journals that preceded the amz, while the rgm ceased to publish music novellas by the time Maurice ­Schlesinger sold his business in 1846. Apart from the amz and the rgm, music novellas were also published in the German Cäcilia, bamz, and NZjM, the French L’Artiste, Le Pianiste, Le Ménestrel, and Revue de Paris, the Viennese Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung, and two short-lived Spanish journals. La I­ beria Musical (Madrid, 1842) published stories on well-known composers, such as “Aventuras de artistas: dos noches de Mozart” and “El rosario de Haydn o el canto del cisne.” El Anfión Matritense (Madrid, 1843), directed by Miguel Agustín Príncipe, a poet, journalist, and gifted amateur performer, published in the supplements short stories, novels and anecdotes, which constituted, however, only 0.8% of the journal.3

2 They often reappeared later in revised form in book collections. Hoffmann, for instance, ­collected new and already published stories in his Fantasiestücke in Caillots Manier (1814–15) and Die Serapionsbrüder (1819–21). 3 Basic information on these Spanish journals can be found on the ripm (Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1759–1962). I have not been able to read the mentioned fiction.

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When the music novellas went out fashion in the mid-1840s, the rgm temporarily accommodated book-length serials by Edouard Monnais and Maurice Bourges, while George Sand serialized in 1842–43 her voluminous novel Consuelo in her journal La Revue indépendante (co-edited with Pierre Leroux, and Louis Viardot). The rgm adopted a feuilleton format in 1845 that printed music fiction at the bottom of the page, but by 1849 both feuilletons and music novellas disappeared from the journal. The following overview of the roughly forty years of music novellas is not strictly chronological, though it does attempt to indicate the major preoccupations and shifts within the genre: (1) Hoffmann’s publications in the amz; (2) French Hoffmann translations and the use of Hoffmann as a fictional figure; (3) Balzac and the turn to the opera; (4) Beethoven images; and (5) fictional figures based on historical musicians. This outline suggests that almost thirty years of the genre’s history may be associated with Hoffmann: the period of his amz contributions was followed by a gap until translations of his works and fictional representations of his own figure appeared in French journals in the years 1829–1834. Hoffmann’s Don Juan story (1813) was perhaps the first novella about opera, but the genuine turn occurred in the mid-1830s, reaching a problematic high point with Balzac’s two novellas (1837–39). The sudden burst of music novellas about historical musicians starting 1836 was another step away from the preoccupation with instrumental music.

Hoffmann in Germany

Ritter Gluck gave Hoffmann access to the amz. By 1815, he had published there forty-one music texts, of which I regard eight as fictional narratives. With Hoffmann’s move to Berlin in 1814 and Rochlitz’s resignation as editor in 1818, literature lost terrain in the amz. Work at the Prussian Supreme Court and poor health prevented Hoffmann from reporting regularly to the journal on Berlin’s musical life, but he published a few more music novellas in Berlin journals, including the Ahnungen aus dem Reich der Töne (1816) and Rat Krespel (1818). My main point is a paradoxical one: the music novellas constituted a new genre that cannot be neatly separated from the neighboring fictional and ­non-fictional genres. I shall first look at the hybridity of Hoffmann’s German texts and then at the genre label conte fantastique that his works introduced in France. Hoffmann’s music publications resist labeling. The music reviews collected in his Schriften zur Musik are highly professional examples of early ­music

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c­riticism but they often overlap with his music fiction. They include, for ­instance, a letter by the fictional Kapellmeister Kreisler (1963: 327–332), whose subtitle says in brackets “Communicated by E.T.A. Hoffmann.” The t­hirteen Kreisleriana pieces of the Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier contain music criticism attributed to a fictional author – as if the text had been signed with a pseudonym. Indeed, Hoffmann did not sign most of his reviews and this obscured for a long time the volume of his contributions. Fifty-eight of them seem ascertained now. Hoffmann started with reviews of instrumental pieces, based on scores, but he indicated as early as 1809 that he wished to review also vocal compositions, even operas, from scores. (1963: 404–405). Hoffmann was among the first to recognize Beethoven’s greatness, but his real love was Mozart, whose humor he particularly treasured (410, 411). Symphonies emerged, as Hoffmann rightly noted, from theatrical overtures that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven turned into independent and completed musical forms, giving them the highest form of instrumental music. This way, the symphonies became the opera of instruments. “The composer now has the freedom to use the endless richness of the instruments in their most diverse mixtures and to thus let the wonderful secret magic of music have its powerful effect on the listeners (145). At this point, Hoffmann placed instrumental music unequivocally above vocal music, but a few years later, in the essay on “Old and New Church Music,” his priority was no longer so clear. Diffusing and blurring by means of intertextual references, character portrayals, and genre ambiguities was typical of Hoffmann writing about music. “The Poet and the Composer” may serve again as an example, this time because of its multiple publications. The main topic, the relationship between libretto and music was originally a conversation embedded in a both autobiographically and historically authentic portrayal of the Napoleonic war. But the historical reference became blurred when Hoffmann included the story in Die Serapions-Brüder (1819), in which friends in a group tell stories to one another: the former external narrator of the dialogue now becomes a fictional figure in the frame story. To make things even more complicated, the different narrators are both called Ferdinand: the name appears on two fictional levels. Scher thinks that the double Ferdinand mirrors the ambiguity of the answer to the question whether the librettist and the composer of an opera should be one and the same person (1998: 244). In my view, the dizzying perspectival con­ fusion of the final version relativizes all statements. The late French translation of the dialogue (rgm 6: 457–460, 465–469) indicates that the librettist/ composer identity was no longer of interest in France – until it was raised again by Wagner.

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Hoffmann in France and in Fiction

In 1828, Jean-Jacques Ampère wrote a favorable review of Julius Eduard Hitzig’s book about his friend Hoffmann (1823),4 and the following year Hoffmann gained a second life in France, not only via translations and studies of his works but also as a fictional figure.5 Ironically, the French interest in Hoffmann was launched in England with Walter Scott’s thunderous attack on him in the Foreign Quarterly Review titled “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Compositions; and particularly on the Works of Ernst Theodor William Hoffman.” (Scott, 1827: 60–98). Roughly the last third of this article was translated into French and published on April 12, 1829 as “Du Merveilleux dans le roman” in the Revue de Paris. Scott’s criticism of Hoffmann did probably more damage to his own French reputation than to the fame of his target. The newly founded Revue immediately straightened the balance by publishing in May an extract of Hoffmann’s “Golden Pot” in Saint-Marc-Girardin’s translation, and Adolphe L­ oève-Veimars’s translation of Ritter Gluck in June. In November, ­Loève-Veimars published the first four volumes of his Hoffmann translations under the title Contes fantastiques, with a preface by Walter Scott (!), but Loève-Veimars rejected Scott in the announcement (see Castex, 1951: 48–49). He went on to publish the following year eight more volumes of Hoffmann translations and another four under the title Contes nocturnes in 1830. In that year, Théodor Toussenelle started to publish his translations in a rival ­sixteen-volume edition, and Henry Egmont published yet different translations under the title Œuvres complètes in 1836. Elizabeth Teichmann (1961) gives a scholarly overview of the dizzying conglomeration of prints and reprints, together with Loève-Veimars’s first study of Hoffmann titled Vie de E.T.A. Hoffmann (1833). We need not go into the details of how precisely Hoffmann contributed to the emergence of the French genre conte fantastique, since only a fraction of  the genre is about music. Suffice it to note that Janin and others often attached the generic label to their fiction, though Janin admitted in the preface to his Contes fantastiques et littéraires (1832) that this was just a trap (leurre).

4 Ampère’s review appeared in the French newspaper Le Globe on August 2, 1828. 5 Brzoska suggests that portrayals that depict him as a drunkard and failed composer were more important than his fantastic stories for they signalled a crisis of romanticism and the need to steps towards realism. This may attribute too much influence to Janin’s fictional ­portrayals of Hoffmann.

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Janin’s Hoffmann Janin’s first contributions to the Hoffmanniana were the sketches “Kressler” [sic, his spelling for “Kreisler”] and “Hoffmann et Paganini” published in 1831. In both, Hoffmann features as a rather pitiful drunkard. “Kressler,” a plotless monologic snapshot signed as Hoffmann, reveals an alienated, unhappy, and alcoholic mind that has no ironic or brilliant insights, while the Hoffmann of the other story laments his failure when he hears an imaginary Paganini playing. Janin’s Hoffmann article in the rgm is intellectually and artistically far superior to these earlier published two sketches. Its second part is a plagiarized reworking of Hoffmann’s own “Casual Reflections,” which I have quoted at the beginning of the first chapter (1989: 423–431). In order to understand Janin’s recycling, we first have to examine Hoffmann’s own essay, for its multifaceted image of creativity, rationality, and publicity in music has often been schematized.6 Let us remember that the critic is the narrator but the dialogue is internal since he speaks alternatively as a critic and as a composer. In Hoffmann’s essay, the narrator’s introductory praise of music criticism is countered by an angry composer who fears that his work will be fastened to an “anatomical table” to reveal its rule violations. Apart from occasional interjections by the composer, the rest of the text conveys the narrator’s differentiated thoughts about good and bad music criticism. Composers may regard their inspired work as “true,” but reason must be allowed to judge the soundness of its foundations even if the composer conceived the music “in the sacred hours of inspiration” (425). The critic believes (with a hint at Hoffmann’s own fictional Councillor Krespel) that the intellect, “this sometimes rather grumpy taskmaster,” must have the right to tear down a music structure if the foundations are weak. But this intellect sees the artwork as an organic tree that it not governed by Rameau’s strict mathematical music rules: Here you find your work not lying on an anatomical slab under murderous hands of a barbaric anatomist, but standing before an allied spirit who casts a sharp eye over it and, instead of ruthlessly cutting it to pieces, puts into words all that he discovers in it, the entire edifice with all its wonderful intricacies. … Think of your work, my dear composer, as a 6 Teichmann (1961: 139) oversees that Janin copies Hoffmann and praises him for his erudite naming of Heinse, while Ellis (2004: 258–261) and Brzoska (1995: 84) do not fully take into ­account the indirect discourse. The central message of Janin’s story cannot be summarized as “only the creative had the right to judge creativity or to explain its inner working” (Ellis, 2004:  258).

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beautiful and imposing tree which has sprung from a tiny seed and now extends its blossom-laden branches high into the blue sky. (426) The friendly critics of the projected music journal will find the seed from which the compositional tree had sprouted. Good critics analyze works from inside rather than outside. The narrator/critic admits that contemporary music is often sensationalist, and he anticipates that the composer will respond: “No more of this jangle and clatter, forget all your modern music, forget Mozart and Beethoven, and the sooner the better” (428 f). Indeed, the composer perceives the critic by now not as an anatomist but as a young man who would allow noise and gossip to float in the journals. Hence he calls to close windows and doors, to lock critics out (429). The narrator now has to defend chatter. Good critics should speak to dilettantes as well as to experts, and artistic journals must include some gossiping (Klatscherei) about composers, composition, and musical life in general: “there is a sort of acceptable tittle-tattle which, rather than being malicious, serves to make even stronger the spiritual bond between the multitude and the beloved, revered composer, … we cannot separate the music from the composer’s work from his person, and … when we think of the one we always think of the other, for otherwise portraits of popular composers would not be so eagerly sought and purchased” (430). If Hoffmann made fun of the philistines by using his fictional Kreisler, here he goes far out to reach the dilettanti. Conveniently, he does not mention that popular gossip strengthens the sales. Janin hit upon the brilliant idea of recycling these reflections about music journals for the launching of Schlesinger’s Gazette musicale. He probably knew about the Hoffmann article from Franz Stöpel, editor of that ephemeral journal, who now lived in Paris and published as François Stoepel an article about the poetics of instrumental music (rgm 1: 327–330; 2: 55–57), reproaching Hoffmann for inconsistency his judgement. Janin’s fictional dialogue (rgm 1: 99–102, 109–112) recycles Hoffmann’s conversation between a critic and a composer. The result is more subtle, playful, and confrontational than the sketches from 1831, though the essay still portrays Hoffmann as an alcoholic. The fictional Hoffmann learns at the end of the first installment that the visitor is a music critic; most of the second installment retells Hoffmann’s essay as an ironic inner conversation (109, 110). The crucial deviation occurs when the description of the organic tree leads to the comment: “And they say, thanks to the criticism: that beautiful tree is only a wretched kernel” (110). Both Ellis and Brzoska feel that calling the “seed” a “wretched kernel” inverts Hoffmann’s aesthetics, but the nature of the kernel need not

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be turned into a fundamental aesthetic issue separating Janin from Hoffmann. The split here is between Janin’s intoxicated and frustrated Hoffmann figure and the well-reasoned argument that Hoffmann himself made in his “Casual Reflections.”

Opera Fiction

Though instrumental music gave major impulses to the development of narrative discourses about music and to the music journals that printed them, instrumental music never dominated the content of the journals, and it did not take long before vocal music became once more the main subject of publications. I have touched upon some of the main impulses. In Germany, ­Hoffmann turned to the composition of Undine and became preoccupied with composing his own romantic opera. He also wrote a major essay on older and newer church music. “Ombra adorata!” and “Über einen Ausspruch Sacchinis” in the Kreisleriana, as well as “Don Juan,” “Councillor Krespel,” “The Poet and the Composer,” and the essay on church music all show that Hoffmann soon became preoccupied with vocal music, partly in connection with his own conducting and composing. In the German and Austrian opera houses Italian operas, mainly those of Rossini, gained great popularity, in spite of heavy criticism from Marx. Finally, an eagerly anticipated German one, Weber’s Der Freischütz, reached the stage as a European success. For Schlesinger in Paris, the Grands opéras brought not only discussion topics but also financial income that could further be bolstered by relevant contributions to his journal. In the 1820s, the amz published a few dialogues on texting instrumental music (see the next chapter) but only few novellas on operas appeared in the ­German journals. Among them was Tieck’s rather poor “Musikalische Leiden und Freuden” (1824. Confrontations of vocal and instrumental music had to wait until the launching of the French journals. Schlesinger was eager to offer music novellas to the French public. He saw it as part of his mission to publish novellas that would popularize German instrumental music whereas music novellas about operas were attractive to the Parisian enthusiasts of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti on the one hand and Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Auber on the other. The trend towards opera became evident in 1835, when Madeleine, Méry, Dumas, and Adam published opera stories, and it reached a peak with Balzac’s “Gambara” (1837), commissioned by Schlesinger, and “Massimilla Doni,” written simultaneously with it. Though much attention has a­ lready been payed to these two novellas, I need to pick up those aspects that are ­crucial for

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my confrontation of vocal and instrumental music – even if B ­ alzac offers no clear position on it. Opera in Balzac’s “Gambara” and “Massimilla Doni” According to René Guise, editor of Balzac’s works in the Pléiade edition, “Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu” (1831) and the two music novellas define Balzac’s ­complex aesthetics.7 The opposition between vocal and instrumental music is central to this complexity. We see it, for instance, in the clash between the admiration for Beethoven’s Fifth in César Birotteau and Massimilla’s comment on Rossini’s Mosè overture: “even you, great Beethoven, on your knees!” (Balzac, 1839: 142) Why did Balzac drop “Gambara’s” original subtitle “ou la voix humaine” (the human voice)? Guise assumes that Balzac turned to opera because he expected he could treat it more easily without technical knowledge (Balzac, 1976–81, x: 1433). Brzoska rightly responds that “opera constituted the heart of musical life then” (1983: 52), but this does not take into account the missionary zeal with which, for instance, the conductor Habeneck mounted a campaign to make Beethoven known in Paris. Schlesinger was torn: in his heart, he was a German missionary of great instrumental music, but his head followed the ringing of the operatic cash register. Gambara is a poor Italian composer living in Paris with an attractive wife, Marianna. A young Italian nobleman, Andrea Marcosini, who pursues her, becomes curious about his music too. In the first section, set in the local restaurant, Gambara gives an account of his apparently brilliant opera about Mohammed, but this ends with a disaster when he goes to the piano and plays on it only incomprehensible cacophony. Then Andrea treats him to a performance of Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable, to which Gambara reacts with high praise – under the influence of alcohol. After a brief aesthetic discussion, the now sober Gambara retracts and joins Andrea and the Italians in the restaurant in criticising the opera. Andrea runs away with Marianna, but then marries a young dancer and Marianna returns to Gambara, who plays on the streets of Paris to have something to eat. Auguste Belloy, Balzac’s secretary, suggested to him in October 1836 to portray an odd Hoffmannesque musician, comparable to his painter in “Le chef d’oeuvre” (Balzac, 1976–81, x: 1432). Indeed, Balzac dedicated the piece to Belloy, thanking him with a brilliant double comment on Ritter Gluck and Gambara: 7 See Guise’s introductions and notes in Balzac, 1976–81, x. On Balzac and music see also Brzoska (1983), Barricelli (1967), Farrant (2002), Guichard (1952), Claudon (1971), Citron (1967), Ellis (2004: 271–279).

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[…] you tossed to my pen a figure worthy of Hoffmann, that casket of unrecognized gems, that pilgrim seated at the gate of Paradise with ears to hear the songs of the angels but no longer a tongue to repeat them, playing on the ivory key with fingers crippled by the stress of divine inspiration, believing that he is expressing celestial music to his bewildered listeners. (459) The passage fits Ritter Gluck’s vision, except that he can play the piano well in the final scene. It fits Gambara even better, for he is unable to convey to his audience the “celestial” music he experiences inside. After a complicated and still debated genesis, which involved a fire in the print shop that destroyed the original sixteen pages, the rgm novella finally appeared in the fall of 1837 as “Gambara.” The first chapter of “Massimilla” was pre-published in Balzac’s Études philosophiques, also in 1837, and a partial prepublication of the Mosè performance appeared on August 25, 1839 in La France musicale, with a preamble that underlined Stendhal’s role in introducing ­Rossini in France. The complete story appeared only in 1840. Balzac wrote to Mme Hanska on May 24, 1837 that music appeared in the two stories “under the double form of execution and composition,” meaning that Gambara speaks at length about his own composition, whereas M ­ assimilla offers a detailed loving commentary on Rossini’s opera Mosè in Egitto, which Stefan Zweig exaggeratedly called “one of the most perfect pieces of musical interpretation in the whole of literature” (1946: 264). Whatever we may think of the oversized performance commentary, one should give the credit, as ­Balzac does in his dedication, to the German musical advisor Jacques Strunz.8 The gesture is not self-evident, for the novella is a hymn to Rossini’s music, to ­Venice, and to the Italian opera culture in the spirit of Stendhal’s book on ­Rossini (see ­Chapter 8). The novelty of “Massimilla Doni” with respect to “Gambara” and most earlier music novellas is the treatment of love and sex. While music novellas were traditionally saturated with sublimated, Platonic love, this romantic cliché acquired a new meaning when Balzac contrasted it with “secret voluptuosity.” He wrote to Mme Hanska: “to understand music is to love more what one loves already. It means to think voluptuously about its secret voluptuosity.”9 To be precise, the voluptuosity is neither in the described stage performance nor in Rossini’s music, but in Balzac’s plot that associates opera culture as such with 8 Brzoska’s excellent article is critical of the Pléiade commentary for not recognizing the contribution of Strunz, related to a misdated letter of Balzac to Schlesinger. 9 “Entendre de la musique, c’est mieux aimer ce qu’on aime. C’est volupteusement penser à ses secrets voluptés” (1545 cf 578, in: Balzac, 1990, i: 226).

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eroticism. The celebrated soprano Tinti twice “diabolically” seduces Emilio Memmi, who has had a Platonic relation with Massimilla. In the end, Emilio and Massimilla get married. Love appears here as both divine and diabolic, and music remains secular, in spite of the biblical libretto. Are these Balzac stories still “Hoffmanesque?”10 Balzac’s relation to ­Hoffmann was problematic. He avoided the use of the label “conte fantastique”; rightly so, for there is nothing supernatural or oneiric in his stories. If, as Ellis argues, Schlesinger used the Hoffmannesque French contes fantastiques “as a vehicle for an artistic manifesto that was to advertise the principles of the publishing house” (2004: 280), then that label was used only for Janin’s contributions to the rgm. Moreover, Balzac defended his music ignorance in a letter to Schlesinger on May 29, 1837 (rgm 4: 199–201). He saw himself as a “man of letters” but the artists continued to divide the world into artists, connoisseurs, and grocery men, disallowing that grocery men may also be connoisseurs. Schlesinger convinced him, against his better judgment, that he was capable of writing about music, but, as Balzac put it, he was always tempted to kick the theoretician who spoiled his enjoyment by calling his attention to a technical aspect like “this is in F major.”

Historical Musicians in Fiction

The rgm opened with Janin’s “Le Dîner de Beethoven,” an homage to the composer in a light and popular style, which apparently fictionalized Schlesinger’s own Viennese meetings with Beethoven in 1818.11 It was followed by Rellstab’s “Beethoven. Tableau des souvenirs de ma vie,” Johann Peter Lyser’s “Beethoven,” and, above all, by Wagner’s “Une visite à Beethoven.”12 As Schlesinger told Wagner, it got “quite a sensational friendly reception.” ­According to Wagner, 10

11 12

Balzac wrote to Schlesinger (rgm 4: 199–201) that Hoffman was aware that a mere glance at Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven would reveal that secret laws interconnect painting, music, and literature (Kreisler). But Hoffmann was content to write about this alliance in thériaki (an opium eater, a smoker of hashish). His works expressed admiration, but he felt too vividly, he was too much of a musician. Balzac thought he had the advantage of being French and hardly a musician: “I can give the key to the palace where he became a drunkard” (201). See Schlesinger’s letter of February 27, 1859 to A.B. Marx, discussed in: Ellis, 2004: 256; Sonneck, 1967: 112–113. Rellstab, “Beethoven. Tableau des souvenirs de ma vie” (rgm 7: 411–415, 419–422, 4­ 39–443), Johann Peter Lyser, “Beethoven” (NZfM 1: 121–122, 125–126, 129–130, 133–134, 137–138, ­141–142, 145–146), and Wagner “Une visite à Beethoven” (rgm 7: 551–553, 561–563, 578–579, 583–585).

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it was reproduced partly or fully “in a good many fireside journals” (Wagner, [1911] 1963: 227). Only few later observers note, however, that the narrator of the rgm version is the protagonist R., whereas the introductory paragraph of the later German version indicates that the unnamed new narrator reconstituted this story and others from R’s legacy (ds 5: 86). By presenting himself only as the editor, Wagner takes distance from his earlier self, probably also because he now presented a German text to German readers. A long pilgrimage on foot to Beethoven takes R., a penniless young G ­ erman musician, from northern Germany to Vienna. On the way he encounters several times a rich young Englishman, who is also heading to see Beethoven. He repeatedly offers R. a seat in his elegant coach, but the young German dislikes him and prefers to continue by foot. In Vienna, both travelers have difficulty in getting an interview with Beethoven, and when R. finally succeeds, the ­Englishman slips in at his coattail and hands the master the score of his own composition. Upon the Englishman’s departure, Beethoven confides to R. that he has doubts about his vocal compositions, including Fidelio, and reveals to him that he has written a new symphony, in which he reintroduced voice ­(Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”) though this had not yet expressed all the dreams about vocal music. The story concludes with R.’s last encounter with the Englishman, who is now heading towards Italy and offers him yet another opportunity to accompany him. This time, he wants to get to know the famous composer Rossini. R. rejects this artless search for celebrities, adding ironically: “I know Beethoven, and this will suffice lifelong” (rgm 7: 585). Generalizing on the topic, the Wagnerian narrator asks R. at the end why vocal music could not be as great and serious as instrumental music. It could give pleasure to “the lighthearted singing folk” as a symphony: “The human voice is there, after all. It is even by far a more beautiful and noble organ of sound than any instrument in the orchestra” (ds 5: 108). Indeed, as critics have noted, ­Wagner uses Beethoven here as a spokesman of his own future art. However, the differences between R. and Wagner himself seem to me more relevant here than the alleged Schlesinger features which Marc Weiner (1995: 153–163) reads into the character of the Englishman. Though Weiner admits that there is nothing directly racist in the story, he spins an ingenious but unconvincing anti-Semitic allegory around it. Citing Schlesinger’s trip to Beethoven, and a ­(German) publisher in the story who advises R. to write “gallops” and other trivial music to earn his living, Weiner sees Schlesinger in the Englishman. Beethoven’s words about new vocal compositions would, then, “implicitly represent also an emancipation of German music from foreign nations and from the Jews” (162). This is a highly forced and implausible interpretation inspired by ­Wagner’s later anti-Semitic utterances. The Englishman is a melopoetic dilettante

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but he is generous, which Schlesinger in Wagner’s eyes was not. Schlesinger was eager to popularize Beethoven in Paris, not only for commercial purposes, and his almost missionary zeal to bring German music to Paris surely agreed with Wagner’s nationalism at this point. Schlesinger was so pleased with the success of the Beethoven story that he urged Wagner to write new ones. Wagner responded with “Un Musicien étranger à Paris” (rgm 8: 65–68, 83–84, 91–94), which, however, he regarded as a revenge for all the misfortunes he “had to endure.” Indeed, the German title says “Ein Ende in Paris,” and the story begins with the funeral of R., attended also by the Englishman of the Beethoven story, who wants to erect some monument for him. The narrator remarks that he should rather pay his debts (8: 65). Schlesinger liked the story less than the Beethoven one, Heine thought that “Hoffmann would have been incapable of writing such a thing,” and ­Berlioz praised it highly in the Journal des Débats.13 Considering that music discourses had little respect for genre distinctions, it is somewhat surprising that the music novellas respected for about thirty years the distinction between fact and fiction. Real music and musicians were, of course, often discussed in fiction, but no real musicians appeared as fictional characters until 1834, when Cherubini, Beethoven, Hoffmann, Johann F­ riedrich Doles (conductor of the Thomanerchor in Leipzig), Mozart, and ­Weber suddenly entered as fictional figures both in German and French novellas. No single reason can explain this shift. In Germany, it was almost ­single-handedly the initiative of the multiply-talented Johann Peter Lyser, who published in 1834 novellas on Beethoven, Mozart and the Doles family, and ­Händel, the latter of which was also published the same year in the rgm. In France, the authors were the composer Fromental Halévy, who wrote a dream vision about the still living Cherubini in the rgm, and, of course, Janin, who in this 13

We are left, then, with “Une soirée heureuse,” which was apparently written on a creative impulse (Wagner, [1911] 1963: 237), “Du métier de virtuose et de l’indépendance des compositeurs” (rgm 7: 495–498), published in German as “Der Virtuos und der K ­ ünstler” (Wagner, 1983, v: 171–176), and the “Caprices esthétiques” (rgm 8: 203–204), signed as “Werner,” which was published in German as “Der Künstler und die Öffentlichkeit” (v: 186–193). For the complex history of the German changes see the Wagner Handbuch ­(Müller, 1986: 483). The “Zwei Epochen aus dem Leben eines deutschen Musikers” contained the following rebaptised stories: “Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven. (Aus den Papieren eines wirklich verstorbenen Musikers” and “Das Ende in Paris” (Aus der Feder eines in Wahrheit noch lebenden Musikers).” They were first published in the Dresdner Abendzeitung, July and August 1841. The Wagner editions published these under the heading “Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris. Novellen und Aufsätze,” adding to them several other Parisian texts (Wagner, 1983, v: 5).

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year published his controversial Beethoven and Hoffmann novellas, after having published three years earlier his two Hoffmann pieces. The next year ­Adolphe Adam published “Le Répétition générale d’Iphigénie en Tauride” (rgm 2: 173–180), which portrays Gluck rehearsing and Méhul as his young admirer. Of all these, Janin’s “Hoffmann” deserves most attention, because, as mentioned above, it had an important impact on the French Hoffmann image. Once recent musicians like Hoffmann, Beethoven and Cherubini became fictional figures in the music novellas it was only one further step to fictionalize musicians from the more distant past. Indeed, several writers took this step, foremost among them Janin and Stéphane de la Madeleine. The fictionalization of contemporary or recent musicians usually raised important aesthetic, moral, or even national issues. This was the case only with Janin’s story about the famous eighteenth-century castrato singer Caffarelli [Gaetano Majorano] (rgm 3: 421–438), which was a powerful attack on castrating for voice. In contrast to the historical Caffarelli, who apparently wanted to be castrated at age ten, Janin’s musician is castrated upon the request of his father and teacher. The famous artist Caffarelli falls in love with a woman and when his father asks him for help, he kills him. Janin’s other story, “Stradella” (rgm 3: 239–242, 247–251, 255–258), converts Hoffmann’s friendly dialogue between a poet and a composer into a confrontation between a brilliant composer and a slick poet. Every time the composer presents dramatic ideas to the poet/librettist he gets smooth verses back. Two very different motivations seems to have been at work in the historical portrayals. The first one is a rather trivial (and perhaps commercial) intent to give a romantic flavor to the story, which was usually linked to a love affair with a tragic ending. The second motivation was more serious, namely to complement in a lighter vein the historical studies and historical performances of Fétis and others.14 Stéphane de la Madeleine wrote in this framework on the violinists Archangelo Corelli (3: 395–401) and Giambattista Bassani (4: 157–159, 166–169, 181–185),15 as well as Guillaume ­Dufay (3: 453–460) and Josquin des 14

15

This observation applies with particular force to the “Stradella” story. It features the historical composer Alessandro Stradella, known for his turbulent life (1639–1682), which was in these years attracting attention both from music historians and from composers (most famously, Flotow’s opera Alessandro Stradella of 1844). In a concert given in 1833, Fétis programmed one of his own arias under a spurious ascription to Stradella (cf. p. 203, below); and in 1837 a grand opera Stradella, by Louis Niedermeyer on a libretto by Emile Deschamps and Emilien Pacini, premiered at the Paris Opéra. The score was published by Schlesinger, and Janin’s story served as a type of advance publicity. [editors’ note] This story links up with “Curiosité Musicale: État de la musique à Rome, en 1639” by Paulin Richard (rgm 4: 149–151), which presents a historical document: André Maugars, Réponse

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Prez (4: 109–113, 129–134). The storyline of “La jeunesse de Bassini” (spelled sic) is aligned with Fétis’s accounts and relates how young Bassani gets married and plays the violin in the new opera house of Chiabrera against the will of his guardian. His wife dies, leaving six children behind, and Giambattista becomes founder of a music school, to which Corelli comes as a young student (subject of the novella “Corelli”). La Madeleine’s story about the aged Dufay spins a romantic story around Fétis’s claim that this composer invented modern harmony. Dufay, who is all quite senile in the story, enters the wrong house and sleeps there. It turns out to belong to the daughter of an old and deceased friend. When Helen, this daughter, gets deadly sick, she sings and Dufay, with his disciple, builds a theory of counterpoint based on it, disregarding her as a person. She recovers and eventually marries Josquin, but Dufay dies. The story set furthest back in history is Alexandre Dumas on Nero (4: ­451–459, 463–470, 475–478, 483–486, 491–496, 503–507, 515–519), which he later expanded into a book. Its relevance to music is only that Nero under a pseudonym wins a singing competition in Corinth, and wins thereby also the heart of young Acté. Only later does she discover with shock what kind of human being Nero is. The two main components of music novellas were plot and dialogical reflection on music.16 The plots derived from different sources. The German fantastic stories relied primarily on Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana, but we should include in this genre also Kleist’s “Die heilige Cäcilie” (1810), for it embodies exactly the kind of ambiguity between the natural and supernatural that Todorov has used as its genre definition (see Hamilton, 2008: 145–155)

fait à un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique d’Italie (Rome, Oct. 1, 1639). The first part of this booklet covers Italian vocal music, and the second one instrumental music, arguing that the Italians treasure the latter more. The second installment containing the second part was not published in the grm, for it was claimed lost. Madeleine’s story starts just below this announcement. 16 According to Ellis the “recurring tropes” in rgm’s short fiction include “genius,” ­“philistinism,” “sublime death,” and “pilgrimage” (2004: 255).

chapter 5

Narrating Listeners, Narrating Instruments I began this book with a selection of examples (Sid Caesar, Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and E.M. Forster) that indicate that the mistakenly named “absolute” instrumental music actually generated an immense variety of narrative interpretations. Since most of these stories had no “objective” value they were usually not recorded. Reading the following narrative interpretations of instrumental music and the discussions about them, we should be aware, however, that they constitute the tip of an iceberg. Most listeners today impose on the listened works similar personal, biographical, historical, anecdotal, and other narratives, for which program booklets often provide the raw material. To ignore these is to exclude an important dimension of listening. To emphasize the importance of these non-professional narrative interpretations I have put them together with instrumental narratives that the post-classical generation of Berlioz and Schumann developed to get beyond pure music.

Listeners Narrate It is no longer the musician who makes music to words of the poet; it is now the poet who makes words out of music. janin, rgm 4: 71

When George Sand’s essay Contrabandier (rgm 4: 1–9) texted Liszt’s “Rondeau fantastique sur un thème espagnol (El Contrabandista),” Janin enthusiastically greeted it with the motto above, unaware that Sands imaginative story was the highpoint of a dialogue on the theory and practice of texting instrumental music that had been going on for thirty years already. André Ernest Modest Grétry had started this dialogue when he admitted in his Mémoires ou Essai sur la musique (1789) that the beautiful Haydn symphonies often inspired him to supply words that they seem to ask for. Composers, who are always tied down by words should be allowed to compose freely and unencumbered; the words should be added afterwards, with their accents adjusted. Why should one not set words to music if music has been accompanying words for such a long time (Grétry, [1789] 1800: 187)?1 According to Grétry, Jean-François M ­ armontel ­predicted 1 Quoted from Karl Spazier’s annotated German translation, Versuche über die Musik (1800).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_007

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that such narrative interpretations will have success. Indeed, the French critic signing with “P.P.” (Pierre Porro?) used narrative readings of German instrumental music in the journal La Correspondance des amateurs musiciens (cam) as early as 1804. For instance, he translated the opening Adagio of one of Haydn’s ­London Symphonies into images of unfortunates who seem to beg the gods for clemency; in the end, the gods listen to their wailings, and the brilliant Allegro, in the major key, follows like an angel of consolation, changing this scene of pain and sadness into a merry festival.2 According to Katherine Kolb Reeve, narrative criticism of autonomous music was an important critical way to introduce German instrumental music to France (1987: 540–541). In an article on the relation between music and poetry (amz 1: 433–440) Rochlitz supported Grétry by rhetorically asking whether the poem has always to be prior to the music (1: 435). He welcomed Grétry’s proposal to write texts to instrumental music, but he regarded only lyrical poems adequate for the task: “in order to capture a symphonic movement, the text would have to be an Iliad. Only lyrical poems can capture music, which must itself be lyrical” (1: 438 f). To prove his point, he commissioned his friend D. Jäger to write a poem that would fit a lyrical Haydn Andante.3 Karl Spazier, who published a selective and annotated German translation of Grétry’s text as Versuche über die Musik (1800), disagreed with Rochlitz and regarded instrumental music as most attractive for a genius, for it required more creativity and fantasy than the composition of songs (Grétry, [1789] 1800: 184). According to Spazier, Grétry never meant to translate music syllable-forsyllable. Grétry’s words were the highest praise of the Haydn symphonies and they honored the independence of instrumental music (187). Spazier mentions also that a certain Cramer had adapted monologues from Hamlet and Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg’s Minona (1785) to C.P.E. Bach’s c minor fantasia, which one can sing with slight changes. “Free declamation would be the most natural and applicable way to interpret an instrumental scene” (188). Next to enter the discussion was Johann August Apel, best known perhaps for the two-volume Gespensterbuch he published with Friedrich Laun, which contains the original story of Weber’s Der Freischütz. Apel published in 1806 “Musik und Poesie” (amz 8: 449–452), accompanied (8: 453–457, 465–470) by a long poem-setting of Mozart’s E-flat major Symphony (nr. 39, K. 543). Apel reaffirmed Spazier’s point that Grétry did not intend a word for word matching of music, any more than Haydn’s 1796 choral version of his orchestral 2 cam 3 (1804): 97–98. See Ellis, 1995: 17. 3 The music and Jäger’s four-stanza poem were printed as the twelfth Attachment to this amz issue: Haydn, “Andante” “Beilage 12” (1: xxxix–xl, after 1: 448).

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­composition of Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (1786) had (8: 449). According to Grétry, the Haydn symphonies had such definite characters that they stimulated in the listeners not just moods but definite images. It is possible to place a corresponding poetic image next to an outstanding orchestral work. The rhythmically and harmonically combined sounds of a symphony represent an idea that can also be represented in poetry and in the fine arts. What Apel claims here matches the contemporary view that a certain structure of digital bytes can be converted into different artistic “languages”: “To transpose a symphony into a poem means therefore nothing else but to conceive of its idea and its specific characterization independent of its means of representation, and to represent it again with the materials of poetry.”4 Apel’s poetic transformation of Mozart’s symphony nr. 39 experimentally illustrates this aesthetic principle.5 Rochlitz reopened this discussion some twenty years later by publishing a fictional letter to the editor, written by a music lover in his upper sixties, a retired clerk at a law court in a god-forsaken town in “Hinterpommern.” Via the trick of a fictional correspondent from the boondocks, Rochlitz picked up the idea of texting music. After recapitulating the dialogue between Grétry, Spazier, Rochlitz, and Apel, the correspondent reported that he had found in the amz of 1806 a review of Beethoven’s A-flat major sonata, opus 26. The opening variation movement stimulated him so much that he bought the score and started to play the music that soon revealed itself as the story of his life: Everything, everything was in front of me, complete, clear, and unmistakable! For, I myself stood in front of myself: this theme with variations contained the most decisive moments of my life, copied as if from a mirror: six chief moments, the theme with five variations, the last one with a short coda that leads into the open, at which I am standing at 4 “Eine Sinfonie in ein Gedicht umsetzen, heisst demnach nichts anders, als ihre Idee und die bestimmte Charakterisirung derselben, abgesondert von dem Mittel der Darstellung auffassen, und von neuem durch das Material der Dichtkunst darstellen” (amz 8: 450). As Forchert notes (397), Apel’s article was also mentioned by Carl Borromäus von Miltiz in amz 20: 272. Ideas of interchangeability were, however, severely criticized later by Hanslick, who insisted that the artistic idea of a musical piece cannot be “peeled off” from it for it was conceived in musical terms. 5 Forchert (1980: 397) claims that the “Ideen-Konzeption” that informs Marx’s Beethoven interpretation is indebted to Apel’s article and its echo. He cites Geck that the bamz became almost a military campaign for Beethoven’s “idea-art” (1967: 71).

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the ­moment, and which, just as this musical one, will be just as certainly short, since it is going to lead me into the open.6 The subsequent detailed autobiography divides the correspondent’s life into periods but offers only general comments on the music: the Andante theme represents his basic character, the lively movements of the first variations his adolescence, the “pride and grandeur” of the second one the energy and independence of his university years, his professional ups and downs and his scholarly and artistic disappointments, down to the “consoling and active” character of the fifth one and the “mild dying” of the concluding Coda. The skillful musical autobiography ends with a final comment: “I describe with all this, point for point, nothing else but what the variation contains and anybody can find in it” (25: 486). Of course, he does not suggest that Beethoven had a provincial life in mind. The principle of this subjective interpretation is pliability: “Everybody who wants to listen to something at the performance of an expressive piece of instrumental music will be able to think of whatever is closest to his heart, inasmuch as it gives the same emotional expression as the music.”7 In this sense, the correspondent’s autobiography is a “counterfact,” a new text written to an existing music, just as Helen’s dreaming is in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Rochlitz declared his authorship by signing this fictional letter, but he made no comments in the text. Knowing that he had serious doubts about texting music, we ought to ask what his intention was. An anonymous reviewer of his volume Freunde für die Tonkunst, which contained a reprint of this piece, had no doubts: this texted music was a joke to show that whoever looks for music’s verbal meaning will find one, but this will differ from person to person (amz 27: 443). However, this was precisely the hermeneutic comment that Rochlitz made the fictional correspondent write. Did he mean it as a joke? Friedrich Ludwig Bührlen, a lesser-known writer but active music lover, and a regular contributor to the amz column “Bemerkungen” (sometimes also 6 “o Leser, da stand’s vor mir; alles, alles stand vor mir, vollständig, deutlich, unverkennbar! Ich selbst nämlich stand vor mir, in den entscheidensten Momenten meines Lebens, abgeschildert wie aus dem Spiegel, in diesem Thema mit Variationen: sechs Hauptmomente, das Thema mit fünf Variationen, die letzte mit einer kurzen, ins Freye führenden Coda, an welcher ich eben im Leben stehe, und die, wie diese musikalische, eben so gewiss nur noch kurz seyn, als mich in’s Freye führen wird” (“Commentatiuncula in usum Delphini,” amz 25: 475–476). 7 “Jeder, der nur beym Vortrag ausdruckvoller Instrumentalmusik an irgend etwas denken will, eben an das denken kann, was ihm zunächst am Herzen liegt, in wiefern es nämlich für die Empfindung denselben Ausschlag giebt, wie die Musik” (amz 25: 476).

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titled “Mancherley, in Beziehung auf Musik und verwandte Kunst”) rounded off this discussion on texting music with another fictional dialogue, signed, to be sure, with a pseudonym.8 Having listened to Mozart’s Andante the previous night, two young men debate whether one should think of anything when listening to instrumental music. Friedrich would like to hear the Andante as a little romance by a poet (529), and he decidedly rejects Wolfgang’s objection that he may miss thereby the music itself. No, this would double his enjoyment, for next to the music he would take pleasure in the situations and feelings he ascribes to it (529). He thought he had heard four speaking or singing voices. Did Mozart himself attribute four conversing voices to his instrumental music? Wolfgang accuses Friedrich of ascribing to Mozart an intentionality that would legitimize his own impulse to fantasize (530). In fact, Wolfgang vigorously opposes all verbalizations of instrumental music. In his view, Friedrich stopped listening to the Andante when he started to search for fitting romances; a Tondichter like Mozart should assign no text to his instrumental music (530). Whatever he may feel or hear should not result in representations of seasons, storms, or cheerful and sad events. We are naturally inclined to think in terms of metaphors, similes, and symbols (531), but Wolfgang hears only music’s holy warning: “I collect but you disperse” (532). Friedrich suggests that composers could indicate with a title or even brief introductory sentences what is to come (532). Dramatized instrumental music? Wolfgang occasionally tastes such “spoiled fruits” as sweet, but actually condemns them. Hence, he gives a devastating description of a tonally painted peasant wedding (obviously hinting at Beethoven’s Sixth), which will always be rough and without shading. Composers should have only musical ideas (533). Must Friedrich reject then all references to things beyond the notes (533 f)? Anticipating T.S. Eliot’s notion of “objective correlatives,” Wolfgang admits that emotions always seek external objectification,9 but text rather than music should satisfy this. Sounds in free instrumental music do not refer to anything (534). We should not associate music with epic or dramatic events, and lyrical dispositions are even verbally inexpressible (535). It is at this point that Friedrich turns to Rochlitz’s “Commentatiuncula,” citing all the discussion partners we followed (536–38). Beethoven knew nothing of the clerk, and an autobiographical “reading” has no objective value. The point is that good instrumental music sets the listeners free, so that all of them can think of what is closest to their heart (538). Wolfgang answers by 8 “Soll man bey der Instrumental-Musik Etwas denken?” (amz 29: 529–538, 546–554). 9 “In jedem Menschen sucht die Erregung ein Vehikel, einen Stoff, in welchem sie sich verkörpert und objektiv wird” (amz 29: 534).

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­sharpening the critique of the reviewer who regarded the fictional autobiography as a joke (545): Rochlitz wrote an a-posteriori fiction to Beethoven’s music. If you seek verbal meaning you will always find what you wanted to find, but this will vary from person to person. Instead of recognizing in this the participation of a creative listener, Wolfgang sees it only as a mental intervention that kills musical feelings and genuine musical pleasure (547). The discussion now returns to the question whether listeners should seek the composer’s original, intended, or unconscious meaning. Wolfgang says that one should ignore a composer’s meanings, for even if they were genuine searching for them this would destroy music appreciation (548). Furthermore, listeners may be cheered when listening to music that came out of the composer’s sadness. The source of a composer’s inspiration is none of our business. According to Friedrich, however, this view condemns the listener to passivity, for according to Wolfgang good listening means recreating the sense that dominated the composer when composing. Listeners should be spiritual relatives of the artist (549). In Wolfgang’s aesthetics, music is a self-enclosed and incomprehensible world that we should regard as a “beautiful play with sounds in most varied combinations,” but not as arbitrary as shapes and colors in a kaleidoscope. He subscribes to organicism: “A work of music develops in an artistic genius according to organic laws, wants nothing else but become, grow, unfold, and bloom,” which means that it does “not point back to the feelings of the composer like a sign to a signified” (550). Since it speaks for itself, we should not try to translate it. For Friedrich this “ethereal art tree” necessitates a “musical dendrology” (552–53), which demands too much of an amateur. According to Wolfgang, each human being is a different listener, but looking at music’s mechanism offers the happy contemplation of an organic-beautiful structure (553). In this sense everybody should have some elementary knowledge of music. Wolfgang admits that we cannot reject the images, shapes, situations, memories, and hopes that music awakens in us, but suggests that we chasing them amounts to silencing the music itself. We should not seek the motives that a composer had in his heart or mind (553). Friedrich understands Wolfgang’s new aesthetics, but promises to test it when listening again to a Beethoven symphony. Wolfgang won the upper hand in this debate, unknowingly preparing the reader for Hanslick’s formalism, but Friedrich’s hermeneutic view that nonrepresentational instrumental music liberates the voice and the imagination of the listener also found future advocates. However, the general trend shifted the attention from the listener to performing voices. Typical for this is a joking discussion between a German conductor, a poet and a painter about ­Italian

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theaters and singers (bamz 1: 207–211, 215–216). We find a similar focus in Tieck’s late music novella titled “Musikalische Leiden und Freuden” (1824; partially republished in Cäcilia, and in the rgm in 1841 under the title “Un mélomane”). The threadbare plot assembles for conversation a conductor, a singer, a dilettante, a gusher, a count, a crazy suicide-prone Italian, and an old man. A mysterious young beauty with a ravishing voice denies she can sing, but confesses in the end that her father forbade it because his wife “sang herself to death” (a copy of Hoffmann’s “Councillor Krespel”). Tieck’s “Musical Sufferings” inverts Berglinger’s suffering. While Berglinger was overwhelmed by his father and philistine dilettantes, we have here a conductor-­composer dominated by a prima donna who endangers the upcoming performance of his opera. The conversation partners include a failed musician, an admirer of Mozart’s Don Juan, and a man who fell in love with the voice of the beauty who now claims to be voiceless. The layman in the group used to love the simplicity of Palestrina’s and Pergolesi’s sacred music, but now wants to hear virtuoso performers. The conductor agrees with him that overemphasized declamation tears music into shreds. Composers now “are hardly able to set a song without composing anew every strophe; they powerfully accentuate, stop, break off, and migrate into studied and far-fetched tonalities” (109). The “magnificent” Beethoven “seldom allows our pleasure to develop quietly but tears us away from the hardly perceived first pleasure to the second and the third one, and he destroys so often his most beautiful effects” (109). The conductor prefers Reichardt’s simple melodies to Beethoven’s restless declamation and skipping. When a young woman regards this as a praise of her beloved Rossini (109), a stereotypical confrontation of Beethoven with Rossini follows and everybody votes for Rossini. The Italian rapturously praises him as the Wunderdoktor of the century, who “brings us stray sheep back to the right street, who kills stonedead all mistaken German efforts, and who builds for himself a pyramid or mausoleum” (110). The “enthusiast” chimes in, feeling slightly guilty for turning against his countrymen. The “layman” assures him that this is no national matter, but then praises Mozart as the true German opera composer. The Italians may claim him but do not understand him: “Mozart, Gluck, Bach, Händel, and Haydn are true Germans, whose German identity should never be disputed; their compositions must be called truly German, the exact opposition to the Italian” (110). The conductor and the dilettante find serious cracks in the monument the Italian wants to erect for Rossini, and they regret that philistine enthusiasm undermines serious German music everywhere, except in Berlin (111). The unnamed Weber is unmistakably the target of laughing remarks that the devil is unmusical, but that the casting of bullets and its associated noise is

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still worse (113). The conductor defends the criticized scene in Der Freischütz, whereas the layman tells once more about his yearning for an “idyllic, pure, and cheerful music,” which would be “a true refreshment after so much monstrosity in our theater” (113). After all this discussion on vocal music, it is only appropriate that the count does indeed find in Julie the mysterious beauty to whom he once listened. She saves the conductor by replacing with great success the prima donna, and, of course, she marries the count. While Berlinger’s friar exclusively focuses on the composer, dialogue turns into chatting in this novella. A more appropriate final text for this section on setting music to text is a story by G.A. Keferstein (published under the pseudonym K. Stein in 1832), allegedly a paper left behind by the student Anselmus.10 He tells how he discussed Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata in the Tiergarten, when he was addressed by Kapellmeister Kreisler, who invited him to enter into his fantastic world. There he mysteriously enacts with light and technical wonders a love story between the young Erlprinz and the daughter of the Erlkönig and Selene. The story is a sophisticated and fantastic emplotment of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata (C major, op. 53). Anselmus writes up the encounter and the emplotment, but the editor is skeptical about everything, partly because Anselmus never made it in real life.

Instruments Narrate Would it not amount to a lack of confidence in the vitality of the pure instrumental style were one to anticipate its complete decay simply because there arose next to it a new species, distinct from drama, oratorio, and cantata, but having none the less in common with these a poetic basis? liszt, NZfM 43: 42

Liszt found it “childish, idle, sometimes even mistaken, to outline programs after the event” but considered it appropriate if a composer creates such a program (863/52). He would have, obviously, disagreed with both Friedrich and Wolfgang in the story I have just analyzed, but I keep the term “instrumental narration” because it is a good alternative to the more popular terms “symphonic poem” or “program music.” Why and how the new generation of 10

“Mittheilungen aus den nachgelassenen Papieren des Studenten Anselmus” amz 34 (1832): 33–37, 49–53.

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­ erlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn (and subsequently Wagner) deviated B from the formal schemes and organizations of the Viennese classics is a major and much studied issue in music history. I shall select those aspects that are most relevant to my juxtaposition of vocal and instrumental music. My motto from the serialized article “Berlioz und seine Harold Symphonie” appeared in 1855 in the NZfM (25–32, 37–46, 49–55, 77–84, 89–97). The author was listed as Franz Liszt, but research has shown that it was partly or wholly written by his then-partner, Princess Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein. The text is thus yet another case of “diffused authorship,” this time due to gender discrimination. Later in this chapter I will discuss the diffused authorship of Schumann. Liszt is said to have coined the term “symphonic poem” and he composed some of the earliest and most important works of this genre. The genre definition is problematic, because instrumental adaptations of a literary text are usually narrative rather than dialogically dramatic (as in the case of opera or oratorio) or lyrical (as in the case of the Lied). This is one reason why the term “symphonic poem” is misleading. A narrative may be in verse but it must have a plot and cannot just be lyrical. “Symphonic” is also misleading, for instrumental narratives were performed as often on individual instruments (mainly on the piano) as by elaborate symphonic ensembles. “Berlioz und seine Harold Symphonie” appeared much later than Berlioz’s music, but it offers a useful double perspective on my subject: its first part makes interesting arguments for endowing pure instrumental music with a program, while the second part contains an analysis of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (1834). Next to Harold I will discuss several Schumann piano pieces and two additional works by Berlioz, the Symphonie fantastique (1830/1845), and Roméo et Juliette (1839). Each composer and each composition represents a different variant of instrumental narration. Schumann and Berlioz composed for different instruments and made different uses of literature. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers frequently emplotted their instrumental music by employing natural sounds and using affective and rhetorical conventions. Vivaldi portrayed storms, Rameau hens, Kuhnau’s the battle between David and Goliath; Johann Sebastian Bach used musical rhetoric to portray grief by descending notes; his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, relied on the Affektenlehre to depict the standardized emotions of fear, happiness, and sadness. Particularly curious is the story of C.P.E. Bach’s “Fantasy in c minor,” composed in 1753. The poet Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg extracted in 1767 a melody from it, and then provided to this two alternative texts, Hamlet’s monologue and a monologue by Gerstenberg himself, spoken by the dying Socrates (Gerstenberg to Friedrich Nicolai, December 5, 1767; see Werner, 1891: 56–60).

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Although Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony still employs imitations of natural sounds, this became rare by the early nineteenth century. Beethoven experimented in Wellingtons Sieg (see Chapter 6) with other techniques of instrumental emplotment; so did Schuman, Berlioz, and Liszt in their compositions. These shifts in narrative music partly derive from theoretical and practical shifts in textual narration towards the end of the eighteenth century. The great impulse came from Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), which radically decomposed the traditional narrator and the chronology of narration. The composers of the next generations were indebted to Sterne, as well as to Diderot and Jean Paul, who adopted the narrative innovations of Tristram Shandy. When instrumental music became autonomous and dominant towards the end of the eighteenth century, narrativizing instrumental music became rare, but, as I have shown in previous chapters, this very autonomy actually pushed listeners to emplot the music they have been listening to, frequently claiming that their emplotments have been authorized by an implicit or explicit authorial intention. Like Gerstenberg’s Hamlet monologue, such music was always emplotted a-posteriori, and should be distinguished from instrumental music that was composed with a plot already in mind. The Berlioz compositions in this chapter represent two such emplotments: Harold en Italie and Roméo et Juliette use literary texts by Byron and by Shakespeare. Narrative instrumental music also made use of paintings, for instance in Liszt’s 1857 composition on Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s painting titled Hunnenschlacht. How can instrumental music adopt the sophisticated narrative theories of literature that Gérard Genette, Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn, Mieke Bal, and others had developed in the second half of the twentieth century? What implications do these theories have for non-verbal narration in music? As the title of Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978) indicates, fiction can offer insights into fictional minds, but only if the narrator assumes a meta-narrative position. Narrators who are part of the fictional world (first-person narrators) can gain such insights only by way of a narrative trick. The problem of instrumental music (and staged plays) is that narrators can only be introduced by some unconventional external means. Pure instrumental music cannot employ an overarching narrator of the type that Bach employs in St. Matthew Passion, and hence it cannot alternate between showing and telling, cannot speak in first or third person, distinguish between external and internal narrators, speak in indirect and free indirect discourse, distinguish between public and private voices, and narrate or focalize on different levels. The impossibility of instrumental diegesis does not mean, however, that music cannot represent events or dialogues. Though instrumental music cannot have a narrator, it can enact stories: it can show even if it cannot tell, it can

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suggest plots. Voice, its most common verbal and rhetorical metaphor, suggests that it can also enact metaphoric dialogues between instruments. Music can also be emplotted musically, for instance by means of quotations and modified themes. Since emplotted instrumental music always enacts in the present tense, its narrating and narrated time must coincide. Does it follow that music cannot have a past tense? I do not think so. Calling diegetic narration “a tale told later, by one who escaped to the outside of the tale” (Abbate, 1989: 228), exaggerates the significance of the narrative past tense, and Abbate does, indeed, take a milder view in Unsung Voices (1991: 52–53). Narrators, whether they are external or internal, are no refugees from the past; their use of the past tense is largely conventional. Personal experiences of the past can be told in the present tense for special purposes, without endangering the premises of fiction. On the other hand, enacted, mimetically represented stories are quite capable of recalling the past. On stage this may happen, for instance, by means of stories told by stage characters; in music, as Abbate herself notes, temporal depth can be created by means of repetition and variation. Indeed, much of the pleasure of listening consists of recognizing familiar schemes, identifying themes, rhythmic patterns, and other structural elements as restatements music heard earlier, in the piece itself or in other pieces. By quoting vocal music without its text, Mahler could even evoke verbal meaning by means of pure instrumental music, relying on the listeners’ familiarity with the text. Kivy thinks that discounting the simple imitations of natural sounds, “musical narrative comes down to musical illustration of a narrative text” (1991: 195), as if narrative music always had to rely on a pre-existing narrative text. This is why Kivy disregards a-posteriori emplotments of music, while I regard these as crucial for interpreting instrumental music. The first part of the Liszt article sets out to legitimate instrumental narration in the recently born instrumental music, following a double strategy of cautiously downgrading pure instrumental music and elevating narration. The first task was tricky, and Liszt was eager to assure his readers that nobody would dare “to deny to our inspired art the supreme power of self-sufficiency.” Indeed, self-sufficient instrumental music was for him “the mother tongue,” the purest expression and highest perfection of music.11 Nevertheless, he quoted Hegel and Fétis, asserting that instrumental music asked for a technical expertise that amateurs did not possess (Hegel, [1835] 1965: 321 f). Both of them considered it understandable, though not very desirable, that listeners are inclined 11

([1870] 1966: 851/42). Translation by Oliver Strunk.

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to emplot instrumental music. Hegel even “appears to foresee the stimulation that a program can give to instrumental music” (Liszt, [1855] 1950: 859). Liszt finds no sense in abstract structuring: “The artist and the connoisseur who, in creating and judging, seek only the ingenious construction, the artfully woven pattern, the complex workmanship, the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of mathematical calculation and intertwining lines, drive music toward the dead letter” (860). Composers who limit the material to music itself are incapable of generating new forms (863). Thus, Liszt was no formalist. He either overlooked or deliberately ignored Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, which appeared just a year earlier. Liszt’s highly estimated composer-hero in this controversy was Berlioz. He thought that formalists would never forgive Berlioz “that he does not, as they do, cultivate form for form’s sake” (847). Berlioz was for him a youthful iconoclast whose works could not be ignored in the long range, even if “they destroy the hallowed frame which has devolved upon the symphony,” even if they offend the ear by not remaining “within the prescribed musical dikes” (848). Composers of program music have an advantage over the purists because feelings are better communicable than form. The “tone poet” reproduces his impressions and the adventures of his soul in order to communicate them, while a “mere musician,” an instrumentalist without a story, “manipulates, groups, and connects the tones according to certain established rules” attaining at best “novel, bold, unusual, and complex combinations” but fails to communicate to the listeners his joys or his sorrows (861). Liszt’s ideas about using literary texts for program music are quite original. He dismisses novellas and novels in prose and considers exclusively poetic narratives, primarily modern “philosophical epopoeias,” such as Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Cain and Manfred, and Mickiewicz’s Dziady. Program music must increasingly rely on literary masterpieces (868). Yet, unlike Grillparzer, he is not concerned with the poeticity of language. Instead, he seeks interiority. The classical epos portrayed heroes in an action-filled physical and social world, whereas the modern epic poem turns inward and no longer aims at recounting the protagonist’s exploits: it has become far more important to show “what the hero thinks than how he acts” (865). The troubled inner life of the protagonist asks for monologues or interior dialogues. The heroes of the philosophical epopoeias are drawn “far beyond life-size” (866); the great merit of their portrayal is to be found in “the most animated, most profound, and often most penitent feelings of great hearts.” For Liszt, the brooding, isolated, and odd giants, are the most lively reflections of “the spirit of the age and nation which produced them” (866). Will the “rare and abnormal impulses” of Faust, Harold, Manfred, Cain and other exceptional heroes reach music listeners to whom

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such ­abnormalities are alien – even if the composer finds adequate musical expressions for them (866)? Liszt’s answer is that importing philosophical epopoeias into music may seem “an absurd, if not sacrilegious undertaking” but it is a historical necessity. Berlioz In 1832, Berlioz remarked that “one cannot miss the poetic thought” in Beethoven’s works: “It is music that gives way to itself, needing no words to make its expression specific; its language then becomes quite indefinite, thanks to which it acquires still more power over beings endowed with imagination. Those without imagination may need words, but imaginative listeners can understand a genre instrumental expressif.” (Trans. Rushton, 1994: 20)12 The remark is surprising, for it comes from a composer whose instrumental work mostly does include words. He certainly did not take Wagner’s view that instrumental music was a historical mistake. This insight may have been a driving force behind the gradual abandonment of the detailed narrative text that Berlioz wrote for the first version of his Symphonie fantastique (1830). In contrast, Harold en Italie never intended to imitate specific passages in Byron’s Child Harold, while Roméo et Juliette uses both incorporated vocal sections and a carefully prepared set of instrumental motives that provides a skeleton narrative. In the last case, Berlioz assumed that some listeners would know the English play, but made the interpretation more difficult by deviating from Shakespeare’s plot. In his letter to Humbert Ferrand of April 16, 1830, Berlioz outlined the idea of an artist who becomes hopelessly taken by a beautiful woman whose image is always accompanied in his mind by a “musical thought” in which he finds a “character of grace and nobility comparable to the one with which he endows the beloved.” This double idée fixe ceaselessly follows him. He turned this idea into a note in the Figaro on May 21, an account in the Revue musicale on November 27, into leaflet texts distributed at the first performance on December 5 (conducted by François-Antoine Habeneck), and into the text that accompanied the first edition of the score in 1845. Berlioz revised the work extensively during his stay in Italy (1831–32) and afterwards. Another version, distributed at the concert of December 9, 1832, stated that “one can even dispense with distributing the program, keeping only the titles of the five movements. The symphony by itself, so the author hopes, can afford musical 12 Berlioz, Le Correspondant, October 22, 1832. Translated in Rushton, 1994: 20.

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interest independent of any dramatic purpose” (Cone, 1971: 31). According to the 1845 version, Berlioz wanted to develop episodes in the life of an artist that lend themselves to musical treatment. Since the composition contains no text, he has to set out in advance the plan of an instrumental drama. The following program must therefore be considered as the spoken text of an opera that serves to introduce musical movements and motivate their character and expression. The program should be distributed to the audience at concerts, for it is indispensable for a full understanding of the dramatic plan of the work. According to Dahlhaus, Berlioz’s formal outline for the Allegro section, sketched in 1835, tries to bring the confusing dream images into a straight sonata form. This is an ingenious critical approach that contradicts the composer’s published intention (Dahlhaus, [1980] 1989: 155) to organize the musical material according to the plot. This is most evident in the transformations that the idée fixe undergoes. According to the original program notes, the “beloved melody” appears again, “but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness” (Cone, 1971: 25). When Fétis labeled the idée fixe an “insipid statement” (219) and made no effort to trace it through the composition he missed the opportunity to discover a structure in it. Schumann published in his journal Heinrich Panofka’s enthusiastic report of the Symphonie fantastique (NZfM 1: 67–69, 71–72) but was so struck by the diverse reactions to the music that he ordered the piano transcription, published Fétis’s critical review with a cautionary introduction (Cone, 1971: 221), and added to it his own response, which is undoubtedly one of his most remarkable pieces of music criticism (NZfM 3: 1–2, 33–35, 37–38, 41–44, 45–48, and 49–51). It is a penetrating analysis with an internal division: the enthusiastic first part is written under the name of Schumann’s Florestan identity, while the longer and more detached second analysis was signed by Schumann himself. When Schumann republished the review in his collected essays of 1854, he dropped the Florestan part and limited the text to the Eusebius/Schumann part. “Harold en Italie” (1834) “Harold in Italy” suggests a musical reenactment of Bryon’s epic poem “Childe Harold,” but it is not. Berlioz originally wanted to compose a choral work on Queen Mary of Scotland, and when he gave this up he conceived the idea “of writing a series of scenes for the orchestra, in which the viola should find itself mixed up”, like a person more or less in action, always preserving his own individuality. “The background I formed from my recollections of my wanderings in the Abruzzi, introducing the viola as a sort of melancholy dreamer, in the style of Byron’s Childe Harold” (Berlioz, [1870] 1960: 202). Actually, Berlioz took Harold’s viola theme from an overture he composed to dramatize Walter

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Scott’s Rob Roy, and he composed “Harold” because Paganini urged him to create something for his newly acquired Stradivarius viola. The confusing facts of Berlioz’s intentions are reflected in the composition itself and they find expression in the hero, who mediates multiple authorial moods. Byron used “Childe Harold” as an alter ego to display his own deeply personal brooding, while Berlioz adapted the Byronic hero for his own personal dejection. Liszt applied the historical and theoretical principles of his “Harold” essay to Berlioz’s composition (NZfM 43: 81–84, 89–97) and approved of Berlioz’s strategy to define his hero with a musical phrase of the viola (a version of the idée fixe). This allows him to indicate whether the hero is present or absent, and he can use modulations and other musical means to indicate shifts in his mood. While “classical” (instrumental) music regulates the thematic changes by means of formal principles, program music links these up with changes in the poetic idea (81). The musical transformations of the theme represent action in the plot. But how can the composer follow or condense the lengthy roaming of Byron’s hero? Can we identify at least sections of it in the music? Unfortunately not, for none of the four music scenes has a corresponding passage in Byron’s poem. Liszt, who had indicated that portraying the shifting moods of a modern hero is much more difficult than following the actions of an ancient epic one, fails to interconnect the music and the poem by quoting stanzas 70–72 of Byron’s Canto iii (90) in the context of Berlioz’s first movement. But Byron’s hero was at this point still in the Swiss Alps, not yet in Italy. In fact, none of Berlioz’s four titles can be associated with any particular passage in Byron’s poem. The viola theme expresses the melancholy of a human figure, and repeatedly mingles with the environment indicated in the four titles, whereas Byron’s hero adopts a certain lofty disdain. Berlioz does not simply adopt the bitterness of the Byronic figure, but allows his hero to delve into the tenderness, piety as well as ribaldry and orgy he finds in Italy. And who is telling the stories? Do we see directly into his Harold’s soul, or are we “reading” the report of a narrator? The question cannot be answered with certainty, and I could find no commentators that even raised the question. Most of them automatically assume that Berlioz’s music gives a direct access to Harold’s inner life. The first movement is titled “Harold in the Mountains; Scenes of Melancholy, Felicity, and Passion.” Harold’s theme enters after a fugato passage and eventually fades but is then taken up by the orchestra, rising to a joyous enchantment with nature (90). In the second movement titled “March of the Pilgrims Singing their Evening Prayer,” there is a similar and yet totally different encounter: while marching, the pilgrims come upon the viola theme, mingle with it, and gradually move on until the music fades completely in an evening

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setting of chimes. The third, scherzo movement tells the “Serenade of a Mountaineer of the Abruzzi to his Mistress” played by “pifferi” (various rustic oboes), whereas trio contains a duet between Harold’s viola and an English horn. In the final scene, Harold encounters a “furious orgy wherein wine, blood, joy, all combined, parade their intoxication – where the rhythm sometimes seems to stumble along, sometimes to rush on in fury, and the brass seems to vomit forth curses and to answer prayer with blasphemies; where they laugh, drink, fight, destroy, violate, and utterly run riot” (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: 299). The subtitle “Recollections of the Preceding scenes” calls attention to the revival of themes from the first three movements, but reminds the experienced listeners also of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, where the recapitulation of the earlier themes is gently rejected by the baritone with “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne,” opening thereby the way for the orchestral setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” about the brotherhood of mankind. Berlioz turned Beethoven upside down: he timidly introduces into the opening orgy the former themes, including that of Harold, but they are simply trampled and suffocated by the brigands. Harold loses his very identity in the last broken evocation of the viola theme, now played by fading clarinets. Nominally, this means that Harold dissolves not within Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” but in his first drama, amidst his Robbers, a play that is, to be sure, populated with more humane figures than Berlioz’s cave of orgy. According to Berlioz’s earlier quoted remark Beethoven needed no words to make his music expression specific for “imaginative listeners can understand a genre instrumental expressif ” without them. A different kind of problem arises, however, when instrumental narratives seek to portray without words objects and situations in the physical world. This is the subject of Berlioz’s “De l’Imitation musicale” of 1837 (rgm 4: 9–11, 15–17; Trans. Cone, 1971: 36–46) which also starts with music’s autonomy: “music is in most cases an art sui generis.13 It is sufficient unto itself, and possesses the power to charm without having recourse to any kind of imitation” (37). Which are the few cases in which music is permitted not to be sui generis? Following Giuseppe Carpani’s Le Haydine (1812), Berlioz distinguishes between direct imitations, when music simply depicts external sounds, and indirect ones, when affective imitation acts in such a way upon the imagination that it engenders sensations analogous to those produced by something silent but seen. The musical imitation of natural sounds is a traditional issue. According to Berlioz, it must be a means, not an end; the imitated item must be worthy, must support the composer’s intentions, and should not occur where 13

rgm 4: 9–11, 15–17; English translation in Cone, 1971: 36–46.

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e­ motional imitation is called for. The test case for this is, of course, Beethoven’s Sixth. Are the sounds of his storm a means or an end? Berlioz finds not only that this “sublime” imitation “outstrips anything that had ever been attempted in the genre” (Cone, 1971: 38), but also that it aims at contrasts and dramatic ­effects – hence it is not an end in itself. In contrast, Beethoven’s musical imitation of a stone rolling in the grave-digging scene of Fidelio is an end in itself (39). More difficult is the case of silent objects. Carpani found the musical depiction of silent referents admirable and enchanting, but Berlioz pointed out that silent objects can elicit a variety of responses (44). Such depictions are metaphors rather than imitations. The moonlight in Agatha’s aria in Weber’s Der Freischütz involves no imitation, for “the calm, veiled, and melancholy coloring of the harmonies and the chiaroscuro of the instrumental timbre form a faithful metaphor or image of the pale light of the moon” (45). Listeners will recognize the metaphor only if they are alerted to it. “Roméo et Juliette” (1839)14 “Speak, my Orchestra,” Berlioz once allegedly said to a band he was rehearsing with, and David Cairns has appropriately used the term as the heading of his chapter on Roméo et Juliette (1999, ii: 176). As I shall demonstrate, his orchestra actually speaks two languages: one with instrumental sounds and another with (French) words. Berlioz’s main raw material “was Pierre Letourneur’s French prose translation of Shakespeare’s play, based on David Garrick’s popular revision of it. It granted the lovers a tear-jerking final reunion in the Capulet chapel of the churchyard”. Berlioz included in his Roméo et Juliette a reunion of the lovers, and he followed Garrick in adding a funeral procession for Juliette, though he hated meddling with originals.15 After receiving from Paginini a gift of 20,000 francs to complete the work, Berlioz prepared a prose translation that Émile Deschamps put into verse (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: Ch. 47). The premiere was a great triumph. So were the Vienna and Prague performances in 1846. The final outline divides the composition into seven parts, which rearrange Shakespeare’s plot and emphasize different parts of the plot. Friar Lawrence, the only Shakespearean character who sings, enters the composition only in the last verbal section and tells how he tried to save the lovers. Subsequently he

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This section is an abbreviated and revised version of Neubauer 2008. In Chapter 16 of the Mémoires ([1870] 1966), Berlioz remarks that he finds Garrick’s “dénouement” more powerful than Shakespeare’s.

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settles the renewed fighting between the Capulets and Montagues and forces them to make peace. Berlioz dwells on emotional states rather than on events, yet he prominently narrates, through both language and music. Texted are the Prologue, the Strophes, and the Scherzetto in Part 1, brief sections of Part 3, the Capulets’s mourning Juliette in Part 5, and Friar Lawrence’s sermon in Part 7. The verbal plot is carried mainly by the Introduction in Part 1 and the both narrating and performing Friar. Shakespeare’s play may not be the most useful foil against which to read Berlioz’s musico-verbal story. Though the composer remained close to Garrick version, he combined it with a music that has a logic and structure of its own. I shall focus therefore on the Berlioz/Deschamps text and its relation to the music, which gives us clues to Berlioz’s musico-literary art. That Roméo and Juliette never sing or speak is a fundamental aspect of this work. Apart from brief choral passages sung by the Montagues, the Capulets, and their guests, only Friar Lawrence sings, and only in the finale. The rest of the Berlioz/Deschamps text is diegetic, sung by various narrators that do not belong to the fictional world of Shakespeare’s play. In contrast to traditional musical narrators in oratorios and elsewhere the narrative voices in Roméo et Juliette do not congeal: sometimes it is a contralto, sometimes a tenor that tells what occurred or will occur, and they react differently to the fictional events and characters. In the Prologue, their words encode the musical themes with meanings, so that listeners may recall their original verbal meaning when they recur in later orchestral parts. Berlioz inverts here the usual function of overtures, whose purely musical motives acquire meaning in the course of an operatic plot. The Orchestral Prelude is the most explicitly narrative and dramatic section. Its program, outlined as “Fighting – riot – intervention of the Prince” is easily recognized by listeners familiar with Shakespeare’s play, where these events take up the first half of the first scene in Act i. Berlioz uses purely instrumental means to render two kinds of action here: a physical combat between rival factions, and the Prince’s authoritative verbal intervention that temporarily suppresses the feud. Surprisingly, Berlioz portrays the chaotic street scene of fighting and riot with a fugal texture, a most formal and highly structured musical form. When this fugally ordered disorder reaches its climax, the Prince enters with an “instrumental recitative” that Berlioz adopted from Beethoven’s Ninth (Rushton, 1994: 22–23, 105–106). The long, drawn-out base notes of the brasses dramatically contrast with the musical scene of riot, but Berlioz seems to suggest a relation between the Prince and his subjects by using for instrumental

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recitative an emphatic and augmented form of the same fugato theme he used for the riot. As Rushton writes, the Prince’s anger “is represented by tonal arbitrariness: there seems no way of predicting which key may be reinforced. […] The dispersal of the combatants is graphically depicted by the liquidation of the fugue subject onto an eventual dominant pedal.” When order is ­re-established, “there is no room for ambiguity in the resolution, and the close, with its growing silences, is stage-clearing music, a subdued reversal of the opening” (23). Thus, the Prince’s secular authority is a symbolic musical order and a temporarily re-established social order. This will be mirrored at the end of the composition, when Friar Lawrence’s religious and moral authority reconciles the feuding families by means of a verbal and musical rhetoric. The prologue that follows the prelude has two aims, “to sing, in effect, the programme of the symphony, and to introduce some of its themes” (23). In such a symphonic approach, the text merely codes the later orchestral motives. However, the texted parts of the Prologue also provide emotional and perspectival images of the here and now, and they specify what precisely went on in the prelude. Given the mimetic limitations of music, the orchestral prelude could portray only a general disorder and its suppression (Berlioz, 1882: 151–152; Albright, 2001: 43–44). To insure that all listeners understand the initial clash, Berlioz offers in the prologue’s initial stanza a verbal summary of what he had just narrated by orchestral means. The recapitulation is sung in unison by a contralto and a small choir, in a recitative of steady pitch: Ancient slumbering hatreds / Have risen as if from hell; / Capulets, Montagues, two warring houses, / Have crossed swords in Verona. / However, the Prince has put down / these bloody disorders, / threatening with death those, who against his orders, / have recourse again to the law of steel.16 rushton, 1994: 91

This verbal recall of what had happened is followed by a present-tense account of current events, starting with the announcement that the Capulets give a ball in “moments of calm.” The rest of the prologue constitutes “a veritable 16

“D’anciennes haines endormies / Ont surgi comme de l’enfer; / Capulets, Montagus, deux maisons ennemies, / Dans Vérone ont croisé le fer. / Pourtant, de ces sanglants désordres / Le Prince a réprimé le cours, / En menaçant de mort ceux qui, malgré ses ordres, / Aux justices du glaive auraient encore recours” (Rushton, 1994: 91). In the following passages of the libretto I take the French original from Rushton; my English translations are indebted to Rushton and others.

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musical analysis of the score, inserted into the score itself” (Chailley, 1977: 117). As Berlioz wrote in the preface, he introduced singing at the beginning to prepare the listeners for the dramatic scenes, whose feelings and passions will be expressed by the orchestra. The retrospective is thus followed by a preview of musical themes in the later orchestral parts. The prologue does not merely encode the musical themes; it also provides glimpses of the future. The first of these perspectival contrasts concerns the difference between individuals and society. Portraying the present, the “recitative harmonique” first focuses on Roméo who laments his destiny and “wanders sadly about the palace,” pining away for Juliette, “the daughter / Of his family’s enemies.” (Rushton, 1994: 90)17 But the narratorial attention quickly shifts from Roméo’s private misery to the glittering décor, the dance, and the joyous exclamations at the ball: “The noise of instruments, the melodious songs / float out of the halls where gold glitters, / rousing the dance as well as joyous peals of laughter.” (91)18 It is at this point, that the increasingly agitated reporting gives way to a purely orchestral Allegro, a lively waltz that recurs later as a “tagged” image of sociability. In narrative terms this shift from texted to pure music is a change from diegesis to mimesis or “scene”: the narrator goes silent and allows the scene to speak for itself in music, as if this were a quotation in the diegetic discourse. The dance is not reported but directly presented as a performance, literal as well as figurative. However, the dance passage is only sixteen measures long; the music slows down in order to allow a return to the diegetic recitative, which reports the ending of the ball and the dispersion of the dancers.19 As the social noise subsides, the narrative voice turns to Roméo, who “sighs for he must leave Juliette.”20 The music that accompanies these words later becomes the opening theme of Part 2, titled “Roméo seul” (measures 24–31). When the hero is jolted from his passivity he assumes an increasingly active role, and the lovers engage in an increasingly passionate dialogue of gestures: he surmounts the garden walls; she confesses her love without knowing of his presence; he reveals himself to her; and she responds with a leap of fire that 17

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“Le jeune Roméo, plaignant sa destinée, / Vient tristement errer à l’entour du palais; / Car il aime d’amour Juliette … la fille / Des ennemis de sa famille!” (Rushton, 1994: 91) In Berlioz’s and Garrick’s versions Romeo is in love at the beginning of the action already; there is no first encounter at the ball. “Le bruit des instruments, les chants mélodieux / Partent des salons où l’or brille, / Excitant et la dans et les éclats joyeux” (Rushton, 1994: 91). “La fête est terminée, et quand tout bruit expire, / Sous les arcades on entend / Les danseurs fatigués s’éloigner en chantant” (Rushton, 1994: 92). “Roméo soupire, / Car il a dû quitter Juliette!” (Rushton, 1994: 92).

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recalls his leap over the wall, as the contralto, tenor, and the small choir report about it, singing. When Roméo reveals himself, the orchestral music marked “Andante con moto e appassionato assai” introduces the adagio theme of Part 3, the great orchestral love scene. At this point, however, the texted music discreetly abandons reporting. The plot is interrupted; a contralto takes over and fills the pause with lyrical-hymnal air, addressed to the lovers. The chorus merely chimes in “ciel” at the end of each stanza. This verbal glorification must come to an end, but the time of pure music has not come yet. As a tenor assumes the narration, we are back in the plot, though not where it was interrupted. By an arbitrary act, which asks that listeners take an imaginative leap, we are thrown back into the social world, in which such sublime love must appear as silly madness: “Soon Roméo’s pallor and distracted languor / Sets all his friends laughing: ‘My dear’ says elegant Mercutio, ‘I bet that Queen Mab has been with you.’”21 Of all the texted passages this one comes closest to Shakespeare’s text, but this is an aside, a brilliantly evocative rendering of an imaginary being that traverses the minds of sleepers and contributes nothing to the plot. Berlioz’s Prologue shuttles now between singing and pure instrumental music, between diegetic narration and mimesis, the imitation of character speech. It engages human voices (1) to recapitulate the meaning of the combat in the instrumental opening, (2) to identify the content of the musical themes in the subsequent symphonic movements (i.e. to code the musical themes), and (3) to intimate the tragedy that will be retold by instrumental means. Berlioz assigns different narrative functions to the chorus and the soloists: the chorus focuses on the plot, the external events, and their interrelations while the contralto primarily portrays moods and passions, and the tenor impersonates Mercutio to fill a pause in the action in another, fanciful way. As in the last scene of “Harold,” a comparison with the opening of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth is revealing. In the latter, the review of the themes from the previous movements declares all of them inadequate for the task ahead: “Oh Freunde, nicht diese Töne” (Oh friends, not these sounds!). Berlioz, in contrast, enumerates and explains his themes before he elaborates on them in the orchestral sections. Looking forward in music history, his method anticipates Wagner’s Leitmotiv technique, but Berlioz does not yet have at his disposal the stage to buttress his semantization of the orchestral music. His method resembles more Mahler’s technique of instrumentally quoting texted music. 21

“Bientȏt de Roméo la pȃle reverie / Met tous ses amis en gaité; / ‘Mon cher, dit l’elegant Mercutio, je parie / Que la reine Mab t’aura visité” (Rushon, 1994: 93).

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Berlioz went here beyond the instrumental genres that emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century, but he did not grant the listeners full interpretive freedom. As Jacques Barzun remarks: “Berlioz expounds but a single principle: music by itself is (or can be) dramatically and psychologically expressive” (2000: 14). As Berlioz himself had emphasized, the lovers remain silent in his work: The duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra … the greatest composers have produced thousands of vocal duets of this kind; it seemed prudent as much as singular to try some other way of doing it. Then there is the very sublimity of this love, whose depiction by a musician is fraught with peril; his invention should be allowed the scope which the exact sense of sung words restrains, but which is possible in such circumstances with instrumental music, richer, more varied, less restricted, and thanks to its very indefiniteness, incomparably more powerful. rushton, 1994: 87–88; cf. albright, 2001: 47; chailley, 1977: 116

Is Roméo et Juliette then symphonic or dramatic, an opera that has ingested a symphony, or a symphony that frames an opera? Both views are tenable: some see a duck where others see a rabbit. Berlioz himself unequivocally stated in his preface that “this is neither an opera concertante, nor a cantata, but a symphony with choruses” – but this does not account for the presence of solo singers.22 Jacques Chailley agreed with him that Roméo et Juliette was a symphony in five movements, though he admitted that Berlioz also characterized it as a symphonie dramatique (1977: 115–116). One may regard the composition as a partly “detextualized” opera (Albright, 2001: 64), or as a symphony that follows Beethoven’s Ninth by opening up to vocal music. Rushton rejects all symphonic interpretations and suggests that the composition “is best understood as a dramatic form, albeit one without precedent and virtually, as it now appears, without prosperity” (1994: 80).23 I agree that Roméo et Juliette has an inimitable dramatic form, but I would add that the dramatic elements are concentrated in the orchestral sections, whereas the texted sections are narrated by narrators 22

23

A related passage in Chapter 49 of the Mémoires: “Enfin, après une assez longue indécision, je m’arrêtai à l’idée d’une symphonie avec choeurs, solos de chant et récitative choral, dont le drame de Shakespeare, Roméo et Juliette, serait le sujet sublime et toujours nouveau” (ii: 35). Following Jeffrey Langford, Rushton reluctantly accepts the view that due to external circumstances (Berlioz’s alienation from the Parisian opera house) the composition became a “temporary substitute for opera” (Rushton, 1994: 80).

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that are not part of the fictional world. Albright has recently suggested that “Roméo and Juliette consists of a symphony in F major embedded within an opera in B minor/major.” The lovers and their “love code” are represented with a “symphonic commingling of themes,” whereas the social world of Verona with its “social code” is essentially operatic (Albright, 2001: 64). This seems to me a felicitous characterization that fits Berlioz’s composition better than the term “semi-opera” that Albright uses in the title of his book to cover both Roméo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust. Albright adopts the term from Roger North, who regarded several of Purcell’s compositions “semi-operas,” because “some scenes were completely spoken, others completely sung, and still others mostly spoken, but including incidental songs” (xi). However, Roméo et Juliette contains no scenes that are completely or mostly spoken without orchestral accompaniment. I want to pursue a genre characterization that Albright adopts from David Gramit but does not work out: “Roméo et Juliette aspires to go beyond finite genres through the act of comprehending all at once. In this sense its analogue in the domain of literature is the novel – for the Romantic imagination, the novel was a sort of Über-genre, breaking down the boundaries between various types of literature” (47). Several aspects of the work support a novelistic approach. We have seen that, with the exception of Friar Lawrence’s text in the Finale, Berlioz’s text is narrative rather than dramatic, so that the narrators (again except for Friar Lawrence) are not part of the fictional world. Even Rushton, who regards Roméo et Juliette as a “covert opera” admits that the Prologue is “positively antitheatrical” (1994: 84). The Prologue, the only longer texted part prior to the Finale, employs three narrative voices: the “small chorus,” the contralto, and the Mercutio-impersonating tenor. Each of these voices has a particular attitude and perspective on the tragedy, and the shift of one to another is ironic. The transition from contralto’s loving admiration to the tenor’s whimsical Queen Mab, for instance, has inevitably an ironic effect. I suggest that Berlioz provides a multi-perspectival presentation that is typical for novels written in the wake of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste. When the contralto addresses in Roméo et Juliette the lovers, or speaks of Shakespeare, when a narrative voice addresses the listener (in the eliminated second Prologue), when an unidentified narrator introduces a voice that will paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mercutio, when, above all, music gives way to narration and vice versa, Berlioz engages in border crossings that violate genre definitions, very much in the manner introduced by Sterne and theoretically elaborated on by the German romantic theoretician Friedrich

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Schlegel. By transgressing established genre borders Berlioz, as well as the Sternean n ­ arrators, call attention to them and problematize what seemed unproblematic. Such meta-narrative border crossings and fanciful intrusions of the narrator became crucial for Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of the novel as formulated in his “Brief über den Roman,” (1958 ff, ii: 329–339) and his famous Athenäum-Fragment 116, which defines Progressive Universalpoesie as an open poetic form exemplified by the novel (ii: 182–183). Paradigmatic novels are for Schlegel “a mixture of narration, song, and other forms” (ii: 336). It is here, in the romantic theory and practice of the novel, that the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk was born, long before Wagner. Performance instructions in the score may be regarded as meta-narrative commentaries and instructions. Berlioz makes ample use of them in Roméo et Juliette, for instance by indicating for measure 226 of Part 2 in the score: “Réunion des deux thèmes, du Larghetto et de l’Allegro” ([1839] 1990: 98). The Allegro and the Larghetto start in measures 63 and 81 respectively. When Berlioz shuttles between narration and reflection, between song and instrumental music, he constructs, I suggest, a uniquely Schlegelian texture. The language of the operatic sections in Roméo et Juliette is not only narrative and performative, but also anticipatory, critical, and reflective with respect to the performance. Transgression of genre borders was as frequent in music as it was in novels and novellas. The locus classicus of this intrusion of criticism into the performance was the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, which I have mentioned already in the context of Berlioz’s “Harold.” What matters in the present context is that Beethoven reintroduced language into orchestral music in a critical and self-reflexive manner. The opening of the movement with a Schreckensfanfare (Wagner, 1983, ix: 120) is followed by an inventory of themes from the previous movements that is interrupted by the bass request to turn to other sounds. It remains unclear what music is actually rejected. The recapitulated themes? The Schreckensfanfare? All previous movements? All instrumental music? In any case, the rejection creates space for the melody that accompanies Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” The unique form of Roméo et Juliette involves structures, tendencies, and ideas that strongly resemble those employed in romantic conceptions of the novel. Berlioz intuitively created a work that has a home in a broad history of the nineteenth-century arts. Like so many nineteenth-century novels, Roméo et Juliette is a mongrel, one of those “large loose baggy monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.” Henry James, who coined the phrase, was puzzled by the “monsters,” which he found exemplified in

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­Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Melville’s Moby Dick. Not bad company for Roméo et Juliette!24 Schumann In contrast to Berlioz, Schumann created no “large loose baggy monsters,” but he was inspired early in his career by those written by Jean Paul, one of the quirkiest followers of Laurence Sterne. What inspired Schumann in these novels was, once again, in contrast to Berlioz, not related to genre but to style and the conception of split characters. Towards the end of his life, Schumann also composed Scenen aus Goethes Faust (1849) and Manfred (1848–51), whose texts were philosophical epopoeias in Liszt’s sense, but his early instrumental narration was more fragmented. Schumann’s diaries and letters are studded with references to Jean Paul.25 What exactly was Jean Paul’s role in Schumann’s narrative referentiality?26 In retrospect, the most remarkable feature of Jean Paul’s prose is that he digresses in Laurence Sterne fashion and constantly shifts narrators, providing thereby a multiple and unstable view of the world. This perspectival narrative mode is precisely what Schumann came to adapt via the figures of Florestan and Eusebius. Opinions and feelings are usually undermined by their subsequent contrasts in his musical narrations. Nowhere are these dizzying rapid shifts of perspectival images more evident than in Schumann’s Papillons (Op. 2; 1829–32), which evokes Chapter 63 in Jean Paul’s novel Die Flegeljahre.27 The plot of the unfinished novel has a number 24

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Georg Kastner’s review of R&J in the amz 42.2 (8. Januar 1840): 17–20. Stephen Heller’s letter to Schumann about a performance of R&J: rgm 6 (1839): 546–549, 560–562. See also Ellis, 1995: 227–228. Jean Paul mirrors himself in all his works, but always via two persons (Schumann, 1971–87: Tgb. 82); Natur – das grosse, entfaltete Schnupftuch Gottes (Tgb. 101); jp has three kinds of spirit, namely Gemüth, Humor, Witz – just as a turkey has three kinds of flesh (Tgb. 105); polymeter (measured rhythm alternating with lyrical-free measure) in jp (Tgb. 113); jp: after each poetic passage a bucket of ice cold Witz (Tgb. 142). On Jean Paul and Schumann see Daverio (1997), Jacobs (1949), Hans Koetz (1933), Edler (2008) and Floros (1981). Schumann underlined in his copy of the Flegeljahre specific passages, numbered them, and marked sections in the Papillons with these numbers (see Boetticher, [1941] 2004), and in 17 April 1832 urged his fellow-Davidsbündler to “read the last scene in Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre as soon as possible, because the Papillons are intended as a musical representation of that masquerade” (Schumann, 1886a, 35–36).

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of unresolved main themes. It opens with a will that, to everybody’s surprise, leaves a huge heritage to the young Walt, on the condition that he goes through a strange sequence of tests. Whether he actually succeeds is left open. His twin brother Vult becomes a flute player and goes through all of Europe, without earning enough money. When he returns, the loving twins start to write a novel, but its completion and publishing is left open. The final chapter is about a masked ball attended by Vult and his brother Walt, Schumann’s models for Florestan and Eusebius respectively. Vult comes in the guise of a woman symbolizing Hope and Walt as a coachman. They both love Wina. Vult generously allows Walt to make advances to her while dancing, but Walt is too shy and remains silent. Vult then convinces Walt to exchange costumes, and so Walt, disguised now as Hope, has to watch how his brother, masked in his former costume, wins over Wina, who believes that her partner is still Walt. At the end of the night, Vult is jealous or angry with Walt and writes a letter to him. They sleep next to each other, Walt tells Vult about his dream, Vult turns it into a flute play, and departs for good while playing it. This ends Jean Paul’s unfinished novel (1959–85, I.3: 758–760). Jean Paul’s novel has twin protagonists and the text is saturated with excursions, both on the micro level of complex sentence structures and on the plot level. Due to constant transformations and changes, everything becomes diffuse, ambiguous, and multi-perspectival. Jean Paul’s deliberate and systematic diffusion of concrete meanings may be read as thematic, rhythmic, and modal shifts within an instrumental music that is no longer bound to definite concepts. If Schumann and others interpreted Jean Paul’s text as musical, this was surely not because Vult plays the flute. What must have appealed to him was the absence of a unitary perspective and plot. He masked his own critical self, sometimes as Florestan and at other times as Eusebius, allowing for identity confusion as if at a masked ball. Schumann summarized the chapter for Ludwig Rellstab on April 19, 1832 as follows: “The masked ball – Walt – Vult – masks – Wina – the exchanging of the masks – confessions – angry declarations – hurrying away closing scene – and then the departing brother.” He added: “I kept on turning over the last page, for the end seemed like a new beginning – almost unconsciously I went to the piano and so one Papillon after another appeared” (1886: 167–168). Most, but not all, of this summary does, indeed, refer to events in the Flegeljahre chapter that Schumann underlined in his copy and used as labels in his Papillons (Boetticher, [1841] 2004: 611 ff). However, some of the textual references in the score are not in the novel, and Schumann contradicts his just quoted remarks in another letter (1886: 53–54), in which he claims that he attached the passages

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after he composed the music. He did not want listeners to guess the narrative exactly but left them rather a range of imaginative possibilities.28 He was annoyed when Rellstab regretted in his otherwise friendly review that the music did not indicate specific details of the text (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 401).29 Schumann fictionalized his music criticism by splitting his self but he completed only one very short music novella, “Der alte Hauptmann” (1837; NZfM 6: 23). We should, nevertheless, trace the cross-pollination of his critical ideas with his editorial principles in running the NZfM, and the narratives of his instrumental music. Florestan and Eusebius, inspired by Jean Paul’s fiction, served as symbolic codes in his music, as contrasting critical perspectives starting with the earliest critical essay on Chopin’s Mozart variations, and as figures of the poetics that Schumann wanted to further with his journal. Florestan is masculine, extrovert, emotional, a passionate Beethoven admirer, and a New Romantic. He is also behind Schumann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler, a figure of humor and progress, one of those “who have presaged all future; what is strange is for them in the next moment no longer strange; the unusual becomes in a moment their property” (Schumann, 1854, I: 5; ii: 366f). Florestan swiftly recognizes beauty, which he occasionally uses to cover mistakes (ii: 366f; i: 60). Eusebius is more feminine, dreamy, and introspective, possessing sensibility and Besonnenheit.30 He grasps things more slowly but more surely than Florestan. He plays the piano with rational awareness, delicacy, and greater technical perfection than Florestan. To young people he recommends the fresh Mozart, so full of life (lebensreich) rather than Beethoven (i: 8) As 28

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When Clara played the piece at home in 1832, a listener remarked that he actually did not like such “paintings” but one ought to listen to them more frequently. Reflecting on this unwelcome remark, Schumann wrote in his diary that listeners are not expected to dissect analytically and mechanically a piece upon first listening. However, one ought to make perhaps an exception with the Papillons, for the changes are too fast and the colors too colorful. The listener still has the previous page in mind while the performer is already finished. This “self-destruction” of the Papillons may contain something critical, but surely nothing artistic. One may insert between the individual parts a glass of champagne (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 407), and cf. note 31 below. Schumann found the review (Iris nr. 21, May 25, 1832) important enough to copy it into his diaries (1971–87, i: 425–426). Rellstab actually pleaded for non-representational music: “Das Kunstwerk darf nicht durch ein fremdes Etwas, es muss ganz allein, voll, durch sich selbst verständlich seyn” (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 425). The romantic sense of this term was introduced by Jean Paul in his Vorschule zur Ästhetik (iii. Program, § 12: Jean Paul, 1959–85, I.5: 56–59), meaning sobriety, thoughtfulness, or composure. E.T.A. Hoffmann adopted the term from Jean Paul in his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Hoffmann, 1963: 37). Martyn Clarke translates the term as “rational awareness” (Hoffmann, 1989: 18, 238).

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Schumann wrote to Heinrich Dorn on September 14, 1836, he saw in Florestan and Eusebius his own “double nature,” which he would have liked to merge into a single man, like his third, mediating figure of Meister Raro – but Father Wieck certainly did not assume this role for him. What function did these figures of critics have in Schumann’s own music? To what extent are his instrumental works referential? Contemporary critics still disagree on this issue. Theodor Uhlig called Schumann an “absolute musician” in 1851 (NZfM 35.2: 219–221), yet Schumann wanted to poeticize music. According to Floros (1981: 96–97), he was convinced that music can and should represent extra-musical matters, and the difference between Schumann’s poetic music and program music is much smaller than it is often claimed. Many of Schumann’s compositions are based on “inner” programs, which he has withheld or coded. The number of Schumann compositions that belong to “esoteric program music” is actually much higher than is generally believed. Schumann sought reference. As he once remarked: “Music that has only sounds and no language or signs for states of the soul would be ‘minor’ music” (1854, i: 35). This seems to define his minimum line. The maximum line he formulated in his two-part and complex 1835 review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, signed as Florestan and Schumann. The two extremes enclose a broad terrain that I shall exemplify with concrete examples from his own compositions. Carnaval (Op. 9; 1834) brings together friends and associates of the NZfM coded by the variously spelled musical cryptogram a-es-c-h. It represents Asch, the birthplace of Ernestine von Fricken, Schumann’s bride at the time. Schumann named sections for Ernestine (“Estrella”) and Clara (“Chiarina”). The music contains references to Eusebius, Florestan, and many decodable puzzles. The concluding “Marches des ‘Davidsbündler’ contre les Philistins” triumphantly confronts Schumann’s group with the musical Philistines, represented by a seventeenth-century Grandfather’s Dance, which makes even an ironic reference to the last movement of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto (Edler, 2008: 132). Schumann became critical of his early pieces because the individual passages rushed past too fast without developing an identity. Papillons “were too small and rhapsodic to allow for a greater rise,” and Carnaval he subtitled himself “Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes” (meaning the four notes constituting the name “Asch”).31

31 [Die Papillons] “sind zu klein und rhapsodisch, um großes Aufhebens zu machen” (discussion of piano trios by Fesca, 1842: Edler, 2008: 130). About the Carnaval he remarked: “so wechseln doch auch die musikalischen Stimmungen zu rasch, als dass ein ganzes

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Schumann was working with these short pieces towards a new form that would not only replace the sonata but also contain a new narrative mode that went beyond language without making use of musical mimeticism. Following Hoffmann, for whom symphonies were operas of instruments, Schumann noted in his diary as early as July 1832 the possibility of purely dramatic “operas without texts.”32 The mentioned “Grandfather Dance” gives the content verbally away; it also gives examples for non-textual narration. In 1837, Schumann further developed his narrative ideas in the Phantasiestücke (opus 12) and the Davidsbündlertänze (opus 6). The first two measures of the latter quote two measures from Clara’s fifth Mazurka in the Soirées musicales, and Schumann conveys this verbally with the remark “Motto v. C.W.” Schumann described the piece to Clara as “an entire Polterabend,” a farewell to friends on the eve of a wedding (January 1838; Schumann, 1886: 274), and he meant by this literally dropping all his original commentaries. Only some idiosyncratic tempo indications survive, such as “Ungeduldig” (Impatient) and “Sehr rasch und in sich hinein” (Very quickly and intimate); Schumann smoothened even “Etwas hahnebüchen” (A little awkwardly) to “Mit Humor.” The Phantasiestücke also use descriptive labels. Some are psychological, as in “Aufschwung,” “Warum?” “Grillen,” or “Traumes Wirren”; others indicate the time of the day that could have a psychological impact, as in “Des Abends” and “In der Nacht.” In the latter, Schumann retrospectively detected echoes of the Hero and Leander myth, whereas in the Ende vom Lied he found once an all absorbing final joyful wedding and next time a mingling of wedding and death bells (Edler, 2008: 136). These aposteriori references were obviously haphazard. Schumann composed the best of his cyclical piano pieces in 1838 with Kinderszenen (Op. 15), Kreisleriana (Op. 16), C major Fantasie (Op. 17), and the Noveletten (Op. 21). He saw manifest in all of them a tension between spontaneous musical invention and a retrospectively added verbal meaning. As he wrote to Clara in March 1838, “it is so strange how I invent almost everything canonically and how I discover only afterwards the voices that sing”, often even in inversions, in wrong rhythms etc. (1886: 280). The Kreisleriana (Op. 16), Schumann’s favorite, evokes Hoffmann’s idiosyncratic musician Kreisler, who is in hopeless conflict with his philistine environment. According to his letter to Clara dated August 3, 1838, “some parts contain a genuinely wild love, your life and mine, and some of your glances” (Blicke). The Kinderszenen he saw as

32

­Publikum folgen könnte, das nicht alle Minuten aufgescheucht sein will” (Schumann, 1854, i: 484). See also Schumann’s letter of September 22, 1837 to Moscheles (1886a: 101). “Warum sollte es keine Opern ohne Text geben; das wäre eben dramatisch. In Shakespeare giebts viel für dich” (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 411).

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the counterpart, namely as “soft, tender, and happy, as our future.” He was irritated by Rellstab’s review, which suggested that Schumann sought sounds of a crying child, for he claimed he started with visual images rather than words: he did have some child heads before his eyes, but he added texts only later, and meant them only as “fine hints for performance and apprehension” (to Heinrich Dorn, September 5, 1839; 1886a: 170). The most explicitly narrative pieces in the piano harvest of 1838 are the Noveletten, actually musical letters written to Clara during the turbulent conflict with her father. They make jokes, like referring to Goethe’s Egmont (“Egmont stories”; fight for “Clärchen”), “family scenes with fathers,” a “wedding” (1886a: 118). Some contain literary references: the third letter (in the NZfM Supplement to May 22, 1838, 8: 164) carried as motto the beginning of the witches scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but Schumann explicitly states that the music was not intended to illustrate the words, for he found the appropriate words only after finishing the composition. Next to verbal citations and references, Schumann employs equally important musical quotations, transposing thereby Jean Paul’s narrative technique unto a musical plane. He introduces in the last fifteen measures of the sixth Novelette a modified passage from the Adagio coda in the last song of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, which he also quotes in the first movement of the Phantasie Op. 17. The following year, Schumann inserted into his Faschingsschwank aus Wien a fortissimo evocation of the “Marseillaise,” which was forbidden in Vienna. All in all, Schumann provides listeners with a wide range of hints, puns, and mysterious codes, while the musical reference system of Berlioz is rather self-centered. After 1838, Schumann frequently experimented with new musical genres. 1840 became the year of the Lied, 1841 that of symphonic music, 1842 that of chamber music, and 1843 that of secular oratorios. Though he continued to use musical narration, he became more concerned with rejuvenating the sonata form, and when he returned to composing piano music in 1845 he regarded Bach’s fugues as “character pieces of the highest art, partly genuine poetic structures (Gebilde), each of which asks for its own expression, its special lights and shadows” (Edler, 2008: 180; Schumann, 1854, i: 354). At this point he fully embraced instrumental music in a non-referential and non-narrative form. Schumann’s late and problematic symphonic poem Manfred (1848–51) is a musical adaptation of Byron’s “Manfred” in a hybrid form that has important analogies with Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette. Schumann turned to Byron’s totally isolated hero in the year of the 1848 revolution. The overture and the intermezzi are purely instrumental, while the fifteen pieces contain no solo arias; some pieces rely on choirs. The dominant mode here is melodramatic declamation (Melodram) of a translation, accompanied by instruments, almost exclusively

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in monologues rather than dialogues. The great dilemma of its production is whether to stage it or not. After the failure of the first-night performance staged in Weimar in 1852, Liszt pleaded for transferring it to the concert hall, but Schumann insisted on an “embodied” stage production. The only “unproblematic” part of the work is the instrumental overture, which uses frequent modulations to portray the torn Byronic soul. In contrast to the usual approach, in this chapter I have interpreted the new autonomous instrumental music not as an empty “absolute” form but as an impulse to generate new discourses, among which music novellas and instrumental narrations (texted instrumental music) stand out. The formalist approach of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) had only few adherents before 1850. Narration, which linked music novellas to instrumental story-telling, was also a key element in early music criticism, theory, and history, as well as in the other arts of the period. However, in my reading, the thrust was not towards a unification under the banner of a joint transgeneric art form “Gesamtkunstwerk.” The trend was just in the opposite direction, namely towards diffusion, multiplication, deconstruction, and hints rather than systematic ties.

part 2 Romantic Orality

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chapter 6

From Journals to Battles Until now, we have followed the new music discourses via the music journals, all but ignoring the turmoil around them. Yet the alleged autonomy of music was violated almost daily by the national and political events of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the post-Napoleonic rewriting of Europe’s map. The present chapter will indicate of how music, like all the other arts, participated in the political events. Friedrich Schlegel, who settled in 1808 in Vienna, came to work for the Austrian army and Metternich, launched in early 1812 the conservative journal Deutsches Museum. In contrast to his cosmopolitan Athenäum (1798–1800) and pan-continental Europa (1803–1805), the Deutsches Museum adopted a national approach and became preoccupied with Germany’s own cultural tradition (Behler, 1975: 23). When closing down the journal in 1813, Schlegel reaffirmed that his original plan was to further history, philosophy, art, and literature in a patriotic and thoroughly German spirit (dm 4.12: 541). Schlegel’s last lectures on literary history, the Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1812), were most comprehensively global, though he discussed all literatures and languages from religious and national perspectives. Still, Schlegel asserted that “every important and independent nation” had a right to have its own unique literature, adding that it was “worst barbarism” to suppress the language of a folk or to exclude it from all higher spiritual education (1958ff, vi: 229). He regarded the Slavs naturally less suited to poetry (vi: 235–236) but he was more positive about Hungarians, for he had learned a smattering of their language when he had to stay in their country with the Austrian forces from June 1808 to December 1809. He familiarized himself with Hungarian literature, but his planned cooperation with Hungarian scholars in the Deutsches Museum did not materialize.1 We have to keep in mind that Emperor Joseph ii had tried to replace Latin with the German language as the official languagefor all the institutions and public life of his Empire, and that Metternich, to whom Schlegel dedicated the publication of his lectures, wanted to keep the ethnicities of the Empire suppressed.

1 Schlegel’s discussion of the Hungarian heroic epics culminates in the suggestion that they probably vanished under King Matthias Corvinus, for he, just like the Prussian Frederick the Great, had no interest in the culture of his own nation (Schlegel, 1958ff. vi: 236 f.).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_008

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Schlegel’s lectures were attended by the bon ton of Viennese society and distinguished visitors (Schlegel, 1958ff, vi: xxii–xxv). In the audience sat also the young Theodor Körner, who had moved to Vienna just that year and was eager to hear lectures by a good friend of his father. He disliked Schlegel’s strong Catholicism, but he found his patriotic rhetoric so convincing that he jettisoned his idol Napoleon and began to look for a dramatic subject that would rouse resistance against him. He came across the Hungarian Miklós Zrinyi, known in Croatia as Nicola Šubić Zrinski, who in 1566 had defended the small fortress of Szigetvár against the overwhelming Ottoman force of Suleiman. The siege ended with the sally and death of all defenders, but Suleiman i had died of natural death a few days earlier and the Ottoman forces could not capture Vienna. The topic seemed to Körner an ideal allegory for fighting Napoleon, whom he regarded as a modern-day Suleiman i. He completed his Zriny within a few months, but the censors were slow to give approval, and not without reason. After all, Napoleon was married to the daughter of Emperor Franz, and Austria would not join the alliance of Russia and Prussia until after Napoleon’s failed Russian campaign of 1812. Furthermore, Zriny transposed a Hungarian/Croatian patriotism into an exhortation to fight Napoleon; however, by 1812, when the Ottomans threatened only Serbia, the patriotism of the Hungarians and Croats was increasingly directed against imperial Austria itself. The Habsburgs did not come to rescue Zrinyi in 1566, executed one of his great-grandsons, and, according to rumors, may have been involved in the death of another great-grandson, the poet Miklós Zrinyi (author of a great epic poem on the 1651 siege of Szigetvár). Allegorical readings of Zrinyi’s patriotism could easily become exhortations to fight the Habsburgs rather than Napoleon. Körner very likely had to revise the play to forestall such a subversive interpretation: in the final version, Zrinyi fights not only for God and a vaguely defined fatherland but also for the Kaiser. Since Zriny’s intense nationalism was allegorical, it could be inverted and redirected against the Habsburgs in the libretto of Ivan Zajc’s Croatian national opera Nicola Šubić Zrinski, premiered in 1876 in Zagreb (see Neubauer, 2004). Körner’s play was finally performed with huge success on December 30, 1812, and he was immediately offered appointments at the Hofburgtheater and the Theater an der Wien. He was willing to become the “Poet of the Theater” at the Hofburgtheater, but preferred in the end the sword to the pen: he volunteered to the Prussian corps of Freiherr von Lützow in March, and was mortally wounded on August 26, 1813. His death in action and the play’s patriotic message kept the melodrama on the German best-seller list all the way until 1945. Körner penned also some rousing military songs that his father collected and published posthumously in 1814 under the title Leyer und Schwerdt (Lyre and

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Sword). Some of them were immediately set to music by Reichardt, Schubert, and Weber.2

Battle Drums at Dresden, Leipzig, and Wellington

On the day of Körner’s death, Hoffmann watched from a window Napoleon’s victorious battle at Dresden. According his diary entries (Hoffmann, 1971: ­220–222), he saw Napoleon’s arrival in the morning, and he followed, with his actor friend J.G. Keller, the events with a glass of wine in his hand – until they witnessed how shells tore a soldier to shreds and spilled the entrails of a civilian onto the street. Keller dropped his wine glass but Hoffmann finished his (Hoffmann, [1814] 1988: 15–16).3 Three days later, he inspected the battlefield that was littered with mutilated bodies. The twenty-five thousand corpses were dumped into mass graves. This was not the end of Hoffmann’s story. In mid-November, he started to revise his diary notes into a text that should narrate his personal impressions in a “picturesque manner” (letter to Kunz, December 28; 1967–69, i: 431). A month later, he decided to divide these drafts into three letters and add to the last one a “vision” titled Die Vision auf dem Schlachtfelde bei Dresden (1971: 239). The battlefield vision opens with a pandemonium of outraged yelling for revenge and howling of pain. The desperate shouts for revenge intensify when a dark figure slowly emerges from the fog. It is an unnamed tyrant who claims that he still rules over the masses and he has the sole right to kill and revenge. The howling bodies sink into a bottomless dark pit, but a dragon rises from bloody waves declaring that he is the “worm of the earth” and the moment had arrived to revenge the suffering of the dead and injured ones. The tyrant is seized in its claws and asks to be forgiven. A voice from above promises him to reduce his suffering if he finds in the crowd below one that is willing to grant him solace, but nobody has pity for the tyrant and the dragon submits him to eternal 2 Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert set the poems “Lützows wilde Jagd” and “Schwertlied.” Each of them also set a battle prayer: Weber the “Gebet vor der Schlacht” and Schubert “Gebet während der Schlacht.” Reichardt also set to music some Körner poems: “Herz lass dich nicht zerspalten” (36) and “Wie wir so treu beisammen stehn” (20). See also “Jägerlied” (27) by Schubert, “Männer und Buben” (42) by Weber, “Reiterlied” (34) by Reichardt and Weber, “Trinklied vor der Schlacht” (44) by Weber. 3 After losing his music directorship at Bamberg, Hoffmann moved to Dresden in April 1813 to assume a conductor position at Joseph Seconda’s theaters in Leipzig and Dresden. He was in Leipzig during the most of June, and returned to Dresden on June 25 with Seconda’s theater group. See Safranski, 1992: Chs. 16–19 for a broad portrayal of Hoffmann in the war.

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s­ uffering and pain. The speaker of the vision wakes up, slowly calms down, goes home, and recognizes in the new world the Prussian and Russian “radiating heroes, the sons of the Gods: Alexander and Friedrich Wilhelm!” This is an aesthetically poor and politically unconvincing vision. The unnamed tyrant, obviously Napoleon, has a mesmerizing and diabolical power that fascinated Hoffmann in several of his successful fantastic stories, including “Der Magnetiseur.” In his letter to Julius Eduard Hitzig of December 1 1813 he calls the French soldiers “rascals” for having destroyed the center of Dresden (1967–69, i: 424). The final glorification of the Russian Tsar and the Prussian King in the Vision is exaggerated and unmotivated, and does not fit Hoffmann’s ironically a-political stance that became blasphemous when refusing to dispose of his wine glass while watching the battle massacre. He frequently shifted his political affiliations, and not only because the Saxon king Friedrich August was Napoleon’s ally. On August 19, he wrote to his friend and publisher Kunz that the inhabitants of the city placed all their hope in Napoleon’s weapons for without them they would be lost (i: 409), but once Napoleon was decisively defeated he ecstatically wrote to the same Kunz, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” (i: 417). Interpreters have noted also that Hoffmann’s poet and composer dialogue calls the Prussian/Russian troops “enemy” at the beginning but sticks this label on the French troops at the end. Hoffmann soon quit the military and political turmoil by entering the “wonderful realm” of his Goldener Topf, originally conceived as a chamber pot (i: 408–409). But since he badly needed money, he wished to capitalize on his battle notes and sent to Kunz the opening “pianissimo” and the final “fortissimo Tutti” of his proposed “picturesque description.” The third letter was to contain, next to the Vision, a pantomime of Napoleon on the bridge. (i: 432). Kunz went ahead and published the Vision as a separate pamphlet (Hoffmann, 1981: 28–31), without consulting with Hoffmann, who strove to dissemble his irritation at the loss of expected income (i: 437–438). The “picturesque” report draft was published only posthumously in 1823, under the title Drey verhängnißvolle Monathe (Three Fateful Months). With true salesmanship, Hoffmann indicated to Kunz that he already had received an offer to publish the battle text via Rochlitz, but felt obliged to give it to Kunz if he paid him the expected honorarium. The editors of Hoffmann’s letters note that Hoffmann used this trick at other occasions to get a publisher’s contract (1967–69: 431–432), but in this case there is a slight chance that Rochlitz was, indeed, familiar with Hoffmann’s battle text and helped “marketing” it, because there are extensive analogies between what Hoffmann wrote about the Battle of Dresden and the following text that Rochlitz himself wrote about the Battle of Leipzig, which became much more famous than Hoffmann’s text.

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There seems to be no document, however, that would support the connection, and the parallels may just indicate a certain common “battle discourse.” Rochlitz, who lived in Leipzig, started his diary of the military events on September 25 and gave it the title “Days of Danger: a Diary of the Leipzig Battle.”4 It became his greatest journalistic achievement. Although Rochlitz respected the Saxon king Friedrich August, a Napoleon ally, he was decidedly not on the French side. Like Hoffmann, he also watched from a window when Napoleon rode through town and settled in the open fields at a hastily established table with a map nailed on top (Rochlitz, [1816] 1912: 214–216). Rochlitz could even see colored pins that, presumably, located the troops. Anybody could walk up close to the virtually unprotected Emperor, who first seemed dark, closed, and somewhat rigid, but lightened up as the canons started to thunder. Now he issued commands in abrupt short sentences, his facial expression still suggesting a mask. The mixture of rigidity and restless gestures struck Rochlitz as something inhuman, but, unlike Hoffmann, he recorded his impression with a question mark: One sensed something quite uncanny, almost dreadful, and I am unable to say to what extent this feeling was the direct consequence of the impression or how far it was cooked up by one’s own fantasy. (215)5 Such psychologically subtle remarks later become mixed with shocking and painful portrayals of the wounded and dead casualties whom Napoleon apparently passed with equanimity (216). Once more, Rochlitz reports with more nuance that his own people engage in selfish fights against each other to survive (221). The fortunes of the battle get reversed in the next days but there is little relief for the French depart in the midst of terrible scenes. Thousands of wounded ones on the streets die due to lack of food and medical assistance. As the diary gradually moves towards liberation, it becomes increasingly contemptuous of the French and flattering for the Prussian and Russian troops. Rochlitz now admires how enthusiastically the Russian troops greet their Tsar Alexander in the city (285). In short, the diary is at its best when depicting fear and misery, but declines when the emotions turn into praise, not unlike Hoffmann’s Vision.

4 Tage der Gefahr: ein Tagebuch der Leipziger Schlacht [1816] 1914: 191–312. 5 “etwas, dass Einem ganz unheimlich, fast grauenvoll dabey ward; und kann ich nicht bestimmen, in wie weit diese Empfindung unmittelbare Folge des Eindrucks, oder in wie weit dieser erst von eigener Phantasie zugekocht seyn mochte” (Rochlitz, [1816] 1912: 215).

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For the amz, the book-long diary was too long and too little concerned with music, but Rochlitz published in the journal the related stories “Ein Traum” (amz 16: 1–5) and “Feldzug” (amz 15: 713–718). In the latter, Rochlitz praised the Russian military bands for playing “natural music” whereas the Prussians just invented something to do the job (716). Rochlitz also wrote for the amz a little fictional anecdote about the potentially deadly accusations of the French against a man who wrote a trivial review for the journal (amz 16: 557–570). The man is confronted with a text in his handwriting that seems to call for a German rebellion against the French. The flabbergasted man recognizes his own handwriting but not the meaning of the text. After much reflection and inspecting the paper he sent to the editors, the mystery gets clarified. In order to save paper, the man wrote his text on the back of used sheets. The dangerous title was half of the actual title, which referred to a collection of old German chorales and organ music for truly German people. With Napoleon gone, Rochlitz felt free to praise German culture and ridicule the over-suspicious French. On December 8, 1813, a week before Hoffmann wrote his Vision, Beethoven celebrated Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Vitoria, Spain with his programmatic Wellingtons Sieg (Op. 91). At this charity concert for wounded soldiers, the musicians were divided on stage in French and British sides, while the music simulated approaching armies and extended scenes of the battle. Not everybody liked the piece. In August 1816, Gottfried Weber, the later editor of Cäcilia, wrote a devastating theoretical criticism of it in the Jenaische allgemeine Literaturzeitung, and in 1825 he embedded this in a Cäcilia essay on painting with music (“Über Tonmalerei”). This publication angered Beethoven so much that he scribbled on page 166 of it: “Oh you miserable scoundrel, what I shit is better than anything you ever thought.”6 What was so outrageous? According to Weber, imitating external sounds was undesirable in “nobler, higher, more sublime pathetic styles” of music but permissible in comic and humorous pieces (1825: 127). Now Beethoven’s music portrayed a serious event, especially since the music incorporated heavy cannon detonations, rattles. Furthermore, rhythmic quart-triplets of the wind instruments of the whole Presto movement depict the moaning and cry of the injured and dying ones (160–61). At the end of the battle part, the Marlborough march is heard again in the distance, as a tragicomic symbol of the French 6 “Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheisse ist besser als was du je gedacht” (on p. 166 of Weber’s article). See Albrecht, 1996, iii: 77 (letter 394). Weber’s article is in Cäcilia 3: 125–172, of which 154–171 are on Wellingtons Sieg. The page of Beethoven’s angry note is reproduced in High Fidelity 21 (January 1971): 59.

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soldiers that sneak away in rags, coughing, with bloody heads, shivering, and chattering teeth. The first part closes with this “joke” (162). Weber’s “joke” label is unfair, for Beethoven surely did not intended to joke here, and we must also ask, on what grounds Weber had reconverted the musical sounds into torn uniforms and bloody heads. Nevertheless, it is evident that Beethoven faced here the same issues of depicting horror in music as Hoffmann and Rochlitz did in language. Weber facetiously asked for the great, new, and brilliant ideas in the battle piece, and, of course, he found the piece unworthy of Beethoven. However, seriousness or joke do not seem to be intrinsic qualities of music for Weber, for he oddly allows that the final return of the Marlborough march “in torn clothes” after the defeat could be funny, for instance, if played on a piano forte with Turkish drumhead in a private gathering where people listen with a glass of wine. Would he have treasured to listen to musical whining in such a gathering, with the wine glass that Hoffmann luckily did not throw away? Surely not, for concluding the portrayal of a horrible battle with a contemptible joke, a biting satire of the moaning and bleeding bodies, was for him, after all, a derision of the mutilated soldiers (163–64). Weber was upset by Beethoven’s use of mechanical instruments in music (165). In 1813, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel sketched a “Battle of Vitoria” and Beethoven composed a short piece for Mälzel’s “Panharmonicon,” which could play several military band instruments.7 However, Beethoven’s composition asked for so many instruments that Mälzel’s machine could not play it. Beethoven added a first part and renamed it Wellington’s Victory. In 1814, Beethoven accused Maelzel of having plagiarized his music and illegally staged performances of it (Beethoven, 1961, i: entry 127). Weber regarded the concert hall as “the sanctuary to which the sounds of pure art are dedicated,” and thus introducing theater machines into it was a sacrilege. Putting the matter in another context, Weber called Beethoven’s music a “Dutch piece” (1825: 170), obviously meaning it was a dirty and lowly portrayal. The second, victory part jeopardized the seriousness of “God save the King” with light rhythm, and with a finale that was a “licentious drunken victory folk festival” that one may even call “rabble feast” (170). No doubt, such remarks led Beethoven to respond with yet another, even more lowly vulgarity. Beethoven himself was not unequivocally positive about this work. He called it “a stupid thing” that may have taken the breath of the Viennese listeners, but he also used some pious words in the Wiener Zeitung to express his 7 The Panharmonicon was soon forgotten, but, as we saw, it resurfaced in Balzac’s “Gambara,” probably via Balzac’s music adviser Strunz.

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gratitude for having had an opportunity “to lay a work of magnitude upon the altar of the fatherland.” “We were all filled with nothing but the pure love of country and of joyful sacrifice of our powers for those who sacrificed so much for us” (cit. in Thayer, [1866–79] 1964, i: 567). However we look at it, the potboiler encouraged the composition of symphonic narratives. Beethoven also contributed to the subsequent Viennese political events. On November 29, 1814, he welcomed the opening of the Vienna Congress with the new cantata “Der Glorreiche Augenblick” (The Glorious Moment) and he participated in a concert for Congress dignitaries in January 1815. At his last public piano performance he accompanied the tenor Franz Wild who sang his “Adelaide” at a gala concert for Tsar Alexander’s thirty-fifth birthday.

Waltzing in Vienna

Napoleon hastily retreated to Paris after his defeat at Leipzig, and was shortly thereafter forced into exile. Accordingly, my account shifts from war to peace and to Vienna, where the post-Napoleonic Congress took place, laced with musical events. Providing glamour and entertainment for the Congress, Vienna could rely on literary and cultural figures that had turned the city into a nodal point of European culture roughly since the outbreak of the French Revolution. As we shall see, links from Viennese culture led westward to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and eastward to Slovenia and Serbia. The main actors on my Viennese cultural stage of 1813–1816 are Friedrich Schlegel, Theodor Körner, Jernej Kopitar, Vuk Stefanović Karadzić, Jacob Grimm, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Wilhelm von Humboldt – of whom only Schlegel, Grimm, and Humboldt participated officially in the Congress itself. However, music was also on the political stage, not only because the diplomats all spent too much time waltzing at balls. According to Zamoyski, a Tattersaal concert on November 1, 1814 gathered forty pianists at twenty pianos to display under Salieri’s baton a harmony that had no parallel “in the councils of the plenipotentiaries of the four great powers” (2007: 327). The city of classical instrumental music was literally inundated in these years with patriotic vocal music, locally as well as from Eastern and Western Europe. Although Beethoven premiered his Wellington piece with his Seventh Symphony, vocal compositions dominated his rather unproductive years at the time: the third and final version of Fidelio (July 1814) was followed by the second setting of the poem “An die Hoffnung” (Op. 94) in 1815, and his only song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” (Op. 98) in April 1816. Only later did he return to the pure instrumental music with his final piano sonatas and quartets. It was

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in these years also that he arranged songs from the British Isles for George Thomson (see Chapter 12). The new genre of the Kunstlied was born in 1815, with some 145 songs of Franz Schubert’s annus mirabilis. It is seldom noted that many of his first art songs participated in the dominant current of politics, patriotism, and the revival of folk music – even if Schubert did not really care about them. Following Weber and Reichardt, Schubert set fourteen Körner poems to music in 1815–16.8 Furthermore, he composed in May 1815 music to Körner’s Der vierjährige Posten (A Four-Year Sentinel) a light Singspiel about a French soldier who deserts from his retreating unit to settle down in the German countryside with his German sweetheart and her family. When French troops return four years later, he claims his officers had forgotten him and he stayed at his observation post the whole time.9 The French do not believe him, but he is finally pardoned. Published only in 1888 (D. 190), Schubert’s Singspiel was first performed on September 23, 1896 in Dresden’s Hofoper.10

8

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Joseph Spaun introduced Schubert to the slightly older Körner early in 1813, at a dinner (Youens, 1996: 34). The fiery Körner, already the official “Theater Poet” at the Theater an der Wien made a lasting impression on the younger composer. Schubert’s setting of the Körner poems, some nineteen months after the poet’s death may have been a symbolic thanks that Körner encouraged him to become an artist. Körner’s play was also set to music by Carl Steinacker under the title Vedette. It was first performed in the Theater an der Wien on August 19, 1813 and mentioned in the amz (14: 613). The Nobel-Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek has recently recycled the Singspiel as Der tausendjährige Posten oder Der Germanist (The Thousand Year Sentinel, or the Germanist), whose first night was in the Heidelberg Theater in March 2012. Jelinek used Irene Dische’s modified English translation, passages of the original Körner’s text, and modified Schubert songs to stage the true story of Hans Schwerte, who suppressed his ss past at the end of World War ii by discarding his original name Schneider and launching a new life and scholarly career. Jelinek’s libretto also made use of Schubert’s Die Zwillingsbrüder (1820).

chapter 7

Music Histories: From Gossip to Nationalism The historiographies of music and the other arts were all born in the second half of the eighteenth century, but the points of departure differed. While Homer and Dante, Rafael and Michelangelo were still appreciated, Greek and medieval music had been forgotten, and reconstituting them meant reviving vocal music, be it religious or secular. Hawkins, Burney, Forkel, and other early historians tried to confine their histories to music proper, but post-Napoleonic historians had to read music in a social and historical context. Histories can be generally characterized as top-down or bottom-up. The former starts from general concepts or theses, into which then all the concrete particulars must be fitted. The latter type starts from facts and observations, which must then somehow be inductively integrated. Starting with the latter, I look at anecdotes, obituaries, and gossipy materials with much loose information that early biographies picked up and later scholarly studies had great difficulty verifying or disproving. The final section is about a special case, the musical and somewhat mistitled “biographies” by Stendhal. The second part of the chapter presents two case studies on constructing top-down music history in terms of historical concepts imported from outside. Thibaut, author of a widely praised study on the purity of music (1824) was professor of law at Heidelberg and the spokesman for integrating the widely differing German codes in the post-Napoleonic period. Although he made a strong impression on Schumann, who briefly studied under him, no attempts have been made, to my knowledge, to link his views on law with those on music history. My other case study, on the 1824 prize competition of the Royal Netherlands Institute, exemplifies the role of nationalism and theory in constructing music history. The competition was announced, in my opinion, to bolster the reputation of the United Netherlands, founded in 1815, after the fall of Napoleon. ­F.-J. Fétis, who became Director of the Brussels Academy of Music once Belgium seceded from the Netherlands, won the second prize but developed in the aftermath a four-stage theory of music history, which foresaw the emergence of atonal music. The scheme undermined the alleged Dutch glory in music history.

Anecdotes, Gossip, and Obituaries

The music journals needed reports about rehearsals, performances, stars, and travels. Many of these gossip-rich accounts were used then later in entertaining © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_009

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biographies that mixed facts with fiction. Most journals followed the amz by including also a permanent rubric titled “Biographische Nachrichten.” Recollections and reports on encounters were also staple materials for the journals. Most of the valid information was ultimately included in Fétis’s monumental Biographie universelle des musiciens (1835–44). The early biographical information on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven ran remarkably similar trajectories: necrologies or hastily assembled biographies were followed by recollections personal acquaintances, and finally by the first, hastily assembled biographies that had to be modified and corrected later. The first biographical notes on these composers were written by personal acquaintances. Georg August Griesinger frequently saw Haydn, and Rochlitz kept contact with Mozart’s widow Constanze and her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen. Rochlitz and Constanze published many Mozart anecdotes in the amz,1 but the Mozart letter Rochlitz published in 1815 (amz 17: 561–566) seems to be a fake. Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s secretary, claimed that he had known Beethoven for 11–12 years, but it turned out to be only 5–6. Furthermore, Schindler inserted many spurious entries into Beethoven’s Conversation Books after the composer’s death. His Beethoven biography (1840) was gradually found erroneous and even deliberately distorted, which encouraged Alexander Wheelock Thayer to start working in 1849 on his three-volume biography (1866–79).2 The journals provided much biographical information in obituaries, but many of them were unsigned and prettied up. Rochlitz’s lengthy obituary of Hoffmann (amz 24: 661–670) shows his inclination to fictionalize facts. The composer introduced himself to Rochlitz at the end of October 1807, asking in a lost letter for help to publicize his music (Hoffmann, 1967–69, i: 227). In another lost letter a month later, Rochlitz promised help and praised ­Hoffmann’s compositions (i: 228). Indeed, a short note appeared in the amz about ­Hoffmann’s engagement at Bamberg, the expected publication of three of his sonatas, and the imminent production of one of his operas (amz 10: 589–590). The sonatas remained unpublished, but Rochlitz wrote a brief positive review of Hoffmann’s recently published “Trois Canzonettes” that the composer sent him on May 10, 1808 (1967–69, i: 243–244; amz 10: 624). The decisive event was, however, when Hoffmann submitted his “Ritter Gluck” on January 12, 1809 (i: 260–262) with a reference to Rochlitz’s own “Der Besuch im

1 amz 1: 17–24. 49–55. 81–86. 113–117. 145–152. 177–183. 2 The amz published upon Beethoven’s death W.C. Müller piece on letter and talks with Beethoven (29: 345–354) and the Heiligenstädter Testament under the title “Den Freunden Beethovens” (29: 705–710).

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Irrenhause.” Rochlitz accepted the story and asked him to become a contributor to the journal.3 In Rochlitz’s obituary of Hoffmann, all this becomes a self-praising but misleading anecdote. Rochlitz claims that Hoffmann has first sent to the journal a funny letter with the music of his early Requiem. The letter (probably the one of October 1807, which Rochlitz claims to have in front of him while writing the obituary) allegedly made such an impression on him that he urged Hoffmann to write for the journal a story or character portrayal of a musician roughly as old as Friedemann Bach, who becomes confused and moody in his old age yet continues to compose great and bold music. He would now get the idée fixe of being a Mozart or Händel or some such hero, and become this way partly happy and partly comic (amz 24: 666). The obituary claims that Rochlitz immediately sent Hoffmann the score of Beethoven’s Fifth with the commission to write about it freely, not just a review. Hoffmann’s correspondence does not support the claim that Rochlitz suggested the writing of “Ritter Gluck” and immediately commissioned the Beethoven review. In submitting his story, Hoffmann made only a passing reference to Rochlitz’s “Besuch im Irrenhause.” The first biographical notes on Haydn appeared in the amz immediately after the composer’s death. They were reliable but contained many gaps. Griesinger, a Saxon diplomat stationed in Vienna and representative of ­Breitkopf & Härtel, had a close contact with the aged Haydn, published the following year the revised notes in book form titled Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn. The first part contained reminiscences of the old Haydn while the second had his notes made during his England trips (1791–92 and 1794–95). Since Griesinger thought that Haydn’s “rhapsodic” notes about his London visits were of little interest to readers he quoted from them only sparsely. In the third part, Griesinger recorded his own, most reliable and useful early personal impressions. However, he cautiously avoided the subject of Haydn’s marriage and attachments to women (see Griesinger, [1810] 1975: 106, 119, 183). Griesinger’s quotes from Haydn reveal how much his output was in response to opportunities and consumer expectations. C.P.E. Bach’s first six sonatas were Haydn’s great model for instrumental music (21), but he wrote his first quartet when Baron Fürnberg asked him to compose something for his chamber group (23). Its great success encouraged him to write more quartets, but at the end of his life he apparently regretted that he did not write more vocal music (80). Had he been lucky enough to go to Italy, he could have excelled as an opera composer (27). He depreciated “sound masters” (Tonmeister) who 3 Rochlitz’s answer is lost. The printed text includes editorial changes; according Hoffmann, Rochlitz particularly disliked his attack on Bernhard Anselm Weber (1967–69, i: 262).

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composed without having learned to sing, letting the instruments dominate (78). He himself apparently sang his Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser every day, especially at the end of his life when Vienna was occupied by Napoleon (65–66). Stendhal – A Biographer? In 1812, Giuseppe Carpani published an unreliable new book on Haydn, Le Haydine, which Stendhal immediately plagiarized in the Haydn section of his Vies de Haydn, de Mozart et de Métastase (1814). Carpani called him “a literary cuckoo who does not lay his eggs in another’s nest but warms eggs he has not laid” (Sadie, 2001, v: 180). Whoever laid the eggs, the hatched ones could fly high for they were not weighed down by heavy facts. Since Stendhal published his next book, the Vie de Rossini (1824), the same year as Carpani did Le rossiniane, he had to plagiarize others, and less obviously. The title is actually a misnomer, for Stendhal writes virtually only about Rossini’s music. He merely noted Rossini’s laziness and gourmand taste. The book is a quilt of opinions adopted from others and a collection of Stendhal’s own free-floating comments on singing and music in general. He was an opera aficionado and perhaps a musician manqué, who satisfied with this book both an inner need to write about music and a public hunger for reading about the glittering opera world. The book was commissioned and first published in England, adapted in Germany by Johann Amadeus Wendt, and published also in Italian.4 Henry Prunières, editor of the Vie de Rossini in Stendhal’s Oeuvre complètes (1922), is surely right that the writer earned more money with this biography than with his celebrated later novels (Stendhal, [1824] 1922, i: xxxv). We may learn more about Stendhal’s version of Rossini’s life if we take a brief look at his own. In 1814, Stendhal settled in Milan, frequented the salons, and immersed himself in the glittering world of la Scala, until the Austrian authorities forced him to leave for political reasons. He then moved to ­Paris, frequented the performances at the Opéra and usually wrote about them while sharing social gatherings in the apartment of the great diva Mme Pasta. According to Prunières, Pasta’s role in the book cannot be overestimated (i: xlvi). Stendhal’s first article on Rossini, signed as “Alceste,” appeared in English in The Paris Monthly Review (1822) and was immediately taken over by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The inaccuracies of this badly written essay challenged Gertrude Giorgi Righetti, the original Rosine in the Barbiere di Seviglia, to publish in 1823 an angry riposte with several corrections, but the 4 Thirteen of Stendhal’s later reviews for the Journal de Paris (1824–27) were collected in the Notes d’un dilettante (1867) and added to the later editions of the Vie de Rossini ([1824] 1922: 281–425).

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­unperturbed Stendhal reprinted the mistakes in Vie de Rossini. He relied on friends fro correcting his text (i: xlvi). Stendhal adored the divas and their voices, but had little interest in facts and a very limited knowledge of music. Vie de Rossini could be characterized as a journal of Stendhal’s sensations while traveling across music (i: xl). He fantasized about Rossini’s youth and operas he never saw (i: Ch. 37), disliking Rossini’s insistence that singers sing only the printed notes. Stendhal’s first love belonged to eighteenth-century Italian music from Pergolesi to his favorite, Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (1792). He preferred ­Rossini’s first operas and regretted that in the mature works the instruments and the text came to play a much too important role. Stendhal would have agreed with Wagner that Rossini’s music contained “absolute melody,” regretting only that this disappeared in his mature works. Neither text nor instrumental music could provide for him the sheer physical pleasure he sought in listening. Rossini’s early Tancrèdi (1813) held, according to Stendhal, a perfect balance between melody and simple harmony (i: 84). He found “dramatic harmony” in the music that greeted the stage arrival of the hero. Instead of letting the instruments express his feelings on stage, Tancrèdi utters just one word and the instruments express thereupon sentiments he himself would be unable to convey (i: 73–74). Instruments are allowed to take over from a text here because Stendhal cares little for librettos. He compares such operatic instrumental passages to descriptions in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, whose prime function is to prepare and sustain speech, dialogues, and narration (i: 75–76). Mozart, whom Stendhal regards as the Scott of music, used enchanting instrumental descriptions but employed them excessively (i: 78). Rossini uses descriptions to please the public, though their picturesque manner occasionally becomes tiring. In Gazza ladra, for example, one would sometimes like to silence the orchestra so that the voice may come forward. Accompaniments should never go beyond the borders of a respectful conversation about the song, and should go silent as soon as the song has something to say. In German music, the accompaniment is often “insolent” (i: 79). Stendhal belittled theoretical approaches and associated them with ­Germany. He rated the Italian voice over German and French instrumental music, without explaining why. He conveyed listening pleasure by consciously using a limited vocabulary of trivial praises such as délicieuse, délicat, admirable, magnifique, charmant, and élégant. The furthest he would go in his final remarks was to conclude that “Rossini’s style is a bit like the Parisian French: vain and quick rather than gay; never passionate, always spirited, seldom boring, and even more seldom sublime” (i: 202). For personal as well as c­ ommercial

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reasons, he wanted to keep his text as light as Rossini’s music. Hence, he offered no technical analyses, not even comments on keys and tonality. He similarly minimalized the text, by quoting mostly a single line of an aria and all but ignoring the dramatic plot. Vie de Rossini has little scholarly value, but has its own meaning as a R ­ ossini reception by a writer obsessed with glittering voices. Berlioz found that ­Stendhal wrote “the most irritating stupidities about music, of which he fancied he had a sense” (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: Ch. 36), but Balzac heavily relied on ­Stendhal’s book on Rossini in “Massimilla Doni” (Spengler, 2006: 70–73), for he did not fancy he had a sense for it himself.

Voice and Instruments in History

In the first year of the amz, Rochlitz complained that many studies existed on older music (presumably those of Hawkins, Burney, and Forkel) but almost none on the most recent one.5 He urged music historians to go beyond the biographies of great composers by embedding music either in a national history, or at least in the artistic and cultural spirit of a nation. The first would evoke a national spirit, the second the particular taste of a period. As usual, Rochlitz had no plans to carry out his own ideas, but at the end of the century he managed to publish two articles in the amz about the eighteenth-century history of German music.6 Of the two, we may safely ignore Johann Friedrich Christmann’s sketch; ­Wilhelm Triest’s book-long essay (about 105 columns) is of some interest because of the way it interlinks instrumental and vocal music in a tripartite scheme. In the first phase, associated with J.S. Bach’s music, harmony dominated. The second period, characterized by new melodies in songs by Graun, Hasse, and C.P.E. Bach, ran until Haydn and Mozart. By 1780, the middle class developed a new sensitivity to better music, which Triest identifies with I.A. Hiller’s operettas or Singspiels. Music, he argued, moved from the specialist elite down to the nation at large and became common good (Triest, 1801: 325). The third period was for Triest one of fermentation (369 ff) rather than a new dawn. Although he regarded Mozart as the greatest opera composer (389), he did not ­recognize 5 “Vorschläge zu Betrachtungen über die neueste Geschichte der Musik” (amz 1: 625–629). 6 Johann Friedrich Christmann, “An das scheidende Jahrhundert” (amz 3: 201–211); Wilhelm Triest, “Bemerkungen über die Ausbildung der Tonkunst in Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhunderte” (amz 3: 225–235, 241–249, 257–264, 273–286, 297–308, 321–331, 369–379, 389–401, 405–410, 421–432, 437–445).

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revolutionary innovations in Haydn’s and Mozart’s instrumental music. He mentions Beethoven in passing as a potentially important composer of piano music if he calms down (408), but he sees in heavier instrumentation a new threat to vocal music. Let us remember that he inaugurated in 1810 a whole new era of music appreciation with his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth (amz 12: 630–642, 652–659), which was an ecstatic praise of instrumental music. His equally epochal “Ritter Gluck” (discussed in Chapter 3) referred to Gluck operas, but foregrounded primarily their instrumental overtures. Hence, Hoffmann’s first writings were on instrumental music. His review of the Fifth opens with the statement: “When music is spoken of as an independent art the term can properly apply only to instrumental music, which scorns all aid, all admixtures of other arts, and gives pure expression to its own peculiar artistic nature” ­(Hoffmann, 1989: 236). In the next few years, reviews of vocal music occasionally appeared in the amz, but two major essays by Hoffmann written at the end of the Napoleonic wars signal a definite shift of perspective. The mentioned dialogue on the poet and the composer (1813) searches for a new type of opera, while the essay on “Old and New Church Music” (1814) was the best and most surprising example among the fledgling new histories. It is a historical sketch that pleads for a resuscitation of sacred vocal music, which advocated the development of a vocal culture of singing societies, along the lines that Thibaut started in Heidelberg in 1814 and Kiesewetter in Vienna in 1816. If Hoffmann formerly ascribed a metaphysics to Beethoven’s music, he now saw medieval singing as “an expression of the total plenitude of existence” and music as “a form of religious worship” whose origin was “to be sought and found only in religion” (1989: 355). Hoffmann’s historical formula for vocal music was that music “migrated from the church to the theatre and then, with all the empty ostentation it had acquired there, moved back into the church” (366). Even Haydn’s and Mozart’s sacred music contained such inappropriately sweetened and playful elements (370) that were more appropriate for oratorios. He expressed similar reservations about Beethoven’s Mass in C (amz 15: 389–397, 409–414). However, Hoffmann repeatedly acknowledged the existence of a world spirit that marched onward, and he made suggestions of how to use the brilliance of the new instrumental music. He regarded M ­ ozart’s Requiem as the model for a new church music, even though its Tuba Mirum used an oratorio style. Hoffmann’s conclusion that “truth is eternal” and the voice of the old masters is still alive in spite of “the seething clamour of frenzied activity that has broken over us” seems to call for a restoration in the spirit of essentialism, which disagrees with the voice we usually associate with

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Hoffmann. Indeed, the outlines and overviews of music histories published in these decades – among them by Alexandre-Étienne Choron (1810–11), Sophie de Bawr (1823), and Raphael Kiesewetter (1834) – tended to focus on the older periods, intending to revive church music. Such a revival was a central aim also of François-Joseph Fétis, but, as we shall see below, he also made a daring prediction that he himself disliked.

Thibaut’s Musical Past and Legal Present

Napoleon’s defeat left a victorious but legally divided Germany behind: the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved after the battle of Austerlitz (1806), but the Code Civil of the French Revolution, turned into the Code Napoleon, was thrown out after the war, and the danger was great that the individual G ­ erman states would inconsistently and idiosyncratically reintroduce the chaotic pandects of the Roman Law. Karl Ernst Schmid suggested in Deutschlands Wiedergeburt (1814) to adopt the Austrian system, but Thibaut, a respected law professor in Heidelberg, went further by proposing in 1814 to set up a Committee to work out a common Civil Law for all of Germany.7 Friedrich Karl von Savigny, professor of law in Berlin, called Thibaut’s publication “infamous,” and responded the same year with the booklet “On the Call of our Time for Legislation and Jurisprudence” (Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft), which rejected all of Thibaut’s arguments.8 The debate went beyond law and raised national issues hotly debated also in historical studies of literature, music, and other fields. The two essays came out just a year before Friedrich Schlegel’s Vienna lectures on literary history appeared in print. What exactly did Thibaut propose? He assumed that ­Germany would remain fragmented, but hoped that legally associated states could grant greater personal freedom to their citizens.9 A single Civil Law for 7 Über die Nothwendigkeit eines allgemeinen bürgerlichen Rechts für Deutschland (1814). Thibaut was appointed to the Heidelberg chair in 1806, primarily on the basis of his Sytem des Pandektenrechts (1803), which he wrote in Schiller’s Jena garden house while teaching at the university there. 8 “infamous”: letter to Achim von Arnim, September 20, 1814. Arnim, a friend of Savigny, respondent by protesting against Savigny’s critique of the Prussian Civil Law (Allgemeines Preussisches Landrecht). Savigny was closely linked to the Heidelbeerg romantics through his marriage to Clemens Brentato’s sister and his not always smooth friendship with Achim von Arnim, whereas Thibaut, who lived in Heidelberg, had no personal relation to them. 9 Since he believed that righteous men are often assigned lowly positions in stormy times (1814: 5–6), Thibaut worried that the higher civil servants would work “in the dark” for their

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all the German states would prevent abuses of power, grant equal rights, simplify litigations, improve the relation between citizens and rulers, and facilitate trans-border communication and commerce. Living side by side under the same law, Germans could enjoy some benefits of a unified state, including variety and individuality (Thibaut, 1814: 8). Thibaut voiced thereby the expectations of merchants and intellectuals in the growing urban middle-class, but he cautiously respected the rulers and avoided Jacobin diatribes. He distrusted civil servants in search of power. According to Thibaut, the Justinian Code contained some brutal laws that satisfied the needs of Rome’s declining power (13, 15). Adopting variants of that Code, the German states made of it a motley quilt of clashing colors. For citizens, certain adaptations of the Code in neighboring states were often unfathomable, and even professors failed to understand all the pandects they specialized in (17). A common Civil Law covering parental violence, security of property, loans, inheritance, and statutes of limitations (19–20) would sustain reasonable living standards that compensated for political fragmentation and provincial pettiness (33–34). Thibaut repeatedly affirmed his patriotism but warned against provincial arbitrariness. Roman Law could not supply a norm for the future; Civil Law had to satisfy present and future needs and general moral values. The priority that Thibaut gave to civil rights and moral issues harked back to the Enlightenment. Savigny admitted that the old laws had some shortcomings, but he categorically opposed any major deviations from the pandects, for in his eyes the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had devastating effects on the German language and the quality of German jurisprudence. Constructing a new code would be untimely (Savigny, 1814: 49, 52, 161). In Savigny’s aristocratic and conservative view, the proposals to construct a new Civil Law restated the Enlightenment ideology of natural law (Naturrecht), which had invaded Europe since mid-eighteenth century as an “unenlightened educational drive”: Sense and feeling for the greatness and uniqueness of other ages, for the natural development of nations and constitutions, and thus for own benefit. He foresaw that officials would rush to discard the recent laws and reintroduce, ­without consultation, the hopeless old muddle (11–12). Zamoyski must have had Thibaut in mind when he wrote that a few participants at the Vienna Congress denounced all “petty despots standing in the way of a united Germany, and who wanted to see the imposition of a pan-German liberal legal structure that would create one by the back door. If a federal system of justice could be imposed on the whole area, then the local rulers would be effectively neutered and every inhabitant of Germany empowered” (2007: 244).

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e­ verything that history must make healthy and fruitful – all these were lost. They were replaced by imposing an unlimited expectation upon a present that was considered to have a mission to realize nothing less than absolute perfection. This drive manifested itself in all fields: its effect on religion and constitution is well known (4–5).10 Savigny wanted to replace this misguided ideology with an organicist and essentialist ideology of history, which, he believed, was sprouting everywhere, defeating the monstrous conceit that humanity could reshape itself and the world.11 Law, which is “organically” rooted in the essence and character of the Volk (8), expresses itself in communal customs and beliefs that become later jurisprudence handled by “technical” experts (12, 14). Adopting the name “Historical School,” Savigny and his pupils argued against legal concepts based on reason, natural law, or codification. Law, like language, was allegedly produced by a quietly working and organically developing spirit of the Volk. Hence, Savigny rejected the recent Napoleonic, P ­ russian, and Austrian codes (54–110),12 and he declared Thibaut’s ideas untimely and unpractical (155–61). Savigny’s colleague, Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, sharpened this conservatism a year later, unperturbed by the paradox that a Roman Law was supposed to represent the “inner necessity” of Germany’s national “essence”: The historical school assumes that the material of law is offered by the complete history of the nation; not arbitrarily and accidentally, so that it 10

11 12

“In dieser Zeit hatte sich durch ganz Europa ein völlig unerleuchteter Bildungstrieb geregt. Sinn und Gefühl für die Größe und Eigenthümlichkeit anderer Zeiten, so wie für die naturgemäße Entwicklung der Völcker und Verfassungen, also alles was die Geschichte heilsam und fruchtbar machen muß, war verloren: an die Stelle getreten war eine gränzenlose Erwartung von der gegenwärtigen Zeit, die man keineswegs zu etwas geringerem berufen glaubte, als zur wirklichen Darstellung einer absoluten Vollkommenheit. Dieser Trieb äußerte sich nach allen Richtungen: was er in Religion und Staatsverfassung gewirkt hat, ist bekannt, …” (Savigny, 1814: 4–5). “Geschichtlicher Sinn ist überall erwacht, und neben diesem hat jener bodenlose ­Hochmuth keinen Raum” (Savigny, 1814:5 f). Thibaut made a careful distinction between the Code Civil of the French Revolution and the Code Napoléon, both of which were introduced in parts of Germany for a short time. In particular, he valued some progressive elements of the Code Civil but he criticized the Code Napoléon for its disregard for the simple citizen (Thibaut, 1814: 37–38). Savigny immediately rejected the penetration of a code (whether Code Civil or Code Napoléon) into Germany as cancerous (Savigny, 1814: 2), but later he gave a detailed critique of the Code Napoléon (54–82).

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can be understood as this or something else, but emerging from the most inner essence of the nation and its history. The particular activity of every age should therefore aim at scrutinizing, rejuvenating, and refreshing a material that exists due to an inner necessity.13 “The Historical School” insisted that the German Code must be derived from the Roman one – just a few years after the Holy Roman Empire collapsed. Nevertheless, its restorative concepts of law and nation won the day (Wrobel, 1975: 122–126). Savigny became a Goethean national hero until well into the ­twentieth century, although a general German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or bgb), introduced on January 1, 1900 in a Germany united under Prussia, followed a modified pandectist structure derived from the Roman Code. In the early debate, some commentators sided with Thibaut, but he g­ radually faded from the picture and became virtually forgotten (1975: 158, 166). His proposal for an intra-German law system ran into a nationalist ­opposition, much as with the introduction of European and global laws, international courts of arbitration, and the The Hague Court of Justice today. Savigny’s n ­ ationalist view of law continued to be celebrated even in post-World-War ii Germany.14 13

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“Die geschichtliche Schule nimmt an, der Stoff des Rechts sei durch die gesamte Vergangenheit der Nation gegeben, doch nicht durch Willkür, so dass er zufällig dieser oder ein anderer sein könnte, sondern aus dem innersten Wesen der Nation selbst und ihrer Geschichte hervorgegangen. Die besondere Tätigkeit aber jedes Zeitalters müsse darauf gerichtet werden, diesen mit innerer Notwendigkeit gegebenen Stoff zu durchschauen, zu verjüngen und frisch zu erhalten” (Wesel, 1997: 436 f, following Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft 1: 6). I have found only two vigorous dissensions. In the introduction to a 1973 republication of Thibaut’s and Savigny’s essays, Hans Hattenhauer found in Thibaut’s text “as much wisdom in judicial politics as humane warm heartedness,” and he saw “goodness and compassion for the simple people” as his prime motivation (44). Hans Wrobel found this humanistic defense of Thibaut too weak (166; 200–206). In his 1975 dissertation he sided with Thibaut in the spirit of the “68 generation” and reprimanded the post-war historians for their continued adulation of Savigny. Wrobel saw the clash between Thibaut and Savigny as a social, material, and class confrontation, in which Thibaut represented the a­ nti-feudalist up-coming middle class seeking support for commerce and capitalism, whereas the aristocratic Savigny adopted conservative and restorative principles that opposed all middle-class efforts to modernize (103). According to Wrobel, the Historical School withdrew to archives and lost contact with life. Its dominance at the universities alienated jurisprudence from life and from the students (“Mit Herrschaft der historischen Schule an den Universitäten war eben das eingetreten, was bürgerlichen Juristen Ansatz mancher Kritik war: die Rechtswissenschaft war dem ‘Leben’ entfremdet,” Wrobel, 1975:  109).

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The misuse of law was an important theme in early-nineteenth century literature, especially in the writings of Heinrich von Kleist. His brilliant comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (first staged in Weimar in 1808), shows a village judge who unsuccessfully tries to keep secret his attempted rape of a girl, and his novella Michael Kohlhaas (first full publication in 1810) is precisely about the injustices that local potentates inflict on a horse dealer who wants to cross from one German state into another.15 Nevertheless, the debate on German Civil Law and the literary works on law would not warrant a discussion in this book had Thibaut not been interested in music as well. Thibaut launched biweekly choral singing sessions at the house of the poetess and music pedagogue Caroline Rudolph, which he changed in 1816 to weekly sessions in his own Heidelberg home. He also started to collect and study old music scores and published in 1824 a book on the purity of music, Über Reinheit der Tonkunst.16 Thibaut wrote no music history but asked for a historical consciousness that contemporary music was, in his view, lacking. He considered most of the music of his time unnaturally full of bravura excesses, deafening Te Deums with eighty drums (Thibaut, [1824] 1826: 111–112), and organists performing exaggerated “organist nonsense” (Organistenunfug). Turned off by such “contaminated” music, Thibaut started to listen to the past; he found purity in Händel, whom he compared to Shakespeare (159), and further back in Palestrina, whom he found comparable to Homer (55). He was disturbed that artists in other fields still admired older works but modern musicians were possessed by an “unhistorical haughtiness” (19) that made them ignorant of music that was more than fifty-years old, including pre-Gluck operas (70, 156). Hence, Thibaut insisted, historical study and familiarity with early composers had to become the foundation of solid musical knowledge. Both Bach and Mozart gave good examples of this: Bach eagerly studied the works of older masters, and Mozart, a genius, also turned to them (5).17 Regarding vocal music as an expression of an ethical disposition, Thibaut differentiated between church, oratorio, and operatic styles (50). In church 15

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Kleist showed interest in law and crime in a very different way when he started in October 1810 the Berliner Abendblätter, a boulevard newspaper that brought sensationalist reports about the latest city crimes. Rochlitz wrote anonymously a very positive review of the first edition of Thibaut’s music book (amz 27: 453–463); another, equally positive, review of the second edition followed a year later (amz 28: 289). Thibaut did think, however, that J.S. Bach was too eager to perfect the “figured” chorale ([1824] 1826: 20), while Haydn and Mozart gave too little attention to their religious compositions (62–63).

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music, as in painting and architecture, he preferred the old masters who had all but disappeared within the last fifty years. Luther’s songs degenerated in the protestant churches, and the chorales were irresponsibly mistreated or neglected (19, 22). Church music could only be resuscitated if the organ players were brought under control (34–35). The oratorio style was turned almost everywhere into an operatic style, while the operatic one itself became corrupted, crazy, vulgar, and overly exalted. Having briefly looked at Thibaut’s two studies, one cannot but ask, puzzled and confused, how they fit together and what approaches scholars of law and music have taken to them. How could Thibaut argue against Savigny’s “Historical School” (which believed in the “holiness of Tradition”), and yet adopt a powerful and rather conservative historical perspective on music? Existing studies of him make no attempt to correlate his law and music studies. Except for Eugen Wohlhaupter, author of a three-volume study of German lawyer/ poets (1953–57), law experts ignore Thibaut’s book on music. Entries on him in the mgg and New Grove do mention, of course, that he was a law professor, but only the latter mentions his debate with Savigny. Thibaut himself kept the two fields separate, as if no bridge existed between them, though today’s interdisciplinary studies on law and the humanities have constructed a variety of interlinking networks. How are we to explain that Thibaut was historically oriented in music but opposed Savigny’s Historical School in law? In the first place we ought to remind ourselves that the Historical School in law was highly nationalistic, while Thibaut was a liberal cosmopolitan who did not reject other forms of historical thinking in law. His specialization, the pandects, was a fundamentally historical subject. Thibaut was dissatisfied with the present state of both law and music but sought the remedy in the opposite directions. The book on the German Civil Law sought a future remedy by suggesting the construction of a comprehensive new Code, whereas the book on music found remedies in the “pure music” of the past. In the case of law, Thibaut took no anti-historical position but saw a choice between two possibilities based on the past: the older system of the Roman pandects was chaotic and outdated, whereas the more recent ideas of the Enlightenment promised to serve the new social order better. Thibaut looked at the history of both fields from moral perspectives, but while his ideas on jurisprudence were supplied by a vision of a liberal future, he found higher morality in older music (and genuine folk music). One may question his adulation of old music but one should recognize that he applied the same critique in both cases. Another common point between Thibaut’s two books was pedagogy. He organized his choral sessions not just as an antiquarian, out of “pure” enjoyment,

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but also because he was eager to kindle in the younger generation a love for a forgotten past. This pedagogical drive is prominent in his music book, which devotes whole chapters to Bildung via models and practical tips on how to start and run choral societies. Jurisprudence posed the pedagogical task differently, for the subject was taught at the universities, but very poorly. Thibaut passionately argued that the existing German civil laws could not be taught via good academic lectures, whereas a general Civil Code would be an “immeasurable gain” for academic instruction (Thibaut, 1814: 27). Studying the existing law demanded rote memorizing of untold numbers of confusing rules, definitions, distinctions, and historical notes, all of which had to be slavishly accepted because that’s just how things are (29, 32). Civil Law was “dead and repulsive.” Schumann and Thibaut The same worries preoccupied Schumann when under maternal pressure he entered the study of law on March 29, 1828 in Leipzig. His diaries and letters of the next year frequently report about drinking bouts and flirtations, but mention his studies only twice to his mother, confirming Thibaut’s devastating view of the field. On May 21, 1828, he reported that cold jurisprudence “crushes you right at the start with its ice-cold definitions,” while on June 13 he added that he had been copying like a machine and could not do more as yet (Schumann, 1886: 25).18 On August 3, he declared that Easter next year he wanted to move to Heidelberg so that he could hear the most famous German lawyers, Thibaut and Karl Joseph Anton Mittermaier (30). Five years after the publication of Thibaut’s book, Schumann arrived at Heidelberg. He was familiar with Thibaut’s reputation in both law and music, but it is unclear what relative weight he gave them. According to Worthen, “Schumann’s ambition to go to Heidelberg was – at least in part – genuine” but he did not tell his mother his more important reason, namely that some friends of his studied there (32). No Schumann scholar suggests that Schumann was perhaps attracted to Heidelberg also because Thibaut taught law there.19 With the reluctant consent of his mother, Schumann transferred to ­Heidelberg to escape the “frigidity” of the Leipzig law studies and probably 18 19

“Die kalte Jurisprudenz, die einem bei dem Anfang schon niederschmettert durch die eiskalten Definitionen, kann mir nicht gefallen” (Schumann, 1886: 22). Only Jensen makes a (brief and ambivalent) remark concerning Thibaut’s views on law. He writes: “Thibaut’s reputation extended throughout Germany; he had worked consistently against the reactionary spirit of the day and had advocated significant changes in civil law supportive of individual rights” (2001: 28). However, he immediately adds: “It was not Thibaut’s expertise in law, however, which drew Schumann closer to him.”

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hoped also to get musical inspiration from Thibaut. Music was surely of greater interest to him, but his letters to his mother foregrounded his new perspectives on studying law. Four days after his arrival he commented in his diary how friendly Thibaut was when he first attended the professor’s music session (Schumann, 1971: 50), and by July 17, 1829 he reported to his mother that studying law with Thibaut and Mittermaier “tasted” wonderfully: Only now do I sense the true dignity of jurisprudence, how it advances the holy interests of humankind. And oh God! This Leipzig professor who stood like an automaton on the Jacob’s ladder to professorship, and read off phlegmatically his paragraphs in poor spirit; and this Thibaut, who happens to be twice as old as the other one, is so brimming with life and spirit that he hardly has time and words to utter his ideas (1886: 62).20 Schumann evinced thus precisely the sort of enthusiastic reaction that Thibaut himself hoped future generations of students would show when studying the envisioned comprehensive German Civil Code. Indeed, Schumann reported on August 3 to his mother that he did not miss a single class in Heidelberg, for it was pure joy to study law with Thibaut and Mittermaier (69).21 Reports to his mother and his family may exaggerate his eagerness to attend Thibaut’s lectures, but it seems rather unlikely that he consistently lied and never attended a single lecture on law, as his friend Eduard Röller later claimed.22

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“ich fühle jetzt erst die wahre Würde der Jurisprudenz, wie sie alle heiligen Interessen der Menschheit fördert. Und Gott! Dieser Leipziger Professor, der wie ein Automat auf seiner Jakobsleiter zum Ordinariat dastand, und geist- und wortarm seine Paragraphen phlegmatisch ablas – und dieser Thibaut, der, obgleich noch einmal so alt wie jener, von Leben, Geist überfließt und kaum Zeit und Worte genug hat, seine Ideen auszusprechen” (Schumann, 1886: 62). Worthen and others do cite Schumann’s university certificate, which testifies that he enrolled in Thibaut’s course on Roman Law, and that he was “especially diligent and attentive” (Eismann, 1956, i: 71). Nobody seems to have noted that the certificate testifies to enrollment in courses by Thibaut and Karl Salomo Zachariä, whereas Schumann mentions attending a course by Mittermaier. Zachariä he mentions only once, in connection with a piano concert he gave. The certificate may not reflect adequately what Schumann actually studied in Heidelberg. Eduard Röller wrote to Emil Flechsig on October 11, 1856 that, as far as he knew, Schumann did not go to classes (Eismann, 1956, i: 69). Daverio (1997: 56) does not question these vague words, but Worthen rightly regards them as part of a myth that Schumann never studied (2007: 38).

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Illustration 7.1 Musical soirée at Professor Thibaut’s, watercolour by Jakob Götzenberger, c. 1829

Schumann continued visiting the weekly music sessions, which are depicted in Jakob Götzenberger’s watercolor Musikalische Soiree bei Professor Thibaut, painted around 1829 (Schumann, 1999: 73; Illustration 7.1). One could just imagine that the person sitting on the side was Schumann. In February 1830, Schumann eulogized Thibaut’s music making: Thibaut is a wonderful, divine man, with whom I spend my most enjoyable hours. When they sing a Händel Oratorio (there are more than seventy singers at his house on Thursdays) and he accompanies them so enthusiastically on the piano, and when at the end two big tears roll down from his beautiful big eyes from beneath his beautiful silver-grey hair, and when he comes to me so enchanted and delighted to shake my hand and cannot utter a word out of sheer heart and emotion – in such situations I often struggle to understand how a wretch like me can be honored to be present in such a sacred house and listen. You can hardly have an idea of his wit, acumen, his sensibility, his pure artistic sense, his affability, tremendous eloquence, and tact in everything (1886: 105).23 23

“Thibaut ist ein herrlicher, göttlicher Mann, bei dem ich meine genussreichsten Stunden verlebe. Wenn er so ein Händelsches Oratorium bei sich singen lässt (jeden Donnerstag sind über 70 Sänger da) und so begeistert am Klavier accompagniert und dann am Ende zwei Große Thränen aus den schönen, großen Augen rollen, über denen ein schönes silberweißes Haar steht, und dann so entzückt und heiter zu mir kommt und die Hand drückt und kein Wort spricht vor lauter Herz und Empfindung, so weiß ich oft nicht, wie ich Lump zu der Ehre komme, in einem solchen heiligen Hause zu sein und zu

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In light of these touching lines about an overwhelming experience, next to glowing reports about Thibaut’s lectures on law, it seems a gross misunderstanding when Perrey summarizes Schumann’s Heidelberg experience as follows: “Schumann escapes to Heidelberg to study with the music aesthetician A.F.J. Thibaut, author of the influential Über die Reinheit der Tonkunst (On Purity in Musical Art). But quickly tires of what he discovers as Thibaut’s pedantry and returns to Leipzig in the autumn of 1830” (Perrey, 2011: 10).24 This seems to imply that Schumann went to Heidelberg only because of Thibaut’s music  book. Perrey apparently took the phrase “Thibaut’s pedantry” from Schumann’s letter to Wieck, dated November 6, 1829, in which he reports that an opposition is forming against Thibaut, in which he himself also participates. Here he notes what “wonderful, pure, and noble hours he had experienced with him”, and how much he is pained by Thibaut’s one-sided and truly pedantic view of music, next to the infinite jurisprudential richness of this invigorating, fiery, and crushing spirit (Schumann, 1886: 81). We do not know who formed the opposition and what its specific objection was. Note, however, that this rich praise of Thibaut’s law lectures was sent to Wieck, Schumann’s former music teacher to whom he planned to return after Heidelberg. Schumann surely did not regard Händel as the Shakespeare of music, but he shared Thibaut’s admiration for Cherubini’s genius (Schumann, 1971: 230, 232; February 25, 1830). Two of Schumann’s Heidelberg experiences distanced him somewhat from Thibaut. As a pianist, he became a darling of the Heidelberg elite, and as a listener he became aware of “the poetic possibilities of musical virtuosity” that Paganini displayed but Thibaut disliked (Daverio, 1997: 58–59). Daverio may be right that Schumann most probably adopted as an article of faith the opening line of Thibaut’s aesthetic tract: “Never before has it been so generally recognized as now that historical study and understanding of the

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hören. Du hast kaum einen Begriff von seinem Witz, Scharfsinn, seiner Empfindung, dem reinen Kunstsinn, der Liebenswürdigkeit, ungeheuren Beredsamkeit, Umsicht in allem” ­(February 24, 1830; Schumann, 1886: 105). He took the expression “divine man” from his diaries (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 228). Schumann actually consulted with Thibaut on his career choices. As he wrote to his mother on July 1 1830, Thibaut had discouraged him from pursuing law studies, “for providence did not predestine him to become a bureaucrat” (1886: 114–115). This confirmation of his own preference may have been crucial for Schumann. As he wrote to his mother on July 30, 1830, he had to choose between law with Thibaut or music studies in Leipzig with Wieck. When he returned to Leipzig, he picked up both law and music studies, but soon complained that the law lectures in Leipzig were unimaginably insipid and miserable  (129).

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available classics should be the foundation of all genuine knowledge.” We have to weigh the quoted letter to Wieck and the remark about Thibaut’s pedantry also against passages in which Schumann took delight at Thibaut’s personality and humor. A diary note records, for instance, Thibaut’s biting remark that the music audience in Mannheim eats only sweets, unable to consume ham, and surely no oysters. Schumann adds that if the professor could attach his personality and chorus to every copy of his book, this would inevitably wipe out Czerny and even Rossini (meaning that they compose for audiences with a sweet tooth).25 Schumann did not forget Thibaut after leaving Heidelberg. Almost a decade later, on January 13, 1838, he asked his friend Anton Wilhelm von Zuccamaglio to invite the professor to contribute to the NZfM (Schumann, 1886a: 107). Thibaut was by then too old to accept the invitation, but when he died two years later, Zuccamaglio wrote for the NZfM (under the name Waldbrühl) a eulogy that revived Thibaut’s powerful personality (14: 1–2, 5–7). Commentators continued to differ on Thibaut’s impact on Schumann. Joseph Wilhelm von Wasielewski, the first Schumann biographer, claimed that his contacts with the professor were merely occasional, probably due to Thibaut’s “ascetic” view on music (Wasielewski, [1883] 1988: 67). However, Franz Brendel, Schumann’s successor at the helm of the NZfM, retorted in an extensive 1858 review,26 that the opposite was true: Schumann was in rapture about Thibaut and “the famous scholar was one of the first figures that had a great and lasting impact on his inner life; getting to know him was epochal in his life.”27 Brendel recalled that Schumann often spoke to him of Thibaut with an unforgettable “holy shyness” and “inner agitation” that gave Brendel an insight into Schumann himself. When the composer lent him his copy of the Reinheit der Tonkunst, Brendel was first struck by Thibaut’s bias, but Schumann forcefully defended the book (NZfM 48: 140). After decades of composing only piano, chamber, and orchestral music, Schumann turned to songs in 1840, surely because of his marriage with Clara, but Thibaut’s preference for vocal music may also have played a role. Indeed, 25

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“Das Mannheimer Publicum, meint Thibaut witzig, ißt nur Confect; Schinken kann es nicht essen und Austern gar nicht. Wenn Thibaut seiner ‘Reinheit der Tonkunst’ oder jedem Exemplar dieses Buches seine eigne Person und seinen Musikverein anheften könnte, so wäre dein Untergang unvermeidlich, Czerny u. auch Du Rossini!” (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 230). Franz Brendel, “R. Schumann’s Biographie von J.W. Wasielewski.” NZfM 48 (1858): 125–128, 137–141, 157–160, 169–171, 181–186, 193–195. “Schumann schwärmte für Thibaut, die Erscheinung des berühmten Gelehrten war eine der ersten, großen, nachhaltig wirkenden in seinem inneren Leben die Bekanntschaft mit ihm machte Epoche in demselben” (Brendel, 1858: 140).

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towards the very end of his life, in 1852, Schumann also composed a Requiem and a Missa sacra. His personal trajectory in composition led him thus to final attempts to renew a vocal genre that was so close to Thibaut’s heart. Thibaut’s voice resonates loud in two of Schumann’s later texts. Summing up the aims of the NZfM after the first year, he wrote that the journal’s goal was “to remember the past and its works most emphatically, to call attention to the ways in which new artistic beauty can be invigorated only at such a pure source, to fight against the recent past as an artless age, for which only a highstrung (Hochgesteigerte) mechanical skill offered some substitute – and, finally, to help to prepare and accelerate a young poetic future.”28 Some thirteen years later, Schumann wrote “Musical House- and L­ ife-Rules” for students, in which he explicitly recommended Über die Reinheit der Tonkunst as a beautiful book to read “when you become older.”29 Indeed, several of the rules speak Thibaut’s moralizing language, for instance when Schumann declares in a very un-Kantian manner that morality and art have the same laws.30 Schumann’s dietary classification of music obviously echoes the professor’s quoted culinary characterization of the Mannheim audience: “One does not turn children into healthy adults with sweets, cakes, and icing. Like physical nourishment, the spiritual one must be plain and wholesome. The Masters have amply provided of the latter; keep to it.”31 Following Thibaut’s urging that musical knowledge must be broad, Schumann recommended to “acquire a thorough knowledge of all the important works by all the great masters,”32 to avoid cultivating “technique and so-called bravura,”33 to join a chorus, and to be modest, for “there is nothing you can invent or think of that has not already been invented or thought of by somebody else.”34 Schumann urged to 28

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“an die alte Zeit und ihre Werke mit allem Nachdruck zu erinnern, darauf aufmerksam zu machen, wie nur an so reinem Quelle neue Kunstschönheiten gekräftigt werden können – sodann die letzte Vergangenheit als eine unkünstlerische zu bekämpfen, für die nur das Hochgesteigerte des mechanischen einigen Ersatz gewährt habe – endlich eine junge dichterische Zukunft vorzubereiten, beschleunigen zu helfen” (NZfM 2: 3). The “Musikalische Haus- und Lebensregeln” were published for the first time in the NZfM  (1850). “Gesetze der Moral sind auch die der Kunst” (Schumann, 1854, i: 170). “Mit Süßigkeiten, Back- und Zuckerwerk zieht man keine Kinder zu gesunden Menschen. Wie die leibliche, so muß auch die geistige Kost einfach und kräftig sein. Die Meister haben hinlänglich für die letztere gesorgt; haltet euch an diese” (Schumann, 1854, i: 165). “Du mußt nach und nach alle bedeutenden Werke aller bedeutenden Meister kennen lernen” (Schumann, 1854, i: 166) – this summarizes Chapter 9 in Thibaut’s book. “Such’es nie in der Fertigkeit der sogenannten Bravour” (Schumann, 1854, i: 165). “Hinter den Bergen wohnen auch Leute. Sei bescheiden! Du hast noch nichts erfunden und gedacht, was nicht andere vor dir schon gedacht und erfunden” (Schumann, 1854,  i:  167).

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study “the history of music, together with hearing live performances of masterpieces from different periods,” for this “will cure you most quickly of conceit and vanity.”35 Schumann becomes Thibaut’s spokesman when he sternly warns that to modify works of good composers is abominable, for the worst disgrace for an artwork is to decorate it with fashionable ornaments.36 Schumann scholars are silent about Thibaut’s law lectures and their potential relevance to Schumann’s life and intellectual development. Admittedly, we admire him for his compositions and not for his knowledge of law, yet the juridical issues that moved Thibaut so deeply became vital in Schumann’s life. A diary entry from August 21, 1831 records how shocked he was when Wieck brutally beat his son Alwin for not playing the violin right, and young Clara entered, smiled, and set down to play calmly a Weber sonata, Schumann asked himself: “Am I among human beings?” (Schumann, 1971–87, i: 364) He termed Wieck’s ferocity a “Jewish attitude,” not because Jews beat their children but because he assumed (not incorrectly) that father Wieck wanted to enrich himself via his children’s talents, whatever the psychological and physical costs may be. Four days earlier Schumann recorded an ominous remark concerning Clara: “I do not believe that Meister Raro has a genuine love for art as such; there is something Jewish even in his enthusiasm for Zilia; he counts already in his mind the thalers that the concerts will bring some day” (Schumann, 1971: 362). Schumann stereotypically called Wieck a Jew,37 but we have seen that ruthless paternal tyranny to make money with talented children was already a theme in Reichardt’s fiction and a fact in both Reichardt’s and Beethoven’s experience. Tyrannical fathers of musically talented German children are replaced today by fathers who ruthlessly exploit their daughters’ tennis talent! Though Schumann does not mention it, he must have been aware that protecting children from parental abuse was one of Thibaut’s explicit arguments in favor of an all-German Civil Code (1814: 19, 37–38). A few years later, Schumann himself came to suffer under Wieck because of the father’s atrocious legal manoeuvering to prevent Clara from marrying him. Is it an exaggeration to 35

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“Das Studium der Geschichte der Musik, unterstützt vom lebendigen Hören der Meisterwerke der verschiedenen Epochen, wird dich am schnellsten von Eigendünkel und Eitelkeit kurieren” (Schumann, 1854, i: 167). Similarly, Schumann recommends to keep the old in high regard, but also approach the new with a warm heart: “Ehre das Alte hoch, bringe aber auch dem Neuen ein warmes Herz” (i: 168). “Betrachte es als etwas Abscheuliches, in Stücken guter Tonsetzer etwas zu ändern, wegzulassen, oder gar neumodische Verzierungen anzubringen. Dies ist die größte Schmach die du der Kunst antust” (Schumann, 1854, i: 165). See above (39), Schumann, 1971–87, ii: 113; Schumann, 1994:132, 35. To Daverio’s remark that these represent a “troubling streak of anti-Semitism” (1997: 197), Worthen replies that the Schumanns “were entirely conventional in their prejudices” (2007: 203–204).

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detect in Schumann’s amazingly vital, resilient, and legally resourceful fight against father Wieck a late impact of Thibaut’s humanistic desire to reform the ­German Civil Code? When Robert ironically wrote to Clara, “I now have a passion for lawsuits” (Worthen, 2007: 194), he seems to campaign against a brutal father, as well as an unfair system of inherited laws. Schumann must have been aware that Wieck’s finagling was made possible precisely by those chaotic and impenetrable pandects of the Roman Law that Thibaut was so eager to replace with a general German Civil Code granting civil rights to all people. In Saxony, both parents had to consent to the marriage of their children. Thibaut’s law and music studies, Schumann’s personal relation to him, and his legal struggle with father Wieck are inextricably interrelated, and the complexity of disentangling them is no excuse for keeping silent about them. Ultimately, these are not just personal matters but exemplifications of music’s embeddedness in social history.

F.-J. Fétis: The Glory of the Low Countries?

Where was modern Western music born and why? Living in the twenty-first century, the question seems both unanswerable and silly, but it preoccupied many post-medieval artists and thinkers. They had little knowledge about ancient music, but they sensed that in music the gap between ancient and modern was greater than in the other arts, and their standard answer became that modern music was born in Italy. Rousseau shared this view with special historical and philosophical arguments: he postulated a pre-historical unity between music and language, and he lamented that the gradual rationalization of modern languages led to its disintegration. In his view, rationalization went furthest in French and affected Italian musicality least: in Italy, music was primarily melodic and only moderately loaded with harmony. Hence, Rousseau could not resist the temptation to add a polemical footnote to the revised version of his “Lettre sur la musique française,” in which he took issue with Abbé du Bos’s admiration for the pioneering contribution of the Dutch late-medieval composers in developing modern harmony: Abbé du Bos went to great trouble to give the Netherlands the honor of renewing music, which would be acceptable if a continuous swirl of chords could be called music. But if harmony is merely the common base, and one believes that only melody is character giving, then Italy is not just the birthplace of modern music. There is some evidence that Italian is the

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only one among all our living languages to possess truly viable music. In the days of Orlando and Goudimel one produced harmony and sounds; Lully added to this some structure. Corelli, Buononcini, Vinci, and Pergolesi are the first who truly made music.38 rousseau, [1838] 1979: 289

Indeed, Du Bos had addressed the question in Section 46 of his classic Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719, rev. ed. 1740), by citing, in turn, the following passage by Lodovico Guicciardini (Louis Guichardin): Our Belgians are the patriarchs of music, which they reanimated and which they brought to a great perfection. They are born with a happy genius to cultivate it, and their talents to practice it are so great that almost all men and women of this country sing naturally, with precision and grace. Joining together art and nature they are successful in getting admiration in almost all Christian courts for composing as well as performing their chansons and symphonies.39 abbé du bos, [1719] 1993: 158–159

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“L’abbé du Bos se tourmente beaucoup pour faire honneur aux Pay-Bas de renouvellement de la musique, et cela pourroit s’admettre si l’un donnoit le nom de musique à un continuel remplissage d’accords; mais si l’harmonie n’est que la base commune, et que la mélodie seule constitue le caractère, non seulement la musique modern est née en Italie, mais il y a quelque apparence que, dans toutes nos langues vivantes, la musique italienne est la seule qui puisse réellement exister. Du temps d’Orlande et de Goudimel, on faisait de l’harmonie et des sons; Lulli y a joint un peu de cadence; Corelli, Buononcini, Vinci et Pergolesi, sont les premiers qui aient fait de la musique.” (note added to the revised version of Rousseau’s “Lettre sur la musique Françoise”; [1753] 1979: 289). “Nos Belges sont les patriarches de la musique qu’ils ont fait renaitre et qu’ils ont portée à un grand point de perfection. Ils naissent avec un génie heureux pour la cultiver, et leurs talents pour l’exercer sont si grands que les hommes et les femmes de ce pays chantent presque tous naturellement avec justesse comme avec grâce. En joignant ensuite l’art avec la nature, ils parviennent à se faire admirer par la composition comme par l’exécution de leurs chansons et de leur symphonies dans toutes les cours de la chrétienté, où leur mérite leur fait faire de si belles fortunes” (Abbé Du Bos, [1719] 1993: 158–159). Guicciardini’s original is as follows: “Questi sono i veri maestri della musica et quelli che l’hanno restaurata et ridotta a perfettione, perché l’hanno tanto propria et naturale che huomini et donne cantan naturalmente a misura, con grandissima gratia et melodia, onde, havendo poi congiunta l’arte alle natura, fanno, et di voce et di tutti gli strumenti, quella pruova et armonia, che si vede et ode: talché se ne truova sempre per tutte le corti de’ principi christiani” *.

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Doubtless, it was Rousseau’s disagreement with Guicciardini and Du Bos – rather than Forkel’s concern that the Netherlands’ musicians had received little recognition (Van Gessel, 2001: 392) – that suggested to the Arts Section of the Koninklijk-Nederlandsche Instituut van Wetenschappen, Letterkunde en Schoone Kunsten to announce in 1824 a prize competition to answer the questions, what contributions the Netherlanders had made in the fourteenth to ­sixteenth centuries to music, and what influence these had on the ­Italian schools that emerged shortly afterwards. These historical and scholarly questions40 had an obvious political agenda as well, namely to bolster the identity of the ­nine-year old United Kingdom of the Netherlands. This new state had been cobbled together after Napoleon’s downfall out of the former United Provinces, the ­Austrian Netherlands, and some imperial fiefs such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. Placed under the sovereignty of the Prince of Orange, son of the last, ousted Stadholder of the United Provinces and now restored into a monarchical dignity, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands covered a territory equivalent to today’s Benelux countries, to provide a buffer state between France and Germany. Culturally highly heterogeneous and with few shared historical roots, the construct fell apart in 1830, when a revolt led to the secession of an independent Belgium and the appellation “Netherlands” shrank to the Northern half, its present-day successor of that name. While the United Kingdom of the Netherlands lasted, however, between 1815 and 1830, there were some attempts to cultivate a common sense of cultural descent from the shared governance under the Dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth and sicteenth centuries. Hence also the choice of theme for the prize competition, which aimed at a European recognition of the “Netherlandic” musicians by implicitly suggesting a “Greater Netherlands” cohesion among them and positioning the new kingdom as a revival of the Burgundian Pays d’en Bas of the 15th and 16th centuries. However, even the sparse biographical information then available showed that, excepting Jacob Obrecht (born in Bergen op Zoom) and Adrian Willaert (born in Bruges), the leading musicians of this “Netherlands School” came from the town of Cambrai and the province of Hainaut, which were in the French-speaking southern part of the area. Establishing a historical “Netherlands School” of music was to bolster, therefore, the identity and reputation of the new Kingdom. Ironically, the only contestant of the first round was Pierre Jean Suremont, a Flemish corresponding member of the Institute, who attributed ambiguous identities to the 40

The Arts Section appointed practicing musicians. To bolster its reputation, it appointed Beethoven, Reichardt, Rochlitz, and others as corresponding members, but they never became active (Van Gessel, 2004:25–26).

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­Netherlanders. The jury found the essay inadequate,41 but Suremont published it independently, as a “minor apologetic work” on the “merits of the celebrated Belgian musicians, inventors, or regenerators of music” (my italics). He wanted to show the national glory of the celebrated Belgian musicians (Suremont, 1828: v) and repeatedly eulogized Flemish/Belgian, not “Netherlandic,” greatness.42 Suremont declared his unceasing love for his fatherland and for the arts (viii), and wanted to reveal a gloire nationale (ix), but left open, precisely which citizens he meant. He quoted the prize questions that spoke of “mérites des Néerlandais,” but he identified his glorious countrymen alternatingly as “les Belges seuls,” as “Flemish (Belgians),” and as Belge ou Néerlandaise. In short, Suremont supported the patriotic goals of the Institute, but interpreted them in terms of a decidedly Flemish/Belgian regional identity. Implicitly, he undermined the concept of a United Kingdom. The announcement of a second competition in 1826 brought two more suitable essays. An Austrian civil servant and amateur music historian, Raphael Georg Kiesewetter,43 won the first prize, while the second one went to the ­Belgian born French-speaking Jean-François Fétis, who was then still Professor of Counterpoint at the Parisian Royal Conservatory of Music (on him, ­Campos 2013). The two essays were written in German and French respectively, the two linguistic cultures surrounding the Netherlands, but they supported the patriotism of the prize questions. Both touched on the issue of shifting national borders, and both of them rejected the view that the Netherlands musicians were French merely because they were born in a region that was later annexed by Louis xiv (Kiesewetter, 1829: 27–28; Fétis, 182: 23).44 Fétis, a native of the ­Walloon city of Mons, used “Néerlandais,” “Belges,” “Pays-Bas,” and ­“Gallo-Belges” 41

42

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The report, dated November 20, 1826 and preserved in dossier 175 of the “Noord-Hollands Archief” in Haarlem, found that Suremont merely listed the composers without critically examining them (Van Gessel, 2004: 30). His epigraph came from Jan Frederik Helmers’s unabashedly nationalistic Dutch poem, De Hollandsche natie, published in 1812 but soon suppressed by the French. Suremont quotes from the sixth canto: “Dat fijn gevoel voor kunst, dat reiner, hooger leven, / Is, Nederlanders, U, bij uw geboort’ gegeven: / Geen Brit, geen Gauler, geen Germaan, geen Itaaljaan, / Zal in het worstelperk der kunst U nederslaan.” (6: 49–52; p. 245); and: “Voelt, Neerland! voelt, u-zelvs! zijt trotsch op eigen waarde! / Blijft, blijft oorspronklijk! zwicht in kunst voor niets op aarde, / En knielt, knielt nevens mij, voor ‘t goddelijk voorgeslacht, / Ja! eeuwig blijft heur asch ons wierook toegebragt!” (6: 485–488; p. 266). Cornelis den Tex, member of the Fourth class, knew Kiesewetter and may have invited him to participate (Van Gessel, 2004: 30–31). The Institute published the two essays in a single volume, Verhandelingen (1829), with separate pagination.

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(10) interchangeably, accepting the nationalism of the prize questions and even deflated French claims by noting his own discovery: ­Josquin des Prez was born, like Fétis himself, in the ancient Burgundian county, now Belgian province, of Hainaut. Writing in Paris, young Fétis opened his essay by congratulating the Institute: “Glory and honor to the Learned Society, which, guided by its patriotism, has raised this great and beautiful question, one of the most interesting ones in the history of the arts” (3). He added, though, that he could not refuse to write an exposé that revealed the names and works of so many illustrious Belgians. The Austrian Kiesewetter equally disregarded his own identity by praising his countrymen only for popularizing the Netherlands achievements with ­German industriousness and perseverance (1828: 58–59). He criticized the music histories of Hawkins, Burney, and Forkel for giving inadequate attention to the Netherlands contributions to the development of harmony, polyphony, and counterpoint.45 His opening immediately puts the issue in national terms by contesting the general belief “that all music has spread from Italy to Europe and the Italians were the teachers of the other nations of this art”; Netherlands musicians composed highly complex counterpoint music when composers elsewhere made only weak attempts to combine several voices (Fétis, 1828: 1). Kiesewetter asked what role the Netherlands musicians played in the development of the simple counterpoint and whether they invented “artificial” or “double” (nowadays termed “invertible”) counterpoint. Were they the first teachers of the double counterpoint and did they exercise influence on schools of music elsewhere? In his view, Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, and the students of the latter developed the double counterpoint, and all music after Ockeghem was inherited from and transmitted by the Netherlands School (1828: 21–25). He claimed that the technical innovation of the invertible counterpoint, led to the flowering of the Netherlands School.46 The Netherlanders were its inventors (4). The inventive genius of this new mode was Ockeghem (22), and the time of the paradigm change was therefore in the mid-fifteenth 45

46

According to Kiesewetter, Hawkins collected materials but did not interconnect and interpret them, Forkel acknowledged the significance of the Netherlands musicians but devoted only a brief section to them, whereas Burney was outright guilty of disregarding earlier accounts and honoring his own compatriots (Kiesewetter, 1829: 2, 15). Double counterpoint interchanges the original order of two voices by transposing the higher voice an octave lower, or the lower one an octave higher. The transposition can also be a 10th or 12th. Bach uses in the four canons of The Art of Fugue the first for an octave inversion, the second one for a 10th one, and the third one for a 12th one. Kiesewetter called these interchanges “double” because they involve two voices; the same principle of transposition could yield triple counterpoints with three voices and even quadruple ones.

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century. One of the last great Masters, Adrian Willaert, founded the Venetian music school (75). Like Fétis, Kiesewetter blamed the Spanish war and the emergence of a monophonic recitative style leading to the opera for the decline of Netherlands music (Kiesewetter, 1828: 77; Fétis, 1828: 53–54). In contrast to Kiesewetter’s broadly documented essay, Fétis’s text was compact. He discussed the musicians of the period one by one, with solid information. For the first half of the fifteenth century, his heroes were Guillaume Dufay, whom he reclaimed for the Netherlands with new evidence, John Dunstable, and Gilles Binchois (12). For the second half of the century his key figures were Obrecht, Ockeghem, and Johannes Tinctoris, all of whom could be claimed for the Netherlands.47 The post-competition events were more interesting than the competition itself. Kiesewetter’s magnum opus, the Geschichte der europäisch-bendländischen oder unserer heutigen Musik (1834) restated the ideas of his essay, in a modified structure. He divided his Geschichte into sections on outstanding musicians, with only few general statements in between. Following Fétis, he classified the Hainaut-born Dufay as belonging to the Netherlands school (Kiesewetter, [1834] 2010: 46), and he saw this as another evidence of a Netherlands leadership. He merely added to the chronology of the essay two pre-Ockeghem Netherland periods related to Dufay (48). Nevertheless, Kiesewetter continued to insist on the Netherlands priority in the invention of counterpoint with a chapter on Ockeghem (50–54), whose period he saw as the highpoint of the Netherlands School. Josquin, whose contrapuntal art had reached the highest level, he regarded as one of greatest musical geniuses of all times (57–58). His chapter on the Willaert period was devoted to the influence of the Netherlands School abroad. The development of Fétis’s theory is more exciting, because he became a leading historian and theorist of music, according to some the first philosopher of music. Scholars like Wangermée, Shellhouse, Dahlhaus, Bloom, E ­ llis and others link Fétis’s mature theory to Kant, Schelling, Victor Cousin, or ­Auguste Comte, but, to my knowledge, nobody has looked as yet at his own intellectual development, which starts with the essay of the Netherlands prize competition. I want to show that Fétis’s mature philosophy and history of music was born in aftermath of the prize competition – at the cost of surrendering the idea of an important Netherlands School of music.

47

In 1830, Fink wrote under the title “Zur Geschichte der Tonkunst” a lengthy and very positive review in the amz (32: 381–395). It covers only Kiesewetter’s article, though it promises to continue with a review of Fétis’s essay.

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According to Fétis’s recollections in Esquisse ([1840] 1994: 42–43), the Secretary of the Fourth Class at the Institute sent him the printed book of the two prize-winning essays early 1830, and he called Fétis’s attention to Kiesewetter’s view that the Netherlanders invented the “artificial” or “double” counterpoint. Double counterpoint was merely a subdivision of “artificial counterpoint,” invented by fifteenth-century musicians in the Netherlands School. Fétis immediately asked his Viennese correspondent to let Kiesewetter know that this is incorrect: double counter-point emerged only in the second half of the ­sixteenth century, and its use in fugues dates from the seventeenth. ­Kiesewetter generously acknowledged Fétis’s claim “that the old masters were not yet familiar with this kind of counter-point.” After rechecking some of his archival scores, Kiesewetter admitted that his double counter-point inversions were only simple imitations. Fétis accepted Kiesewetter’s admission, but rudely lambasted him for incorrect transcriptions in his prize-winning essay. He criticized both the Dufay transcription in Kiesewetter’s Appendix xi (21) and a plate in the text (30). He reprimanded the jury of the competition for having discovered the error only after choosing Kiesewetter as the winner and he repeated this Kiesewetter criticism in his later “Résumé de la philosophie de l’histoire de la musique” (Fétis, 1835–44, i: xxxvii–ccliv). On the other hand, Kiesewetter entered in a sharp polemic with Fétis under the pseudonym A.C. Leduc, when the latter corrected a dissonance in M ­ ozart’s “Dissonanzenquartett” (K. 465) in his article “Sur un passage singulier d’un quatuor de Mozart.”48 Fétis responded on July 17, 1830 to Leduc, but it is unclear whether he realized that he polemicized, once more, with Kiesewetter. All this happened before Fétis reviewed the Verhandelingen in his own Revue Musicale in October 1830, just a few weeks after the revolt in Brussels initiated the move towards an independent Belgium.49 Though the review does not mention the event, we can sense its impact, for Fétis consistently speaks now of Belgian rather than Netherlands musicians. The review is fair towards Kiesewetter, but it claims that the French had a role in the development of the counterpoint, and it criticizes Kiesewetter’s concept of “artificial” or “double” counterpoint (rm 2nd series 1830: 258–262). According to the Préface to the third edition of his Traité ([1844] 1849: xi-xiii), Fétis had an astonishing 48

49

See Fétis “Sur un passage singulier d’un quatuor de Mozart” (rm 5: 601–606), François Perne (rm 6: 25–31), Fétis (rm 6: 32–34), Leduc (amz 32: 117–132; 33: 81–89, 101–105, ­493–500?), and Fétis July 17, 1830 to Leduc. Did he know that his critic was Kiesewetter? See also Hass, 2009: 39. rm 2nd series 1830: 230–247 (Oct. 2), 257–269 (Oct. 9), and 289–297 (Oct. 16). The last installment promised additional ones, but these were apparently never published.

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s­ ix-hour-long rapture of inspiration in the Bois de Boulogne in May 1831, half a year after publishing the review. He conceived then his new system, which I shall present here according to its first formulation in an 1832 lecture series that he partially printed in volume 12 of the rm.50 He restated this theory with no substantial changes in his Esquisse (1840), and in Traité (1844). According to Fétis, harmony had been initially founded on the consonances of the third, the fifth, the sixth and the octave. When these gradually felt monotonous and boring, composers started to let voices imitate each other (rm 12: 170), but even this was of limited use: After Palestrina’s works, everything was exhausted in the arrangement of ideas linked to this harmony and tonality, and […] the musicians had to find new harmonic elements, as well as a new tonality, for their art would otherwise decline. This perceived but unstudied necessity led to the discovery of the natural harmony of the dominant, i.e. the harmony of the seventh with a major third, which itself gave birth to the sensible [leading] note and the modern scale (12: 171).51 This cornerstone of Fétis’s new theory of tonality wiped out all claims, including his own, that the Netherlands musicians had had a founding role in the development of modern harmony. Palestrina now became the terminal figure of a tradition that was overturned with the “discovery” of the dominant ­seventh chord – but only towards the end of the sixteenth century. The age of Netherlands’ glory now became for Fétis a tepid, boring, and limited practice of harmony, for the “natural” dissonance leading to modern harmony was discovered later. Did the idea that “the natural harmony of the dominant created modern tonality” ([1840] 1994: 43) really hit Fétis as an intuitive thunderbolt in the Bois de Boulogne? I hear echoes and reactions to Kiesewetter’s ideas. Echoes, because Kiesewetter also claimed that the more complex harmonies emerged 50

51

Fétis’s eight lectures, given between May and July 1832, are printed in rm 12: 131–133, 1­39–141, 155–158, 161–164, 169–171, 177–179, 185–187, and 196–198. Franz Liszt, who was among his listeners, was deeply impressed by Fétis’s historical scheme. “après les travaux de Palestrina tout était épuisé dans l’ordre d’ideés attaché à cette harmonie et à cette tonalité et … la nécessité de trouver de nouveaux élémens harmoniques ainsi qu’une tonalité nouvelle était imposée aux musiciens, sous peine de voir commencer la décadence de l’art. C’est de cette nécessité sentie sans être analysée … qu’est née la découverte de l’harmonie naturelle de la dominante, c’est-à-dire l’harmonie de la septième avec tierce majeure, qui elle-même a donné naissance à la note sensible et à la gamme moderne” (rm 12: 171).

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out of boredom with the monotonous uniformity of simple harmony, though he dated this earlier than Fétis. Reactions, because Kiesewetter repeatedly asserted that complex harmonies were artificial and pressure-produced: technically skilled musical geniuses became exuberant and subjected the boring simple counterpoint to a “certain self-imposed constraint” (1828: 14). They called this first a rota, then a canon, and in some forms already a fugue. Hence, “artificial counterpoint” constrained simple harmony into new paths. Fétis apparently wanted to replace the artificiality and constraint in Kiesewetter’s double counterpoint with a harmony based on the dominant ­seventh, which he considered natural. This insistence on “natural” dissonances strangely contradicts Fétis’s general view that music has no “natural” laws. To seek natural and scientific principles for music, whether in the planetary system, in acoustics, in abstract numbers, in the divisions of the monochord, or in the physical structure of human beings is futile (Fétis, [1840] 1994: iv). Music was not only a science but also an art, by which Fétis meant that next to the major/minor tonal system there have been equally valid other systems in other cultures and epochs. Tonality was the primary organizing agent of all melodic and harmonic successions and the scale was the primary factor in determining tonality, setting out the order of the successive tones, the distances that separate the tones, and the resultant melodic and harmonic tendencies. However, tonality was also socially conditioned. Scales were cultural manifestations, resulting from shared experience and education. Nature provided the tonality principles, but human understanding, sensibility, and will formed the different harmonic systems. Having thus taken a multi-cultural view of music systems, Fétis went on to insist that the Western system of major and minor scales allowed only two fundamental and natural chords. The “natural” triad on the first degree of a scale was the point of departure for consonance, which dominated the first phase of the tonal system in the Middle Ages, which he called “unitonic,” for it used only consonant triads and offered no possibility to modulate. The decisive step away from this consonant unitonic system was, according to Fétis, not the introduction of the double counterpoint, which was artificial and limiting, but the dominant seventh chord, the “natural” counterpart to the basic chord of consonance. The dominant seventh, the “natural” chord of dissonance, allowed for modulation. Fétis’s notion that a “natural” dissonant chord allowed modulation and, hence, opened the second period, which he called “transitonic,” negated the existence of a glorious Netherlands period because the new system arose, according to him, much later, sometime between Zarlino and Monteverdi. Since Fétis never explicitly distanced himself from the view of his prize essay the

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idea of an epochal Netherlands School remained unchallenged for a long time. Interest focused rather on Fétis’s four-stage history of harmony, of which the mentioned unitonic and transitonic were the first two phases. Fétis outlined the other two periods in his theory of music history in his 1832 lectures (rm 12: 196–198) and, later, in the third volume of his Traité. The “pluritonic” one allegedly emerged with Mozart’s use of expanded enharmonic modulation, which included the diminished seventh and augmented sixth. The final “omnitonic” period was a prophetic future projection: prescriptions on how to resolve a note would eventually vanish and prepare the way to atonal music: “The ear will have become so familiar with the multiplicity of these resolutions of a single note, that the end result of this ordre omnitonique will be the total destruction, in certain cases, of the scale, and the beginnings of an acoustic division of the musical scale into twelve equal semitones.”52 Fétis’s new theory forced him to rejuggle his list of old masters. The key figures now became François Landino, Jean de Muris, Guillaume de ­Machault, Gilles Binchois, John Dunstable, Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht, but Fétis no longer recognized any Netherlands School as a motor behind the development of the harmonic theory and its practice and he no longer mentions it in his Esquisse or his important 1849 preface to the third edition of the Traité. We should not read this as an expression of ­Belgian nationalism. Although Fétis developed an admirable activity to build up musical life and research in Brussels, his work was free of nationalist sentiments. Indeed, he moved away from supporting the nationalist project of the ­Koninklijk-Nederlands Instituut towards a philosophical and cosmopolitan vision of music that no longer regarded the Western system as natural. The politically motivated construct of a glorious Netherlands period in music history remained unchallenged in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was only in 1939 that Paul Henry Láng reexamined the matter in the shadow of the coming war. According to him, Kiesewetter’s canonized presentation of the great Netherlands musicians gave “the impression that French Gothic music passed, almost overnight, into Germanic lands” (Láng, 1939: 48). The Hungarian-born Láng, who became (without an accent) a leading us musicologist at Columbia University, favored the French (Latin, Roman) culture over the Germanic (Nordic) one, and he seems to have found a certain cultural 52

As Fétis wrote in the third person: “M. Fétis prévoit le moment où l’oreille aura acquis une telle habitude de la multiplicité de ces résolutions d’une note, que le résultat de cet ordre omnitonique sera l’anéantissement total de la gamme dans certain cas, et l’origine d’une division acoustique de l’échelle musicale en douze demi-tons égaux, à cause de l’égalité des tendances” (rm 12: 198).

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arrogance in labeling “Netherlandish” what he considered as Flemish/French music – though he warned that “the Netherlands do not represent a purely Germanic civilization diametrically opposed by nature to Romanic genius” – Holland and Belgium bridge the Germanic and Romanic worlds (48–49).53 Láng set out to show that the “Netherlands Schools” had no national character and were much more international than previously assumed. Nevertheless, by foregrounding Burgundy, which included for a while the Netherlands and had a French linguistic and cultural orientation, he attributed a key role to French culture in the “Netherlands” (48). He adopted the designation “Burgundian School” to refer to a musical style without any specific “racial” or national character. Burgundy was split after the Battle of Nancy in 1477 between the duchy of Burgundy, which reverted to the French crown, and the northern Flemish lands (Brabant, Flanders, Holland and Zeeland), which became part of the Habsburg Empire under Maximilian. Láng admits the growing German influence – “The Romanic genius, tiring of its centuries-long efforts, began to yield to the G ­ ermanic element” (53) – but claims that Hainaut, one of the Romanic provinces, produced some of the greatest musicians of the N ­ etherlands School (50). The compositional style soon changed, for many disciples of O ­ ckeghem and Josquin were Frenchmen (55), and this French strain diluted the ­Germanic-­Netherlandish contingent. Láng avoided again the “Netherlands” label by claiming that the Flemish monopoly went over into a “Franco-Flemish School” (56), which then spread to Italy. The reconciliation of a “scintillating” Italian music “with the serene tenets of Nordic polyphony” determined the style of the next generation. Since the Flemish and Franco-Flemish ideas needed Italian sun (58), Italian culture helped the Netherlanders to embark on new stylistic ventures. The polyphonic art of the later Flemish and ­Franco-Flemish musicians “adhered to the idea of a universal European musical culture that knew no national boundaries” (57). In sum, future histories of the “­ Netherlands Schools” would have to do justice to their Latin component (59). The issue remains problematic even today. Klaus Hortschansky’s carefully argued 1995 entry in the new mgg (1995: 674–688) claims that the term “Frankoflämisch” has become generally accepted for the music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (674).54 53

54

Láng’s worries were justified. Karl Gustav Fellerer wrote an essay for H.J. Moser’s aborted project on “Die deutsche Musik und ihre Nachbarn” on the German(ic) essence of Flemish/Dutch music (Potter, 1996: 97, 99). According to Hortschansky (1995), Kiesewetter’s and Fétis’s essays opened a new perspective on the music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but their label “­ Netherlands” is to be understood in terms of the political situation of the 1820s. Hortschansky

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Albert Dunning’s entry “Low Countries” in the New Grove of 2001 a­ cknowledges that the United Kingdom of the Netherlands “regarded itself in a Romantic nationalist sense as the heir to a general cultural legacy of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.” This “musical golden age of the area from about 1430 to the close of the 16th century was felt to be typically ‘Netherlandish’” (Sadie, 2001, xv: 228). Hence, according to Dunning, attempts to label part or all of the period as “Burgundian,” “Flemish,” or “Franco-Flemish” emphasize “only a partial aspect or fail to recognize the cultural unity and independence which was centred at that time in the Netherlands as a whole” (xv: 228). How much did Fétis’s tonality theory become accepted? Hugo Riemann criticized Fétis for abandoning the natural and scientific basis of tonality, but Carl Dahlhaus, who extensively compared the two views in his Habilitationsschrift Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (1968) usually took Fétis’s side, even in his later dating of harmonic tonality. Curiously, neither Hortschansky nor Dunning comment on Fétis’s thesis that the crucial development of modern harmony occurred after the “Netherlands period.” If Fétis is right (and Dahlhaus sides with him) the Netherlanders cannot be regarded as the pioneers of harmony anymore. It should be a small compensation to the Netherlanders that Fétis’s final important theory emerged in the aftermath of the Netherlands prize competition. Kiesewetter’s and Fétis’s prize-winning essays ought to be understood in terms a new historical consciousness that manifested itself not only in literary and art criticism, but also in philosophy, and, as we have seen, even in law. Indeed, Kiesewetter became an important collector of old music scores, and he also organized house concerts of older church music between 1816 and 1842. They were sometimes held in the Augustinerkirche and attended by the Viennese haut monde as well as artists and intellectuals. These social aspects of the public music performances resemble those of Friedrich Schlegel’s 1812 Vienna lectures on ancient and modern literature, which, Herfrid Kier suggests, ­Kiesewetter may have attended (Kiesewetter, [1834] 2010: x). The antiquarian zeal to revive older music by means of collecting and performing ancient scores culminated in the publication of Kiesewetter’s Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen Musik (1834). Curiously, but not without reason, Kiesewetter moved the orientation of his music history in the opposite direction from Fétis. The latter moved with his Esquisse towards a more technical and scholarly style, whereas Kiesewetter wrote his history in a biographically oriented popular style. slips, however, when he identifies Brussels, rather than Amsterdam, as the seat of the ­Koninklijk-Nederlandsche Instituut (674). No institute in Brussels felt an urge to glorify the greater Netherlands!

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In contrast to literature and the fine arts, where historical awareness had always been alive, historical approaches to music were awakened by the emergence of new, purely instrumental and harmonically daring forms of music. By reopening a past that consisted primarily of vocal music, Thibaut, Kiesewetter and Fétis signaled alienation from the music of the present. This is evident in the case of Thibaut as well as in Fétis’s harsh criticism of Berlioz and Wagner, but perceptible even in Kiesewetter, who saw music as a progression. At the end of his book he claimed that the fine arts were based on nature, but music on the spirit of geniuses who intermittently entered into the world with a new, hitherto unknown perfection. The highest music has not yet been reached “and it would be an outrage to designate the products of our time as the non plus ultra” (100). Did he mean to denigrate the present or value it as a stepping stone to still higher music?

chapter 8

Speech and Song Paradoxically but inevitably, the revival of orality was initiated and advocated in print, more precisely in scholarly publications whose final aim was to move from a fluid medium to firm grounds. Orality may have been a desired language form but advocating it needed consistent arguments. We shall consider in this chapter linguistics and pedagogy, two blooming fields of the early nineteenth century that gave new significance to the spoken word. Whereas for general grammar, language arose when the noise produced by the mouth or the lips had become a letter, it is accepted from now on that language exists when noises have been articulated and divided into a series of distinct sounds. foucault, [1966] 1973: 286



Michel Foucault

The shift from letter to sound in the epigraph to this chapter means moving from the older linguistics that Foucault associates with Port Royal to a new phonetics-based grammar. In The Order of Things this new linguistic theory becomes, together with economics and biology, a pillar of the new episteme that crystallized around 1800. The new grammarians broke with the letter-based conception and now regard language “as a totality of phonetic elements”: With Rask, Grimm and Bopp, language is treated for the first time (even though there is no longer any attempt to refer it back to the cries from which it originated) as a totality of phonetic elements. … By means of the ephemeral and profound sound it produces, the spoken word accedes to sovereignty. … [Language] has acquired a vibratory nature, which has separated it from the visible sign and made it more nearly proximate to the note in music. (286) Language is “a totality of phonetic elements” but not to be associated with Rousseau’s claim that language developed from emotional cries. Foucault’s

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sources are Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Bopp, and Jacob Grimm’s Über den ­Ursprung der Sprache (1852).1 The referential scheme is Cuvier’s anatomy, in which representation became a secondary feature of the individual element “because it had been related, at first, to a total organic structure and make possible the establishment of relations of adjacency or kinship” (280). Intrinsic meaning was replaced by function within “a total organic structure.” The same happened with the idea of language: words did not lose their referential function but their “constitutive” role became determined via their place within a sentence and their link with other words: If the word is able to figure in a discourse in which it means something, it will no longer be by virtue of some immediate discursivity that it is thought to possess in itself, and by right of birth, but because, in its very form, in the sounds that compose it, in the changes it undergoes in accordance with the grammatical function it is performing. (280) The word is no longer directly attached to a representation (280). To specify what it says the word “must belong to a grammatical totality, which, in relation to the word, is primary, fundamental, and determining” (281). The function of a word within such a “grammatical totality” is analogous to the function of anatomical part in an organism – and analogous also, I would add, to the function of musical elements in a sound structure. For Foucault, this is an epochal reduction of representation: “The displacement of the word, this backward jump, as it were, away from its representative functions, was certainly one of the important events of Western culture towards the end of the eighteenth century” (281). Transferred to music, this means that vocal music had a primary representational function but in instrumental music this is replaced primarily by the structure of chords. Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788–1801) also compared music and language, but on the basis of the Port Royal theory of language. Not accidentally, Foucault finished his passage on the new grammar with a reference to music. The analogy between comparative anatomy and musical form acquired an aesthetic function also in the music theory of A.B. Marx, 1 Foucault quotes in The Order of Things from Schlegel’s treatise on Sankrit ([1966] 1973: ­280–284, 291), Bopp’s Conjugationssytem (284, 288, 289), and Bopp’s Comparative Grammar (287). From Grimm he quotes passages on the analogy between the new comparative linguistic and comparative botany and anatomy, the verbal roots and their duplication, and the ingenious dissection of the flexions and derivations (287, 288, 289).

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who, having made his mark as the editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (in which capacity we have encountered him in C ­ hapter 1), was also the author of music-theoretical disquisitions such as the 1837 Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch. Foucault illustrates his theoretical statement with “the new interest shown by Raynouard and the brothers Grimm, in non-written literature, in folk tales and spoken dialects” (286). Foucault uses Friedrich Schlegel’s and Franz Bopp’s linguistic theory to illustrate his point that views on language became wholly oriented towards spoken sounds.

Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp

The idea of comparative linguistics involves Sanskrit, which Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux and William Jones put forward already in the eighteenth century as the ancestor of the modern Indo-European languages. Alexander Hamilton, Antoine-Léonard de Chézy, Silvestre de Sacy, and Louis Mathieu Langlès fell under the charm of the Sanskrit language and its great literary works. Jones wrote: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia. jones, [1786] 1807: 34

These questions of comparative linguistics were studied for some time together with Sanskrit literature. The next important steps were taken in Germany by Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Bopp, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Schlegel, the first German to tackle the subject, took lessons from Hamilton when both lived in Paris. He was followed by Franz Bopp, who went to Paris in 1812 to study Sanskrit with Hamilton and de Chézy.

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Schlegel’s path-breaking study Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier ([1808] 1975: 105–440) proposed in 1808 that Greek, Latin, and other European languages derived from Sanskrit. He was the first to suggest to take as a model Cuvier’s comparative anatomy: “The structure or comparative grammar of languages furnishes a certain key of their genealogy, just as the study of comparative anatomy has done to the loftiest branch of natural science” (Schlegel, [1808] 1975: 137). Schlegel regarded the verb roots as “germs” that sprouted, not due to some external force but in accordance with the inherent laws of linguistics. These roots would couple with subjects and predicates in two ways: the additive and mechanical Chinese language left the verb roots unchanged and merely added syllables or words to contextualize the roots, whereas Sanskrit was “organic,” for it used internal inflection. Bopp’s Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache (1816) is generally regarded as the first systematic comparison of the Indo-European languages. As the full title indicates, it compared the Sanskrit conjugation with those of the Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages. It also included translated passages from the sacred Vedas and the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. Bopp expanded this Conjugationssytem in his English language Analytical comparison (1820), by going beyond verbs and looking at complete “organisms” of grammar. He agreed with Schlegel “that comparative grammar will give us quite new explications of the genealogy of languages, similar to the way comparative anatomy has thrown light on natural philosophy” (Bopp, [1820] 1974: 15), but he rejected the theory that the European languages derived from Sanskrit and he modified Schlegel’s view that languages used either agglutination or internal inflection to form statements. The “sanctified language of the Indians” may have been particularly capable of expressing “the most diverse connections and relations in a truly organic manner, by means of an inner bending and shaping of the root syllable,”2 but even the single-syllabic roots of Sanskrit often used suffixes (agglutination), nit unlike the polysyllabic roots of Arabic and other languages. Chinese remained the only language that used neither inner inflection nor agglutination. Particularly important for our notion of orality is that Bopp attributed the beauty of ancient Sanskrit to everyday spoken language rather than to texts by scholars and priests:

2 “Unter allen bekannten Sprachen zeigt sich die geheiligte Sprache der Indier als eine der fähigsten, die verschiedensten Verhältnisse und Beziehungen auf wahrhaft organische Weise durch innere Umbiegung und Gestaltung der Stammsilbe auszudrücken” (Bopp 1816: 7; see also Bopp, [1820] 1974: 15–16).

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the beauties of the Sanskrit language are not the work of the learned or of the priesthood, as some might be inclined to suppose; … they really were in daily use in the mouth of the people, and were so strongly impressed upon their minds, that they did not forget them in their transmigrations beyond distant mountains and seas. We might farther conclude, that a nation, possessing a language so polished in so early a period, where we are altogether abandoned by the light of history, must be able to boast of a very ancient literature. (14) Since only written records survived, Bopp’s statement must be based on the westward “migration” of the spoken language and its later incorporation in European languages. This remarkable observation endows spoken language not only with a beauty that is reflected in de surviving epics, but also with a power to change and migrate. As we shall see in Chapter 11, this perspective on Sanskrit bears a strong resemblance to the preference Karadžić, Kopitar, and Grimm showed for the living spoken Serbian language and a grammar that is based on this. Bopp saw language not as a fixed written structure but as a spoken medium that underwent constant changes due to its own nature (usually defined as “organic”) and to social and environmental factors. This is precisely the perspective that Vuk Karadžić adopted in the same years when combatting the Old-Slavonic Church rules of the written Serbian language. As in the Sanskrit case, the “learned” and the “priests” believed that their rules were timeless. The early nineteenth century produced in both the Sanskrit and the Serbian case, a dynamic new theory of grammar based on the spoken language and supported by works of literature. The major difference between the two was that Bopp had only indirect access to the ancient spoken language, but used this to outline a theory of comparative linguistics that interlinked what was now being identified as the Indo-European language family.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Foucault never mentions Wilhelm von Humboldt. Why? As a scholar, Bopp was, indeed, superior to Humboldt, who was his senior, but Foucault had other reasons to exclude Humboldt, which are, in my opinion, contained in one of the last sentences of his book: “As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And perhaps nearing its end” ([1966] 1973:   387). The idea that humanity would be nearing its end would have been incompatible with Humboldt’s humanism, centered on a theory of language that regarded the inner spiritual forces as a motor not only of

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c­ reating ­language but also of a general humanist progression of humankind. In Foucault’s system, the change of episteme around 1800 was not a matter of humanity’s progress, and the “archeology” of new comparative grammar at that time did not discover a spiritual inner force in language creation and history. Indeed, Bopp’s essays speak of language structures and changes without tracing them to human agents and their spirit. The issue is of great importance if we seek an analogy to non-representational instrumental music in language. Wilhelm von Humboldt responded on January 4, 1821 with a detailed and very enthusiastic letter to Bopp’s 1820 essay (Bopp, [1820] 1974: 61–66),3 and in his great unfinished study, Sprachbau und Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, he admitted that his insights into Sanskrit were indebted to Bopp (Humboldt, [1836] 1963: 504). The following closer look at Humboldt’s work will show that it both disseminated Bopp’s theory and made it more relevant to music, especially to A B. Marx’s theory. Humboldt held that language is created, shaped, and reshaped by an internal human spiritual drive for meaning, which coerces and shapes the physical givens. Differences between languages arise because linguistic communities inhabit different climates, have their own strength or drive, and their own physiological makeup to produce sounds. Humboldt regards the spiritual forces as far more important than natural ones: the physical language sounds must “conform” to the demands of the inner speech-form (503). As Burnham observes, this agrees with Marx’s view that a spiritual entity, an Idee, shapes the material expression of each piece of music.4 Although Humboldt occasionally refers to tribes, he identifies language communities as nations: comparative language research must start from the realization language has its most delicate roots “in the national spiritual force” (383). In a more general sense, Humboldt believes that every nation, whatever its relations to the external world, can and must be regarded as a human individual who follows an internal and specific spiritual course. Bildung must also be interpreted in terms of the nation’s “spiritual individuality” (409). Language 3 Still the same year, he helped appointing Bopp as Extraordinary Professor at the University of Berlin, where Bopp became in 1825 Professor of Oriental Literature and General Linguistics. 4 “Both the inner speechform and the sounds of the language work together, as the latter conform themselves to the demands of the former; the treatment of this speech-unity becomes thereby the symbol of the desired specific conceptual unity. This latter unity, thus planted in the sounds of the language, extends itself over the specific speech act as a spiritual principle” (Humboldt, [1836] 1936: 503; Burnham, 1990:186). Given the publication date of Humboldt’s work, Marx could not have read it while he was the editor of the bamz. It should also be noted that Fichte and Schleiermacher had long left the University of Berlin before Marx was appointed there.

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is the spirit of a nation, and the spiritual force of a nation determines language differences (414 f). Although Humboldt’s central concept is the national spiritual force, he consistently uses the natural metaphor of “organism” to bring together the untold numbers of linguistic facts, and to posit for language a fundamental evolutionary development. The organic vision allows him to see language as a constantly changing and evolving entity governed from within, by the inner spiritual drive. Language is an internally linked organism (384), but different languages, like Sanskrit and Chinese, merge ideas and sounds in different organisms (397). Though the national language organisms differ from each other, all of them are motors of a cultural evolution that engages each language separately and all languages together. Language shapes character and Bildung (396), even though they are not always at the same level (398). This belief in cultural progress led to Humboldt’s rosy image of modern colonialism. He believed that it took civilization into the most distant parts of the world, manifesting a “principle of general humanity” and representing progress with respect to Greek and Roman colonization (401). The Pestalozzi-inspired educational theories that Humboldt attempted to put into practice in the Prussian system are evident also in his theory of language learning. In his view, the inner drive that created and developed language is also at work when children learn language. Language is organic because it cannot be chopped up to acquire it piecemeal. It is incessantly creating itself by means of definite laws although its circumference, and, to some extent its manner of creation, remains undetermined. Children do not learn language mechanically by designating words, depositing them in memory, and repeating them stammering; language ability grows through age and practice (431). All children of the world respond to an increased inner language drive at a certain age. These ideas of language learning correspond to the Pestalozzian music theory that Michael Spitzer (1998) has identified so convincingly in his pedagogical reading of Marx’s Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition. However, Humboldt himself wrote very little about the analogy between music and language. On the positive side, he finds that the language drive manifests itself in songs, even on the lowest cultural level: “probably no desert ever accommodated nomadic hordes that were not obsessed by their songs. For humanity as an animal species is a singing being, but one that combines thoughts with sounds” (435). Since animals have no language drive that would interconnect sounds and thoughts, their sounds remain an inarticulate roaring or bellowing. Articulated sounds always reveal an intention and an ability to produce

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­ eaning in terms of ideas, and this distinguishes them from animal cry and m from musical sound (440). Humboldt perceives the language drive in songs since they involve articulated words, but presumably (he does not say this explicitly) not in pure instrumental music. Unlike A.B. Marx, Humboldt does not seem to have reflected on the culturally most “progressive” music of his age, the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Jacob Grimm essentially agreed with ­Humboldt’s view of music. He favored songs to instrumental music that has been “awakened from a dead instrument,” for the latter has, according to him, a “roaming and gliding” expression, more felt than understood. It is the opposite of articulated language, which clearly grasps thoughts and firmly holds them. In songs, music can give a festive accompaniment to words.5 Songs were born when words were recited with accent and rhythm, but the rising abstraction of the song led to other music that swims at such heights after it surrendered the word that no thought can securely follow it.6 In this sense, language is no precipitation of music but music should be called a sublimation of language.7 Did these linguistic approaches to music have any impact on music theory? Dahlhaus thinks so. He interprets Hanslick’s “tönend bewegte Formen” as a response to Hegelianism, which regarded the beautiful as a physical manifestation of the spirit. For Hanslick, the beautiful was no expression of the spirit but musical form (Dahlhaus, [1978] 1989: 109–113). Hanslick quoted from Jacob Grimm’s Ursprung der Sprache but, Dahlhaus suggests, he actually followed Humboldt, when he wrote that language is “a working of the spirit in material capable of the spirit” (112). Using quotes from the Humboldt study I have been analyzing ([1835] 1963: 418–19f), Dahlhaus concludes: “Humboldt’s philosophy of language was one of the fundamental precepts of the Hanslickian thesis (that music as form was ‘spirit,’ i.e., ‘content’ in the Hegelian sense) that made it superfluous to search for content outside form” (Dahlhaus, [1978] 1989: 113). Humboldt had almost certainly no personal contact with A.B. Marx at the University of Berlin, because he worked in seclusion at the end of his life, after he was dismissed from his last official post in 1819. As Burnham notes, 5 “Musik aus todtem instrument geweckt, mit ihrem schweifenden, gleitenden, mehr gefühlten als verstandnen ausdruck, steht der alle gedanken deutlich fassenden, bestimmt greifenden, gegliederten sprache entgegen, im gesang aber tritt sie gesprochenen worten hinzu und gibt ihnen feierliches geleit” (Grimm, [1852] 1866: 56–57). 6 “aus betonter, gemessener recitation der worte entsprangen gesang und lied, aus dem lied die andere dichtkunst, aus dem gesang durch gesteigerte abstraction alle übrige musik, die nach aufgegebnem wort geflügelt in solche höhe schwimmt, dasz ihr kein gedanke sicher folgen kann” (Grimm, [1852] 1866: 57). 7 “Viel eher dürfte die musik ein sublimat der sprache heiszen als die sprache ein niederschlag der music” (Grimm, [1852] 1866: 58).

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Marx positively mentions Humboldt’s Sprachbau in his Erinnerungen (Marx, 1865, ii: 124) – but only once. Nevertheless, Humboldt’s work on language is relevant to virtually all aspects of Marx’s music theory, especially to his ideas on pedagogy, history, nationalism, and organicism. We need not assume that Marx was “influenced” by the musical implications of Humboldt’s language theory in order to see that when he depreciated pure musical sound and its combinations as largely worthless play he agreed with Humboldt’s notions of language and language drive. His representational approach to Beethoven’s music ascribes to the composer a drive towards “higher meaning” that inevitably involves language. In order to find meaning in a piece of instrumental music, Beethoven had to attribute to it an Idee, which would raise it above mere sung music that was mere “absolute music” without such an Idee. Marx consistently ascribed verbal meaning, however unspecifiable, to instrumental music (Burnham, 1990).

Johann Christoph Adelung

For a broader picture of the interweaving of music and language in the early 1800s, we have to leave Foucault aside, and turn from comparative linguistics to the linguistics that concerned itself with the relationship between spoken and written language. The most important representative for the purposes of my book was the Saxon Johann Christoph Adelung, who advocated a turn from Latin and other dead languages and from the formalized discourses of churches and scholars to the “living” spoken language of the “simple people.” Adelung made his fame with his five-volume Versuch eines vollständigen grammatischkritischen Wörterbuches der Hochdeutschen Mundart (1774–1786), which he ceased to call a Versuch (attempt) in the second edition of 1793–1801. He calls High German a dialect (Mundart) and he carefully adds in the subtitle that his dictionary constantly compares High-German with other dialects, especially the Upper-German ones (meaning Bavarian, Austrian, and Swiss). The High German of the dictionary was based on the chancery style of Saxony, the written language of Luther’s bible translation, but was attentive to the differences between German dialects into account. Why Adelung gave such careful attention to dialect differences is spelled out in his book on the principles of orthography, the Grundsätze der deutschen Orthographie (1782): Write as you speak, for the script should represent for the eye the names of concepts in terms of simple sounds, and must not represent for the eye any sounds that cannot really be heard, and is not allowed to represent

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these as they are really heard. This is something like a natural law for every script, and all deviations and changes from it are to be seen as so many positive laws, by means of which the best of society and language has found it justified to limit the natural law and to define it further. (1782: 34)8 Adelung followed an empirical rather than abstract line of thought, and his theory asked for attention to readers. Whom did Adelung actually address with “Write as you speak”? His elaborate formulation shows that the answer is rather problematic. He was not yet thinking of the German speakers as a folk in Herder’s sense. What he seems to advocate is neither the language of the streets in Berlin or Vienna, nor the language spoken on the fields by the peasants. He does allow “deviations and changes” from his general law as so many auxiliary “natural laws” that further define it, but these may only be introduced by “the best of society” – a vague term that leaves open whether he means the intellectual or aristocratic “best,” but definitely excludes the lower and uneducated echelons of society. The new linguistic theories of Adelung, Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, and others were important for music because they turned to the living spoken language, yet, strangely, the most revolutionary implications of these new language theories concerned not vocal but instrumental music. To see this we have to shift our attention from individual words to linguistic structures. Bopp focused on the ways in which languages modify their root words to fit into verbal statements, and thereby downgraded questions of word semantics. The issue became how roots assume functions within the “organic” verbal system by means of inflection and agglutination. As Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote already in his contribution to Adelung’s unfinished mega-project titled Mithridates (1816): “We should compare not individual unanalyzed words of two languages but the analogies in word formation, together with the whole spectrum of their root sounds, if we seek to come to a reasoned judgment about their origins and their kinship.”9 This means that the object of study should become the internal 8 “schreib wie du sprichst, weil die Schrift die Nahmen der Begriffe nach ihren einfachen Tönen dem Auge darlegen soll, folglich dem Auge keine andere Töne darstellen darf, als wirklich gehöret werden, und sie nicht anders darstellen darf, als sie wirklich gehöret werden. Dies ist gewisser Massen das Naturgesetz einer jeden Schrift, und alle Abweichungen und ­Abänderungen davon sind als so viele positive Gesetze anzusehen, durch welche das Beste der Gesellschaft und der Sprache das Naturgesetz einzuschränken und näher zu bestimmen gut gefunden” (Adelung, 1782: 34). 9 “Nicht die einzelnen ohne weitere Analyse aufgegriffene Wörter zweier Sprachen, sondern die Analogie der Wortbildung, zusammengenommen mit dem ganzen Umfang ihrer

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system of language rather than the relationship between individual words and the world. This was a step towards Saussure concept of language, even if the early comparative grammarians were deeply interested in language history.

The Mother’s Voice and Pestalozzi

Following Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck, Friedrich Kittler (1985) has labeled the years around 1800 as a threshold or saddle period of a historical transition. He used the earlier-quoted Foucault passages on the new comparative linguists and applied them to literature and reform pedagogy to demonstrate the emergence of a new oral consciousness as the central issue in the dominant new system of recording (Aufschreibesystem). In a lengthy section titled “The Mother’s Mouth,” Kittler shows that the new spelling books of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Heinrich Stephani and others “delegated to mothers first the physical and mental education of their children, then their alphabetization” (Kittler, [1985] 1990: 27). Sounds from the mother’s mouth represented the voice of nature in these primers: “Letters have no meaning. Letters are not like sounds, related by the voice to the body and to Nature. […] all arbitrariness disappeared in an inner sense called the Mother’s voice” (29). Kittler overestimated the significance of reform pedagogy, which was no E ­ urope-wide movement, and could have vastly strengthened his case by broadening his linguistic and literary material. In particular, one misses the impact of Ossianism on folk song collecting, and Adelung’s, “write as you speak” on the principles of grammar. As I shall show, the call to the mothers to teach their children to speak was intimately related to music and music pedagogy. The famous Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrch Pestalozzi started his writing career with the novel Lienhard und Gertrud (1781–87), in which mother ­Gertrud has a special talent for keeping her poor family alive. Pestalozzi’s bestknown pedagogical study, Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801), uses her name, but this was merely the publisher’s trick, for Gertrud does not appear in the book, which was based on pedagogical work that Pestalozzi started in 1799 at an Institute in Burgdorf. He was a Rousseau adept, but while the Rousseau’s Emile depicted private education with a tutor, Pestalozzi sought an education for the masses, including the lower and lowest classes. The title Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt is misleading also because it proposes a method of teaching instead of reporting on one that is already fully in practice. The book consists ­ urzellaute, muss man vergleichen, um über ihre Abkunft und ihre Verwandtschaft ein W gegründetes Urteil zu fallen.” (Humboldt in Adelung, Mithridates: 34).

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of fourteen letters written to the publisher Heinrich Gessner, but Pestalozzi’s actual theory and method takes up only Chapters 5 to 11 ([1801] 1982: 44–93). The closing chapters eloquently and with burning anger condemn the existing pedagogical practices and institutions. Pestalozzi’s basic tenet is that teaching should lead children from “dark perceptions” (dunklen Anschauungen) to “clear concepts” (deutliche Begriffe). He has been frequently criticized for meaning different things by Anschauung, but the Kantian background of his scheme seems obvious. Parents and educators must realize that children acquire their first impressions and knowledge of the world through their five senses. Education starts at the moment at which the child’s senses become receptive to nature; the child is being taught by nature (15). It will grasp abstract ideas only on the basis of repeated perceptions: “Perception is the absolute fundament of all knowledge” (80). One should not reason with children but communicate with them at their level of development, which will define, secure, and clarify their perceptions (18). Very young children should be given books of visual images, and be exposed to sounds that constitute the elements of language. Pestalozzi distinguishes between three innate human forces that provide the elementary means of education: sound, the identification of mere visual forms, and the ability to count (48–49). Learning through sounds is faster than learning through sights, for children react more readily to sound than to sight (87). The learning of language must in the first instance be based on the knowledge of sounds (Tonlehre), which includes teaching the child songs and simple articulated sounds (50). The mothers should speak and sing to their children, who will respond even in their earliest age to elementary sounds like ba-ba-ba or ma-ma-ma (Büch der Mütter; 51). Language teaching starts with the exposition of the basic vowels; the addition of a preceding or following consonant can lead to the formation of syllables and accumulation of syllables to the formation of words (51–53). This can be facilitated with a spelling book ­(Buchstabierbuch), whose function is to bring articulated sounds to the child’s attention (84). Writing follows at a later stage, not only because children must first be familiar with the sounds before they can convert them into letters, but also because the art of writing can only follow after the acquisition of drawing (47, 71). Music enters this education because Pestalozzi regards basic language learning as part of a more encompassing Tonlehre, whose other branch is singing. Nevertheless, he insists that the final aim of language is to lead mankind from dark perceptions to clear concepts (55), which posits a fundamental dividing line between musical and verbal sound: “Since singing is not the means to get from dark perceptions to clear concepts, (much rather a skill that must be d­ eveloped

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according to other perspectives and for other aims),” Pestalozzi leaves musical sounds out of the picture, remarking only that the teaching of singing and music must proceed like all other fields by beginning with the simplest and proceeding from the completion of a simpler exercise to the practicing of the more complex one (53). Michael Spitzer (1998) rightly observes that this is also the principle of A.B. Marx’s conception of music learning in his Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (1837–47), but he notes that Pestalozzi writes about children’s education whereas Marx discusses the music education of adults (of older children). Spitzer downplays also another basic conceptual difference related to the age difference. For Pestalozzi, the first education of a child “is never a matter of the head, never a matter of reason; it is always a matter of the senses” (Pestalozzi, [1801] 1982: 108): physical perceptions come first, even if they are in the service of final clear concepts. This general conception cannot be applied to music, nor to Marx’s music theory, in which listening to mere musical sounds (for instance Rossini) is a debasement of the spiritual inspiration underlying each musical experience. The physical experience is for Pestalozzi of existential significance; for Marx, in great music, the pleasure of physical sound must be dominated by spiritual ideas. There is a moment in Pestalozzi’s scheme when teaching must go beyond what nature can offer: language learning means that one must tear oneself away from the listening to blind nature and follow the guidance of mankind itself; it can give human beings a more definite and comprehensive direction; while nature can give only force and means but no purposeful dscipline (54). This seems to me still far from the way Marx links nature and spirituality. We should remember also that Pestalozzi saw music as a means to educate and humanize, to cultivate the sensitivity of people in all social classes (Dahlhaus, [1980] 1989: 313–314). Music, just like literature, was for Pestalozzi a vehicle rather than a ­self-­sufficient end. This was not the idea that Michael Traugott Pfeiffer and ­Nägeli proposed in 1809 as music pedagogy based on his ideas (amz 11: 769–776, ­785–793, 801–810, 817–845). Nägeli made of it a book titled ­Gesangbildungs-Lehre the following year. The opening slogan of the article, “Everything in before the people, with the people, for the people,” sounds Pestalozzian, but the meaning of “People” (Volk) unmistakably carries here a national sense related to the Napoleonic wars (Nägeli, 1809: 769). The teaching method is elementary, in the sense that the authors selected as a starting point what they considered as basis of music, and gradually moved towards higher complexity. They abandoned the usual music division into harmony and melody, for they believed that rhythm was the base of all music. It involved only three numbers (full, half, and quart notes) and yet had a role in all of life. The next level, melody, was more complex because involved more numbers. Instead of an octave

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with eight notes, a scale of two tetrachords (c-f, f-h), was proposed, which the ­authors c­ onsidered more natural and easier to sing (801 ff). Music was presented as the most penetrating and broadest means of shaping what the authors called “higher gymnastics,” an involvement of all parts of the body, including seeing (scores) and feeling next to hearing (816–17). The method followed, it was claimed, the nature, i.e., the bodily structure of children (824). This method to teach singing introduced words and language only in the last phase labeled “Humanistik” (829). The elementary method meant that music had to be taught in its purity, unaffected yet by words, and the subject had to be looked upon in isolation (829–31). Social and communicative dimensions entered the teaching only at the end. As a result, the authors refused to regard instrumental music as inferior to vocal music (832). In the highly rhetorical final part of the essay music a “bright heaven, in which all pure human existence is mirrored. Not only words, rhymes, poems, lyrics in the narrower sense … are represented ideally in this element” the age of music begins when the higher art becomes a common good of the folk, the nation, even of all ­European contemporaries (833). The essay reached a nationalistic emotional pitch by claiming that music was to become a Nationalheiligthum, a holy German shrine, to be nurtured so tenderly that it blossoms as a truly German song of the heart (835). While the essay did not call for direct political action, it declared that the pedagogical project counted on the German men (837), and it closed with a highly biased sketch of music history, which tried to show how German music had mightily surpassed Italian composers like Marcello, Pergolesi, and Jomelli, all whom had terrible shortcomings (841–42). This nationalism was definitely not in the spirit of Pestalozzi. Was there any justification to call this essay and the subsequent book musical adaptations of his pedagogical theory? The issue was taken up in the amz in 1811 by Friedrich Wilhelm Lindner, a teacher at the Leipzig Bürgerschule and at the University of Leipzig. The resultant controversy about music pedagogy took up a considerable part of the amz that year.10 10

Lindner, “Was ist bis jetzt für die Gesangs-Bildung geschehen? Historisch-kritisch beantwortet” amz 13: 3–8, 17–23, 33–43, 49–59; Lindner’s anonymous review of the Gesangsbildungs-­Lehre (amz 13: 465–475, 481–486); anonymous review of Lindner’s Musikalische Jugendfreund. Leipzig: Lindner, 1811 (amz 13: 613–625); anonymous review of Nägeli’s Historisch-kritische Erörterungen über die deutsche Gesangskultur, amz 13: 629–642, 645–652; Nägeli, “Anrede an die schweizerische Musikgesellschaft” (amz 13: 656–664, 665–673, 685–692); Nägeli’s responses to Lindner’s review amz “Anzeige” nr. 12, Sept. 49–56; nr. 15, Oct.: 66–68.

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Lindner’s first reaction was a lengthy discussion on recent studies on music pedagogy (amz 13: 3–8, 17–23, 33–43, 49–59). He welcomed the Nägeli/Pfeiffer essay, for he believed that nobody had as yet provided a general education through singing lessons (4). Lindner was initially highly positive, even though he thought that the essay had received more praise than it deserved (8). He had no fundamental critique of the elementary method that started with rhythm and introduced text in the third phase only, and he regarded the theory as true to Pestalozzi, for it started with what is measurable. Of course, this was not unique to Pestalozzi, and Lindner guessed that most readers would not find the theory particularly new. It must have come as a total surprise to the amz readers that Lindner’s anonymous review of Nägeli’s Gesangsbildungs-Lehre (13: 465–475, 481–486) later that year was devastating. The reviewer found the book inflated, the style pompous, and the pedagogical method both prescriptive and impractical. Time and again, he refers to the much better pedagogical method used in the Paris school of singing. As in the earlier essay, the first phase of the book prescribed a method of teaching general music (from rhythm to melody) and proceeded from there to a specific music teaching that involved language – implying that music in itself was more general than vocal music. This specific music teaching started with instructions for pronouncing vowels and consonants, which directly coupled music and language learning. Unfortunately, writes the reviewer, Nägeli copied here almost completely Wilhelm Traugott Krug’s method of how to learn reading. Last but not least, Lindner thought that Nägeli’s method was not “genetic” in Pestalozzi’s sense (485–86). Lindner did not spell this out, but presumably he meant that the teaching did not move from vague sense impressions to rational abstraction. In contrast to Pestalozzi, Heinrich Stephani is today so forgotten that his works are very difficult to come by, though his spelling primer Handfibel oder Elementarbuch zum Lesenlernen nach der Lautiermethode (1802) reached its 102nd printing in 1868.11 Like Pestalozzi, Stephani was a man of the Enlightenment fighting for a radical reform of education, but he had a much more controversial relation to state and church and he was finally dismissed from his administrative position and even ejected from the Lutheran Church. He is of particular interest for this project because his spelling books bring language learning much closer to music than Pestalozzi’s Gertrud. His Fibel für Kinder edler Erziehung (1807) contains an outline of his argument and a call on 11 See Ulbricht (1998) and Kittler (1990).

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­ others to take over the language education of their children, which was then m still considered too difficult for women (15). Stephani recommends his method to mothers because it accelerates language learning by developing the speech organs to master the “purest dialect” of the mother tongue (10). The methods used in school furthered the teacher’s pronunciation, which always contained traces of provincial dialects. S­ tephani’s method was supposed to teach words according to the inner nature of “the language itself” and is therefore a “national means” (Nationalmittel) to gradually eliminate all dialects and foster a “completely pure pronunciation” (11). Stephani advocated a method that teaches spelling by words, without chopping them up according to the Buchstabirmethode, a spelling by letters (11) The mouth with its parts is an instrument on which we can play certain meaningful sounds. Writing, in this sense, is a composition for the mouth instrument, whereas reading is an art to play on our mouth instrument the recorded notes (16–17). Stephani wants a clear distinction between a letter (Buchstabe), the sound of the letter (Buchstabenlaut), and its name (Buchstabenname): a letter and its name are arbitrary signs but the letter’s sound we can produce with our mouth instrument (18).12 People often know the shape and the name of a letter but not the sound itself, because the traditional teaching methods considered the letter’s name as its sound. Yet, everything depends on our ability to produce the sound on our mouth instrument (19). Hence, Stephani calls his method “elementary” or “sound” method. Only two other ones exist: the syllabic (Syllabir) and the letter (Buchstabir) method (19–20). The syllabic method shows and asks to imitate the pronunciation of syllables (20), whereas the letter method mistakenly assumes that the name of a letter is already its sound, and the pronunciation of each syllable must be preceded by the naming of each letter in it (20). However, when we pronounce a word, converting it from sight to auditive language, we combine sounds, not names. The names of letters should therefore be taught only to children who already know how to read. Learning must be accomplished through sounds (21). Thus, sounds rather than names are the basic elements of language and language learning. When Stephani calls the mouth a sound-producing instrument, he traces music and language back to a common oral basis. By 1814, he

12

The fourth of Stephani’s six levels of learning deals with the problem that letters and sounds do not match each other perfectly. Some sounds are represented by two different signs (e.g., f and v), whereas, vice versa, some letters correspond to two different sounds. Stephani is convinced that this will eventually be corrected, for Germans grasp the truth that simplification is among the worthiest ornaments of a language (1807: 22–23).

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came to oppose, however, calling his method “lautiren” (34) because he did not advocate pronouncing the sound of each alphabet letter and then combine the corresponding sounds to a syllable. He adopted Adelung’s scale (Tonleiter) to accommodate the ear to a pure musical gradation of the language sounds (66). Der goldne Topf Kittler applies these pedagogical theories to literature: Goethe’s Faust discards the written volumes of scholastic learning to seek a proper translation for the “word” (Kittler, [1985] 1990: 3–24), and Hoffmann put in “The Golden Flower Pot” (77–108), “a simple school program into practice” (97). This “fairy tale of the new age,” written right after Napoleon’s battle at Dresden, opposed rigidified written and living spoken language as well as fatherland and mother tongue. The tale splits the life of the student Anselmus: his “realist” mentors are Conrector Paulmann and Registrator Heerbrand. They are joined by ­Paulmann’s daughter Veronica, who is eager to become the wife of Anselmus, who in turn is destined to become a distinguished Geheimrat. The mentors want to help the student by sending him to the strange Archivarius Lindhorst, with whom he could earn money by copying some oriental manuscripts. Anselmus is grateful, but his efforts are constantly thwarted by strange and often highly disturbing irruptions into his life by forces of another world, which are at times evil and threatening and at others deeply emotional and seductive. When Anselmus runs through the gates of Dresden, he crashes into a basket of apples and cookies, thereby provoking the anger of a hag. When he tries to recuperate under an elder tree, he hears some strange whispering voices and harmonious crystal bells, and he perceives three little glittering snakes gliding in a seductive way along the branches of the tree. The irruptions repeat themselves. When Anselmus goes for the first time to Archivarius Lindhorst the doorknob suddenly turns into the hag’s threatening head and prevents him from entering. The next time he succeeds, but in the house of the strange Archivarius things also unexpectedly transform several times. In short, Anselm’s “normal” life is constantly interrupted by both repulsive and attractive visions of others worlds, and in such moments of disconnectedness he seems mad to the “normal” world. The question is whether he will be able to overcome his “possessed” states, and if not, whether the evil or the sexually attractive forces will take possession of him. In the end, Anselmus wins the battle and marries the Archivarius’s charming daughter Serpentina, who assumes a human body after having been a snake. Veronika loses her battle for Anselmus but manages to marry his father’s friend Heerbrand, who has just been appointed Hofrat.

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Where should the “Mother’s voice” come from if there are only two unmarried women in Hoffmann’s fairy tale? Kittler resolves the issue by interpreting the whispers and lisps as coming from the elder tree as the voice of mother nature: addressing her babies, the little snakes then “begin by oscillating between being sounds of nature and daughters of a matrilineal family” (79). It remains a problem that, according to Hoffmann’s text, Serpentina’s “marvelous blue eyes looked down at him with unspeakable desire, so that an unknown feeling of both supreme bliss and deepest sorrow” seemed to tear Anselmus’ heart apart. Kittler regards the woman’s triple identity as Serpentina, S­ chlänglein, and a mere “schl” in the rustling tree as a “translation into the mother tongue or Mother’s Mouth. In order to complete the poetic translation cycle, Anselmus will only have to translate out of the mother tongue as well” (80). Accordingly, Serpentina in the rest of the story functions in a double role as a maternal teacher and a promising lover. The linguistic education and inspiration become crucial in the task that Anselmus has to carry out for her father Lindhorst. Anselmus has a calligraphic talent, but has to accept Lindhorst’s devastating criticism of the samples he brings to their first session. According to Kittler, he has to stop imitating, and learn, in the spirit of the reform pedagogues, to express his own individuality. He apparently learns this because after a few successful introductory sessions the Archivarius gives him first an Arabic script and then one written by the Sanskrit masters of the “Bhogovotgita,” who “represent the mythic origin of writing itself” (85). The crucial criterion of Anselmus’ success is that what he copies without any studying and reflection turns out to be the extremely complex ancestral history of Serpentina and Lindhorst, a history that Serpentina tells him verbally afterwards. This story of calligraphy and deciphering is an allegory. We are alerted to this when Hoffmann introduces the Bhagavad Gita (as the book’s title had been spelled by Schlegel in1808). Excepting one crucial aspect, the studies of Schlegel and Bopp fit Anselmus’ efforts to decipher letters that represent “the mythic origin of writing itself”; he has to face the question “of whether he can produce letters ‘genetically’ from their origin” (85). While Anselmus has to decipher Serpentina’s ancestral history, Schlegel and Bopp had to decipher from the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts a comparative linguistic history, the changes in the spoken languages and found their precipitation in the written letters. In the same way, Serpentina’s verbal account of her ancestral history may be said to have been made possible by the Anselmus’ creative calligraphic reconstitution of what was placed in front of him. Hoffmann probably knew of Schlegel’s study; he could not have known of Bopp’s Conjugationssystem, which was published two years after Hoffmann’s fairy tale.13 The genuine relevance of 13

Hoffmann and Bopp may have met later in Berlin, where they both were members of the prestigious Club Gesetzlose Gesellschaft zu Berlin, founded 1809.

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Sanskrit studies to Kittler’s approach to Der goldne Topf is that deciphering old texts opens in both cases new understandings of spoken language. However, there are crucial differences. The poetic world of Atlantis, where Anselmus and Serpentina end up, has no counterpart in Sanskrit studies, unless one regards the opening of the Vedas and the Sanskrit epics for Western audiences such a trip to a poetic world. Furthermore, nature has completely different meanings and functions in the two undertakings. In Hoffmann’s fairy tale it is nature that speaks (according to Kittler, through the mother’s mouth), whereas in Sanskrit studies, nature controls the development and the separation of different languages only in terms of the physical structure of speech organs. The actual language separations and shifts represent an autonomous process involving the roots and the combinations of sentence elements – hence Foucault’s comparison of language with music. The great interest in the Sanskrit language and its sacred and epic poems had its own impact on literature and music. William Jones translated in 1789 Kālidāsa’s ancient play Abhijñānaśākuntalam (Of Shakuntala recognized by a token) and Georg Forster translated the English version into German in 1791. This resulted in two aborted and almost forgotten opera projects. The ­Viennese physicist Johann Philipp Neumann turned the pay into a libretto, and, as noted earlier, Tieck prepared in 1814 a libretto of it for Reichardt, who died soon. Neumann’s libretto, which was rediscovered 2002 in Vienna’s Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, has a more intriguing history: Schubert started to compose an opera with it, but stopped in the spring of 1821. The Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen completed the surviving fragments in the twenty-first ­century, and the opera was presented in 2006 as a concert version at the Bad Urach festival, and on the stage of the Saarland National Theater on March 27, 2010 in Saarbrücken.

chapter 9

Vocal Authenticity? Due to the ephemerality of primary oral communication only an insignificant fraction of original communications survived, and these usually in several versions. Authentic or official vocal records are rare. Texts and songs existed in untold variants, for each transmission “corrupted” further what had been considered chronologically the first. This changed with the development of reading and writing, for now every stage of the communication chain could in principle be recorded and included in a historical archive. However, such archives were produced in the process of building historical reconstructions. The nineteenth-century rise of historical consciousness gave ancient documents extraordinary value, and moved an untold number of them from storage into functional memory in Aleida Assmann’s sense. Since the interest was directed also towards the distant past, information about pre-literate oral societies became particularly valuable. Robert Wood’s mentioned study of the oral culture of the Homeric epics in Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1769) is an excellent example for this. Recuperation presented special problems, especially when somebody claimed to have found a written document that was never fully documented later. According to Thomas Percy, his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1760–65) was based on a manuscript that he found on the floor in a friend’s house just before it was to be used to light fires. Others asserted the survival of a lost spoken language. Fabre d’Olivet, who dedicated his book on the troubadours and their Occitan poetry (1803) to his mother, relates in its opening poem how the Occitan mother tongue replaced his first imperfect cries with soft and flexible words guided by nature – until in the name of science the French idiom was forced upon him in school, his prison (Fabre d’Olivet, [1803] 1997: ii). Difficulties in verifying such cases opened the door for those who fraudulently claimed they have discovered some sunken oral good. The present chapter deals with the historical issues of authenticity in music and language. Ossianism Let young artists, through the study of national songs, narratives of the history of the patria, the mysteries of poetry, the mysteries of nature,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_011

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raise themselves to vaster horizons than those provided by the rule books and by old canons of art. mazzini, [1836] 1954: 186

Much of what Mazzini was calling for in the 1830s had actually been set into motion already in the 1760s with James Macpherson. In 1760, he published the Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language (1760). in 1762 these fragments were reassembled into an epic poem Fingal , attributed by Macpherson to to the Gaelic bard Ossian, whose further opera he published in 1765 as The Works of Ossian. These “national songs” not only generated unprecedented European interest in the “mysteries of poetry” but simultaneously raised basic questions about the authenticity of historical documents and voices. Since national songs and narratives of national histories played a central role in the nineteenth-century rise of orality, we should first look briefly at Ossianism. Macpherson’s English-language prose-poems claimed to have been translated from Gaelic. The consensus now is that some of poems may have been based on Gaelic originals but most of them were Macpherson’s own inventions. Thomas Curley, who has recently reexamined the matter, suggests that we should regard Macpherson “a writer of mostly original literature” (2009: 7), for he invented a poet and initiated a language revival that he himself did not carry out. While Ossian was to some extent a contrivance (and, let it be said, presented by Macpherson as a historical rather than a fictional character), the Gaelic language that Macpherson failed to disclose did have a historical past and cultural presence, not only in Scotland but also in Ireland. The Europewide impact of the Ossian poems was due both to the Otherness of the poetic figure and to the fascination with Gaelic, which led to a Celtic revival and stimulated romantic quests for buried literatures, languages, and music. These quests were laden with explosive political issues. The debates in Great Britain on the authenticity of Macpherson’s pseudo-Gaelic productions “became a seismograph of the fragile unity within restive diversity of imperial Great Britain” (Curley, 2009: 1). Arguably, one of Macpherson’s primary motives was “to put the Gael on the literary map, and in this he undoubtedly succeeded” (Gaskill, 2004: 7); one of Macpherson’s long-range impacts was that “British literary history” can no longer be understood as written with a single language (Gaskill, 2004: 7). In the course of the 1760s, most readers skeptical of Macpherson’s claims became convinced that Ossian was a reworking from medieval Irish balladry, triggering an upsurge of antiquarian interest in Irish-Gaelic (Leerssen, 1996; Moore, 2004).

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Among the many literary recuperations and more-or-less contrived epic recoveries inspired by Macpherson (surveyed in Leerssen 2004), the earliest and closest imitation was a Fabre d’Olivet’s Le troubadour, poésies occitaniques de XIIIe siècle, published as a purported translation from Occitan in 1803. He claimed that the manuscript of the original Occitan poems were sent to him by somebody with the pseudonym “Rescondut” (“hidden” in Occitan, as Fabre tells in a footnote). Responding to Fabre’s Azalaïs et le gentil Aimar (1799), which was allegedly translated from an ancient Occitan manuscript, the invented correspondent Recondut expressed the hope that Fabre will translate the new poems, so that they become for the southern troubadours what the book of Ossian poetry had become for the northern bards (Fabre d’Olivet, [1803] 1997: vii). Fabre denied any resemblance. Ossian’s poetry came from people with a “primitive morality.” In contrast, the Troubadours were whipped by feudalism as well as fanaticism; they sang in the darkness of a barbaric century, displaying the chains that shackled them (xi). In order to prove the authenticity of his poems, Fabre sketched in his introduction the historical conditions, inserted a “dissertation” on the Occitan language and the Troubadours (xxvii-lxviii), and he provided notes on the orthography, prosody, and vocabulary of Occitanic (159–90). Early doubts about the authenticity of Fabre’s volume were confirmed in François-Juste-Marie Raynouard’s six-volume study Choix de poésies originales des troubadours (1816–21). Herder on Ossian Gaskill’s volume on The Reception of Ossian in Europe (2004) comprehensively documents Ossian’s literary impact on the continent, as well as in the British Isles. However, the German reception is divided into separate articles on Klopstock, Goethe, and Schiller, which leaves out, for instance, Theodor Körner’s translation of passages from Ossian’s poems (Youens, 1996: 57; and, exhaustively, the impressive and very comprehensive Schmidt 2003–04), and chops up Herder’s Ossian writings, which were, next to Goethe’s, arguably the most important German ones. The classic study on Herder and Ossian by Alexander Gillies (1933) still stands as a benchmark in this regard. Herder was preoccupied with “origins” and therefore skeptical of translations. The issue was foremost in his mind when he read, as far back as 1763, the first translations of Ossian poems in Riga. In 1769, he reviewed the first volume of Michael Denis’s German translations in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (10.1: 28–35); sailing back home, he purchased in Amsterdam the other two volumes (letter to Hartknoch, Febr. 1770), which he reviewed in 1772. The same year, Herder incorporated these reviews into excerpts from a f­ictional ­correspondence on Ossian and the songs of older nations (Herder, 1903, ii: ­13–66). The letters, addressed to a fictional critic who thought o­ therwise,

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r­ adiated an enthusiastic image of Ossian and understood his songs as poetry by “wild” ancient people. Herder was unconcerned with the accusation that the Ossian poems were fake, but he found it problematic that the English poems were translations rather than originals. The problem exponentially worsened with Denis’s German translation of Macpherson’s English translation. Since the Ossian poems were folk songs of uneducated, physical, and wild people that had survived a very long time in the “larynx” of a “fatherly” tradition, translating them into hexameters was inappropriate (ii: 14–15). Thus, Herder understood the Ossian songs as revelations of a cultural and linguistic Other. Provocatively calling the Gaelic tribes “wild,” he claimed that the wilder a folk was the more lively, free, sensuous, and lyrical its poetry had to be (ii: 19). Stylistically, the poetry of wild tribes incorporated jumps, turns, and other irregularities (ii: 53) that disturbed a standardized modern taste. Exactly this was the problem of Denis’s translation: it forced the irregular Ursprache into the tight bodice of hexameters. Macpherson’s “sample” of the original language was wasted on Denis (ii: 24). Fair enough: the irregular poetry of a cultural Other cannot be understood within a canonic Western form. But did Macpherson’s English “translations” not smoothen already the wild Ursprache? Did the jumps and turns in the English Ossianic poems reflect the inaccessible original Gaelic? Gaskill translates Herder’s questions into a key issue of contemporary translation studies by insisting that Macpherson’s “translations” are no “domestications”: If Macpherson’s rendering were indeed strictly literal (and nowadays nobody would claim that it is), this would make it an early example of foreignizing, as opposed to domesticating literal translation: in other words, rather than aiming for the greatest possible naturalness in the target language [something that Denis tried], the exoticism and otherness of the original is preserved by the adoption of deliberate “translatorese” (2004: 12). Herder had to admit that even alienation from his own literary language could not bring him close enough to an Other that was shrouded in mist. How could he write a postscript “when no writing exists, when everything is mere talking around Ossian, the unfortunately half-extinguished and distorted display of human nature? At most, there will be an eternal preface to what one wants to and should come to – and never actually comes to!” (Herder, 1903, ii: 61). Unexpectedly, but not inappropriately, Herder continues his postscript with the remark that contemporary German poetry was “a gothic building” (ii: 64) inadequate for musical setting, and contemporary church music had an even

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more pitiful structure. Karl Wilhelm Ramler’s libretto Tod Jesu (1755 and 1760) was highly praised and set to music by Graun (1755), Telemann (1755), and J. Chr. F. Bach (1760), but Herder saw in it only images without sentiments (ii: 66). Did Ossian change the taste? According to Dahlhaus, “the Ossian craze was one of the literary preconditions for the ‘romantic tone’ in opéra comique and the lied” ([1980] 1989: 21), but his list of operas with “Ossian material” is limited. Christopher Smith’s article “Ossian in Music” (Gaskill, 2004: 375–392) includes Jean-François Le Sueur’s Ossian, ou Les bardes (1804), Méhul’s Uthal (1806), as well as John Calcott’s songs, Schubert’s and Brahms’s settings of Ossian poems, Massenet’s Werther (1892), and Mendelssohn’s Scottish compositions. To these one should still add Carl Loewe’s “Odins Meeresritt” (Op. 118).

Forgeries, Opera Adaptations, Plagiarisms, and Copyrights

As Nick Groom has shown via stories about Ossian, Thomas Chatterton’s invented medieval monk Rowley, William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare papers, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright’s activities (which probably included murder), the new attitudes redefined forgery, and “forgery changed also the course of literature”: [forged literature is] a realm of the fantastic, in which stories lie embedded within other stories, works unfold within works; in which fictions, dreams, and ghosts perpetually interfere with the order of things; in which time is forever unravelling backwards into a dark abysm in the fruitless search for origins; and of course in which, most fundamentally, uncanny doubles, copies, and counterfeits will stalk, shadow, and worry their supposed originals. groom, 2002: 3

Walter Scott ended his review of The Poems of Ossian by praising Macpherson’s poetic power: while we are compelled to renounce the pleasing idea, “that Fingal lived, and Ossian sung,” our national vanity may be equally flattered by the fact that a remote and almost a barbarous corner of Scotland, produced, in the 18th century, a bard, capable not only of making an enthusiastic impression on every mind susceptible of poetic beauty, but of giving a new tone to poetry throughout all Europe.1 scott, 1805: 462

1 Edinburgh Review 6 (1805): 462.

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In this sense, forged literature is the underbelly of fiction, which may itself be seen as a special kind of fraud. Most writers and critics reject this view, but Goethe was surprisingly liberal as to intellectual property, at least within poetry: “Greatness can only come about via appropriation of alien treasures.”2 Scott would not go that far, but he suggests that the disclosure of forgery should not automatically deprive the work of aesthetic value.3 A particularly bizarre hoax in this vein was Prosper Mérimée’s La Guzla (1827), a collection allegedly translated from Illyrian or Morlaque poems. Mérimée claimed to have learned the language from his Morlaque mother, and he added a fictional biography of a collector/editor. In 1840, he admitted his hoax, but by then he had several victims, including Pushkin, who included in his collection of “Songs of the Western Slavs” several translations of Mérimée’s poems (as well as some poems collected by Vuk). He was alert enough to ask Mérimée about his sources, and the French writer confessed to him already in 1835 that they were faked. Subsequently, Pushkin’s publication in 1835 included a witty preface. However, the faking also provoked an angry protest from Nodier, who claimed that Mérimée had plagiarized his (mis)translation of the tragic poem “Hasanaginica” (Wilson, 1970: 201–203; Leerssen 2012). The early music forgeries include a very unusual case, not because of a trick or the quality of the music itself but because the perpetrator was one of the most highly respected music historians, François-Joseph Fétis. The Italian art song “Se i miei so sospiri,” attributed to Alessandro Stradella, was performed in 1833 at a Paris concert he organized, and he published the piece for voice and strings in 1838 and then again in 1843 for voice and piano with the new lyric “Pietà, Signore.” Fétis claimed that he possessed the original manuscript but it was not found in his library, and Fétis himself is now regarded as the author. Scarlatti set the text “Se i miei so sospiri” to a different music. Such hoaxes became popular in the twentieth century: Marius Casadesus claimed to have discovered Mozart’s Adélaïde Concerto, other members of the Casadesus family invented compositions by J. Christian Bach, Händel, while Fritz Kreisler frequently performed pieces attributed to Pugnani, Tartini, Vivaldi, and others. As a performing art, music is inevitably exposed to wide and complex adaptations, some of which blend into falsification. Berlioz fumed when orchestras 2 “Gehört nicht alles, was die Vorwelt und Mitwelt geleistet, dem Dichter von Rechts wegen an? Warum soll er sich scheuen, Blumen zu nehmen, wo er sie findet? Nur durch Aneignung fremder Schätze entsteht Großes” (to Chancelor Friedrich von Müller, December 17, 1824; Biedermann, 1889–96, v: 119). 3 Bruno Grosjean published under the name of Binjamin Wilkomirski Holocaust memories, which were received with highest praise until it was discovered that the author did not go through the described experiences. Only a handful of critics upheld after this the aesthetic value of the text.

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did not have instruments and qualified players to perform his richly orchestrated music and he was furious when “Mozart was assassinated” by Lachnith, a Prague horn player who staged the Magic Flute as “Les mystères d’Isis.” When Castil-Blaze staged Weber’s Freischütz as Robin des Bois he cried out, “The miserable! … and to think that a poor sailor is punished with fifty lashes for the least act of insubordination!” (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: 61). Weber wrote two angry open letters to Castil-Blaze (Weber, 1908: 404–407), who responded that Weber should be grateful that his opera became a success in France. According to Berlioz, Castil-Blaze earned 5000 francs with the staging (Berlioz, [1870] 1966: Ch. 16), Berlioz took a revenge by writing a wickedly hilarious review of CastilBlaze’s own opera, Pigeon-Vole. One of his last pieces for the rgm was the novella “Idylle” (10: 407–408), which has been noted in Chapter 1 (p. 43 above). Berlioz was similarly angry about changes made in staging Gluck and Sacchini (54–57), but his greatest rage concerned mutilations and revisions made in Shakespeare plays (Ch. 16 and 190 ff of Ch. 44). And yet he himself replaced Shakespeare’s “less gripping” ending with Garrick’s more pathetic denouement of Romeo and Juliet. In this version, Juliet wakes up before Romeo’s death and they spend a few ecstatic moments before they die together. Opera constitutes a special case. By definition, stages had always been populated with impersonations, for instance, when boys played female roles in Shakespeare’s theater or when castrati sang in eighteenth-century operas. Opera impersonations became popular with Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Beethoven’s Fidelio, the latter also involving a gender shift. The counterpart, not recognizing a person who is often ignorant of his or her true identity was frequent in Verdi and other Italian operas. Yet a step further, assuming a false personality acquired new political meanings in Russian national operas, especially in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Other identity concepts and transformations are at the core of fairy tale operas.

Authentic Folk Songs?

Herder coined the German term Volkslied in 1773 in the essays relating to Ossian and Thomas Percy’s collection. Herder subsequently used the concept as the title of his two-volume international collection of folk songs. Strangely enough, this German term relating to two English collections had no exact English equivalent until Volkslied was retranslated into English as “folk song” towards the late nineteenth century (cf. generally Gelbart 2011). Cecil Sharp, the greatest English folk-song collector, notes that it was included in the

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­Century Dictionary of 1889 but still omitted from the New English Dictionary of 1901. He found best what he found in Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of 1894, which states: “A song or ballad originating and current among the common people, and illustrating the common life with its interests and enthusiasms as derived from legend or story; also a lyric poem on a popular theme in the style of such a ballad” (Sharp, [1907] 1965: 3). Other languages and nations use different terms for this concept. The French use the word “populaire” to distinguish folk songs from art songs, but most experts of folk music in the English language insist that “popular songs” should not be equated with “folk songs.” While Herder’s concept of Volk broadened the concept of nation, in the context of folk songs Volk came to designate a rural population that cultivated songs in an oral tradition, quasi-isolated from urban civilization and the cultural elite. This way, folk songs could be differentiated from urban songs. As research and collection of folk songs progressed, the urge to separate folk songs from urban popular songs intensified. Jacob Grimm attributed the folk songs to an unconscious national or communal spirit, and his brother Wilhelm also found it impossible to assign collective products to individual contributions ([1816] 1882: 157; 597). Others disagreed. Cecil Sharp ([1907] 1965: 11) quotes – without proper source reference, alas – one of the Schlegel brothers to the effect that a poem “implies a poet; just as behind every work of art there sits the artist. Legend, ballad, and proverb might be the property of the people, but they were nevertheless the work of the individual, not of the community. A crowd of workmen, no doubt, carry the stones and beams and do the actual building of the cathedral; but they act under the direction of the architect, and his are the ideas which they translate into terms of bricks and mortars.” The double meaning of Volk resulted in a paradox: folk songs originate from the total community, but its transmission is attributed solely to that unlettered rural population that remained untouched by feudal, and later urban, civilization. In Sharp’s definition, the term denotes “the song which has been created by the common people, in contradistinction to the song, popular or otherwise, which has been composed by the educated” ([1907] 1965: 4). Since, however, Sharp regarded “common people” as unlettered, “whose faculties have undergone no formal training, and who have never been brought into close enough contact with educated persons to be influenced by them” (4) he limited, like Bartók and others, the practitioners of folk songs to a dwindling rural population of peasants. A number of twentieth-century theorists, among them A.L. Lloyd (1967) and Bohlman (1988), argued that urban songs emerging

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from an industrial context should also be included. This broadened Herder’s folk concept to include the working class, and was therefore welcomed by the communists. Though the folk was said to compose “songs,” the eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century collections usually contained only texts; music entered the collections only once mechanical recording became possible around 1900. Only subsequently could serious research start on the relationship between verbal and musical accents. Working with the Serbo-Croatian material, Bartók concluded “that in the majority of the songs text and melody have remained interchangeable, within the limits given by the differences in the metrical structure of the text lines” (Bartók and Lord, 1951, i: 81). Macpherson presented the Ossian poems not as folk songs but as works of a single poet from the third century, but since he wanted to revive also the Gaelic language he stimulated Europe-wide folk-song revivals. More important for folk-song collection than Ossian was Thomas Percy’s almost simultaneously published three-volume Reliques of Ancient Poetry consisting of old heroic ballads, songs, and other pieces (1760–65), based on a manuscript that Percy claimed, as I have mentioned, to have found on the floor in a friend’s house just before it was to be used to light fires. He added further ballads from other sources to the forty-five he took from the folio, including at least three ballads that anonymous ladies communicated to him from oral poetry. The Reliques contained altogether hundred-eighty ballads, including “Chevy Chase,” “The Battle of Otterburn,” “Lillibullero,” “The Nut-Brown Maid,” “The Wandering Jew,” and several on Robin Hood. Percy man-handled his manuscript, writing notes on the folio pages and freely changing the rhymes. In the preface of his own collection Ancient Songs (1792) Joseph Ritson aggressively attacked Percy for his unscholarly work, but the Reliques inspired folksong-collecting all over Europe. Walter Scott, who read the Reliques in his youth, published his own The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802–1803. I distinguish between “ethnic” and “national” folk-poetry revivals. The Gaelic and the subsequent Scottish, Irish, and Welsh revivals were ethnic because they advocated to varying degree linguistic, poetic, cultural, and sometimes even political recognition for ethnic groups on the British Isles, just as Provençal, Occitan (Langue d’Oc), Catalan, Basque, and other songs did in the early nineteenth century. These revivals were ethnic because they took place in the strongly established national states of Britain (see Roper, 2012), France, and Spain. These ethnic revivals asked, directly or indirectly, for an emancipation of minority cultures and a differentiation within centrally governed homogenized states. Arguably, strong ethnic folk-song revivals were partly responsible

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for the relatively weak and late folk-song revivals in the national languages of English and French. In contrast, in Germany and most of today’s East-European countries folk songs became powerful driving forces towards national unity or emancipation. The German national factor became particularly evident in Herder’s essay on the Ossian songs, when he incorporated them in his collection “Von deutscher Art und Kunst” (2: 1–94). Herder’s advocacy of reviving a sunken, strong, and even “wild” old German culture accompanied and supported his criticism of the contemporary elite culture. The Ossian songs and Percy’s collection inspired him to put together the first significant international folk-song collection Volkslieder (1778–79). In turn, the volume stimulated further collections and generally fortified ethnic self-consciousness. Articles in Timothy Baycroft’s and David Hopkin’s Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century (2012) demonstrate how important collecting folk poetry was in the nineteenth-century nationalist movements. The new voice of folk poetry persistently claimed ancient ancestry, but, as in the case of male choirs, it wanted to sing in unison with the marching modern nationalists. The “individual genius” we encountered so often in the music novellas remained important but, as Körner and Hoffmann’s uniformed poet shows, joining a national community now became of prime importance. Herder’s enthusiasm for the folk songs of all nations, especially the Slavic ones, anticipated the global interest of Thibaut, Fétis, and a few others. Nevertheless, the thrust of Herder’s legacy was to search for a lost German and Germanic tradition. The increasingly self-conscious German literary tradition preferred Shakespeare as a model to French classicism, and this intensified once the first warm greetings of the French revolution turned into bitter resentments, first against the bloody Robespierre terror and then against Napoleon’s imperial military moves. As a result, German folklore revival during the first decades of the nineteenth century acquired a strong national tendency, which, as we have seen, had its analogy in Savigny’s notion of German/Roman law. The Heidelberg romantics (a network with Savigny, as one of the nodal points: he was brother-in-law to both Arnim and Brentano through the Arnim sisters Bettina and Kunigunde, and had the Grimm brothers as students) studied the Germanic past and dedicated themselves to the reconstruction and revival of fairy tales, myths, sagas, and epics, all of them products of past cultures that belonged to a historically national Other. The main publications included the Germanic Edda, the Nibelungenlied, the fairy tales collected and published by the Grimm brothers, and the famous folk-song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, whose three volumes Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano

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­published in 1805 and 1808. In view of its international significance, this project deserves a longer discussion. Whose Wunderhorn? As the magic horn in the title indicates, the idea of Des Knaben Wunderhorn had a musical feature, though Mahler’s musical settings of several poems was needed to reestablish the connection. Since the song-composer Reichardt was one of the moving spirits of the project, Arnim dedicated to him a musically rich postscript in the first volume (1805). Arnim confronts here a weak present with a lost powerful past, putting the blame on the feebleness of song-texts and opera libretti (i: 860). In his view, empty poetry often distracts from music. In France, the demand for novelty had almost completely eradicated folk songs even before the revolution; in England, singing of folk songs had become rare; in Italy, the national folk songs had vanished because shallow people wanted novelty in opera; and in Spain, songs disappear and nothing important circulated anymore. Arnim blamed the vanishing of dialects for the loss of German authenticity: the singers of art songs want to sing the way the elite talks, namely without dialect. This way they isolate themselves from that part of the Volk that can still take “the full and limitless power of enthusiasm without discharging nullity or craziness” (i: 863–64). Similarly, the discourse of the learned people separates them from everything that is high and wonderful in the Volk. This social rather than regional division of language marginalizes the more poetic people, and Germany experiences consequently a shortage of folk poetry (i: 877). It was a boat trip that inspired Arnim and Brentano to start their collection (i: 881). Arnim sings the praise of Austrian/German dancing along the Danube, and German-singing shepherds at the origin of the Rhine. Arnim even suggests that these songs and dances relate to “national operas” (Nationalopern), probably meaning locally produced and performed Singspiels (i: 881). All these loving words for the homeland have a double connection with the world beyond the German borders. While Arnim regrets the vanishing of wandering journeymen, military service or studies abroad (i: 870 f) he rudely asks for cleansing his homeland of all “foreign pestilence.” As to the other countries: Italy is Italy for us only because it was long strong enough to neglect what was foreign. Their plays still resonate with the songs that all sing on the streets, and the craftsmen who work at the doors learn them from those who pass by, without any conceit for they have pleasure at it. Music can heal there even the poisonous bite of the tarantella. (i: 883)

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Thanks to this Italian charm, Arnim forgives the English if they celebrate Italian virtuosi. Even so, he advises the English to listen rather to that poor woman on the street corner who sings about Mary of Scotland, to chase eagerly to the music of the hunting horn, and to animate their legs when they hear a Scottish bagpipe. among sailors, the highest music celebrates Lord Nelson’s victory. (Arnim ignores the French musical celebrations of Napoleon.) The first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn was dedicated to Goethe. He reacted with a very favorable review as early as January 1806 (Goethe, 1985–94, VI.2: 602–616), which became bloated with brief comments on almost every song. But the review’s introduction and ending contain important comments. Goethe recommended the book for every window, mirror, and corner in private homes, but, above all, “on the piano of lovers or masters of music, in order to provide the poems with their traditional melodies, to provide them with appropriate tunes, or, if God wanted it, to tease out with their help new and significant melodies” (VI.2: 603). However, he recognized that the poems did not record performances and that Volkslied was therefore a loose term for them: These sort of poems – which we have for many years come to call folk songs, though they are actually neither by the folk nor for the folk – incorporate something so solid and competent that we can grasp that the core and tribal aspect of nations contains, retains, and adopts such things, and thereby reproduces them – such poems are poetry at its best. They have an incredible charm even for us who are standing on a higher level of education, a charm that observing and remembering youth can have for the aged. (VI.2: 614) Two further comments of Goethe are relevant. First, he recommended including in further volumes not only older German songs from the Middle Ages but also songs of other nations. Achim and Brentano refrained from this. Secondly, Goethe took a very liberal view of editorial interventions and constructions: “we should accept gratefully the restoration, which is here and there odd, put together from foreign parts and even spurious. Who is ignorant of what a song must endure when it passes for a while through the mouth of the Volk, and not only of the uneducated ones! Why should the person who records it in the last instance and compiles it with others not have also a certain right to it?” (VI.2: 616) After a brief involvement in the Napoleonic war, Arnim returned to Reichart’s hospitable Giebichenstein estate in October 1807 and worked there with Brentano. When Reichardt was appointed conductor in Kassel by King

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Jerome, the two poets joined him and continued preparing there the material of the two last volumes. The final work was done in the spring and summer of 1808 in Heidelberg. The publication of these two volumes meant for many the appearance of a long-awaited “German Percy.” The model was Percy, not only because his collection contained ballads as well as lyrical songs, but also because Arnim freely adapted his material. The changes involved rhyme, rhythm, and other stylistic matters, adding poems of the editors, but also “gentrifying” and refining the content. Unlike Herder, Arnim and Brentano did not admire Ossianic “wild” poetry. Like Reichardt, Arnim disliked rough, vulgar, and erotic poetry, and preferred poetry in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The reshaped Naturpoesie was no longer natural but a form of Kunstpoesie, a consciously and intentionally conceived poetry. The dichotomy raised debates, not only with the Heidelberg scholar Johann Heinrich Voß, but among the editors themselves, for Brentano did not like Arnim’s all too “poetic” reconstructions. Similar differences existed between the Grimm brothers. Jacob was for naive, truthful, and necessary poetry, whereas Wilhelm preferred poetry that manifested editorial work, especially in the case of myths in foreign languages. The debates on the collective construction of Des Knaben Wunderhorn shows how important folklore revival was in forging Germany’s national identity. Thibaut, who was in search of music’s “purity,” did not link folk songs to nationalism but used the designation to make social distinctions. He sharply distinguished between a Gassenhauer (street ditty) and a genuine folk song. The former had a short popular life, the latter possessed an enduring quality: Pure and bright as the personality of a child are, generally, all those songs that originated from the folk itself or, having been adopted by it, were preserved and cherished therein for a long period of time. These songs almost always correspond to the dispositions of strong human beings untainted by culture, and they often attain a value all their own by partaking in great national features. Returning to the times when nations enjoyed complete purity, freshness and youth, they irresistibly capture even (mis)educated people, in whom noble emotions of youth may still be awakened.4 4 Thibaut, [1824] 1826: 76–77: “Rein und lauter, wie der Charakter eines Kindes, sind dagegen in der Regel alle Lieder, welche von dem Volke selbst ausgingen, oder, durch das Volk aufgenommen, lange Zeit mit Vorliebe von demselben bewahrt wurden. Solche Lieder entsprechen fast immer der Empfindung des kräftigen, unverbildeten Menschen, und bekommen vielfach auch dadurch einen ganz eigenen Werth, dass sie sich an große Nationalbegebenheiten

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Thibaut insists that folk songs must express an uncorrupted, pure humanity, but he makes no distinction between songs that come from the folk and those that are adopted by it. The idea derives from Rousseau, but Carl Dahlhaus wants to make a distinction between an Enlightenment concern to reinstitute a “noble simplicity” and a romantic one that seeks to find it in a pre-historical “authentic” culture.5 In a broader European context such radical distinction is problematic, as the very French term for folk song, “chanson/chant populaire” indicates. Karl Spazier’s serialized article “Einige Worte über deutschen Volksgesang” (amz 3: 73–81, 89–94, 105–111) shows this was not just a linguistic distinction. Thibaut was concerned that songs flooded daily life, but the ravishing pure national songs that offered insights into the character of people were utterly neglected (Thibaut, [1824] 1826: 5–6). He gave the study of folk songs high importance, but this meant listening to songs alive rather than unearthing old parchments that did not record the music itself. Contrary to most folk-song advocates, Thibaut was a cosmopolitan rather than a nationalist: he pleaded for a broad and open-minded approach that went beyond the fashionable fatherland songs. The repertoires should include the whole world and lead to an understanding of diverse national characters (77). Thibaut’s long chapter on folk songs surveyed the recent European folk-song publications, including those of Britain, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. He noted that the British gave much attention to their national songs, but they tended to modify the texts as well as the music. Opposed to such reworking, Thibaut wanted to preserve their simplicity and naturalness (92), for in Rousseau’s sense he found a healthy and pure “childhood” in them.

anschließen, und, in die Zeiten der vollen Reinheit, Frischheit und Jugendlichkeit der Völker zurückgehend, selbst der verbildeten Menschen, in welchem noch edle Jugendempfindungen zu wecken sind, unwiderstehlich eingreifen.” 5 Dahlhaus, [1980] 1989: 107–108. Dahlhaus is preoccupied with the question how to call songs by modern composers that become so popular that the author’s name fades and the songs are considered as folk songs. Referring to Wilhelm von Zuccamaglio, Schumann’s friend, who “disguised his ‘folklike’ songs (some of which eventually became folk songs) as ‘ancient folk songs’,” he notes that for the eighteenth-century mentality “his urge to write, rather than collect, folk songs was just as legitimate as the romantic disposition that compelled him to hide his authorship” (Dahlhaus, [1980] 1989: 108). Dahlhaus characterizes the romantic process, not unjustified, as “Umsingen” (109), by which he means the way Brentano and Arnim used the material they found. The path of the folk song was again from the folk to the individual (bottom up) rather than from the elite individual down to the vulgar folk via Zersingen (top down).

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Perhaps most fascinating and unexpected is Schumann’s Thibautian instruction “to listen frequently to all kinds of folk songs; they are a mine of the most beautiful melodies and offer you insight into the characters of different nations.” (Schumann, 1854, i: 168)6 Surprising is not just that Schumann gives here so much attention to folk songs, but that he adopts an intercultural rather than national perspective (Blick in den Charakter der verschiedenen Nationen), which literally repeats Thibaut’s request, to embrace the whole world by being “many-sided” rather than simply patriotic: via folk songs one can immerse oneself in the character of all people (Thibaut, [1824] 1826: 78). Thibaut gave a detailed and well-informed survey of Britain’s national folk-song market, including remarks on Byron’s Hebrew Melodies in Andreas Kretzschmer’s translation (1822). Of course, Thibaut did not find sufficient ancient purity in them. Lacking “secure ground,” they were “in any case very interesting” (82). 6 “Höre fleißig auf alle Volkslieder; sie sind eine Fundgrube der schönsten Melodien und öffnen dir den Blick in den Charakter der verschiedenen Nationen” (Schumann, 1854, i: 168).

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“Write as You Speak” – in Serbian I have introduced in previous chapters Adelung’s “write as you speak” and discussed the conflict between formalized and poetic Sanskrit. The thrust of the present chapter is to show how Adelung’s principle became operative in Vuk Stefanović Karadžić’s Serbian folk-song collecting and grammar revision, the impact of which reached in both Eastern and Western Europe all the way to Milman Parry’s theory of Homeric orality. The case study also sheds light on the post-Napoleonic rise of nationalism.1 The first section introduces the Slovenian linguist Jernej Kopitar, who was Vuk’s mentor and his “publicity manager” all over Europe, especially in Germany. Thanks to Kopitar, Jacob Grimm became a strong supporter and even translator of Vuk’s work. The encounter gave Grimm a major impetus to initiate a European movement to collect folk-songs and to revalue the language of the “Volk.”

Kopitar, the Networker

The Slovenian philologist Jernej Kopitar started his career with a Slavic grammar (Grammatik der Slavischen Sprache in Krain, Kärnten, und Steyermark, 1808) based on Adelung’s “wonderful principle” (179). He compared the orthographies of the Cyrillic languages among one another and their relation to the “Teutonic” languages, by which he meant all the remaining European ones. Kopitar moved in 1808 from Ljubljana to Vienna, where he briefly studied law before getting a post in the Imperial Library in 1810 and becoming the chief censor of Slavic and Modern Greek publications at the Interior Ministry. He was an “Austro-Slav” who worked towards the cultural emancipation of the Slavs within the Austrian Empire, in opposition to those advocating Slavic unity under the aegis of Russia. In the summer of 1834, the German poet, philologist and folksong ­collector  Hoffmann von Fallersleben joined the informal get-togethers of 1 This chapter draws on the great body of knowledge brought together in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (Cornis-Pope & Neubauer 2004–10), and as a result concentrates, here as elsewhere in this book, on linguistic orality rather than on musical productivity and performativity, which is more centrally covered in Samson 2013. [Editors’ note].

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_012

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Serbs, ­Slovenes, Greeks, Romanians, Albanese, Macedonians, and other EastEuropeans at the restaurant Zum weissen Wolf. His little poem glorified Kopitar as Kummerwender (one who distracts you from sorrow).2 Kopitar’s most valuable contributions to the development of Slavic linguistics became, however, his intensive and broad international network of scholarly correspondents. This network included the Homer scholar F.A. Wolf, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Leopold Ranke, the Czechs František Palacký and Josef Jakub Jungmann, and the Slovaks Jan Kollár and Pavol Šafařik (Ibrovac, 1966: 71). He was in particularly close contact with the Czech Josef Dobrovský, the father of Slavic linguistics, who put him in touch with Jacob Grimm. Kopitar almost certainly attended Schlegel’s Vienna lectures on literary history, and he must have welcomed Schlegel’s claim that “every important and independent nation” had a right to a unique literature. Of course, Slovenia would not be among the “important and independent nations,” but Kopitar was eager to balance valuation of the Germans and Slavs in Austria and contributed several texts in this sense to Schlegel’s Deutsches Museum (dm). His three relevant contributions, all based on his Grammatik der Slavischen Sprache, related to issues raised by Adelung’s call for phonetic orthography and dealt with inadequacies in the German language. He proposed an Austrian “Idiotikon,” he wrote a letter to the editor under the fictional name of a Cossack on the need to reform German orthography, and he called the German language amusical, which elicited a response from Schlegel (see Chapter 13). An “Idiotikon” (or lexicon) with typical Swiss idioms was in the making, and writing similar ones for Austrian, Saxon, Hessian, Swabian and other German dialects would have been logical. Schlegel praised Kopitar’s proposal for an Austrian one and suggested that a team should carry it out since the Austrian language itself had many shades. The Cossack letter criticized the inconsistencies of German orthography by applying Adelung view: “one sound, one letter.” The Cossack claimed that Russian orthography was consistent while the German one was jumbled. He proposed a universal alphabet, based on sounds of which every language could use letters that corresponded to their pronunciations, but he insisted that the alphabet could only be universal if each of its elements was based on spoken sounds. Schlegel’s intended response never materialized because he had to close down the journal (dm 4.12, 540–542).

2 Sein Nam’ ist weit und breit geehrt / Und lebt in Aller Munde, / So lange Treu’ und Wahrheit währt / von Laibach bis zum Sunde; / Am liebsten und am besten / Ist er bekannt den Gästen // im Wolfen. … Hoch leb’ Er! lang und lange! / Der Fremden Freudenspender, Der Freunde Kummerwender / Im Wolfen. (Ibrovac, 1966: 73).

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Karadžić, the Voice of the Volk

The initiative to construct a speech-based orthography of the Serbian language was taken by the young Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, who fled to Vienna when the Ottomans reoccupied Belgrade. He arrived at Vienna in 1813, so that his crucial early activities fall within the years of the Viennese Congress. According to Duncan Wilson, it was “principally Kopitar’s literary programme that Vuk carried out from 1814 until his death fifty years later, quite consciously, although he never specifically subscribed to Kopitar’s ‘Austro-Slav’ views and was often acting against them. The literary programme, as expounded in one of Kopitar’s letters to Vuk, comprised a Grammar, and a Dictionary of the ‘popular’ Serb language” (Wilson, 1970: 3). Meanwhile it has been shown that in his later years Vuk softened Adelung’s principle in order to further the integration of Serbian and Croatian (Okuka, 1988: 125 ff). Vuk assembled a slim volume of folk songs already by the end of January 1814, but he waited with the publication of Mala prostonarodnja slavenoserbska pjesnarica (“A small Serbo-Slavic folk-song book”) until the end of ­October. He admits in his long preface to the folk songs that he recollected them from memory, remembering his happy childhood days when he kept sheep and goats (Wilson, 1970: 91–94). Wilson points out (97) that here, and elsewhere, Vuk consciously separated himself from the educated Austrian Serbs by presenting himself as a “child of nature.” His volume contained mostly lyrical “women’s” songs, and in his later multi-volume edition of folk songs he kept the voice of the women in the first volume, before those of the heroes in the later ones. It seems that women’s voices had a certain priority for Vuk, just as in the pedagogical treatises of the time. For him, as he concludes his preface, “such songs have preserved and still preserve among the common people the nature and essence of the Serbia of former times” (94). Precisely this feature made the folk songs useful also as material for the construction of a speechbased grammar. The devotional literature of the Church Slavonic language was written in the eighteenth century under Russian influence in a Slavonic-Serbian that was “closer to Russian than to Serb” (101). It lost its ties with the spoken vernacular but many educated people believed that it was closer to an original Slavonic language that the vernacular had corrupted. The Austrian government under Joseph ii became critical of the Russian-inspired Church-Slavonic, while the Orthodox Church started a campaign against the popular Serb that the writer Dositej Obradović had advocated at the end of the eighteenth century. This was the situation into which the volume that Vuk wrote with Luka Milovanov entered at the end of 1814. It carried the title Pismenica serbskoga

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jezika, (Songbook in the Serbian language), whose title also indicated that the orthography was taken from the speech of the common people (po govoru prostoga naroda). As Vuk wrote in the Preface, this first attempt could not come up with the fine and deep language rules that gave eternal fame to Adelung among the Germans and to Dobrovský among the Czechs, but reflecting long and hard he always returned to the principle “write as you speak and read as it is written.” His rules for declination and conjugation were formulated according to the language of Serbs living in villages far away from the cities (Karadžić, [1814] 1968: 30–31). Metropolitan Stefan Stratimirović of the Orthodox Church made every effort to suppress Vuk’s reform, but the proud and happy Kopitar immediately wrote an enthusiastic review in the Wiener allgemeine Literaturzeitung.3 In an autobiographical recollection, Vuk considered the grammar a “pitiful attempt,” but he remembered that Kopitar was pleased to see it in print because he expected that Vuk would be eager to improve the first approach (Wilson, 1970: 99). Apart from Kopitar’s review, Vuk’s first grammar received little, and mostly negative attention. As Vuk wrote to Kopitar in April 1815, he was anxiously waiting for his review, but praise would displease his present friendly host, the Archimandrite Lukian Mušicki in the monastery Šišatovac (Wilson, 1970: 109–110). He added that in the future he would take into account that “people don’t like getting away from the old lettering.” He will print “according to common sense and the essence of the language.” In the first half of 1815, Vuk was back in Serbia to do true folk-song collecting, and he had the enormous luck of finding two outstanding singers, Tešan Podrugović, a poverty-stricken hajduk (outlaw) and the blind Philip Višnjić (107, 110–111). Vuk’s second publication of folk songs, the Narodna srbska pjesnarica appeared in 1815 and opened Europe’s doors for Vuk and the Serbian folk songs. It contained mostly heroic songs, and even included music notes for six of them, added by the Polish composer Franciszek Mirecki (Karadžić, [1815] 1965: 355). These stimulated the first setting of Serbian poems by the German composer Carl Loewe in 1825. Vuk’s Serbian songs were later also set to music by Dvořák, Janáček, Tchaikovsky, and, above all, Brahms (see Bojić, 1990) – a suggestive analogy to the Haydn and Beethoven arrangements of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh songs that I shall discuss in the next chapter.

3 Kopitar’s criticism usually asked whether a proposed spelling moved towards the universal principle “one sign for each sound.” The main issue was the use of the “hard sign”. See Kopitar’s “Review” (1815), Wilson (1970: 386–387), and Okuka (1988). on Vuk’s changing attitudes towards a strictly phonetic alphabet.

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Jacob Grimm, the Patron

It was in 1815 that Jacob Grimm entered the stage to present the Serbian folk songs to the world, the same year that he published with his brother Wilhelm the second volume of the first edition of his famous fairy tales. Since 1811, he had corresponded with the doyen of Slavic philology, Josef Dobrovský, who put him in touch with Kopitar. At the end of 1814 Grimm came to Vienna to participate at the Congress as (a poorly paid) Secretary of the Hessian State Delegation, and it was on this occasion that he personally met Kopitar. Later exchanges between Grimm and Dobrovský show that the Czech scholar disliked Vuk’s grammar and folk-song collecting because he thought they would hinder access to older texts in Church Slavonic. However, Grimm agreed with Kopitar that orthography ought to follow the pronunciation of the spoken language rather than the spelling of older texts (Mojašević, 1990: 20–24). At the beginning of 1815 he issued a call to collect folklore, established a Society to Collect Folk Poetry, and sent around his invitation to collect folk poetry (Cirkular wegen Aufsammlung der Volkspoesie; see Grimm, 1864–90, IV.1: 56). Kopitar passed on the circular to Vuk, and he urged Grimm to learn more about the Slavic languages, especially the Serbian one. He sent Grimm some nineteen poems from Vuk’s first volume in literal German translation, which Grimm copied and circulated among German writers and intellectuals (Mojašević, 1990: 34–35). On June 10, 1815, Kopitar sent a copy of Vuk’s first Serbian collection to Goethe with a dedication, some literally translated poems, and short information about him. (Goethe had forty years earlier already published his own metrical version of the famous tragic “Hasanaginica” poem in Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern.4) Upon Kopitar’s urging, Grimm published an enthusiastic review of Vuk’s first folklore collection in the Wiener Literarische Zeitung (September 15, 1815), claiming that the Serbian love poems were comparable only to the Song of Songs and that the Serbs were blessed with poems, songs, and stories that possessed a rich poetic language. Tuned in to the discussions on orality and print, he added: “it looks as if the good God had by this rich gift of popular poetry wished to make up to them for their lack of books” (Wilson, 1970: 113; see also Mojašević, 1990: 43–47). In a review of Vuk’s second collection, Kopitar valued Serbian folk poetry much higher than the poetry of other Slavic nations (Mojašević, 1990: 31). Vuk’s next project was, upon Kopitar’s urging, the Srpski rječnik (“Serbian dictionary,” 1818; trilingually Serbian, German, and Latin) that they completed 4 On Goethe, the “Hasanaginica,” and Vuk, see Wilson (1970: 196) and Leerssen (2012: 13–19).

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together in intensive cooperation (Wilson, 1970: 114–117). The dictionary included only what Vuk’s ears had verified “in every-day speech,” but it included words from various dialects and even adopted Turkish words. It also included expressions and little stories that offended the Church (124). The work was completed by April 1817, but ran into publication problems, and when it appeared the following year, it received some severe attacks for including vulgar and foreign words. Kopitar immediately defended it in a review in the Jahrbücher der Literatur (1818) with the subtitle “whether the mother tongue, basic principle of all literature, should only be disregarded by the Serbs (and the Modern Greeks)” (see Mojašević, 1990: 49–51). At Kopitar’s request, Grimm also defended Vuk in a review published on April 26, 1819 (“Serbisches Wörterbuch”) by facetiously remarking that the learned Slavonic monks presumably never heard many of the words that Vuk learned from blind singers. Grimm, who published his Deutsche Grammatik in 1819, returned a few years later to the new edition of the Serbian grammar that Vuk attached to the Srpski rječnik. After learning some Serbian he published in 1824 a German translation of it (prepared by Dimitrije Tirol) with a foreword titled Wuk’s Stephanowitsch kleine Serbische Grammatik. In a highly diplomatic move, Grimm recommended Vuk and his work to the new Serbian leader Miloš Obranović, who was not always favorably disposed to them. Instead of praising the intrinsic merits of the grammar, he predicted that the richness and beauty of the collected Serbian poetry could astonish all of Europe and become a common good, but only if the spoken vernacular can emancipate itself from the dead language of the Orthodox Church. Once more, the highest recognition went to the female voice: the Serbian women songs constitute a lyric poetry whose clarity and intimacy are unequalled elsewhere (Grimm, [1824] 1974: note 54) Grimm regarded it as a “strange folly” that Serbian Church scholars should regard their spoken daily language as a bastardized Cyrillic Church language, corrupted with Turkish words that should be left for herdsmen and peasants.5 He noted that a “natural drive” weakened, wore off, and finally dropped unaccented syllables in both Serbian and German, but in contrast to Kopitar, who regarded this as a source of “harshness” and unmusicality in German, Grimm found the opposite: “All Slavic clans seem to be naturally gifted in poetry,

5 “ein aus der Cyrilischen Kirchensprache entstelltes, durch türkische Wörter vollends verderbstes Idiom […], das man billig gemeinen Hirten und Bauern überlasse” (Grimm, [1824] 1974: xii–xiii).

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d­ isposed to song and dance. Quiet and deep emotions distinguish their songs” (xviii).6 When Vuk published, in Leipzig, the first three volumes of his greatly enlarged Narodna srbska pjesnarica (“National Serbian songbook,” 1823–24), Grimm reviewed them (Wilson, 1970: 390–394). Talvj (Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob) published in 1825–26 a two-volume German translation. As Wilson (172–89) and Mojašević (1990: 89–102) have shown, these stimulated Goethe to write about the Serbian folk songs, generating a Europe-wide interest. Adelung’s principle raised orality above textuality and the musicality of language above the visually represented alphabet. Inadvertently, this indicated also the complexity of Rousseau’s urging that the intellectually overloaded modern languages should return to their original and natural musicality. The living melodies of folk songs could be passed on from mouth to mouth, but given the dominance of print they also asked for musical notation on paper, which was difficult to produce while listening. Vuk was lucky to find several singers (many of them blind women), whose identity and manner of singing was unique, but, unfortunately, only their unique personalities survived on record. Their singing and the sound of their string instrument, the gusla, evaporated. What survived was only the physical instrument, which acquired such mythic power that it even inspired counterfeit imitations in Prosper Mérimée’s aforementioned La Guzla (1827; see above, p. 203). Thanks to Kopitar’s and Jacob Grimm’s networking, interest in Vuk’s work did not remain limited to Austria and Germany. In England, John Bowring translated some of the songs (Wilson, 1970: 204–207; Ibrovac, 1966: 216). The most important French specialist of Serbian folk songs became Claude Fauriel, whose primary work was on the Provençale language and poetry. We now look at his career and at the lectures he held on the translations of Vuk’s Serbian folk songs.

Fauriel, the Professor

In France and Spain the first important ethnic folk-song collections were in Provençal, Occitan (Langue d’Oc), Catalan, Basque, Breton, and other regional languages. The collectors were Fabre d’Olivet, who wrote the above-discussed hoax about a troubadour poet, François-Juste-Marie Raynouard, who published 6 “Alle slavischen Stämme scheinen von Natur dichterisch begabt, zu Gesang und Reigen aufgelegt. Ihre Lieder zeichnen sich durch stille, tiefe Empfindung aus” (Grimm, [1824] 1974:xviii).

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a six-volume collection of troubadour songs, and Claude Fauriel, who taught Provençal at the Sorbonne in 1830–31. As Anne Dymond writes, “the embrace of the folk came later and more sporadically in France than in other European countries” (2012: 137; see also Ibrovac, 1966: 22). Fauriel was among those few ethnic folk-song collectors who also collected on the national level. Having served in various French administrative positions, he turned in 1802 to literature, translation, and scholarship. His wide circle of friends and contacts included Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni (whose tragedies he translated), the Schlegel brothers, Jacob Grimm, and even Kopitar, who had pushed for collecting new-Greek folk poetry even before Fauriel had started his project. Like Byron and many other philhellenic writers and intellectuals, Fauriel enthusiastically supported the Greek insurgence of 1821, and he cooperated with Kopitar, Baron Werner Haxthausen, and a number of native informants in collecting new-Greek folk songs, although he did field work only among Greeks living in Venice and Triest. He also had to cope with three different versions of Greek: the learned Phanar, the popular spoken one, and a mixed one. Unlike Vuk, he did not try to standardize the popular spoken variant. The French translations of the new-Greek songs and Fauriel’s “Discours préliminaire” for the two-volume Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (1824–25) received high praise, not only from Frenchmen but also from Kopitar, Goethe, Grimm, and John Bowring. Kopitar notified Vuk on April 23 and June 25, 1823 that Fauriel’s publication had been announced (Ibrovac, 1966: 199). The success of the Chants populaires led in 1830 to Fauriel’s appointment as Professor of Foreign Literature at the Sorbonne. The first year he lectured on the history of Provençal poetry, a material that his friends published posthumously in 1846 as a three-volume Histoire de la littérature provençale. Fauriel unequivocally showed here that Fabre’s volume was a hoax; his own attempt to show that the chansons de geste and the Arthurian romances derived from Provençal poetry, proffered in earnest and not as a hoax, were mistaken and failed to get philological credence. Kopitar announced Fauriel’s publication of new-Greek songs in the Jahrbücher der Literatur (April-June 1824), and published there the following year a detailed joint review of both Fauriel’s and Vuk’s publications (201). This may have given Fauriel the idea to devote his 1831–32 Sorbonne lectures to a comparison of new-Greek and Serbian folk songs. The voice that resounded in the Sorbonne lecture hall survived in the form of lecture notes (later edited by Ibrovac 1996).

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Fauriel was unaware of Vuk’s publications when he collected new-Greek poems. He became familiar with them only by way of translations by Talvj and others. Although he had an astonishing talent for languages, he never mastered a Slavic one. In his introductory lecture he belittled the problem of using translations by praising the translations as “wonderfully exact” – though they contained mistranslations (426). The new-Greek songs he discussed were his own translations. Equally limiting was the fact that Fauriel published and taught only the texts, though one of his sources, Baron Haxthausen’s documents, did contain music scores (237) and Vuk’s second collection contained a few. Since Fauriel believed that folk poetry was the first human emotional and intellectual expression (see his “Discourse préliminaire” in Fauriel, 1824–25, i: xvii–cxliv) and (Ibrovac 1966: 61), the music of the folk songs would have deserved much more attention. Fauriel and all of his readers concluded that the Serbian songs were of a higher quality than the new-Greek ones (see Goethe to Talvj on June 10, 1824: Steig, 1891: 33–34). Two major questions loomed large in Fauriel’s pioneering comparison: how these two national collections relate to the remaining Balkan folk songs, and whether one could establish a historical priority or “parenthood” among the folk songs of the region. Fauriel left the answers to future investigations. The issues of priority and comprehensive regionality were interrelated, for most observers were aware that Albanese folk poetry was probably the oldest in the Balkan. Kopitar noted in his Fauriel review that the names of the combatants and technical terms such as liméri, meterísi, tuféki, and jurussi were in Albanese or Turkish (Ibrovac, 1966: 401). To Bowring Kopitar wrote on March 24, 1828 that the Albanese folk songs would need to be collected, for Fauriel’s new-Greek ones were doubtless imitations of Albanese ones. The next task would be to seek out the parallels between the Albanese, Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian songs, and ask, “which of these four peoples were the inventors” (202).7 Fauriel cautiously broadened the scope of his course by devoting a lecture to non-Serbian folk songs, namely the Russian Song of Igor and the texts “discovered” by Václav Hanka. The Czech scholar Hanka (who worked for a while with Vuk in Vienna) presented to the public newly “discovered” Czech manuscripts 7 This issue of seniority has been reopened in our days by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, especially in The File On H (first Albanian publication in 1981 as Dosja H.). The book is about two scholars looking for a living Balkan (mostly Serbian) orality, in order to support Milman Parry’s famous thesis on Homer’s oral-rhapsodic roots. In Kadarë’s version of events, angry Serbs destroy the recordings the two Western scholars made of Albanian songs.

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in 1819. Grimm and most others accepted these as authentic, unaware that they were forged by Hanka so that the “honor” of the ancient Czechs could match those of the Serbs. Vuk’s work, which contained no fakes, encouraged the production of Hanka’s “invention,” which compares with the Ossian fakes because both were generated out of national pride. The authenticity of both has since been questioned, but since they have become part of national myths, their criticism was a highly sensitive issue. The debate on the Song of Igor is still going on, but Hanka’s texts were definitively proven to be false at the end of nineteenth century. Doubts about the Hanka documents had already been expressed by the time of the Sorbonne lectures, but, ironically, Fauriel thought that the Serbian heroic songs were more products of the imagination than texts dealing with historical facts, whereas all of Hanka’s papers were within the limits of historical plausibility (Ibrovac, 1966: 608). According to Fauriel, the same held true for the Russian heroic songs. That the consistency and historicity of both may be in the service of deliberate national mythmaking did not seem to have entered Fauriel’s otherwise scholarly mind. Indeed, neither of the two nineteenth-century approaches to ancient folk song was foolproof. The collectors could either come up with a document that claimed to be from the distant past (Percy, Fabre, Hanka etc.), or they recorded live singing (Karadžić etc.) that could not itself be faked, but since it was short-lived it had to be noted down, and this permanent written record could just as much have been a forgery as allegedly ancient documents.

Parry and Bartók: Secondary Orality

The music of folk songs was seldom noted down in the nineteenth century, but the arrival of the first recording equipments changed this. The new technology also had an important role in the decision by the American scholar Milman Parry to apply recordings of Serbian and Balkan folk song performances for his hypothesis (first made in his 1928 Sorbonne thesis) about an oral-formulaic proto-Homeric tradition. Parry visited the Balkans in 1933, choosing to study the Serbian oral tradition of his time because of the reputation of what Vuk had collected and printed in the nineteenth-century. As Albert Lord, Parry’s early assistant, writes: “Unlettered singers of the massive Yugoslav epics studied by Milman Parry have known to derive their texts from versions collected by Vuk Karadžić in the opening years of the nineteenth century and circulated in ‘national song’ books” (1960: 25). Parry recorded some 350 heroic poems and 205 “women’s songs.”

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Parry’s 1928 Parisian dissertation on the formulaic character of Homer’s language had demonstrated on textual-stylistic grounds the oral roots of what had been recorded in writing. He concluded that “Homer could only have learned his formulas by hearing them spoken in the full voice of those poets to whom he listened from his childhood” (quoted in: Parry and Lord, 1953–54, i: ix). In order to reconfirm this, he went to the Balkan like a modern-day Vuk, in order to record on modern machines the voices of still existing folk singers. As John H. Finley writes in the Preface to the Parry and Lord collection, Parry added to the logical argument about Homer’s oral style a second one based on the living Serbian tradition: “A style must be oral, he reasoned, which repeatedly shows identical or analogous phrases in the same position in line, since repetition of this amount and kind must be functional and, if functional, must serve the purpose of enabling the poet to compose his verses” (ix). Such a stilloperative orality confirmed not only Parry’s formal analysis of Homeric poetry but opened the door for comparative studies of oral poetry in general (x). To study on-going linguistic processes in order to learn something about the past was an adaptation from the natural sciences that had profound implications for reevaluating romantic revivals. As a rule, these revivals looked for ancient documents instead of looking at life at present, which was usually seen as corrupted and impoverished. Pushing the generalization even further, Roman Jakobson wrote in his Preface to the Parry and Lord collection: “The modern science of language has come to realize that the most efficient way to obtain a thorough understanding of the linguistic events of the past is to study closely the linguistic processes which we ourselves witness” (xi). Parry died in an accident in 1935, and the music of the folk songs he collected was not evaluated until the arrival of Bartók in the us. Sponsors came forth to engage Bartók’s knowledge in transcribing the recorded music on paper, which he did at Columbia University. The final result of this were the posthumous publications of Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (1951) and the enlarged the four-volume Yugoslav Folk Music, published under Bartók’s and Albert Lord’s names in 1978. The latter contained the fully recorded women’s songs that Bartók transcribed in 1941–42. A two-volume Serbocroatian Heroic Songs appeared under Parry’s and Lord’s names in 1953–54. On-going processes today give us also some new perspectives on the political issues of Vuk’s nineteenth-century undertaking. As we have seen, embracing the spoken language of the “Volk” was not only an issue for the Orthodox Church but also a source of tension between the Habsburg and Russian Empires. A third imperial interest was involved too, the Napoleonic support for an “Illyrian” language concept in Croatia and Slovenia; the ideal of an

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­“Illyrian” linguistic unity for the Southern Slavs under the Habsburg Crown was popular with Romantic Nationalists around Zagreb in the 1830s, but became politically suspect to the authorities in the run-up to 1848. However, after long consultations, the Vienna Literary Agreement of March 1850 united leading intellectuals from the Croatian and Serbian lands in a joint acceptance of Vuk’s language conception, now including Croatia: a “Serbo-Croatian” language standard was put forward for general use, based on the Štokavian dialect and broad enough to include also Bosniak, Montenegrin, and Kosovo-Serbian dialects. Its orthography, either in Latin or Cyrillic as the user’s religion might stipulate, was almost entirely speech-based – as Kopitar had wished it to be. Though the linguistic structure is still considered exemplary today, its political instrumentalization for building a state union of the Southern Slavs (“Yugoslavia”) was an enormous failure, most obviously because of its suppression of Kosovar Albanian. Few inhabitants of former Yugoslavia now regard their language as “Serbo-Croatian.” Vuk is not to be blamed for this, but the nineteenthcentury turn to orality created well-nigh irresolvable ethnic conflicts between regionalization and centralization.

chapter 11

Contrafacts from the British Isles Vuk’s revision of Serbian orthography and his collection of Serbian folk songs were unique achievements, but song revivals occurred also elsewhere, not only in Eastern Europe, as Fauriel’s new-Greek folk-song collection shows, but even in the British Isles, where Macpherson’s Ossian provoked Irish, Scottish, and Welsh revivals. To what extent these revivals were merely poetic, or broadly cultural, or even political is still being debated. Though only few of the songs were directly political, they fortified minority cultures that were at that time bereft of political power and eager to recuperate a historical identity with its own vernacular and ethnic poetry. This interest in songs manifested itself on both sides of the continent, but in very different forms of collection and distribution. Short of offering a fullscale comparison, the following discussion will concentrate on the transformations that songs from the British Isles underwent, more specifically, on the repeated marriages and divorces of text and music that produced what experts call contrafacts: the grafting of new songs (texts or melodies) onto existing material. The ethnopolitical issues of songs had virtually no significance for the Scotsman George Thomson who became one of the most prominent publishers of national melodies, starting with his Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs of 1793. It included twenty-five new poems by Robert Burns, arranged for piano, violin, and cello by the Austrian-born French composer and Haydn student Ignace Pleyel. Thomson was fond of old airs but he was neither an outright nationalist nor a purist, and so he published for amateur players and asked Viennese composers to arrange the songs. After Pleyel, he commissioned Haydn, who arranged close to four-hundred-and-fifty Irish, Scottish, and Welsh songs for several publishers, and, finally, Beethoven, whose Select Collection of Original Irish Airs he published in 1814. The most controversial ethnic songs emerging from Britain’s national song market, Lord Byron’s and Isaac Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies (1815–16), originally claimed to revive ancient Jewish songs but were actually based on melodies sung at synagogue services in London. They came to be regarded as political and labeled “proto-Zionist,” for many of them expressed a yearning to overcome the diaspora. I shall analyze one song from the collection and one of its Byron poems for which Schumann composed new music later.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_013

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Scott (Re)turns to Ulster

The British song market meant that James Power in Dublin, Thomas Preston in London, as well as William Napier, William Whyte, and George Thomson in Edinburgh selected original ethnic melodies and usually commissioned poets such as Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, and Walter Scott to write poems to fit them (Slater, 1952: 76). They also commissioned composers to provide arrangements for the melodies. Haydn (who had earlier used East-European folk songs while at Esterháza) composed his first Scottish arrangements during his visit to London in order to rescue the violinist and music publisher Napier from going bankrupt with his first Scottish-song collection (Geiringer, 1949). The enormous success of the new Haydn arrangements (1792) led to another volume with Napier in 1794. Haydn published his first volume with Thomson in 1802, and he completed finally altogether 445 arrangements of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh songs. They consisted of instrumental accompaniments, occasional additional voices, as well as introductory and concluding ritornellos.1 Thomson sent Haydn the tunes but no texts and titles. He added the headings and the words once he received the arrangements, using “either the original folksong or, mostly, a new poem by one of his collaborators” (Geiringer, 1949: 186). As Thomson relates in the preface to his first volume of Beethoven arrangements (1793), he was delighted that Beethoven was willing to continue Haydn’s work, and he sent him forty-three melodies on September 25, 1809.2 Beethoven immediately went to work but the scores he sent to Thomson in July 1810 were caught in Napoleon’s continent-wide blockade of Great Britain and reached Edinburgh only in the summer of 1812. Beethoven’s first twelve arrangements, titled Select Collection of Original Irish Airs … Composed by Beethoven appeared at end of 1814. The title acknowledges that the “Irish Airs” were united with characteristic English (sic) poetry. Beethoven was unhappy that he had to arrange the music “blindly,” without the actual poems. Thomson responded on December 21, 1812 that several of the texts were “still in the poet’s brain,” needing much attention and reflection 1 I use the term “arrangement” for Haydn’s and Beethoven’s work, though Cooper finds it belittling. Thomson specified that all these should be for piano, violin, and cello, though he recognized later that the strings complicated performances at home. Beethoven paid little attention to the strings and separated the piano more clearly from the voice than Pleyel and Haydn (Cooper, 1994: 108). Thomson accepted independent piano parts, but requested that Beethoven introduce the melody on the piano as well (144). 2 On Beethoven’s cooperation with Thomson, see Cooper, Hufstader, McCue (2006), MacArdle (1956), and Weber-Bockholdt (1994).

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b­ efore they could be united with the music (Cooper, 1994: 73). Later he provided Beethoven with French summaries (76–77, 79, 85, 87). Beethoven continued to arrange songs from the British Isles until 1820, and Thomson published 126 of them.3 As he wrote to Beethoven, he was “ravished” by his ritornellos and accompaniments, but he added: “my dear sir, there are some which are much too difficult for our public. It is a fact that not one young lady in a hundred here will even look at the accompaniment of an air, if it is the least bit difficult” (17). Hence, Thomson repeatedly requested simplifications.4 Because of their difficulty, and perhaps for other reasons as well, Beethoven’s arrangements did not sell well, and Thomson finally stopped sending melodies to him. As he wrote on August 29, 1821 to William Smyth: I have no expectation of ever receiving any benefit from what Beethoven has done for me. He composes for posterity; I hoped that his gigantic genius would bend and accommodate itself to the simple character of national Melodies, but in general, he has been too learned and eccentric for my purpose; and all my gold ducats, about 700 of them, have been thrown away, besides the expense of engraving, printing, and paper! cooper, 1994: 43

Carl Maria von Weber also arranged for Thomson ten Scottish songs, which were published in 1826, simultaneously with a German version titled Schottische National-Gesänge. In this case, two sets of contrasting texts exist: Thomson’s texts included five poems by Robert Burns and one by Walter Scott, whereas the German publisher Probst commissioned minor German poets. May hybrid mixtures like Beethoven’s arrangements still be called folk songs? Barry Cooper acknowledges the problem but keeps the term, while Petra Weber-Bockholdt (1994) seems to follow Dahlhaus by regarding the term inappropriate. In any case, these airs or songs do not follow the “Ossianic” search for a lost authentic national tradition, and they seldom exude a nationalistic spirit.

3 Cooper, 1994: 8–9. All but one of these groups of arrangements are without an opus number and are listed as “Werke ohne Opuszahl” (WoO) 152–158 in Beethoven’s oeuvre. The volume published as 25 Scottish Songs (1818) was republished by Schlesinger in Berlin with Beethoven’s supervision, and became Opus 108. 4 Cooper, 1994: 126–129. Most of Thomson’s correspondence with poets and composers is preserved in the British Library Add. mss 35263–9. Beethoven’s correspondence with Thomson and Schlesinger is listed in Cooper (1994: 240–243).

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Thomson sent no texts to Haydn and Beethoven because he thought that they would not understand them and because he usually did not yet have the newly commissioned poems in his hands. Once the title-based music arrangements arrived, Thomson usually proceeded to replace the original texts with new commissioned ones. In most cases, it is unclear when and how exactly he merged the new texts with the arranged melodies (Cooper, 1994: 69, 72–73). Since the arrangements and the texts were new, only the melodies could be called original, and even their originality was questionable: they belonged to an oral-performative tradition that frequently circulated in different versions across the ethnic borders of the British Isles, effectively de-nationalizing them. This did not bother Beethoven, who regarded them all Scottish because they came from an Edinburgh publisher. On January 1, 1816, shortly after Karadžić’s first publications and Jacob Grimm’s enthusiastic reaction to them, Thomson asked Beethoven to arrange two-three songs each from Germany, Poland, Russia, Tyrol, Venice, Spain, and other possible countries, with “purely national melodies, stamped with the musical character of each country” (Cooper, 1994: 25). Accordingly, Beethoven sent him within a few months eighteen continental songs and later additional ones (26–27). He did not submit Serbian arrangements and was in all likelihood ignorant of Vuk’s activity in Vienna, and unaware also of the reception of his songs by Jacob Grimm, Goethe, and others. Thomson could not find suitable modern texts for these continental melodies and opted out. As he wrote on October 20, 1816 to Beethoven, he had to abandon his design “because the measure and the singular style of them suit neither the form nor the genius of English poetry. The efforts of our poets to fit English verses to them have been all in vain” (78). He still asked William Smyth to write verses for continental poems, but Smyth also gave up in 1818. Beethoven went ahead and arranged, nevertheless, further continental songs, and even looked for publishers for them in 1820, but almost all of them were published only in the twentieth century. The case of “The Return to Ulster” from the Select Collection of Original Irish Airs exemplifies how Thomson’s unfathomable editorial work married an original Irish text and tune with Beethoven’s arrangement and Walter Scott’s new poem. “The Return to Ulster” Once again, but how chang’d since my wanderings began I have heard the deep voice of the Lagan and Bann,

Contrafacts from the British Isles

And the pines of Clanbrasil resound to the roar That wearies the echoes of fair Tullamore. Alas! My poor bosom, and why shouldst thou burn! With the scenes of my youth can its raptures return? Can I live the dear life of delusion again, That flow’d when these echoes first mix’d with my strain? It was then that around me, though poor and unknown, High spells of mysterious enchantment were thrown; The streams were of silver, of diamond the dew, The land was an Eden, for fancy was new. I had heard of our bards, and my soul was on fire At the rush of their verse, and the sweep of their lyre: To me ’twas not legend, nor tale to the ear, But a vision of noontide, distinguish’d and clear. Ultonia’s old heroes awoke at the call; and renew’d the wild pomp of the chace and the hall; and the standard of Fion flash’d fierce from on high, like a burst of the sun when the tempest is nigh. It seem’d that the harp of green Erin once more could renew all the glories she boasted of yore. Yet why at remembrance, fond heart, shouldst burn? They were days of the delusion, and cannot return. But was she, too, a phantom, the maid who stood by, And listed my lay, while she turn’d from mine eye? Was she, too, a vision, just glancing to view, Then dispers’d in the sun-beam, or melted to dew? Oh! would it had been so, – O would that her eye Had been but a star-glance that shot through the sky, And her voice, that was moulded to melody’s thrill, Had been but a zephyr that sigh’d and was still. Oh! would it had been so, – not then this poor heart Had learn’d the sad lesson, to love and to part; To bear, unassisted, its burthen of care, While I toil’d for the wealth I had no one to share. Not then had I said, when life’s summer was done,

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Illustration 11.1 Carolan, the celebrated Irish bard, engraving by J. Robins

And the hours of her autumn were fast speeding on, “Take the fame and the riches ye brought in your train, “and restore me the dream of my spring-tide again.” thomas, 1814: 1–5

In this case, Thomson acknowledged the original text and melody were “Lament for Terence MacDonough,” an Irish elegy upon the death of a distinguished gentleman from Co. Sligo, written and composed in 1713 by the blind Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670–1738); O’Carolan was proverbially known from the mid-eighteenth century on as the “last of the bards,” and celebrated both for his virtuosity and his command of a declining musical tradition (O’Sullivan 1958; for the Beethoven connection: Hufstader, 1959: 349–350). The English translation opens as follows: Lament for Terence MacDonough My heart is sorely saddened, and there’s no joy in my voice, And there is no passion in my love because of your death, young Terence!

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High prince of jewels, whose excellence is known in all quarters, And since I heard of your death there’s no champion of mine living! O upright pillar of every province who commanded each court, Every action of legal sophistry disposed, If the new king knew of the testimony of your fame, The crushing sick difficulty of your absence would him becloud. The harpist O’Carolan (Illustration 11.1), often regarded as Ireland’s national composer, differed from the gusla-playing blind native informants of Karadžić: instead of reworking a native oral tradition, he composed a new tune and wrote a new poem. However, he relied on a broad European literary and musical tradition, for he was friends with Swift, and his tunes reworked music by Vivaldi, Corelli, and Geminiani. Thomson discarded O’Carolan’s text in order to wed Scott’s poem a-posteriori to Beethoven’s arrangement.5 The beginning of the new combination looks as follows in the German edition (Illustration  11.2): How precisely this combination came about is an intriguing puzzle. We only know the original song, O’Carolan’s “Lament,” and the final merger of Beethoven’s music with Scott’s poem. However, the melody in Beethoven’s arrangement is not identical with O’Carolan’s recorded version, and since he was usually faithful to the melodies sent to him we cannot be sure what exactly he received from Thomson. Neither do we know whether Thomson sent to Beethoven O’Carolan’s original title, “Lament for Terence MacDonough,” or Scott’s title for the poem in the making. Cooper, a Beethoven scholar, assumes that Thomson sent the composer Scott’s title and he considers Beethoven’s arrangement “felicitous”: “the poet, on returning to the scene of his youth, laments the loss of the rapture and love that formerly accompanied those scenes. Beethoven’s setting is suitably gloomy, with a throbbing bass accompaniment, sighing motifs in the prelude, and an oppressive F minor” (1994: 88).6 Had Beethoven worked with the title “Lament for Terence MacDonough,” a “gloomy” arrangement would have been even more felicitous.

5 Thomson obtained most of the Irish melodies from a Dr. J. Latham in Cork, who sent him a substantial supply of Irish melodies about 1802–1805 (Cooper, 1994: 65; Hufstader, 1959: 354). However, O’Carolan’s “Lament” was published in Edward Bunting’s collection The Ancient Music of Ireland (1796). I found the text and the score of O’Carolan’s poem on 25-07-2013 at the website www.irishpage.com/songs/carolan/terynote.htm. The music is reproduced from O’Sullivan 1958: 284. 6 Cooper (1994: 155) also notes “irregularities”: “minor with b7 (and some #6).”

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Illustration 11.2 Beethoven, Irische Lieder nr 1: “Heimkehr nach Ulster”

The lyrical “I” of Scott’s poem return to Ulster and is therefore Irish, presumably because it was to be part of a collection of Irish Airs. Since the final product brings together a Scottish author, an Irish lyrical “I,” and a Viennese composer, nothing survives of the original sentiments. Furthermore, the lament in Scott’s

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poem upon returning to Ulster does not concern a real, d­ eceased person, but his lost heroic dreams and first love. Thomson seems to have missed the poem’s mood when he thanked Scott for his extremely likable Irish song, whose every line “breathes the delightful enthusiasm of joys that are past in the happiest manner” (Scott, 1932–37, iii: 24). Did he understand the concluding lines, which convey that the despairing aged man would gladly give up fame and riches if only he could start all over again with the maiden whom he so rudely left behind? Thomson actually commissioned the poem without telling Scott which composer he had asked (or planned to ask) to compose the music. As Paul Barnaby at the Scott Archives in Edinburgh kindly told me, the correspondence between Scott and Thomson is silent about the matter. Since Scott sent off the poem on November 28, 1811, it must have reached Thomson well before Beethoven’s music finally overcame Napoleon’s continental boycott.7

Byron on Jordan’s Banks

In May 1813, The Gentleman’s Magazine announced not only the Beethoven volume of Irish Melodies but also that a certain Isaac Nathan “is about to publish ‘Hebrew Melodies all of them upwards of 1000 years old and some of them performed by the Antient Hebrews before the destruction of the Temple’” (Ashton, 1972: 5). Thus, Nathan wanted to enter the national song market with music that was original rather than bastardized. Like Macpherson, he intended to revive a genuine and original national poetry. Who was Nathan and what happened to his quest for ancient authenticity? Well before Thomson got into the national song business, Domenico Corri, an Italian composer, singing master, and publisher had published in London A Select Collection of most favourite Scots Songs (1780). Corri became the teacher and mentor of the young Jewish Nathan, and his Scottish collection may have suggested to Nathan the project of Hebrew songs. Nathan adopted Thompson’s strategy of asking a respected contemporary poet to provide new texts, but his announcement indicates that he hoped to revive a genuine ancient music that was not modified by a Haydn or a Beethoven.

7 Scott wrote “I send you the prima cura of the Irish song, reserving corrections till I know how you like it and how it suits the music. I am apt to write eleven instead of twelve syllables in this measure, which does well enough for metrical rhythm, but not for musical. The foot can easily be supplied where omitted” (Scott, 1932–37, iii: 24).

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When Walter Scott turned Nathan down, the composer approached Byron, who had actually just declined to work with Thomson.8 Byron did not even respond, but, when Douglas Kinnaird, his friend and later financier, asked him to help Nathan, he sent the composer five poems, of which only one had a Jewish theme.9 Nathan set the poems to music within four days, and Byron was so deeply impressed by them that he started an intense cooperation with the upstart composer that finally yielded the two-volume Hebrew Melodies (1815–1816). Byron was probably most taken by Nathan’s setting of his “She walks in beauty,” which became, indeed, the most popular song of the collection. Inspiration for the poem was not the Bible, but Anne Wilmot’s beauty at a party, which enchanted Byron so much that he jotted down the following verses as soon as he got home: She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. Nathan found a brilliant solution by adapting the text to a melody of the Hebrew liturgical text “Lekha dodi” (Come my Beloved). Still used in the synagogues on Fridays, “Lekha dodi” asks a mysterious “beloved” to welcome the Shabbat, called “bride”: “Let’s go, my beloved, to meet the bride, / and let us welcome the presence of Shabbat.” Inviting a beloved to meet an allegorical bride heightens the adoration for Byron’s walking beauty – at least for those familiar with the “Lekha dodi,” which serves only as a silent foil of Nathan’s song.

8 Scott visited later Nathan with his daughter, and seemed to have liked his music (Burwick and Douglass, 1988: 10). Encouraged by this, Nathan approached him once more on November 22, 1815 with a request to write poems to Polish melodies that he recently received (Slater, 1952: 88). The project did not materialize. 9 Thomson humbly approached Byron on July 10, 1812 to write poems for national songs, and when he received no answer he sent him on September 22, 1812 five Irish melodies. Byron declined on September 10, 1813, claiming that he was unhappy with his attempts; Robert Burns and Thomas Moore were difficult to imitate (Ashton, 1972: 11–12). Thereupon, Thomson selected three Byron poems (“The Kiss, Dear Maid, thy Lip has left,” “O, had my Fate been join’d,” and “Lochnagar”) and “married” them to the Beethoven arrangements published in 1816 and 1818 (Cooper, 1994: 70, 80–81).

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Where did the Hebrew liturgical text and its melody come from? Commentators point to Lekhah Dodi, a liturgical song on words written in the Ottoman city of Edirne by the sixteenth-century cabbalist Rabi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz.: Come in peace, crown of her husband, Both in happiness and in jubilation Amidst the faithful of the treasured nation Come O Bride! Come O Bride! cf. adler & cohen, 1901–06

If the Alkabetz poem is erotically tinted, its history is outright polygamous. Ashkenazy cantors could not resist the poem’s lure, and most of them tried to provide at least one musical setting for it (Sendrey, 1970: 192f). The champion seems to be with more than twenty settings the cantor Isaac Juda Eberscht of Offenbach, the father of Jacques Offenbach. “Lekha Dodi” has, then, a stupendous variety of settings, none of which is “original” or “authentic.” Nathan’s adaptation seems to be the only evidence to indicate which adaptation of “Lekha Dodi” was sung in the London synagogues of his time. Unfortunately, Byron’s friend Kinnaird was vexed at the fact that Nathan’s tunes could not be traced back to the biblical times. He vetoed the inclusion of an essay by Robert Harding Evans on the music of the Hebrews, and wrote himself a terse Preface that Nathan and his co-author, the singer John Braham, were obliged to sign: [The Hebrew Melodies] are a selection from the favourite Airs which are still sung in the religious Ceremonies of the Jews. Some of these have, in common with all their Sacred Airs, been preserved by memory and tradition alone, without the assistance of written characters. Their age and originality, therefore, must be left to conjecture. But the latitude given to the taste and genius of their performers has been the means of engrafting on the original Melodies a certain wildness and pathos, which have at length become the chief characteristics of the Sacred Songs of the Jews. ashton, 1972: 123

Kinnaird’s phrase “orality dominates in the absence of writing” probably meant to emphasize John Braham’s contributions to the Hebrew Melodies. Braham, a converted Jew, a friend of Nathan, and England’s most celebrated tenor at the time, gave public and private performances of the Hebrew Melodies that were enthusiastically received. For this and more he was named co-author on the title page of the collection and received half of the royalties. Scholars have been

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divided on Braham’s contribution. Some believe that he was only included to enhance the commercial success, but I tend to side with those who claim that Braham did contribute to the shaping of the music through embellishments, which were both fashionable virtuoso phrases and adaptations of intoned recitation (cantillation) in Jewish liturgical practice. The gliding vocal lines helped to attenuate conflicts between the textual and musical accents. Nathan himself held that singers ought to smooth over such discrepancies. Once Byron committed himself to the project, he studied the Bible and wrote poems relating to various biblical figures and, above all, to the Jewish diaspora. His poems emerge from a Diaspora that could be overcome only by means of a real or imaginary reassembly at the site of origin. The Hebrew Melodies lament a double absence from that site: God has disappeared and the Jews are in exile. The Jewish yearning to return from the Diaspora correlates with prayers for the return of a deus absconditus, a God that has absented itself from his chosen people and land. The theme is central in five of the twentysix original melodies, three of which are based on Psalm 137, titled “Ballad of the Exiles.” In this Psalm, the Jews in Babylonian captivity swear never to obey their captors to sing “hymns of Zion.” It ends with shocking lines that acquire new associations with the Israel-Palestinian wars: Destructive Daughter of Babel, a blessing on the man who treats you as you have treated us, a blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies against the rock! As Slater remarks, nationalism rather than religion “is the burden of even those stories which Byron retold from the Old Testament” (1952: 89). Nathan linked Byron’s poetry about Jews in Diaspora to his later engagement for Greece, and he saw both as evidence of an ardent love of liberty that influenced all of Byron’s actions (Nathan, 1829: 28). Indeed, the philo-Semitism of the Hebrew Melodies agrees with Byron’s later Philhellenism, and the poems inspired by these sympathies link up with the East- and South- European poetry that furthered national liberation movements. However, Byron’s abstract love of liberty did not imply love of Greeks and Jews. As he remarked to James Kennedy: “I love the cause of liberty, which is that of the Greek nation, although I despise the present race of the Greeks. … I am nearly reconciled to St. Paul, for he says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am equally of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile”

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(Slater, 1952: 92). Implying that there are no permanent national characters, Byron draws a sharp line here between the Greeks and Jews of his own world and their classical and Biblical forefathers. The following song shows that his text identified much more directly with the Jews in Diaspora than the hybrid music that Nathan copied from the synagogues of his time. “On Jordan’s Banks” On Jordan’s Banks the Arab camels stray, On Sion’s hill the False One’s votaries pray, The Baal-adorer bows on Sinai’s steep – Yet there – even there – Oh God! Thy thunders sleep: There – where thy finger scorched the tablet stone! There – where thy shadow to thy people shone! Thy glory shrouded in its garb of fire: Thyself – none living see and not expire! Oh! In the lightning let thy glance appear! Sweep from his shivered hand the oppressor’s spear: How long by tyrants shall thy land be trod? How long thy temple worshipless, Oh God? Nathan set this Diaspora poem to the well-known melody of the Chanukah song “Ma’oz tzur” (My Rock of Salvation), whose lyrics address God as “My refuge my rock of salvation!” and retell the Egyptian, Babylonian, Hellenic, and Roman subjugation of the Jews, climaxing in a call to destroy the latest captors: O bare Your holy arm, And hasten the time of salvation. Wreak vengeance upon the wicked nation, On behalf of your faithful servants. For deliverance has too long been delayed; And the evil days are endless. O thrust the enemy into the shadows of death. The text of “On Jordan’s banks” resembles the lament and the prayer of “Ma’oz tzur” so well that I am tempted to speculate that Nathan may have shown the Chanukah poem to Byron in October 1814, during the most intense period of their cooperation. Be that as it may, it has meanwhile become generally

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a­ ccepted that Nathan was the first to adapt the Chanukah song for non-­ liturgical purposes. He did not know, however, that the “Ma’oz tzur” melody had a rich non-Jewish musical ancestry. Research has meanwhile identified three sources of the melody. The first four measures are identical with the music of Luther’s “Nun freut euch liebe Christen gmein.” As recently discovered, Luther’s music is, in turn, based on fifteenth-century Bohemian secular motives, which allows the Israeli musicologist Hanoch Avenary to sigh with relief that Luther no longer ignites the Chanukah candles (1979: 177). The Bohemian ancestry reveals an important Reformation strategy: Luther and his colleagues imposed new texts on popular secular melodies in order to popularize the new faith. The tune of Nathan’s first four measures has thus a triple contrafactual history: Luther sought wide acceptance by using popular melodies, English synagogues turned Luther’s melody into a contrafactual “Ma’oz tzur,” and Nathan produced from this another contrafact by means of Byron’s poem. The second source tune is a rather uninteresting reference to Emperor Maximilian, but the third one is identical to the melody of the popular German song “Ich weiss mir ein Meidlein huebsch und fein” (I know a girl neat and fine) with the refrain “Huet Du dich, vertrau ihr nicht, sie narret Dich, sie narret Dich” (Beware, don’t trust her, she fools you, she fools you).10 The Chanukah participants trust in God as their rock, but a subtext of the tune distrusts a flippant girl, who fools you. The subtext undermines trust in God with non-trusting and sexual frivolity. Would Nathan have chosen the tune had he known of these subversive antecedents? The Hebrew Melodies sold more than 10,000 copies and hence was much more successful than Thomson’s Irish and Scottish volumes. Thomson’s own reaction was divided. He sent in a letter to Byron three Welsh melodies with Beethoven arrangements without verses and he praised Byron’s poems as “diamonds of the first water,” but to William Smyth he wrote that he thought very little of the music: With the exception of one or two melodies they do not appear to me at all worthy of Byron’s verses. To some of the melodies, indeed, it is scarcely practicable to sing the words with any effect whatever. The latter do not

10

The song was written by Orlando di Lasso and Caspar Othmayr (1515–1553), who is now regarded as one of the most important German composers of the forst half of the sixteenth century. Othmayrs song is published separately but also included in the volume Reutterische und Jegerische Liedlein (1549).

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seem to have least affinity with the former, and their union confounds measure, rhythm, sense, and everything belonging to a good song. In short Jew and Christian could not possibly agree worse. slater, 1952: 85; based on hadden, 1898: 193

Indeed, the accents of these poems frequently clash with the musical accents. Even the very well-disposed editors of the facsimile edition of the Melodies admit, for instance, that the musical phrasing of the first line in the above poem separates the Arabs from their camels (Burwick and Douglass, 1988: 13), but they exonerate Nathan by noting that any alteration of Luther’s chorale would have upset the Christian listeners. Did Nathan respect the Lutheran song more than the Chanukah tradition? I wonder. More disturbing than these aesthetic issues were the anti-Semitic receptions and the questions raised by Kinnaird, Thomas Moore and others, asking why Byron sympathized with the Jews. (Slater, 1952: 82–85). The poet responded smilingly: he had earlier been called an infidel, and now he will be labeled a Jew – but he would not have liked this. A few days after the second volume of the Hebrew Melodies was published in April 1816, Byron divorced his wife and left England for good. He was touched when Nathan sent him as a farewell some “motzas” (Nathan, 1829: 89–90). In Switzerland, he soon started to write Manfred, whose musical transmediation by Schumann he no longer lived to hear. After adventurous years and final bankruptcy, Nathan also left England in 1841 to settle in Australia, where he continued to pursue authenticity by collecting aboriginal music. He wrote several unsuccessful operas and was so intensely involved in furthering Australian musical life that Charles Bertie has called him Australia’s First Composer (1922). His descendants include the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who pursued authentic performance practices, and a certain Harry Nathan, who patented a musical setting of “Waltzing Matilda,” Australia’s unofficial national anthem. The authenticity and pre-history of that waltz is as contested as that of the music for the Hebrew Melodies.

Schumann as Saul

The musico-textual partners of the Hebrew Melodies did not formally divorce, because Nathan’s music was silently interred soon after the songs were published. The Hebrew Melodies became known as poems, and even leading scholars neglected Nathan’s and Braham’s music. Leslie Marchand’s celebrated

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three-volume Byron biography (1957) mentions Nathan four times and Braham twice. Thomas Ashton’s critical edition of the Hebrew Melodies prints only the lyrics and mentions Nathan only in reference to Byron’s biography. The resurrection of Nathan’s music was initiated by Burwick’s and Douglass’s excellent introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the original edition in 1988. However, the obliteration of Nathan’s music widowed Byron’s poems only briefly. They were translated into German by Franz Theremin (1820), Julius Körner (1821), Andreas Kretzschmer (with music, 1822), Adolph Böttger (1841), and Otto Gildemeister (1864); and these translations spawned new musical settings by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Loewe, who produced a two-volume collection.11 They had to compete with Nathan’s music, which rose from its ashes in Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei (Op. 47; 1881) and three Hebräische Gesänge (no opus number; 1888) for chorus, orchestra, and organ (see Lichtenstein, 1996). Schumann’s song “Mein Herz ist schwer” (subtitled “Aus den hebräischen Gesängen,” which is nr. 15 in the Myrthen cycle, Op. 25), was a product of the composer’s Liederjahr (1840). In that year, he also composed the cycles Liederkreis (to Eichendorff poems), Frauenliebe und Leben (to Chamisso poems), Dichterliebe (to Heine poems), and four volumes of the Romanzen & Balladen (Op. 45). Schumann thought that the Lied was perhaps “the only genre in which truly significant progress has occurred since Beethoven” (Schumann, 1854, ii: 147), but he did not consider Schubert as its pioneer. What we observe here is Schumann’s personal turn from instrumental music (mostly piano) to vocal music. Schumann’s “Mein Herz ist schwer” is based on the Julius Körner translation, published by the composer’s family. The text is one of Byron’s three adaptations of Saul’s biblical laments. Whether Schumann was aware of, perhaps even familiar with, Nathan’s setting of Byron’s “My Soul is Dark” is unclear. It is one of Nathan’s weaker settings, adapted from a Passover tune that he first also used in setting “Oh Weep for Those,” which was among the five poems that Byron first sent him. 11

Loewe’s two volumes included “Herodes’ Klage um Mariamne,” “An den Wassern zu Babel,” “An Babylons Wassern gefangen,” “Wär’ ich wirklich so falsch?,” “Alles ist eitel, spricht der Prediger,” “Es waren Ruhm und Weisheit mein,” “Todtenklage,” “Thränen und Lächeln,” “Sie geht in Schönheit,” “Jephta’s Tochter,” “Soll nach des Volkes und nach Gottes Willen,” “Die wilde Gazelle,” “Weint um Israel,” “Mein Geist Ist Trüb?,” “Mein Geist Ist Trüb: Den Ton Der Saiten,” “Saul vor seiner letzten Schlacht.” A.B. Marx reviewed the two volumes in the bamz (4: 157–158 and 6: 2–3). Mendelssohn composed music to his own translation of “Sun of the Sleepless.”

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Mein Herz ist schwer Mein Herz ist schwer! Auf! Von der Wand die Laute,Nur sie allein mag ich noch hören; Entlocke mit geschickter Hand Ihr Töne, die das Herz betören. Kann noch mein Herz ein Hoffen nähren, Es zaubern diese Töne her, Und birgt mein trocknes Auge Zähren, Sie fließen, und mich brennt’s nicht mehr!

My Soul is Dark My soul is dark – Oh quickly string The harp I yet can brook to hear; And let thy gentle fingers fling Its melting murmurs o’ver mine ear. – If in this heart a hope is dear, That sound shall charm it forth again – If in these eyes there lurk a tear ’t Will flow – and cease to burn my brain –

Nur tief sei, wild der Töne Fluß, Und von der Freude weggekehret! Ja, Sänger, daß ich weinen muß, Sonst wird das schwere Herz verzehret! Denn sieh! Von Kummer ward’s genähret, Mit stummem Wachen trug es lang, Und jetzt vom Äußersten belehret, Da brech’ es oder heil’ im Sang.

But bid the strain be wild and deep, Nor let thy notes of joy be first – I tell thee – Minstrel! I must weep, Or else this heavy heart will burst – For it has been by sorrow nurst And ached in sleepless silence long – And now ‘tis doom‘d to know the worst And break at once – or yield a song.

“Oh Weep for Those,” whose melody Nathan adopted from the same source, is a “proto-Zionist” poem mourning for the homeless Jews. But neither the original English nor this German translation reveals that this is Saul’s biblical lament, and it remains unclear whether the person engages in an internal dialogue or addresses a companion (David). As Nathan wrote in his Fugitive Pieces: “When the evil spirit of the Lord came upon Saul, he had recourse to the charms of music for the removal of the malady, and Lord Byron in this melody paints the effects of music as producing a species of joy emerging from melancholy” (1829: 37). Without this comment, the poem may be read as a psychological drama consisting of a secular depression and its potential healing by means of music – an experience that Schumann so frequently encountered. No communal, historical, or religious issues manifest themselves here. Schumann returned to song composition in 1846–47 with a different orientation. He no longer focused on solo voices, partly because he was concerned with the general social and political tendencies related to folk and community.

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The new orientation is evident in his Burns-Lieder Op. 55 (1846), which use a choir. According to Edler, the late Schumann considered ballads and oratorios the best for turning directly to the folk (2008: 243–244). What general ideas do these few but important cases suggest? All of them, especially the Hebrew Melodies raise, first of all, the question of authenticity. While this was no primary aim of Thomson’s or Schumann’s songs, it was originally the explicit goal of Nathan’s project that misfired. Nineteenth-century scholars could identify only six liturgical sources for the Hebrew Melodies, but Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, the father of Jewish ethnomusicology, discovered in the early twentieth century the sources of several other Nathan melodies in the English synagogue practice (1929). It is this practice, rather than Nathan’s music itself, which has raised new questions of authenticity, for the Ashkenazy tradition of most English synagogues had been more open than the more self-enclosed Sephardic one, and it absorbed material from divergent cultures. Some Jewish musicologists have come to regard much of it as “corrupted,” a ragbag of Jewish, Christian, and secular material. Should then certain musical traditions be protected like historical monuments, as Avenary suggests when he criticizes corrupting modes of singing the “Ma’oz tzur”? I, for one, am suspicious of measures to keep the purity of music, language, culture, or race. The impure English synagogue praxis has its own value and it immensely widened the interpretive radius of the Hebrew Melodies by means of associations, combinations, and subtexts. Far from regarding these combinations as so many “corruptions” of an imaginary “clean” ancestor, I read them as enrichments of the Hebrew Melodies. “Nomadic” melodies entered into ever-new partnerships with texts. As in the case of “On Jordan’s banks,” marriages between verse and melody often ended in divorce when the partners encountered new counterparts. In the absence of a stable home, texts and melodies float in an artistic Diaspora that encourages new adaptive partnerships. Thanks to Nathan’s music, we can now hear how countless melodies and poems resonate in the Hebrew Melodies. What we observe here may be best characterized by a passage from Wilhelm Tappert, one of the earliest Darwinian musicologists in Germany, who suggested that melodies are the most “indefatigable globetrotters”: They cross roaring streams, pass the Alps, surface on the other side of the ocean, and lead a nomad life in the desert. … Given the truly human interest for everything foreign, some melodic Cinderella will be held in high honor far from her homeland, or they become, perhaps, a patriotic song, a national hymn whose sounds unfailingly exert most arousing effects. The vagabonds often return home somewhat laced, masked, and

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reshaped, and they live a new and glittering life as “imports” in their old home. After all, there is no music police that would ask for a birth certificate and a testimonial on moral conduct. tappert, 1889: 7

Of course, melodies are scrutinized today as to plagiarism, but the mutations they undergo are usually sufficient to escape law suits. Melodies today still live a life that poetry used to live in Homer’s time, until the arrival of writing, and this is why Parry went to record Serbian folk singing. The melodies he recorded may have been usually quite different from those that Vuk wrote up, but the process of orality was similar. In the early nineteenth century, interest in oral traditions revived, but the results of that interest led quite different results in Serbia and the British Isles. In the former, search for authenticity was the primary motive, while in the British Isles this was only the case with Nathan’s original plan. Counterfacts prevailed.

chapter 12

Vernacular Operas The Germans, Spaniards, and English used to claim for a long time that they have a music that suits their language: they actually had national operas that they admired in good faith. They were firmly convinced that they would damage their glory if they allowed abolishing these masterworks – which sounded unbearable to all ears but their own. Finally, however, pleasure won over vanity, or, at least, they were able to give the matter a sensible turn by allowing taste and reason to sacrifice the prejudices that often make nations ridiculous due to the matter of honor they attach to them. rousseau, [1753] 1979: 257–258

∵ Unbearable German, Spanish, and English national operas that were finally given up to avoid being ridiculous? Who is speaking here? When? And what concrete national operas are meant? One is inclined to ascribe the statement to a nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer, since by common consent the term was introduced Europe-wide in connection with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar. But who in the later nineteenth century would dare to call national ­operas “unbearable” to all ears except to the members of that nation itself? If we take a step backward and affix the term “national opera” to the earlier struggle to create a German national opera we are no better off, for, to my knowledge, nobody dared to look in such negative terms at national operas in and around the Napoleonic wars. We have to take yet another historical step backward to find the author, namely Jean Jacques Rousseau. Indeed, a moment of reflection allows us to place the passage in his attack on French music and language in the “Lettre sur la musique françoise” (1753), though it is still a puzzle which abandoned German, Spanish, and English national operas he meant. No matter how we resolve this puzzle, Rousseau’s use of the notion “national opera” triggers reflections about the historical applicability of the term. Is it not too restrictive to apply it only from the nineteenth century onward? In this chapter, I shall look at the history of opera in terms of three major confrontations about introducing vernacular operas:

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1) 2)

The Parisian Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s The attempt of Emperor Joseph ii to launch German singspiels in ­Vienna, and 3) The announcement of the Viennese Opera Directory in 1812 to offer awards for German comic and dramatic librettos. This all but forgotten event occasioned Kopitar’s ideas about libretti in Slavic languages. We have to note one important distinction between the political foundations of folk songs and operas. I have divided the folk music revivals into national and ethnic ones. The national ones took place in fragmented or subjugated countries like Germany and the East-Central European countries. I have included here also Italy because it was subjugated and divided until 1861. It had one of the richest folk-song treasuries, but only a vanishingly small fraction of it called for a rally against Austria. This was different in the field of the opera, for several Italian operas allegorically thematized subjugation and liberation. They include Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto (1818), his Guillaume Tell (1829), Verdi’s Nabucco (1842), and many other Italian operas that portrayed despicable tyrants.1 Curiously, such direct or indirect calls for Italian political liberation were so popular all over Europe that they tended to thwart attempts to create vernacular operas elsewhere. The first great nationalist pamphlet war about vernacular operas was the famous Querelle des Bouffons, which burst on the Parisian scene when Pergolesi’s La serva padrona was staged on August 1, 1752 by an Italian touring company at the Royal Academy of Music. Supporters of the French tragédie lyrique, symbolically assembled in the “Queen’s Corner,” battled against Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Diderot, Rousseau and admirers of Pergolesi and the Italian opera buffa in the “King’s Corner.” For the people in the Queen’s corner, defending a French genre against an intruder from outside was a national issue. Lully, the founder of the tragédie lyrique, may have been Italian born, but he was the court composer of Louis xiv and he cooperated with the classic French playwright Philippe Quinault to compose operas with the twelve-syllable ­Alexandrine for the arias and ten-syllable heroic lines for the recitatives. Lully considered the Italian style inappropriate for the French language, and did not follow the Italian strict division into separate recitatives and arias. In sum, he gave greater attention to the spoken words than the Italians did. 1 This image of Verdi as the hero of the Risorgimento has been challenged by Parker (1997). Gossett, however, argues that it nonetheless “had a solid basis in history,” and, although the composer’s role in the national unification was not unique, it certainly was a very important musical contribution to the nationalist discourse. (2007: 232).

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In November 1753, Rousseau entered the Querelle with his “Lettre sur la musique françoise.” Anticipating his later essay on the origin of languages, he associated the national character of music with melody, which, in turn, he derived from the national language, especially its prosody ([1753] 1979: 261, 264). He regretted that French was a rational language for philosophers and wise men in pursuit of truth, and just for this reason, he found it ill suited for poetry and insufficient for music (254). The French are still unwilling to admit that the Italian language is the best basis for music (269). A detailed criticism of Lully’s aria “Enfin il est en ma puissance” from Armide (312–20) led to his ­famous conclusion: [there is] neither measure nor melody in French music because the language is not susceptible to them; that French singing is only continual barking, unbearable to all unprejudiced ears; that the harmony is brutal, without expression and feeling uniquely like schoolboys’ padding; that French arias are not arias; that French recitatives are no recitatives. Hence I conclude that the French have no music and can have none; or, if they should ever have one, that would be so much the worse for them. (318) The French language that Rousseau belittled here tongue in cheek against the dominant Italian became in Germany a major obstacle in developing vernacular operas. In the 1760s, Johann Adam Hiller started to write and stage in Leipzig singspiels in German, using spoken dialogues and orchestrated songs instead of the Italian secco-recitativo and de-capo arias. Frederick the Great preferred the French language, and the Berlin stages were dominated by French and Italian operas during his reign. Reichardt was appointed Chief Court Conductor in 1775 but was unable to make Berlin the home of the German singspiel. The “King’s corner” in Berlin was in this sense not patriotic but foreign-oriented. When Reichardt’s appointment ended in Berlin, he tried himself to breathe new life in German singspiels with Tieck, who actually disagreed with his view that comic operas had become tasteless and should be discarded. Reichardt wanted uninterrupted singing, whereas Tieck found speaking as important as singing, and tried to find a middle ground between a merely entertaining singspiel and a libretto in Carlo Gozzi’s fairy-tale style. Upon Reichardt’s request, Tieck wrote the fairytale libretto Das Ungeheuer und der verzauberte Wald, the chaotic plot of which tried to reconcile song and speech by staging characters that thematize the problems of the genre: the libretto set an “enlightened” ­opponent of singing against enchanted romantic figures that incessantly ­twitter. The ridiculous, indecisive, and confused king remained caught in the

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middle (Tieck, [1800] 1829: 149–150). Reichardt never composed music for this, and Tieck published the text separately in 1800. The language policy of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph ii, furthered the German language, and this led him, in contrast to Frederick the Great, to favor vernacular librettos. Joseph ii was as eager to hear German on the opera stage as he was insistent to see German in the chancellery documents. On February 17, 1776, he decreed that the Theater nächst der Burg (today Burgtheater) “shall be the court and national theatre; – that from now on nothing but good regular original works and highly thought-of translations from other languages shall be performed” (quoted in Manning, 1975: 31). He excluded from the program ballet (even the company of Noverre) and Italian opera buffa. From 1778 onward, the company of the national theater had to share the space with a newly established Nationalsingspiel, i.e. a national company that often performed one-act singspiels. All of the performed singspiels were in German, though many of them were translated. Die Bergknappen by Ignaz Umlauf, the conductor, became the opening opera. The program of the first year included several singspiels by Grétry. In the second season, 1779–80, all but one of the staged works were singspiels, but  most of them were adaptations from French, and some from Italian. In 1780–81, only two original German singspiels were performed. The nine new works of 1781–82 included three tragic singspiels by Gluck (two performed in Italian), and operas by Paisiello, Piccini, and Grétry. Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail had its first night on July 16, 1782 with great success. However, the public continued to prefer Italian opera buffa, and financial reasons led in 1783 to the dissolution of the Nationalsingsspiel. No independent company existed henceforth to perform only operas in German. No German opera was given at the Burgtheater until March 1785, the year when the actual Nationals­ ingspiel program was terminated. Vienna became the birthplace of German-language music theater, but the Emperor’s initiative failed. Mozart’s Don Giovanni with Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Italian libretto premiered in Prague’s Italian Teatro di Praga on October 29, 1787. Mozart’s Zauberflöte (first night on March 30, 1791) was produced in cooperation with Emanuel Schikaneder’s private commercial enterprise, the Theater auf der Wieden. Vienna did not produce additional important singspiels in the following decades. Mozart died in 1791, Haydn turned to symphonies and oratorios rather than operas, whereas Beethoven had a long and frustrating struggle to produce his only opera, Fidelio (first version 1805, final version 1814). As the popularity of mythical themes and settings dwindled, composers and librettists experimented with exotic librettos, often with Turkish settings, as in the case of Mozart’s Die Entführung. German singspiels with Turkish

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­settings included Gluck’s Le cadi dupé (Burgtheater, December 8, 1761), Haydn’s L’incontro improvisso (Esterháza 1775), Neefe’s Adelheid von Veltheim (1780), and André’s Barbier von Bagdad (Berlin, 1783). The line continued with Weber’s earliest work, Abu Hassan (1810). When the Napoleonic wars fueled German and Austrian nationalism, the Direction of the Viennese Opera was unhappy with such false “orientalism” and became more involved in stimulating a national German opera culture. It announced on March 22, 1812 in the Österreichischer Beobachter that it wanted to correct “an important deficiency in the dramatic art” and counter the charge that “the German opera seldom gives pleasure to the educated ones.” In order to save the honor of German genius and taste, operas had to be raised to the status of “the most perfect work of the performing arts.” The pivotal year of 1812 made this honorable enterprise apparently urgent, and the competitors were given only seven-month, until October 1812. The prizewinners of the German tragic and comic libretto competition were promised hundred ducats each. The tragic libretto was to be written in a “dignified language, and in pleasant verses that had a beautiful harmonic rhythm”. The text should not dominate the music but enter into a complete union with it. In contrast, the plot of the comic libretto was to be taken from the modern world in order to exemplify its morals. It was to be light in expression and verse, free of vulgarity, and was expected to switch to metered language whenever action was interrupted by expressions of feeling.2 An anonymous correspondent sarcastically asked in the Österreichischer Beobachter (April 10, issue nr. 101), what exactly “modern” meant and why the Direction wanted a “modern” comedy. An action in the present would present a problem, for the contemporary European-Christian costumes were dull, and comic operas (in distinction to comic plays) needed some glittering and unusual visual effects to compensate for the reduced role of language in musical staging. Librettists of comic operas would have to turn to the Turks, the Scottish Highlanders, the Indians, or the Chinese to escape from the dull swallowtails and court dresses of contemporary Western Europe.3 If the D ­ irection ­really 2 According to Kopitar, the deadline was extended in nr. 152 of the Österreichischer Beobachter (1812a: 533), but I could not find the announcement in this issue. 3 “Es ist allgemein anerkannt, dass unsere heutigen europäisch-christlichen Trachten wenig künstlerischen Werth haben, wenn man schon durch Einführung versilberter und vergoldeter Uniformen nachzuhelfen sucht … Die Oper aber unterscheidet sich von der Comödie durch starke Einmischung der Musik, wodurch die Illusion erschwert wird, weshalb man als Gegenwicht gern etwas mehr prunkendes, fremdartiges, und dem Auge-angenehmeres zulässt … Ein Mitbewerber um den ausgesetzten Preis, der dieses fühlt, wäre also bei den

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wanted to exclude libretti based on classical plays, or comedies by Molière and other modern playwrights, it should welcome treasures from the romantic fairy world, such as Cinderella, Bluebeard, and Richard the Lionhearted (Anonymous, 1812: 434). Kopitar intervened in this libretto discussion with a “Letter to the Editor” in the Deutsches Museum titled “Ueber die unmusikalische Beschaffenheit der deutschen Sprache” (About the Unmusicality of the German Language), in which he followed Rousseau’s argument in a German context. Even astronomically high awards would yield only German operas on the level of mediocre Italian ones, for the German language was unmusical and therefore unfit for operas. German words usually ended in consonants, often even in silent ones (Kopitar, 1812a: 533), which meant, as Kopitar cited Nina d’Aubigny von Engelbrunner, that a singer’s throat tires out with the turns and twists of the German words that terminate in “ch”s and “sch”s. The corresponding Italian words close with fully articulated vocals (534). Kopitar added in brackets that Italian would probably remain the language of singing in Western Europe, but Slavic and Greek would come forward in Eastern Europe. Hence, he responded to the anonymous correspondent that it was not necessary to go to Turkey, Scotland, India, or China to stage exoticism: Are there, next to Scottish Highlanders, not enough other Christians that wear no swallowtails? The Greeks, the Serbs and other South-Slavs, the Magyars, the Poles, and the Russians are all such no-swallowtails (Nicht­ fracks), and their histories are full of topics for operas (at least for the Opera Seria: for the Buffa these nations are, of course, too close to the beginnings of civilization)! Why does one not take recourse to these? (535)4 For Kopitar, the main issue was not scenic splendor but plot and, above all, acoustics. Friedrich Schlegel (dm 2.12: 536–545) defended the musicality of the German language, though he admitted that it sounded harsh due to its tendency ­erwähnten Einschränkungen genöthigt, zu den Türken, Bergschotten, Indianern und Chinesen zu flüchten, um den Fracks und Hofkleidern zu entgehen” (Anonymous, 1812: 434). 4 “Als gäbe es, außer den Bergschotten, nicht noch andere Christen genug, die keine Fracks tragen! Die Griechen, die Serbier und andere Südslaven, die Madjaren, die Polen und Russen sind lauter solche Nichtfracks, und ihre Geschichte voll von Opernsujets (wenigstens für die Opera Seria: für die Buffa stehen diese Nationen freylich noch zu nahe an dem Anfang der Civilisation)! Warum nimmt man nicht auch einmal zu diesen seine Zuflucht?” (Kopitar, 1812a: 535).

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towards brevity and its disregard for syllables and letters that were merely fillers (539). However, Schlegel claimed, hardness does not signify lack of musicality. After all, the highly musical Provençal Troubadour verses frequently ended in strong rhymes (540), and the softer minor scales were complemented by the harder major ones. German was simply a “major” rather than a “minor” type language (537). How could the highly musical German spirit speak an unmusical language (538)?5 Thus Schlegel, like Rousseau, weighed the vernacular against Italian, which was still the dominating musical language. However, Rousseau resolutely condemned the French language for its lack of musicality, whereas Schlegel, as we have seen, claimed that German was “hard” but not unmusical. He does not share Rousseau’s idea that the vernacular points towards some primeval model language that one ought to reconstruct: “Excluding lucky exceptions in folk songs,” everyday language has “much that is raw and ill sounding. To achieve higher musicality, each language has to undergo a careful selection and a many-sided formation” (543). He was against operatic combinations of German texts and Italian music (541), for he disliked the softness of Italian libretti. The German concept of opera, he thought, had been colored too much by Italian and other foreign models. German operas ought to have a pleasant German sound and should not follow Metastasio, who plucked the virile elements from the language.6 Schlegel believed that every musical language had its own rules for producing pleasant sounds (543), but he claimed he was a layperson to propose ways to use these sounds in writing and composing a German opera. Thus, he suggested consulting with Beethoven and the worthy successors of Mozart and Gluck (542). Not a bad idea, though judging from the birth pains in composing Fidelio Beethoven was not the best expert to consult! Kopitar and the anonymous correspondent were better in preparing the ground for vernacular operas, though they failed to see the potential of the comic genre. The correspondent anticipated the German romantic opera: 5 The German-Greek musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades points out in Musik und Sprache (1954) that musiké referred in classical Greece both to musical rhythm and to a language of fixed-length syllables. The fixed syllables were gradually abandoned in the modern languages in favor of accent-based structures. Like Schlegel, Georgiades considers the German language strongly accent based, but, contrary to Schlegel as well as Kopitar, he believes that just this distance of the German language from musiké has led to an intense German cultivation of music. 6 “Da wäre es nun die Frage, ob nicht schon unserm Begriff von einer Oper zu viel Italienisches und Fremdartiges beygemischt ist” (dm 2.12: 542); “Eine deutsche Oper müsse einen deutschen Wohllaut haben und dürfe nicht Metastasio folgen, der die männlichen Teile der Sprache ausrupfte” (dm 2.12: 544).

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­Hoffmann’s Undine (1816), based on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s romantic poem, had its highly successful first night four years later. Weber praised it as the first genuine German opera, and went on to compose his even more successful Der Freischütz (1821). The Slavic and East-European national operas that Kopitar advocated were launched only later, with Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836). Mistaken was only Kopitar’s parenthetical skepticism about EastEuropean comic operas. It was misplaced, because Kopitar forgot that the anonymous correspondent was not concerned with tragic operas, only with comic ones. It was mistaken, because this great advocate of folklore did not recognize that, next to history, folklore could also become a source of opera libretti (which is what the anonymous correspondent actually suggested). Kopitar was actually proven wrong by opera history, above all by Bedřich Smetana’s Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride, 1866), which emerged from a broad folkloric tradition. Schlegel had too little knowledge of East-European languages and cultures to respond to Kopitar’s proposal that one should encourage the composition of Slavic and Hungarian instead of German operas. However, the Deutsches Museum printed a poem that Caroline Pichler (dm 1.2: 101–106) dedicated to Ferenc Széchényi.7 It was on the famous fifteenth-century Hungarian military leader János Hunyady, father of the Renaissance King Matthias and László Hunyadi, about whom Erkel composed later his national opera. The journal also printed scenes from Körner’s melodrama Zriny (2.12: 515–521), whose migration reveals, as we shall see, the eclecticism of national operas. I have not succeeded in locating any reports about the results of the libretto competition, but, next to the mentioned publications in the Deutsches Muse­ um, there were at least two interesting reactions to it. The first is in Goethe’s letter to Zelter, dated May 19, 1812 from Karlsbad, which starts with a dialogue on text and music, based on the “Rinaldo” cantata text that Goethe had previously sent to Zelter for setting. Zelter was very pleased with it because the text left plenty of space for the musician. Goethe responded that librettos should offer blueprints, not final images. The Germans do not understand of these things, and yet hundreds of them want to try it. In contrast, we admire some Italian works, where poet, composer, singer, and stage designer (Dekorateur) all can come to an understanding of a technique of display. The new German operas 7 Pichler held prestigious receptions that Theodor Körner also frequented. Zamoyski calls her “egeria [female councelor] of the German romantic national movement and inventor of the dirndl” (2007: 304).

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c­ ollapse because of a shortage of appropriate texts, and the dear Viennese, who have no idea of how tackle the issue, set a prize of hundred ducats on the best opera. goethe, 1985–98, xx.1: 280

Indeed, Prince Joseph Lobkowitz asked Goethe on September 2, 1812 to chair the jury and recommend him two further jury members. When Goethe responded on October 7 with subdued enthusiasm without rejecting the proposal outright, Lobkowitz assured him he would send him only librettos that had a chance to win. Apparently, no such submissions came in, and the matter was dropped (XX.3: 292–293). Hoffmann recorded in his diary on April 23, 1812 the announcement of the Viennese competition (Hoffmann, 1971: 364–365; 1967–69, i: 334); noting also that the submissions ought to be sent to the Directorate of the Imperial Opera, to Prince Lobkowitz, who was then the Director of the Opera House. He must have reacted to the amz notice on April 29 (14: 305–306) of the announcement rather than to the original in the Österreichischer Beobachter. We do not know whether he really wanted to enter the competition, but his decision to write a new opera falls right in this period. In 1812 he read Friedrich de la Motte’s fairy tale “Undine,” contacted the writer via his friend Hitzig, and hearing from him that Motte-Fouqué wanted from him a detailed sketch, he sent it to him on August 15, 1812 with expressions of his greatest delight. The most important stage work that emerged from patriotic concerns was no opera but Theodor Körner’s melodrama Zriny, which I have briefly discussed in Chapter 7. Of particular interest here is that the drama designed to fuel Austrian patriotism in 1812 became in 1876 a vernacular Croatian opera. The transmutation of Körner’s play into a Croatian national opera was staged on November 4, 1876 under the title Nikola Šubić Zrinski. Although Vatroslav Lisinski (Ignaz Fuchs) had staged his opera Lyubov i sloba in Croatian as early as 1846, the climate was more conducive to national operas after the AustroHungarian Compromise of 1867. The compromise strengthened Hungary’s position with respect to the minorities. The intermedial shift from melodrama to opera introduced some highly interesting new national perspectives on the historical material. What fired up Croatian patriotism turns out to have a highly impure pedigree. The hero of the 1566 siege of Szigetvár was named after his ancestral Dalmatian fortress, Zrin. To this day, the Croatian Zrinski family is called Zrinyi in Hungarian, and Nicola Zrinski is revered among Hungarians as Miklós Zrinyi – in good measure because his great-grandson (also a political and military leader called Miklós) dedicated the most important seventeenth-century Hungarian epic

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to the h ­ eroic defense of Szigetvár. To complicate matters, Petar Zrinski, the poet’s brother, prepared a Croatian version of this epic poem before he was executed by the Habsburgs on charges of treason. Petar Zrinski became a ­Croatian national hero, both for retelling the epos in Croatian and because of his martyrdom. All these seem excellent reasons for basing a libretto on Petar’s version of the epic. And yet, Zajc and his librettist, Hugo Badalić, turned to Körner’s ­German melodrama for their plot. Why did they use a German rather than Croatian text? The answer probably lies in the (undeserved) German admiration for Körner’s play, which actually watered down the Hungarian nationalism that was prominent in the epic poem. Since 1848, Hungarian and Croatian nationalism worked at cross-­purposes. The Croat leader Jelašić sided with Austria and fought against Hungary in 1848/49; the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that came about in 1867 slighted the Croats and other Slavic minorities. In the 1870s, a Croatian national opera had to fear both Hungarian and Austrian censorship, but Körner’s Zriny gave an Austrian pedigree to the libretto that the Hungarians, the junior partners of the Monarchy, could hardly challenge. The Zagreb poster for the first night of Nikola Šubić Zrinski conveniently neglected to mention that the libretto was based on Körner’s melodrama. In Körner’s Zriny, the hero Zrinski dies for God, the Emperor, and an unspecified fatherland. The hero of Zajc’s opera died for the same causes, at least so it must have seemed to the censors who read the German translation of the libretto (reprinted in the cd booklet of a recent Croatian recording). But the vernacular text sung on stage differed from the one submitted to the censors. While the German translation mentions “Croatia” or the “Croatians” only once (and then speaks of a “brave Croatian loyalty”) the stage characters repeatedly sang praises of Croatia and Croatians, precisely where Körner’s original censors wiped out praises of Hungary and the Hungarians. The strange recycling history of Zrinski resembles the repeated writing of counterfacts in the history of Nathan/Byron’s “On Jordan’s Banks,” which I have discussed in the previous chapter. In both cases, a search for an authentic ethnic voice produced strange cultural hybrids.

Epilogue I planned this book as a reflection on an important change within nineteenthcentury “classical music.” Soon I realized, however, that this shift couldn’t be considered within the confines of that limited artistic and social frame only. Hence, I looked in the second part at select scientific, social, and national events that co-determined the features of that persistent voice. The relevant phenomena could easily be expanded, for instance by including the subject of Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe (Lajosi and Stynen, 2015). Instead of further expanding an already very wide circle of nineteenth-century phenomena, I want to conclude by reflecting on the negative, as well as positive, aspects of that revival of orality, which further expanded roughly a century later as a result of technological advancement. Marshall McLuhan opens his Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) by suggesting it has multiple ties with Albert B. Lord’s Harvard dissertation The Singer of Tales (1960), which was based on the research that Lord conducted as Milman Parry’s assistant on the oral tradition of the Homeric epics. Harry Levin’s preface to Lord’s book notes that new technologies have helped a more general recovery of orality: “The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through electrical engineering” (Lord, 1960: xiii). The subject of McLuhan’s own book was precisely this transition from print monopoly to radio, recording, and television, giving rise to a “secondary orality.” While primary orality had existed prior to all forms of writing, secondary orality depended “on writing and print for its existence” (Ong, 1982: 3). Parry’s turn to oral culture, just as Bartók’s somewhat earlier, was aided by the first recorders. According to McLuhan, the primary orality of pre-literate societies made a balanced use of all senses, but the introduction of the alphabetic system foregrounded visuality at the cost of the “audile-tactile complex”: the introduction of literacy meant focusing on a specific visuality related to the alphabet (1962: 43; see also Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies). The visuality of the alphabet and, later, of printing, had disturbed the earlier cooperation between the senses, just as “what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent” (McLuhan, 1962: 41). Secondary orality revives then some elements of primary orality by means of new technology, but it continues to rely on the existing language ­technologies

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004343368_015

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of writing and printing. Yet voice recording was just a technologically ­superior way to satisfy a deeply felt romantic yearning to revive pre-literary traditions. When Parry, a classical scholar, wanted to learn about the oral tradition behind the Homeric epics, he turned to the South-Slavic culture, because he knew that the folk-songs to which Vuk Karadžić listened in Serbia during the early nineteenth century were still alive there. Hence, Parry’s secondary orality revived not only aspects of the ancient primary orality but also what I call romantic orality. Listening to live folk singers was only the tip of an iceberg. As Foucault writes, “the whole being of language became one of sound” around 1800 ([1966] 1973: 286), and, I suggest, these spoken words resonated within a ­European culture of romantic orality. McLuhan does not mention Karadžić and other key figures of romantic orality, while Ong mentions only vaguely and in passing the Grimm brothers and the American Francis James Child for having worked over “parts of oral or q­ uasi-oral or near-oral tradition more or less directly, giving it new respectability” (Ong, 1982: 16–17). Kittler’s book Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (1985) brilliantly explores some of this romantic orality by contrasting it with the secondary orality of the twentieth century. Curiously, he refers to these oral phenomena as an Aufschreibesystem, a write-up system. I showed that these folklore and language revivals were deeply interwoven with artistic, scholarly, and scientific innovations that furthered the spoken word, and I prefer therefore the English title of Kittler’s book, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990). For McLuhan, regaining some of the primary orality via technological advancement is a fundamentally positive development that liberated the voice from the suppressive domination of writing and printing. Yet, orality revival was far from a pure blessing. As a child, I had secret access in Budapest to the broadcasts of the bbc, but I also recall the indelibly inhuman voice of Hitler and the Hungarian Nazis, which preached racial and ethnic purity. Purity and primal authenticity were already the ideal subjects of the (non-technical) search of the voice in the nineteenth century. Both historical forms of orality brought great opportunities, but they also encouraged demagoguery, rabble rousing, and the exclusion of the unwanted. Pure voice is an ambiguous concept, and negative implications of purity must have motivated Goethe’s surprising remark that integrating foreign property into poetic texts is perfectly permissible. This not only recommends the violation of copyright but also what many would consider the contamination of a pure entity. My book may be said to thematize such contaminations, ­starting with the idea that allegedly “absolute” pieces of instrumental music routinely get compromised when narratives or images are associated with

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Epilogue

them. On a different level, the nineteenth-century idea of a pristine primary voice is ­negated by the very mechanism of oral culture, which involves ceaseless change and adjustment to new situations. The “persistency” of the voice implies inconsistency. Körner turned a Hungarian epic on a Hungarian/Croatian hero into an Austrian call to resist ­Napoleon, but a Croatian composer with strong affinity for Italian music r­ efashioned the theme to build up resistance against Austrian as well as Hungarian suppression. Persistence requires here and elsewhere changing alliances, shifting vernaculars, and even changing identity. Whether such associations are justified and valuable must be decided from case to case. But we must be aware that consistent purity is virtually always constructed out of an inconsistent variety of ideas and phenomena.

References A Select Chronological List of Short Music Fiction, 1797–1848 Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, “Das merkwürdige musikalische Leben des Tonkünstlers Joseph Berglinger” Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders 1797. Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, “Ein wunderbares morgenländisches Märchen von einem nackten Heiligen” Phantasien über die Kunst 1799. Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder, “Fragment aus einem Briefe Joseph Berglingers” Phantasien über die Kunst 1799. Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder [Ludwig Tieck?], “Ein Brief Joseph Berglingers” Phantasien über die Kunst 1799. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Bruchstücke aus Briefen an einen jungen Tonsetzer” AMZ 2 (1799): 1–5, 17–20, 20–22, 57–63, 161–170, 177–183. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Bruchstücke aus dem noch ungedruckten Buche Ferdinand, ­Geschichte der Bildung eines Tonkünstlers” AMZ 5 (1802): 1–18, 41–52, 57–70, 73–85, 89–100. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Der Besuch im Irrenhause” AMZ 6 (1804): 645–654, 661–672, 677–685, 693–706. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Ritter Gluck” AMZ 11 (1809): 305–319. Heinrich von Kleist, “Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik (Eine Legende)” Abendblätter, November 15–17, 1810. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters, musikalische Leiden AMZ 12 (1810): 825–833. [Ung.], “Die Musik. Ein Dialog” AMZ 14 (1812): 287–305. [Kapellmeister J. Kreisler] “Höchst zerstreute Gedanken” Zeitung für die elegante Welt 14 (January 4–8, 1814). [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Des Kapellmeisters, Johannes Kreislers, Dissertatiuncula über den hohen Werth der Musik” AMZ 14 (1812): 503–509. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Don Juan: Eine fabelhafte Begebenheit, die sich mit einem reisenden Enthusiasten zugetragen” AMZ 15 (1813): 213–225. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Der Dichter und der Komponist” AMZ 15 (1813): 793–806, 809–817. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Ein Traum” AMZ 16 (1814): 1–5. “Brief des Baron Wallborn an den Kapellmeister Kreisler” and “Brief des Kapellmeisters Kreisler an den Baron Wallborn” Die Musen 3 (1814): 272–293. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Ombra adorata!” Fantasiestücke in Caillots Manier, vol. 1, 1814. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Der vollkommene Maschinist” Fantasiestücke in Caillots Manier, vol. 1, 1814.

258

References

E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Kreislers musikalisch-poetischer Klub” Fantasiestücke in Caillots Manier, vol. 2, 1814. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Die Automate” [excerpt] AMZ 16 (1814): 93–102. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann; Aus den Papieren des Kapellmeisters, Johannes Kreisler” AMZ 16 (1814): 178–187. [E.T.A. Hoffmann], “Der Musikfeind” AMZ 16 (1814): 365–373. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Musikalische Reise von Grossmiezchen nach Lämmel” AMZ 16 (1814): 237–252. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Ahnungen aus dem Reich der Töne” Morgenblatt für gebildete S­ tände 10 (February 21 & 22 1816). Revised as “Johannes Kreisler’s Lehrbrief” in Fantasiestücke in Caillots Manier vol. 4, 1815. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Rat Krespel” Frauentaschenbuch für das Jahr 1818. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Zufällige Gedanken bei dem Erscheinen dieser Blätter” Allgemeine Zeitung für Musik und Musikliteratur, October 9 and 16, 1820. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Commenticula in usum Delphi” AMZ 25 (1823): 473–488. Anonymous, “Das Genie, ein musikalisches Reiseabentheuer” BAMZ 1 (1824): 191–195, 199–201. Anonymous, “Einige Gelegenheits-Bemerkungen über das italienische Theater, aus Gesprächen abgehorcht, gehalten von einem Deutschen Kapellmeister, einem ­Maler und Dichter” BAMZ 1 (1824): 207–211, 215–216. Ludwig Rellstab, “Theodor, eine musikalische Skizze” BAMZ 1 (1824): 247–249, 255–258, 263–266, 271–275, 279–281. Ludwig Tieck, “Musikalische Leiden und Freuden” [excerpt] Cäcilia 1 (1824): 17–36. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Der siebenzigste Geburtstag” Cäcilia 1 (1824): 281–296. Friedrich de La Motte Fouqué, “Der unmusikalische Musiker. Eine Erzählung” Cäcilia 2 (1825): 169–199. Anonymous, “Szenen aus dem Leben eines jungen Komponisten” BAMZ 3 (1826): 285–288, 294–296. Ludwig Rellstab, “Aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Künstlers. Eine musikalische Skizze” Cäcilia 4 (1826): 1–42. Ludwig Rellstab, “Julius, eine musikalische Novelle” Cäcilia 6 (1827): 1–108. [Friedrich Ludwig Bührlen], “Soll man bey der Instrumental-Musik Etwas denken?” AMZ 29 (1827): 529–538, 546–554. Carl Klingemann, “Provinzialismen. Eine unmusikalische Novelle” BAMZ 4 (1827): 97–99, 105–109, 121–124. Carl Klingemann, “Der Fabrikant Philipp Oehrmann und seine Tochter” BAMZ 4 (1827): 153–156, 161–164. Ernst Weyden, “Die Meister-Probe, Erzählung in sechs Bildern” Cäcilia 10 (1829): 65–96. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Une Représentation de Don Juan.” Revue de Paris 6 (September 1829): 57–59.

References

259

E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Gluck. Souvernirs de 1809.” Trans. Loève-Veimars. Revue de Paris 3 (June 1829): 65–78. J.C. Lobe, “Wie muss ein Instrumental-Werk beschaffen seyn, wenn es einen vollkommenen Kunst-Eindruck hervorbringen soll?” AMZ 32 (1830): 261–269. S.H.G., “Gesang der Engel” AMZ 32 (1830): 365–373, 380. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “La Vie d’artiste” Revue musicale 7 (1830): 97–103, 129–137. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Contes fantastique. Paris: Reduel, 1830. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Le Chevalier Gluck [Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue ­musicale 10 (20.4.1830). E.T.A. Hoffmann, “L’Archet du Baron B. [Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue m ­ usicale 10 (13.11.1830): 2–12. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Kreisleriana I, Tribulations musicales du maître de chapelle J. ­Kreisler: Le concert de societé [Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue musicale 10 (27.11.1830): 62–73. Hoffmann E.T.A., “Kreisleriana 2, Sur la Musique instrumentale de Beethoven [­Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue musicale 10 (4.12.1830): 97–104. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Don Juan [Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue musicale 10 (18.12.1830): 161–173. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “La Leçon de violon.” Trans. Loève-Veimars L’Artiste 1 (1831): 138–142. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Biographie de Kreisler. Fragment [Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue musicale 10 (8.1.1831): 249–257. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “L’Ennemi de la musique [Opuscules de E.T.A. Hoffmann].” Revue musicale 10 (15.1.1831): 281–289. Jules Janin, “Hoffmann et Paganini.” Journal de Débats 1831. Reprint in Contes fantastiques et Contes littéraires (1832) 158–169. Jules Janin. “Kressler.” [sic!] L’Artiste 1 (1831): 42–44. Reprint in Contes fantastiques et Contes littéraires (1832) 33–40. K. Stein [G.A. Keferstein], “Mittheilungen aus den nachgelassenen Papieren des ­Studenten Anselmus” AMZ 34 (1832): 33–37, 49–53. Théodore Muret, “Le Chateau de Robert-le-Diable” L’Artiste 2 (1831): 181–182. [Johann Peter Lyser], “Vater Doles und seine Freunde. Blätter aus dem Tagebuch eines ehemaligen Thomas-Schülers” NZfM 1 (1834): 45–46. 49–51, 53–55, 57–58, 61–62, 65–66, 69–70. [Johann Peter Lyser], “Beethoven” NZfM 1 (1834): 121–122, 125–126, 129–130, 133–134, 137–138, 141–142, 145–146. [Johann Peter Lyser], “Händel” NZfM 1 (1834): 265–266, 269–270, 273–274, 277–279, 285–286. K. Stein [Gustav Adolph Keferstein], “König Mys von Fidibus oder Wahrheit und Dichtung aus dem Leben eines ausgezeichneten Musikers der neuesten Zeit.” Cäcilia 16 (1834): 17–63, 103–134, 145–196, 213–234.

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Jules Janin, “La Maternité” La Romance 1 (1834): 70–71, 75–76. Jules Janin, “Le Dîner de Beethoven” – conte fantastique RGM 1 (1834): 1–3, 9–11. Fromental Halévy, “Ali Baba et Sainte Cécile” RGM 1 (1834): 19–22. Carl Maria von Weber, “Songe de Charles-Marie de Weber, par lui même” RGM 1 (1834): 27–28. Jules Janin, “Hoffman[n]” RGM 1 (1834): 99–102, 109–112. Hector Berlioz, “Le Suicide par enthousiasme” nouvelle RGM 1 (1834): 229–231, 237–239, 248–250, 255–256. Hector Berlioz, “Un Bénéficiare et Rubini à Calais” RGM 1 (1834): 317–319. Jules Janin, “L’Homme vert – conte fantastique” RGM 1 (1834): 397–401. [Johann Peter Lyser] “Haendel” – conte (trans. du Mont from NZfM 1: 265 ff) RGM 1 (1834): 417–424. W. Schüler, “Der Ton Des. Erzählung” NZfM 3 (1835): 129–130, 133–134, 137–138. Jules Janin, “Le concert dans la maison” – conte fantastique RGM 2 (1835): 1–5. Joseph Méry, “La Fontaine d’Ivoire” RGM 2 (1835): 26–30. Jules de Saint-Félix, “Le meilleur des mes amis. Histoire musicale” RGM 2 (1835): 33–37. Anonymous, “Le concert de Hummel (Extrait du Journal d’un Voyageur)” trad. from German, Dumond. RGM 2 (1835): 45–49. Joseph Méry, “La Norma au Carlo Felice” RGM 2 (1835): 61–63. [Frédéric Mab], “Les cygnes chantent en mourant” RGM 2 (1835): 77–80, 85–90, 96–97, 109–117. Alexandre Dumas, “La Ballade de Bourbon-L’Archambault” RGM 2 (1835): 101–106. Alexandre Dumas, “La Juive” RGM 2 (1835): 141–146, 149–154. Adolphe Adam, “Le Répétition générale d’Iphigénie en Tauride” RGM 2 (1835): 173–180. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “L’Auteur de Charmante Gabrielle” RGM 2 (1835): 354–357. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “Comment l’opéra fut introduit en France” RGM 2 (1835): 377–381. Adolphe Adam, “Un Début en province” RGM 2 (1835): 421–426. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Einige kleine, historisch-kritische Bedenklichkeiten über den berühmten Herrn Kapellmeister Cherubini, wohnhaft in Paris” AMZ 37 (1835): 589–599, 605–628. [Johann Peter Lyser] “Gluck in Paris. Novelle” NZfM 5 (1836): 179–180, 183–186, 187–189, 191–192, 195–196. Anonymous, “Lettre du chat Murr (E.T.A. Hoffmann) Au Rédacteur de la Gazette musicale de Berlin” RGM 3 (1836): 1–3. Alexandre Dumas, “Une Mort, un succès, une chute” RGM 3 (1836): 9–16, 17–21. Carl Maria von Weber, “La Loche – conte fantastique” RGM 3 (1836): 33–35, 41–43. Samuel Bach, libraire [Théophile de Ferrière], “Le Vieux râcleur” RGM 3 (1836): 49–53. Samuel Bach, libraire [Théophile de Ferrière], “Divagations musicales de Samuel Bach. Brand-Sachs” RGM 3 (1836): 129–133, 137–146.

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Samuel Bach, libraire [Théophile de Ferrière], “Divagations musicales de Samuel Bach. Sebastien Floghel” RGM 3 (1836): 307–311, 315–318. Jules Janin, “Gabrielli” RGM 3 (1836): 161–165, 169–172, 185–189, 195–198. Jules Janin, “Stradella, ou le poète et le musicien” RGM 3 (1836): 239–242, 247–251, 255–258. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “Corelli : −Nouvelle” RGM 3 (1836): 395–401. Jules Janin, “Cafarelli” RGM 3 (1836): 433–438. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “La Vieillesse de Guillaume Dufay” RGM 3 (1836): 453–460. [Robert Schumann], “Der alte Hauptmann” NZfM 6 (1837): 23. Wolfgang Robert Griepenkerl, “Bruchstücke aus einer Novelle, ‘das Musikfest’” NZfM 7 (1837): 5–7, 9–10, 13–15, 17–19. W. Schüler, “Die Macht der Töne. Erzählung” NZfM 7 (1837): 97–99, 105–106, 109–110. George Sand, “Le contrabandier” histoire lyrique RGM 4 (1837): 1–9. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “Francesca” RGM 4 (1837): 37–44. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “Les Psaumes de Josquin” RGM 4 (1837): 109–113, 129–134. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “La Jeunesse de Bassini” RGM 4 (1837): 157–159, 166–169, 181–185. Honoré Balzac, “Gambara – étude philosophique” RGM 4 (1837): 347–351, 355–362, 363–369, 371–376, 380–382. Antoine Elwart, “Faute d’un piano! Chronique musicale de l’Hotel Bazancourt” RGM 4 (1837): 387–389. Margeanville, “Il ne faut pas jouer avec le feu” RGM 4 (1837): 395–400, 403–405, 411–414. Hector Berlioz, “Le Premier opéra” RGM 4 (1837): 427–431, 435–437. Alexandre Dumas, “Histoire d’un ténor” RGM 4 (1837): 451–459, 463–470, 475–478, 483–486, 491–496, 503–507, 515–519. Jules A. David, “Le Musicien du regiment” RGM 4 (1837): 547–554, 559–566. Augustin Toursel, “Le Modèle” L’Artiste 14 (1837): 70–72, 81–83? Franz Liszt [with Marie d’Agoult], “Lettres d’un bachélier ès musique” RGM 5 (1838): 57–62, 125–131, 217–222, 279–281, 296–298; RGM 6 (1839): 14–15, 115–117; RGM 8 (1841): 417–420. Heinrich Heine, “Lettres confidentielles” [translated fragments] RGM 5 (1838): 17–22, 41–44. Henri Panofka, “Sonate en la mineur de Beethoven. Extrait du journal d’un artiste” RGM 5 (1838): 233–236. Stéphane de la Madeleine, “Le Maître de chapelle de François Ier. Chronique du XVe siècle” RGM 5 (1838): 245–249, 253–257. Félicien Mallefille, “Les Exilés – Un Chemin” RGM 5 (1838): 363–364. Johann Peter Lyser, “Hamlet in der Oper. Musikalisch-ästhetische Gespräche” NZfM 9 (1838) 171–172, 175–176, 180–181, 183–185, 191–192, 207–208.

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Johann Peter Lyser, “Vogler. Eine Episode aus seinem Jugendleben” NZfM 10 (1839) 2–4, 9–10, 17–19, 25–27, 29–30. Johann Peter Lyser, “Johann Schenk, Novelle” NZfM 11 (1839): 105–107, 109–110, 114–115, 117–118. Felix Romani, “Ode à Paganini” [trans. Berlioz] RGM 6 (1839): 374–376. E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Le Poëte et le compositeur” RGM 6 (1839): 457–460, 465–469. Honoré Balzac, “Une représentation du Mosè de Rossini à Venise” La France musicale August 25, 1839. Honoré Balzac, Massimilla Doni Études philosophiques vol. 21 Paris: Souverain, 1840. Johann Peter Lyser, “Luther” NZfM 12 (1840) 145–147, 149–150, 153–154, 157–158, 161–162, 165–166, 169–171, 173–175, 177–179, 181–183. Richard Wagner, “Une visite à Beethoven” RGM 7 (1840): 551–553, 561–563, 578–579, 583–585. Ludwig Rellstab, “Beethoven. Tableau des souvernirs de ma vie” RGM 7 (1840): 411–415, 419–422, 439–443. J.B. Sorge,“Die Schifferinn aus Brienz” Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung 1 (1841): 313–314. Richard Wagner, “Une musicien étranger à Paris” RGM 8 (1841): 65–68, 83–84, 91–94. Henri Blanchard, “Chieng et Sering, ou les nouveaux Siamois” RGM 8 (1841): 129–132. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “”Un aveugle” RGM 8 (1841): 177–180. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “De Paris à Rome et de Rome à Paris” RGM 8 (1841): 201–203. Richard Wagner [Werner], “Caprices esthétiques. Extraits du journal d’un musicien ­défunt. Le musicien et la publicité” RGM 8 (1841): 203–204. Ludwig Tieck, “Un mélomane” [fragment of “Musikalische Leiden und Freuden”] RGM 8 (1841): 264–265. Henri Blanchard, “La valse, ou les deux prisonniers célèbres” RGM 8 (1841): 365–366. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Galerie ancienne et modern. Une leçon de Jarnowick” RGM 8 (1841): 377–380. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Galerie ancienne et modern. Un ténor français en Italie” RGM 8 (1841): 449–452. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Un Requiem” RGM 8 (1841): 461–463. Richard Wagner, “Une soirée hereuse. Fantasie sur la musique pittoresque” RGM 8 (1841): 463–465, 487–489. A. Specht, “Moeurs musicales. Le Mari de la cantatrice” RGM 8 (1841): 495–497. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais] “Un nom d’artiste” RGM 8 (1841): 565–567. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Esquisses de la vie d’artiste” RMG 9 (1842): 137–140, 145–167, 164–166, 185–187, 200–201, 233–235, 313–315, 324–325, 353–355, 364–366, 465–468. Jules Lecomte, “Le Joueur de viole, et le pigeon de la place Saint-Marc, histoire vénitienne” RMG 9 (1842) 241–242, 249–250, 261–265, 303–306, 325–328.

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Henri Blanchard, “Ludwig, ou l’élève de Weber” RMG 9 (1842): 473–475, 489–492. William Fitz-Berth, “Il Caro Sassone” Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung 2 (1842): 2–3, 5–7, 9–11, 13–15, 18–19, 29–30, 33–34, 41–42. George Sand, “Consuelo” La Revue indépendante (1842–43). Georges Sand [music by F. Halévy], “Carl” RGM 10 (1843): 1–3, 9–11, 12a, 19–21. Henri Blanchard, “Un songe d’un nuit d’hiver” RMG 10 (1843): 3–5. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Petits mystères d’une soirée musicale” RGM 10 (1843): 51–53, 59–61, 77–79, 91–93. Edouard Fétis, “Un Cabinet de curiosités musicales” RGM 10 (1843): 107–109, 116–118. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Un Soprano” RGM 10 (1843): 155–157. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Luthier et l’artiste” RGM 10 (1843): 185–187, 191–193, 207–209. Maurice Bourge, “Une mélodie” RGM 10 (1843): 247–249, 257–258. Edouard Fétis, “La Voix humaine de l’orgue de Weingarten” RGM 10 (1843): 319–321. Edouard Fétis, “Le Querelle de la basse viole, du violon et du violoncelle” RGM 10 (1843): 375–377. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Débuter à l’Opéra!” RGM 10 (1843): 399–401. Hector Berlioz, “Idylle” RGM 10 (1843): 407–408. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Le Docteur Matanasius” RGM 10 (1843): 415–417, 423–425, 17. Johann Peter Lyser, “Zweier Meister Söhne” NZfM 21 (1844): 169–171, 173–175. Henri Blanchard, “L’Actrice et l’étudiant” RGM 11 (1844): 10–11, 18–19, 26–28, 33–35, 60–66. Hector Berlioz, “Euphonia, ou la ville musicale” RGM 11 (1844): 49–50, 57–60, 76–77, 92–93, 97–99, 145–147, 189–190, 254–256. Maurice Bourges, “Une Occasion” RGM 11 (1844): 129–130, 137–138. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Portefeuille de deux cantatrices” RGM 11 (1844): 331–335, 339–343, 347–352, 355–359, 363–367, 370–375, 379–383, 387–391, 395–399, 403–407, 411–413, 419–421, 431–434; 12 (1845): 1–4, 9–12, 17–20, 25–27, 33–36, 41–43, 49–51, 81–83, 97–100, 113–114, 121–122, 137–139, 145–146, 153–157. Maurice Bourges, “Souvenirs d’un octogénaire” RGM 12 (1845): 201–204, 209–213, 217–221, 225–229, 233–236, 241–245, 249–253, 257–262, 265–269, 273–277, 281–285, 289–293, 297–301, 305–310, 313–318, 333–338. Z.Z.Z. [Armand de Pontmartin], “Causeries musicales” Le Ménestrel 12.27 (June 1, 1845): NP. Anonymous, “Une Soirée à plaisir” RGM 12 (1845): 307–309. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Les Elèves de baron de Bage” RGM 12 (1845) 389–391. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Vouloir et Pouvoir” RGM 13 (1846): 1–3. Paul Smith [Edouard Monnais], “Les sept notes de la gamme” RGM 13 (1846): 401–405, 409–411; RGM 14 (1847): 1–2, 13–14, 29–31, 37–40, 45–47, 53–55, 61–63, 69–71, 85–86,

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Index Abbate, Carolyn 2, 114 Adam, Adolphe 96, 102 Adelung, Johann Christoph 12, 187–189, 195, 213–216, 219 Alexander (Tsar) 141, 144 Alkabetz, Shlomo Halevi 235 Ampère, Jean-Jacques 93 Apel, Johann August 30n7, 105, 106 Assmann, Aleida & Jan 9, 198 Auber, Daniel 7, 96 Avenary, Hanoch 238, 242 Bach, Carl Philipp Emmanuel 6, 105, 112, 148, 151 Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich 202, 203 Bach, Johann Sebastian 29n6, 112, 151, 157n17 Bacon, Ricgard Mackenzie 20 Badalić, Hugo 253 Bal, Mieke 113 Balzac, Honoré de 1, 2, 7, 36, 89–91, 96–99, 104, 143n7, 151 Barnaby, Paul 233 Barth, J.A. 45 Bartók, Béla 13, 205, 206, 222–224 Bassani, Giambattista 37, 102, 103 Bawr, Sophie de 153 Baycroft, Timothy 207 Beethoven, Ludwig van 1–11, 13, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30–35, 37, 40–42, 47, 49, 50, 55, 58, 62, 70, 75, 82, 84–86, 91, 92, 95, 97, 99–102, 106–110, 113, 116, 119–121, 124, 125, 127, 130, 131, 133, 142–144, 147, 148, 152, 165, 168n40, 186, 187, 204, 216, 225–228, 230, 231, 233, 234n9, 238, 240, 247, 250 Bellini, Vincenzo 20, 96 Benjamin, Walter 13, 48 Berlioz, Hector 6–8, 11, 26, 35, 37, 38, 40–45, 47, 101, 104, 112, 113, 115–128, 133, 151, 178, 203, 204 Bertie, Charles 239 Binchois, Gilles 171, 175 Bloom, Peter 108–109, 161 Bohlman, Philip 205 Bourges, Maurice 91 Bowring, John 219, 220

Braham, John 235, 236, 239, 240 Brahms, Johannes 202, 216 Brandus, Louis-Lazare 38 Breitkopf, Brenhard Christoph 19, 20, 22–25, 36, 148 Brendel, Franz 45, 47, 163 Brentano, Clemens 207–210, 211n5 Brzoska, Matthias 34, 35, 39n14, 40, 89n1, 93n5, 94n6, 95, 97, 98n8 Bührlen, Friedrich Ludwig 24, 107 Burney, Charles 146, 151, 170 Burnham, Scott 27n4, 30, 33, 184, 186, 187 Burns, Robert 225–227, 234n9 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 13, 113, 115–118, 133, 212, 220, 225, 233–241, 253 Caesar, Sid 1, 2, 104 Cafarelli 37 Calcott, John 202 Campra, André 61 Carpani, Giuseppe 119, 120, 149 Casadesus, Marius 203 Castil-Blaze, François-Henri-Joseph 22, 40, 204 Chamisso, Adalbert von 240 Chatterton, Thomas 202 Cherubini, Luigi 24, 27, 101, 102, 162 Chézy, Antoine-Léonard de 181 Child, Francis James 255 Chladni, E.F.F. 23 Chopin, Frédéric 38, 46, 130 Choron, Alexandre-Etienne 153 Christmann, Johann Friedrich 151 Coeurdoux, Gaston-Laurent 181 Cohn, Dorrit 113 Comte, Auguste 171 Constant, Benjamin 220 Cooper, Barry 226n1, 226n2, 227, 228, 231, 234n9 Corelli, Arcangelo 37, 102, 103, 167, 231 Corri, Domenico 233 Cousin, Victor 171 Curley, Thomas M. 199 Cuvier, Georges 180, 182 Czerny, Carl 163

286 d’Agoult, Marie 90 Da Ponte, Carlo 247 Dahlhaus, Carl 4–6, 9, 30, 117, 171, 177, 186, 191, 202, 211, 227 d’Aubigny von Engelbrunner, Nina 249 Denis, Michael 200, 201 Deschamps, Emile 102n14, 120, 121 Destouches, André 61 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 220 Diderot, Denis 8, 49, 50, 55–62, 65, 70, 71, 79, 89, 113, 126, 245 Doles, Johann Friedrich 47, 101 Donizetti, Gaetano 20, 38, 45, 96 Dufay, Guillaume 37, 102, 103, 171, 172, 175 Dumas, Alexandre 7, 35, 40, 43, 96, 103 Duni, Egidio 61 Dunning, Albert 177 Dunstable, John 171, 175 Durante, Francesco 65 Dvořák, Antonin 216 Dymond, Anne 220 Edler, Arnfried 128n26, 131–133, 242 Eicke, Kurt-Erich 32 Ellis, Katharine 22, 34, 43, 89n1, 94n6, 95, 97n7, 99, 103n16, 105n2, 128n24, 171 Evans, Robert Harding 235 Fabray, Nanette 1 Fabre d’Olivet, Antoine 198, 200, 219 Fauriel, Claude 13, 219–222, 225 Ferrand, Humbert 116 Fétis, François-Joseph 7, 11, 20, 34, 35, 37, 40–43, 102, 103, 114, 117, 146, 147, 153, 166–178, 203, 207 Feydeau, Ernest 44 Fink, Gottfried Wilhelm 25–26, 171n47 Flaubert, Gustave 43–45 Forchert, Arno 30–32, 106n4, 106n5 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus 23, 146, 151, 168, 170, 180 Forster, E.M. 3, 104, 107 Forster, Georg 197 Foucault, Michel 5, 55, 59, 179–181, 183, 184, 187, 189, 197, 255 Franz ii/I (Holy Roman Emperor/Emperor of Austria) 138 Fricken, Ernestine von 131 Friedrich (Frederick “the Great” King of Prussia) 137n1

Index Friedrich August (King of Saxony) 140, 141 Friedrich, Jean Paul 21, 113, 128–130, 133 Friedrich Wilhelm (King of Prussia) 80, 140 Garrick, David 120, 121, 123n17, 204 Gaskill, Howard 199–202 Geminiani, Francesco 231 Genette, Gérard 113 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm 105, 112, 113 Gillies, Alexander 200 Glinka, Mikhail 204, 244, 251 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 6, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 47, 57, 65–70, 88, 99n10, 102, 110, 152, 204, 247, 248, 250 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 8, 32, 33, 36, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 58–62, 75, 76, 89, 115, 133, 195, 200, 203, 209, 217, 219–221, 228, 251, 252, 255 Goncourt, Edmond & Jules 45 Gozzi, Carlo 246 Graun, Carl Heinrich 77, 151, 202 Grétry, André Ernest Modeste 40, 104–106, 247 Griepenkerl, Wolfgang Robert 47 Griesinger, Georg August 147, 148 Grillparzer, Franz 8, 24, 57, 72, 77, 82, 84–88, 115 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 245 Grimm, Jacob & Wilhelm 12, 13, 144, 180, 186, 205, 213, 214, 217–220, 228 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel 48 Guicciardini, Lodovico 167, 168 Guillén, Claudio 5 Guise, René 97 Halévy, Fromental 7, 35, 37, 38, 43, 47n26, 96, 101 Hamilton, John T. 57, 59n3, 77, 84, 103, 181 Händel, Georg Friedrich 10, 21, 47, 48, 52, 76, 101, 110, 148, 157, 161, 162, 203 Hanka, Václav 221, 222 Hanska, Ewelina 98 Hanslick, Eduard 52, 53, 63n7, 84, 85, 88n10, 106n4, 109, 115, 134, 186 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus 17 Härtel, Gottfried Christoph 19, 20, 22–25, 36, 148 Hartmann, C.H.F. 45 Hasse, Johann Adolf 151 Hawkins, John 146, 151, 170

287

Index Haxthausen, Werner von 220, 221 Haydn, Joseph 6, 7, 10, 21, 26, 32, 37, 40, 49, 55, 58, 65, 79, 81, 92, 99n10, 104–106, 110, 147–149, 151, 152, 157n17, 186, 216, 225, 226, 228, 233, 247, 248 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 13, 32, 33, 56, 58–65, 88n10, 114, 115 Heine, Heinrich 38, 101, 240 Heinse, Wilhelm 49, 52, 53, 94n6 Heller, Stephen 38, 128n24 Herder, Johann Gottfried 49, 188, 200–202, 204–207, 210, 217 Hiller, I.A. 151 Hitzig, Julius 27, 28, 93, 140, 252 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 2, 3, 6–8, 10, 13, 19, 22–25, 27, 28, 34, 36, 40, 52, 56–58, 65–68, 70–72, 78, 89, 90n2, 91–96, 98, 99, 101–104, 110, 130n30, 132, 139–143, 147, 148, 152, 153, 195–197, 207, 251, 252 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich 213 Hollander, John 48 Homer 9, 146, 157, 198, 214, 221n7, 223, 243 Hopkin, David 207 Hortschansky, Klaus 176, 177 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav 62 Hugo, Victor 39 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 30n7, 144, 181, 183–188, 214 Idelsohn, Abraham Zevi 242 Ireland, William Henry 202 Jakob. See Talvj Jakobson, Roman 223 Janáček, Leoš 216 Janin, Jules 7, 8, 35, 37, 39–40, 43, 71, 89, 93–96, 99, 101, 102, 104 Jelašć, Josip 253 Jérôme (King of Westphalia) 210 Johnson, Julian 63, 64n8 Jones, William 181, 197 Josquin des Prez 37, 102–103, 170, 171, 176 Jungmann, Josef 214 Kant, Immanuel 7, 31, 171 Karadžić, Vuk 11–13, 144, 183, 213, 215–216, 222, 228, 231, 255 Karoli, Christa 66 Kaufmann, Walter 58, 59

Kaulbach, Wilhelm von 113 Kayser, Philipp Christoph 75 Keferstein, G.A. 25n3, 111 Kennedy, James 236 Kier, Herfrid 177 Kiesewetter, Raphael 9, 84, 152, 153, 169–178 Kinnaird, Douglas 234, 235, 239 Kittler, Friedrich 12, 189, 193n11, 195–197, 255 Kivy, Peter 3, 4, 114 Kleist, Heinrich von 103, 157 Klingemann, Carl 34 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 200 Knorr, Julius 45 Kollár, Jan 214 Kopitar, Jernej (Bartholomäus) 11, 12, 144, 183, 213–221, 224, 245, 248n2, 249–251 Körner, Theodor 11, 138, 139, 144, 145, 200, 207, 240, 251–253, 256 Koselleck, Reinhart 189 Kotzebue, August von 27 Kretzschmer, Andreas 29, 212, 240 Krug, W.T. 23, 157, 193 Kuhn, Thomas 5 Kuhnau, Johann 49, 50, 112 Kunz, Carl Friedrich 139, 140 La Madeleine, Stéphane de 102, 103 Lachnith, Ludwig Wenzel 204 Landino, François 175 Láng, Paul Henry 175, 176, 214n2 Langlès, Louis Mathieu 181 Laun, Friedrich 105 Le Sueur, Jean François 202 Leroux, Pierre 91 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 40, 88 Levin, Harry 254 Lienau, Robert Emil 27 Lindner, Friedrich Wilhelm 192, 193 Liszt, Franz 6, 8, 26, 35, 36, 38, 42, 47, 90, 104, 111–116, 118, 128, 134, 173n50 Lloyd, A.L. 205 Loève-Veimars, Adolphe 93 Loewe, Carl 202, 216, 240 Lord, Albert 222–223, 254 Lotti, Antonio 65 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 37, 167, 245, 246 Luther, Maryin 47, 158, 187, 238, 239 Lützow, Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von 138, 139n2 Lyser, Johann Peter 47, 99, 101

288 Machault, Guillaume de 175 Mackerras, Charles 239 Mahler, Gustav 114, 124, 208 Mann, Thomas 54, 161n23 Manzoni, Alessandro 220 Marmontel, Jean-François 104 Marschner, Heinrich 46 Marx, A.B. 22, 26–35, 65, 88n9, 96, 99n11, 106n5, 180, 184–187, 191, 240n11 Marx, Karl 59 Massenet, Jules 202 Maugars, André 37, 102n15 Mazzini, Giuseppe 199 McLuhan, Marshall 13, 254, 255 Méhul, Etinne Nicolas 102, 202 Melville, Herman 128 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 10, 25, 26, 112, 202, 240 Mérimée, Prosper 203, 219 Méry, Joseph 96 Metternich, Klemens von 137 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 7, 35, 36, 38, 45, 47, 96, 97 Michaelis, Chr. Fr. 23 Mickiewicz, Adam 115 Mirecki, Franciszek 216 Mittermaier, Karl 159, 160 Monnais, Paul 91 Moor, Margriet de 54 Moore, Thomas 199, 226, 234n9, 239 Mörike, Eduard 89 Morrow, Mary Sue 20n1, 90 Moscheles, Ignace 38, 132n31 Motte Fouqué, Friedrich de la 10, 251, 252 Mozart, Constanze née Weber 147 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 6, 17, 21, 24, 26, 31, 32, 37, 40, 44, 47, 49, 50, 58, 76, 82, 86–92, 95, 99, 101, 101–106, 108, 110, 130, 147–152, 157, 161, 165, 186, 203, 204, 147, 250 Muris, Jean de 175 Mušicki, Lukian 216 Mussorgsky, Modest 204 Nägeli, Hans Georg 12, 23, 191, 192n10, 193 Napier, William 226 Napoleon 9–11, 23, 28, 29, 35, 38, 59, 92, 137–142, 144, 146, 149, 152, 153, 155, 168, 191, 195, 207, 209, 213, 223, 226, 233, 244, 248, 256

Index Nathan, Harry 239 Nathan, Isaac 13, 225, 233–243 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 2 Neefe, Christian Gottlob 248 Neumann, Johann Philipp 197 Nissen, Georg Nikolaus 147 Nodier, Charles 203 Novalis (G.Ph.Fr. Von Hardenberg) 7, 21, 49, 53, 54 Novello, Vincent & J. Alfred 20 Obradović, Dositej 215 Obrecht, Jacob 168, 171, 175 O’Carolan, Turlough 230, 231 Ockeghem, Johannes 170, 171, 175, 176 Offenbach, Jacques 235 Ong, Walter J. 13, 254, 255 Ossian 11, 12, 21, 199–202, 204, 206, 207, 210, 222, 225, 227 Pacini, Emilien 102n14 Paginini, Niccolò 120 Paisiello, Giovanni 247 Palacký, František 214 Palestrina, Giovanni da 37, 65, 110, 157, 173 Parry, Milman 13, 213, 221n7, 222–224, 243, 254, 255 Pasta, Giuditta 149 Pederson, Sanna 22, 29–32 Percy, Thomas 198, 204, 206, 207, 210, 222 Pergolesi, Giovanni Batista 65, 110, 150, 167n38, 192, 245 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 12, 32, 81, 185, 189–195 Pfeiffer, Michael Traugott 191, 193 Piccini, Niccolò, 247 Pichler, Caroline 251 Pleyel, Ignace 224, 226n1 Podrugović, Tešan 216 Power, James 226 Powers, Richard 54 Preston, Thomas 226 Príncipe, Miguel Augustín 90 Printz, Wolfgang Kaspar 49 Prunières, Henry 149 Pushkin, Alexander 203 Quantz, J.J. 6 Quinault, Philippe 245

Index Rameau, Jean-Philippe 6, 50, 55–58, 61, 66, 67, 70, 71, 94, 112 Ramler, Karl Wilhelm 202 Ranke, Leopold von 214 Rasmussen, Karl Aage 197 Raynouard, François-Juste-Marie 181, 200, 219 Reeve, Katherine Kolb 105 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich 4, 27, 49–52, 73, 75, 76, 90, 110, 139n2, 145, 165, 168n40, 197, 208–210, 246, 247 Rellstab, Ludwig 22, 28, 33–35, 45, 89, 99, 129, 130, 133 Ricordi, Giovanni 19, 20 Riemann, Hugo 177 Righetti, Gertrude Giorgi 149 Robespierre, Maximilien 207 Rochlitz, Johann Friedrich 8, 22–26, 33, 57, 72, 76–85, 90, 91, 105–109, 140–143, 147, 148, 151, 157n16, 168n40 Rolland, Romain 54 Röller, Eduard 160 Rose, Stephen 48, 49, 240 Rosenkranz, Karl 59 Rossini, Gioacchino 9, 20, 21, 30–32, 34, 39n13, 65, 88, 96–98, 100, 110, 149–151, 163, 191, 245 Roth, Nancy Ann 36, 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 51, 52, 62, 85, 166–168, 179, 189, 211, 219, 244–246, 249, 250 Sacchini, Antonio 204 Sacy, Silvestre de 181 Safranski, Rüdiger 57, 139n3 Saint-Beuve, Charles Augustin 39 Sand, George 7, 8, 54, 90, 91, 104 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von 11, 153–156, 158, 207 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Caroline von 112 Scarlatti, Domenico 203 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 171 Scher, Paul 54, 65, 68n10, 69, 92 Schering, Arnold 30n7 Schiller, Friedrich 50, 76, 100, 119, 127, 153n7, 200 Schindler, Anton 147 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 220 Schlegel, Friedrich 21, 54, 126–127, 137, 144, 153, 177, 180–183, 249

289 Schlesinger, Adolph 19, 20, 26, 27 Schlesinger, Maurice 7, 19–20, 26–28, 35–47, 90, 95–101 Schmid, Karl Ernst 153 Schott, Bernhard 19, 20 Schubert, Franz 6, 11, 139n2, 144, 145, 197, 202, 240 Schüler, W. 47 Schumann, Clara née Wieck 39, 45, 47, 50–51, 85–86, 130n28, 132–133, 163, 165–166 Schumann, Robert 6–8, 20, 35, 45, 51, 128n25, 128n27, 130, 132, 133, 146, 159–163, 164n31, 165, 212, 240 Schunke, Ludwig 45 Scott, Walter 13, 93, 118, 150, 202, 203, 206, 226–228, 231–234 Senefelder, Alois 20 Seth, Vikram 54 Shakespeare, William 48, 113, 116, 120, 121, 124, 125n22, 126, 133, 157, 162, 202, 204, 207 Sharp, Cecil 204, 205 Smithson, Harriet 41 Spazier, Karl 104n1, 105, 106, 211 Spitzer, Michael 185, 191 Spontini, Gaspare 22, 31 Stanzel, Friedrich Karl 113 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 7, 9, 31, 88, 98, 146, 149–151 Stephani, Heinrich 12, 189, 193, 194 Sterne, Laurence 113, 126, 128 Stöpel, Franz 19, 95 Storm, Theodor 24, 89 Stradella, Alessandro 102, 203 Stratimirović, Stefan 216 Strunz, Jacques 98, 143n7 Suremont, Pierre Jean 168, 169 Swift, Jonathan 231 Széchény, Ferenc 251 Talvj (Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob)  219, 221 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 216 Teichmann, Elizabeth 93, 94n6 Telemann, Georg Philipp 202 Thaler, Lotte 32, 33 Thayer, Alexander Wheelock 144, 147 Thibaut, Anton Friedrich Justus 11, 146, 152–166, 178, 207, 210–212

290 Thomson, George 13, 145, 225–228, 230, 231, 233, 234, 238, 242 Tieck, Ludwig 4, 7, 49, 72, 73, 75, 76, 89, 96, 110, 197, 246, 247 Tinctoris, Johannes 171 Tolstoy, Leo 52, 89, 128 Turk, D.G. 23 Turner, William 17 Umlauf, Ignaz 247 Verdi, Giuseppe 20, 204, 245 Viardot, Louis 91 Višnjić, Philip 216 Vivaldi, Antonio 112, 203, 231 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 6, 7, 36, 49, 72–74, 76, 81, 89n1 Wagner, Richard 5–7, 11, 26, 31, 35, 38, 44, 47, 87–89, 92, 99–101, 112, 116, 124, 127, 150, 178 Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths 202 Weber, Carl Maria von 6, 13, 27, 31, 38, 40, 43, 47, 49, 54, 65, 87–89, 96, 101, 105, 110,

Index 120, 139, 142, 143, 145, 148n3, 165, 204, 227, 248 Weber-Bockholdt, Petra 226n2, 227 Weiner, Marc 100 Weisstein, Ulrich 65–67, 70, 71 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley (Duke) 113, 139–144 Wendt, J.A. 23, 149 Whyte, William 226 Wieck, Friedrich 21, 50–51, 86, 131, 162–163, 165–166, and see Schumann, Clara Wild, Franz 144 Willaert, Adriaen 168, 171 Wilmot, Anne 234 Winn, James Anderson 48 Wohlhaupter, Eugen 158 Wolf, Friedrich August 214 Wood, Robert 9, 198 Zajc, Ivan 138, 253 Zrinski/Zrinyi (noble family) 138, 252, 253 Zuccamaglio, Anton Wilhelm von 163, 211n5 Zweig, Stefan 98