A Garland of Songs for a Nation of Singers: An Episode in the History of Russia, the Herderian Tradition and the Rise of Baltic Nationalism

Analysis of the contents of Janis Cimze's harmonized folksong collection A Garland of Songs (1872) and the cultural context in which it was published reveals its musical portrait of an emergent Latvian nation to be a synthetic construct. Drawing upon aspects of the German nationalist choral movement, the quasi-Herderian work of Baltic German folklorists and new opportunities for cultural expression afforded by mid-century Russian imperial reforms, Cimze's work inspired heated and increasingly xenophobic debate among his contemporary Latvians about the destiny of their community in pre-Revolutionary Russia.