Nostalgia is the emotional passport to return home, to repossess the comfort of what has already been experienced. This home is constructed as both a physical space or, in a more intangible way, as an affective atmosphere. Nostalgia is experienced at the edge of time, in a mesmerizing tapestry that interweaves past, present and future with the never-ending possibilities of what could have been – for nostalgia amounts to memory plus imagination. In periods of transition, nostalgia provides a shelter from which to watch the world unfold into the unknown. Nostalgia is the emotion we experience when we are both happy and sad about the past, both grateful yet somewhat bitter; it is a perfect example of the rich affective potential of a mixed feeling. Its characteristic bittersweet and contrasting notes make of nostalgic reverie a prolific reflection board from which questions about the meaning of life, identity, change, belonging and the attachment to a landscape arise. Is knowledge of past happiness the key to the orchestration of a better future? Does creative reflection about past traumas open up the possibility of redemption? Does every utopia carry within itself a nostalgic seed?
Nostalgia is caught up in an ever-evolving circle: it is perennially fed, always relevant, always new and old at the same time. It could seem to have ahistorical or supra-historical characteristics, for nostalgic work conflates different chronotopes. However, the history of nostalgia is that of a fascinating modulation.Footnote 1 For centuries it was a state of the mind and the body waiting to receive a name. Johannes Hofer, a nineteen-year-old Alsatian doctoral student, coined the neologism ‘nostalgia’ in his medical thesis defended in Basel in 1688.Footnote 2 Until the nineteenth century, physicians in Europe diagnosed nostalgia in cases that we nowadays refer to as tuberculosis, meningitis, gastroenteritis or depression.Footnote 3 Advances in medicine over the course of the nineteenth century turned the existing nostalgia paradigm obsolete and the term acquired a radically different set of meanings while becoming a poetic outlet for the Romantic mind.
In this new context, nostalgia combined issues relating to identity, memory, exile and yearning.Footnote 4 The term ‘emotion’ – imported into English from French – followed a parallel transformation. In the early nineteenth century it ceased to be used to describe physical disturbances and entered the vocabulary of psychology.Footnote 5 Nostalgia as a research topic also emerged as modern historiography was taking shape, when the Age of Revolutions turned the past into a place lost forever while liberating a ‘new future’.Footnote 6 Revolutions questioned the linearity of time, an issue echoed in the musical domain by reflecting on whether musical form was a diachronic succession or a synchronous entity. This latter conception derives from the nineteenth-century idea of ‘architecture as frozen music’ and from metaphorical spatial descriptions of musical structure as the ‘return to the principal idea’.Footnote 7 Although not commonplace until the twentieth century, the first representation of musical form as space was published in the early nineteenth century with Antoine Reicha’s 1825 Traité de haute composition musicale.Footnote 8 Taking the literature on music and spatiality further, this issue offers a new understanding of how musical works navigated the relationship between nature, the country and the city over the course of the long nineteenth century.
Emotions are determined by historical developments. Jean Starobinski, the great historian of melancholia and also a psychiatrist, described how nostalgia ‘developed in Europe at the time of the rise of the great cities’.Footnote 9 Urbanization and industrialization altered the constitution of the countryside, villages and towns forever. The desired return home of the nostalgic subject was therefore an impossible cure to their ailment. Rather than a solution to the problem, the idea of returning became the trigger of nostalgia and of the feeling of loss. The contemporary meaning of nostalgia has tended to emphasize the temporal aspect of longing whereas, historically, nostalgia has mixed issues related to time-travel with desires emanating from actual geographical displacement. The redistribution of groups, communities and populations in industrial Europe explains the understanding of nostalgia not just as an individually felt emotion, but also as a social malaise.Footnote 10
Urbanization in this era carried within it a particular feeling of time. A musical time, even. Lewis Mumford described how the city makes time visible in ways that the countryside does not. Made of different layers that contrast with the ‘scattered artifacts’ of the countryside, ‘past times preserve themselves in the city’.Footnote 11 The superimposed rhythms of city life led Mumford to coin his thought-provoking metaphor of the city as a symphony. This issue further investigates the meaning of his remarks about the temporalities that cohabit in a single site, where ‘the city in part escapes the tyranny of a single present, and the monotony of a future that consists in repeating only a single beat heard in the past’.Footnote 12 Nostalgia breaks this tyranny and monotony by weaving myths, carefully crafted golden ages, aspirations, unresolved wishes, half-true memories and desires into narratives about the interconnectedness of history, virtual reality and the future. The first people to have been diagnosed with nostalgia were Swiss soldiers sent abroad, that is, people who had been peasants at home. Their mobility meant losing all that was attached to the notion of the home, broadly understood: the family household, the connection with nature, tight social bonds and the unspoilt happiness of childhood. Studying musical nostalgia in the nineteenth century means exploring the musical evocation of notions such as memory, shared identities, spatial imagination, desires for a better future, and the emotional attachment to a particular landscape.
The articles in this issue delve deep into these categories. Tristan Paré-Morin explores the French repertoire and musical works explicitly using the word nostalgia, offering an analysis of how nostalgia is constructed in musical terms and studying nostalgia in Parisian musical culture. Dane Stalcup navigates the nostalgia–utopia tandem in Hector Berlioz’s virtual and futuristic city of Euphonia, which owes much to the composer’s own biography and hometown. Jonathan Hicks questions the concept of domesticity and British exceptionalism with regard to the notion of the home through the epitome of the nostalgic song, Henry Bishop and John Howard Payne’s ‘Home, Sweet Home’. Ondřej Daniel and Jakub Machek place nostalgia at the core of the development of Czech state nationalism and investigate the popular folk and brass band music that came to represent the changing urban landscapes of Prague.
This special issue aims to enrich the existing literature on music and nostalgia by exploring the expression of this emotion outside the scope of recorded music. The invention in 1877 of the phonograph, by Thomas A. Edison, marks the opening of a new chapter in the history of musical nostalgia. The advent of musical recording technologies allowed listeners to listen back to an identical rendition of a musical piece and to rejoice, therefore, in the apprehension of the musical past. For this reason, the majority of studies of musical nostalgia have focused on the period of recorded music and all of the retro worlds made possible by the record.Footnote 13 The musical nostalgia studied here was crafted through scores and writings, in periodicals and through urban planning.
Melodies of the Swiss Alps: the Original Nostalgic Music
When the term nostalgia was coined it was applied to Swiss soldiers sent to fight far from home. Hofer’s thesis – a treatise on the psychosomatic effects of displacement – had great repercussion in the medical world and beyond. In 1710, Theodor Zwinger, Hofer’s mentor, reissued and extended his student’s thesis by publishing it under the title of De Pothopatridalgia vom Heimweh.Footnote 14 Zwinger came up with an alternative terminology which emphasized the spatial dimension of nostalgia. ‘Pothopatridalgia’ is the pain caused by the absence of a homeland, and ‘nostomania’ is a return-delirium. More importantly, Zwinger also introduced music in this expanded version and included a transcription of a ranz des vaches, described simply as a ‘cantilena helvetica’. Long used as a cattle-call, ranz des vaches songs are known to have existed since the fifteenth century, acquiring different connotations that go well beyond the context of a work song, for instance when the lyrics refer symbolically to fertility.Footnote 15
A recurrent trope in the literature about nostalgia reminds readers that the fact that this emotion did not have a proper name until the seventeenth century is no reason to ignore that humans had been experiencing and describing it for a long time. Odysseus’ ten-year return from Troy to Ithaca, often referred to as the original nostalgic homecoming, has been echoed from a myriad of different angles in the Western literary and cultural canon since Homer’s time.Footnote 16 ‘Homer glorified nostalgia with a laurel wreath and thereby laid out a moral hierarchy of emotions’, wrote French-Czech author Milan Kundera.Footnote 17 Odysseus’ homecoming to Ithaca was not just a safe return, it was the result of a brave journey conquering major challenges. For many nostalgic subjects, the idea of the return is not permeated therefore by implications of retreat or withdrawal, but of triumph. Critiques of nostalgia have considered this emotion as backwards and reactionary. Nostalgia has, however, also been taken as a sign of a morally righteous mind: the return becomes synonymous with the safeguard of heritage, redemption and gratitude. The subjects in this issue all have their own Ithacas in the form of a shared space: Imperial France and Parisian musical and leisure spaces (Paré-Morin and Stalcup), the British and the Czech nation (Hicks, Daniel and Machek) and the open air urban spaces where people feel at home.
Folk music was a major source of musical nostalgia in the nineteenth century. The pan-European wave of folklore revival festivals sparked a renewed interest in the genre of the ranz des vaches which, in turn, also contributed to the crafting of a new space: the Bernese Oberland as seen through the Romantic gaze. Following the success of the 1805 Unspunnenfest – held in the ruins of the thirteenth-century Unspunnen Castle (near Bern), and a nostalgic location in itself – the first volumes of Swiss folksong were published in Bern under the title of Acht Schweizer-Kühreihen, mit Musik und Text, including a volume dedicated to the ranz des vaches.Footnote 18 The musical instrument most closely associated with these melodies, the alphorn, was also rediscovered. The 1805 festival was held as a symbolic union between the country and the urban population of Bern. The successful imbrication of folklore, the local games and crafts, dance and music made of Unspunnen a touristic destination. The festival materialized the Romantic ideal of nature as proxy of a cohesive society and as the medium for a nostalgic, simple life amid increasing industrialization and urbanization. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the revived repertoire of the ranz des vaches entered the musical canon of Western composers, for example in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808), Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) and appearing as a symbol of the Swiss countryside in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829, based on Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell from 1804), performed here by the horn.Footnote 19
A number of historians have linked the birth of nostalgia as a modern emotion to Romanticism. In this interpretation, nostalgia is a reaction to the perception of accelerated change and the feeling that the present is shrinking.Footnote 20 It was also with Romanticism that spatial metaphors of music gained great currency: Schlegel, Schelling, Goethe or Hegel, for example, promulgated the notion of architecture as ‘frozen music’.Footnote 21 Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell conveyed the site-specificity of the ranz and captured the Romantic association between music, nostalgia, nature, connectedness and simple virtue that dominated so many expressions of longing in the nineteenth century:
The day will come when bitter tears will flow
And you will yearn for this your mountain home;
For that which you now spurn with brittle pride,
The Kuhreihn and its simple melody,
Shall echo in your ears in distant lands
And break your heart with longing for your own.Footnote 22
The articles in this issue explore further manifestations of the spirit of the Unspunnenfest, namely the community building credentials of musical nostalgia, the negotiated coexistence of country and city, the yearning for home and the use of the musical echo of distant lands as compositional material.
The music and musical ideas explored in these articles operate as bridges to bygone times. To use Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s celebrated turn of phrase when referring to the ranz des vaches, music does not only act as music but as a ‘memorative sign’. Rousseau’s linking of music with memory advanced findings in the field of contemporary psychology and neurology, for music–induced nostalgia has now been proven to activate the hippocampus, the brain area primarily charged with cognition, memory and spatial navigation.Footnote 23 Folk music is at the heart of Rousseau’s quest for equality. Exceeding the potential of modern theatres, Spartan public festivals were for the Swiss philosopher the type of festivity where aesthetics were equipped to positively influence society.Footnote 24 Berlioz’s city of music Euphonia is likewise modelled after Sparta and, mocking the utopian city of the Saint-Simonians, reflects on the sociopolitical and aesthetic realms of the public festival (see Stalcup, in this issue).Footnote 25 Daniel and Machek focus on the emergence of urban folk music in Prague, elaborating on the community-building power of outdoors and promenade concerts. These articles reflect on how music was brought to the fore in the struggle for self-affirmation, in a framework that, as described by Rousseau in his account of the ranz des vaches, blended ‘old pleasures’ with ‘bitter pain’:
These effects, which do not take place on foreigners, come solely from habit, from memories, from a thousand circumstances which, recounted by this Tune to those who hear it and recalling for them their country, their old pleasures, their youth, and all their ways of living, arouse in them a bitter pain for having lost all that. The Music therefore does not precisely act as Music, but as a memorative sign.Footnote 26
Condensed here is the ‘musical nostalgia triad’, consisting of the juxtaposition of ideas about the country, popular song and emotion.Footnote 27 Distance is critical to Rousseau’s account: both the physical distance between the listener and their native landscape, and the temporal distance between the moment when nostalgia is experienced and the precise time recalled through music. Commenting on the first displaced Swiss soldiers listening to the ranz de vaches from abroad, it has been argued that nostalgia hits the listener like thunder, making them suddenly aware of the gap between the first version of the song heard in its original context and that retained in their memories.Footnote 28 According to Daniel M. Grimley, ‘one of nineteenth-century music’s most intensive and problematic modes’ is the ‘sound of landscape heard from afar’.Footnote 29 The impossibility of walking that distance turns nostalgia into a chronic problem. The discontent that distance creates makes the nostalgic person feel exiled also from a wholesome experience of the present (as is the case of Hortense de Beauharnais, see Paré-Morin or of Hector Berlioz, see Stalcup in this issue).
Landscapes of the Mind
Accepting that a nostalgia-curing return is only a fantasy separates the mature individual from their childhood world. A concept only apprehensible in adulthood, childhood only exists when it is too late to return to it.Footnote 30 In comparison to nostalgia, the concept of homesickness (which has often been used almost as a synonym) became associated with the immaturity of childhood. Nostalgic daydreaming – or reverie – is profiled, then, as an escape forward that cannot be fed but through past memories. Dane Stalcup’s article in this issue is an example of this. Nostalgia plays an important part in establishing our life narrative, in both its individual and collective dimension, and in aiding in the development of our sense of well-being. Indulging in nostalgia is therefore a means towards the reconciliation of the contrasting feelings that we may harbour within ourselves at any one time. Under this light, the home becomes a metaphor for feeling at peace with oneself. Accepting that the past is gone for good is ‘a marker of a mature and modern outlook’; giving in to the ‘apotheosis of the known’ means accepting the ‘finitude of life’.Footnote 31 Here lies the power of music for reconciliation. The music studied in this issue bridged the gap between the actual landscapes of the composers and performers and their own ‘landscapes of the mind’ as well as those of their listeners.Footnote 32
Those landscapes of the mind are sites worth exploring and dwelling in. In the late twentieth century psychological research started to propose that nostalgia is in fact a pleasurable state and that one might even desire to feel nostalgic. From here follows the logic of nostalgia-driven marketing techniques, which become effective by placing an object of desire close to our deepest emotions. As shown by Paré-Morin, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a musical repertoire aimed at enabling nostalgic pleasures. ‘Home, Sweet Home’ (explored by Hicks) became a global success (a ‘bankable product’) in the ‘commodification of the landscape’ process related to leisure, consumption and increasing middle-class tourism.Footnote 33
Tourism and international relationships loomed large over the different national concepts of nostalgia and its akin diseases/mental states, such as melancholia and spleen. The different approaches to the attachment to the home in the nineteenth century speak about diverging perceptions of nuclear issues of the time such as patriotism, cosmopolitanism or colonialism. The self-perceptions of the English and the French as being nostalgic or not defined their contrasting national characters, the former considering themselves immune to nostalgia but occasionally falling prey to spleen. On the other hand, for medical writers of the early nineteenth century in France, curing the French of their nostalgia meant making them more cosmopolitan, less attached to their regions and thus more prone to identifying with the nation state.Footnote 34 Studying the international reverberations of the hit song ‘Home, Sweet Home’, Hick’s article draws on cross-channel comparisons to theorize the British construction of ‘home’ as constitutive of Victorian nostalgia. The violence of the Paris Commune of 1871 gave impetus to the British invention of a ‘religion of the home’, a place which ought to be protected from the houseless revolts that took over the streets of the French capital. As (luckily) most people live in their homes, philosopher Emanuele Coccia has remarked that the only people who truly live in the city are the homeless.Footnote 35 The cherished home is thus a symbol of the British withdrawal from the city centre as a defining characteristic of their attitudes towards public space.
The cross-channel comparison of how nostalgia affects people differently informed local ideas about the nation and patriotism. Daniel and Machek’s article takes up another dual opposition: that between Czech and German culture. Their piece examines the development of Czech folk music into a genre designed for urban consumption as well as the cross-over between rural folk and military brass bands in Prague. With this contribution we gain better knowledge of the defining role of the folk across Europe in the creation of the modern nation states, through the effort of folk societies and their ethnographic work. In the case of Prague, the authors show how this process of folklorization of two urban music genres was based on a nostalgic turn. This kind of retrospection serves to rescue from the past those traits, memories and experiences that are relevant to the present projection of an aspirational national identity. Identity is always the result of a narrative, and nostalgic memory fulfils the needs of the identity-building process, as it is based on those memories which are stored in changeable and dynamic ways.Footnote 36 As Marc Augé has proposed, popular music – like that performed by the marching bands of Prague – holds the potential of permanence, allowing the ‘desires laid to rest’ to ‘spring back to life in a moment’.Footnote 37 The key to nostalgia’s appeal for the nationalist project is precisely its mixing of reality and fantasy, the fruitful misunderstanding of virtual realities as ‘yesterday’s actual history’.Footnote 38 Hofer’s thesis defended the idea that nostalgia thrived on the ‘loathing of foreign air’.Footnote 39 In the Czech borderlands and their bilingual context, the quest for a national music (the homecoming of the Czech nation) could only happen through opposition to the Other. The emergence of a Prague-based urban folk fulfils the project of a musical Czech Romantic nationalism, where the spirit of the people, now constituted as a nation, is embodied in its urban folk.
Nostalgia and sound have had a shared history since the term’s inception in the seventeenth century, with physicians of the time suggesting that the high prevalence of nostalgia in Switzerland was caused by the damage inflicted on the eardrum by the incessant clanging of cowbells.Footnote 40 When analysing the fatal disease affecting Swiss soldiers, Hofer was also studying the emotional power of music. The agency of musical works in corrupting the soul was at the centre of Hofer’s appreciation that popular song had the power to make soldiers want to desert. These explanations imply that it is while listening to music that nostalgia is triggered. This emotion is therefore not the result of a gradual psychological process, but rather a music-driven sudden event with physiological, sociological and aesthetic ramifications. Along the process of resignification of nostalgia away from the medical jargon and into the aesthetic and political spheres, it also joined the emotional lexicon next to concepts such as that of desire. When the homeland is removed from the spotlight and nostalgia becomes more about the enjoyment of the emotional process than about the resolution of the yearning, it becomes ‘the desire for desire’.Footnote 41 When this happens nostalgia is often conflated with utopia by turning towards a ‘future-past’.Footnote 42
As Dane Stalcup discusses in his article, although Berlioz imagined the city of Euphonia in the year 2344, this venture into the future owed much to the composer’s past. With touches of retrofuturism and a fascination with modern technology, Berlioz’s text is a testament to the effects on the musical sphere of the nineteenth century’s vertiginous rhythm of technical innovation, with inventions such as the airplane, oil drilling, photography, refrigeration or vaccination having seen the light of day in this era.Footnote 43 Berlioz’s Euphonia is also modelled after the composer’s hometown in La Côte-Saint-André, in the plains of Bièvre. His futuristic city is the simultaneous projection of two places: his childhood hometown and the city of Paris where he came as an adult and which failed to fully satisfy the composer’s ambitions. Berlioz’s spatial imagination is highly revealing of the composer’s desires. The fact that Euphonia is situated in the German Harz mountains places the novel in the trail of Schiller’s poem cited above. Here, Berlioz yearns for his ‘mountain home’ as a site of an imaginary communion with his idol, Gluck, in the German composer’s homeland.
Whereas much of the history of nostalgia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has focused on men, including soldiers and mercenaries, nostalgia among women, and women composers, is still a subject needing further enquiry. As Tristan Paré-Morin discusses in his article, the first composer to have explicitly labelled a work as nostalgic was Hortense de Beauharnais, queen of Holland and mother of Napoleon III. Overlooking Lake Constance during her Swiss exile, Hortense composed her Lay de l’exil or Les Charmes de la patrie, romances from the Arenenberg Castle, which she redecorated in French imperial style. Her nostalgia for imperial Paris is paradigmatic of the elites, who mourn the loss of their particular world.Footnote 44 Her worrying about not being able to die in France shows that what was at stake in the ‘global operations of war and empire is memory’.Footnote 45 Like her contemporary, Franz Schubert, Hortense’s music can be heard as if ‘possessing the quality of a memory’.Footnote 46
The urban sites that constitute the map of this issue act as what Pierre Nora influentially termed ‘sites of memory’.Footnote 47 Through their temporal palimpsest, these places bear testimony to the superimposed rhythms that in Mumford’s view defined city life. Musical nostalgia is thus grounded in material spaces that act as the prime sites for the population of a city to come together under the premise of listening. The public, open-air concerts described in this issue fulfilled the role of the ancient festival by bringing people together under the sign of their belonging to the urban fabric.
This special issue offers new avenues to map out the musical translation of the wide and rich territory of nineteenth-century nostalgia in the cultural landscape of several European cities. This framing piece has started with the remark that it is the bittersweet flavour of nostalgia that leaves its seductive aftertaste. The present time is ripe for seeking a more complex understanding of how this emotion has performed in the processes of urbanization and in the consolidation of ideas about regional and national identities throughout history and across continents. The issue also explores the more intimate expressions of nostalgia, by studying the individual approaches of composers and the pleasure of listeners presented with nostalgic works. Nostalgia is a mixed feeling. Whereas much of the literature on nostalgia and music dwells on longing and the temporal dimension of loss, this set of articles aims to become a novel resource for continuing the study of nostalgia and place in the long nineteenth century and beyond.
Lola San Martín Arbide is a Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain. She holds a PhD in Musicology from the Universidad de Salamanca and has held postdoctoral positions at New Europe College (Bucharest), EHESS (Paris), the University of Oxford and the Universidad del País Vasco (Bilbao). Her research explores the cultural history of sound and music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to urban modernity, nostalgia, and the global circulation of operatic and popular repertoires. She is writing a book about Paris and the urban landscapes evoked in Third Republic music, literature and film. She has published widely on topics including Erik Satie, Debussy, early sound film, feminist reinterpretations of Carmen, and the transnational reception of French opera. Her chapters and articles have appeared with Cambridge University Press, Classiques Garnier and Peter Lang, amongst others. She has recently written on musical nostalgia for The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (2024).
Open access
