History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914 by Barbara Eichner (review)

Barbara Eichner’s new book announces a new series from Boydell and Brewer, Music in Society and Culture. History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914 certainly makes for an impressive opening volume. Eichner’s choice of time-frame is not arbitrary. Although some mention of the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘long’ or otherwise, is inevitable, she explicitly wishes to concentrate on often little-known works (holding Wagner at one remove or more) from a period that ought to be better understood than it is, a period that is not, as she puts it, merely ‘a transitional state between Herder and the Holocaust’ (p. 38), and which has perhaps received less attention from musicologists concerned with historicism than that immediately preceding. There may well be no Sonderweg (special path) of German history, at least no more than there is with respect to any other national or thematically defined history, yet sometimes we need to proceed as if there were, if only to refute the original claim.

For an unusual strength of Eichner’s book is her command, especially apparent in her Introduction, of the non-musical historiography on German history and more specifically on nationalism. Now it is true that we should be unlikely to find anyone today to echo Willi Apel’s extraordinary claim from 1970, cited by Eichner, that ‘the nationalist movement [in music] is practically nonexistent in Germany’ (p. 27). Yet there remains a tendency for the special claims of the non-German nations, especially during the nineteenth century, to ‘nationalist’ status to eclipse that of the German states in which no one has ever denied the strength of political and indeed other cultural nationalism. We may have downgraded, even eradicated, the ‘periphery’, yet we have sometimes been a little slower to translate our lessons back—or forwards—to the sometime ‘core’. Even Richard Taruskin, a writer who has certainly turned to this question, has, as Eichner points out, fallen prey to a historical narrative of a Sonderweg no serious historian of nineteenth- or twentieth-century Germany would now accept. Many, though by no means all, historical musicologists have a good deal of historiographical catching-up to do—rather as they do with, for instance, the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848–9, the Third Reich, and so on. Eichner is not unique, nor does she claim to be; she is, however, more unusual than one might expect.

Eichner’s principal concern, so far as I understand it, is to examine the expression of German national narratives in music. This is accomplished first through the genre of opera, next in ‘the more egalitarian surroundings’ (p. 39) of the musical festival and male choral societies, interestingly portrayed as mediators between historical research and popular celebration of national heroes, and finally via the symphonic works of Carl Reinecke and Siegmund von Hausegger, both of whom ‘came to the German musical sphere from its geographical margins and whose instrumental works arguably reflect their precarious position as Germans’ (p. 39). The complexity of identity within ‘German’ lands can hardly be underestimated. To take an example at random, what might a boy born in 1871, the son of a Viennese of Slovakian-Catholic descent, who had the year before converted to Judaism, and of a mother who was the daughter of a mixed Muslim and Sephardic marriage (Zemlinsky), have in common with some of the figures Eichner discusses? With, say, Hausegger, born to a Wagnerian father in what was perceived by nationalists to be the Styrian ‘border town’ of Graz, let alone with a generic, ‘respectable’, Protestant Brahmsian, straight out of Buddenbrooks, raised and working in Hanseatic Hamburg? The answer might be ‘more than you would suspect’; on the other hand, it might not.

And that is before we even begin to consider other identities: those...