Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (review)

In his most recent book Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, James Garratt takes on the monumental project of dispelling the notion that artistic autonomy, so clearly associated with the nineteenth-century aesthetic, demanded the separation of the artistic sphere from the social and political. In his introduction, he pointedly asks: "Why did Richard Wagner and other nineteenth-century musicians devote so much attention to social reform, if the dominant artistic principle of the age demanded art's detachment from social and political concerns?" (p. 1) He spends the rest of the book exploring the various ways in which musicians, philosophers, and critics approached social aesthetics. The scope of Garratt's study is quite impressive. Spanning the long nineteenth century, this book moves from the late eighteenth-century philosophical and literary foundational discussions of the function of art to the roles of music festivals and workers' songs. Garratt thoroughly reveals the myriad of nineteenth-century understandings of and debates about the social aesthetic of art.

With Friedrich Schiller as the lynchpin, the first chapter teases apart late eighteenth-century literary philosophies of art and social reform that shape the ways in which musicians of the romantic period developed their ideas of reform through music. Garratt situates Schiller's aesthetic position between the aloof morality of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Herder's dogmatic social justice agenda for art. For Schiller, art created freely can cultivate society; however, he stipulates that art does not necessarily require a social or political agenda in order to achieve this goal. One of Garratt's key points in this chapter is with regard to Wilhelm Heinrich Wacken roder's Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) and Phantasien über die Kunst für die Freunde der Kunst (1799), which include the biography and essays of a fictional composer, Joseph Berglinger. Through this character Wacken roder establishes the connection between instrumental music and aesthetic separatism, the basis for the idea that instrumental music is on a higher plane than vocal music and can create a more refined society than vocal music can. Garratt points out that the telescoped focus on Wacken-roder's aesthetic by later nineteenth-century writers misrepresents it as the notion, predominant in late-nineteenth-century aesthetics, that music transcended the socio-political world. The breadth of Garratt's research on Schiller and his contemporaries aptly counters the prominence of Wackenroder's ideology and provides a rich foundation from which the reader can contextualize the conversations that follow.

The final section of this chapter distinguishes between the philosophies of Hans Georg Nägeli, founder of the Zurich Singinstitut, and Carl Friedrich Zelter, famed director of the Singakademie in Berlin, with regard to the role of music in society. Although Zelter claimed his Singaka demie to be a musical democracy, his leadership was not to be challenged. His insulated group received government support and never gave public performances. In Nägeli's view, on the other hand, the function of music was to reach and cultivate all classes of people.

Garratt devotes chapters 2 and 3 to the Vormärz period, continuing the discussion of social aesthetics in connection with the music festivals that became popular during this era. Of the three types of events—music festivals, Sängerfeste for large male choruses, and commemorative festivals celebrating important cultural figures—Garratt's interpretation of the last of these is the most provocative. In particular, his take on the Bonn Beethoven Festival of 1845 provides a fascinating twist to the way in which the concept of artistic genius in the mid-nineteenth century was celebrated and perceived. Alexander Rehding recently dealt with this concept in his article "Liszt's Musical Monuments" (19^th-Century Music 26, no. 1 [Summer 2002]: 52-72). Rehding discusses how the cantata Liszt composed for the inauguration of the Bonn Beethoven Monument celebrates not only Beethoven but also Liszt's compositional prowess...