Die Sinfonie im deutschen Kulturgebiet 1850 bis 1875: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungs- und Institutionengeschichte (review)

Die Sinfonie im deutschen Kulturgebiet 1850 bis 1875: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungs- und Institutionengeschichte. By Rebecca Grotjahn. (Musik und Musikanschauung im 19. Jahrhundert, 7.) Sinzig: Studio, 1998. [391 p. ISBN 3-89564-051-4. DM 72.]

This book is an important contribution to the social history of the concert. German concert life has been the subject of many distinguished studies, from Eduard Hanslick's Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1869) to Gerhard Pinthus's Das Konzertleben in Deutschland: Ein Abriss seiner Entwicklung bis zum Beginn des 15. [i.e. 19] Jahrhunderts (Strassburg: Heitz, 1932) and Eberhard Preussner's Die bürgerliche Musikkultur: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Musikgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935), and to recent work by Hanns-Werner Heister, Ottmar Schrieber, and Walter Salmen. But the subject has needed rethinking and deeper exploration of the sources in light of all that has gone on in musicology in the last generation. Rebecca Grotjahn has taken a major step in that direction with her polished dissertation, written under Arnfried Edler at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. She not only makes a detailed survey of the new symphonies performed between 1850 and 1875, but also outlines many aspects of German concert life in that period.

One can see the origins of Grotjahn's method in the historical empiricism of Der Sozialstatus des Berufsmusikers vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert, the pathbreaking study published under the editorship of Walter Salmen in 1971 ([Kassel: Bärenreiter]; English translation, The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Herbert Kaufman and Barbara Reisner [New York: Pendragon, 1983]). She defines her subject through the theoretical concerns of Heister, Carl Dahlhaus, and Arthur C. Danto, but also through the thinking of historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler on history as Problematik. Among her main principles is the need to reestablish the context of institutions and repertories within which the symphony was performed, no small task given the highly decentralized Germany of the mid-nineteenth century. She delimits her geographic range based on the notion, now often favored, of a German Kulturgebiet comprehending Austria as well as the regions that became part of the Second Reich.

The appendixes will be of great use to scholars. They include a list of new symphonies, 507 works by 238 composers; a chronology of local first performances for each composer; and breakdowns by location and title designation. All told, there are records for local first performances in 82 cities in Germany and 26 outside it. Leipzig leads at 219 new works, with Berlin half that at 111, then Vienna 97, Dresden 63, and Bremen 55; London and New York each claim 37. The 507 works include those named Sinfonische Dichtung (43), Suite (31), Serenade (32), and other idioms (43). One suspects that such titles became more numerous in the final quarter of the century.

Also highly useful is Grotjahn's history of how German concerts evolved from the start of the century. She shows how the "miscellaneous" program gave way to one eventually called "symphonic," including more instrumental and less vocal music, and defined ideologically as serious as opposed to light. The term Kunstanspruch (roughly, high artistic status) provides the main concept by which to trace this development. The Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts were the focus of these changes in repertory and ideology; the small Saxon city continued to dominate in the evolution of German musical taste for a remarkably long time. Indeed, I have found that the Euterpe concerts--played chiefly by high-level amateurs--were at their founding in 1834 performing works by composers seen in the emerging canon to an even greater extent than the Gewandhaus.

The book's method for the analysis of repertory is highly imaginative. Grotjahn has crafted a sophisticated set of tools by which to ask questions about a mass of...