Musical Romanticism and nationalism are both concepts closely tied to the idea of ‘the folk’. This chapter considers the twisting and turning relationships in music between Romanticism, nationalism, and the folk. It treats first the origin of the concepts. Next it takes up the importance of music as a folk ‘language of nature’, and the effect of German musical hegemony during the nineteenth century in spurring different configurations of ‘national’ and ‘folk’ music. It also looks at the realities that complicate many Romantic claims about national music, such as the presence and contributions of ethnic minorities. The chapter argues that Romantic musical nationalism in music is ultimately a series of reception tropes, and summarises five key approaches. It concludes with a study of a single piece, Smetana’s The Moldau, to show how these different tropes can converge and play off each other.

The two passages of music below might be taken, by a musician who had not yet encountered them, to come not only from the pen of very different composers but from very different eras. The first (Example 16.1) seems to be from the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. Its theme – songlike in form but clearly instrumental in tessitura and technique – unfolds exuberantly upward against a cloud of oscillating strings, a sensuous texture retained by at least some of the instruments almost continually until the theme lands on a cadence at bar 16. This opening seems inspired byFelix Mendelssohn’s celebrated Octet Op. 20, whose beginning is remarkably similar, although Mendelssohn’s theme is presented by violin rather than cello Example 16.2). In both chamber pieces, too, the outer elements of the texture come to play off each other melodically as the theme unfurls.

The conception of national music was from its earliest days linked closely to another idea: tradition. Tradition was not a long-standing idea waiting to be pressed into service, but was rather a construct coeval with the category of national music: “tradition” too was a component of the new quest for origins. (Thus the common substitution of the term “traditional music” for “folk music” in many contexts during the last two decades of the twentieth century did not entail a major cognitive shift.) In the course of the later eighteenth century, tradition began as a term employed – often derogatorily – to designate and investigate oral transmission itself, but it widened into a more abstract and regulative concept carrying tremendous cultural force.

Many European cultural assets were passed predominantly by oral means until the printing press; and although printing itself brought about a massive social transformation, it took two or three more centuries for “oral” and “literate” culture to be acknowledged as inherently separate entities – with marked characteristics, and profound differences. As Nicholas Hudson points out, the identification of “oral tradition” in its current sense was part of this process; the modern conception of oral tradition was basically an eighteenth-century phenomenon. There was of course not a complete lack of earlier European observation on the differences between speech and writing, even long before the printing press, but until the eighteenth century the word “tradition” continued to be used almost exclusively in the specific domain of the church.

This final chapter will gather various strands, suggesting how the folk and art music categories hardened in their present forms and perpetuated themselves into today's world – and how they affect our thoughts both about earlier periods of music history and about current music-making.

A final ripple: folk music and art music encounter popular music

Perhaps the last major readjustment to the concepts of folk and art music happened as these came to sit alongside a third category, “popular music.” This music was “popular” no longer in the old sense of culture shared across classes; rather, as the Industrial Revolution changed Europe forever, its definition came to be based on a new set of criteria revolving around the taint of the commercial, of politics, and of class. Alongside the relationships in Figure 6.1 (p. 204), a new schema emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century (see Figure 8.1). The modern paradigm into which we fit “folk” music and “art” music is a combination of the two frameworks (Figures 6.1 and 8.1).

Certain anti-commercial values date back to the later eighteenth century – when the supporters of both “national music” and musical “classics” set themselves up against “fashionable” music – but the fashionable music they railed against did not yet have the characteristics of “popular” music as we know it (i.e. as in Figure 8.1: associated with crafty manipulation for a mass audience).

The concepts of folk music and art music as interdependent, origin-based musical domains quickly exploded out of the more localized discourses and milieus in which they formed. The new categories would eventually reach the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, but already by the 1820s they had come to underlie musical thought across Europe. Their spread is clear when we contrast the roles assigned to a simple, symbolic song in each of two wildly successful French operas, separated by a crucial forty years. In André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's 1784 Richard Cœur-de-lion, the plot pivots on a “romance” played by King Richard's friend Blondel in disguise as a blind minstrel – and which turns out to be a composition by King Richard himself. (The imprisoned king is alerted to Blondel's proximity by the tune, and knows he will be rescued.) This chivalric romance may be “old” and “simple,” but like the “picturesque” contents of Percy's Reliques it belongs to the ancient aristocratic minstrels and kings – the Rizzios and the James Is. (Indeed, Richard is very much an old-regime opera; its signature tune “Ô Richard, ô mon roi” became a royalist anthem during the Revolution.) The drama in François Adrien Boieldieu's La Dame blanche, which took the Opéra-Comique by storm in the mid-1820s, also hinges on the protagonist's recognition of a song, but the song now represents the new “folk” category.

If the new attention to creative origins brought about by cultural nationalism was a necessary prologue to the ideas of “folk music” and “art music,” a deeper foundation for the new categories began with the redefinitions of “nature” in the later eighteenth century. The words “nature” or “natural” lurk around every corner of eighteenth-century musical discourse, yet between 1720 and 1790 the connotations of these words for writers on music – even writers in the same geographical location – shifted radically. Scottish music was already linked especially closely with the idea of “nature” at the turn of the eighteenth century, and events in the 1760s thrust the country into an even greater association with the natural. As nature changed meanings, so did Scottish music.

If an average Lowland Scottish gentleman were approached around 1700 and asked to play “One of these things is not like the others” with the list of tunes I presented in my Introduction, he would almost certainly have singled out neither of the two pieces we might choose today – not the French air (the only piece from outside of Scotland) and not the fiddle dance (arguably the only real “folk” tune in modern parlance). Instead, he would probably pick the bagpipe pibroch. He would most likely find this bagpipe music extremely foreign, even strange (whereas he might well know a version of the Lully tune, which circulated around Europe in different forms). Even in the unlikely event that this particular Lowland gentleman just happened to possess enough Highland connections to have a passing familiarity with the pibroch genre and its stylized ornaments and repetitions, he would probably still consider the bagpipe piece the odd one out. Unlike the other two melodies, the pibroch was an occasional piece with a rigid set of performance rules, and it did not lend itself to dancing. In other words: for the purpose of categorizing the pieces, the Lowland gentleman would not really care who wrote them, or even where they came from. He would want to know how they functioned, how they were being used in a specific circumstance.

The lasting idea of art music has depended on the reconciliation of art-musical works (and their composers) with the notion of genius. This was a basically Romantic reconciliation. In the later eighteenth century, as long as “art” continued to be interchangeable with “artifice,” it remained opposed to the new idea of primal nature, and thus to genius. Even after the idea of genius had gained a new vitality in the 1760s, the term took time to pick up its familiar connotations as part of art. Rousseau, for example, worshiped genius in a rhapsodic way because of his novel insistence that music imitated human nature rather than an unchanging natural order. Still, since Rousseau clung to a version of the mimetic principle (if altered), we cannot expect his influential version of genius to be the nineteenth-century version of artistic genius. William Tytler had closed his 1779 dissertation on Scottish music with an extended quotation on genius from Rousseau's Dictionnaire, and in some respects Tytler's depiction of James I also approached the idealized Romantic artist of the nineteenth century. Whereas those who had made Rizzio the symbolic father of Scottish music had credited the Italian with great craft, Tytler now held up James I for a quality just the opposite of craft: genius – the rejection of rules rather than training in rules.