Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture: A Comparative History of Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham, and: Thomas Tallis and his Music in Victorian England (review)

In the wake of pioneering studies by figures such as Cyril Ehrlich and John Lowerson, music historians have become increasingly aware of the complex nature of the British musical situation in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ehrlich and Lowerson saw music as part of the society of its day, and they contextualized musical life in a manner that their musicological contemporaries felt largely disinclined to attempt at a time when the focus of traditional musicology was still on the musical text itself, driven by the requirements of the "life and works" treatment. The priorities of composition-centred history confused the state of compositional life with the state of musical life as a whole, with the consequent implication that the "English Musical Renaissance" (a term encapsulating British compositional developments from the 1880s) stood for the revivification of British music in all its aspects.

"Renaissance" implies a preceding nadir, but a rounded view of British musical life would search in vain for any prior dearth of activity. The Victorians loved music, and increasing economic prosperity meant that music was taken up as a participatory activity and listening pastime with enormous relish and enthusiasm across society, something that is as evident in the brass and wind bands of the urban and rural working classes as in the domestic and concert hall attendance of the middle classes, with choral singing common to both. Technological developments had lowered the unit costs of instruments and printed music alike, while the British craze for competition expressed itself in extended local and national festivals, featuring an eclectic, but demanding mix of European and British repertoire. And then there was the music exam industry, too. Buoyant sales of such perennial choral favourites as John Stainer's Crucifixion (1887), William Sterndale Bennett's The Woman of Samaria (1867), and A. R. Gaul's Ruth (1881), as well as an abundance of ballads, music hall ditties, and commodity music of all types, tell a similar story.

Clearly the British had sufficient compositional fecundity to keep up with consumer demand. But the problem (and a subtext of the Musical Renaissance trope) was that most British composers were just too adept at writing music for the market, got used to the money it brought, and never looked back to the uncertainties of trying to compose a masterpiece. James Duff Brown and Stephen Samuel Stratton's British Musical Biography (1897) estimated that some forty thousand people were engaged in the musical profession, meaning that music offered very considerable employment opportunities. In this light, it is hard not to see the "Musical Renaissance" ideal as a means of distancing the worthiness of "art music" from its much more successful, but commercially tainted, commodity cousin.

The moral purpose of music forms an important theme of Antje Pieper's Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture. Pieper's comparison of two musical institutions, Leipzig's Gewandhaus and Birmingham's Triennial Festival, identifies an immense cultural gulf that, by extension, applies more generally between attitudes and practices in Germany and Britain. Setting them within the wider context of the philosophical and aesthetic debates of the time, Pieper shows how institutional approaches to programming defined their respective societies and cultural mores. The Leipzig Mendelssohn, for example, cut a very different figure from the Birmingham Mendelssohn. To Leipzig, Felix Mendelssohn's classical musical persona was the exemplification of the true artist and a bastion against the subjective excesses of Romanticism and the corrosive, essentially empty virtuosic display of a Niccolò Paganini so popular elsewhere. But in Birmingham, where the oratorio ruled supreme, Mendelssohn was prized because in Elijah, written for the 1846...