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:

The historical challenge and a black and white response

If we were applying the title of this chapter to the period 1800–60, and resorting to the nineteenth century’s favoured type of historiography, the ‘great-man theory’, and focusing on new music rather than all the music that was performed, then household names and lists of canonical works would crowd these pages. We would be navigating through Beethoven’s string quartets and piano sonatas, Schubert’s too as well as his piano ‘miniatures’, the Mendelssohn Octet and Songs without Words, Schumann’s piano-chamber music such as the Quintet and his piano cycles from the 1830s that have been performed recurrently to this day – Carnaval (1835) above all, perhaps – and indeed other piano music of that time, most obviously from Chopin and Liszt, both of whom were prolific, as well as being instantly recognised at the time as outstanding. It would be a considerable challenge to provide a representative picture of a period of such scintillating novelty both in the home, in the salon – from which chamber music was emerging on to the professional stage – and in the concert hall, where the piano had established its prestigious position in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.

In the second part of the century, on the other hand, which is our concern here, it is noticeable how the ‘great-man theory’ shows a certain retrenchment, since in both chamber and piano music the scene came to be so radically dominated not by a group of composers of different ages and in different countries, but by one figure, that of Johannes Brahms. This dominance was especially marked after the 1860s, when Brahms had become established as a mature master, and when Liszt had turned from the piano solo largely to other genres. In the 1860s too an aesthetic polarisation had seized European musical life: to put it at its crudest, the agenda was divided between those matters which concerned Wagner’s music dramas (and, admittedly, Verdi’s operas), and those matters, including instrumental music, which did not.

A chapter of this size cannot provide much more than an overview of music and class in four major cities (London, Paris, New York and Vienna), but will focus on detail whenever this illustrates the broader argument or reveals developments of particular interest. In the second half of the nineteenth century features of musical life associated with a capitalist economy and the consolidation of power of a wealthy industrial bourgeoisie became firmly established. Prominent among such features were the commercialisation and professionalisation of music, new markets for cultural goods, the bourgeoisie’s struggle for cultural domination and a growing rift between art and entertainment.

Presented below is a study of music and class in four cities, not four countries. Nevertheless, these were the major commercial cities of those countries, home to the wealthiest commercial families. In each, there was rapid population growth and the creation of a large market for entertainment. The power wielded by the upper class began to weaken earlier in Paris than in London, and was slowest to give way in Vienna where the bourgeoisie mingled least with the aristocracy. In New York, there were no inherited titles, of course, although the ‘upper ten’ of that city were often disposed to define themselves against the European aristocracy and, at mid-century, were perceived to be not dissimilar to the upper classes of Paris’s Faubourg St Germain or London’s West End. Paris and Vienna both underwent major reconstruction in the second half of the century. Napoleon III instructed Haussmann to redesign Paris following the 1848 Revolution, and the result was a city of wide arterial boulevards and symmetrical layouts.

Music, rhetoric and representation

The development of the new subject of aesthetics from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards and the changes in the status of music associated with the rise of ‘Romanticism’ form a constellation which has profoundly affected many aspects of modern thought. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this constellation is the quite widespread acceptance, between the later part of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries in Europe, of the Romantic idea that music might be able to say more about philosophy than philosophy can say about music. Just how strange such an idea would have been during much of the eighteenth century can be gauged by the fact that in his Critique of Judgement of 1790 Immanuel Kant, who was in other respects decisive for the development of Romanticism, still saw music as a lowly art form, the effects of which were analogous to a person in society taking out a perfumed handkerchief whose smell could not be avoided. The wider significance of the changes in the status of music derives from their connection both to major transformations in conceptions of language in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to the new accounts of the mind in the philosophy of the same period. These issues do not fit straightforwardly into the nineteenth century, and it is only possible to understand them if one recognises that the conceptions which determine the aesthetics of at least the first half of the nineteenth century are a product of the later part of the eighteenth century.

An imagined past

Goethe’s letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (9 November 1829) is sometimes cited as an idealisation of the Classical string quartet, in which this genre is treated as a musical embodiment of civilised Enlightenment conversation between intellectual peers, the ‘thread’ of the conversation passing effortlessly through the entire musical ensemble. In other respects Goethe’s comment sheds light upon the relationship between early Romantic instrumental music – specifically chamber music in this context – and its immediate Classical past. The evocation of an ideal mode of Enlightenment conversation suggests a nostalgia for a past, even if that past were nothing but an imagined construction (that is, one of many such possible pasts), in relation to which the early Romantic present might be situated. Although he mentions no specific event, either public or private, nor even a specific repertory, it is clear enough that what Goethe had in mind was one of a series of quartet performances organised in Berlin by Karl Möser, at first informally, as an outgrowth of a tradition of chamber and orchestral concerts he had initiated in 1812, and continued on a more permanent footing from the mid-1820s.

Paris, 1850: Wagner and Meyerbeer

In the winter months of 1850 Richard Wagner found himself once again in Paris – and not for the last time – with the aim of improving his fame and fortune. Around the middle of February he heard a performance of Meyerbeer’s latest sensation, Le prophète, which had received its première ten months earlier (16 April 1849), although the origins of the work stretch back to the 1830s. In his autobiography Wagner recounts how he noisily exited the theatre in revulsion at the stock operatic roulades to which the false prophet’s mother, Fidès, pours out her grief in the famous Act IV finale. In this new opera he perceived the ‘ruins’ of all the noble aspirations of the 1848 revolution; he read it as a sign of the complete moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the French provisional government, the ‘dawning of a shameful day of disillusionment’ for art, society and politics alike. For Wagner, a rather more hopeful dawn was soon to be signalled by the première of his own Lohengrin under Franz Liszt’s drection at Weimar in August 1850, if under musical conditions rather less auspicious than those enjoyed by Le prophète in Paris.

This nexus of events provides an apt starting-point for surveying operatic developments of the following half-century. The dialectic of Wagner vs. Meyerbeer, as manifested in the examples of Lohengrin and Le prophète, informs a broad spectrum of the operatic repertory to nearly the end of the century – certainly well into the 1880s, when Wagner’s mature ‘music dramas’ gradually displaced the influential spell of his ‘Romantic operas’ Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.

Most historical accounts of European choral movements in the nineteenth century note a certain loss of intensity and idealistic purpose after the revolutions of 1848. Central to the constellation of possible reasons may be the expansion and liberalisation of economies leading to greater mass production and an increasing division of labour. With an enormous growth in musical consumption and participation in massed singing a dilution in the idealistic zeal displayed by the first amateur choral groups was all but inevitable. The changes in musical production were equally predictable with an increasing distinction between the amateur and the professional that may have resulted in some decline in the musical capabilities of the former. Dahlhaus relates the withering of the seemingly holistic combination of conviviality, educative purpose and bourgeois self-display to the increasing polarisation of the public and private spheres; audiences became an anonymous, cosmopolitan public who no longer fully shared the social brotherhood of the amateur singers. Steady economic growth contributed to a sense of hedonism rather than idealism in some places, such as Napoleon III’s France, but also to more authoritarian, centralizing regimes. It was not unknown for choral establishments to be subject to police observation and many inevitably swapped their idealism for a more reactionary stance. On the other hand, the very fact that some musical institutions provoked official surveillance suggests that they must have retained some of their radical elements.

The decline of traditional choral foundations

Johann Nikolaus Forkel paints a grim picture of the state of German choral foundations in 1801. Now that music is dominated by the untutored tastes of the ‘Liebhaber’ its necessity as a serious fundamental of education and worship is eroded:

What seems particularly ironic about Forkel’s statement is his sense that a modern Christian should be ‘enlightened’ (later he notes that the Enlightenment has brought many improvements to religion, if not yet to religious music). It was, after all, the Enlightenment that had swept away the last vestiges of music as a fundamental of education. The scholastic notion of music theory as the basis of mathematics and cosmic order survived into the early eighteenth century, and some of this traditional prestige reflected on music’s more practical, rhetorical function as an adornment of liturgy and a medium of scriptural interpretation. The Enlightenment brought both a demystification of the powers of music and a turn away from the general hegemony of religion per se. If music was no longer central to the academic core of education, if the educational establishments were less intimately connected with the church and if the churches no longer recognised any special spiritual power in music, the decline that Forkel observes seems hardly surprising.

Beethoven vs. ‘Beethoven’

On 28 May 1810, a young woman wrote to the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describing her new acquaintance, Ludwig van Beethoven:

Symphonic practice in later nineteenth-century Europe was no unitary activity that we should collapse into a crisp, linear narrative. The reality was messier. It would be more accurate to regard the world of orchestral composition as an arena of competing ideologies and diverse aims, a field of energy and circulation. To be sure, the energy was anything but random. Composers, performers, publishers, critics, academics, students and audiences channelled it through a flurry of enabling and constraining preconditions, historical and cultural circumstances sorted out differently by different groups. Among the most significant precondition was the idea of tradition – or, more to the point, the struggle over the presumed ownership of that tradition. By the second half of the century the European idea of the symphony as a high-status cultural achievement was nourished by lovingly shaped readings of the genre’s Austro-Germanic past. Commonly enough, the grounding shape was reinforced by a heroic tale: the ascent to the apex, Beethoven – embodying the long-sought liberation of the modern idea of greatness in instrumental music, the definitional moment of full symphonic adequacy, the ‘undeniable’ launching of ‘the new era of music’ (as Liszt put it in 1855) – followed by a crisis of continuation in subsequent decades.

Spurred also by external factors – technological, economic, political, ethnic-national – the symphonic crisis invited a number of solutions: it had been disseminated to several different publics on several different terms. As a result, by mid-century no central authority was able to establish a consensus concerning the best way to continue the tradition while still honouring its past.

In the sphere of art music, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation and wider dissemination of many of the structures and institutions which had been set up in Europe during the preceding decades, and which were now developing worldwide and gaining in status. Models for operatic, orchestral, educational, publishing and journalistic institutions provided by the major European centres – particularly Paris, Vienna and London – became established in the New World to the extent that cities such as Boston and New York emerged as their potential rivals on the increasingly intercontinental stage of middle-class musical life. Such consolidation took various forms: nationalist drive and the breakdown of court culture lay behind the emergence of municipal musical culture in much of what now constitutes the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary; in North America, the ‘European’ musical traditions of cities such as New York and Boston were initiated by immigrant German musicians and embraced by a wider middle class hungry for cultural status. The pace of consolidation also varied: in France and Britain, for instance, it was leisurely in comparison with the breathless rush from urbanisation to the establishment of Europeanised cultural institutions in a new city such as Los Angeles, in which the developments of a century in Europe took place in just a few decades, starting in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the relatively late appearance of now-familiar pillars of musical life in some European cities should not be forgotten: through the entire period under consideration Paris lacked a purpose-built orchestral concert hall and Vienna a permanent civic symphony orchestra. In these areas respectively each city lagged well behind Chicago and Boston, for example.

It is paradoxical that a body of work which begins by being so narrowly preoccupied with problems of the writer's self, and which to the end centres on characters expressing his intimate and unchanged concerns, should also contain so much history. Partly it is a matter of natural growth, the widening range of experience in increasingly turbulent times, which a novelist of all people could hardly ignore; but it also sprang from a remarkable congruence between Thomas Mann's themes and the patterns of twentieth-century German history. His work, with all the traditions, ambitions and temptations that lay behind it, was representative of fundamental German situations and responses before he set out consciously to represent them in fiction. When awareness dawned and representation became deliberate analysis, he was able to represent those phenomena with such depth of insight because he had been so deeply part of them and they of him. We can read him for pleasure, but also for understanding. Crede experto: believe the man who has gone through it himself. He can offer, in a word that is central to both Mann's art and his ethics, Erkenntnis (a complex concept which embraces knowledge, insight, analysis, understanding). Two of Mann's novels in particular are impressive reports - they are a great deal more than that, but they are that too - on crises of modern history: The Magic Mountain of 1924 on pre-1914 Europe and on the conflicts, especially acute in Germany, which were left unresolved by the First World War; and Doctor Faustus of 1947 on the long roots of Nazism in German culture and society.

The punning title of this chapter has a particular rationale. It imitates a marked feature of Mann's own writing practice, where patterns of repetition are used to accentuate strategies of imitation. My argument here will be that this repetitive formulation of acts of imitation has a particular significance for the representation of gender and sexuality, and that these categories of identity, in their turn, have a special importance for Mann's project as a whole.

T. J. Reed has commented on how Mann’s narrative voice in Death in Venice engages in mimicry of Aschenbach’s own discourse. He cites a narratorial judgement of the fallen artist, ‘der in so vorbildlich reiner Form . . . das Verworfene verworfen hatte’ (‘who in such exemplarily pure form had . . . rejected the wayward as wayward’) (viii, 521) and points out that it sounds uncomfortably close to the uninflected vigour of Aschenbach’s own earlier judgements. Specifically, it is an act of ironic citation, taking up the description of Aschenbach’s moral pronouncements, the ‘Wucht des Wortes, mit welcher hier das Verworfene verworfen wurde’ (‘the weight of words, with which the wayward was here rejected as wayward’) (viii, 455). The repetition works on several levels. It is inherent in the original collocation of ‘Verworfene’ and ‘verworfen’, which is in turn ironically framed by a grotesque sequence of repetitive sounds. The narrator is, in other words, performing Aschenbach’s excessive speech act by larding it with further excess, with a too vocal ‘weight of words’. The reiteration later in the text clearly replays this pronounced irony, and it does so all the more tellingly by juxtaposing it with notions of ‘exemplarily pure form’. It is, in other words, a form which is designed to be copied, but not in the parodic style which the narrative voice vocalises. The savage irony of this distorted repetition of the exemplar from the master’s copy-book is that the model form is designed not least as a lesson in the discourse of manhood. The ‘Wucht des Wortes’ is a discursive template of virile ethics for young men to adopt and it rebounds brutally on the master-turned-pederast. That is, an excessively masculine discourse marks the punishment of a man who fails to maintain the exemplary purity of his patriarchal function.