When Mozart was commissioned to write a symphony for the Concert Spirituel in Paris in 1778, he made a point of learning about the tastes and expectations of his audience. As his letter to his father details, he composed his ‘Paris’ Symphony, No. 31 (K. 297) with an eye to their response, writing particular passages to delight and astonish them, and taking immense satisfaction in their applause. In doing so, he was following his father’s tried-and-true advice: as Leopold Mozart had written to his son just a few months earlier regarding another work, ‘you will do well to follow the taste of the French. If one can only win applause and be paid well, the rest is not important.’³

According to Liszt, the Irish pianist-composer John Field, born only a generation after Mozart, had a completely different attitude towards his music and his public. He was ‘unabashedly indifferent’ to his audience, relying only on his own interior experience (his ‘inner feelings’ and ‘dreams’) for inspiration. Not only was there no question of an audience’s tastes and expectations influencing his compositions, but Liszt emphasised that the ‘feelings and dreams’ that infused Field’s piano music were possible only because of the composer’s complete autonomy and independence from the public.

To be sure, caveats can be added to both of these accounts. Mozart’s relationship to his audience was often more ambivalent and complex than what he described in this letter, and Liszt’s essay on Field probably says as much about Liszt’s own creative ideals (or the ideals with which he wanted to be associated) as it says about Field’s views and creative process. Nevertheless, the differences between the two reflect a sea change in ideas about music that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany and Britain. Under the influence of the Romantic movement, these years saw a rethinking of the aesthetics and ethics of musical expression, and Liszt’s remarks distil several important features of the new orientation. As Liszt described it, Field’s music was valuable not only because it stemmed from his innermost ‘feelings and dreams’, but also because it was authentic. Authenticity, as it is colloquially used, often denotes the quality of being ‘true to oneself’. But for Liszt and other Romantics, the concept meant more. Being true to oneself was contingent on the ability to hold oneself apart from the external world, to resist its influence, to compose (and live) almost as though it did not exist. The reasons for this shift in priorities are multiple and complex, and as we shall see, the concept of authentic self-expression was not without internal tensions and contradictions. Nevertheless, it was one of the core ideals of musical Romanticism, and as such, it contributed to new expectations for composers, performers, and audiences, as well as significant changes in the status of music as an art form.

For much of Western history, the concept of mimesis (imitation, or ‘re-presentation’) provided a foundation for understanding music’s effects.⁴ At a basic level, mimetic theories hold that music’s expressive power derives from its capacity to imitate something observable and definable in the world – often (although not always) human passions. Mimesis was a particularly important concept in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Discussions varied as to what exactly music imitated (the impassioned rhetoric of a skilled orator; the internal motions of bodily humours and passions; the pre-articulate cries of early humans, etc.) and the techniques by which this imitation was accomplished. Nevertheless, many eighteenth-century writers on musical aesthetics assumed that: (1) what music imitated was a recognisable phenomenon in the world around it; (2) the musician, through a combination of skill, training, and judgement (including reliance on known techniques and past models), could somehow re-present this phenomenon in the medium of music; and (3) if the music was successful, it would produce the desired effect (often a sympathetic emotional resonance, delighted recognition, or pleasure) on the part of the listener. This last part is crucial: in this paradigm, the work of art is directed towards an audience. It is a means to an end, and can be evaluated according to its success at eliciting the intended response. We can observe this view in the Mozart letter quoted above. Although there is no consensus about which passage Mozart was describing in his letter to his father (and he seems to have been aiming for delight and astonishment rather than a more specific imitation of emotion through music), he makes it clear that he viewed his symphony as a success because of the audience’s strong reaction.

In the later decades of the eighteenth century, though, mimetic theories of music gradually ceded ground to what has sometimes been termed an ‘expressive’ or ‘expressivist’ orientation.⁵ The extent to which Romantic thinkers rejected earlier audience-centred paradigms can be seen in an essay by E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘On a Remark of Sacchini’s, and on so-called Effect in Music’, which first appeared in 1814.⁶ Hoffmann, one of the foundational figures in Romantic music criticism, bemoaned what he saw as a tendency amongst contemporary opera composers to heed ‘the eternal braying of theatre-directors for “Effect! Only effect!” in order to pull in the audience’. According to Hoffmann, because the goal of so many composers was ‘effect’, they set about composing in exactly the wrong way. Studying the works of past composers, they ‘became preoccupied with technical resources, seeing them as the means whereby effect was obtained’. With Mozart as a model, for example, they might observe that ‘striking modulations’ and ‘his frequent use of wind instruments’ produced strong emotional effects on the audience. (Notably, Hoffmann viewed Mozart as a ‘Romantic’ composer and did not find him guilty of the same ‘composing for effect’ as his successors.) But by mechanically imitating the features they observed in Mozart, composers could only produce ‘curious compositions in which without any motivation … crude changes of key and blaring chords from every conceivable wind instrument follow in rapid succession, like garish colours that never coalesce into a picture’. Ironically, because of their overemphasis on ‘effect’, the music of these composers failed to move the audience.

Instead, Hoffmann outlines a creative process for would-be opera composers in which the key to writing ‘effective’ music, paradoxically, is not thinking about its effect at all:

The passage encapsulates several Romantic ideas about musical expression. First, the content comes not from the external world, but from deep within the composer (‘deep within his own heart’ or ‘the fire of inspiration that inflames [his] breast’).⁸ This is not to say that this inner experience cannot be stimulated by something external, such as the characters and situations of the libretto, but rather that these external stimuli need to be internalised, processed, lived by the composer, and that this inner process, rather than the external stimulus, is the true source of the composition that results.

Furthermore, the process of composition that Hoffmann describes seems to preclude any rationalised calculation; it happens ‘unconsciously’ and ‘in a state of ecstasy’ as the composer’s ‘inner music’ flows outward. While his musical training has a role to play, at no point does he consciously wield technique. Instead, all of his previous training only gives him the ability to ‘grasp hold of the music that would otherwise rush past him’. Indeed, such a description evokes the etymological origins of the word ‘express’: to ‘push’ or ‘press’ out. Hoffmann’s understanding was predicated on the Romantic conviction that within the artist there lay mysterious, untapped depths, an inner spiritual domain that could never definitively be articulated or rationally understood, but that nevertheless could be accessed or intuited through art. Yet crucially, the originality and depth of inner experience that this process required was not available to just anyone. Hoffmann ended his account of the creative process by noting, ‘admittedly all this is tantamount to saying: just make sure, my dear fellow, that you are a musical genius, and then the rest will take care of itself!’⁹

Hoffmann’s concept of the composer’s autonomy hinged on following inner inspiration and renouncing the objective of creating an ‘effect’ on an audience. Other writers cast this autonomy in even more stringent terms, attempting to bracket out any awareness of an audience from the creative process. This principle was explored at length in the British philosopher John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘What Is Poetry?’ from 1833. Mill, for whom the work of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth had been personally transformative, drew a strict hierarchical distinction between ‘poetry’ and what he called ‘eloquence’, and he believed that this distinction applied not only to the written word, but also to music.¹⁰ ‘Eloquence’, Mill wrote, ‘is heard; poetry is overheard.’ He continued:

Mill recognised that it was a tall order to ask poets to remain unaware of the eventual readers of their work, that their poems would eventually be ‘printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop’.¹² Still, he maintained that the creative process and product should be uncontaminated by this knowledge: ‘No trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself’, and the poet must ‘succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express his feelings exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he feels that he should feel them, though they were to remain for ever unuttered’.¹³

In short, Romantic theories of expressive authenticity frequently emphasised the need to erect boundaries against the external social world. Their concern was that becoming too porous, too subject to the influence (‘in-flowing’) of society would corrupt or fragment the artist’s unique sense of being – the inner source from which all true art springs. A host of philosophical, social, and economic developments contributed to this shift in priorities. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that human nature was essentially good, but became corrupt through participation in society, which required artifice and posturing in pursuit of status and esteem. This valuing of ‘inner’ nature over ‘outer’ social relations was amplified as the bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy as the primary patrons and consumers of music and other cultural products in the nineteenth century. As has been well documented, a reconfiguration of social space (and the modes of subjectivity and relationship cultivated within that space) accompanied the ascendancy of these middle classes.¹⁴ The bourgeois individual cultivated his or her inwardness most assiduously within the private sphere of the home, where the sense of being sheltered from the demands of public and economic life was thought to enable a kind of idealised, ‘purely human’ form of relationship unmarred by pretence or artifice – an ideal to which the many earnest, confessional letters written during this time period vividly attest.¹⁵ The supposedly unmannered intimacy of this space was defined in contrast to the pomp and artifice of the noble court, where ritual, ceremony, and display (often involving music and other arts) served to convey distinctions of wealth, power, and status.¹⁶

At the same time, increased social, economic, and geographic mobility during the nineteenth century meant that individuals frequently found themselves in unfamiliar social settings and amongst strangers. This social reality required the ability to interpret others, and present oneself, in situations where a system of shared social codes (the meanings ascribed to comportment, speech, dress, and other forms of behaviour) could no longer be assumed. In this context, the moralising tone accompanying exhortations to personal authenticity also betrays an anxiety, both about misinterpreting (or worse, being deliberately misled about) the essential character of someone else, or about being misinterpreted oneself. The ideal of the authentic individual arose partly in response to these circumstances: a virtuous person was cast as someone in whom there was complete harmony between inner nature and outward behaviour, who remained the same no matter the social circumstances, who resisted the temptation to alter his or her behaviour in different settings, in a word, who refused to perform.¹⁷

There was a continuity, then, between ethical demands placed on individuals and aesthetic standards applied to the arts. Amongst the arts, the ideal of authenticity was perhaps most pronounced within music. In the early nineteenth century, music and lyric poetry were seen as the art forms most conducive to self-expression, and music in particular was thought to offer the most pure, direct, and unmediated access to the inner life. As many Romantic writers pointed out, even poetry relied on the seemingly arbitrary symbols and syntax of language, and thus inserted a layer of artifice and convention between subjective experience and its artistic expression. Music, on the other hand, was known as the least representational medium, and instrumental music in particular was defined by its absence of clear signifiers, and was thus best suited to expressing the ‘inexpressible’. Indeed, in some Romantic thought music did not merely ‘represent’ this deeper reality, but rather embodied or manifested it.¹⁸ As Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder wrote (in language reminiscent of Hoffmann’s later image of music ‘flowing out’ of the composer), ‘with the mysterious stream in the depths of the human spirit – speech reckons and names and describes its changes in a foreign material; music streams out before us as it is in itself’.¹⁹

Nevertheless, at the same time that music was idealised as the purest, most immediate expression of interiority, it also entered into a series of expanded contexts in public life. In the nineteenth century, public concerts became widespread, mass market publishing made printed music more readily available than ever before, and a burgeoning music criticism industry produced accounts of new compositions and events that were consumed by a diverse reading public.²⁰ These contexts placed strain on the ideal of expressive authenticity, making it difficult to ignore the centrifugal forces of outward performance and other-orientedness that inevitably accompany the social practice of music.²¹ In an era in which expressive authenticity had become a moral and aesthetic standard, musicians found themselves in the paradoxical position of needing to perform an authentic self through music – to convince audiences and critics of this authenticity – in order to achieve any degree of success or critical esteem. Even the most idealistic composers found it difficult to operate outside this logic. Robert Schumann, writing to his fiancée Clara Wieck in 1838, told her that she had made the right choice in not performing his Études symphoniques in one of her concerts: ‘they do not suit the public – and it would be lame if I later wanted to complain that they had not understood something that was not intended for applause; it was not intended for anything at all and exists only for its own sake’. Nevertheless, in the next sentence, he wrote, ‘But I confess that it would make me very happy if something of mine were successful sometime, that is, if you played it and the audience ran up the walls from excitement; we composers are vain, even if we have no reason to be.’²²

Due in no small part to these inherent tensions, then, in practice expressive authenticity was not a stable quality. Instead, it functioned as what has sometimes been termed a ‘regulative’ ideal in nineteenth-century musical life: broadly and intuitively understood and valued, and frequently evoked as a way of conferring aesthetic legitimacy and prestige, yet employed in ways that were inconsistent and complex.²³ Because of this function, it is important to ask not only what it was, but also how it worked. How did nineteenth-century musical practice (including composing, performing, listening, and criticism) orient itself towards the ideal of expressive authenticity? What were the practical consequences of adherence to this ideal? And how did it create or reinforce hierarchies and power relationships in musical culture? The remainder of this essay will explore how these questions played out in several interrelated areas of musical practice in which questions of expression and authenticity came into the foreground.

In nineteenth-century criticism, efforts to discern the authenticity of a composition often hinged on evaluating the extent to which certain technical features emanated from a point at the centre – the composer’s inner subjectivity, or more specifically, an inner experience that manifested outwardly as music. For many nineteenth-century listeners and critics, Beethoven’s music came to represent a gold standard in this respect, as a veritable industry of biographical and myth-making initiatives encouraged listeners to experience his music as the sonic record of his inner experiences and struggles, and analytical criticism by Hoffmann, A. B. Marx, and others drew attention to the integration between whole and parts in his music, and argued for an organic relationship between individual features and essential, spiritual content (in Marx’s terms, the Idee of a work).²⁴

Such a division of works of art into inner essence and external form was indebted to the Idealist philosophy that dominated German intellectual life in the early nineteenth century.²⁵ And indeed, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had considered the question of authenticity in art. Hegel drew a contrast between what he termed the ‘ideal style’, which ‘hovers in between the purely substantive expression of the topic [Sache] and the complete emergence of what pleases’, and the ‘pleasing’ artistic style, whose primary aim was to produce an effect on the spectator:

The notion that particular details can become detached from inner content and turn towards an audience provides an indication of how certain musical characteristics and practices emerged as flashpoints in discussions of authenticity in music. Many critics, for example, viewed piquant orchestral sonorities with some degree of suspicion. Timbre was often cast as a way of using instrumental effects to ‘dress up’ the more enduring content of a musical work (usually thought to reside in such elements as pitch, rhythm, and harmony) with ephemeral sound effects that played directly on listeners’ senses.²⁷ Because timbre seemed to fall into the category of ‘external appearance’, it was at risk of becoming independent of the ‘topic’ and existing solely ‘in relation to the spectator’. Indeed, the abuse of orchestral effects (‘blaring chords from every conceivable wind instrument’) was exactly what Hoffmann lambasted in the essay cited above, when he admonished composers for pandering to audiences at the expense of their inner inspiration.

In practice, composers responded to the discourse on timbre in varying ways. When the British composer Ethel Smyth lived and studied amongst Brahms and his friends in the 1870s, her impression was that they viewed orchestration with a high-minded disdain: ‘in that circle what you may call the external, the merely pleasing element in music, was so little insisted on that its motto really might have been the famous “take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves”’.²⁸ Other composers, of course, fully embraced the creative possibilities offered by timbre. But it is noteworthy that even Berlioz, a composer famous for his innovative orchestral effects, regularly emphasised that such effects were only justified when they were ‘motivated’ by some deeper expressive purpose.²⁹ When discussing Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer in his memoirs, for example, he praised the overall ‘sombre colouring’ and ‘certain stormy effects perfectly appropriate to the subject’, yet censured Wagner for his ‘abuse of the tremolo’ in passages that contained no other ‘striking ideas’.³⁰ The implication was that such passages might appeal to listeners’ senses and emotions with their wash of shimmering sound, but because they expressed nothing, they were effects without a cause; in fact, they may even disguise a lack of invention or authentic content on the composer’s part.

For similar reasons, virtuosity represented another flashpoint in nineteenth-century discussions of self-expression and authenticity. Rooted in the physical process of singing or playing an instrument and the spectacle of performers displaying their technique, virtuosity brought forward several familiar dichotomies. Could virtuoso showpieces be the expression of a composer’s deep interiority, or were they merely a hodgepodge of impressive techniques and figures designed to impress audiences? To what extent did virtuoso performers allow the ‘mysterious stream in the depths of the human spirit’ to flow forth ‘as it is in itself’ (to paraphrase Wackenroder), and to what extent were they merely skilled technicians, compromised by a desire to gain applause, acclaim, and commercial success? Many of these recurring questions can be observed in an anonymous 1834 review of Sigismund Thalberg’s Grande fantaisie sur ‘I Capuletti e Montecchi’ that appeared in Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Describing the work’s alternation between learned contrapuntal writing and brilliant virtuosity, the reviewer discerned no inner expressive necessity, but rather a desire to ‘adorn itself with different colours for each person’: ‘One sees very clearly how the composer wanted to make the variations pleasing for the connoisseur as well as the layperson, how he thinks to satisfy the former with pretty fugued or four-voice passages, and for the latter, to compensate for their boredom with brilliant and elegant passages. … A piece like this’, he concluded, ‘whose highest and only tendency is to seek admiration … we cannot possibly call good’.³¹

Scattered throughout the review are suggestions about how Thalberg should approach composing: ‘A young composer, if like Herr Thalberg he possesses knowledge in addition to natural talent, does not need to fear that he will become ordinary if he only renders simply and transparently what is inwardly felt.’ The reviewer’s conviction that Thalberg had not achieved this goal derived from an analysis of the piece’s technical bravura and frequent stylistic shifts. Yet tellingly, the reviewer describes authenticity in both absolute and strikingly personal terms, perceiving a continuity between Thalberg’s compositional choices and his essential character: ‘If he mistakes this principle, if he senses it not even once, if he worships the fashion of the day as his God, and if he subordinates his talent to the applause of the masses, then everything that he wants to do to preserve a deeper individuality is a vain effort.’³²

Such identification between the musical (‘the piece’ seeks admiration) and the personal (the composer is unable to preserve his ‘deeper individuality’) were typical in nineteenth-century criticism. In an age of musical celebrity, listeners and critics consumed reports, biographies, and images of famous musicians coterminously with their music; each informed the other. But this emphasis on the identity of the composer could combine in troubling ways with the assumption (as articulated above by Hoffmann) that only a unique individual – a genius – would possess both the inner depth and creative power to produce authentically expressive music. Increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, such an individual was assumed to have a gender (male) and a nationality (German). For musicians who did not fit this profile, it was often the case that even the most compelling music was suspected of inauthenticity, of meeting the surface requirements of form and technique but lacking expressive depth.

Of this strain of criticism, Wagner’s invective against Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn in Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850/1869) is only one of the most well known and pernicious examples. Wagner’s argument was that an artist’s inner inspiration could only be nurtured through membership in a historical community: the German Volk, which Wagner defined in racialised terms that excluded even German-born converted Jews such as Mendelssohn. In Wagner’s view, a Jewish composer, a perpetual outsider, could never obtain ‘so intimate a glimpse into our essence: … he merely listens to the barest surface of our art, but not to its life-bestowing inner organism’.³³ In Mendelssohn’s case, Wagner wrote, his music might appeal to audiences when it is confined to ‘the presentment, stringing together and entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished figures’;³⁴ indeed, it may mimic the music of other great German composers with ‘quite distressing accuracy and deceptive likeness’.³⁵ But it had no centre; it could not contain the ‘deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart’, all external appearances to the contrary.³⁶ In a word, it was inauthentic.

It is here that we can observe how the Romantic ideal of authentic self-expression, while nurturing artists’ ‘feelings and dreams’, also enabled many of the ideologies of exclusion that have become deeply embedded in the Western musical canon. Within an aesthetic framework valuing skilful imitation and demonstrable effect, the kind of argument advanced by Wagner lacked power. Yet with the composer’s inner experience as the yardstick, inauthenticity became one of the most damning charges to level at music. It was also one of the most difficult to counter: Wagner’s evidence for his claims lay in common knowledge about Mendelssohn’s Jewish identity and social background, and descriptions of what Wagner felt or failed to feel when listening to Mendelssohn’s music. Wagner warns his readers not to be deceived, to question the music’s authenticity. But he leaves it to ‘professional critics’ to ‘prove’ his claims with ‘specimens of Mendelssohn’s art-products’.³⁷ Yet even if someone attempted to ‘disprove’ Wagner’s allegations using the tools of musical analysis, the essay’s distrust of musical surfaces – Wagner’s assertion that they can bear a deceptive, even indistinguishable similarity to the ‘real thing’ – would to some extent defang such a defence. The success or failure of the argument depended on its appeal to readers’ existing prejudices and their acceptance of the writer’s authority as someone who is able to discern authentic from inauthentic music. As even the most cursory look at much music criticism of the last 200 years shows, the logic underlying this kind of critical gatekeeping has proved remarkably tenacious despite its speciousness.³⁸

Yet Wagner was hardly the dominant voice on Mendelssohn’s music, and a final example shows in a more general sense how the Romantic aesthetics of authenticity opened up new modalities of musical experience that have remained influential. When Mendelssohn was away from Berlin on his Grand Tour in 1829, his sister Fanny often consoled herself for his absence by engaging with his music, and recorded a particularly intense experience one evening: ‘I’ve been alone for two hours, at the piano, which sounds especially nice today, playing the Hora [Felix’s motet Hora est]. I get up from the piano, stand in front of your picture, and kiss it, and immerse myself so completely in your presence that I – must write you now.’³⁹ In some intangible way, Fanny felt her brother’s spirit to be there in his music, accessible to her under the right conditions; while her description may seem uncanny, even extreme, belief in this possibility guided many nineteenth-century approaches to listening, performance, and criticism. The fact that this belief can still be observed informing these practices today, albeit sometimes in altered ways, testifies to the flexibility and capaciousness of expressive authenticity as a critical concept.