Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley ed. by Bennett Zon, and: Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain ed. by Martin V. Clarke (review)

Why that favoured land which has given birth to a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Bacon, a Hobbes, a Locke, a Dryden, a Scott, a Wordsworth, a Moore, a Byron, a Coleridge, a Keats and a Shelley, should be barren of great thinkers in the poetical and philosophical art of Music, it would be difficult, nay, impossible, to define.

(qtd. in Zon 201)

This 1841 plaint, uttered in the journal Musical World, articulates the sense of musical inferiority that was common in the Victorian period and which fed into the counter charge of the so-called English Musical Renaissance. For how could it be that a country whose literary heritage demonstrated extraordinary achievement should, at the same time, be such a failure when it came to musical composition? This creative imbalance seemed an offense against the natural order of things. Surely it could only be a question of British composers trying just that little bit harder? Under these circumstances, it is difficult to know whether the tribulations of Sisyphus or Tantalus make the better metaphor for the sorry lot of British composers; but whether expressed as failure to push that boulder right to the top of the hill or to grasp the fruit successfully, the feeling was only too clear: with hardly any exceptions, British composers were falling woefully short of the creative stature of their great literary counterparts.

The perception that nineteenth-century British composition was letting the nation down has persisted. It was further exacerbated when the German writer, Oskar Schmitz, condemned Britain as The Land without Music (1914, English translation 1926): “the English are the only cultured race without a music of their own (music-hall ditties excepted)” (trans. Hans Herzl [Jerrolds, 1926], 26). The accusation stung—especially as it was made by someone whose nationality symbolized the musical achievements of the Austro-German tradition. Given this accumulation of national angst about underachievement and the dearth of great works of music to write about, it is not so surprising that studying Victorian musical life came to be seen as the scholarly equivalent of working in a salt mine. Because of traditional musicology’s respect for the text (the notes) it has become almost axiomatic that music examined under the musicological spotlight should have aesthetic value. Why else would one wish to investigate it? That musicological convention sits easily in the case of canonical repertoire, but the issue of value becomes much more problematic when it comes to repertoire composed by minor or peripheral figures. More recent musicology, however, has come to emphasize the importance of context—not just the musical text—in shaping a musical culture. This has produced some thorough investigations into the roles or effects of institutions, economic factors, social values, education, and performance practices. Sometimes enquiries into these wider musical, cultural, social, and economic circumstances have been rather more interesting or fruitful than the intrinsic quality of the compositions involved. What certainly emerges from treating British music of the long nineteenth century in this multi-dimensional way is an individual musical culture that well repays the effort of studying it.

All these issues are foregrounded in both books under review. Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain contains eleven essays which explore the interaction of theological ideas and musical treatments in a series of repertoires ranging through formal worship to informal religious occasions to oratorio texts. These essays cover a gamut of Victorian religious experience and, by doing so, call attention to the diversity of attitudes to faith and their musical treatment in the Victorian age. But it is in the festschrift for Nicholas Temperley, Music and Performance...