Introduction

Music is ubiquitous in Romantic literature. To wander through its poetry and prose is to encounter a landscape crowded with obscure village minstrels, prophetic bards, carefree improvisors, cruelly disfigured and rejected castrati, and enthusiastic kapellmeisters ready to cruise the job market.¹ Genius composers draw us into infinite nocturnal kingdoms (Beethoven), die listening to their own sublime creations (Haydn), and return to life to haunt pubs and opera houses (Gluck).² Here, Sappho’s song echoes as she leaps from a cliff; there, a ‘Hindoo’ girl sings a prediction of her love match; Albanian soldiers ‘half-scream’ war-ballads in the mountains; medievalising lutes sound mysteriously through the darkness to heroines imprisoned in castles; caged birds sing in praise of Waldeinsamkeit, while nightingales vie for airtime with the silent pipers on an antique urn.³

And this din largely covers just one dimension of the relationship between literature and music: the representation of music in literary texts. Just as significant for Romanticism was the new twilight zone between literature and music theory or criticism, epitomised by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s publications of the same material in music journals and collections of ‘literary’ Fantasiestücke. Finally, there is the enormous territory of Romantic literature in music, most strikingly poetry settings in lieder, and adaptations of prose for operas, melodramas, and instrumental works (Mérimée’s novella for Bizet’s Carmen; De Quincey’s autobiography via Musset for Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique; Dumas fils’s play for Verdi’s La traviata; Hugo’s novel for Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Les Misérables).

The task of this chapter is not to survey this vast field, but to ask what work music does for literature in Romanticism. The question is difficult enough, not least given the problems of periodisation endemic to studies of Romanticism. Romanticism is not contemporaneous across European traditions, and nor is literary Romanticism easily synchronised with musical Romanticism. Thus ‘Romantic’ debates over sublimity, virtuosity and naturalness, spontaneous creativity, and fidelity to the musical work are fought over ‘baroque’ and ‘classical’ compositions by Handel, Arne, Mozart, or Gluck.⁴ Related to periodisation are broader definitional problems, not infrequently scorned by Romantic writers themselves (‘one feels the Romantic, one does not define it’, wrote one).⁵ Should we talk of Romantic movements (centred on social groupings and affiliations, and often on canonical artists), Romantic eras and generations (at the risk of implying that a spirit of the age permeates all cultural productions), or of Romantic aesthetics, more or less temporally limited (since, for instance, Friedrich Schlegel famously believed ‘all poetry is or should be Romantic’, a statement difficult to fathom outside the particular moment and milieu of Jena Romanticism (1798–1804))?⁶

As a cluster of values, tendencies, and theories, Romantic aesthetics include engagement with philosophical Idealism, absolutes, and ideals – both ‘normative’, in the sense that art represented ideals, and ‘categorial’, in the sense that making and reflecting on art might enact ideals such as freedom, spontaneity, infinite play, indeterminacy, or autonomy.⁷ As autonomous, art was imagined to be non-utilitarian (not difficult in a world where personal patronage was increasingly unreliable), although it could be deeply politically and socially engaged. Romanticism was not, of course, concerned with ‘emotion’ above ‘reason’ or ‘enlightenment’, nor with individual subjectivity against community or society. It was, however, bound up with new understandings of such categories: the dominant paradigm of ‘emotions’ was crystallising in our period (alongside claims that aesthetic responses are not passionate); and eighteenth-century ideas about the shaping power of the subject’s imagination and perception took on new dimensions and urgency, leading some texts to despair of accessing reality through the ‘green spectacles’ of our own perceptual apparatus (Kleist’s letters), others to revere imagination as a ‘power’ revealing an ‘invisible world’ superior to empirical experience (Wordsworth’s Prelude), and still more to create dialectics between experience as given and self-created.⁸ Although metaphors surrounding imagination were often visual, the (for Romantic authors) emotionally charged and time-saturated medium of music was increasingly both a model for literary production, and a source of metaphors for subjectivity – as when Coleridge calls ‘Joy’ a ‘strong music in the soul’, given to us by ‘Nature’, but becoming ‘the life and element’ ‘Of all sweet sounds’ available to perception, ‘All melodies the echoes of that voice’ (lines 64, 68, 58, 74). These words, from ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802), suggest a final Romantic concern: the idea of a malady – melancholy, madness, solipsism, incurable longing – sometimes seen as a universal human asset, but often identified with specific problems of modernity, be they despotic revolutions, repressive old orders, urban and utilitarian pressures, idleness and loss of old meanings, or alienation – a mal du siècle.

Other chapters in this book help explain music’s distinctive and exalted place in this aesthetic, in particular its connection with origins, of languages and peoples, and with ends, the telos of humans’ connection with the infinite and undetermined. For our purposes, it suffices to recall the musicological argument that the failures of music within (narrowly) representational artistic paradigms became a strength when representation was seen as limited and determined, making music, in Hoffmann’s words, ‘the most Romantic of all the arts … for only the infinite is its object’.⁹ This leaves verbal arts in an uncomfortable position. They not only habitually represent and refer (although texts like Novalis’s Monolog (1798) will dispute this), but do so using arbitrary signs which differ between places and times, suggesting language’s ‘determination’ by society, and moreover subjectivity’s determination by language, so long as we cannot fully prise apart thought and word. Thus while Romantic theory makes expansive claims for literature – the best known being Schlegel’s that ‘Romantic poetry’, aka literature, is ‘a progressive universal poetry’ which is ‘alone infinite, as she alone is free’ – literature also faces problems which, I suggest, music helps to navigate.¹⁰

The following is shaped by two methodological approaches to the question of the work of music for literature: word and music studies, and the somewhat newer field of sound studies. The former often concentrates on representations of music and on word–music relations in text settings. It is shaped by modernist understandings of the specificity and separateness of the arts, and the poignant gaps between them (for instance, literature is silent and textual; literature aspires to but never achieves polyphony).¹¹ Sound studies, meanwhile, following postmodern media and cultural studies, tend to assume the constructed and so changeable nature of divides between media and senses, while striking an anti-elitist stance which can sideline the ‘elite’ sources and close musical and textual analysis often found in word and music studies. Both approaches resonate with Romantic-era and pre-Romantic aesthetics – think, on one hand, of the gulf between visual and verbal arts in Lessing, on the other of Romantic ideals of synaesthesia or the reunification of the faculties (split by modern divisions of labour) in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. But it is sound studies’ stronger questioning of the division between the arts which particularly informs this chapter’s two broad answers to the question of the work of music.

First, ‘music’ has a strong role in forming ‘literature’, as an art, discipline, and institution whose contemporary form emerges in the latter part of the eighteenth century. A well-known marker in this process is a new division between imaginative and non-imaginative literature: in Johnson’s 1755 dictionary, ‘literature’ means ‘Learning, skill in letters’, but the term has roughly its modern scope around 1800 (for instance, in the English translation of Madame du Staël’s De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (The Influence of Literature on Society, 1812)). Other markers include the establishment in Edinburgh of the first chair in rhetoric and belles lettres, in 1762, held by Hugh Blair, the principal champion of the supposed primitive bard Ossian; and the establishment in the 1780s of ‘philology’ in German universities (roughly equivalent to Anglo-Saxon language and literature departments). There are also new pedagogical practices, including a stress on learning reading through motherly oral instruction; changing emotional and imaginative investments in reading; and marked rises in literacy and print.¹² These coincide with longings for a lost oral immediacy that supposedly existed before modern print culture, with ballad crazes, stylings of poetry as songs, lyrical ballads, or odes, and fashions for improvisation – alongside justifications of written literature as the most comprehensive art after all, reuniting sight, gesture, and sound under the aegis of imagination.¹³

Second, the remainder of this chapter suggests, music helps Romantic literature to fail. Perhaps paradoxically, failure is a key way of responding to and evoking ideals. What is sometimes called the ‘literary absolute’ flourished in literary theory – a genre, if not separate from, then athwart literary ‘works’. Poetry and imaginative prose meanwhile employ music to suggest ideals without needing fully to instantiate or capture them, a hubristic task and a self-defeating one insofar as these ideals are infinite and indeterminate. Failure, like music, has varied meanings and uses for Romantic literature, and one of the chief conclusions of this chapter is that, while music often evokes the universal and/or indistinct, there is also a strong alignment between music and particularity. Within the limits of any particular set of aesthetic characteristics or functions, failure thus proves a useful and wide-ranging thread running through the work of music for Romantic literature.

Loss of Sound and Certainty: Blake, Hoffmann, Kleist

The ‘Introduction’ to William Blake’s 1789 Songs of Innocence (later, following the French Revolutionary Terror, expanded as Songs of Innocence and Experience) is not a prose preface but an energetic poem. Voiced by a rural ‘Piper’ (line 7), it suggests simple oral origins through compact lines, straightforward and repetitive syntax, an elementary and rough rhyme scheme (abab) and frequently recurring sounds (especially chear, hear, clear (6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20)). But the song – if such it is – does not insist on oral purity. It is an apparently cheerful parable about the emergence of writing from absolute music, and simultaneously about the genesis and fate of the Songs as a text.¹⁴ The piper first ‘Pip[es] songs of pleasant glee’, then, upon the request of a genius- or Christ-like child, gives these songs a programme: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb’ (2, 5). He is next told to ‘Drop [his] pipe’ and ‘Sing’, and finally to ‘sit … and write / In a book that all may read’ (9, 13–14). Making a ‘rural pen’ from a ‘reed’, the piper ‘wrote [his] happy songs, / Every child may joy to hear’ (16–17, 19–20), creating a text that has print’s ease of dissemination (all may read) and writing’s function as record and script for performance (children may hear).

We might wonder, however, what tune the words will take, if any, and whether something has been lost in the piper’s descent from wandering to sitting, from ‘valleys wild’ to tamer stream (1), from pipe to pen, and from an immediate audience with a seraphic child to a merely potential audience of distant children. The poem does not strongly invite a suspicious reading, yet many experienced readers stumble over such questions, and particularly the ambiguity of the piper ‘stain[ing] the water clear’ (18), apparently with his pen: does writing stain the water dirty, or ‘clear’ and repristinate it? Moreover, what stains the flowing water, so suggestive of pure origins, and what is the stream’s place in writing? Is the water itself an ink, or a writing surface for the dabbling reed? In the absence of Blake or the piper to answer such questions – so the ideal of immediate presence goes – readers are free to disagree, freer and less certain than in an oral and musical ‘beforehand’. The poem thus constructs not just one ‘oral-literate conjunction’, in Maureen McLane’s words, but several.¹⁵ It allows us to imagine literature’s all-encompassing nature – its paths out of and back into orality and song – but also to question the idyll presented on the page.

A loss of innocence is deepened in German Romantic texts which complicate their oral-literate conjunctions by acknowledging that music, as well as words, can be written, creating complex matrices of music, word, sound, and text. Kleist’s ‘Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik (eine Legende)’ (St Cecilia or the Power/Violence of Music (a Legend), 1810) and Hoffmann’s ‘Ritter Gluck’ (Sir Gluck, 1814), like Grillparzer’s Biedermeier novella Der arme Spielmann (The Poor Player, 1847), all turn on unreadable scores. In Kleist’s case, a maternal detective-figure approaches the manuscript of a mass by an ‘old master’, hoping to unlock the secret to the musical experience which miraculously converted her iconoclast sons to Catholicism. But she is musically illiterate, or at least cannot decipher this old notation. Seeing the score’s ‘unknown magical signs, with which a fearsome spirit seemed mysteriously to define its circle’, she ‘thought she would sink into the earth’.¹⁶ She, too, soon converts. What the mother, a truth-seeking Protestant, fails to read is legible by others – namely, the nuns of the apparently wealthy and well-connected convent of St Cecilia – and the reader is left wondering about the roles of divine intervention as against worldly power plays and obfuscation in the Protestants’ return to the old faith. In Hoffmann’s case, an apparition of the dead composer Gluck plays from a richly bound and printed score, yet its notes are invisible to the dilettante narrator – either a sign of his musical-philosophical tone-deafness (for he misunderstands the genius), or the sheer impossibility of translating the infinite, teeming, polymorphous ‘forms’ (Gestalten) of ideal creativity into quotidian life on the page, the letter that kills while the spirit gives life. With Grillparzer, we meet a musical text as botched and cramped as the aspirations of its atrocious ‘beggar-musician’ to unstained personal and musical harmony in a fallen world.¹⁷

In each story, music represents for some characters an ideal experience which, to others, looks or sounds incomprehensible. The fact that music is not immediately present within these literary prose texts – as sound or as writing – allows them to stage a gap between the ideal and the prosaic (the latter aligned with the writer-narrator), and furthermore to pass on this gap to the reader as a failure of certainty, the impossibility of contact with a musical ‘source’ which might prove whether the ideal was an illusion all along or not. This kind of useful failure, created by writers who were themselves composers, players, or commentators on music, contrasts sharply with the desirable failure of musical ideals with a Romantic such as Coleridge.

Avoiding the Ideal: Coleridge

One of Coleridge’s best-known treatments of music is ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1796). This rural and domestic idyll sees the poet sitting with his future wife, musing on the philosophical implications of sounds emanating from an aeolian harp. This instrument fascinated Romantic listeners because it was played by the wind, seeming to activate and manifest the creativity and harmony of nature (even ‘the mute still air / Is Music slumbering on her instrument’ (lines 33–34)). For Coleridge, the harp suggests first eroticism (‘caress’d, / Like some coy maid’ (15–16)); then the supernatural (‘a soft floating witchery of sound’ (20)); then more elevated philosophical materialism, influenced by Enlightenment nerve theory – Coleridge engaged especially with Hartley’s idea that solid nerves, vibrating like instrument strings, grounded all sense perception, movement, and thought – theory tainted by association with scepticism and pantheism.¹⁸ The speaker distances his philosophising from scepticism, and recalls the Neoplatonic Christian imagery of a world soul (long associated with music) as well as Romantic scientific work on the underlying unity of sensation and life: there is

Yet still he imagines his ‘passive brain’ being given thoughts, as the harp is given melodies by ‘random gales’, and wonders ‘what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d, / That tremble into thought, as’ they are swept by ‘one intellectual breeze’, ‘the Soul of each, and God of all?’ (42–3, 45–9). All this looks ideal: a vision of organic and spiritual unity, and one not only formulated intellectually, but suggested by, even on a continuum with, an empirical musical experience. Moved by music, as harp strings are moved by the wind, the poem seems to enact that flow between individual and universal, mechanical ‘motion’ and ‘soul’, which it describes (28). Similar musical visions appear in Schlegel’s Abendröte (Sunset, 1802; 1.1.15–18) – where ‘Everything seems to speak to the poet / For he has found the meaning, / And the universe [seems] a single choir, / Many songs from One mouth’ – or Eichendorff’s miniature ‘Wünschelrute’ (Divining Rod, 1838):

With Coleridge, however, the ideal and the aural idyll are not the final word. In the last stanza, the speaker accepts the ‘mild reproof’ of his beloved’s ‘more serious eye’, and abandons his ‘unhallow’d’ speculations (or, perhaps better, ‘auscultations’, since this is philosophy as listening) (50, 52).¹⁹ Joy and contentment – the poet’s ‘Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour’d Maid!’ (65) – arise not from musical nature revealing itself naturally to poet-philosophers, but from the intervention of the biblical God, ‘saving’ broken natures and revealed, partially, in scripture (62). Likewise, proper poetry emerges not as enthusiastic invention, flowing from ‘vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring’, but humble ‘praise’ of God, ‘The Incomprehensible!’ (58, 60–61). Readers may regard the final stanza as marring the poem’s shape and sentiments. But, for the speaker, claims to ideal plenitude are dangerous, and failure to embody it a saving grace. Poetry responds to the pressures of the given: not a world spirit but actual community (the female companion), revealed religion (and its limits), and, more mutedly, an inherited poetic tradition of rural contentment, taken from Virgil’s Georgics. In this long tradition, philosophical speculation on nature is situated within quiet rural landscapes, like the one with which Coleridge begins (where ‘The stilly murmur of the distant Sea / Tells us of silence’ (11–12)); and, while Virgil’s poet-speaker asks the muses for philosophical enlightenment and elevation, he then falls back into the more humble request for a quiet life and unspectacular contentment (Georgics 2.475–89). An internal tension between sound, music, and quiet thus runs through the poem, and prepares the well-tuned reader for the fact that ‘wild’, ‘delicious’, exuberant music will help poetry to reach its necessary domestication and falling-short (25, 20).

Music plays a no less pivotal role in perhaps the best-known Romantic failure in poetry, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ (1797/1816). In a preface which by its nature underscores the poem’s lack of self-sufficiency (as will the marginal notes in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’), Coleridge reports that he published this ‘fragment’ at the request of Byron, ‘rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits’.²⁰ Romantic tropes of the exotic or ‘other’, spontaneous, and ideal are on full display. During a vivid opium dream, inspired by reading an antique travelogue which narrated the still older history of the Mongol khan Kublai, the author experienced a spell of spontaneous ‘composition’. This original poem was composed in an ideal psycho-physiological state, ‘without any sensation or consciousness of effort’, and an ideal quasi-Adamic language, whose ‘expressions’ ‘correspond[ed]’ perfectly with the ‘things’ they represented. Seeming ‘to have a distinct recollection of the whole’ upon awakening, Coleridge ‘instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines’ we know as ‘Kubla Khan’ before being interrupted by a visitor from the quotidian world.²¹ Fled was the vision, and the remaining 150–250-odd lines of poetry Coleridge imagined himself to have composed in his altered state. ‘Kubla Khan’ is thus presented as a monument to a lost ideal poetic experience – a witness to a ‘whole’ that is all the more evocative of perfection for being itself broken. The imaginative stakes are high, but the pressures on the words on the page relatively low. Internally, the poem also describes imperilled, utopian perfection. First, there is the ‘miracle of rare device’ that is Kubla Khan’s heterotopic ‘pleasure-dome’, arising as if by magic through his creative ‘decree’ and seemingly channelling the violent forces of nature (35, 2). Yet its pleasures and musical ‘mingled measure’ cannot drown out the labours of kingship, the sound of ‘Ancestral voices prophesying war!’ (33, 30).

Third-person description now breaks off, replaced by a first-person reflection on a past ‘vision’ of an ‘Abyssinian’ ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ (37–9). She sings of another artificial paradise, Abyssinia’s ‘Mount Abora’ (41). The speaker’s now-indistinct ‘vision’ was apparently sonic – although the visual term builds in extra distance between reader and music – since its (non)sounds become a stimulus for his own potential construction of an artificial paradise:

This conditional act of creation with its lost possible ground – music – is bracketed one further step by the hypothetical reaction of ‘all who heard’ the music: ‘all should cry, Beware! Beware!’ at the enthusiastic (and implicitly opiated) creator, should enclose him in a quasi-magical, protective triple ‘circle’ and close their eyes to him (48–9, 51). The underlying structure here is significant: an exotic woman, singing about a legendary mountain in her native land – one long associated with the hidden source of the sacred river Nile – represents poetic creation’s lost source of plenitude (a ‘loud and long’ ‘symphony’, or sounding-together (45, 43)). Moreover, as lost, the singer represents the stimulus for the existing poetic fragment, in its mode of imperfect recollection, wish, or lament, strategically distanced from an encircled ideal.

Coleridge’s very different treatments of strange stringed instruments in these poems use music to figure an ideal which it is actually in the poem’s interests to avoid. ‘Kubla Khan’ arguably has a pragmatic rationale for avoidance: the perfection of altered states cannot be communicated directly, and gesturing towards their loss becomes a good bet in persuading readers something was really there. But in both poems there is a dimension of moral danger and delusion in the ideal that makes failure to reach it valuable. What explains this danger and its alignment with music? It should be acknowledged that the scenario does not fully capture the range of music’s work for Coleridge, let alone for other English Romantics, and figures including Fanny Burney, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, the Shelleys, and Thomas De Quincey engaged more closely and positively with musical culture. Nonetheless, the lurking suspicion of music in the two poems perhaps holds some trace of broader English Protestant suspicions of music as sensual distraction and self-display.²² If not typical, the poems find many echoes elsewhere. The moral questions raised in ‘The Eolian Harp’ are shared by Wordsworth’s ambivalent depiction of excessive musical absorption in ‘The Power of Music’. Meanwhile, the less clearly denounced artificial paradise of Coleridge’s opium vision is echoed by De Quincey’s depiction of the ‘Pleasures of Opium’ in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) – recalled from the other side of this ‘Paradise’, when he has suffered and apparently overcome the ‘Pains of Opium’. Opium’s pleasures are epitomised by visits to the opera, where he heard alongside opera singers the passionate ‘music’ of Italian women speaking in the audience, a musicality enhanced by its separation from utilitarian signification – since De Quincey understood no Italian – and which he compared with the musicality of ‘Indian’ women’s speech, as recounted by a contemporary traveller to Canada.²³

The connection of music with exotic women’s language deserves further exploration. It suggests associations of music with the non-semantic, a- or irrational, undetermined and vague; with passion, sensuality, wildness; and with racial, national, epistemological, and gendered otherness. These are alterities that modern male European authors might claim to harness and mediate to readers without embodying them, making music a useful ‘constitutive other’ for literature. But the exotic woman can also suggest music’s associations with things more particular, determinate, and grounded, leading us to a final and complex case of literary failure.

Exoticism and Philological Failure: Mérimée

Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845/47) is not always counted amongst the Romantic works of this archaeologist, historical conservationist, and master of short fiction. Yet it reflects and interrogates key developments stemming from Romantic-era literature and literary-critical method, still important to the discipline today – namely historicism and hermeneutical philology. Nor is Carmen obviously concerned with music: despite her name, and unlike Bizet’s gypsy, Mérimée’s does not seduce through song. Music is incidental, scattered through the novella, integrated into larger soundscapes and broader depictions of character, custom, and place.

This is as it should be in a novella shaped by historicism, a term coined by Friedrich Schlegel but with roots in Enlightenment-era philosophy and its reception by Herder and others.²⁴ Historicism assumed that character and action vary across nations and their specific stages of historical development; influenced by history, national languages are great repositories and transmitters of cultural specificity, revealing a people’s nature and pointing to its origins. For Herder, the origins of language and song were conjoined. The first language indeed was song, and present-day orally preserved folk songs offered a better insight into the spirit of a people than more alienated modern languages. Within the historicist paradigm, consciously or not (self-consciously in Mérimée’s case), literary authors will show the organic connection between language, social milieu, and individual plots. Literary historians and critics will give close attention to the specificities of language (philology) in order to interpret or divine a text’s original meaning (the hermeneutic task). While German Romantics are usually held to have concentrated on the specificities of distant lands or times, especially the Middle Ages, Mérimée’s friend Stendhal is credited with applying historicism to the here and now, showing in his realist novels how both unremarkable everyday mores and apparently idiosyncratic individual fates are shaped by larger socio-historical forces.²⁵ Tellingly, Stendhal connected music with national origins and specificities in his Memoirs of Rossini (1824), recounting how the changeable timbres of Giuditta Pasta’s voice inspired in an exiled Neapolitan a vivid moonlit vision of his ‘unhappy homeland’.

Set in near-modern-day Spain, Mérimée’s Carmen combines realism with a romanticising, exotic location. Philology and historical interpretation are built into its premise: the narrator is a travelling French dilettante-scholar who comes across Carmen’s lover and murderer, Don José, during an archaeological ‘excursion’ which he hopes will prove the exact site of the classical Battle of Munda, a ‘fascinating question’ supposedly ‘holding all learned Europe in suspense’.²⁶ The narrator recounts the ‘little story’ of Carmen to fill in time before his dissertation on Munda’s origin takes the scholarly world by storm. We soon find he is also a keen linguist and ethnographer, recording in footnotes details of language use (Carmen switches between Spanish, Basque, and ‘chipe calli’), pronunciation, and telling idioms, and using his observations in faltering attempts to discern the geographical and ‘national’ origins of Don José and Carmen herself (mistaken for an Andalusian, a Moor, or a Jew).

Music and sound are crucial here. The undercover bandit José is initially taciturn (a stance affirmed in the novella’s last sentence, which quotes a ‘gypsy’ proverb, ‘A closed mouth, no fly can enter’ (339)). The pronunciation of José’s ‘first words’ marks him as a stranger in Andalusia (3). But only his singing to a mandolin, with incomprehensible words and a ‘melody plaintive and exotic’, suggests to the narrator that he is specifically Basque (7). The song – a characteristic ‘zortziko’ – affects José in a way that on one hand reveals his ethnic traits and origins, and on the other hints at his individual character and fate. José grows ‘sombre’, ‘profound[ly] melancholy’, and resembles ‘Milton’s Satan’. ‘Perhaps, like’ that Romantic antihero, he is brooding on ‘the abode he had left behind [Heaven/Navarre], and of the exile he had earned by some transgression’ (7). (The same is true of Carmen’s only conventional musical performance, a romalis dance for a high-society party. Glimpsing this dance accompanied by ‘tambourine’ and ‘guitar’, José ‘fell in love with her in earnest’ – yet he introduces this pivotal personal moment in quasi-historicist, sociological terms, as generally characteristic of gypsies and their place in Spanish society: ‘They always have an old woman … and an old man with a guitar … . As you know, Gypsies are often invited to social gatherings to entertain guests’ (27–8).²⁷)

José’s melancholy seems not simply associative, but directly prompted by sound’s affective and aesthetic qualities. For, much later, he tells the narrator: ‘Our language is so beautiful, señor, that when we hear it spoken far from home our hearts leap at the sound of it’ (23). Rousseau had linked sound with nostalgia – originally a longing for a specific place, one’s homeland – citing Swiss soldiers’ propensity to fall fatally ill if they heard their native (verbally incomprehensible) cow-herding songs in distant lands. This trope has a decisive narrative function in Carmen: when José, then a soldier, arrests Carmen for attacking her fellow worker, it is Carmen’s recognition of José’s Basque accent, her ability as a polyglot gypsy to speak Basque, and her false claim to be José’s compatriot which persuade him to let her escape. This plunges him into a series of punishments and transgressions ending in the lovers’ isolation and deaths. The sonic effect is double-pronged, specific and general; since not only Basque, but Carmen’s vocalising in any language (along with her laughter) always overpowers José’s reason, he claims, making him a ‘fool’, ‘drunken’, ‘mad’, bending him irresistibly to her will (24).

José’s response to Carmen’s voice suggests a kind of sympathetic magic: sound makes him resemble her wild and exotic character. The cluster of associations – madness, drunkenness, magic, transgression, passion, exoticism – belongs to cultural clichés about music as ‘other’ to modern rationality and rule-bound civilisation. Music represents an alluring ideal of sorts – freedoms, extremes, and rebellions in an age of staid moderation, inertia, and inward-looking pedantry (recall the ‘fascinating’ question of Munda) – but not an ideal realist literature can straightforwardly embrace. Mérimée deploys these associations in Carmen’s incidental uses of music. The lovers’ first orgiastic one-night stand begins with Carmen ‘danc[ing] and laugh[ing] like a madwoman, singing, “You are my rom [husband], I am your romi [wife]”’, before violently smashing an old woman’s ‘only plate’ to fashion makeshift castanets (30). Like her other words, Carmen’s song lies: she is already married. But on another level the music is incantatory and interpellative, helping to effect José’s deracination and transformation from an honour-bound Basque-speaker into something like a Roma. After the resurfacing of Carmen’s real rom, she will idly sing and ‘rattl[e] her castanets’ as a cover for kissing José at their shared campsite (prompting his accusation, ‘You are the Devil incarnate’, to which she replies, ‘Yes’ (39)). She ‘clack[s] her castanets’ like protective talismans or noisy carnival instruments to ‘banish’ any ‘disturbing idea’ (46), and just before her death, ‘engrossed’ in a weird mental state as she undertakes rituals that predict her murder, she ‘sing[s]’ ‘magic songs invoking’ the original ‘great Queen of the Gypsies’ (51).

This is a world where sounds are identifiers and signatures, typifying characters and groups like the timbre of an instrument. José has his Basque accent; the narrator a repeating watch (a novelty in Spain, leading Carmen to misidentify him as an upper-crust Englishman); even King Pedro I, a footnote claims, was easily recognised in a dark alley by an old woman through his ‘extraordinary disability’ of ‘loudly’ ‘crack[ing]’ ‘knee-joints’ (29). Carmen has her castanets, but gypsy sounds are also an anomaly and problem for the narrator’s methods. Polyglot, code-switching, wild, magical – these sounds of course delocalise and exoticise gypsies, failing to specify their origins or locality. The novella’s belated fourth instalment, a free-standing ethnographic sketch of the gypsies, hammers home the anomaly. Their pre-European origins are unknown; their reasons for migrating unknown; ‘strangest of all, no one knows how … their numbers soon increased so prodigiously in several countries so far apart’ (337) – in other words, even the assumption that peoples emanate from single origins is undermined. Finally, the origin of gypsy language is unsettled, and, flouting the logic of hermeneutic philology and the tie between nation and speech, ‘[e]verywhere they speak the language of their adopted country in preference to their own’ (337).

These anomalies help the novella to stage its failures and instal its central character as, not merely an enigmatic femme fatale in the tradition of French literature, but an inscrutable force of resistance and autonomy who tells her lover, ‘you have the right to kill your romi. But Carmen will always be free’ (52). José’s failure to control Carmen, and the narrator’s scholarly failure fully to place the gypsies in general and Carmen in particular, join a series of imperfections: the lovers’ deaths and failed relationship; half-accidental murders; incomplete linguistic crossings (Basque and ‘chipe calli’ are essentially closed to the narrator, and even Carmen speaks the former ‘atrociously’ (24)); the forever-suspended proof that the narrator has located Munda; incomplete plot arcs (characteristic of modern short fiction) concerning José’s death and the narrator’s promise to return a medallion to José’s mother at home – narrative promises of closure or return to origins left hanging by the focus on Carmen’s end. As in ‘Kubla Khan’, music helps to evoke lost origins, wholeness, and creative freedoms not possessed by the literary work itself judged as a set of words on the page. It creates something like a ‘transcendence’ or ‘ideality effect’, a sense of something further that literature can strive to become and represent.

Conclusion

However unappealing the stereotypes of music in a text like Carmen, the work of music within this novella and the other examples discussed aligns it with the aspirations of Romantic literature as defined by Schlegel:

Schlegel’s definition is both infinitely demanding and absolves literary works of embodying any perfections – classically associated with completeness – or living up to any particular ideal, since standards would make poetry determined and unfree. The ‘ideal’ of Romantic poetry can only be provided by ‘a divinatory criticism’ like Schlegel’s, not by analysing a canon of extant exemplary works.²⁹ Romantic poetry is great in theory; in practice, in order to ‘never be complete’ it frequently cultivates smallness, showy incompleteness, and failure. Although Schlegel claims that Romantic literature has no real boundaries – ‘encompass[ing]’ multiple arts, non-arts like philosophy, and the ‘artless song’ breathed out by a ‘child’ – nevertheless one of the most effective ‘caprices’ of Romantic writers is precisely to construct limits and acknowledge laws above and outside literature – perhaps above all the law of music.

Methodologically, this observation brings home a foundational argument of media studies, now also important for sound studies and musicology, that different media have porous and changing boundaries, and, in Georgina Born’s words, exist ‘relationally’.³⁰ This insight encourages us to see relationships between literature and music within the broader framework of sound, and to attend to matters as seemingly external to music as hermeneutic philology. This reinforces the fact that the ‘work’ of music for literature extends beyond any trope or structure such as failure, to forming the institution and discipline of literature itself. Nonetheless, the uses and timbres of failure are manifold and revealing. It might spur melancholy, frustration, madness, longing, humility, suspicion, or an awareness of interdependence. Its flipside is promise and possibility – the sense taken from Romanticism into the commonplaces of later culture: that life and art are epitomised by ‘Effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something ever more about to be’ (Wordsworth);³¹ the drive ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’ (Tennyson);³² that the failure of pleasure drives the formation of civilisation and individual psyches (Freud); or that, in words claimed by postmodernist ironists and popular self-help books alike, we are condemned and free to ‘Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better’ (Beckett).³³ Even E. M. Forster has a little of it when he declares in ‘Not Listening to Music’ – a celebration of his failure to concentrate on or write about music – that while his ‘own performances upon the piano’ (usually Beethoven) ‘grow worse yearly’, ‘never will [he] give them up’: ‘Even when people play as badly as I do, they should continue: it will help them to listen.’³⁴

Long regarded as the paradigmatic example of Romantic musical landscape, Felix Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Op. 26, remains unique insofar as the surviving evidence related to its composition allows us to trace the inspiration for the work’s distinctive opening contours to a specific time and place. The broad outlines of this story are well known.¹ During the summer of 1829 Mendelssohn travelled to Scotland with the diplomat and writer Karl Klingemann, a trip that included a walking tour of the Highlands and the Hebridean archipelago. On the afternoon of 7 August near the small town of Oban on the Scottish mainland, Mendelssohn attempted to document his impressions of the surrounding landscape in a pencil drawing that offers a tantalising glimpse of the archipelago for which the composer was about set sail (see Fig. 4.1). Arriving later that evening on the Isle of Mull, Mendelssohn continued to record his impressions, this time in the form of a twenty-one-bar sketch whose musical substance closely resembles the opening of the completed overture. Of particular interest here is Mendelssohn’s prefatory note in which he claims a direct connection between his own reaction to the landscape of the Hebrides and the music that he immediately felt compelled to jot down. Indeed, it is precisely the directness of this claim that demonstrates why the overture in its final form has continued to serve as an important point of reference for anyone wrestling with the fraught question of how a musical work can be said to evoke a particular landscape or, indeed, the idea of landscape more generally.²

Figure 4.1 Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Ein Blick auf die Hebriden und Morven (A View of the Hebrides and Morven), graphite, pen, and ink on paper, Tobermory, 7 August 1829

(Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. M. Deneke Mendelssohn D.2, Fol. 28)

In the case of The Hebrides, discussions concerning its presumed connection to the place by which it was inspired have naturally been informed by other factors including, most prominently, the suggestive power of the work’s title.³ This serves to remind us that while in recent years our understanding of Mendelssohn’s overture as a ‘landscape’ has been shaped by the musical sketch and accompanying commentary described above, as is the case for many Romantic works, the perceived presence of visual and scenic elements has for most listeners been determined largely by the overture’s more immediately accessible ‘programmatic’ layer. With respect to Romantic instrumental music more generally, such programmatic layers have traditionally included work and movement titles, as well as printed programmes and other kinds of programmatic descriptions. In vocal and choral music, it is the poetry itself that has tended to play the most important role in establishing a sense of place, while in opera a similar role has been played by libretti, staging manuals, and the like. Of course, there are other kinds of texts that have been used to make interpretive claims about the relationship between music and landscape in the nineteenth century, including (1) a composer’s letters, diaries, and other writings; (2) paratexts, including autograph annotations in a composer’s sketches, manuscripts, and printed scores; and (3) contemporary performance reviews and other forms of written commentary and analysis. Whereas our understanding of the relationship between music and landscape continues to be shaped by such texts, the question of how this relationship is manifested in specifically musical terms continues to pose considerable interpretive challenges. With this in mind, I will focus my attention in what follows on two larger issues raised by Mendelssohn’s overture, both of which are relevant to the perceived presence of the visual and scenic in Romantic music in all its manifestations. I will begin by considering the claim that a musical work has the ability to evoke landscape in the first place, whether in general or specific terms. Following a brief exploration of the depiction of music and music making in Romantic art, I will turn my attention to the notion of landscape as an object of contemplation, considering it both as an activity from which composers frequently drew creative inspiration, and as a metaphor that has often been used to make sense of individual works whose musical identity is in some way bound up with the idea of landscape broadly construed.

Evoking Landscape

When Mendelssohn jotted down his musical impressions of the Hebrides in 1829, the notion that instrumental music had the potential to illustrate already had a long and distinguished history. Amongst the most important precedents are the pièces de caractère of François Couperin (1668–1733), works whose evocative titles often seem to align closely with their musical character. Of more immediate relevance is the characteristic symphony, the illustrative genre par excellence that emerged during the second half of the eighteenth century. Often remembered for their vivid depictions of storms, battles, hunts, and pastoral idylls, these works also frequently gave musical expression to a range of national and regional characters.⁴ While not programmatic in the Listzian sense, such works anticipate the Romantic conception of programme music insofar as their descriptive titles are often supplemented by elaborate prose descriptions. But to the extent that the characteristic symphony draws on an established tradition involving the musical representation of things or events, it is important to remember that the genre also placed a strong emphasis on human emotions and expressive content. Indeed, it is precisely this duality that allows us to make sense of Beethoven’s own contribution to the genre in his Sixth Symphony (1808), a work whose title he gave in a letter to his publisher as Pastoral Symphony or Recollections of Country Life: More the Expression of Feeling than Tone-Painting.⁵ Yet, as it turns out, Beethoven’s apparent rejection of Tonmalerei as suggested by this subtitle is not borne out by the completed symphony. For in addition to the numerous examples of musical illustration that can be found throughout the work, the very form of the second movement (‘Scene by the brook’) appears to have been determined by the kind of landscape it purports to evoke. In his discussion of an early sketch containing material for this movement, Lewis Lockwood has observed that underneath a preliminary version of the 12/8 figure, which in its final form has been widely understood to represent the motion of the brook, Beethoven wrote: ‘je grosser der Bach je tiefer der Ton’ (the greater the brook the deeper the tone). For Lockwood the significance of this annotation as it relates to the movement as a whole is that Beethoven ultimately went on to establish a ‘correlation between the image of the widening and deepening brook and the orchestral forces that develop the form of the movement’.⁶ We might even go so far as to say that it is precisely the movement’s sense of motion that ultimately informs Beethoven’s attempt to evoke this particular landscape. Indeed, as Benedict Taylor has recently proposed, ‘music can successfully model a landscape to the extent that it implicates its moving, dynamic aspects, its temporal processes’.⁷

Whereas the early reception of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony reflects the competing aesthetic claims embedded in the work’s subtitle, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a critical vocabulary that revealed another kind of tension in the reception of Romantic music: namely, between musical works that were understood to illustrate and those that were thought to possess narrative qualities. In his discussion of the role of metaphor in nineteenth-century music criticism, Thomas Grey identifies a ‘“pictorial” mode (appealing to a range of “natural”, rather than abstract, imagery), and a “narrative” mode, which ascribes to a composition the teleological character of an interrelated series of events leading to a certain goal, or perhaps a number of intermittent goals that together make up a more or less coherent story’.⁸ But as Grey goes on to argue, these modes are by no means mutually exclusive:

The extent to which these metaphorical modes often overlapped is made plain in a rarely discussed passage that Grey cites from the second part of Franz Liszt’s essay on Berlioz’s Harold in Italy first published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1855. This overlap is particularly evident in the context of Liszt’s discussion of the emerging interpretive tradition around the symphonies, sonatas, and quartets of Beethoven, in which critics had endeavoured, in Liszt’s words, ‘to fix in the form of picturesque, poetic, or philosophical commentaries the images aroused in the listener’s mind’ by these works.¹⁰

At first glance Franz Brendel’s often-cited tribute to Robert Schumann’s early piano works appears to offer a straightforward example of the ‘pictorial mode’. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that the way in which Brendel uses the metaphor of landscape to illuminate specific musical features in Schumann’s music does not, strictly speaking, draw on ‘natural imagery’, but rather on the representation of such images.

If, for Brendel, this description pertained most directly to the Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, Berthold Hoeckner has shown that it applies equally well to Schumann’s celebrated evocation of distant sound in his Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6 (1837), specifically at the beginning of the cycle’s penultimate number, ‘Wie aus der Ferne’, where the use of the damper pedal gives rise to a distinctive texture that ‘easily compares to Brendel’s image of a landscape with a blurred harmonic background against which melodic shapes stand out like sunlit objects’.¹² Given that the relationship between music and landscape being proposed here is more precisely a relationship between music and the visual representation of landscape, it is worth considering whether the desire to draw technical and formal parallels between musical composition and painting risks overinterpreting the presumed visual dimension of the works under discussion, especially given that Schumann was not attempting to compose landscape in the way that would become increasingly common in the decades that followed.

During the second half of the nineteenth century conscious attempts to compose landscape often drew on a compositional device referred to as a Klangfläche (sound sheet), a device that as Carl Dahlhaus has noted gave rise to the most ‘outstanding musical renditions of nature’ in Romantic music.¹³ Dahlhaus provides three examples (the ‘Forest Murmurs’ from Act II of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried, the ‘Nile Scene’ from Act III of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, and the ‘Riverbank Scene’ from Act III of Charles Gounod’s Mirielle), each of which functions as a self-contained musical tableau. Characterised by outward stasis and inward motion, these passages are suggestive of landscape in part because the Klangfläche is ‘exempted both from the principle of teleological progression and from the rule of musical texture which nineteenth-century musical theorists referred to, by no means simply metaphorically, as “thematic-motivic manipulation”, taking Beethoven’s development sections as their locus classicus’.¹⁴ Indeed, Dahlhaus goes on to observe that ‘musical landscapes arise less from direct tone-painting than from “definite negation” of the character of musical form as a process’, something that is particularly evident in the later nineteenth-century use of the Klangfläche where the status of the resulting tableaux is determined partly in relation to the larger symphonic narratives in which they are embedded.¹⁵

Perhaps even more common during the latter half of the nineteenth century are those works whose relationship to landscape is bound up with the claim that their creation has been inspired by an actual geographical locale. Amongst the most ambitious attempts to compose a large-scale instrumental work in these terms is Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage (composed between 1837 and 1877), a sort of musical travelogue inspired by the composer’s ‘pilgrimages’ to Switzerland and Italy. As Liszt writes in the preface to the work’s first volume, ‘Suisse’, his aim was to give ‘musical utterance’ both to the ‘sensations’ (sensations) and ‘impressions’ (perceptions) that he encountered during his travels. How precisely this is conveyed to the listener in terms of specificity of place is, of course, more complicated. Whereas in the earliest published editions of the work each individual piece is preceded by a full-page engraving that was presumably meant to put the performer in mind of the specific locales being evoked, for most contemporary listeners the work of musical illustration would have been carried out by the individual movement titles, as well as through the use of well-established musical topics.

This desire to draw connections between musical works and the places in which they were composed has long played an important role in accounts of one composer in particular: Gustav Mahler. The history of this interpretive tradition can be traced, in part, to the testimony of the conductor Bruno Walter. In the summer of 1896 Walter visited Mahler at his lakeside retreat in the Austrian village of Steinbach am Attersee where the composer was at work on his Third Symphony. Walter later reported that as he stepped off the boat and glanced up towards the surrounding mountains Mahler offered a most unconventional greeting: ‘You don’t need to look – I have composed this all already’ (‘Sie brauchen gar nicht mehr hinzusehen, das habe ich alles schon wegkomponiert’).¹⁶ Earlier that year Mahler provided a more detailed account of his belief in the mimetic power of his own music. Commenting on the Third Symphony’s minuet, which at the time still bore the title ‘What the flowers in the meadow tell me’ (Was mir die Blumen auf der Wiese erzählen), Mahler reportedly said:

In addition to his belief that this landscape served as the primary source of inspiration for the movement as a whole, Mahler also went one step further by suggesting that the listener would be able to envision Steinbach and its surroundings in the music’s very fabric: ‘Anybody who doesn’t actually know the place … will practically be able to visualise it from the music, so unique is its charm, as if made just to provide the inspiration for a piece such as this.’¹⁸ While connections of this sort have remained an important thread in the reception of Mahler’s music, such interpretive moves have also been treated with scepticism. Theodor W. Adorno was amongst the first to resist the idea that these works might reflect specific features of the landscapes in which they were composed. And while it is true that his discussion of Das Lied von der Erde makes reference to its place of composition amongst the ‘artificially red cliffs of the Dolomites’, Adorno is careful not to propose any direct link between this singular landscape and the musical fabric of this remarkable work.¹⁹ It is nevertheless worth remembering that Mahler’s symphonies have long been thought to aspire to the visual, an aspiration that is particularly evident in those passages that invoke the rich tradition of the operatic landscape tableau.

Of course, the presence of landscape imagery in Romantic music was not always bound up with these illustrative modes. Daniel Grimley has been particularly attentive to this issue as it relates to questions of landscape and nationhood in the music of Edvard Grieg, Carl Nielsen, Jean Sibelius, and Frederick Delius. And while for Grimley the idea of landscape in this music is closely tied to broader cultural formations of national identity, he also substantially broadens our understanding of this topic by drawing on perspectives from historical-cultural geography and environmental studies, including a range of ecocritical discourses. In the context of Grieg’s music, for example, he has argued persuasively that landscape is not ‘merely concerned with pictorial evocation, but is a more broadly environmental discourse, a representation of the sense of being within a particular time and space’.²⁰ Grimley also encourages us to think of the function of landscape here both as a spatial phenomenon (through associations with pictorial images connected to the Norwegian landscape and the folk traditions of its inhabitants) and as a temporal one (involving historical memory and attempts to recover or reconstruct past events). In his close readings of individual works, he also interrogates their formal properties in a way that forces us to think about landscape not only in terms of the evocation of a particular place, but also in terms of a ‘more abstract mode of musical discourse, one grounded in Grieg’s music with a particular grammar and syntax’.²¹

Excursus: Making Music in Romantic Art

Nowhere are the connections between nineteenth-century musical culture and the visual and scenic manifested more clearly than in the depiction of music making in Romantic art. Prominent examples include Moritz von Schwind’s Eine Symphonie (1852) and Gustav Klimt’s Schubert at the Piano (1899), the former depicting a performance of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, and the latter offering an idealised portrait of Franz Schubert. In contrast to these composer-centric canvases, the works of the German painter Adolph Menzel are particularly notable for their emphasis on the social dimension of music making. In The Interruption (1846), Menzel captures the moment in which a group of unannounced house guests interrupt two young women who have been making music in a lavish drawing room, while in Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim in Concert (1854, Fig. 4.2) the focus is entirely on the two musicians whose studied concentration reflects the intensity of an unfolding performance.²² More explicit in its diagnosis of music as a social phenomenon is Menzel’s Bilse Concert (1871, Fig. 4.3). Although the orchestra here occupies a prominent position in the middle of the canvas, Menzel devotes equal space to the audience (at the bottom of the frame) and the candlelit busts of composers who keep silent watch over the performers and their audience (at the top).²³ Finally, in Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci (1852, Fig. 4.4), Menzel draws our attention both to the elaborate setting in which the performance takes place and to the absorption of the musicians and auditors in attendance. So popular was this painting that on the occasion of Menzel’s seventieth and eightieth birthdays it was transformed into a tableau vivant, demonstrating the continued vitality of a tradition that flourished during the nineteenth century as entertainment for the educated middle class.

Figure 4.2 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim in Concert (1854), coloured chalks, 27 × 33 cm, Private Collection

(Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 4.3 Adolph Menzel, Bilse Concert (1871), gouache, 17.8 × 12 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

(bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY)

Figure 4.4 Adolph Menzel, Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci (1850–2), oil on canvas, 142 × 205 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

(Wikimedia Commons)

Contemplating Landscape

Amongst the most important functions of Romantic landscape painting was to provide the viewer with an opportunity to (re)experience the sublimity of the natural world through an act of private contemplation. So central was this impulse to the painterly imagination in the nineteenth century that the act of contemplation would itself become the focus of numerous canvases. This is particularly evident in the tradition of the Rückenfigur, in which the depicted figure is seen from behind. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) remains the most representative example of this tradition, while Carl Gustav Carus’s Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley (c. 1820) offers a useful point of comparison in that it makes explicit the religious dimension often associated with this mode of solitary contemplation. Composers were often depicted in similarly contemplative poses, including in the Rückenfigur of Beethoven by Joseph Weidner and Arnold Schoenberg’s Self-Portrait from Behind (1911).

In the context of nineteenth-century compositional traditions this mode of private contemplation occupies a particular place of prominence in the genre of the lied. Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) offers a particularly compelling manifestation of this tendency. In the first song the speaker contemplates the landscape that separates him from his beloved, a present-tense reflection shot through with a sense of melancholy that is carefully matched by Beethoven’s setting of the poem’s first stanza: ‘Upon the hill I sit / Gazing into the blue land of mist / Looking towards the far pastures / Where I found thee, beloved.’ But as the speaker begins to dwell on his own isolation, the music takes on an increasing urgency; not in the vocal line, which remains largely the same from stanza to stanza, but rather in the accompaniment, which undergoes a further intensification midway through the final stanza.

This isolation is further highlighted in the cycle’s second song, above all in the unusual treatment of the vocal line in the middle stanza. Here the melody is transferred to the piano while the singer declaims the text on a single pitch: ‘There in the peaceful valley / Grief and suffering are silenced: / Where in the mass of rocks / The primrose dreams quietly there / The wind blows so lightly / Would I be.’ To the extent that this hushed meditation reflects the experience of someone lost in thought, this moment represents a deepening of the cycle’s contemplative mode. Yet as we bear witness to the speaker’s innermost thoughts, we are also provided with an opportunity to experience the stillness of the landscape by which he is surrounded.

Although the contemplation of nature is often understood to be an act of communion that requires the subject to be quiet, reverent, and immobile, many composers had an active relationship to the landscapes they inhabited. While these composers rarely ‘worked’ outside in the manner of the plein-air painters, they often sketched as they walked. Beethoven’s pocket sketchbooks, for example, reveal the extent to which the composer’s surroundings inspired creative activity. Mahler, too, is reported to have composed in this manner, sketching out Das Lied von der Erde (1908) during the course of his daily walks through the mountain landscapes of the eastern Dolomites.²⁴ Of course, the idea of traversing a given landscape was thematised in many nineteenth-century works, from Schubert’s Winterreise (1827) to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899). In the case of Verklärte Nacht our understanding of the sextet’s narrative power is shaped in part by the eponymous poem by Richard Dehmel that was included in the first published edition of the score. Indeed, the music ultimately seems to convey the spirit and the sweep of Dehmel’s goal-oriented narrative, which begins with an unnamed woman confessing to her partner that the child she is carrying is not his. And while at the outset the night is cold and the landscape bare, through an act of forgiveness and acceptance the night is transfigured and transformed into something that is at once lofty and bright. That the narrative is presented as a nocturnal walk, recounted alternately by the narrator and the unnamed couple, is relevant insofar as the piece not only appears to reflect Dehmel’s imagery, but also possesses a musical trajectory that conveys the shifting moods of the poem. Schoenberg would later provide a detailed programme note that offers a literal mapping of poetic image and musical gesture, demonstrating the extent to which he understood this work to operate both at the level of the pictorial and the narrative.²⁵

Whereas the musical personae devoted to the contemplation of landscape in Romantic music commonly occupied an elevated perspective (a tradition that runs from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte to Richard Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie a century later), there is also a parallel tradition running from Schubert to Schoenberg in which the wanderers and walkers are more properly earthbound creatures, far removed from the lofty perspectives of hill and mountaintop. In the early twentieth century this tradition found an unlikely continuation in the music of Charles Ives, a composer whose embrace of the quotidian often seems to suggest a ground-level view of the world as filtered through the eyes and ears of the modern urban subject. Ives’s interest in the evocation of place is particularly evident in his orchestral works, where the use of programmatic titles making reference to specific geographical locales is often supplemented by detailed prose descriptions. In Central Park in the Dark (1906), Ives’s self-described ‘picture-in-sounds’, the composer aims to capture what might have been heard by an attentive listener ‘some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night’.²⁶ In spite of the obvious emphasis here on listening, Ives also provides a succession of richly detailed images that allow the listener to envision the source of the sounds that are being attended to so carefully by the work’s unnamed subject.

In ‘The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)’, from Ives’s Orchestral Set No. 1: Three Places in New England (c. 1911–14), the act of contemplation once again plays out in the context of an urban landscape. Here the object of contemplation is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, a high-relief bronze that pays tribute to Shaw and his soldiers, who comprised one of the first African-American regiments to fight for the Union Army during the American Civil War. Perhaps the greatest interpretive challenge posed by Ives’s work concerns the question of what exactly this music is attempting to depict. While it is possible to identify a narrative dimension (one that reflects the ill-fated battle at Fort Wagner that culminated in the deaths of Shaw and more than half of his soldiers), when taken together with Ives’s accompanying poem this piece might also be heard as a musical response to the memorial itself, one that reflects the ‘auditory image of men moving together’.²⁷

Finally, in ‘From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose’ from Orchestral Set No. 2, we are presented with a composition that purports to describe an event witnessed by Ives in New York City on the morning of 7 May 1915: namely, the spontaneous reaction of a large crowd of New Yorkers to the reported loss of 1,198 lives in the tragic sinking of the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania. The illustrative power of Ives’s accompanying note makes it worth quoting at length.

As was the case with Central Park in the Dark, there is a clear relationship here between the note’s descriptive detail and the work’s chaotic surface. But whereas Central Park in the Dark looks to an imagined past, From Hanover Square North attempts to capture Ives’s own lived experience as an eye- and ear-witness to the remarkable event he so eloquently describes in his note. Indeed, Ives creates a musical analogue to the ‘multiple, competing aspects of the city’ in part by dividing the orchestra into a distant choir and a main orchestra, two distinct ensembles whose relative autonomy creates a ‘visual perspective’ that allows us to ‘hear behind the foreground sounds’.²⁹ Equally remarkable is the presence of narrative elements that foreground what Ives went on to describe as a desire to convey the ‘ever changing multitudinous feeling of life that one senses in the city’.

The Persistence of Romantic Landscape

Whereas Ives’s unique approach to the evocation of place may have found few immediate followers, the same cannot be said about the music of his British contemporaries, including Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Frederick Delius, who together engaged with this tradition in a particularly influential way during the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is hardly coincidental that more recent generations of British composers have continued to breathe new life into that tradition, including Peter Maxwell Davies (An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise and Antarctic Symphony), and Thea Musgrave, whose Turbulent Landscapes offers an extension of the Lisztian programmatic ideal. Less obviously illustrative is Jonathan Harvey’s … towards a pure land, a work that nevertheless takes the listener on a journey towards an imagined place that Harvey has described as

Despite the staggering plurality of compositional and aesthetic priorities represented by the works of this eclectic group of composers, what binds them together is the extent to which they are part of an ongoing dialogue with musical Romanticism writ large. Indeed, their renewed exploration of the visual and scenic, as well as their engagement with questions surrounding the narrative and expressive qualities of individual works that once dominated discussions of musical representation in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, make clear the continued relevance of these traditions amongst twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers, audiences, and critics.

Less ink has been spilled over musical nationalism than blood over political nationalism – but a great deal of ink nonetheless. And arguably some blood, for the two phenomena are closely linked. Musical nationalism has supported and been supported by political nationalism: in the nineteenth century an opera performance could be the catalyst for a revolution, or a tone poem could rally the pride of a politically prostrate nation. Musical nationalism is clearly a Romantic concept – not just because modern nationalism and musical Romanticism are systems of thought that emerged contemporaneously, but because of a common idea at their nexus: ‘the folk’. It is a concept that depends on both Romanticism and nationalism to make sense, and which in return has undergirded musical nationalism. Indeed, in English, German, Russian, and other languages, ‘national music’ and ‘folk music’ began as synonyms. Over the long nineteenth century ‘national’ and ‘nationalist’ music were terms that frequently came to apply to types of art music. Yet they never separated fully from ‘folk music’. Evaluations of the ‘national’ characteristics of art composers such as Grieg or Glinka have frequently fastened on the perceived connection to folk music in their work. At other times, the connection is less direct. The iconic national status of Beethoven or Verdi, for example, has nominally been built on carrying forward traditions rather removed from folk music. And yet ‘the folk’ still lurk underneath, an indelible legacy of Romanticism.

The Nation

To unravel this knot, we should begin by tracing the history of the ideas themselves. Most historians agree that, in the form in which it has been disseminated around the world, nationalism was a phenomenon born in the eighteenth century.¹ Earlier ideas of ‘nation’, ‘liberty’, and ‘self-government’ were tied to feudal fealty and competition. It was only when the idea of divine right was rejected that those who would govern had to find new answers to the question of what united ‘a people’ under their government. If, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, government was a social contract, then who should be bound together by or excluded from such an arrangement? The answer came in appeals to (and sometimes dogged invention of) a shared culture that could become central to ‘national’ identities: languages, laws, religious customs, literature – and artistic products. ‘Cultural’ and ‘political’ nationalism have thus always been two sides of the same coin, the latter reliant on identities built up by the former. Since these identities included music, the first real assertions of ethno-national ownership of musical styles, techniques, and traditions date to the early eighteenth century.²

Such appeals to shared culture became many times stronger, however, when they could evoke ancient, mythical origins. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Europeans were increasingly encountering cultures very different from their own. More importantly, they had begun conceiving such cultures not simply as heathen outsiders of a divine order they themselves represented, but as frozen earlier stages of humanity on its fixed path away from ‘nature’ and towards modernity – stages they believed their own cultures to have passed through as well. These European ethnocentric understandings of human development were shared by so-called pro- and anti-Enlightenment thinkers, despite the fact that the former saw ‘progress’ towards the European present as positive and the latter saw it as an intangible loss. In terms of nationalism, however, it was the latter ‘Romantic’ viewpoint that most frequently shaped the discourse, because when proto-Romantic thinkers such as Rousseau began to envision modern civilisation as representing a breach with a purer, more natural human past – for which they yearned nostalgically – the idea of ‘authenticity’ emerged.³ Tracing cultural traditions backwards towards hoary natural ethnic roots could add a great essentialist force to any national claims.

The Folk and Their Music

The idea of ‘the folk’ originates from just this urge. Europeans found ‘the folk’ the moment they conceived of the natural, ‘primitive’ Other not abroad but within their own midst: as pure peasants untouched by the corrupting forces of industrialisation, urbanisation, and modernity in general. These people, seen as living preservations of any nation’s past, were first ‘discovered in plain sight’ on the geographic edge of Europe, in the Scottish Highlands. The apparent unearthing by James Macpherson of pre-Christian epics by the Celtic bard Ossian still living in oral tradition catalysed a discussion across Europe about the potential of isolated groups to create and to preserve delicate literature and music without writing. From a modern point of view, Macpherson was a fraud. He had assembled into a coherent whole his English ‘translations’ from diverse oral fragments of Gaelic poetry he had picked up, modifying them and adding the connective tissue to make them narrative epics. But these facts did not diminish the cultural earthquake caused by the Ossian publications in the 1760s. The debates they immediately spurred about non-literate creativity, collective creation versus modern reproduction, and the reliability and power of oral tradition spread across the continent, playing a prominent role in establishing modern standards of authorship and authenticity in the first place.

Since rural oral poetry, including Ossianic poetry, was generally sung, it is no surprise that the term ‘national music’ – tied to these authentic ‘natural’ roots of a culture – entered the English language in the disputes around Ossian. It meant something close to our term ‘folk music’, which is actually a later retranslation of ‘national music’ back into English. Johann Gottfried Herder, the early Romantic Prussian thinker who coined the word Volkslied, first introduced it in a 1773 essay on Ossian, as a translation of ‘national song’.⁴ Volk in German captured the mystical collective properties of nationalism perfectly – like the Slavic narod, it can be rendered in English as ‘people’, ‘folk’, or ‘nation’ in different contexts. After Herder, discourse on narodnaya song and music seeped into Slavic languages (and decades later, ‘folk song’ and ‘folk music’ seeped slowly into English). The expanding vocabulary indicated the international potential of the ideas: Herder’s foray into the Ossian debate had been motivated by his ardent belief that pure, authentic rural groups similar to the Scottish Highlanders could be found all over Europe (‘we Germans too’ had them, he gushed). He had encouraged literate Europeans to collect folk poetry and song from every nation, and a year later (1774) published the first edition of his own international collection, soon retitled Volkslieder.⁵ As if in answer to Herder’s call, other collections – such as Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s famous Des Knaben Wunderhorn – rapidly followed, in Germany and beyond.

The understandings of the relationships between words and music in these Ur-Romantic collections also exposed typical Romantic thought patterns. Mid-eighteenth-century thinkers – such as Condillac, Monboddo, Rousseau, and Herder – had begun to argue that ‘music’ in some form was a primal medium of communication prior to language.⁶ Versions of this theory became extremely influential (resurfacing in Darwin’s work and even modern evolutionary theory), and led to the famous Romantic cliché that music was a ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ language, which helps explain why many published collections of national song across Europe, such as those just mentioned, contained words but no music. For many editors, the lack of printed music in no way indicated its lack of import. Just the opposite: there was more effort expended on pinning down on paper specific, sanctioned versions of the words of songs because collectors assumed that the music needed less help to spread intact orally across time and space. Music could perpetuate itself naturally and primally – as a more direct and untutored expression of the soul. The same assumption guided the famous national song collectors of the period who did print both words and music (e.g., Vasily Fyodorovich Trutovsky and then Nikolay Lvov and Ivan Prach in Russia; Robert Burns and his partners in Scotland; and Johann Friedrich Reichardt and others in Germany; or later Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué in France).⁷ In their editorial decisions and in their prefatory material they made it clear that they too considered words subject to ‘decay’ in oral transmission amongst the national populace (often because they came upon bawdy texts where they had hoped for idealised ‘national’ poetry). They assumed that the different versions of texts they found could be traced back to a single high-quality original representing the nation’s natural values. With music, however, the same collectors were prepared to accept different variants and even allow that continued changes in oral tradition could lead to equally ‘authentic’ versions. By the middle of the nineteenth century, folklorists acquiesced to a similar idea of valid variants in living tradition in other media (poetry, stories, myths, etc.);⁸ but early on, ‘national music’ had a particular cachet, worthy of the generally high status of (ineffable) music amongst the arts in Romantic ideologies.

National Art Music: Old Cultivated Traditions versus New National Schools

Despite these common assumptions, the national implications of music varied heavily from place to place. In the roughest terms, claims over music as national cultural capital split into two types based on the strength of local traditions of educated, cultivated music. In France as well as (the future) Italy and Germany, there were centuries-old religious and operatic training systems that had created musical styles far removed from those of the rural ‘folk’. The funding, organisation, and achievements of such well-established educational and professional traditions could themselves be staked out as national property. Indeed, German nationalists had even more: the recent explosion of prestigious instrumental music from Vienna and the North could be newly leveraged as a cultivated heritage allowing Germany to bid for musical dominance against its neighbours in specifically ‘Romantic’ terms. Champions of modern German composition increasingly framed ‘pure’ instrumental music as the most direct window into the human psyche (a twist on the idea of music’s primacy discussed in the previous paragraph).⁹ As several of the other chapters in this volume touch upon, promoters could frame this music – full of modern artistic ambition but devoid of words that might tie it directly to a particular time and place, even to a particular language – as ‘universal’. And yet, as the same writers pointed out happily, it was the Germans who had led the way.

Meanwhile, unlike the musical ‘centres’ above, most nations in the rest of Europe, and many others around the world, could not claim well-funded professional musical traditions as their cultural property. Whether through proximity to the dominant musical nations or through political subjugation, these musically ‘peripheral’ nations, to the extent that they supported elite music making, had historically sent their ‘best and brightest’ to the metropoles to be educated or had imported educators from those centres. Their trained musicians thereby found themselves in a weak position to argue that they represented autochthonous culture. Instead – as we might expect given the centrality of ‘the folk’ in nationalist discourse – bourgeois nationalists in such places directly promoted ‘national music’ in its original ‘folk’ sense. They collected and published ‘their’ rural traditional music with particular purpose and speed.

In the longer term, however, this focus proved unsatisfactory to professionally ambitious nationalist musicians. Romanticism might almost be defined through an obsession with organic metaphors, and so it was with the folk. Despite their importance, the folk were consistently framed as relics. Pure and authentic, they could stand as the organic roots of nations, but not as the blossoms and sprouts of a nation’s modern achievement on the international stage. For this reason, as Romantic nationalism spread, each musically ‘peripheral’ nation soon sought to build upon its distinctive folk-musical roots a modern, individualist, elite compositional tradition, what came to be called a national ‘school’ of music.

National schools were both figurative (educational traditions) and often literal (conservatory buildings in the urban centres of the aspirant nations). They aimed to show young musicians how to integrate their nations’ unique and ‘authentic’ folk roots with international professional standards – or vice versa depending on the emphasis. The schools were responsible for a long list of composers that come to mind when people speak of ‘nationalism in music’. Amongst the earliest areas to adopt the school approach were Eastern Europe and Scandinavia (giving us Mikhail Glinka, Niels Gade, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Bedřich Smetana, Edvard Grieg, the Russian ‘Mighty Handful’, Jean Sibelius, etc.). By the later nineteenth century the same approach had spread through the British Isles (Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, etc.), the Iberian peninsula (Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla, etc.) and to the United States (including, famously, Jeanette Thurber’s invitation to Dvořák to run her National Conservatory in New York – to some it seemed necessary initially to import a European ‘nationalist’ to teach Americans how to mine their own ‘folk’ material for national ‘art’ music).¹⁰ The trend reached most countries in the Americas (Antônio Carlos Gomes, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carlos Chávez, Alberto Ginastera) and continued through the twentieth century and even beyond, carrying on the legacy of Romanticism in many modern postcolonial African and Asian nations, especially if they were multi-ethnic constructions without their own long-established ‘classical’ musical traditions from precolonial days to unify them (Fela Sowande, Lucrecia Kasilag).¹¹

Musicians from national schools seemed liberated to create fusion styles that could join a national past and present, collective folk ‘authenticity’ and individual, original artistic ‘genius’ – thus fulfilling a Romantic ideal nearly perfectly. As Carl Dahlhaus noted, art music ‘prompted to harmonic [or other stylistic] experiment by procedures or material originating in folk music was on the one hand technically progressive’, while on the other hand potentially immediate in its popular appeal; it thus ‘seemed to suspend or resolve the conflict between the avant-garde and popular taste’.¹² Composers from the national schools engrained themselves successfully in local histories, becoming heroes in many cases. The main airports in the capitals Warsaw and Budapest are still named after Chopin and Liszt respectively.

Centre and Periphery as a Covert Value System

At the same time, the power structure (cultural and political) that rendered these nations musically peripheral in the first place also worked against the international reputations of their star composers in ways both obvious and more insidious. By the mid-nineteenth century the musical hegemony of Germany was complete in terms of prestige. Influential German writers and critics had relentlessly extended their claims for the ‘universal’ qualities of German instrumental music to assert that German music in general was the most universal – an argument buoyed by claims that German culture overall took the best of all others and synthesised it. Through this process, German art music took the role of the ‘unmarked norm’: even as the shared standards themselves were framed as German achievements, they provided the rules and set the aspirational goalposts and criteria against which all other music would come to be measured. Richard Taruskin has outlined a ‘double bind’ that musicians born outside these traditions accordingly faced. If they observed the dominant rules fully and wrote music that sounded German (and hence, ‘neutral’ or ‘universal’), they would be denigrated as non-German imitators of German music, unable to create their own sounds. But if they worked only with local traditions, they would be ignored on the international stage, seen merely as representatives of ‘primitive’ foreign music. The ‘school’ approach was thus their logical recourse; it played up exotic ‘folk’ elements from their respective nations that set them apart – using those features, as Dahlhaus outlined, to create a ‘modern’ hybrid with the international standard. Yet however successful this strategy was locally within the nations that used it, it nevertheless allowed the German critics who made the rules to stop short of awarding such composers the highest, ‘universal’ status given to Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.¹³

Even the vocabulary quietly indicated the hierarchy: ‘National(ist) music’ in common parlance came to mean peripheral music. Towering figures of German musical prose as different as Robert Schumann, Eduard Hanslick, and Richard Wagner all argued in different ways that musical ‘nationalism’ itself was provincial, because music should be universal. As Wagner put it, other countries’ music (both folk and art music) was ‘national’ (i.e., local), while Germany’s was ‘purely human’.¹⁴ The irony of manifesting German nationalism by decrying musical ‘nationalism’, akin to those in privileged positions in our times decrying ‘identity politics’ on the assumption that their dominant position is not itself an identity, perpetuated itself as Germans went on to found the modern discipline of musicology and determine its foundations internationally. Until quite recently, Wagner, and to a lesser extent Verdi, because they represented central traditions, were included in ‘mainstream’ chapters of textbooks, somehow separate from the sections on ‘nationalists’. It has taken the development of new approaches for nationalism to be considered in a more balanced light.¹⁵

Complicated Realities

Wagner’s own music makes clear another issue: despite the general trend for ‘peripheral’ composers to rely more on ‘folk music’ to build their national claims and ‘central’ composers to rely more on adherence to educated national traditions, there was actually a great deal of variation in this respect from composer to composer and even within the output of single artists. The extent to which a given composer used pre-existing melodies or even folk-like melodies to evoke nationalism, and the extent to which a given composer allowed such ‘folk’ styles to alter or create a personal style, was not entirely predictably correlated to the centre–periphery opposition outlined above.

First of all, because of its centrality to broader nationalist claims, the ‘folk’ retained a kind of talismanic importance even in nations with strong traditions of cultivated music. This is certainly true of Germany. The very idea of organically integrating folk roots into individual modern art (indeed the entire Romantic obsession with organicism and organic metaphors, joining biology and the arts) was of German Romantic origin. Herder’s greatest influence in forming the modern international idea of ‘folk song’ was not creating the term (Volkslied was a translation from English after all), but rather his suggestion that Volkslied was valuable not (or not only) in its own right, but as ‘raw material’ for individual Romantic artists. As I have argued elsewhere, the Romantic idea of ‘art music’ is thus itself built on a contrast with ‘folk music’ – a binarism that was not an equal opposition but involved the organic integration of one into the other.¹⁶

Thus, depending on which Romantic strands a German nationalist picked up, different approaches to the folk presented themselves. Whereas Hanslick’s nationalism drew upon idealist philosophy to argue for cultivated traditions of instrumental music as the German achievement of universality (he had little time for ‘national melodies’ as ‘art’), Wagner internalised a notion of art music as dependent organically on the folk. He accordingly sought to emphasise any connection to the folk that he could find in Beethoven’s music, as a stepping stone to his own. The anchor of his argument was the ‘Ode to Joy’ in the Ninth Symphony, which he framed as an assimilation of the spirit of German folk song – a folk song by Beethoven himself. By thus defining ‘the folk’ as including any composers who organically absorbed the spirit of their people (and united words and music, as ‘the folk’ did when composing), he could make similar claims about the folk roots of his own music dramas, however far-fetched those claims usually were in terms of sonic resemblance to any German music in oral tradition.¹⁷

On the other side of the coin, there were composers born on the ‘periphery’ who were not particularly interested in ‘folk music’. Chopin, for example, was generally most concerned with furthering the cosmopolitan elite piano traditions he found in his adoptive homeland of France. He wrote some character pieces that were ‘national’ dances (the Polonaises and Mazurkas), but long-standing attempts to find direct connection between their sounds and Polish peasant music have been shown up as rather strained.¹⁸ And Grieg himself was compelled to rebut the constant search for folk music in his work, denying, in later life, that he had had in-depth knowledge of peasant music when he wrote his earlier compositions that people often claimed were folk-inspired, and instead opting for a different typical nationalist argument: that his music already sounded Norwegian simply because he was organically Norwegian.¹⁹

Another factor complicating relationships between ‘the folk’ and ‘national music’ is the presence of racial minorities within ethnically conceived nations. Notably, for example, in both Hungary and Spain, the Roma and Calé/Gitano ethnic minorities (the so-called ‘Gypsies’) over centuries contributed strongly to the styles that were picked up as essentially ‘national’ by the Romantics.²⁰ The cognitive dissonance this caused amongst nationalists was resolved in one of two ways. They could recognise Romani contributions but relegate them to the role of wild, untrained ‘natural music’ – again organic ‘roots’ that magically created something beautiful but needed the majority population to blossom into a modern national symbol. (This is how Liszt framed the ‘Gypsy’ style as Hungarian national music, and it points to how both peasants and minorities could be viewed as ‘noble savages’.) Alternatively, nationalists could use notions of (racial) purity to lead a backlash, searching to find national music roots not ‘corrupted’ by the ‘foreign’ Romani influence. These might be a different body of ‘authentic’ peasant folk music (in Hungary, this approach culminated with Bartók’s fieldwork, prose, and composition) or might be educated ‘national’ art music of the past (such as in Spain, when nationalists sought to oust Andalusian flamenco as the national musical symbol). One historiographical model, then, allowed Romani musicians to play the role of the fertile but unthinking, naïve folk inventors; the other excluded them completely. In neither is the minority population read as possessing agency and intellectual development of its own as part of the modern nation.

Questions about the music of ethnic minorities can be reframed as part of a larger thorny issue: national claims to music may be based on the (supposed) first origins of melodic material amongst an authentic folk, but they may also be based on later ‘domestic’ developments in imported, internationally shared, or minority-sourced material. Generally, nationalists have seized on whichever answer allowed the majority ethnic group to get credit. Certainly, this was true in the above cases involving Romani music. This trend was exacerbated when multi-ethnic and settler colonial nations developed their own musical nationalisms. For example, White American nationalists have historically barred the musical contributions of Black Americans from representing ‘national’ culture by calling them ‘foreign’ (African), or mere ‘developments’ of White styles (thus placing the ‘national’ at the point of supposed origins). Or just the opposite: Black music was allowed as valid American folk ‘roots’ but in need of ‘development’ into art by the White population or traditions (thus placing the ‘national’ as evolution).²¹

Reception Methods for Reading Music as National since the Romantic Era

Both the ability of influential arbiters sometimes to embrace origins and other times to embrace subsequent development as national, and the ability of audiences and scholars to posit folk music connections regardless of their tenuousness, highlight the mediated aspect of folk and national claims. Ultimately, as recent scholarship has noted, the national has always been in the eye (and ear) of the beholder.²² Aspects read as national in a piece of music vary in degree and kind at different geographical and chronological points in its existence, and for different audiences. It thus seems helpful to consider five common reception methods (often also internalised by composers) through which music has since the Romantic era been perceived or claimed as national. All may be used by insiders or by outsiders of a national culture, but that distinction may lead to very different reactions to the claims.

1. 1) The creator(s) of a piece can be framed as a source of national pride, as representations of their countries, by simple virtue of being from there. Such creators can be ‘the folk’ as a group (Irish peasants as the original creators of Irish national music), or individuals (Beethoven the German; Verdi the Italian). This approach also allowed Romantic nationalists to claim local figures who lived before the era of nationalism too (Bach the German, Palestrina the Italian, O’Carolan the Irishman). It also encompasses debates about when minority groups, expatriates, and so forth count as ‘national’.

2. 2) The linguistic or musical materials of a piece can be seen as national heritage. This may involve the words set to music, but it may also be a question of collective claims to musical style (e.g., the pervasive use of motivic development seen as ‘German’) or musical idioms (such as the harmonies or rhythms typical of a national folk song or dance repertoire) including when these idioms are perceived in ‘art music’ that builds on folk origins (as with claims about Chopin’s mazurkas). Musical genres may also be framed as nationally representative (e.g., opéra comique as the French ‘national genre’).

3. 3) The values of a piece can be framed as representative of a nation, drawing on homologies between national cultures and their musical products (e.g., German music seen by German critics as ‘serious’, ‘masculine’, and ‘rational’ like the German people; Italian music seen by Italians as full of a gift for melody like the Italian people; French music seen by the French as showing clarity and wit like the French people; both French and Italian music seen by the Germans as ‘feminine’ and ‘bodily’).²³ Particular composers and performers may be seen as embodying those values (Beethoven as ‘manly’ for so many critics).

4. 4) The subject matter of music, such as opera plots or open or secret programmes in instrumental music, can relate to a national event, hero, myth, or landscape (e.g., Sibelius’s Finlandia; Grieg’s Peer Gynt; Wagner’s Meistersinger as German history). But note that even something as supposedly simple as topical plots were filtered through radically different perceptions. Thus many of Verdi’s early and middle operas were read retrospectively as thinly veiled Italian nationalist parables.²⁴ Chopin’s Ballade Op. 38 could be read as encoding a story of the crushing of Poland – but to radically different degrees by Polish audiences in Poland, Polish audiences in Paris, and French artists sympathetic to Poland’s plight.²⁵ That the duet ‘Sacred Love for the Fatherland’ from (the French) Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici (about Spanish rule over Naples) sparked brawls that spilled out of the opera house during a (Brussels) performance two years after the premiere, and led to the Belgian Revolution of 1830, is entirely due to the ability of audiences to filter pieces to apply topically or allegorically to themselves.

5. 5) The uses of melodies or pieces (on their initial appearance or even much later), especially by governments and institutions, can make them into important national symbols. These uses create meanings that stick to music indefinitely in many cases. Examples here include twentieth-century applications of Romantic music, such as Nazi use of Die Meistersinger in film and rallies, or the use of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. More immediately, they include the general case of national anthems, themselves a phenomenon dating from the Romantic era, due to their appeals to a people or folk.²⁶

These reception methods can support each other or be combined, of course, but they can also be pitted against each other rhetorically at different times, depending on the needs of different interlocutors.

A Case Study: The Moldau

We might instructively end with a brief case study that looks at the different variables in flux. Bedřich Smetana was, according to legend, inspired to father the ‘Czech school’ of composition by a slight from an Austrian who stated that the Czechs were good musicians but had no creative identity separate from Germanic music; Smetana cemented this role through his operas on national themes, such as Libuše (which opened the Czech national theatre in 1881), and also by his cycle of tone poems Má vlast (My Fatherland), the second of which, Vltava (The Moldau), was written at a feverish pace in late 1874.

At the most obvious level, this programmatic piece focuses on reception method 4 above (subject matter) as the key to nationalism. In this case, landscape weaves together and binds various other symbols of the nation: the Vltava is the Czech national river, beginning from springs in the south of the country and eventually flowing grandly through Prague before emptying into the Labe (Elbe). This aspect (which ties the piece to the historical and geographical subjects of the other works in Má vlast) was immediately recognised as ‘national’. Smetana’s programme is labelled into the score; it traces the river from its sources, which are illustrated by trickling watery adumbrations of the main theme (Ex. 5.1) before that famous melody bursts forth (Ex. 5.2). The piece then follows a rondo form, the main ‘flowing Moldau’ theme alternating with depictions of what the river snakes past: a woodland hunt, a rustic wedding, the water nymphs of Czech mythology playing in the moonlight, and St John’s rapids. The final section, in which the river ‘flows grandly’ into Prague past the Vyšehrad, the old fortress above the banks, converts the main theme to major for its apotheosis and briefly quotes the motive of Vyšehrad, the previous tone poem in the collection.

Example 5.1 Smetana, Vltava (1874), from Má vlast, opening, bb. 1–6

Example 5.2 Smetana, Vltava, main theme, bb. 39–47

But the programme’s subject matter is tied to other ‘national’ connotations. Notably, nationalist music journalists immediately claimed a close connection to Czech folk song for the piece (reception method 2). One early reviewer called the broad main melody itself ‘a naively simple motive of Czech folk song’. Another, arguing that ‘Czech folk song’ was an ‘endlessly minable source’ that must be the basis for any Czech national [art] music, claimed that it was, admirably, the basis for the entire piece here.²⁷ In fact, it is unclear whether Smetana’s main melody was drawn directly from any existent Czech folk song (unlikely), whether it in fact became taken up as a children’s song (changed to major as ‘The Cat Crawls through the Hole’, Ex. 5.3), or whether it (like the cat song) simply mimics a whole family of very similar tunes in use in both ‘folk’ and art music across Europe – not least in Sweden where Smetana had recently been living and was probably familiar with a very similar minor version of the melody.²⁸ Nevertheless, it was clearly important to early nationalist audiences (and to many since) that the melodic materials be seen as fundamentally Czech and of folk origin – specifically or abstractly. An interesting aspect of the piece is that the riverside wedding episode, which presents a peasant dance melody, a polka (which, despite its name, is a Czech national dance, see Ex. 5.4), in fact uses stylised ‘folk music’ as landscape: it becomes part of the sounds and sights along the river – like shepherds in a rural landscape painting.

Example 5.3 ‘The Cat Crawls through the Hole’, Czech children’s song

Example 5.4 Smetana, Vltava, polka, bb. 122–30

At the same time, the piece needed to stand for Czech modernity, and here genre and artistic values came to the fore. Tone poems were specifically associated with the ‘New German’ School – and it took some contortion from Czech nationalists to reclaim the genre as appropriate for Czech art music. Smetana’s champions did so by arguing that the Czechs were uniquely capable of developing the genre, thereby demonstrating Czech presence amongst the most ‘modern’ nations (reception method 3) and Czech ‘readiness’ for increasing political independence within the Hapsburg empire.²⁹ In this context, it was particularly important to affirm Smetana’s own ‘Czechness’ (reception method 1), despite the fact that he was mainly a German speaker (hence the insistence on the Czechness of the folk-musical materials, and on Smetana’s intimate familiarity with Czech folksong). The movements of Má vlast could thus be presented and read as organically integrating ‘natural’ elements of the Czech lands – landscape and folksong – with internationally competitive modern composition techniques perfected on Czech soil, by a Czech. Such instrumental music was ideally poised (even more than Smetana’s Czech operas, which, tied to the Czech language, had their greatest impact domestically) for exhibition on the international stage.

Finally, Czech institutions have continued to use Smetana’s work as national symbolism (reception method 5). Indeed, Má vlast has served almost as a shibboleth. Public announcements in Prague’s train station are cued by the short motive of Vyšehrad, and on Czech Airlines flights The Moldau has been piped briefly over the speakers to announce arrival in Prague. In this layered history we can see how Romantic claims of an organic relationship between nineteenth-century composition techniques and a national ‘folk’ can be parlayed though the creation and reception of one composition.

Call to mind the most familiar tendencies of Romantic aesthetics – the breaking of aesthetic conventions, nostalgia for the past, the highlighting of individual subjectivity, idolisation of wild nature – and you would be hard-pressed to extrapolate from them a characteristically Romantic political position. The pursuit of the ineffable, or the prizing of the unconscious, meanwhile, seems to shortcut this possibility altogether by suggesting a deliberate disavowal of the political world – and that is before you add music into the equation. Drawing parallels between aesthetics and politics is always a risky business, and with music and Romanticism particularly tricky. The themes of this chapter are thus best teased out by questioning their possible intersections. How did the political beliefs of Romantic musicians affect their creative endeavours? Can we speak of styles having political tendencies – and if so, what is/was the politics of ‘Romantic’ music? Which political tendencies contributed to Romanticism in music? Which Romantic political positions influenced musical life? Which Romantic elements of musical life influenced political life? What are the political implications of Romantic theories about music?

The first two questions raise thorny issues of musicological method. Composers’ politics have received significant treatment in scholarship, not least because of the influence of the Romantic hero on musicological historiographic models: the centrality of the individual as a structure for studying music (as well as other arts) has been long-lasting, if not unchallenged. The sizeable academic literature on Beethoven’s politics, for instance, not to mention the stories circulating about him in musical culture more broadly, attest to the difficulties of pinning down the political beliefs of historical figures who were not prone to straightforward or consistent political statements. This is, in fact, one of the best places to observe both the pitfalls and the critiques of reading political positions onto musical choices, or – as is implied by my second question – political positions from musical choices: often Beethoven’s music has been seen as a site of resistance.¹ But such approaches are now well problematised: connections that we might see between musical choices and contemporary politics were not necessarily intended by the composer nor legible to audiences at the time, and such connections have to be established as more or less plausible, based on the conventions and discourses of the time. Thus the second of my six questions should rather ask which political tendencies (if any) have been attributed by whom (whether composer, critics, or audiences) to musical Romanticism or Romantic musical style.

For all these reasons, and for the purposes of showing the breadth of possible approaches to this topic, it is the remaining four questions that I’ll explore in this chapter, outlining some of the ways that connections between music, politics, and Romanticism can be drawn. This includes discussion of Romantic theories of state governance or political organisation, and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, as well as exploring how Romantic aesthetics could be given different political spins in different political contexts; my focus on German lands and France is particularly instructive on this latter point, where the intersections of revolutions and Romanticism vary considerably. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in musical life, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

Romanticism and Revolution

While it is possible to trace proto-Romantic tendencies across the second half of the eighteenth century, in the cult of individual sensibility, for example, or in Rousseauvian reactions against the reification of rationality, few would deny the impact of the French Revolution of 1789 in forming Romantic aesthetics. The failure of the Revolution – its descent into the Terror and disorder, its subsequent usurping by Napoleon – was seen by many to demonstrate the failure of reason itself, and of attempts to order the world logically and systematically, which fed the Romantic emphasis on individual perception and interpretation over objective truths. The sense of rupture brought about by Revolutionary attempts to erase the ancien régime – not least the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette – and the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1815) contributed to a longing to return to a simpler past, or to wild, unspoilt nature. Moreover, that sense of turmoil, of unstoppable social forces and violence, increased the salience of the category of the sublime in art (as opposed to the beautiful).

Romanticism can be seen as a response to the Revolution, then, but that does not mean that all Romantics were reactionary or anti-revolutionary. To be sure, many of the early Romantics in France, the German lands, and England, after initial support, recoiled in horror at the violence unleashed in France. But their impulse was not to preserve a pre-Revolutionary status quo; if any single tendency amongst the early Romantics can be generalised, it is a critique of the ‘mechanistic administration of society’ (to use Novalis’s term for Enlightenment rationality) that they saw as culminating in the Revolution.² For Friedrich Schlegel, the aesthetic provided a space to reverse this process: in his ‘Gespräch über die Poesie’ (1800), he presents the purpose of poetry (understood as a quality of all arts) as being to ‘annul the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason and to take us back to the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the original chaos of nature’.³ Such a statement might suggest the tension between the Romantic emphasis on individual imagination, not to mention chaos, and any system of political organisation. Elsewhere, though, Schlegel and others did contemplate alternative models of society in more concrete terms, emphasising the interdependence of the individual and the collective. Indeed, the Romantics sought to combat the perceived atomisation of a rationalised society through various sources of community, including religion, love, and art.

Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christendom or Europe, 1799), for example, extols the unity of medieval Europe, when ‘one Christendom inhabited this humanly fashioned part of the world; one grand common interest bound the most distant provinces of the wide spiritual realm’.⁴ Love, meanwhile, was ‘the completion of community’ for Schlegel,⁵ and the subject of Novalis’s treatise Glaube und Liebe (Faith and Love, 1798), which advocated for the emotional bonds within family and marriage as the basis of society. Schleiermacher too argued that without love ‘no individual life or development is possible … everything must degenerate into a crude, homogeneous mass’,⁶ and in his Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens (Essay on a Theory for Social Conduct, 1799) proposed intimate sociability and conversation as a way of developing meaningful bonds that served both the individual and the wider society. For Schlegel, art could serve such a purpose, in a Romantic outgrowth of the Herderian idea of shared culture creating communities.⁷ Romantic conceptualisations of the state emphasised organic bonds, in other words, rather than systemised relations or social contracts: Adam Müller, in Die Elemente der Staatkunst (The Elements of Statecraft, 1809), argued that ‘the state is not a mere factory, a farm, an insurance, institution or mercantile society; above all, it is the inward association of all physical and spiritual needs, of all physical and spiritual riches, of all the inner and outer life of a nation into one great, energetic, infinitely moving and living whole’.⁸ The prizing of organicism was of course apparent in Romantic approaches to artworks too: as Ethel Matala de Mazza has pointed out, ‘The social models of the Romantics were aesthetic constructs in the most precise sense: they grounded their postulate of togetherness on the imaginative “evidence” of aesthetic experience.’⁹ This should not lead us to read any trace of organicism in music as a political statement, however, but rather to see the power of the organic model in both spheres, the political and artistic, and the importance of such interconnection for the Romantics.

The German Romantics’ political programme was not, therefore, a mere reversion to pre-Revolutionary times, and indeed contained elements of radical anti-capitalism. It was nonetheless strongly hierarchical. With the idealisation of the medieval period came its feudal structures (explicitly advocated by Müller in his later work), and the elitist tendencies of Romantic political thought are latent in Schlegel’s statement that ‘A perfect republic would have to be not just democratic but aristocratic and monarchic at the same time: to legislate justly and freely, the educated would have to outweigh and guide the uneducated, and everything would have to be organized into an absolute whole.’¹⁰ Moreover, many of the Romantics would ally themselves with restoration causes or employers: both Schlegel and Müller worked for the conservative Austrian politician Klemens von Metternich. But in their advocacy of medieval structures, the Romantics were in fact far more extreme than their reactionary overlords, and increasingly, the vintage of their political and social models (and their view of art’s purpose) reflected an impulse to retreat from rather than transform contemporary society.

If the trajectory of many German Romantics is one of increasing conservatism and withdrawal, elsewhere the political tendencies of Romantic movements are more ambivalent. In England Wordsworth and Coleridge similarly recoiled inward in reaction to the Revolution, but the younger Shelley and Byron would continue to support republicanism. In France, Chateaubriand quickly turned against the Revolution and joined a royalist emigré army based in Germany; beguiled by the individuality of British literature, he published a number of articles from 1800 onwards on figures such as Ossian and Shakespeare, followed by his paean to Christianity (Génie du christianisme) in 1802. Other French advocates of Romanticism in those early years – such as Madame de Staël, whose On Germany in 1813 was central in defining Romanticism for Europe as a whole – were politically liberal: de Staël, a moderate Revolutionary in the 1790s, opposed Napoleon’s authoritarianism, and advocated instead a constitutional monarchy along a British model.¹¹ Common to both de Staël and Chateaubriand was a rejection of the rigid control and ordering of society (whether by utilitarian rationality or an authoritarian leader), which finds a parallel in their aesthetic stances.

Such a parallel should not be assumed. The Romantic principle of resistance to ordering or convention has often been divorced from its specific historical and individual contexts in ways that have cast all Romantic art works and artists as politically progressive simply by virtue of the aesthetic experimentation and freedom they pursued. Certainly, the Romantics proposed the breaking of artistic conventions: Schlegel, advocate of the ‘confusion of the imagination’, also complained that ‘All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity’, and that the celebration of individual subjectivity and genius was antithetical to abstract rules.¹² The political corollary of this aesthetic stance can vary, however. One of the reasons that the association between Beethoven and the Revolutionary has been so enduring, for example, is because of an (over-)easy equivalence drawn between aesthetic and political ‘liberation’, between the (artistically) revolutionary and the Revolutionary. This takes some unravelling. In the first place, French Revolutionary politicians in fact tended to be somewhat conservative in their aesthetic pronouncements as a result of their concern for the wide legibility of art: official Revolutionary music was often far from artistically revolutionary.¹³ But there are ways in which the ruptures of the Revolution did prompt musical experimentation that would become associated both with the Revolutionary and the Romantic: Sarah Hibberd has argued that attempts by composers such as Cherubini to reflect the power and sublimity of Revolutionary violence prompted harmonic and formal experimentation that was associated at the time with political radicalism, regardless of the political viewpoints of the composers generating it. François-Joseph Gossec, for example, heard clear (and to him, worrying) political connotations in the ‘noisiness’ of the music of Cherubini and others: ‘[M]elody, melody! That is the refrain of sensible men and the sane part of the public. Harmonic detours, barbaric transitions, exaggerated chromaticism, that is the truck of fools and fanatics.’¹⁴

Harmonic detours, barbaric transitions, exaggerated chromaticism: these sounds might be of the Revolution – but does that make them always an incitement to revolution, intended or perceived, whether in a French or other national context? Many of the features that appeared so dramatically new in Beethoven’s music can be traced to Cherubini, whose influence the German composer was happy to admit. Indeed, Kaiser Franz was reported to dislike Beethoven’s music because ‘There is something revolutionary in the music.’¹⁵ Some of the vocabularies and innovations now associated with musical Romanticism can be traced to French Revolutionary music, in other words – and their appeal to the Romantic sensibility traced to the disorder, sublimity or ‘liberation’ they conveyed: while Kaiser Franz may have perceived it as a threat, E. T. A. Hoffmann admiringly described Beethoven’s music as a setting ‘in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain’.¹⁶ But, again, we should be careful about drawing too easy a parallel between an aesthetic experience of, or references to, Revolution at one remove, and any desire to dismantle the political status quo; all the more so between those aesthetic innovations that are merely aesthetically revolutionary (which have no connection to the sounds of the Revolution) and political radicalism. After all, the aesthetic experimentation that Beethoven pursued later in his life has more often been traced to a withdrawal from the world (because its esotericism rules out unambiguous political communication of any nature) or to conservative politics (aligned with the medievalism and mysticism of German Romantics such as Schlegel and Müller).¹⁷

The parallel – between Romantic aesthetic experimentation and political liberation – has more obvious contemporary salience in a nineteenth-century French context, and this is partly because those rigid artistic rules that Romantics were so keen to transcend – classicism – were more deeply embedded in the ‘establishment’ in France, and more associated with the official culture of the Bourbon monarchy; there was, in other words, a direct link between political control and aesthetic restrictions. Napoleon’s regime (1799–1815) reinforced this association, propagating neo-classicism both as a way of legitimating his rule by referencing the aesthetic of the pre-revolutionary ancien régime, and as a way of distancing Napoleonic society and art from Revolutionary chaos and experimentation. Thus de Staël’s De L’Allemagne was censored for its suggestion that the Germans could rejuvenate the French, and for its promotion of Romanticism at the expenses of the national tradition of classicism. From a figure who also opposed Napoleon politically (de Staël was banished from Paris in 1803), such a suggestion in the aesthetic sphere was considered both unpatriotic and anti-Napoleonic, and in 1814, the Bonapartist journal Le Nain Jaune drew up a mock treaty of a ‘Romantic Confederation’ calling for the utter defeat of French literature and language, ‘signed’ by de Staël and others.¹⁸

That Le Nain Jaune was a liberal Bonapartist journal should again serve as a check to any easy equation between progressive politics and Romantic aesthetics: its own anti-Romantic stance reflected a concurrent association between royalism and Romanticism (de Staël, after all, advocated a constitutional monarchy). But let us pursue a little longer the growing tendency for that first equation in France, which takes some unexpected musical directions. While politicised disputes about Romanticism in literature were already underway in the 1810s, it was a little later that music got drawn in, by which point certain binary oppositions had become established in criticism with varying degrees of pejorative intent: liberal vs royalist; Romantic vs classical; freedom or anarchy vs order; foreign vs French. Although German music was not automatically classed as Romantic, German libretti with supernatural tendencies were: when Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz was performed in Paris as Robin des bois (1824), it was criticised for its ‘Romantic devils’¹⁹ by opponents, just as it was celebrated by Victor Hugo’s Romantic circle.²⁰ The transferral of those binaries to musical characteristics came into focus more in the discourse around Italian opera in the second half of the 1820s, prompted, at least in part, by the publication of Romantic manifestos by literary figures in 1823–5 (Victor Hugo’s Nouvelles odes and Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare), Rossini’s increasing dominance of the Parisian operatic scene, and a growing association of Romanticism with modernity and the present (this despite its affinity for the past!).²¹ In 1825, Charles de Salvo’s account of Lord Byron en Italie et en Grèce contained an anecdote in which Rossini himself (apparently) acknowledged his music’s categorisation as Romantic, and linked this to its deliberate contemporaneity. Noting that he had been criticised for bringing together large forces, trumpets and drums and the like (and labelled Romantic in doing so), Rossini suggested that ‘if the war continued in Europe, I would have put the cannon in every finale, and I would have made music with guns’.²²

Rossini’s innovative noisiness – paradoxically – takes us back to the 1790s, and this aesthetic-political association is made explicit in the critic Louis Vitet’s articles on Romanticism in the liberal paper Le Globe in 1825. Recognising the complicated history of the term, Vitet sought to consolidate the movement and its political resonances, declaring that ‘Taste in France awaits its 14 July … Practical Romanticism is a coalition animated by diverse interests, but which has a common goal, the war against the rules, the rules of conventions.’ The political language is not merely metaphorical: the restrictiveness of aesthetic institutions such as the royal opera house and the sterility of classical conventions are directly linked to absolute monarchy and its regulation of the artistic sphere. Rossini, moreover, is heralded as a genius, and Vitet also identifies musical features associated with Romanticism, namely, harmonic and orchestral innovation.²³ The politicisation of Rossini’s musical style is as apparent from the arguments of its detractors. As Emmanuel Reibel has shown, the opera composer Henri-Montan Berton, declared by Stendhal the ‘champion’ of the ‘counter-revolution in music’,²⁴ associated musical rules with political stability, classicism with the ancien régime, and declared himself at war with those who praised Rossini for ‘shaking the rules of the old musical regime’.²⁵ While Berton had come to prominence as a composer during the Revolutionary decade, he was by this point a solid establishment figure, having worked at the Opéra, taught at the conservatoire since its foundation, and been honoured as a member of the Institut de France (the prestigious national learned society). Back in 1821, seemingly in response to Rossini’s success in Paris with Otello, he had published a serious of articles identifying the new decadence he detected:

As already suggested, though, these two opposing positions were not the only ones in this debate. It was perfectly possible to find liberals who were anti-Romantic, who saw the aesthetic as conservative in its mysticism or decadence, and maintained a commitment to clarity and rationality: thus Le Corsaire attacked Rossini as the ‘sublime leader’ of a school propagating ‘hustle and bustle’ and ‘double gibberish’.²⁷ Similarly, it was possible to find conservative monarchists who remained attached to the mystical, nostalgic elements of Romanticism, in the vein established by Chateaubriand at the start of the 1800s. In fact, one of the reasons that Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829) was such a powerful symbol of Romanticism in 1820s France was its combination of ‘modern’ music by one of the figureheads of Romanticism, on a theme of Revolution, with an older, nostalgic Romanticism that revelled in the authenticity of folk culture and mountains.²⁸ Published that same year, Toreinx’s Histoire du romantisme, which singled out Rossini for his own chapter (Beethoven and Weber only had a chapter between them), described the composer as a ‘true Romantic author’, commending, along with his bold modulations and rich and varied orchestration, his capacity to paint ‘local and historical colours’.²⁹ In this same history, Toreinx himself wondered at the changing political fortunes of Romanticism – ‘at first … the defender of liberty. Then it was the accomplice of despots’ – and described the recent (re-alliance) of Romanticism with progressive politics as itself a ‘revolution’.³⁰

Romantic Isms

If the above section was structured around the relation between Romanticism and r/Revolution, it was also about the contrasting tendencies of Romantic liberalism and conservatism in the nineteenth century (or indeed liberal Romanticism and conservative Romanticism). This section develops those themes in relation to some other ‘isms’, particularly nationalism and dynasticism (or dynastic patriotism), within a Prussian and German context.³¹ In the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘Germany’ did not exist as a political entity, but rather as an idea defined by shared language and culture, which the national movement sought to realise politically. The importance of Romantic aesthetics and symbols to both nationalist and dynasticist discourses lies in the way they contributed to narratives of political identity: appeals to the rightness of any particular grouping on account of a shared past or culture. As Matthew Gelbart has pointed out elsewhere in this volume, any claim to a shared culture is strengthened by the evocation of its ancientness. Looking at these two political movements allows us to see the Romanticisation of the past as politically ambivalent (as with Chateaubriand and de Staël): the nationalist movement in nineteenth-century German lands tended to be populated by those of liberal politics, who saw unification as a way to increase individual liberties; the cause of dynastic patriotism tended to be more conservative, preserving the status quo in terms of leadership and social organisation. To both, a Romanticisation of the past was useful to unite populations around a heritage, however mythologised, elaborated, and invented.

The rehabilitation of J. S. Bach provides one telling example of how Romantic aesthetics enabled a new appreciation of older artworks – and how such heritage could be a politically unifying force. The complexity of Bach’s music, neglected in the second half of the eighteenth century in favour of Italianate ‘noble simplicity’, became once more appealing as qualities of profundity and complexity emerged as positives.³² Carl Maria von Weber’s celebration of Bach’s ‘most unexpected progressions’ in part-writing and ‘long successions of unusual rhythms in the most ingenious contrapuntal combinations’ gives some indication of the points of connection with an aesthetic of ‘beautiful confusion’, and his comparison of ‘this sublime artist’ with ‘a Gothic cathedral’ indicates the way that the aura of age fed the sense of profundity: Bach’s ‘individuality’ was, according to Weber, both ‘Romantic’ and ‘truly German’.³³ Indeed, the Romantic rehabilitation of Bach had a distinctly nationalist flavour, of which Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 biography presents the most (in)famous example: ‘this man – the great musical poet and the greatest musical orator that there has ever been and probably ever will be – was a German. Be proud of him, fatherland, be proud of him, but also be worthy of him!’³⁴

Weber’s own musical endeavours included a sustained attempt to create distinctively German artworks, particularly in the field of opera. His Der Freischütz, premiered in Berlin 1821, was only the most successful of early nineteenth-century efforts to define German music theatre through subject matter or self-conscious stylistic markers. Kotzebue’s libretto Hermann und Thusnelde (1813), for example, had drawn on the myth of the warrior Arminius/Hermann, who united disparate tribes to defeat the Romans in 9 ce, as recorded by Tacitus. Intended as a grand opera with spoken dialogue, and containing a supernatural appearance from Germania herself and the transfiguration of Thusnelde in Valhalla, the work was set by three composers, without either critical or popular success.³⁵ E. T. A. Hoffmann’s opera Undine (1816), which sets Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1811 story, is set near the Danube in medieval times, but features a water nymph, combining the appeal of the national chivalric past with elements of fairy tale. The stage design thus presented both Gothic architecture and the German (super)natural environment, while the costumes imitated the paintings of German masters from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.³⁶ Weber reviewed the Berlin production for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, measuring Hoffmann’s opera against the ‘German ideal’ of organic unity, though it has to be said that his vested interests led him to a more favourable opinion of its merits than many other critics.³⁷

Der Freischütz is clearly in the Undine rather than Hermann mould. Set in the seventeenth century and featuring the forests, hunting, and hunting horns of German folklore and Romantic sensibility, this opera too combined the appeal of the natural and supernatural. Richard Wagner would later testify to the significance of the forest to the German nation when he sought to explain it to the French: the French word ‘bois’ could not capture it.³⁸ While, as several scholars have now argued, there is much that is musically Italian and French in this depiction of German country life, Weber did attempt to mark it sonically as German through the use of folkish melodies, horns, and male-voice choir writing. These musical elements were not exclusive to German musical traditions, but were increasingly defined as German musical symbols: in the case of the male-voice choirs, the association was both with traditional hunting culture and masculinity and with the contemporary student singing societies that acted as a cover for liberal political organisations. Certainly, Der Freischütz served not only as a focus for pan-German efforts to create a German opera tradition, but also, in the context of Berlin, as something of a covert rallying cry for those who opposed the monarch’s traditionalism but were censored from overt statements of opposition.³⁹

Although liberals saw in Der Freischütz a symbol of a pan-German community united by a Romanticised shared culture and past, dynastic monarchies opposing that vision could use similar tactics. The same year that he was writing Undine, for example, Hoffmann was commissioned to write a theatrical prologue celebrating the Prussian hereditary dynasty, the Hohenzollerns, on the anniversary of the beginning of their reign as Margraves of Brandenburg in 1415. Thassilo was performed in October 1815 with music also by Hoffmann. Set in the time of Charlemagne, with Thassilo, the first of the Hohenzollerns, credited with saving the Fatherland by uniting all Germans, the prologue thus trod the delicate tightrope of acknowledging the German cultural nation while amplifying the historic importance of the dynasty. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, the need to shore up the dynastic identities of the German states that made up the German Federation (the loose association created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to replace the Holy Roman Empire, which had been dissolved in 1806) only increased as the movement for political unification, and thus the dissolution of the individual states, grew in strength: this movement would lead to the revolutions of 1848, where the demands for a German nation of shared culture and history were allied with calls of individual liberty, in opposition to hereditary and autocratic rulers. Thus Friedrich Wilhelm VI of Prussia (reigned 1840–61), like his Hohenzollern forebears, faced the challenge of uniting his diverse and discontinuous territories, not all of them German speaking, not all of them Protestant. Known as the ‘Romantic on the Throne’, he sought to locate his authority – and the integrity of the Prussian state – in the past: both in the lineage of the Hohenzollerns, which gave him a divine right to rule, and whose hereditary lands had historically been diverse and discontinuous; and in a pre-Reformation Christian (Catholic) unity, which overcame the contemporary confessional and linguistic divides in Prussia. This strategy, in which we can see the influence of the German Romantics at the start of the century, was at least in part derived from his personal mysticism, aesthetic preferences, and convictions, but was also a strategic, anti-Revolutionary ‘monarchical project’ which sought to preserve the political status quo.⁴⁰

Friedrich Wilhelm’s support for the reconstruction of the medieval, Catholic cathedral in Cologne (part of the Kingdom of Prussia since 1815) can be seen as part of this project, combining a specifically confessional statement of inclusivity with a monument to German medieval architecture: the completed building, begun in the thirteenth century, was inaugurated in 1842. The king’s preference for historical repertoires such as Palestrina (the Missa Papae Marcelli was apparently one of his favourites)⁴¹ and his cultivation of historicist church music also reflect his conception of Prussia. To be sure, church music has historically contained references to earlier styles to a much greater extent than secular repertoires have, and as James Garratt has shown, German Romantics of both Protestant and Catholic persuasions were drawn to Palestrina: E. T. A Hoffmann’s ‘Old and New Church Music’ is a good example of the former.⁴² But the self-conscious historicism of court-appointed composers writing for the Prussian Union Church (a Protestant body combining Lutheran and Calvinist churches, created in 1817), and their references to specifically Catholic repertoires of church music, suggests that this wider tendency could be politicised. Thus Laura Stokes has argued that choral settings of the Deutsche Liturgie for the Prussian Union Church in the 1840s use gestures to earlier church music to evoke either a harmonious ‘pre-sectarian past’, or the shared history of religious change: in the case of the settings of Eduard Grell (organist at the Berliner Dom from 1829 and later director of the Singakademie), and Wilhelm Taubert (Kapellmeister from 1841), a more or less strict evocation of a Palestrinian style; in the case of Mendelssohn (Kapellmeister from 1843 to 1844), a more eclectic set of historical references, including chant, modalism, antiphonal and imitative writing, chorale structures, and strict treatment of dissonance, which combined could be interpreted as an evocation of the multiple historical and denominational elements making up Prussia’s religious identity.⁴³

The musical Romanticisation of Prussian dynastic identity can be seen in Meyerbeer’s opera Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, performed in Berlin in 1844. The narrative of this opera revolves around the revered eighteenth-century Hohenzollern monarch Frederick the Great, accompanied by Enlightenment ideas about the assimilation of diverse groups into the state – which suited present-day Prussian needs, as well as Meyerbeer’s own status as an assimilated Jew in Berlin. In many ways it is a typical patriotic work – containing pre-existing military music and an unambiguous narrative of loyalty and sacrifice to the state – but the central character of the gypsy woman Vielka, who can read the future, adds a mystic element to this retelling of Prussian history, and at the end of Act 3 she prophesies a glorious future for Frederick’s house and his realm, presented in a series of tableaux vivants. The history of the Hohenzollerns is thus presented as a historical epic, including scenes from the life of Frederick the Great (with one of his star opera singers, Madame Mara, singing an Italian aria by Graun), the Napoleonic Wars (volunteer soldiers singing a patriotic song in 1813; Friedrich Wilhelm III’s victorious return to Berlin in 1814), and the burning of the royal opera house in 1843. Rather like Thassilo and the Deutsche Liturgie, the tableaux fold non-German (cosmopolitan) and pan-German (volunteer songs) together with the figures of the Prussian monarchs, romanticising the dynastic alongside the national.

Romanticising the Politics out of Music?

Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s commitment to dynastic monarchy, and his sense of his position as grounded in an older tradition of political organisation, was one of the reasons that he refused the crown of a unified Germany in 1848. At a stretch, we might say that Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s Romanticism was one of the many reasons that the 1848 revolutions, in which liberals sought to unite German states, failed. Certainly, at the time there were voices that directly criticised Romantic aesthetics for inhibiting political change, even when those aesthetics were not allied with conservative politics: while the recourse to the past or to other worlds had the potential for radical critique of contemporary society, too often (so ran the criticism) it served to draw attention and energy away from the present. Music – considered the ‘most Romantic of all the arts’ precisely because of its capacity to gesture towards other worlds or the ineffable in a relative absence of specific or stable content – was particularly susceptible to this criticism, not least because it was an art form considered to have remained Romantic, while others had begun to embrace new tendencies towards realism.⁴⁴ In fact, for some critics of Romanticism, music represented the worst of it, leading to a devaluing of this art form relative to other arts (a recursion to an eighteenth-century hierarchy), which naturally led others to a defence of music’s role.⁴⁵

The year 1848 thus sees a debate – largely conducted between two differently orientated music journals, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AmZ) and the Neue Zeitchrift für Musik (NZfM) – precisely about the themes of this chapter: the relationship between music, Romanticism, and politics. Some sought to rescue music from politics (via Romanticism); others, to rescue music from Romanticism for politics. In an article on ‘Relationships between Art and Politics’ for the AmZ, Eduard Krüger defended music against its apparent political failings by declaring that it did not have anything to do with politics, but rather the ‘contemplation of the beautiful’. Carl Kretschmann in the NZfM, on the other hand – writing after the Revolution had clearly failed – distinguished music per se from Romanticism in music, which he characterised as an ‘over-reliance on the feminine in artistic production’ that had led to ‘enervation, weakness, and disease’: music must become masculine again, by becoming democratic.⁴⁶ As Sanna Pederson has pointed out, critics promoting a politically engaged, democratic music generally only contrasted it to the decadence of Romantic music, rather than defining it more explicitly. The one figure who historically had represented this political ideal seems – for several commentators – to have been none other than Beethoven: another NZfM journalist would claim that ‘Beethoven was a democrat not only in his life but also in his art; he was filled with the spiritual forces [geistigen Mächte] of his age and attested to this in his works’.⁴⁷ This brings us full circle to some of the powerful legacies of the nineteenth century for our own received understandings of music, those enduring ideas that were presented at the start of the chapter for unpicking: that music is the least political by being the most Romantic of the arts; and that Beethoven is a prime example of political progressivism in music. Neither of these truisms captures the complexity of the interrelations of music, Romanticism, and politics: the political ambivalence of Romanticism as a movement; the adoption of Romantic aesthetics and music by opposing political movements; and the fickle associations of political and aesthetic progress. Both Romanticism and music, and Romantic music, turn out to be rather unstable in their political meanings, but no less politically powerful for all that.

The French Romantic novelist George Sand, born Aurore Dupin, wrote The Seven Strings of the Lyre during the early days of her decade-long affair with Frédéric Chopin. This ‘woman’s version of the Faust legend’, published in 1839, featured a magical instrument – not a piano, but a richly ornamented lyre of ivory. The heroine, Hélène, receives it at her birth, though she is forbidden to play it. Mephistopheles, disguised as an antiques dealer, tries to get hold of the harp and through it, the souls of Hélène and her protector, the philosopher Albertus.

When Hélène at last plucks the lyre’s strings, she awakens its spirit. Its vibrations immerse her in ‘powerful harmonies’ and a ‘dazzling spectacle’ which evoke sorrow and joy, the entire chromatic scale of human emotion and experience. A gloomy ‘sea of sand’ becomes a glorious cityscape of gleaming towers, fountains, and a river like ‘a serpent of gold and azure’, while the ‘confused clamour’ of human activity modulates into an ‘imposing concert’:

Sand’s enchanted lyre was one of the many magical instruments, tools, and machines that danced through the music of the long nineteenth century: from Mozart’s Magic Flute, the charmed bullets in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, or the 1805 collection of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, set to music by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler), through to the animated machines and toys in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Yet Sand, the great Romantic author, set her play not in the time of childhood or fairy tales, but her own: the early Industrial Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, production of all kinds was being concentrated and amplified with new forms of organisation and new inventions, much of it driven by steam engines and other inventions.

In the Romantic era, critics and theorists sometimes portrayed music as ideal and transcendent, as the sound of feeling, a force striving to realise the purity of immaterial spirit or abstract form. This strand of interpretation, focusing on works’ pure musicality, runs from German Idealism and the writings of Romantic authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann through to Richard Wagner and his followers. Yet the composers, performers, critics, audiences, and promoters of Romantic music – including Hoffmann and Wagner themselves – were also sharply aware of the unavoidable necessity and importance of concrete technology, in new instruments, stage design, architecture, and printed publicity. Inventions and technical adaptions, from new and improved instruments to new lighting and staging techniques, were at the heart of many of the defining characteristics of Romantic music: the sense of wild, dangerous, creative energies in both nature and human arts, the exploration of the most exalted and sombre of human emotions and visionary states, restless formal invention, and appeals to both the intimacy of the individual soul and to vast audiences.

George Sand’s vision of the harmonies of labour and industry was partly inspired by the ideas of the social philosopher Pierre Leroux, who envisioned the ongoing spiritual evolution of humanity through symbolism, the arts, and the redistribution of property. Leroux was one of many utopian thinkers of the early nineteenth century, including such early socialists as Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, Flora Tristan, and the young Karl Marx, all of whom were imagining a more just and equal society in which industrial machinery would play a central role. This was also an era of intensified European imperial expansion, with organised military technology making possible the violent acquisition of new territories and subjugation of their inhabitants. In the sounds and visions summoned by Hélène’s lyre – of steam, banging hammers, and marching armies – Sand conjured up the creative, destructive, world-changing powers of industry, oscillating between dissonance and consonance.

The cultural critic Edward Said wrote that Giuseppe Verdi’s 1870 opera Aida – whose central plot concerns the doomed love between an Egyptian general and an Ethiopian slave – ‘is not so much about but of imperial domination’; in complicated ways, Said argued, every aspect of the work participated in the logic of the conquest and colonisation of foreign peoples.² At the end of this essay, we will return to Said’s suggestion about Verdi’s opera. More generally, we might adapt his formulation to think about the relationship between Romantic music and technology. Romantic music is of technology: entirely dependent on well-established and radically novel arrangements and uses of material implements for its effects. Yet Romantic music is also frequently about technology. Its conception, performance, and reception often directly or indirectly reference, portray, and allegorise the promises and dangers of machines and technical domination, participating in wider logics of analysis, production, and control.

Romantic music often presented itself as a consolation against the violent changes, profound uncertainties, and fierce social tensions of industrial modernity – an entertaining or distracting flight into a nostalgic past, the comforts of nature, erotic bliss, spiritual uplift, or dream-like mythologies, including fantasies of national unity. Through its dependence on technology, and its ability to reflect upon its consequences, Romantic music was also an exemplary manifestation of its age.³

An Extended Palette

Romantic artists used all available technical means to create strong impressions and remarkable experiences in their audiences. For musicians and composers, this meant an obsessive focus on instrumentation, selecting the instrument which would provide the exact colour or timbre for each moment. At the time of Haydn and Mozart the orchestra typically contained two dozen instruments, with melodies largely carried by the strings, and brass filling in background tone, led by a seated performer – often the composer at the harpsichord or fortepiano. Instruments like the clarinet and trombone were introduced in certain works by Mozart, but by the middle of the nineteenth century the orchestra had expanded greatly. Beethoven introduced the contrabassoon, Mendelssohn the ophicleide (a kind of tuba), while Berlioz brought in the cornet and the harp, and further deepened the low end with the gigantic ‘octabass’. The early nineteenth century saw technical developments in wind instruments, introducing new valves and keys as well as pad extensions in woodwinds and brasses, allowing performers to play notes more rapidly and to allow the brass to remain in tune in multiple keys. Using methods of mass production and assembly lines, instrument makers such as inventor Adolphe Sax rolled out new horns, including brasses with reeds, as in the saxophone.

Instrumental innovations often involved collaborations between composers, performers, instrument makers, and scientists. The field of acoustics was on the rise, with studies and treatises from scientists including Ernst Chladni, Felix Savart, Jean-Baptiste Biot, and Ernst and Wilhelm Weber paving the way for Hermann von Helmholtz’s monumental work on the physics of sound and music in the 1860s. Similar partnerships were formed to examine the anatomical dimensions of musical performance.⁴ Devices were applied to teach and trace ideal hand posture on the piano; the ‘laryngoscope’ made it possible to inspect those aspects of soprano’s throats that allowed them to soar into higher registers, and created science-based norms of good vocal performance. Studies of the ear – including the building of artificial ears – informed the design of instruments as well as the theorisation of the chain of musical transmission, from instrument to vibrating air to the ear’s ‘tympani’ and onwards to the nerves, brain, and soul. The scientific study and optimisation of musicians’ bodies implied a treatment of human performers as tools or machines within a wider technical assemblage.⁵

A remarkable development of late eighteenth-century music, with profound implications for the following century, was the consolidation of the orchestra as a relatively standard form, defined by several performers on each of the string, reed, and brass instruments, accompanied by percussion. Haydn’s works did much to explore the capacities of the orchestra, effecting an ‘orchestral revolution’ which carried into the next century. Haydn demonstrated the flexibility of a large ensemble, playing one set of instruments off the other, moving themes across instruments, drawing out the unique meanings and tones of each – their ‘personalities’ – to assert a harmonious order to nature’s diversity and a ‘harmony between individuals and the collective whole’.⁶

The orchestra itself came to be seen as a single instrument, a machine composed of specialised parts – skilfully arranged by the composer and governed by the conductor, a role which became increasingly prominent in the early nineteenth century.⁷ This conception was reinforced in actual machines built around the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the Orchestrion, which could be programmed to perform multipart symphonies to amused crowds. Beethoven’s ‘Battle Symphony’, Wellington’s Victory, Op. 91, was originally composed for the Panharmonicon, built by Johann Maelzel, a Bavarian instrument maker who also designed a metronome, a mechanical trumpeter, and a speaking machine. It has been said the two loudest sounds anyone had ever heard in the early nineteenth century came from the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars and the concert halls in which the modern orchestra performed; the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, which Beethoven originally dedicated to Napoleon himself, linked both forms of technological bombast.

Some of the new instruments used in Romantic music came from other cultures. Musical treatises of the eighteenth century, such as Charles Burney’s General History of Music, had inventoried the world’s musical offerings. Romantic music was often set in exotic locations – the Middle East, Asia, Africa – and composers added instruments from the musical traditions of these places in order to produce ‘local colour’, in a kind of auditory tourism – though often with the instruments’ uses and meanings altered from their original settings. For example, the tam-tam or gong was traditionally used in South East Asia and China in court ceremonies and processions to mark the rank of different nobles and officials. In Romantic music, its sudden and shocking sound could mark endings and beginnings, as well as signifying magic and a violent entrance from another metaphysical realm.⁸

New and modified instruments were crucial for the high-impact mass performances of symphonies and operas. If the classical music of the eighteenth century most often involved command performances in royal and aristocratic courts, Romantic music was a central part of the nineteenth century’s emerging mass entertainment aimed at the rising bourgeoisie. New concert halls were built with acoustic impact in mind; opera houses became sources of civic pride, showcases for architectural beauty and technical prowess, featuring indoor gas lighting which could now be lowered, focusing attention on the stage and away from the crowd. There was furthermore a large marketplace for printed music, along with abundant criticism in specialist and general journals, carried forwards in unprecedented floods of mechanically printed words.

Technological innovations also played an important role in the more intimate settings of parlour and salon music. A steady stream of improvements to the pianoforte made it far more responsive than the harpsichord or clavichord – including the sustaining pedal, dampers to mute the sound of each note after being struck, and the double escapement mechanism, introduced by Sebastian Érard in 1821, which made it possible to sound the same note in very quick succession without waiting for it to return to its starting position. The result was a supple instrument with a wide dynamic range, covering several octaves, which allowed for extremely rapid successions of notes as well as sustained and resonant tones. Paganini dazzled audiences through his virtuosic mastery of the violin; with the improvements to the piano, the space was cleared for Liszt to demonstrate his prowess on the larger instrument, making it an extension of his own individuality. The music of figures such as Chopin and Schumann likewise made use of the piano’s effects and dynamics to convey a wide range of emotional states, from melancholy and perplexity to exuberance and devotion.

Music in the era of Romanticism went beyond merely an ‘application’ of technology to being defined by what the media scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘technicity’: every aspect of music, in its production and its reception, whether sensory, emotional, philosophical, or critical, operated within a logic of mechanical manipulation and enhancement, precision and repeatability.⁹

Pipe Dreams

The exploration of imagination and fantasy, of pathological and altered states of mind, defined the arts of the Romantic era. The ‘pipe dreams’ of the opium addicts Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey, and of the ‘Club des Hashischins’ which included Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gaultier, and Eugène Delacroix inspired major works, while Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique musically conveyed the effects of opium. Yet in even Romantics’ lush internal reveries, industry and technology were not far away. Experiments with drugs were taken as data in the emerging field of psychology, while philosophy inquired into the foundations of consciousness.¹⁰ Nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, was the first hallucinogen discovered in a laboratory, by chemist Joseph Priestley; it was tested by Coleridge’s friend, the chemist and poet Humphry Davy, and refined in a process developed by James Watt, the steam-engine inventor.

Explorers of the psyche – whether artists or scientists – also investigated the possibilities of mesmerism or animal magnetism. First popularised in the late eighteenth century by the Viennese doctor Anton Mesmer, in animal magnetism, sensitive individuals claimed to be able to access and control the invisible fluid responsible for life and thought. The magnetiser’s rhythmic magnetic ‘passes’ upon a patient placed him or her into an altered state, bringing about ecstatic pleasures and medical cures. Although a commission at the French Académie des Sciences in 1784 attributed Mesmer’s effects to patients’ overactive imaginations, a new generation of practitioners appeared in the 1820s and claimed new powers – reading and seeing at a distance, telepathy, communication with spirits – and suggested links between animal magnetism and the new science of character, phrenology.¹¹ Animal magnetism also resonated with the lightning-quick, elusive qualities of electricity, and both mesmerism and electricity helped inspire a musical aesthetics focused on ‘effects’. The electric telegraph’s ability to communicate and command at a distance formed a further link: figures ‘entranced’ or hypnotised appeared on stage in musical opera, likened to automata or androids acting under invisible but mechanical command.¹² In a performance of 1844 Hector Berlioz actually employed an ‘electric metronome’ to transmit an impulse from a conductor to ‘subconductors’ of a large orchestra, while electricity was integrated into such musical spectacles as Luigi Manzotti’s 1881 ballet Excelsior, which featured a ‘Dance of the Telegraph Operators’.¹³

Both telegraphy and mesmerism drew upon the invisible forces, fluids, and ethers being actively researched in the mechanical sciences. While in the late eighteenth century, electricity, magnetism, heat, and light – called the ‘imponderable fluids’ – were seen to be independent of one another, after 1800 a wave of researchers in what has been called Naturphilosophie or ‘Romantic science’ examined the interrelations of these phenomena and the ways they could be converted into each other. A path-breaking discovery was made in 1820 by Hans Christian Ørsted, who showed that electricity and magnetism were modifications of a single underlying principle. Later researchers including Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, and Joseph Henry investigated the relations amongst electromagnetism, light, and heat, while fundamental research on steam engines by Helmholtz, Sadi Carnot, and James Joule laid the foundations of thermodynamics, the laws of conversion of heat into motive force. By the middle of the century, physicists had embraced the notion of a single ‘energy’ which could be converted into any one of these forms with the proper technical interface. These phenomena were understood to travel as vibrations in an ether which surrounded and penetrated all bodies. This concept informed the understanding of music, and spurred reflections on the nature of the mind, soul, or spirit, and its ability to act upon the world. Ether was the vibratory medium within which all other media, including thought and feeling, made their impact.¹⁴

In these ways the fantasies of Romantic dreamers were closely tied to technical and scientific developments. Even more widespread ‘pipe dreams’ captured public attention in the Romantic era, in visions of industrial expansion: the Industrial Revolution was in fact a matter of pipes – tubes, valves, and cylinders, as in the cycle from hot to cold in the steam engine.¹⁵ Industrialisation meant conveying forces, fluids, and other materials from one location to another – from one end of a factory to the other, from sites of extraction to those of production, sale, and consumption. Engineers and scientists worked out calculations to maximise the efficiency of forces, goods, and people as they moved through a reticulated system of intersecting flows.

The general concept of ‘communication’ underwrote schemes to design large technical systems and networks to join distant places. Saint-Simonian engineers, including the political economist Michel Chevalier, and Prosper Enfantin, who led a mission of engineers to Algeria and Egypt, saw roads, railroads, and waterworks as the blood vessels for a new, peacefully organised civilisation, which would make national and regional boundaries obsolete; they devised plans to open canals in Panama and Egypt, joining East, West, North, and South, in a vast system of efficient circulation. Industrialisation, properly administered, would liberate the productive forces of the earth and society; guided by the emotional works of artists, the slumbering power and idealism of humanity could be awakened, to create a new, harmonious global society. The reflections of composers, instrument makers, architects, and performers to improve, direct, and increase the flow of sound were in keeping with these other forms of industrial speculation.¹⁶

Romantic Audiovisuality

In the Romantic era, music was deeply embedded in the culture of urban spectacle. Cities were drastically increasing their populations; the growing middle class had money to spend on entertainments: magic shows, comedies, tragedies, and ‘vaudeville’ stages. Industrial expositions promoted machines to make clothing, books, sculpture, and music, such as Maelzel’s mechanical trumpeters and harpsichordists. A wide audience grew for scientific lectures, in Paris’s Athenée and Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and in London in the Royal Polytechnic Institute, where Davy, Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, and John Tyndall expounded the principles of chemistry and the physical sciences. Their performances featured striking experiments and demonstrations including explosions, demonstrations of electric lighting, magic lantern displays, optical illusions such as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, and the seemingly self-playing ‘magic lyre’ display of Wheatstone, with harps suspended in the air which appeared to play themselves.¹⁷ In such spectacles, the sonic and visual were closely entwined.

Other new popular entertainments in London included the Cyclorama, which simulated geological catastrophes, and the Colosseum, which housed concerts, plays, and natural history collections. Many cities hosted the panorama – a large cylindrical building containing an elevated viewing platform from which spectators viewed 360-degree realistic painted landscapes, city views, or battle scenes. The scale and optical principles of the panorama were repeated in painting, as in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and employed in stage design, where gigantic realistic painted backdrops sought to transport viewers to distant regions in line with the aesthetic ambitions of Romantic music.¹⁸ One prominent Parisian stage painter, with a studio near the vaudeville theatre and panoramas, invented a new entertainment he called ‘the diorama’, a painting on a semi-transparent screen of a landscape or interior, connected to a lighting system which gradually shifted to bring out different colours and shadings, changing a scene in spring to one in winter, or a daylight view into one of night, often accompanied by music and props – a technology of contrasts, of transformation. The inventor was Louis Daguerre, whose more famous invention, the daguerreotype – the first commercially viable form of photography – was originally intended as a technical aid for painting stage sets, including for operas.

Already in the late eighteenth century popular entertainments were fusing optical devices with music. Deirdre Loughridge has shown how a series of optical inventions, such as the microscope, shadow play, peep show, and phantasmagoria, created new visual experiences – picturing the very small; projecting images; separating spectators from the space of the objects they observed – which affected musical imaginaries: Haydn’s Creation was the sonic equivalent of a ‘magic lantern’, while Beethoven created phantasmagoric musical effects heard as the interplay of dark and light. As the nineteenth century began, popular displays took on encompassing views of nature, including orreries and planetariums, machines which showed the moving order of the planets around the sun.¹⁹

Musical and visual technologies were brought dramatically together in Romantic opera, where it was impossible to separate appreciation for the music from the reception of the plot, acting, dancing, costumes, lighting, backdrops, sets, or special effects. The full suite of techniques of Romantic audiovisuality were brought together in the Paris Opera, notably in the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer’s brother was the director of the astronomical observatory in Berlin; he was also in correspondence with the great scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who had a hand in most of the scientific and sensory inventions of the time and was an enthusiast of the panorama, daguerreotype, and telegraphy.

In his smash Parisian opera of 1831, Robert le diable, Meyerbeer joined audacious orchestration with new sights. A ballet of lascivious nuns cavorted in flesh-coloured tights to the sound of sinister bassoons; a diorama-like backdrop shifted its appearance from light to dark; explosions were made by blowing clouds of seed on to gaslights; the entrance of the chords of a church organ was an unexpected ‘sublime invasion’.²⁰ Critics and audiences commented as much on the visual spectacle as on the music. The libretto offered a compelling character who was the son of a devil; Robert worked witchcraft with a magical branch, which he broke to free his soul. This theme of Meyerbeer’s opera cemented the impression, already made prominent in Faust, that there was something both magical and diabolical about technology.

The emphasis on technical control was taken yet further by Richard Wagner, who defined opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – where material technologies of all sorts ensured an organic, ideal unity (even though Wagner sneered at the ‘materialism’ of Meyerbeer’s works in a notorious anti-Semitic broadside, ‘Jewishness in Music’, a source for later attacks against Meyerbeer). To place all elements of the opera under his control, Wagner had a new hall built in Bayreuth where he could be the supreme master of puppets. The audience at his Festspielhaus, pilgrims in a religion of art, adopted a reverent awe towards Wagner’s musical dramatisations of Norse mythology.

Technology was indispensable to Wagner’s instrumentation and the design of the hall. Wagner also ordered brilliant lighting arrangements, flames, and hidden wires to simulate flight, and made use of billowing clouds of steam for the breath of a dragon and as a ‘fade-out’ in the transition between scenes. The special stage drapery that came to be associated with Bayreuth, the ‘Wagner Curtain’, performed a subtle but swift demarcation between dramatic units.²¹ The quasi-sacred aura of Wagnerian opera, with its aspiration towards a spiritual experience of pure musicality, was inseparable from an incomparable technological investment in every aspect of the performance. As if to bury the contradiction, unlike in previous concert halls, where the musicians were in the audience’s line of sight, in Bayreuth Wagner hid his orchestra in a lowered space before the stage, making the source of the music invisible – a technical invention through which the technological dimension of music was either sublimated or denied.

Music and Technology as Show of Force

Our discussion so far has primarily shown how Romanticism was of technology: thoroughly dependent on technical interventions to realise its aims. The extent to which it was about technology is a somewhat different matter. Can we say that a Schumann lied or a Chopin nocturne is ‘about’ technology? Each explores the sonic, emotional, and semiotic affordances of the voice and piano, and might be understood – at least by critics today – as a commentary on them. Likewise, the use of audiovisual technologies to produce enthralling visions, ecstatic transports, and uncanny or magical access to a supernatural realm – all recurrent themes in critical responses to Romantic arts – could be seen to reinforce a new understanding of the relationship between humans and nature: that art is nature continued by other means. Such a view recalls Renaissance theories of art as both a mirror and an improvement of nature. Yet with the vast new scale of the nineteenth century’s ‘mechanical arts’ – and after passing through the Enlightenment’s polarisation of art and nature, in which art was often considered a corrupting influence – the deliberate surpassing of nature in Romantic art often took on uncanny, colossal, or monstrous aspects.²²

Some works of Romantic music explicitly took technology as their theme, as in Berlioz’s programme for the National Exposition of the Products of French Industry in 1844, which included his ‘Hymn to France’, praising his homeland’s technological achievements. He repeated the feat in 1855 for the opening of the Palais de l’Industrie, France’s answer to the Crystal Palace, with an orchestra of 1,200 instruments performing in a ‘gallery of machines’. The Crystal Palace, at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851, proclaimed a new control over nature: a gigantic transparent structure in which the entirety of the natural and human worlds could be presented as an interior, a mastered environment. In this enormous hothouse, plants from around the world thrived, while well-behaved masses observed, evaluated, and were suitably awed by the technical inventions and commercial goods produced by nations and their colonies. Other international expositions and World’s Fairs soon followed. In 1861, Berlioz planned another ‘monster-concert’ to be performed in the Crystal Palace itself with a chorus of 10,000; his composition, ‘The Universal Temple’, with lyrics by Viard, proclaimed European unity and freedom for ‘all the children of labour and art’.

Such works praised the benefits of technical progress. Yet the fascination in Romantic arts with demonic and diabolical technologies suggested a fundamental ambivalence about the ‘magic’ of new industrial forces and their staggering ability to accelerate production, shrink distances, and ferry information at lightning speed. Both sinister and optimistic portrayals of nineteenth-century technology highlighted anxieties about agency and personhood. New inventions promised mastery, yet could easily escape those who used them, as in the legend of the sorcerer’s apprentice. The recurrent image of mechanised (or mesmerised) subjects highlighted the blurring of boundaries between humans and machines, as well as technology’s power to dominate and enslave.²³

Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète premiered in Paris in 1849, during the period when the Provisional Government was in power in France after the worker’s revolution of 1848. Technically, it was a wonder: Berlioz praised its orchestration, it packed delirious special effects onto enormous stage sets, including an ice-skating scene using roller skates; it concluded with a stunningly bright artificial sunrise, produced by an electric arc-lamp invented and operated by the physicist Léon Foucault. Thematically, it was read as a commentary on recent events. In the French Revolution of 1848, echoed worldwide, impromptu armies of republican and socialist workers, inspired by utopian aspirations for a just reorganisation of labour and industry, had overthrown the Orleans Monarchy. The revolution was violently repressed in the bloody ‘June Days’ of 1848, followed by a tense return to order under the imperially inclined President, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Meyerbeer’s opera, about a revolutionary messiah manipulated by power-mad conspirators, could be seen to condemn both the uprising and the forces of order it opposed.²⁴

The new arrangements of industry had created new fortunes for owners and investors. They also threw thousands of labourers out of work by replacing them with machines or re-employing them at unliveable wages. The promise of improved sanitation, an abundance of consumer goods, an end to hunger, and beautiful new habitations were held out and, to widely varying extents, realised in projects of urban renewal such as that directed by Baron von Haussmann in Paris after Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1851. Yet these changes to everyday life came at the cost of the destruction of traditions of guilds and artisanship and local networks of support, and contributed to a sense of dislocation and disorientation with the new pace and intensity of urban life. The progress of national industry also made possible imperial expansion – the growth of the British Empire in Asia and Africa, France’s new acquisitions in the South Pacific and North Africa, and Germany and Italy’s projects of unification, quickly followed by dreams of colonial acquisitions. The growth of industry was inseparable from the growth of empire.

To return, in conclusion, to the opera Aida – a work that is ‘not so much about but of imperial domination’ – we might also consider the ways in which Verdi’s landmark work is both of and about technology. And while musicologists’ rising interest in the technological and scientific dimensions of music might seem to direct attention away from the politics of colonialism and race, Aida suggests how technology and empire often went hand in hand in Romanticism and music.

The original invitation for Verdi to compose a work for Egypt came from the ruling Viceroy, Ismail Pasha, in 1869, who wished to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal – a technological project long dreamed of by the Saint-Simonians as a step towards increasing peaceful communication and exchange throughout the Mediterranean. Verdi declined, but he later accepted an invitation to debut a work in 1871 to open the new Opera House in Cairo. Arrangements were negotiated by a French archaeologist, Auguste Mariette, who had in 1867 co-ordinated Egypt’s exhibits for Paris’s International Exposition of 1867, where the Egyptian display had taken the medal for best in show.²⁵ With his support of Verdi, the Viceroy was exhibiting the modernity of Egypt and participating in the international culture of Romantic music and opera. The opera house was situated in the ‘new city’ of Cairo, a Haussmann-style enclave of wide avenues, gas lighting, and civic halls.

Verdi’s work, too, was a colossal, technologically enhanced spectacle – a show of forces. The imposing sets reconstructed ancient Egyptian buildings to Mariette’s specifications. Verdi sought to evoke exoticism and archaeological authenticity, and to create distinctive orchestral effects by writing parts for a newly constructed ‘Egyptian trumpet’ (with an extra-long stem and bell) and ‘hyper-flutes’, both of which were louder and stronger than normal, and which were to sound as if by magic when a giant statue in one of the stage-set’s temples was struck by sunlight. Following Wagner, Verdi chose to hide the orchestra, burying the ‘indecent’ view of the ‘tops of the harps, the necks of the double basses, and the baton of the conductor all up in the air’.²⁶ Verdi exerted a dictatorial command over all aspects of the production; its grandiosity was a testament to the largesse, power, and glory of the Viceroy.

In the opera’s processionals, ballet, and victory march (following the Egyptian army’s victory over Ethiopia), viewers were subjected to a protracted display of a gigantic, disciplined organisation of human labour and technical prowess. Whether this was meant to inspire or repulse the audience was unclear; likewise, just what the story of Aida says about imperial domination is notoriously ambiguous. Ralph Locke has identified nine distinct interpretations, including either celebrating or protesting Egyptian domination over its southern African neighbours; European domination over North Africa and other non-European regions; Prussian domination over the French; or Austro-Hungarian domination over Italy.²⁷ However it is read, though, the opera undeniably dramatises technically co-ordinated domination and its effects.

In the final scene – containing some of the most moving music in the operatic canon – Aida is locked in a tomb with her lover, the Egyptian general, Radames, who has refused to give her up and has thus been condemned by the Pharaoh and his jealous daughter. Above them, in the high-ceilinged temple, Egyptian priests conduct a ritual of immortality, singing out in low monotones. In contrast, the lovers duet in soaring, even eerie harmony, announcing the opening of heaven to receive them; above them, the Egyptian princess who loves Radames sorrowfully prays for peace.

Aida’s finale enacts power, labour, and control on a stunning scale: in the complexly divided stage design lit differently above and below, in the philologically researched and realised Egyptian sets, painting, and costumes, in the gigantic company of singers who have crossed the stage on their way to war and back – and, of course, in the virtuosity of the singers, musicians, and composer. This power and control reflected and communicated with the power on display in the gaslit streets of the new city of Cairo, the gigantic engineering feat of the Suez Canal, and the international race to develop and deploy the powers of industry and invention to remake the world and gather up its wealth. In just a few years, crippled by debt to European banks for the building of the canal, Egypt would fall under French, then British rule, making Aida’s portrayal of Egyptian supremacy – and its colonial domination of the Ethiopians – newly ironic.

When the lights go out on the tragic lovers, the ravished audience explodes in applause. Romantic music and spectacle, made possible through technology, glorify technology’s reign. They draw attention to its destructive, suffocating potential and its mesmerising, nearly irresistible appeal.

The Real Supernatural

Amongst the best-known supernatural evocations of the nineteenth century is Franz Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s ‘Der Erlkönig’, a piece that catapults us headlong into a wild scene: a father’s desperate ride on horseback, a boy terrorised by unseen forces, and the spirit-whisper of the malevolent Erlking (see Fig. 8.1). In and beyond Schubert’s own time the song was received as strikingly original, notable for its recasting of Goethe’s narrative (such that a storm is raging from the outset) and its tendency towards genre-bending (a conflation of ballad and lied traditions). But most novel of all, according to critics, was the character of the Erlking himself, whom Schubert depicted not as a distant phantasmagorical creature, as in Goethe’s poem, but instead as an uncannily human figure crooning a lullaby-like melody.¹ The Erlking’s song is first heard pianissimo, separated from the musical world of father and son by its higher range, major mode, and rounded lyricism. But slowly, as the lied unfolds, his vocal compass begins to expand, deepening in range, absorbing motives from the two ‘real’ characters and finally breaking out of the make-believe stasis of the major mode into minor-mode actuality. His final D-minor cadence (b. 123) marks the moment when the supernatural explodes irrevocably into the natural, severing the father’s hold on his son and claiming the boy’s life (Ex. 8.1).² The Erlking proves uncontainable, an ontological blur of human/inhuman, masculine/feminine, real/imagined, a creature hovering on the boundary between phenomena and noumena. It was for this reason that nineteenth-century listeners feared Schubert’s song – but it was also why they revered it. Indeed, the German novelist Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) asked to hear the piece on his deathbed, particularly the passages of the Erlking, which ‘drew him, like everyone else, with magic power towards a transfigured, fairer existence’.³ What attracted Jean Paul was also what made Schubert’s supernatural world quintessentially ‘Romantic’: its erosion of stable distinctions between this world and the next, its promise of an enchanted real.

Figure 8.1 Moritz von Schwind (1804–71), Der Erlkönig (c. 1830). Oil on canvas, 32 × 44.5 cm, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

(Wikimedia Commons)

Example 8.1 Schubert, ‘Der Erlkönig’, D. 328 (1815): the Erlking’s final minor-mode cadence ‘And if you are not willing, I shall use force’, bb. 119–23.

To understand more clearly the shift in musico-magical ontology exemplified by ‘Der Erlkönig’, and by other supernatural evocations of the period, it is helpful to start by widening our lens – considering the backdrops against which Romanticism’s newly tangible enchantment emerged. Of course, a comprehensive history of musical magic is not our aim here, but we might begin a concise overview by considering the critical terminology associated with the reception of Schubert’s song. It was, as many listeners argued, a piece whose Romanticism was rooted in modern forms of ‘fantasy’.⁴ This reference was not casual but gestured towards a wide and rich discourse on the fantastic, associated with the literary theory of Friedrich Schlegel, the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis, and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and (later) the fiction of Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, and Jules Janin. As Gautier put it in 1836, the fantastic was a newly forged mode that jettisoned the make-believe wands, castles, and spells of eighteenth-century fairy tales in favour of a surnaturel vrai, a ‘true’ or ‘real’ supernatural reconciling imagination with science, dream visions with physical realities, the material with the ethereal.⁵

A generation earlier, Friedrich Schlegel, in his ‘Letter About the Novel’ (1799), had provided the foundation for such a definition, introducing the fantastic as a revolutionary impulse eliminating all boundaries and classifications, uniting fictional and factual narratives in an arabesque-like mixture of ‘storytelling, song, and other forms’. Fantasy dissolved not only generic constraints, but also entrenched epistemological boundaries. The source of its supernaturalism, for Schlegel, was a ‘sentimental’ or ‘spiritual’ force, a spirit of divine love permeating the created universe itself. Not otherworldly or elusive, divine magic was immanent, expressed ‘in the sphere of nature’.⁶ Though palpable, it was not easily captured or described; indeed, only art could apprehend it. And of all the arts, according to Schlegel, music was best suited to achieve this:

Poetry, for Schlegel, was fantastic only when animated by spiritual sound; the two are united in his theory of Romantic fantasy in an inextricable pairing, together providing an intimation of true magic: ‘something higher, the infinite, a hieroglyph of the one eternal love and the sacred fullness of life or creative nature’.⁸

Backdrops for Romantic Fantasy

Schlegel’s natural conception of enchantment was not entirely novel but, as he acknowledged, recuperative, ‘tending toward antiquity in spirit and in kind’.⁹ His fantastic ontology represented a partial return to an earlier magical paradigm: that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when visible and invisible, physical and metaphysical realms were conceived as parts of a resonant whole. Mingling Platonic ideas with Pythagorean and Christian tenets, Renaissance cosmologists had conceived an all-encompassing enchantment, a network of harmonic concordances flowing downwards from God, linking celestial, intellectual, and mundane planes in sacred musico-mathematical logic. Every facet of the created universe was animated by divine sound, connected to every other via resonant sympathies. The result was an organic unity – a spiritus mundi – animated by ubiquitous musical magic. Magician-philosophers harnessed its power by penetrating the secrets of the universal sympathies, the occult relationships between macrocosm and microcosm. In doing so, they achieved Orphic sway, translating divine resonance into composed melody, which could bring bodies into (or out of) tune with the surrounding universe. Spoken poetry, clothed in cosmic music, had similar powers, vibrating within material bodies to transform and illuminate. Magic was real, powerful, and proximate, intimately connected to the pursuit of natural science and philosophy.¹⁰

For Schlegel and the early German Romantics, the intellectual-magical unity of this world seemed a lost utopia, a golden age that had slowly dissipated through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eroded by the forces of secularism, scepticism, and materialism. Natural magic, as Friedrich Schiller put it, had been repressed by ‘the faith of reason’.¹¹ Of course, occult beliefs did not disappear suddenly or entirely during the so-called Enlightenment, but were marginalised, no longer associated openly with reliable philosophical and scientific knowledge. Enchantment itself ceased to be regarded as ‘real’, emerging instead as imaginary, the stuff of entertainment, fraud, or childhood whimsy. The epoch of natural magic gave way to what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics alike referred to as the age of the ‘marvellous’.¹² Amongst the key literary signals of this shift was an explosion of fairy-tale literature beginning around 1700, ushered in by collections including the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s Les contes de fees (1696) and Antoine Galland’s free translation of Arabic stories, Les mille et un nuits (1704). Emanating largely from France, these fictions relocated enchantment to make-believe and foreign places, demoting spirits and genies (old harbingers of natural magic) to the status of illusions, pedagogical instruments, or vehicles for satire. Such tales were widely translated and imitated, establishing an ‘enlightened’ form of fictional magic, a rationalist bulwark against antiquated (but still latent) forces of superstition.

A similar trend emerged in the theatrical world: an outpouring of operatic tales of make-believe and exoticism, which shored up the idea of magic as illusory, the province of entertainment rather than serious intellectual enquiry. Music, once a key agent of magic, suffered a parallel loss in status. No longer linked to mystical mathematics or cosmic resonance, it was associated instead with the production of theatrical effects. David J. Buch describes this shift as the moment when ‘composers, theorists, and critics could define music in purely rational terms’, when sound was no longer inherently divine but simply aesthetic. By the mid-eighteenth century, this transformation had allowed ‘a distinct category for magical topics’ to emerge, a sounding marvellous.¹³ Jean-François Marmontel, in an entry for the famous Encyclopédie, identified ‘le théâtre du merveilleux’ as a broad category of supernatural representation defined in contrast to ‘simple nature’. His compatriot, Louis de Cahusac, in an article on ‘Féerie’, located it as a style of music distinguished by ‘an enchanting sound productive of illusions’.¹⁴ These ‘illusions’ were generated by a collection of musical topics carefully cordoned off from the realm of the actual, designed to evoke imaginary domains: muted registers, modal harmonies, and wind instruments to invoke scenes of dream or sleep; diminished harmonies and low brass scoring to conjure the underworld; static harmony and unison scoring for oracle scenes; and so forth. Such devices defined and constrained magic, which emerged as the ‘Other’ against which reason and reality were constructed.¹⁵

As the marvellous paradigm solidified through the last half of the eighteenth century, the authors and composers with whom it was associated began to strain against its boundaries, resisting the idea of magic as superficial or purely illusory. Their reaction was motivated in part by a sense of loss, a nostalgia for direct human access to mystery, enchantment, and spiritual experience, often yoked in modern criticism to burgeoning Romanticism.¹⁶ With it came early signs of a renegotiation of magic’s status. Schlegel’s real supernatural, as he described it in 1799, was clearly not just recollective, meant to reanimate aspects of Neoplatonic natural magic, but also reactive, a rejection of the constraints associated with eighteenth-century illusions. But how did the new fantastic ontology emerge? How was the domain of reason reconnected with that of enchantment? Answers to these questions are many and complex, but two major catalysts may be noted here.

The Recuperation of Magic

The first involves philosophical innovations proposed by a group of young German Romantics – the Frühromantiker – centred in Jena and Berlin in the last decade of the eighteenth century. These included Friedrich Schlegel himself, his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (amongst others). Amongst the primary achievements of this group was a reassessment of the ideas of Immanuel Kant, whose system of critical idealism had aimed, in part, to reconcile old Enlightenment tensions between rationalism and empiricism. Though it had done much to breach this divide, Kant’s work had, in so doing, generated a new and equally problematic separation between understanding and sensibility, phenomena and noumena. The new ‘Romantic’ or ‘Absolute’ Idealism of the young Romantics sought to eliminate this dualism, generating a philosophical model uniting real and ideal, natural and supernatural in a logical whole.¹⁷ Key to such a project was an embrace of pantheistic impulses inherited from the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza, and updated by Gottfried Herder. Drawing on these tenets, the forgers of Romantic Idealism dismantled the idea of divine magic as emanating from a personal, removed God, replacing it with the notion of divinity as an organic force, a metaphysical animator of the natural world. Their work combined Spinoza’s monism (the notion of God as the abstract, underlying Substance of all creation) with the tenets of vital materialism (the concept of matter as enlivened, invested with active power) to produce a dynamic deity, ‘the infinite, substantial force … that underlies all finite, organic forces’.¹⁸ The result was an integration of spirituality and materiality, imaginary and actual worlds, which were subsumed into ‘an organic whole, where the identity of each part depends on every other … [as] aspects of a single living force’.¹⁹ Recast in this form, divine enchantment became compatible with – indeed, inextricable from – the material world. Perceiving magic again meant looking at and listening to God’s physical creation, the voice of nature itself, whose sound was re-endowed with magical efficacy. What emerged, as we have seen in Schlegel, was the notion of God-through-nature: the idea of a real or natural supernatural.

The second catalyst was the series of major political upheavals roiling the last decades of the eighteenth century, emanating from (though not confined to) France. These clashes, which led up to and followed the 1789 revolution, destabilised the intellectual structures that had sustained the Age of Reason; in particular, as Michel Foucault has influentially argued, they dismantled systems of marginalisation that had confined poor, ill, mad, and criminal populations to the fringes of cities and therefore the outskirts of social discourse. As the impulses of revolution gathered impetus, these populations came flooding back, crowding the streets of Paris, demanding recognition and representation. They brought with them many of the old magical beliefs that had been contained and disciplined by reason: the demons of a repressed past.²⁰

The sense of encroaching menace that preceded the events of 1789 was felt not just in France but across Europe; indeed, the return of dark supernaturalism was anticipated in England as early as the 1760s by the rise of Gothic culture. Ushered in by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and extended through the late eighteenth century by the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, Gothic tales feature monsters of all sorts, from vampires to succubi and ghouls, which hover on the peripheries of the known world in medieval castles, underground caverns, and foreign locales. From these (worryingly close) places, they terrorise the domain of reason, morality, and order, suggesting a world under threat. But in the final hour, Gothic supernaturalism is almost always explained away as illusion or misconception, demons are vanquished, and order restored. The pattern is linked, in modern literary criticism, to the idea of a world teetering on the edge of collapse, a last-ditch attempt to shore up the crumbling intellectual and political structures of rationalism.²¹

As the century drew to a close, Gothic containment began to erode and, rather than hovering on the margins, literary monsters began to infiltrate the centre, escaping from distant or underground hiding places into the space of the modern real. It was this ontological conflation that characterised the emerging fantastic culture, which recuperated not just divine forms of enchantment but also demonic impulses.²² Post-revolutionary tales of fantasy are replete with doppelgängers, emblems of supernatural darkness who are also characters of the ‘actual’ world: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s demonic seductress Giulia in ‘A New Year’s Eve Adventure’ is also the young girl Julietta; Alexandre Dumas’s enchanting socialite in ‘La femme au collier de velours’ is also a dead guillotine victim. No resolution or explanation for these doubles is offered. In fantastic worlds, the dark supernatural is placed alongside the natural as its inescapable, inevitable counterpart, the signal of a newly integrated but also fractured world.

And it was not just the forces of revolution that produced the new ‘real’ demonism, but also those of burgeoning imperialism. From Napoleon’s continental incursions of the early 1800s to the rapid colonisation of India, Africa, and America by the major European powers, the nineteenth century was a time of unstable (expanding, contracting, collapsing) borders. Cultures of reason were threatened not just by ill and mad spectres on the edges of cities, but by the idea of monsters in more remote places which, once distant and separate, now became real and proximate. Foreign – babbling, threatening, illegible – bodies were increasingly wedded to legible ‘enlightened’ ones, the ‘civilised’ self to an imperial shadow.²³ Small wonder, then, that theorists of the fantastic often describe the mode in terms of grotesque conflation or paradox. It was a mode of rupture, a recuperation of magic that was rooted not just in Romantic Idealism (including the pantheistic recovery of divine nature) but in political dislocation and violence (the return of repressed demonism). Its surnaturel vrai was enticing as well as threatening and had a marked impact on all the arts, especially, as Schlegel suggested, on cultures of musical production and reception.

We have already examined ‘Der Erlkönig’ as a symptom of the new fantastic ontology, but Schubert’s supernaturalism was by no means unique; nor was the idea of ‘real’ enchantment confined to German-speaking lands, as it extended across Continental Europe, the British Isles, Russia, and America. Magical worlds of all sorts were naturalised, rendered compatible with both reason and science in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from fairy lands to angelic domains and hellish invocations. Below, we take brief tours of two such spaces, though it is important to note that many others existed, and that the influence of the surnaturel vrai was neither total nor unchallenged. Rather than a universal shift, the rise of Romantic fantasy might be understood as a general cultural drift which coexisted with fragments of the older marvellous and Gothic traditions, taking a variety of forms depending on local circumstances and conventions.

Fairies, Science, and Natural Magic

The naturalisation of the supernatural may be seen especially clearly in Romantic fairy evocations, especially those of Felix Mendelssohn, which showcase the new interweaving of magic, reality, and reason.²⁴ Like Schubert, Mendelssohn forged an early reputation by writing supernatural music, focusing in particular on Shakespearean elfin scenes. The most widely known of these was the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21 (1826), although the sound world of this piece had been anticipated less than a year before in the scherzo of the Octet, Op. 20 (1825), and would be invoked again in another scherzo – the opening piece in Mendelssohn’s collection of incidental music for Shakespeare’s play (1842). In all three works, we encounter presto, pianissimo wind and string textures, breathless motivic exchange, and an array of virtuosic whirring and fluttering figures. These effects were received by critics as strikingly original; indeed, the Overture seemed so new that it was deemed by one reviewer to have ‘no sisters, no family resemblance’.²⁵ And, as in the case of ‘Der Erlkönig’, the work’s novelty was yoked explicitly to the new aesthetics of fantasy (the term is highlighted in a number of nineteenth-century reviews of the Overture, including those of Ludwig Rellstab and Gottfried Wilhelm Fink).²⁶

Of course, Mendelssohn’s fairy music was not entirely unmoored from tradition. It owed a debt to earlier operatic and theatrical scores, which often cast fairy music in dance forms featuring quick tempi, quiet dynamic levels, and contrapuntal writing. But his scherzo sound departs from the elfin ‘topic’ established during the eighteenth-century marvellous epoch in that it is too quick to operate as dance music, and lacks what Buch calls the ‘elegant’ or ornamental aesthetic of such pieces, tending instead towards microscopic buzzing and humming.²⁷ It was Fanny Mendelssohn who revealed the template for Felix’s new elfin sound in a letter describing the origins of the Octet’s scherzo. The piece, she revealed, took its direction not from musical models but from literary description and natural sound: a passage from Part I of Goethe’s Faust called the Walpurgisnacht Dream, which describes a celebratory masquerade performed in honour of Shakespeare’s fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania.²⁸ The music for their performance is furnished by a miniature orchestra composed largely of insects: ‘Fly-Snout and Gnat-Nose, here we are, / With kith and kin on duty / Frog-in-the-Leaves and Grasshopper – / The instrumental tutti!’²⁹ To their buzzing and whirring, Puck dances, Ariel sings, and other supernatural creatures flit and hover. This was the imagined entomological soundscape that inspired Mendelssohn’s fairy scherzo; indeed, his insect effects were what made Fanny feel, as she put it, ‘so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession’.³⁰ For both her and her brother, the sound of fairies was inextricable from that of bees and grasshoppers, captured and rendered into music by Felix’s novel orchestral textures.

The same close attention to nature also shaped Mendelssohn’s elfin supernaturalism in the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. According to Julius Schubring, Felix spent much of the summer of the Overture’s composition outside, observing botanical forms and textures and listening to insect song:

Example 8.2 Mendelssohn’s ‘buzzing fly’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Op. 21 (1826), bb. 264–70

Audiences (as reported in numerous reviews) heard not only flies but other small creatures including gnats in the Overture, whose textures seemed to them to vibrate with insect sound. The piece hovered in a space between natural imitation and poetic expression – in the uncertain domain of the fantastic. Its effects were borrowed and extended in a host of other ‘fantastique’ scherzi, so labelled by composers from Berlioz to Stravinsky.³²

An intersection between fairy magic and entomological life was apparent not just in musical works but in literature and popular science. A survey of nineteenth-century fairy stories (including the fantastic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Charles Nodier, and George Sand) reveals that elfin creatures were pervasively figured as insects, their magical miniaturism shading fluidly into microscopic realism as if one world might be housed secretly within the other. And texts on entomology made the same link, interspersing images of butterflies, beetles, and flies with fanciful renderings of fairies, sometimes to appeal to children and in other cases to personify nature’s ‘magic’.³³ Across disciplines, there was a sense that looking at nature and listening closely its voice could reveal enchanted realities – a hint of the pantheistic magic that Schlegel and other Idealist thinkers associated with the organic world. Modern technology was crucial to this venture. Microscopes, newly affordable and available, promised to reveal hidden botanical and entomological wonders, and virtuosic orchestras functioned similarly, capturing ever-more delicate and inaccessible soundscapes. New instruments, both scientific and musical, breached the gap between science and magic, generating a characteristically fantastic blurring.³⁴

But access to enchanted realities was not available to all; only the special few were gifted with senses sufficiently honed to perceive the magical sights and sounds at the heart of the created world. Acute, quasi-divine perception was the province of artistic genius, the basis of a new hierarchy elevating poets, painters, and especially composers to priest-like status. Revered, though often depicted as tortured or mad, the fantastic musician was suspended between the material and ethereal, apprehending both physical surfaces and supernatural (Platonic or vitalist) essences. This model for the inspired listener was, in some regards, a reanimation of the old Renaissance magus, though rather than manipulating the inaudible mathematical resonances of a Pythagorean universe, the Romantic composer harnessed the real sounds of a pantheistic world. Preserving these in composed ‘hieroglyphs’, he wielded not just aesthetic but metaphysical power, producing works with the capacity to transform, enliven, and elevate.³⁵

Imperial Demons

If fairies were rationalised, given new life, by fantasy’s surnaturel vrai, so too were demons. From Goethe’s Mephistopheles (in Faust settings by Berlioz, Liszt, Gounod, Boito, and others) to Carl Maria von Weber’s Samiel in Der Freischütz and the bloodthirsty Lord Ruthven in Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr, figures of supernatural evil loomed large in Romantic theatrical and instrumental repertories. Their proliferation can be dated, in part, to the rise of Gothic culture (mentioned above) as well as to burgeoning fears of political violence during the years surrounding the French Revolution. However, on the musical stage, demonic evocation also had an older provenance, hearkening back to depictions of monsters, spectres, and the underworld in opera since the seventeenth century. What was new and compelling about Romantic demons – what set them apart from older theatrical horrors – was their partial release from the imaginary world into the realm of the scientific real. Like fairies, sylphs, and angels, they were naturalised, but not by the Idealist longing and pantheistic belief that recalled benevolent magic; instead, the ‘nature’ with which demons became associated was manufactured by theories of physiological difference emanating from the human and social sciences.³⁶

In marvellous opera of the eighteenth century from Niccolò Jommelli to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, scenes of dark supernaturalism were associated with the so-called ‘terrifying style’ (later also called the ombra topic), marked by low brass outbursts, the minor mode, diminished harmonies, bare octave or unison sonorities, rhythmic disruption, and sudden dynamic contrasts.³⁷ This collection of gestures served to depict a range of horrors from witches to flying dragons and hell itself, acting as a carefully cordoned-off magical semiotics separating dark imaginings from ‘actual’ life. Such effects were not lost in the Romantic period, but they began to coexist with another set of topical markers: those of the exotic. These included noisy percussion (especially the janissary combination of cymbals, triangle, and drum), downbeat thumping, syllabic text-setting, static rhythms, and non-progressive harmonic structures associated with the (alleged) primitivism and ferocity of Turks, Scythians, and other heathen groups.³⁸ Gradually, the markers of otherworldly demons began to blur into the sounds of these human ‘savages’ in a new convergence of ‘real’ and mythological malevolence.

This shift took root towards the end of the eighteenth century, when belief in the dark aspects of Christian supernaturalism (including hell and the devil) had been almost completely dismantled, rejected as medieval superstition. There was no room, amongst the educated classes, for the old demons – creatures who had once contained and focused fantasies of sadism, violence, and depravity. Such fantasies persisted, however, floating around in the collective consciousness, attaching to the poor fringes of society and increasingly, to colonial bodies on the edges of expanding Western empires. The new sciences of anthropology and ethnology fuelled this transference, generating theories of racial difference that demoted European peasants along with colonial Others to inferior status. Both populations were categorised as physically and morally inferior, inclined towards violence, gluttony, and lasciviousness. The result was a justification of imperial incursion and domestic oppression as well as the invention of what H. L. Malchow terms the ‘racialized Gothic’, a class of human fiends.³⁹

The sonic markers of the new demonism appear clearly in Meyerbeer’s grand opera Robert le diable (1831), a work that influenced virtually every infernal evocation of the following three decades. The most famous portion of this opera was (and remains) the Act 3 finale, the dance of the damned nuns, which takes place in a quintessentially Gothic landscape: a graveyard in the courtyard of an ancient moonlit monastery. The evil Bertram has lured the opera’s hero, Robert (Duke of Normandy), to the spot, convincing him to commit a sacrilege – to pluck the evergreen branch on the tomb of Saint Rosalie, which will grant him immortality and unlimited power. The traditional signals of the ‘terrifying style’ (low brass, tremolo, minor mode, and diminished harmonies) accompany Bertram’s recitative as he calls the faithless nuns sleeping beneath the monastery stones to awake and aid him in his plan. As they come slowly back to life, however, a different set of effects begins to creep into the orchestra: a ringing triangle and a quiet, staccato motive in the upper strings. To this accompaniment, the nuns rediscover the objects of pleasure to which they had succumbed during their lives, including wine and dice. They urge Robert to complete his task and, when he plucks the fatal branch, the topical convergence already underway is fully realised: the scene shifts from minor mode to a raucous D major marked by noise, percussive clashing, and downbeat thumping. Gone are the sonic effects of Meyerbeer’s airy wraiths, replaced by those of savage revellers. The nuns are joined by demons shouting a jerky, syllabic message, and together they form ‘a disordered circle’, commencing a fortissimo bacchanale. Over the course of the scene, ghostly spirits become exotic primitives. The otherworldly collapses into the Other.

Berlioz, in one of several essays on Robert, wrote that Meyerbeer’s use of percussion signalled a newly savage ‘fantastique’ aesthetic. And the critic François-Joseph Fétis deemed the whole third act a ‘monde fantastique’, an infernal vision unlike any that had come before.⁴⁰ Especially memorable, for him (as for many reviewers), was the bacchanale, a dance originally associated with Greek pagan ritual but long since appropriated by Western travel writers as a signal of primitive societies. Its telltale circle of revellers appeared in numerous nineteenth-century depictions of native African, American, Australian, and Mexican cultures. Differentiated from one another only superficially, the ring-dances associated with these places became inextricable, for many Western readers, from pagan abandon and debauchery (see Fig. 8.2).⁴¹ Meyerbeer was the first to employ the form in an infernal evocation, but he was by no means the last. In the wake of Robert le diable, a host of other composers invoked bacchanalian circles and related exotic effects in demonic scenes, including Adolphe Adam in the ballet Giselle (the ‘Bacchanale des Wilis’), Berlioz in the Pandemonium scene of La Damnation de Faust, and Liszt in the Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (‘Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke’).

Figure 8.2 La danse du sabbat, an infernal bacchanale. Metal engraving, in Paul Christian, Histoire de la magie

(Paris: Furne, 1884) (http://fantastic.library.cornell.edu/imagerecord.php?record=68)

In these pieces, as in Meyerbeer, ombra markers intermingle vertiginously with the images and sounds of an ‘undeveloped’ colonial world, and demons themselves hesitate, like Hoffmann’s menacing doppelgängers, between mythology and ethnography. The fear they articulate is no longer that of biblical devils or eternal damnation but of vengeful slaves and savage colonies – a threat born of guilt, racial prejudice, and the terrors of modern empire.

Further Threads

The above sketches are points of departure, meant to encourage a wider consideration of music’s interface with Romantic forms of natural or scientific magic, several of which are discussed in other chapters of the present volume. We could, for instance, contemplate enchantments produced via composerly interactions with new electrical, optical, and telegraphic technologies;⁴² intersections amongst sound, vitalist magic, and physiology forged by instruments including the aeolian harp and glass harmonica;⁴³ or forms of magical-musical embodiment bound up with nineteenth-century theories of sex and gender.⁴⁴ Understanding Romantic sound worlds means, in many senses, tracing the history of magic – documenting music’s reinstatement as an agent of puissant enchantment, a conduit between material and metaphysical domains. The ‘end’ of the Romantic period (in so far as we can identify such a thing) might be understood as the moment when sound was, once again, divested of such power, slipping back to the status of the aesthetic, rational, or merely marvellous.

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk recently posed the question ‘where are we when we hear music?’¹ Romantic responses are consistent in their religious and often specifically Christian imagery: a ‘better world’ (Jean Paul), ‘paradise’ (Tieck), the land of ‘faith’ and ‘holy peace’ (Wackenroder), a ‘kingdom not of this world’ (Hoffmann), and so on.² Like Sloterdijk’s question, these responses are more complex than they may at first appear, pointing to more than just subjective piety or religiosity (not coincidentally a term introduced into the German language in the years around 1800).³ Since the time of Heine’s Die romantische Schule (1835), the Romantic investment in religion has often been disparaged as regressive and equated with ‘throne-and-altar nostalgia’.⁴ A more sympathetic, though no less one-sided standpoint is to treat such religious rhetoric as an arbitrary ‘jargon of ultimacy’ servicing purely secular conceptions of transcendence.⁵ In different ways, both these approaches reflect how, more broadly, the master narrative of secularisation has shaped conceptions of the relationship between Romanticism and religion.⁶ Although scholars have long abandoned clunky notions of an Age of Reason sweeping aside an Age of Faith, the view that religion became a marginal force fighting a doomed rearguard action continues to shape attitudes towards post-Enlightenment religious art. While we may no longer share the confidence with which modernist commentators such as Adorno blasted the false consciousness and ‘poisonous’ religiosity tainting the products of art-religion, something of this suspicion still clings to works such as Wagner’s Parsifal and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (let alone Gounod’s Ave Maria).⁷ The issues yoked together by the secularisation paradigm are far from irrelevant to Romantic religion, art, and art-religion; indeed, the secular-modernist brand of critique epitomised by Adorno feeds on the anxieties of its host, converting Romantic concerns over the continuing possibility of religious art into accusations of mystification and falsity. But to understand the nature of the religion within art-religion, we need to approach it with an alternative model of secularisation in mind: one that emphasises the continuous, dynamic unfolding of religion and the dialogic nature of art’s encounters with it. As Daniel Weidner argues, secularisation and art-religion do not wipe the slate clean; rather, both resemble palimpsests in which the sacred meanings they overwrite remain tangible and active.⁸

Most discussions of the relationships between Romanticism, religious art, and art-religion divide the field into three broad categories, each encompassing a distinct set of attitudes:

1. i. art considered as an element within traditional religious practices, such as music for use in the liturgy or private devotions

2. ii. art as offering its own points of access to the truths, meanings, and experiences of religion, serving to complement, supplement or interpret them (in Claudia Stockinger’s phrase, primary art-religion)⁹

3. iii. art as co-opting the claims and cultic functions of religion, reconstructing, critiquing, or negating it, or simply taking its place; in Adorno’s phrase, ‘the self-exaltation of art as the absolute’ (secondary art-religion).¹⁰

Two caveats are needed before exploring these categories further. First, we should avoid pre-emptively treating them as successive stages within the process of secularisation (or music’s journey from being ‘the most religious among the arts’ (Tieck) to what Georg Simmel described as ‘the religion of today’).¹¹ Art-religion – particularly in the secondary form outlined above – has often been represented as one of the secular forces filling the void left by the retreat of religion; this model is at work in Max Weber’s view that in modernity art ‘takes over’ religion’s functions, laying claim to its own form of redemption.¹² While this perspective fits well with some works from Weber’s own period (such as Delius’s Eine Messe des Lebens or Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie) it exaggerates the secularity of earlier forms of art-religion, which tend to be heterodox or syncretic rather than post-Christian in orientation. Second, we need to resist the polarised view of sacred and secular fostered by the secularisation paradigm. Under Romanticism, the borders between religious art and art-religion were porous, and often the same genres and works were approached from all three of the perspectives outlined above. Consider, for example, the Romantic reception of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, elevated by Wackenroder as an emblem of the Christian calling of the artist, by Hoffmann as an intimation of infinity, and by Wagner as a symbol of a ‘redemption through love’ that transcended religious dogma.¹³ Within individual compositions, too, these strands overlap and collide, in spite of energetic attempts by critics and institutions to police the boundaries of the sacred.¹⁴

Listening Religiously: Art-Religion and Music Aesthetics

Romantic conceptions of art-religion percolated only gradually into the musical sphere, shaping attitudes towards listening and performing music well before they had an impact on composition. Although art-religion emerges in the years around 1800, the term itself is seldom found in discussions of music prior to the 1850s, when it was invoked by critics seeking to burst the bubble of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Tellingly, his opponents, such as the literary historian Julian Schmidt, presented Wagner’s vision of the ‘oneness of religion, art and society’ as a stale rehash of the ideas of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Romantic school from half a century earlier.¹⁵ While Schmidt’s aim was polemical, he is right to identify Schleiermacher and the Romantic school as the key sources for what has been described as the ‘convergence’ model of art-religion: the view that art and religion – functioning as separate reality compartments in modernity – needed to be drawn into unity.¹⁶ In his Über die Religion (1799), Schleiermacher argued that such convergence provided a vital route for reviving religion and reconciling it with the present: ‘Religion and art stand alongside one another like two friendly souls whose inner affinity, whether or not they feel it to the same degree, is as yet unknown to them … To bring them together and to unite them in one bed is the only thing that can bring religion to completion on the path on which we are heading.’¹⁷ Schleiermacher’s conception of this convergence assumes that each of these partners has its own autonomous capacity for revelation. In the writings of the Romantic school, however, the boundaries between the two are often blurred, dissolving art and religion into equivalence or identity: for Hölderlin, ‘that which is most beautiful is also holiest’, while Tieck apostrophises music as ‘the completely revealed religion’.¹⁸

For Carl Dahlhaus, the impulse to draw art and religion together reflects not only the new metaphysical claims being made for art around 1800, but also the primacy given to feeling within contemporary religious thought.¹⁹ One of the most important legacies of art-religion is the heightened awareness it helped to generate of the proximity between aesthetic and religious experience. In terms derived from aesthetics, Schleiermacher describes religion as ‘a sense and taste for the infinite’, metaphorically linking it to the feelings instilled by art (religious feelings are ‘like a piece of sacred music’ accompanying human actions, while religious communication aims at transmitting ‘heavenly tones’ in a manner akin to Orpheus).²⁰ For Schleiermacher, both art and religion share the capacity to enable individuals to ‘lose the finite and find the infinite’, generating moments of revelation in which ‘the sense of the universe bursts forth as if through immediate inner illumination’.²¹ While Schleiermacher is keen to recruit art as a conduit to religion, he is careful not to treat aesthetic and religious feelings as equivalent, arguing that he does not himself grasp ‘how the artistic sense [Kunstsinn], by itself alone, merges into religion’; indeed, he coins the term art-religion (Kunstreligion) in the context of denying the possibility of art being the dominant element in such a partnership.²² Less caution is displayed in the two other foundational texts of Romantic art-religion, Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) and Phantasien über die Kunst (1799). In these texts, religion and art are folded into one another to the extent that they become interchangeable; artworks become altars, artists priestly mediators with the divine, and aesthetic experience a force capable of triggering religious conversion:

Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen and Phantasien are best known for their idealisation of medieval and Renaissance religious art, playing a significant role in fostering the Nazarene movement in painting and the Palestrina revival in music. In discussing painting, they focus almost exclusively on old Italian and German art, idealising it as a model of art in the service of the Church, a relic of an authentic, unreflective religious belief lost to modernity. Their picture of music is more nuanced, elevating both early church music and modern instrumental music as sources of religious revelation. In common with most early Romantic writers, Wackenroder and Tieck treat the former as a kind of artless mood music whose naivety, simplicity, and purity exercises an immediate effect on the listener.²⁴ In contrast, they imbue modern instrumental music with a distinctively modern form of religiosity.²⁵ In the musical essays and experiences of the fictional composer Joseph Berglinger, such music is presented as a mysterious, otherworldly language, an object of religious devotion on account of its ‘deep-seated, immutable holiness’.²⁶ With Berglinger, the experience of ‘divine, magnificent symphonic movements’ becomes a religious exercise, transforming the concert hall into a sacred space in which he ‘listened with just the same devotion as if he were in church’.²⁷

Given the extent to which such perspectives helped to shape both art-religion and the reception of absolute music, it is worth probing the conception of religion at work in them. Here, we are not dealing with the ‘heavenly innocence’ or ‘purity and sanctity of devotion’ that Romantic commentators discerned in premodern art, but with the inscription of new meanings onto a religious background.²⁸ When Tieck speaks of instrumental music as revealed religion, or when Hoffmann evokes the unknown kingdom unlocked by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they employ metaphors and imagery that diverge significantly from those they apply to early church music.²⁹ As Tom Spencer notes, Wackenroder and Tieck present a ‘loose patchwork’ of religious references and allusions, stitching together language drawn from the Bible, the Pietist tradition, classical mythology, and the poetics of the sublime in order to create a modern form of aesthetic religiosity, akin to the new mythology invoked by Schelling and Schlegel.³⁰ These ingredients call attention to the capacity of instrumental music to convey religious truth, while at the same time giving that truth a specifically modern character. If this music, for Wackenroder and Tieck, imparts revelation, it does so through a glass darkly, offering incomprehensibility, infinite longing and a ‘frightful, oracularly ambiguous murkiness’.³¹

The kind of primary art-religion epitomised by Wackenroder and Tieck fits well with Rüdiger Safranski’s description of Romanticism as ‘the continuation of religion by aesthetic means’.³² In places, however, the Berglinger pieces flirt with the secondary form of art-religion outlined above; not merely through their syncretic language, but through drifting towards an aestheticism in which art and its cult seemingly aspire to replace religion rather than renew it. Thus Berglinger presents music as a seductive alternative reality cut off from the everyday world, a ‘beautiful poetic delirium’ in which life becomes a musical work.³³ This view of art is simultaneously proposed and critiqued, giving these texts what Marco Rispoli describes as a ‘manic-depressive dynamic’; Wackenroder’s final piece on Berglinger dwells mercilessly on the delusions of aestheticism, rejecting its presumptuous elevation of the artist as an ‘autonomous, human God’ and damning its view of art as a ‘deceptive, fraudulent superstition’.³⁴ The presence of such multiple, competing conceptions of art-religion within these and other early Romantic texts enabled a wide range of artists and movements to draw inspiration from them. But it also explains why the concept met with hostility from both those (such as Goethe) who equated it with religious regression and those (such as Eichendorff) who saw it as a Trojan horse for secularising tendencies.

Composing Religiously

Symbols, Frames, and Riddles

If art-religion draws the infinite through the finite, August Wilhelm Schlegel observes, it can do so ‘only symbolically, through tropes and signs’.³⁹ To understand how this symbolic divination of the absolute functions in practice, it makes sense to turn to the artist most associated with Romantic art-religion, Caspar David Friedrich. Rather than cultivating one form of art-religion, Friedrich’s paintings circle fluidly through a range of models: some seemingly overdetermined in their Christian symbolism, some employing what Kant described as the ‘cipher language’ of nature to hint at a pantheist drift, while others present open spaces stripped of anchoring symbols.⁴⁰ Paintings such as Abtei im Eichwald (1808–10), Kreuz und Kathedrale im Gebirge (1812), and Winterlandschaft mit Kirche (1811, see Fig. 9.1) draw on multiple familiar religious tropes. In the latter, the wooden wayside crucifix, prayerful penitent, and visionary Gothic church concealed in the mist point to a specifically Christian vision of redemption, an impression confirmed by the discarded crutches in the foreground, which suggest the kind of sudden conversion experience described by Schleiermacher. Even here, where the Christian dimension of the symbols seems transparent, their placing within nature serves to broaden the painting’s vision of transcendence. Elsewhere, as in Der Mönch am Meer (1808–10), Friedrich empties his canvases of clear religious symbolism, drawing on imagery associated with the secular sublime to imbue his works with an unspoken plenitude of meaning. (For those unsympathetic to Friedrich’s work, such as Hegel, the riddle character of his paintings amounted to no more than ‘mystery-mongering’ [Geheimniskrämerei].)⁴¹ But perhaps the most interesting works for our purposes are those in which religious symbols are withheld, but appear present in absence. In Fichtendickicht im Schnee (c. 1828, see Fig. 9.2) the religious symbolism of Winterlandschaft mit Kirche is gone, yet seems to cling imperceptibly to the thicket of spruce trees recalled from the earlier picture. While there, the thicket enclosed a penitent gazing at a crucifix, here the sanctuary-like configuration of trees seems to generate a similarly intense focus, relying on the viewer to imbue it with meaning. The lack of explicit signs of religious transcendence has the result, as Ian Cooper argues, that ‘their reference is entirely interiorised in our sense of the scene as revelation, and specifically as revelation occurring through the framing effect of the picture’.⁴²

Figure 9.1 Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Winterlandschaft mit Kirche (Dortmund version) (1811). Oil on canvas, 33 × 45 cm, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund

(Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 9.2 Caspar David Friedrich, Fichtendickicht im Schnee (c. 1828). Oil on canvas, 31.3 × 25.4 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich

(Wikimedia Commons)

In music, works of art-religion traverse a similar spectrum of symbolisation, and are also inscribed with religious meanings as a result of framing effects. Some works, such as Spohr’s Symphony No. 4 Die Weihe der Töne, Op. 86 (1832), and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 Lobgesang, Op. 52 (1840), proclaim their proximity to religion through multiple ingredients: titles, texts or poetic programmes, musical topics, and the use of pre-existing materials with religious associations (in Spohr’s case, the Ambrosian Te Deum and funeral chorale ‘Begrabt den Leib in seine Gruft’, while in Mendelssohn’s, the chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ as well as allusions to religious works by Handel and Bach). Not all art-religion, it should be noted, involves a quest for transcendence; in the case of the Lobgesang, it is the community effect of religion that is reconstituted, while Die Weihe der Töne celebrates the blessings and consolations bestowed by music.⁴³ While these works present a dense array of verbal and stylistic pointers, other compositions rely purely on musical topics to draw religious resonances into their fields of meaning. Like the monk’s habit in Der Mönch am Meer, the concluding chorale in Anton Rubinstein’s Symphony No. 2 ‘Océan’, Op. 42 (1851) injects religion into the natural sublime, an effect not lost on the critic August Wilhelm Ambros:

The work turns at its end to the loftiest thoughts of which man is capable. Where the ocean is concerned, such declarations are hardly necessary: the roar of the waves is the sound of the organ, the altar candles shine in the eternal stars, plumes of mist ascend as incense, and the gathering clouds serve as altar hangings! All these elements coalesce into a ceremonious chorale like the thrilling one with which Rubinstein concludes his final movement.⁴⁴

As seen earlier, absolute music was prone to being heard through the filter of art-religion, even in the case of works lacking the kind of conspicuous symbols found in Rubinstein’s symphony. In a recent essay, Wolfram Steinbeck seeks to refute the long-established tendency to treat Bruckner’s symphonies as ‘masses without texts’ and ‘cathedrals in sound’; for Steinbeck, Bruckner’s musical materials – including his so-called ‘chorales’ – lack clear connections to church music, while the composer’s fervent Catholicism would have rendered him immune to the claims of art-religion.⁴⁵ Much of what Steinbeck has to say is convincing; there is, after all, little intrinsic relationship between, for example, the four root-position chords that mark the climax of the first movement of Bruckner’s Ninth and either the Lutheran chorale or Catholic chant harmonisations. Yet his arguments ignore the extent to which, like Friedrich’s Fichtendickicht im Schnee, works of absolute music were imbued with a religious dimension as a result of framing factors. Sacralised by the consecrated space of the concert hall and the discourses of art-religion, such music could rely on subtle hints – akin to the traces of blue sky in Friedrich’s painting – to point listeners towards the transcendent.