First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (review)

First Nights: Five Musical Premieres. By Thomas Forrest Kelly. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. [xvi, 387 p. ISBN 0-300-07774-2. $29.95.]

One of the most frequently discussed topics among music professors is the teaching of the general music class for nonmajors, the so-called music appreciation course. The issue crops up frequently on musicology e-mail lists, where texts and approaches are often discussed, and a major textbook publisher even sponsored a seminar on the subject at the 1999 national meeting of the American Musicological Society. The organizational approach that is often criticized is, perhaps, the most common: the timeworn "great works" curriculum, in which a series of famous works of Western art music are introduced to a class of non-music majors who have little or no prior musical experience. The class is introduced to some terminology, either at the beginning or throughout, and then (presumably) told why they should "appreciate" this music today, timeless art that it is. More than a dozen gorgeous, high-budget "Appreesh" (as it is often called) text packages, complete with recordings, follow some close variant of this approach.

Thomas Forrest Kelly has made a striking new contribution to the discussion. First Nights is devoted to five such "great works": Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo, George Frideric Handel's Messiah, Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, and Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. ("Greater works," in the canonical sense, probably do not exist.) Instead of taking the music apart, however, using whatever terminology might be deemed appropriate for nonmusicians, Kelly provides historical and cultural context for the premieres of these works, using as many primary-source documents as possible. These are drawn from correspondence related to the genesis and production of each work, recollections of the principals involved, and reviews and commentary by those who were at the performances. The author links these documents together with a wraparound narrative that seeks to limn out contemporary life: living circumstances in Beethoven's Vienna, court politics in Monteverdi's Mantua, musical life in the Paris of Berlioz. The result is an uncommonly vivid picture of the world--the professional musical world and the listener's world--in which each of these works appeared.

Derived from Kelly's years of teaching a Harvard course for nonmajors called First Nights, the book deliberately leaves the listening-experiential component up to the reader, and with this in mind, a list of recommended recordings (by Jen-yen Chen) is included. Kelly's primary goal is not to take the reader through each piece, but to provide as thorough and multifaceted a preparation for listening as possible, putting us--to a limited extent, of course--closer to those who lived contemporaneously with this music but had never heard it. This is radically different from the traditional music appreciation approach, which has not stressed investigation into how the music was produced and heard and what it meant to people when it was new, different, and immediate--but rather, "the work itself." One of the accomplishments of Kelly's book is to illustrate the poverty of that traditional approach.

Professional music historians are not likely to have their knowledge of these works altered substantially, though it certainly will be deepened. The precarious circumstances of the initial performances of Beethoven's Ninth and Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique are familiar to many, including students. Similarly, the near-riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite is one of the most celebrated scandals in music history. But few of us have seen all these primary-source documents or read all the recollections, and the pictures that emerge of these five musical works in their times are vivid indeed.

Inevitably, the choice of works included will not satisfy everyone. To this point, Kelly states, "Admittedly, I chose these pieces because they are favorites of mine, but they are also excellent candidates for a study of this kind in that the information available about each of them has enabled...