In the opening scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona the title characters have an abstract, literary debate about love, introducing their ideas with the formula “writers say” (1.1.43, 46).1 The principal lovers at the beginning of the play are Proteus and Julia, who communicate by letter and whom we never see together until Act 2 scene 2, when they are forced to part. Love seems a matter of words, disembodied and unfulfilled, all theory and no practice. In Act 2 scene 5, however, Launce, the play's principal clown, gives a different view of it. When his colleague Speed asks about Proteus and Julia, “how stands the matter with them?”Launce replies, “Marry, thus: when it stands well with him, it stands well with her”(19-21). In our era, sex has been as relentlessly theorized as any human activity. For Shakespeare's clowns it is a simple, practical matter. There is nothing to debate, though there may be something to illustrate: elsewhere in the scene Launce uses his staff as a comic prop; he could use it here.

Launce’s name, a variant spelling of “lance,” makes this sort of comedy appropriateto him. Moreover, he is accompanied in his major scenes by his dogCrab. It is not just that sex brings out the animal in humanity, though Shakespeareuses that idea elsewhere: Falstaff appears for his final encounter withthe wives of Windsor as a stag at rutting-time, and in Cymbeline Posthumusimagines that Jachimo in bed with Imogen “Like a full-acorned boar . . . /Cried ‘O!’ and mounted” (2.5.16–17).

Stephen Gosson might treble and intensify his famous antitheatrical malediction could he know what a cliché of theatre history one sentence of it has become:

It is time to take Gosson seriously, to identify Shakespeare as one of the ransackers and to treat his Italian stories as a chapter in the history of ransacking, which also entails treating ransacking itself as a first premise of Renaissance dramaturgy.

Ever since Chaucer’s Clerk and Franklin told tales from the Decameron,English literature has borne traces of Italian stories, though to call them“Italian” is to dismiss their remote origins, in many cases lost in the distanceof antiquity and Indo-European folklore. It was the Renaissance versions,however, the “mery bookes of Italie” that delighted sixteenth-century Englishreaders and, according to Roger Ascham, undermined their faith and morals.Playwrights in those times before copyright laws were under no pressure toinvent original stories and instead valued new presentation of old material.Italy was the contemporary crucible of dramatic theory and Tasso, foremostamong theorists, wrote that originality in dramatic composition should consistin form rather than in matter.

In Shakespeare's day, long after the Reformation, the calendar as established by the Church, with its series of days consecrated to saints and its fixed and movable feasts, still played a role of major importance. It constituted a matrix of time, the effect of which was to subordinate events of secular life to those of the sacred cycle of the year (the movable feasts of the Christian liturgy governed by the Easter cycle and ranging from Shrove Tuesday to Corpus Christi) and to commemorate a host of popular beliefs and folkloric traditions that had developed over centuries. The year was, by and large, divided into two halves: the winter or sacred half, ranging from Christmas to 24 June (which corresponded to Midsummer but also to the latest possible date for the feast of Corpus Christi); and the summer half, with its mainly agrarian feasts and host of local and occasional celebrations, which went from 25 June to Christmas.

Shakespeare, as a playwright, is unique in the place and importancehe ascribes to popular festivity and holidays, thus giving what mighthave been regarded as “airy nothing” a “local habitation and a name”(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.16–17). He indeed includes all andsundry, court and country, in his festive kaleidoscope firmly set on the fertileground of the variegated traditions and customs of “Merry England,”and this without nostalgia or satire.

Drama makes a ceremony out of a muddle. Much of the world's theatre originated in seasonal festivals, rites of fertility and initiation, and forms of liturgy. It still retains a ceremonious quality, with performers and audience responsive to conventions of conduct. Yet the subject of drama is confusion: whether evoking horror or hope, drama gives shape to the disarray and precariousness of our lives. Accordingly, the word confusion is one which Shakespeare explores. While he uses it most often in the root meaning of ruin or perdition (OED, sense 1), he also employs most of the other senses then current: putting to shame (sense 2); mental perturbation, embarrassment (3); the 'confusion of tongues' at the tower of Babel (4); the now standard meaning of disorder (5); tumult and commotion (6); and finally conflation, or the 'con-fusion' of intimate mingling and blending (7). He also delights in the possibilities of the word. When Launcelot Gobbo is teasing his old father, he says, “I will try confusions with him” instead of “try conclusions”or make an experiment (The Merchant of Venice, 2.2.37). When out hunting, Theseus and Hippolyta relish “the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction” (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.110-11), an echoing confusion of senses 5, 6, and 7. When Hymen comes to resolve the enigmas of Rosalind with “Peace ho! I bar confusion” (As You Like It, 5.4.125), he gives his statement a comprehensive finality by blending senses 3, 5, and 6. Friar Lawrence insists on the irrelevance of histrionic outpourings of grief at Juliet's apparent death by juxtaposing senses 1 and 6: “Peace ho, for shame! Confusion's [cure] lives not / In these confusions” (Romeo and Juliet, 4.5.65-66).

By the second half of the nineteenth century music had achieved a central position among the arts, to the extent that, as Walter Pater put it in 1877 in his now celebrated aperçu, ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. This registered a remarkable change in the aesthetic status of music in the hundred years from the 1780s to the 1880s. From an art form regarded as a pleasant but meaningless entertainment without cognitive value, music had come to be viewed as the vehicle of ineffable truths beyond conceptualisation. Although the idea of art music as an autonomous, non-conceptual reflection of inwardness upon itself had remained a constant throughout this period, what had changed was the perception of music by the other arts and the interpretation of this non-conceptuality, particularly in philosophical aesthetics. While the focus in this essay is on music and ideas in the period from 1848, the centrality of the concept of autonomy to the other arts by the late nineteenth century also provides other vantage points from which to view a phenomenon which was to become largely naturalised within music itself. It can be argued, indeed, that for this very reason music calls for awareness of its reflections outside itself, in particular in literature and philosophy, in order for the implications of its autonomy and non-conceptuality to be recognised more fully. An example to illustrate this point is to be found in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s infamous novel A Rebours of 1884, a work which takes to its extremes the retreat into the inner world and the rejection of the dominant Realism and Naturalism of its time.

The title of this chapter implies not only a concern with musical style and musical language, but also that a distinction may be drawn between the two. In the paragraphs that follow I shall take this distinction to be roughly equivalent to the point at which the style of a musical passage, work or repertory can be said to be more than simply a matter of how a composer’s musical mannerisms, habits or inclinations are identifiable as an emergent property of the music he or she produces. At this point, ‘style’ – as an attribute of a passage, piece or repertory – becomes something that can be manipulated along with the musical elements that express that style. Such manipulation allows musical language to be deployed as a means to a variety of ends: to express emotion, for example, or to articulate a drama, or to engage in cultural politics.

All of this presupposes that differences of style are actually recognisable as such across the field of contemporaneous musical composition, and indeed by the middle of the nineteenth century this had clearly been the case for some time. What is more, one of the century’s most notable attempts to deploy musical language for culture-political ends dates from this time, with the declaration of the New German School. But the most remarkable flowering of this kind of project was to come a little later, in and around the two decades that straddle the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A music-lover of catholic tastes who had the time and resources to travel around Europe and North America taking in premiéres during this period could have heard the first performances of works as diverse as Don Juan(1889), Pagliacci(1892), the Variations on America (1892), En Saga(1893), the Prélude à l’Aprè-midi d’un faune (1894), the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony (1895), Verklärte Nacht(1902), Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Jenůfa (1904), Salome (1905), the Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and The Firebird (1910) – to name a mere dozen.

Compositional and contextual histories

Even the formula ‘compositional and contextual’, suggestive of a dual perspective – a ‘double root’ – may not fully embrace the materials and methods of a music history, whose very subject-matter must be open to debate. Texts, sounds, activities: all are primary data – objects, facts and events that are variously fore-grounded, ordered and interpreted to generate our narratives. One obvious starting-point would be to place musical works centre stage, prioritising the cultural forms in which art music has most often been presented in the West. But that signals an analytical enquiry. If we want to write history we need to fill the spaces between works, to find strategies for connecting them. Two such strategies, conversely related, are prominent in histories of nineteenth-century music. One is intertextuality. We join up the works through similarity, as we might note the resemblances between visual stills. This quickly brings us to composers, to suggestions of influence or mutuality, and eventually to stylistic genealogies. The explanatory focus shifts – one may justly say ‘reverts’, for this is the mode of the past, of the nineteenth century itself – from the work to its creator. The present volume is well served by this approach, and there are strong arguments for privileging it, given the historicism of the age. Yet, paradoxically, intertextuality risks undermining ‘work character’. If I choose to focus on the work, after all, I presumably value that quality of uniqueness that marks it off as more than the instantiation of a type. I celebrate its individuality, its embodiment of a singular idea.

A traditional assumption of historiography that musical trends followed those of the other arts after a lapse of time is hard to sustain with the burgeoning of Romanticism, a movement which among other things embraced the emerging category of the ‘poetic’. Pointers to Romanticism in literature of the 1770s isolate phenomena within a predominantly Classicistic culture; Goethe could write an Iphigenia auf Tauris as well as Faust. An early and important identification of the musically Romantic by the composer, jurist and man of letters E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) extended the definition back to include the instrumental music of Haydn and Mozart. The ‘poetic’ in music reflects a tendency to artistic synthesis outside the self-evidently synthetic field of theatre music: permeation of an artistic form by the values of another, or indeed by ideas normally considered beyond the realm of art, is traceable in song and in certain genres of instrumental music, but there is no need to assume that it alone constitutes the phenomenon of Romanticism, and its development is continuous with eighteenth-century opera, song and programme music.

Writing about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810, Hoffmann argued that purely instrumental music, without programme or literary allusion, is quintessentially Romantic; he resisted pointing to developments in French opera, even before the Revolution, as precursors of Weber’s operas or, indeed, his own.

Few generalisations are safe, but the following one is perhaps more defensible than many others: the coming together of words and music is a Hydra-headed phenomenon, changeable from composer to composer, era to era, place to place, and it is always fraught with difficulties. Song is both natural, that is, an innate impulse (to heighten words by singing them precedes recorded history) and unnatural (words and music are two different sign-systems), and its agonistic tensions were the source of continuing debate in the later nineteenth century, especially given the commercial viability of the genre. Songs abounded: by the later decades of the century, the composer Peter Cornelius could rightly speak of an endless stream of Three Songs issuing from German music firms, while the immense girth of Ernst Challier’s Grosser Lieder-Katalog (Great Song Catalogue) of 1885 testifies to the proliferation which prompted Cornelius’s half-exasperated, half-rueful comment. He was, after all, a contributor to the floodtide, composing both song cycles (including Vater unser, Op. 2; Trauer und Trost, Op. 3; Rheinische Lieder, Op. 7; and the popular Weihnachtslieder, Op. 8) and individual songs. Whatever the assertions of singing ‘as the birds sing’ – so proclaims Goethe’s Harper in ‘Der Sänger’ (The Minstrel), a ballad replete with ironies – or of folklike naïveté, the nineteenth-century lied was never unselfconscious, and by this point it had its own history to contend with as well.

Nationalisms

The French Revolution brought into sharp focus a cluster of ideas about freedom and rights that had been bred in seventeenth-century England and nurtured in eighteenth-century France. Unsurprisingly, it is far from easy to disentangle these ideas – to be clear about causes and effects. Notions of freedom and rights were no doubt promoted by the mode of production of an emergent capitalism in the seventeenth century. But they were promoted too by the Protestant reformation and its influential ethos; and by the philosophical empiricism cultivated by English thinkers. How is one to define a relation between these levels? A (broadly) Marxist position claims that changes in the polity, as also in the cultural and intellectual domains, are invariably motivated by changes in the socio-economic base. Yet this is in competition with the claim (by, for example, Max Weber) that ideas can change the world. Then again, more recent critical theory takes refuge in dialectics, a seductive solution to the chicken and egg problem, but one that may on occasion amount to a failure of nerve. Whatever the underlying causality, it is clear that on a political level strengthening notions of popular sovereignty were given practical meaning and propaganda by the Revolution in France, as earlier by the American War of Independence. These events effectively inaugurated an age of revolution and of liberalism, though it should be noted that from the start liberalism involved a dimension of contractualism as well as of freedom.

Introduction

Even with endorsement from a figure as eminent as the great Italian politician Cavour, who called opera ‘a great industry with ramifications all over the world’, the title of this chapter accepts a number of prejudices. Why should opera of this period be thought an ‘industry’ when, say, orchestral music or secular choral music is not? All these types of public entertainment were fostered by institutions in which were embedded power relations and social hierarchies; all had systems of production limited by economic circumstance; all depended on the agency of performers, and so forth. But opera, and perhaps particularly opera of this period, seems historiographically more deeply marked by its means of production than other musical genres; the mechanics of how operas come into being are thus more difficult to disentangle from the ‘works themselves’. What is more, this circumstance is often used as a means of devaluing the repertory, questioning its seriousness of purpose as ‘art’. To repeat the question, why is this?

The simplest explanation lies in a marked shift in opera’s aesthetic status. The very idea of ‘opera’ underwent an important transformation during the eighteenth century, evolving from a sub-species of spoken theatre into what was essentially a musical genre. And even though elements of the earlier definition remained in force in some areas during the early decades of the nineteenth century (perhaps particularly in the otherwise very different cases of Italian opera seria and French opéra comique), the period covered by this chapter saw a gradual consolidation of this new status, with music regarded more and more as the dominant element, and with the position of the librettist as a literary/dramatic figure experiencing sharp decline.

This chapter explores a rich seam within music’s economic and social history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Successive political and economic developments and demographic responses to them impacted heavily on musical culture, causing an exponential increase in the number of public concerts as well as rapid expansion in the worlds of music publishing, music journalism, music teaching, and instrument manufacture and sales. New musical professions sprang up as a largely urban music-consuming public voracious in appetite but variably refined in taste exerted growing financial power. Established professions either evolved in reaction to intense market pressures or disappeared entirely.

Certain obstacles make it difficult to chart the profession of music – or, more accurately, the professions of music – from 1800 to 1850. One is the sheer diversity of professional activities, which prohibits detailed investigation and watertight conclusions across the board. Another is the diversity of centres in which they were practised, ranging from capital cities to provincial locations in any number of different countries. A third is the diversity of consumers at the time – above all, the ‘middle class’, a socially disparate group with complex hierarchies of status and taste that defy concise summary. My approach is therefore highly selective, offering case-study illustrations drawn from a broad spectrum of professions, geographic locations and consumers, rather than a comprehensive coverage doomed from the start. Although eclectic, my strategy at least reflects the lack of cohesion within the profession of music itself during this period.

Social background

For most Europeans and North Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the French and the Industrial Revolutions was a social and economic transformation which saw the virtual destruction of one social class, the peasantry, and the hegemony of a newer one, the bourgeoisie. In the ensuing ‘age of capital’ the rise of the bourgeoisie and its relationship with the nobility is as complex as it is important, and a degree of generalisation must be forgiven in what is a musical, rather than a social, history. The pace and the precise nature of this transformation differed from region to region; this chapter, however, is concerned only with the principal areas of Europe in which it is evident: Great Britain, France and the German-speaking lands. And although the bourgeoisie was by no means exclusively citified, my focus will be London, Paris and Vienna, as it is in these, the major European capitals of the early nineteenth century, that the developments can be seen at their most concentrated.

Because Britain had had her political revolution at an earlier date, the power of the monarchy posed no great threat, and, for the most part, little inconvenience. Nor did the rise of the bourgeoisie significantly challenge the nobility, since new industrial capital soon formed the main component in national capital, overtaking landed inheritance, and leaving the latter safe in the hands of its hereditary owners for their own posterity. This also meant that surplus aristocratic capital could be invested in new and exciting ventures such as the railways which had the advantage of being not only British, but on home ground, as opposed to some of the more distant foreign ventures, where the volatility of local conditions could, and often did, jeopardise investments; the loss of the American states was a sobering lesson, in terms of national imperial pride as well as of economics.

On canons and spearheads

A focus on greatness is one of the markers of nineteenth-century culture. Indeed it was the nineteenth century that fostered and nurtured that fetishism of greatness – of the great artist, the great work – so familiar to us today. The language of music criticism in the early nineteenth century tells part of that story, registering a subtle shift from the acknowledgement of excellence to the recognition of greatness. This shading of meaning is worth elaborating. Excellence suggests pre-eminence in an enterprise whose terms of reference have been validated by convention. Greatness, on the other hand, implies an achievement or an aptitude so far beyond the ordinary that it is capable of remaking the conventions – resetting the terms on which future evaluations might be made. Excellence carries with it the sense of an object well made, a task well done. Greatness transcends the making, as also the function. It imposes itself on the world. It goes without saying that the nineteenth century did not initiate the concept of greatness. It flourished in the ancient world, and it was reinvented (partly through the mediation of Islamic culture) for the thinkers and makers of Renaissance humanism. And humanism is to the point, for it is the purely human that is honoured in a project of greatness, that capacity of the exceptional mind to speak for all, to celebrate our potencies, to express our emotions through the mystery of creative genius. It was above all during the Renaissance that creativity took on something of its modern, elevated, sense, not least through a swerve towards secular themes, which proved no less susceptible to the aura of creative genius than their sacred counterparts.

Progress: theories and discontents

During a series of articles published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1848, the editor J. C. Lobe expressed his misgivings about the problem of progress in music, a concept that seemed particularly urgent to the German musical press in the Year of Revolutions. In response to the slogan, ‘our age is the age of progress’, he could find only this much meaning: