Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies

Volume 1

Bennett Zon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429627200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Originally published in 1999, this volume of essays arises from the first biennial Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain conference, held at the University of hull in July 1997. Like the conference, this book seeks to expand and reassess our current knowledge of musical life in Britain during the nineteenth century, as well as to challenge the preconceptions of earlier attitudes and scholarship.

This volume covers a cohesive range of subjects and materials intended not only as a revision of past views and scholarship, but also as a tool for further research. It provides a vigorous reconsideration of the musical activity of the period.

PART ONE

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Xenophilia in British Musical History

Nicholas Temperley

This chapter addresses the ‘Land ohne Musik’ idea. I know it is a stale topic, but at the same time it has to be the topic for any introduction to the area of nineteenth-century British music. Now that we are getting serious about the history of British music in the nineteenth century, it is time to review the historiography. I’m sure there are few scholars who still think that Britain is, or ever was, a land without music. But I am equally sure that those who work in this field are aware of the ghostly presence of this idea, and have had to deal with it in one way or another. I would like to take this opportunity to bring the question to some sort of resolution.

Another old chestnut is ‘The Dark Age of British Music’.¹ I suggest that it is essentially the same idea as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’, since both cover a period that generally includes all or part of the nineteenth century. A ‘dark age’ implies a ‘light age’ to follow, and the term came into use at about the same time as the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ idea, that is, about the turn of the century.² When historians began to talk about a rebirth or a renaissance, they could highlight the dawn by emphasizing the darkness that had come before it. But the Victorians themselves could not see any approaching dawn, and believing that there was something wrong with them, they kept saying ‘The English are not a musical people’. This was translated as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’. But all these formulations are rooted in the same belief: that nineteenth-century Britain was an unmusical place.

I would like to look at three nineteenth-century statements of this belief, one British and two foreign. Among many British examples, one of the most significant is found in The Musical World, which spoke of ‘the old-fashioned and still fashionable twaddle in high quarters – that the English cannot be a musical people’.³ Notice especially the word ‘old-fashioned’ implying that the idea was far from new in 1841,⁴ and the words ‘fashionable’ and ‘high quarters’, to which I will return later.

The Belgian historian and critic François Fétis addressed the subject in his ‘Letters on the State of Music in London’, published in the Revue musicale and translated as a special treat for readers of The Harmonicon.⁵ Fétis wrote that ‘An English composer beholds neither glory nor profit in the effects of his labour; who, then, shall induce him to write? … We need not wonder if in London we find only arrangers, who esteem their labours no more than the public’. The important thing to notice here is that Fétis was not himself delivering an unfavourable judgement of contemporary British composers. (He praised several of them quite warmly later on in his Biographie universelle des musiciens, more especially John Field and William Sterndale Bennett.) Rather he was reporting on the low opinion that the English had of their own composers.

So it was with Robert Schumann. In 1837 he was at pains to repudiate the saying ‘Englischer Komponist, kein Komponist’.⁶ ‘Old prejudices have been weakened by the names of Field, Onslow, Potter, Bishop, etc.’, he wrote, but above all he drew his readers’ attention to the creative power of Bennett.⁷ Schumann’s stand in support of Bennett had no chance of being popular with his readers. It is a testimony to his courage and honesty.

In an age of growing musical nationalism, only the English played down the value of their own music. As Warren D. Allen put it in his valuable survey of music histories, ‘The opposite of chauvinism appears in English histories of music during the Victorian era’.⁸ Nationalists of other countries, certainly including many Germans, were only too happy to take them at their word. It gave them a cast-iron justification for doing what they wanted to do anyway – to eliminate Britain as a possible competitor for musical prestige. F. J. Crowest wrote in 1881: ‘We have the continental reputation of being the Great Unmusical Power of Europe – strong enough in commerce and steam, but devoid of musical talent, invention, and discrimination’. German music histories of this period tend to ignore British music altogether, or to give perfunctory mention to a few composers. Emil Naumann’s five-volume history of music (completed in 1885) was so deficient that Sir Frederick Ouseley, when editing a translation, had to add special chapters on British music.⁹

A subset of this idea was the illusion that the English (as opposed to the Scots, Irish and Welsh) had no ‘national’ music or folk song. William Chappell in 1859 blamed this on Burney’s History and Crotch’s Specimens.¹⁰ George Alexander Macfarren had to publish an article to refute the belief,¹¹ but the idea was too deep-seated to be so easily eradicated. ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ had become dogma.

The idea spread not only in space, but in time. Just as nineteenth-century European critics took the Victorians at their own valuation, so did twentieth-century historians. Alfred Einstein, in his Music in the Romantic Era, gives space only to Sullivan, and even then strictly as a satirist. Carl Dahlhaus, in his book Nineteenth-Century Music, follows suit, declining to evaluate or discuss Sullivan’s music as such. Leon Plantinga’s is the only non-British general history of nineteenth-century music that gives serious consideration to a number of British composers. It is the same with general histories, where music itself is often slighted. The classic Portrait of an Age: Victorian England by G. M. Young makes no mention of music at all, not even when discussing the accomplishments of young ladies for the marriage market. Here he goes beyond negative judgement of English composition to the ludicrous extreme of pretending that music played no significant part in Victorian life. From judgements like these the ‘Land ohne Musik’ idea was reformulated as the ‘Dark Age of Music’.

The British arrived late in the arena of musical nationalism, perhaps because they had felt unchallenged in most other contests. A few intellectuals such as Ayrton, George Hogarth, Chappell and Macfarren asserted British claims to musicality; but musical nationalism did not become a movement until late in the century.¹² That was when the Musical Renaissance idea was adumbrated, then proclaimed. Rural English folk music was discovered, the Golden Age and Henry Purcell were elevated, Henry Davey announced that the art of composition had been an English invention. But the belief that Britain in recent times had been an unmusical nation was still unchallenged. The terminology was changed to represent a temporary rather than a permanent state. Darkness was now followed by light, or death by rebirth.

This has turned out to be a durable concept. Was it a verdict based on a consensus of independent aesthetic judgements? Or was it a historical construct derived from factors outside music?

Table 1.1 points to the correct answer to this question. It shows the time limits of the ‘dark age’ and the ‘renaissance’ as assessed by a series of writers, arranged in chronological order. I have tried to include all authors who have offered a serious assessment of nineteenth-century British musical composition, and who have made a clear statement about a dark, lean or low period followed by a rebirth or improvement. Some authors, such as Gerald Abraham, Cyril Ehrlich, Eric Mackerness, Percy Young and myself, are missing, because we did not subscribe to any judgement of that kind.

Nobody has put the beginning of the ‘dark age’ earlier than 1695, the year of Purcell’s death. Some have put it as late as 1800, or left it undefined. There is an even more striking lack of agreement about the end of the ‘dark age’ and the starting-point of the ‘renaissance’. This critical change of direction is marked by the upward-pointing arrow. The result of these two uncertainties is that there is stark divergence in the evaluation of the nineteenth century itself. For some writers, it is the dark age; for others, it is the dawn. Colles saw a ‘precipitous ascent’ just where Blom saw a ‘nadir’.

The upward-pointing arrow tends to move farther and farther to the right as you go down the page and the date of the source gets later. This cannot altogether be explained by the tendency to downgrade the immediately previous age and to boost one’s own era. Both Davey in 1895 and Howes in 1966 perceived a rebirth in about 1880; on the other hand both Ouseley in 1885 and Hadow in 1931 saw a revival beginning in about 1800. The 1830s marked a downturn in the view of two historians but an upturn in the eyes of four others. Fellowes, discussing only cathedral music, saw two revivals, one about 1837 and another, following a mid-Victorian trough, in about 1885.

So it is the idea of darkness followed by rebirth that commands agreement among historians. Opinions about which music is dark and which is reborn vary too widely to amount to a consensus of aesthetic judgements.

There is further variation. In two branches of British music to which I have given close attention, namely piano music and parochial church music, I found patterns that were quite different, both from each other and from the preponderant modern view of a renaissance just before 1900. In piano music there was a summit of achievement in the 1790s, followed by a slow decline that lasted well into the twentieth century.¹³ In Anglican parish church music, there are two distinct chronologies, one of urban, the other of rural church music. For urban church music the high point seemed to come in the 1860s, followed by a slight decline and then a second rise after 1900, and an apparently terminal decline after 1950. For rural church music, now often called West Gallery Music, the apogee was about 1800 or 1810, followed by a slow decline towards extinction at the end of the century.¹⁴ In all these cases I am speaking not of musical activity or quantity, but of the quality of original music, measured by my own judgement and by the staying power of compositions. Another example is cathedral music, where William Gatens arrived at a considered judgement that the High Victorian period was a summit of achievement; this is the very period for which Fellowes constructed a special valley between early and late Victorian revivals. In opera, Eric Walter White sees a rebirth in 1834 followed by an eclipse after the failure of the Pyne-Harrison company in 1869.

Table 1.1 Chronologies of the ‘dark age’ and ‘renaissance’

The change of terminology (‘Land ohne Musik’ to dark age followed by renaissance) came with the rise of English or British nationalism in the late Victorian era.¹⁵ This, it now seems clear, had little to do with music, but was motivated by the emergence of Germany, and to some extent the United States, as economic, political and potentially military rivals. So long as Britain was clearly the world leader amon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• List of Plates and Figures
• List of Tables and Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Nicholas Temperley
• Part One Introduction
• Part Two Historiography
• Part Three Instruments and Performing Ensembles
• Part Four The Wesley Family
• Part Five Local Music History
• Part Six Repertoire, Genre and Concert Life
• Part Seven Analysis and Criticism
• Index