when did german music lose its innocence?
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When did German Music Lose itsInnocence?RYAN MINORPublished online: 10 Aug 2009.
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Journal aftbe RoynlMusicalAssaciatioion, 133 no. 2 334-352
When did German Music Lose its Innocence?
RYAN MINOR
Stephen Rumph, Beethoven a@er Napokon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. ix + 295 pages. ISBN o 520 23855 9.
Jeffrey S . Sposato, The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendebsohn and the Nineteenth- Century Anti-Semitic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xi + 228 pages. ISBN o 19 514974 2.
Celia Applegate, Bacb in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelrsobn’s Revival of the St Matthew Passion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. xii + 288 pages. ISBN 978 0 8014 4389 3.
STEPHEN Rumph is mad at E. T. A. Hoffmann. And not just Hoffmann alone - he also has a beefwith (in alphabetical order): Adorno, counterpoint, historicism, long- ing, lyricism, medievalism, modernism, mysticism and Romanticism. What could possibly bind together such a motley group of suspects? In Rumph‘s eyes, they are all implicated in either the creation or the continued sponsorship of a conservative world-view manifested in Beethoven’s late compositions. Hoffmann is under the gun because his famous - and famously influential - promotion of a musical kingdom ‘not of this world’ fundamentally misrepresents Beethoven’s political resonance, and helps obfuscate what Rumph sees as the composer’s abandonment of his own liberal ideals.’ (For this reason, Rumph is also mad at Beethoven himself.)
Although Rumph’s ire is focused exclusively on the mystical cult of late Beethoven, his fundamental concern is not unique. Indeed, it constitutes part of a growing interest in music and politics during the first half of the nineteenth century, and in particular within the very Austro-German context that so forcellly pro- claimed music’s separation from politics and everyday concerns to start with.2 All three authors considered in this review article focus solely on the first 40 years of the century. And the portrait they paint is in many ways revelatory: instead of late Beethoven as a dreamy inward turn, the Bach revival as a simple rediscovery of musical heritage, and the Mendelssohn oratorios as an innocent celebration of Protestant theology, we are left with a musical world that was anything but untouched by nationalism, political reaction and anti-Semitism.
This revised historiography lessens the distinction between the beginning of the century and its end - and thus challenges head on the quixotic assumption that
’ Many readers will recognize this argument from an earlier article by Rumph: ‘A Kingdom Not of this World: The Political Context of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Beethoven Criticism’, 19th-CcntutyMuric, 19 (1995-6), 50-67. Rumph‘s monograph reviewed here is a revision of his dissertation of the same tide (University of California at Berkeley, 1997). See, for instance, Nicholas Mathew, ‘Beethoven’s Politid Music and the Idea of the Heroic Style’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, ~ 0 0 6 ) .
Q The Author zw8. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association. AU rights reserved. doi:10.1og~/jrmalfkn006
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music’s entanglement with politics by the century’s close represents something of a fall from grace. But if the collective effect of these monographs is a more sober account of the early nineteenth century, the terms of this revision differ drastically between the three volumes, particularly when it comes to the treatment of historical evidence. If anything, this musicological move towards politics is actually a move towards history, the latter serving as a kind of explanatory mechanism for why par- ticular works were written, performed and received as they were. All three volumes rely heavily on contemporaneous sources, and to varying degrees (and with varying success) secondary literature from intellectual, cultural and political history. And in this sense the questions these books raise are not limited to Germany, or even the nineteenth century; more broadly, they suggest some of the ways that musicology and history can work with - and against - each other.
Battling hagiography The most ambitious of the volumes is Rumph‘s book, which embodies many of the rewards and pitfalls that often accompany as polemical an intervention as Rumph attempts. His thesis that ‘the same ideology that shaped Beethoven’s late style helped create the Restoration’ (p. 107) still remains to be demonstrated, but it is undeniable that Rumph‘s attempt to open up the hermetic casing surrounding late Beethoven is long overdue. There is arguably no other set of works in the canon that has so consistently been granted a free pass when it comes to questions of political allegiance, and this exemption from ideological scrutiny is all the more surprising given the bare facts of Beethoven’s career: the early renown of his ‘Joseph‘ cantata; the murky, if intensely felt, political allegories in Fiaklio; the celebratory works for the Congress of Vienna; and the initial impetus behind the Missa s o h n i s as a celebration of Archduke Rudolf’s elevation. To this list of compositions Rumph might have added the simple fact that Beethoven benefited from aristo- cratic patronage for most of his professional life. Even if one endorses the proposi- tion that his late works stem from an inward turn away from Metternich and the Restoration - a reading Rumph vehemently contests - the point remains that late Beethoven was literally underwritten by an entrenched and increasingly reactionary ruling class.3
The question, then, is why this oeuvre and the institutional affiliations that paid for it have not undergone more level-headed scrutiny. And on th is count Rumph is surely right to emphasize the obvious: the doggedly persistent investment in an aesthetics of the ‘purely’ musical that has helled both nineteenth-century Romantics and their twentieth-century modernist heirs. Rumph is also right to question why Hoffmann has been allowed such a prominent and representative role in articulating these aesthetics, and it is t h i s attack on Hoffmann’s aesthetic and political credentials that commences his study. His charge is that Hofhann’s aesthetic programme embodies a conservative politics that not only misrepresents the ‘heroic’ Beethoven, but also - and more ominously - articulates precisely the
Rumph might have cited T a DeNora, Brrthovcn and the Communion 0fGcniu.s: Musical Politics in Vim, 1792-1803 (London, 1995), although one suspects that her emphasis on Beethoven’s relations with the Viennese ruling classes before 1809 - that is, the date at which Rumph sees Beethoven’s adherencc to Revolutionary ideals going sour - may have been an unwelcome challenge to his schematic.
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troubling direction in which Beethoven’s later works (and their musicological sanc- tification) would soon be headed. This is a lot to lay at the feet of one writer, and indeed the prominence Rumph accords Hoffmann seems misplaced at first glance, given that his writings do not focus on Beethoven’s late works. Hoffmann’s inclusion does serve Rumph‘s purpose, however, since it undeniably allows him multiple opportunities to swipe at his two favourite targets: insufficiently liberal politics and musical commentators who neglect to condemn (or even implicitly promote) those politics. This two-pronged assault is frequently illuminating, and always thought- provoking; it can also be misleading, particularly in its approach to historical and political context. But since virtually all of the charges levelled at the late works and their promoters stem from Rumph‘s critique of Hoffmann, it is worth considering his argument against the writer in detail.
Rumph makes a persuasive case that Hoffmann may not in fact be the best con- temporary guide to Beethoven, music-history textbooks notwithstanding. For one, Hoffmann seems to be listening through a fdter that blocks out much of what is unique in Beethoven’s scores: his famous review of the Fifth Symphony ‘registers none of the traits that lend the [main] theme its impact’; elsewhere he ‘homes in on a trivial harmonic detail’ and ‘ignores entirely the extraordinary return of the scherzo’ (pp. 29-30). One suspects after a while that Rumph is condemning Hoffmann for failing to write a suitable undergraduate theory paper, but his frustration in corre- lating Hoffmann’s analysis with many modern listeners’ experience of the work is surely an indication that the former is not an infallible guide to the latter. Certainly the congratulatory tones with which twentieth-century musicology promoted Hofhann’s review - that is, as the first prominent arrival in a new promised land of instrumental aesthetics - seem never to have registered the disconnection between his largely soporific account and the relentless dynamism most modern listeners (Rumph chief among them) choose to value in the work.
Far more prominent than this musical case against H o h a n n is Rumph’s political one, which begins with a useful reminder for those of us accustomed to viewing the writer simply as a fanciful music-lover who wrote unusual short stories: he was, in fact, a committed government functionary, indeed one who wrote official anti- Napoleonic propaganda. What does this knowledge of his political activities tell us about musical aesthetics? Very little, Rumph promises: ‘Hoffmann’s personal polit- ical beliefs do not matter much to this study’ (p. 25). But if this were the case, it would contradict an earlier and more prominent assertion: ‘Coincidentally, as one of the original proponents of “absolute music”, [Hoffmann] can serve as a reminder of the political motivations behind that creed’ (p. 6). It is hard to swallow Rumph‘s rather disingenuous protestation that ‘coincidence’ is at work here, since the rest ofhis sentence (and indeed the entire book) insists upon that very connection: Hoffmann was engaged politically and promoted absolute music, therefore absolute music is stained by those political motivations. That is anything but coincidence; it is guilt by association. But even putting aside the tortured logic, Rumph falters on historical grounds - what Hoffmann promoted was not ‘absolute music’. To be sure, he endorsed an ideal of instrumental music, but as Mark Evan Bonds demonstrated ten years ago, equating the musical idealism fuelling Hoffmann’s dreamy effusions with the ideology of absolute music is fundamentally anachronistic.*
Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumend Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of tbc American Muicologcal so cia^ 50 (1997), 387-420.
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In this case, Rumph‘s line of argument essentially condemns the son for the sins of the father, but he is also eager to apportion blame in the opposite direction. His discussion of Hoffmann’s aesthetics does precisely this in charging that the writer’s societal ideals were not merely prophetic, but in fact instrumental in articulating the course of nineteenth-century German history. Rumph sees in H o h a n n a cynical, Francophobic mysticism that promotes an organic ‘spiritual totality of the state’ (p. 28) over enlightened, secular democracy. Without pausing to think much about what democracy, the state or even the Enlightenment could have meant in early nineteenth-century Prussia, he strikes an ominous note in prophesying the political and historical fallout of such politics:
The contours of a political model thus emerge from the language of Hoffmann’s criticism. We behold a harmonious, spiritually unified collective ruled over by an absolute monarch and mediated by an elite intelligentsia. It is a fair prediction of the course that German political life would take in the nineteenth century. (p. 33)
This may predict German political life as Hoffmann (and countless others) hoped it would be, and in a form that Rumph desperately wants to condemn, but it is a far cry from German political life as it was experienced. For starters: the astonishing claim that Germany was ‘spiritually unified’ in the nineteenth century. If there was one thing Germany was not it was this. What exactly does Rumph think the Kulturkampf was about? To suggest that a mystical sense of national belonging sutured over all the confessional and religious strife dividing nineteenth-century Germany is to exchange historical reality for simple jingoism. Much the same can be said about the claim of an absolute monarch: for most of the century ‘Germany’ was a patchwork of principal- ities ruled by hundreds of monarchs, none of them absolute - and, more importantly, recent scholarship has shown how local and regional identities continued to mediate national allegiance long after unification and the institution of a Khiscrrcicb.5 Spiritual and political unity may have been desired, and even announced, but that did not make them real. It is problematic enough to blame H o h a n n for the century that followed him, but to blame him for one that did not follow is something else altogether.
How did it come to this? Rumph begins his book with a promise to convey the political complexity of the early nineteenth century- he announces that his study will display a ‘profound sense of ambivalence’ (p. 6) - yet his attack on Hoffmann soon dissolves into a cheap exercise in character assassination. No doubt it is hard work to write as revisionist an account as Rumph attempts -one that is both critical of and for musicology. And he is absolutely on the mark to insist that we begin to take seriously some of the less savoury politics that have accompanied, or even partially determined, Hoffmann’s brand of musical Romanticism and its musical and musicological leg- acies; we still need to explain how and why it was - and what it means for us now- that Beethoven flourished during some of the worst years of Metternichian reaction. But the moment Rumph forsakes historical and political complexity in favour of low
And the charge is even more absurd if by ‘Germany’ Rumph a d y meant the Gmfllilrutrch realm of both Germany and Austria prior to 1871, which his grafting of Beethoven’s Vienna onto Hohann’s Berlin might suggcst. On regional and national identities, see Cclia Applegate, A Nation ofProuinciaL: The Gmnan Zdra of Hehat (Oxford, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation m a LncalMrtaphor: Wumrmbq, Zmpmd German) and NationalMrmory 1871-1918 (London, 1997); and, most recently, Abigail Green, Fatherlad: Statc-Buildingand Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, zoor).
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blows and personal attacks, he ceases to ask why historical actors may have made the choices they did; lived lives are abandoned for historiographical slogans.
Consider, for instance, Rumph’s handling of the Napoleonic invasions. He is upset that Beethoven resented the French for causing him financial hardship. He is even more disturbed by passages such as the conclusion of Hoffmann’s church-music essay, in which a ‘spirit, as though illuminated by a heavenly bolt, recognizes its home, and in this recognition gains courage and strength to bear, even to resist, its earthly travails’. Is this a barely concealed propaganda effort to transmute Romantic longing into Francophobic chest-thumping? Rumph thinks so. ‘Spiritual Sehnsucht becomes a call to arms against an enemy whose identity can scarcely be mistaken’ (p. 32). Such a reading assumes a lot: that there is a hermeneutic imperative to Hoffmann’s criticism; that there was a stable semantic field coordinating aesthetic and political vocabularies; that spirituality and yearning were, but could no longer be, goals unto themselves; and that the only imaginable ‘earthly travails’ befalling German-speaking Europe were the French. But supposing that Rumph’s reductionism is simply distorting an otherwise legitimate claim - and it is hard not to see some political parallels - one is still left with the sense that he has little interest in understanding why Hoffmann and Beethoven (and the rest of Europe!) may not have been so favourably disposed towards the French at that moment.
Rumph is of course correct to point out that a cultural Francophobia predated the invasions, and that even before the Terror not all Germans embraced the Revolution, much less its aftermath: ‘When the French Revolution spilled across the Rhine and devolved into Napoleonic imperialism, German artists had a literary arsenal at hand’ (p. 17). Absolutely. But Rumph then proceeds to ignore entirely the experience of the invasions themselves, as if they were but a minor inconvenience. Apparently all the rape and looting by the Grande Armie (as well as their forced billeting) were just a small price to pay, the bayonets and marauding soldiers nothing more than universal humanity in disguise. Indeed, so unimpeachably virtuous and cosmopolitan are ‘all things French and enlightened‘ (p. 5 ) in Rumph‘s telling that abject assimilation seems to be the only proper response to Napoleonic conquest he will allow. But the fact that H o h a n n and Beethoven refused to turn the other cheek does not necessarily amount to a dangerously regressive embrace of the era’s worst tendencies; it may also signifjr that they did not enjoy being invaded. Rumph forgoes any sustained attempt to understand the restrictions, motivations, experiences and pos- sibilities underlying political thought and action during this period. Instead, we are simply left with pot shots such as: ‘Not surprisingly, H o h a n n disdains democracy’ (p. 32) - a charge that is meaningless without contextualization. (And in fact would largely suffer from it, since even in Rumph‘s beloved Revolutionary France suffrage was restricted to a few wealthy, property-owning men.)
At issue, however, is not simply Rumph‘s oddly disproportionate antipathy towards Hoffmann, but the straw-man version of Romanticism he constructs in the process. Although Rumph begins his study by identifying ‘political romanticism’ as the chief perpetrator, it is soon ‘the Romantics’ and ‘Romanticism’ tout court that come under prosecution. Romanticism, we learn, is a ‘mystical Teutonism’ (p. 19) that ‘emerged during a time of widespread patriotism’ (p. 34). ‘Authoritarian’ (p. 21) and ‘hierarchical’ (p. 28), it relies on a ‘viilkisch nationalism’ (p. 20) that is bent on reversing the gains of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by enervating ‘liberal teleologies’ (p. 155) and marshalling spirituality into ‘political meliorism’ (p. 107). It is hard to know where to start with such a claim, though marvelling
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at its sheer overdetermination is a likely first step. Indeed, so hell-bent is Rumph on discrediting this remarkably phantasmagoric image of Romanticism that he runs roughshod over countless complications: the large differences separating early and late Romanticism among German writers;‘ the prominence of Romanticism (as well as Francophobia) outside Germany and German nationalism; the fact that ‘wide- spread patriotism’ in the early nineteenth century was generally limited to local and regional efforts to expel Napoleon’s armies, and was neither volkisch nor nationalist in orientation (here Rumph has himself fallen for a myth propagated by German nationalists later in the century);’ and, perhaps most importantly, the strong corre- lation between nationalism - even of the Romantic strain - and liberal, oppositional politics once nationalism did finally gain a foothold in the larger German public. (It is a telling omission indeed that none of the bottom-up, communal liberalism inspired by Herder and his Romantic legacy finds a place in Rumph‘s account.) As Rumph tells it, history has been reduced to a set of competing slogans - one he finds admirable, the other very, very bad.
No doubt the bold simplicity of such an approach may be tempting, and particularly so in Rumph’s case, where he has such an encrusted historiography of mindless valorization to contend with. But it is ultimately, and mercifully, unsustainable. So let us leave Hoffmann to his suspect Romanticism for a moment and consider Felix Mendelssohn, another vital participant in the creation of a German national music. Jeffrey Sposato’s account of Mendelssohn’s sacred music is no less revisionist than Rumph‘s - and it will certainly be more controversial - but it still manages to leave intact many of the competing allegiances that this of all composers had to negotiate. In fact, one might go so far as to say that, in the light of Mendelssohn’s contentious reception history, writing a book about the composer that does not recycle either veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric or a naive, feel-good insistence upon his Jewish self- identity at all costs is, by definition, revisionist. Sposato’s goal is simple, perhaps deceptively so:
Rather than variously celebrate or condemn Mendelssohn as the proud or lapsed Jew, or the true or false Christian, we should instead attempt to better understand his situation and see him not as a hero or symbol, but as he was - talented, sensitive, ambitious (socially and artistically), a man with an unusually complex background living in a difficult era. (p. 13)
It is a sad reflection on a good deal of Mendelssohn reception that this should need to be stated, let alone that it might represent a novel approach to writing his history. But what Sposato has in mind is not simply a re-examination of Mendelssohn’s self- identification as Jew, Protestant or German; rather, he is interested in the ways in which this identity was negotiated in the composition of his sacred music. In other words, the issue is not just the imposition of an identity upon the composer from without, but the reflection and outward retransmission of these forces from within his works.
On this point, see most recently Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Conccpt ofEarb Gmnan Romanticism (London, 2003). ’ Katherine Aaslestad, Place and Politics: Local Idmtig Civic Culture, and Gmnan Nationalism in North
G m n y during the Rrvolutionaly Era (Leiden, zoos). See also Ute Planert, ‘Wann beginnt der “moderne” deuuche Nationalismus? Pladoyer fiir eine nationale Sattelzcit’, Die Politik &r Nation: Deurscher Nationalismw in Kriq und Kriren 176+1960, ed. Jorg Echternkamp and Sven Oliver Miiller (Munich, ZOOZ), 25-60.
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Although Sposato’s primary focus will be the relatively unknown territory of the oratorio drafts, his study takes as its starting point a familiar narrative of facts and controversies surrounding Mendelssohn’s Jewish identity: that the composer had the bad luck to die fewer than three years before Wagner’s ‘Jewishness in Music’ essay fundamentally rewrote a reception history that had not had enough time to develop sufficient immunity; that the terms of this anti-Semitic revision proved hard to dislodge until well after the Second World War; and that many post-war musico- logists sought to recast Mendelssohn as a proud, self-identifying Jew - despite h i s conversion, substantial corpus of overtly Christian religious works and widespread success among Christian audiences. Sposato acknowledges that Mendelssohn must have identified at least in part as Jewish, and in any event that he lived in a culture that was rarely hesitant to remind him of his origins. Both of these points remain undis- puted. ‘But to identify as Jewish and to embrace that identity are two very different things’, Sposato argues (p. if), and it is the charge that Mendelssohn rarely embraced his Jewish roots that is the book‘s central provocation.
Yet how can the relative strength or conviction of such an embrace be measured? One can imagine what might constitute positive proof: protestations of faith, habits of speech or dress, participation in the Jewish community. Demonstrating the oppo- site is much less clear-cut methodologically; normal evidentiary standards give way to absence and negation. Perhaps with these limitations in mind, Sposato wisely holds off on presenting his most speculative material until later in the book. He starts on the firmer ground of Mendelssohn’s psalm settings, which he divides into four categories: juvenilia; fulfilments of Friedrich Wilhelm Ws revised liturgy in Berlin; commis- sions, frequently promoting a wide range of religious traditions; and the psalm cantatas of the 1830s, which ‘contain elements that orient them toward a Christian audience’. Sposato admits that this last category is the shakiest with regard to his claim that none of the settings amounts to an affirmation of Mendelssohn’s Jewish identity, let alone its celebration. But his contention that the cantatas’ incorporation of ‘chorale-like melodies’ (including one that sounds a good deal like the Passion chorale ‘0 Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’) as part of a general orientation towards the Leipzig public illustrates how difficult it would have been for Mendelssohn to write a specifically ‘Jewish‘ psalm setting - even if he had wanted to - given the aesthetic leanings and institutional constraints of his audiences (p. 8). And perhaps just as crucial a determinant along these lines was Mendelssohn‘s upbringing, which was itself, on Abraham Mendelssohn’s insistence, orientated around high German Protestant culture.
So far, this is a Eamiliar picture: bourgeois, converted Jews largely accepting of the dominant culture into which they hoped to assimilate. The issue, as Sposato sees it, is that post-war Mendelssohn reception has wanted more than this: assimilation checked by a strong Jewish self-identity. And one person in particular who wanted more than assimilation is Eric Werner, whose ‘new image’ of the composer as a proud Jew has gone a long way towards solidifying the ‘Mendelssohn hero’ model character- izing much post-war historiography.’ Sposato’s revisitation of Werner’s evidence is in many ways ground-breaking; indeed, an earlier version of Sposato’s critique
* This felicitous play on the ‘Beethoven hero’ trope comes from Michael P. Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn’s Music and German-Jewish Culture: An Intervention’, Mnsicuf Quartwh 83 (1999), 31-44.
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published in 1998 has already attracted a good deal of a t t en t i~n .~ For what he has found, as Leon Botstein put it after publishing the 1998 essay, amounts to a smoking gun: Werner falsified documents. lo
Although Sposato points out that there are numerous untraceable citations in Werner’s work, thus leaving open the question of whether Werner’s veracity might not need a systematic re-evaluation, he focuses on two instances in which Werner’s falsifications seem explicitly intended to overemphasize Mendelssohn’s Jewish self- identity against all odds. Werner’s lesser offence is a souped-up narration of an anti- Semitic encounter the young Mendelssohn endured during the Hep-Hep riots in 1819; while Sposato points out that the taunting was undeniably anti-Semitic, he shows that Werner probably added salacious details to his account. Far more serious is an 1833 letter from Felix to his family whose discovery and publication by Werner has led to its canonization as the ‘most significant document for the postwar Mendelssohn interpretation’ (p. 28). As Werner published it, the letter includes multiple instances of Mendelssohn not simply identifying as Jewish, but expressing pride in that identity. Yet in the letter as Mendelssohn actually wrote it, none of these statements appears. To be sure, the letter still expresses Mendelssohn’s approval of impending Jewish emancipation in England and disapproval of recent statutes in Prussia- Sposato is not arguing that Mendelssohn was politically anti-Semitic- but it does not express these sentiments in terms of personal involvement. Sposato includes a facsimile of the letter as proof: Werner simply added the statements.
Both Sposato’s initial essay and its revised version in his monograph are surpris- ingly understated - even demure - given the historiographical stakes involved as well as the severity of Werner’s falsifications. But the message is clear, and its significance for the larger question of Mendelssohn‘s self-identity is hard to miss. One may or may not agree with Botstein, who in response to Sposato’s initial article essentially argues that Werner’s misdeeds are unfortunate but forgivable because his heart was in the right place.” Yet even if the Werner &air has done damage to the post-war image of Mendelssohn as self-identifying Jew, there remains the question of what significance this revision would ultimately entail. As Steinberg has insisted, we also need to look at Mendelssohn’s compositions themselves.12 And to a large extent, that is precisely what the rest of Sposato’s monograph does.
Replacing hagiography Sposato steps up the intensity of his charge against the ‘Mendelssohn hero’ image by focusing on the drafts and published versions of Mendelssohn’s oratorios, his work in editing the St Matthew Passion for the famous 1829 performances, and his &led collaboration on A. B. Marx’s Mosc. Sposato’s arguments will certainly prove no less controversial than the Werner discussion, for he attempts to show that
Jeffrey Sposato, ‘Creative Writing: The [Self-]Idendfication of Mendelssohn as Jew’, Musical Quam& 82 (1998). 190-209. Leon Botstein, ‘Mendelssohn and the Jews’, Musical Quarter& 82 (1998), 210-19. See as0 Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn’s Music and German-Jewish Culture’; Botstein, ‘Mendelssohn, Werner, and the Jews: A Final Word‘, Muical Quam& 83 (1999), 45-50; and Peter Ward Jones, ‘Lener to the Editor’, Musical Quarter& 83 (199913 27-30.
Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn’s Music and German-Jewish Culture’, 32. In many ways, much of the reaction to Sposato’s article has been somewhat superseded by his book; I will return to this point later.
10
I ’ Botstein (‘Mendelssohn and the Jews’, 218) places it in a ‘long line of honorable and noble forgeries’.
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Mendelssohn actively sought to incorporate, and even highlight, anti-Semitic mater- ial in these works as a way of distancing himself from his Jewish heritage. Unlike the Werner discussion, however, much of this later argument remains highly speculative, probably out of necessity: aside from personal testimony that does not seem to exist, there is simply no smoking gun, no hard evidence imaginable - let alone extant - that could demonstrate this remarkable claim beyond all doubt.
Yet the force of Sposato’s proposal is hard to ignore, particularly in the sheer quantity ofmaterial he presents. Indeed, for a composer who was allegedly celebrating his Jewish identity at every turn, Mendelssohn does seem to have included an awfully large number ofanti-Semitic texts in his oratorios. Obvious examples are the choruses ‘So sprich der Herr’ and ‘Hier ist des Herren Tempel’ from Pauhs, in which the Jews plot to kill Paul for his blasphemy. Along similar lines are the depictions of animal sacrifices and burnt offerings that Mendelssohn proposed for inclusion in Marx’s oratorio, texts which Sposato suggests would have ‘resonated especially strongly with nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes, considering the long-held belief by many Christians that Judaism was a religion based on empty ceremony’ (p. 65) as well as evoking age-old images of blood libel. Sposato catalogues numerous instances of comparable texts in the oratorios and their drafts, many of which do seem on a regular basis to depict Jews as rule-bound, greedy and barbaric. Moreover, Sposato shows that these decisions amounted to more than a merely passive inclusion of texts dictated by their source. His analysis of the drafts for Paulus, for instance, indicates that ‘Mendelssohn rejected the options provided by the actual biblical story in Acts 1926-28 and his contributors [Marx, Schubring and Julius Fiirst] to position the Gentile Greeks at the heart of the uprising against Paul, choosing instead to place the Jews in that role’ (p. 108). Sposato sees a similar objective at work in Mendelssohn’s decision to retain the notorious ‘Sein Blut komme iiber uns’ chorus in the Bach, despite his numerous cuts to the rest of the work - and despite the fact that Johann Nepomuk Schelbe and Karl Heinrich S h a n n , two Christian conductors editing the piece for performance shortly thereafter, did feel free to excise the movement.
This demonstration that Mendelssohn had choices, that his textual decisions were not just a matter ofwholesale in- or exclusion, is a crucial part of Sposato’s argument. But it also leads him down the slippery slope of claiming intent, and it is here that Sposato’s rhetoric begins - out of necessity - to outpace his evidence. He assures us that Mendelssohn’s importation of ‘negative imagery’ of Jews into the Moses story ‘demonstrates definite intent’, and that Mendelssohn ‘certainly intended to make E1ia.s a Christological work‘ (pp. 63, 146). And beyond the question of intent is the issue of what motivated it. Here, Sposato’s attempts at armchair psychology are exceedingly speculative: Mendelssohn ‘felt incapable of challenging’ the tradition of anti-Semitism in the oratorio; he ‘equated disassociation with disparagement’; he harboured ‘an overwhelming personal desire to assimilate’ and ‘frequently felt conflicted when handling anti-Semitic imagery’ (pp. 57, 77, 88, 92). And how does Sposato know any of this? The answer, of course, is that he does not - and until a large epistolary goldmine is discovered, it will remain speculation derived entirely from his conjecture of what must have been motivating Mendelssohn’s dispiriting actions. Perhaps those actions speak for themselves; together with the biographical argument laid forth earlier in the book, Sposato’s exposition of the repeated incorporation of Christological and anti-Semitic elements in these works may point in precisely the direction he proposes. Or they may not: his explanation is simply, and necessarily, a shot in the dark.
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And questions still remain. For one: Sposato is insistent that these oratorios were primarily theological in nature. Yet he admits that there is little evidence that audiences or critics were attuned to theology at all, much less that anyone ever noticed the anti-Semitism or commented on the likely motivation for its inclusion. (And one wonders: did audiences have librettos? Without them the texts may have been incomprehensible, even in the recitatives.) If anyone did register the anti- Semitic texts and contemplate their significance coming from this particular com- poser, it has yet to show up in contemporary accounts. For a composer so often accused of providing exactly - and no more than - what his audiences wanted to hear, this would amount to a curiously unbidden offering; to put a spin on Sposato’s fine phrase, we might say that in this reading Mendelssohn overpaid the price of assimilation. Perhaps, then, the opposite is true, and Mendelssohn did not overshoot the mark but in fact got it just right: his contemporaries silently noted the Christo- logical and anti-Semitic texts, processed their significance, and enjoyed seeing their prejudices and religious beliefs underwritten by such edifying music. If this latter scenario is the case, Mendelssohn really did pay the right price for assimilation - he was just never given a receipt.
Or was he? There may be no paper trail documenting the exchange oftoxic texts for entry into the club, but there is strong evidence that Mendelssohn was rewarded handsomely for his contributions to, and assimilation into, German Protestant cul- ture. Certainly this was the case by 1840, when Friedrich Wilhelm IV courted Mendelssohn to come to Berlin and participate in his project of ‘Christian- German’ cultural revival.13 (In fact, t h i s is the same Friedrich Wilhelm IV that sought to annul the rights granted Jews in 1812.)’~ And Sposato’s own evidence would imply a strong degree of acceptance even earlier in Mendelssohn’s career. He quotes, for instance, some infamous lines from Zelter’s 1821 letter to Goethe about his star pupil: ‘He is, to be sure, the son of a Jew, not a Jew [himself]. The father, with great sacrifice, did not allow his sons to be circumcised and has raised them properly; it would be a truly rare thing [. . .] if the son of a Jew were to become an artist’ (p. 52). Sposato lets the letter speak for itself, and it is of course evident that Zelter’s anti-Semitism shines right through. But what is also evident is that Zelter exempts Felix from it: he does not consider the composer himself to be a Jew. The letter fairly clearly reserves its prejudice for the unassimilated and unconverted, suggesting - in a slightly less noxious twist on Wagner’s argument 3 0 years later - that, for Zelter at least, Jews could indeed (though rarely) become true artists through assimilation.
In Sposato’s account, Mendelssohn seems to have realized none of this - and hence may have paid a fair amount more than the list price for his assimilation. And as it stands, the picture Sposato paints seems contradictory at first glance: he suggests that Mendelssohn did not identify as Jewish, indeed was entirely assimilated into bour- geois Protestant culture, and that Mendelssohn’s Jewish heritage was always on his mind, dogging him at every step to the extent that his most famous works were all
l3 On Friedrich Wilhelm IVs project and its political and cultural contexts, see John Edward TOM, Becoming Historical: Cultural R r f o m t i o n andPublic Memory in Early Ninettrnth-Gntu?y Berlin (Cambridge, 2004). See also Amos Elon, The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the Grrmnn-Jcwa’sh Epoch 1743-1933 (New York, zooz), 142ff., for a brief account of Heine’s run-ins with Friedrich Wiielm IV
l4 Werner E. Mosse, ‘From “Schutejudm” to “Denache Staaabiirgcr Jiidischrn Gluubm”: The Long and Bumpy Road of Jewish Emancipation in Germany’, Paths ofEmanrzpation: Jcws, Stutcr. and Citimhip, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Kaanelson (Princeton, NJ, I991), 59-93.
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attempts to dissociate himself from it. But if Sposato had provided a greater sense of the possibilities and restrictions facing bourgeois Jews in Mendelssohn’s Berlin - particularly the transition from a primarily cultural and religious anti-Semitism to a proto-racial one starting mid-century - these larger patterns of assimilation and conversion would probably show that this seeming contradiction was in fact a very real paradox reflecting the balancing act many nineteenth-century assimilated Jews were forced to perform. And as Arnaldo Momigliano has suggested, it is a paradox whose discussion remained taboo among Jews in Mendelssohn’s circle. l5 In this sense, the reverberating silence that isolates Mendelssohn’s use of the anti- Semitic texts from any documented desire or reception may simply be symptomatic, and speculation such as Sposato’s is not only unavoidable but intuitively correct.
As far as Sposato’s book is concerned, however, this silence seems to be as much generated from a lack of contextualization as it is the failure of Mendelssohn and his contemporaries to discuss their understanding of certain oratorio texts. Unfortunately, once Sposato turns to the works there is little mention of the outside world: stations in Mendelssohn’s career, experienced or reported acts of anti- Semitism after the 1819 incident, changes in the dominant cultural identity. Aside from the death of his father Abraham, whom Sposato sees as the main force behind Felix’s ‘compulsion to repudiate’ his heritage (p. I O ~ ) , the book essentially dispenses with context after the first chapter. As a result we are left with largely immovable categories - Jews, Germans, ‘thr nineteenth-century anti-Semitic tradition’ - and very little of the complex play of assimilation and dissimilation that characterized Mendelssohn’s negotiation of the broader world as well as that world itself. For not only was German identity during t h i s period a quickly moving target, but German attitudes towards Jewish emancipation, assimilation and conversion were also in flux. Thus while many Jews’ economic and social ascent coincided with the sharp decline in their legal status after Napoleon’s defeat, German nationalist opposition grew considerably less receptive to anti-Semitism in the 1830s and 1840s - precisely the period Sposato covers - and in fact was prepared to offer emancipation in the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament. l6 To be sure, what the National Assembly espoused was mainly a rhetoric of assimilation and, in some cases, blanket conversions. But that fits the bill precisely in Mendelssohn’s case. Liberal nationalists’ support of Jewish emancipation during the years Mendelssohn was actually writing his oratorios is just as crucial a context to these works as the anti-Semitic incidents were earlier in his life, and Sposato’s general avoidance of th is later context is an unfortunate oversight. Certainly no one would claim that Mendelssohn should or could have forgotten the anti-Semitic incidents of his earlier years, but it seems equally problematic to imply that he was unaware either of his own success among the German public or of larger shifts in that public’s acceptance of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Sposato’s book has provided a much-needed corrective to Mendelssohn studies, but before this impres- sive thesis is either canonized or consigned to the cold-case file for lack of evidence, a closer and more sustained look at the interactions between Mendelssohn’s oratorios and their broader, contemporaneous context is in order.
Is Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘J. G. Dropen between Greeks and Jews’, EWYJ in AneirntandMoh Hirtoriopapby (Middletown, CT, 197), 3x0, cited in Michael I? Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn and Judaism’, The C a m b r 4 e Companion to MmdcLohn, cd. Peter Mercer-Taylor (Cambridge, 2004), 26-41 (p. 27).
“ As Brian Vick puts it: ‘If the carly nineteenth-century German culture of nationhood hardly presented wen a fipdc of postmodern pluralism, it still roofed a national mansion having many rooms.’ D$ning Germany: The 1848 FrankjFtn Parliamrnrarians and Natioml I h t i t y (London, zooz), 109.
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Yet if Sposato’s later chapters do not - and probably cannot - measure up to his opening expos6 of the Werner material, his historiographical argument regarding the insistent ‘Mendelssohn hero’ trope is still iron-clad. In a sense, Sposato’s treatment of the Werner evidence and Rumph‘s assault on H o h a n n and his aesthetics fulfil similar functions. They both single out one influential critic for creating a discursive space that could support only a single, and exceedingly valedictory, reading of the composer’s life and works. And, like Sposato, Rumph attempts to provide a corrective to this historiography by turning to the works themselves.
Perhaps because the myths they repudiate are themselves so one-sided, both Sposato’s and Rumph‘s interventions struggle with the same issue: the temptation to reduce political identities to simple oppositions (German/Jewish, Rationalism/ Romanticism, Revolution/Reaaion, etc.). To be sure, these terms are not anachro- nistic- but the easy heuristic of their strict opposition is. After all, they meant different things for different people: for Rumph‘s Beethoven, the Enlightenment was a noble cause he abandoned at his own moral peril; for Jews like the Mendelssohns, the Enlightenment was disabling as much as enabling, forcing upon them a universaliz- ing ideal at the expense of many of their own intellectual and spiritual tradition^.'^ And to state what should be obvious: historical actors are often just as complex as the movements with which they are ofien identified. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was, among other things, a notorious anti-Semite whose proposal for emancipating Jews was ‘to cut off their heads in one night and put others on them in which there would not be a single Jewish idea’.18 The same Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a frequent, and enthu- siastic, guest at Jewish salons in Berlin.” Heinrich Heine, whom Rumph likes to trot out as a liberal witness to the dark cast of Romanticism, was himself an admirer of Jacob Grimm and an enthusiast for German antiquity and the German Middle Ages.” Caspar David Friedrich, German Romantic painter ar excellence, was also a strong supporter of democratic constitutional principlesg And even H o h a n n , Rumph’s representative Romantic, could be shoehorned neither into Romanticism nor into Liberalism - as Heine himself announced.22
It might therefore seem that wielding terms like ‘Romantic’, ‘liberal’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘democracy’ must be undertaken with the utmost care, lest they ossify into Manichean oppositions - particularly when they apply to musical analysis. On this count, unfortunately, Rumph once again proves to be his own worst enemy by trying
l7 On this point see Jonathan M. Ha, Germans, / n u s and the Clnim ofModmriry (New Haven, CT, 2003).
Sadly, neither Sposato nor Rumph gives any indiation that the Enlightenment was not a unified movement or force, much less that its ideals and e&crs have received rather prominent - and not always laudatory - treatment among intellectual historians. For ausefd compendium ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, see mat is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Qlurtionr, ed. James Schmidt (London, 1996). See also Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cuhnzl I h t i r y in France and Grrmanj 17p-1914 (Ithaa, NY, 2003), for a timely reminder that we need to speak of Enlightenments, in the plural. SK Hess, Grrmanr, Jews, and the Claim o f M o h i g L+I.
George S. Williamson, The LongingfirMyth in Gemany: Religzon andAesthctiE Cultuwfim Romantirim to Nietzcche (London, 2004), 113.
” lost Hermand, ‘Das offene Geheimnis: &par David Fricdrichs Christ-germanische Allcgorien’, Rcvolutio Grrmanica: Die Sehnrurht Mch dr* ‘alten Frrihn‘t’drr Germam, 1750-1820, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael Nicdermeier (Frankfurt, zooz), 172-220.
” Adolf Strodtmann (cd.), Heinrich Hcinei. Siimmtliche Web, Rcchtm2if3ig Original-Ausgabc, ZI vols. (Hamburg, 1862), xiii, 48.
18
l9 Deborah H e m Jewish Hi& Sorig in OURqirne Berlin (London, 1988), 145. 20
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to show how Beethoven’s late works - that is, the music itself and not simply its reception - line up seamlessly with the evil spectre of Romanticism he constructed in his harangue against Hoffmann. Rumph’s tactic in approaching the music is simple: he plays the primal energy of Beethoven’s heroic style off against the alleged torpor of his later works, and assigns each a corresponding political message. The heroic style is universal, vitalist and rational, as befits its unassailable, French Revolutionary provenance; the late style, by contrast, is static, hamstrung and legit- imist in its political allegiance. This latter claim has some obvious problems, but first it must be said that Rumph’s musical discussions give rise to some truly enjoyable moments. He really likes the heroic style, and there is something charming, almost infectiously so, about the enthusiasm with which he writes about the ‘Eroica’ and ‘Pastoral’ Symphonies. What he actually says is hardly ground-breaking - in fact, it relies on a vocabulary of unity, logic, organicism and dynamism that reads like a time capsule from the 1980s - but his account of what is for him a prelapsarian Beethoven is notable for the way Rumph so proudly wears his heart on his sleeve. His concluding description of the 1808 Akademie (the concert premiering the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Choral Fantasy) is typical, deeply purple prose and all: in this concert, Beethoven’s ‘heroic sublime’ is ‘not a flight into some mystical Gcisterreicb, but a four-stage rocket blast into the noumenal sphere; not an immolation in the p e r h e d night of Romanticism, but a pilgrimage on bloody knees up Mount Olympus’ (pp. 55-7).
Yet once Rumph turns his attention to the late works, the relentless dynamism of Beethoven’s heroic style is replaced by relentless harping on Rumph‘s part, as he dispatches a volley of charges against the late style and what he perceives as the insidious effects of its political orientation. The primary agent of this reactionary lethargy is archaism, particularly counterpoint. Thus, for instance, we learn that in the Ninth Symphony ‘the voices of the “Ode to Joy” by no means vindicate the free individual of Enlightenment imagination. On the contrary, they crawl backwards into the womb of a pre-individualistic, feudal Christendom’ (p. 221). This is a serious charge, and Beethoven scholars and cultural theorists alike may be dismayed that they have missed such a spectacularly dystopian regression. What should have tipped them OR Simple: the ‘Seid umschlungen’ section is written in a ‘purely vocal stile untico’. What is more, ‘This stylistic procession [from modern instrumental style] perfectly matches the stages of poetic expression, which proceed from wordless recitative to solo stanzas to choral refrains’ (pp. 220-1). In other words, the move from instrumen- tal to vocal music, and from the individual to the collective, is, +so$cto, regressive. Why that is the case Rumph does not tell us. Nor does he ever justify his charge against archaism and counterpoint (which he tends to equate). As far as Rumph is concerned, counterpoint in the late style is nothing more than a wet, suffocating blanket geared at smothering any remaining vestiges of human vitality. And although it is hard to square this with even the most imposing of Beethoven’s late contrapuntal structures - the ‘Et vitam venturi’ in the Mhsu sokmnis might serve as one of many counter- examples - it does follow a perverse, if tautological, logic. Having declared counter- point one of Metternich’s henchmen (and also having soft-pedalled over all the contrapuntal moments in the heroic works), Rumph can easily survey the late works, spot contrapuntal intrusions and lament their irrevocable malignance.
The problem is that Rumph can no more ground his enthusiasm for the heroic style in politics he likes than he can demonstrate that the late style is determined by politics he does not like. And the result is particularly ironic, since the entire premiss
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of his book is that it bypasses all the ahistorical, ‘modernist’ (his word) Beethoven scholarship by returning the music to history, to its contemporary political reso- nances. Yet in Rumph‘s hands t h i s move takes us nowhere, since it simply reinstates all the orgiastic fbssing over thematic coherence in the heroic style by assigning it an estimable political credo, and then mounting a smear campaign against everything else. It may well be the case that Beethoven’s contemporaries invested Univcrsalgcscbicbte with admirable notions of autonomy and rationality, but it is Rumph - not Rousseau, Kant or Fichte - who decided that sonata form should serve as the movement’s conceptual ballad (and thus inherit its moral credentials). And it is Rumph, not Beethoven’s contemporaries, who has named the learned style the ‘official stamp of the Hapsburg dynasty’ (p. 99). This grafting of Rumph‘s musical taste onto nineteenth-century politics is not only ‘modernist’ in the extreme; it is also deceptive. The following two statements are representative of his methodology: ‘Beethoven himself clearly understood archaic counterpoint as a symbol of orthodoxy and the ancim rigime’; Adorno’s philosophy ‘ignores the obvious political associa- tions of the stih antico, so clearly recognized by Beethoven himself’ (pp. 111, 244). Rumph‘s evidence? None whatsoever: no citations, no biographical corroboration, no bibliographical support from other scholars. In their place, the ‘clearly’s, the ‘obvious’es and the ‘Beethoven himselfs paper over Rumph‘s sleight of hand. He is the one who has decreed archaism and counterpoint to be symbols of political reaction, and he has done it by fiat alone.
What is more, if Rumph had actually engaged contemporary discourse on coun- terpoint, he might have discovered exactly the opposite of what he so eagerly wants to denounce. Take, for instance, this passage from Georg Joseph Vogler’s Systmfirr dm Fugenbau, written in 1811:
The fugue is a conversation between a mob of singers. One should think of a popular throng [‘Volks-Auflauf ] that revolts, an acclamation of a crowd of men, where each believes that he alone should speak, where each combatant wants only to portray himself, where all egotistically want to follow their own plans, and where no one wants to listen to anyone e1se.23
As Keith Chapin has remarked, Vogler’s formulation is constructed out of ‘metal left over from the canons of the French Rev~lu t ion’ .~~ But here it is forged to the opposite ends ofwhat Rumph tells us: this is counterpoint as revolution, not reaction; move- ment, not stasis; and headstrong individuals, not cowering masses. And it is but one indication of how seriously Rumph’s chosen method of feeding two algorithms into each other - one calculating liberal versus conservative politics, the other musical dynamism versus static contrapuntal ontologies - is not only violently reductive; it simply, and necessarily, malfunctions.
History and historiography Rumph‘s metastasized version of Romanticism and his wilful treatment of the contrapuntal evils it allegedly engendered do make for engaging reading, but they
23 Cited and translated in Keith Moore Chapin, ‘From Tone System to Personal Inspiration: The Metaphysics of Counterpoint in 18th- and 19th-Century Germany’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, zooz), 170.
24 Ibid.
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hardly convince; his claims are over-argued and under-researched. To a much lesser extent even Sposato’s fine book would seem to commit some of the same sins, par- ticularly in its sometimes thin historiographical basez5 In both cases, it is hard to avoid the sense that the books’ recourse to history often amounts to dabbling. Yet on the other hand, how could it not? Rumph and Sposato (and myself> are musicologists by training, not historians. It is all but impossible to gain historiographical control over another discipline; whenever musicologists ‘use’ history to prove a point we necessarily run the risk of simplifling, even distorting, the very context we are trying to flesh out.26 In this sense, the best we can hope for is minimal distortion (a goal that might be reached by refusing to consign ‘context’ to a book‘s introduction or first chapter, and by attempting a more thorough-going review of the relevant historical work to start with).
Yet in the case of Rumph and Sposato the difficulty is not just disciplinary; it also has to do with the time period. German historians often refer to the early nineteenth century as the ‘Sattelzeit’, a ‘saddle period’ from the outbreak of the French Revolution until well into the 1820s.~’ This matches precisely Beethoven’s lifetime. Mendelssohn, for his part, inhabited a ‘schone Zwischenfall’, as Nietzsche called it, an in-between epoch straddling Beethoven’s era and that of mid-century Roman- ticism.28 Taken together, Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s lives form a 60-year stretch of ‘saddles’ and in-betweens, a long but turbulent epoch that is difficult to pin down with regard both to its broader outlines and to its cast of characters. As Steinberg suggests, cases such as Mendelssohn’s illustrate how unstable identities were in Biedermeier Germany.29 But not just identities: there is precious little in this period (nations, institutions, ideologies) that offered stability, certainly not to the extent that it allows for easy import into a musicological study without considerable qualification.
If anything, one might try reversing the claim to show how music itself- or at least the idea of it - served as a binding agent or rallying force to help provide direction and meaning to Germans’ lives. And instead of importing one atomized rubric (Romanticism, anti-Semitism) whose very singularity leaves intact most of the his- toriographical barrier between music and politics th is scholarship is presumably seeking to dislodge in the first place, we might begin to focus on the larger cultural and political world as it coalesced around musical composition, performance and reception. This is precisely what Celia Applegate’s book does - although in the context of the present argument one should acknowledge at the outset that her success in th is enterprise does have a disciplinary component: she is a historian. And in fact the book‘s announced focus on the St Matthew Passion revival is largely relegated to
*’ Aside from some studies already cited in this review- Hess, Germum,jnur. andthe Chim ojModmrity, Vick, Drfining Gmnany, Elon, The Pity ofitAll- Sposato’s account would also haw benefited from work such as Shulamit Volkov’s: for instance, Anlirmritimrru ah blrurrllrr Codc Zchn EIIIZYI (Munich, 2000) and Dnr jdischr h j e k t I& Modrmr (Munich, a w I ) .
26 Lcon Boutein has recently argued a similar point, suggesting that the heuristic of anti-Semitism can no longer serve as the catch-all historical explanation for a l l late nineteenth- and early wenticth-ccntury Europe. ‘Music in History: The Perils of Method in Reception History’, Murical Quurter~ 89 (zw~), 1-16. On the ‘Sattelzcit’, see most recently Plancrt, ‘Wann beginnt dcr “modcrne” deutschc Nationalismus?’
28 On Nieasche’s comment as well as a broader consideration of Mcndclssohn’s apparent liminality, see Peter Mercer-Taylor, ‘Introduction: Mendelssohn as Border-Dweller’, The Cambridge Compmion to M d k s o h n , cd. Mercer-Taylor, 1-7.
27
29 Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn’s Music and German-Jnvish Culture’, 32.
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the two outer chapters; the bulk of her attention is given to the broader historical and political context in which the Bach work was revived. In short, this is not a study orientated around musical composition in context, such as Rumph‘s and Sposato’s, but rather acts of musical performance and appreciation in context - and as such it neither stokes nor dampens the inflamed rhetoric surrounding musical hermeneutics.
This is both a virtue and a limitation, a step forward as well as to the side. For musicologists primarily interested in the way musical works reflect and refract the larger world at the time of composition, Applegate’s study provides raw contextual material but no direct model of interpretation. It runs the risk of being consulted, and cited, as mere background. This would be a mistake, however, for what Applegate provides is far more interesting, and far more crucial, than simple ‘context’ alone: it is a study of how a culture and a nation became musical, how ‘an array of institutions [. . .] defined a singular space for music among the creations of what Germans under- stood to be their nation, and thus together defined what national culture was and what it took to sustain it’ (p. 2). To be sure, this is not an unfamiliar story, particularly in its broadest outlines: the rise in musical journalism, the growth of choral societies, the increasing investment in German musical ‘seriousness’, the idealization of both a national and a musical past in the reception of Bach and Handel, the sacralization of the concert hall - none of this is unusual, although the elegant concision with which Applegate presents it is.
Yet Applegate does more than fill out these familiar contours; she supplements and expands them with new perspectives - and in some cases, crucial correctives - that go a long way towards restoring the strange fortuity of the St Matthew Passion perfor- mances as well as challenging and refining many of the historical narratives that have traditionally led to and from them. For instance, she points out that the publication of musical periodicals was a shaky financial endeavour, and that the longevity of the Allgemcine mwikalischc Zeitung - and hence its prominent role in educating the musical public represented by the Bach performances - was in large part due to happenstance: Friedrich Rochlitz, its founding editor, was lucky enough to be under- written by the music publisher Breitkopf & Hael , and t h i s rare partnership provided financial security denied to most other music journals. Such attention to the provi- sional, even accidental, elements fuelling much of the Bach revival is also put to good use in Applegate’s contention that the Passion performances most likely could have taken place only in Berlin - for it was only there, in what was otherwise a musical backwater, that ‘esoteric Bach expertise’ (p. ZI), the person of Felix Mendelssohn, and many unpublished Bach manuscripts all came into contact with prominent suppor- ters such as A. B. Marx and Germany’s intellectual establishment (Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt).
Both of these examples give Applegate’s account a revisionist tinge, emphasizing that the Passion performances and the cultural energies that produced them were not as inevitable as we may have thought. But Applegate is also carell to link the fleeting, private or accidental elements underlying the revival to broader shifts in the public sphere. That treasure trove of Bach manuscripts in Berlin, for instance, is not just a result of the Mendelssohn family’s prescient good taste, but also a prime example of the ‘culture of collecting’ that ‘shifted from an essentially private activity [. . .I to a collective and public effort’ by the early nineteenth century (p. 205). And Applegate makes the convincing argument that musical journals such as Rochlia’s Allgemcine musikalische Zeitung - long taken for granted by musicologists - owe their very existence to the birth of a German literary public as well as the emergence of musicians
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themselves into this public, professional sphere around the turn of the century. This attention to social history pays further dividends in Applegate’s discussion of choral societies, allowing her to link musical amateurism, bourgeois gender norms and the emerging public space of musical associations to the very institution that hosted those epochal performances of the Passion in 1829:
The most acceptable way [. . .] for most women to go public as musicians was to wear the protective cloak of amateurism, with its connotations of private life and domesticity. The first organization to make this respectable publicity possible, crossing the invisible line dividing domestic and public music making, was the Singakademie. (p. 138)
And it should be noted that this discussion of musical amateurism does not limit itself to the marbled corridors of the high bourgeoisie; Applegate’s amusing depiction of Michael Traugott Pfeiffer’s Gesang6ildungslchre and Johann Bernhard Logier’s chiro- plast (a torturous contraption intended to facilitate keyboard skills) rounds out a finely textured account of music education in reformist Prussia.
But it may well be that this book‘s fundamental intervention - and one that is likely to inspire reactions of utter dismay among musicologists that we have got this part of the story wrong for so long - is its discussion of religion, both the official variety and an emerging ‘religion of art’. Applegate announces that her book will ‘take apart the pieces of the secularization story’ (p. 8). But this is far too modest, for in fact she demolishes the notion that the Passion performances point to the sacralization of the concert hall at the expense of actual religious ~entiment.~’ For starters, she reminds us that Friedrich Wilhelm 111’s 1817 union of the Lutheran and Reformed branches of Protestantism led to an extraordinarily heterodox church whose mixed allegiance to reformism, statism and orthodoxy managed to alienate virtually all of its constituencies. And the resulting liturgy - cobbled together from a number of sources, including Russian Orthodox chants arranged for all-male choruses - was but the latest challenge to a musical tradition that had seen more than its fair share of troubles since Bach‘s time: among others, Applegate points to ‘the decline of the Lutheran cantoral position, the relegation of the organist to an impoverished profes- sion, the deterioration of the chorale, the spreading silence of the congregation, the marginalization of musical training in the Latin schools, and the virtual disappear- ance of the trained choir of students’ (p. 179). Thus it should come as no surprise that the Passion performances, as well as those of the contrapuntal, sacred tradition more generally, took place outside the Protestant church. They had to. Moreover, the ostensibly secular institution of the bourgeois choral society proved itself to be an eager recipient of this sacred tradition, leading to a brisk market in oratorios and other ‘classical’ sacred music.
Yet Applegate also shows that this was no mere closed economy, simply shifting a tradition of religious sentiment from one institution to another. Rather, it points to a larger ‘reconfessionalization’ of the public sphere more generally, indeed a ‘free- floating of piety to places outside traditional sacred spaces’ (pp. 258, 178). Choral societies such as the Berlin Singakademie were one public face (and voice) of this sacralization. And although Applegate is not arguing that there was no such thing as a
30 Applegate singles out Friedrich Blume as an advocate of this secularization reading: hotcrtant Church Muric: A Hirwty rev. cdn, in collaboration with Ludwig Finscher rtul. (New York, 1974), 315. To be fair, Blume is but one of many to haw designated the Pasion performances an early exemplar of ‘art religion’.
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‘religion of art’ in 1829, her evidence shows that the Passion performances were not, for the most part, evidence of it. As A. B. Marx announced in advance: ‘We are called not to a festival of art, but to a most solemn religious celebration’ (p. I). In light of statements such as these, Applegate notes that ‘one comes, finally, to the most basic of conclusions. What people overwhelmingly responded to in the St Matthew Passion was Bach‘s musical rendering of the “drama of the sacrifice of Jesus”, in other words, the religion’ (p. 224).
In distinguishing between a ‘festival of art’ and a ‘religious celebration’, Marx’s announcement of the Bach performances both draws a line and anticipates its even- tual crossing. In so doing, he captures precisely what is so interesting, as well as so difficult, about this period: its simultaneous resemblance to, and difference from, the later nineteenth century. And by noting Marx’s acknowledgement - teetering some- where between the sentimental and the naive, between the continued resonance of an older model of musical revelation and its eventual secular replacement - we are ultimately forced to deal with both the continuities and the distinctions that span the nineteenth century.
Once again, Applegate leads the pack, and perhaps most importantly in her dis- cussion of German nationalism. In a well-known article from 1998, she had already warned musicologists about the pitfalls of subscribing to a monolithic and teleo- logical ‘Luther-Bismarck-Hitler’ understanding of German na t iona l i~m.~~ Her discussion of the Passion performances helps flesh out that point. In viewing the nationalism of the 1820s as an ‘emergent cognitive model for Europeans, a way of ordering experience, of looking at the world and making sense of one’s place and identity in it’, Applegate is able to acknowledge - indeed, insist upon - German nationalism’s central role in the Passion performances, but without resorting to the more familiar, and more ominous, spectre of late nineteenth-century nationalism:
Cultivating the German Bach never was intended merely to soften people up for political union, just as malung Bach part, indeed the founder, of a national music tradition was not an end in itself. For all those who contributed to Bach’s emergence as a ‘national symbolic figure’, his music mattered more than his national identity, not that the choice would have made any sense to them. The national designation identified the man and his music, and it need hardly be said that Bach gave more to the category of German or German music than either gave to him. (p. 256)
This inseparability of music and national identity became all the more naturalized, Applegate suggests, because this kind of nation-building is not always intentional or even conscious. In other words, it is a scattered culture - rather than an explicit project - of nation-building that in many ways distinguishes early nineteenth-century nationalism from its successors later in the century.
This is a much more diffuse notion of national identity and practice - spread between the distinct but imbricated realms of the literary sphere and the musical one; the salon and the concert hall; the classroom and the living room; the government ministry and the church; the collected manuscript and the published edition. And it works in tandem with a similarly diffuse approach to historical change that is neither
31 Cclia Applegate, ‘How German is it? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Cenmry’, rgth-Cmtury Music, 21 (19974, 274-96.
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insistently teleological nor blind to continuities: ‘While the 1829 performances were the end of nothing and not precisely the beginning of anything, they nevertheless stand as a culmination. For stargazers, this is the point at which the celestial body [. . .] reach[es] the highest point above the observer’s horizon’ (p. 236). This is perhaps a fancill formulation, and no doubt one that engages in a healthy diet of hagiography bestowed upon Mendelssohn, Bach and Berlin itself. But it does not come at the cost ofApplegate’s insistence on a dynamic and contingent field of cultural and political identity. It is precisely this emphasis on the multiplicity of forces that made possible, and benefited from, the Bach revival that sets her account apart. And as musicologists focusing on nineteenth-century Germany continue to interrogate both the roots and the resonance of music-making in the broader world, as we try to understand when music and politics engaged in their familiar contretemps of mutual attraction and repulsion, and as we conceptualize both music- and nation-making in a way that neither reduces the former to the latter nor attempts to sever their common roots, we will ignore Applegate’s book - its method as much as its content - at our own significant peril.
Ryan Minor ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor of Music History and Theory at SUNY, Stony Brook. Recent publications have appeared in Opera Quarterh Cambridge Opera Journal, ~pth-century Mutic and Franz Liszt and his World (ed. Christopher Gibbs and Dana Gooley, Princeton, NJ, ZOO^), and focus, in particular, on the aesthetic and political trajectories of the chorus within the changing landscapes of German musical culture in the nineteenth century. He is currently working on a book exploring the musical and political resonance of the chorus in nineteenth-century Germany.
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