Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848

In recent years, musicologists have devoted ever-increasing attention to the study of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century music criticism. For scholars of reception, the history of criticism, and aesthetics, contemporary periodicals provide an invaluable resource, whose accessibility has been greatly enhanced through the online version of RIPM. Yet the full potential of such journals for enhancing our understanding of music and culture has seldom been appreciated. For a start, most scholars focus their attention on a small number of high-profile titles: for every fifty references to the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung or the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, one is lucky to encounter one mention of Euterpe, Teutonia, or the Musikalischer Haus-Freund. In addition, it is generally the leading articles and most prominent reviews that attract interest, rather than the descriptions of provincial musical life, the stories and poems on musical subjects, the polemical and satirical pieces, or the articles on institutions. In short, a large body of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing on music has been almost entirely ignored, since it offers little to those whose interests centre on individual works and composers. But the value of these texts as a source for broader social and cultural perspectives is immense, as is apparent from several German monographs on topics largely neglected by British and American musicologists (see e.g. Nicolai Petrat's Hausmusik der Biedermeier im Blickpunkt der zeitgenössischen musikalischen Fachpresse (1815-1848) (Hamburg, 1986), whose picture of attitudes towards domestic music-making in the nineteenth century is gleaned from over seventy contemporary journals). As a consequence, David Gramit's monograph, which uses this body of discourse as a means of exploring the emergence of bourgeois musical culture, is timely and important.

Although Gramit's monograph is wideranging, it does not present the comprehensive survey implied by the title. Rather, the main body of the book consists of four case studies, each of which investigates a circle of issues generated by the changing function and status of music in the decades around 1800. While the subject of one of these essays—the role of the concert in establishing the unique claims of German art music—is unsurprising, the others examine less familiar territory: the role that discussions of non-European musical cultures played in buttressing the claims made for German music; the ways in which the idealization of folk music in this period reflects the problematic interaction of social and aesthetic concerns; and the aims and assumptions of musical pedagogy. These topics are well worth exploring, and Gramit's thorough and rich discussions certainly enhance our understanding of broader developments in this period. But as he is surely aware, these chapters do not offer anything like a full coverage of 'the aspirations, interests, and limits of German musical culture': in spite of the book's strengths, readers may perceive a disparity between Gramit's ambitious programme and what is actually delivered.

The introductory chapter bears the brunt of fulfilling the expectations generated by the book's title and blurb. Not only does it have to unify a group of disparate essays, but to outline and substantiate his key arguments. Fortunately, it largely succeeds in these tasks: it is arguably the most significant section of the monograph, and offers much to stimulate future work in this field. Gramit presents a thought-provoking account of the relation between the emergence of a public culture of serious music, the ideal of human cultivation, and the desire of musicians to enhance their social status. He argues convincingly that the lofty claims made for music in this period were 'intertwined with the interests of music as a field of social practice' (p. 2): while Gramit asserts that he has no wish to represent musicians simply as 'cynical opportunists' (p. 17), he makes plain that their championing of musical and cultural reform was inseparable from their own material interests. The transformation of music from an aristocratic entertainment to a bourgeois art stemmed, therefore, from the social aspirations of musicians: as a result, the emergence of music as a high art cannot be understood through 'the privileging of a history of ideas and aesthetic developments' (p. 20), but requires a consideration of the concerns of musical practitioners.

One of the most useful conclusions that Gramit draws from this perspective concerns the oppositional strategies that are all-pervasive in German musical discourse of this period. He argues that the splintering of music into the spheres of high and low culture was no mere by-product of the claim that certain types of music possessed universal validity: rather, the maintenance of the new-found prestige of music required that it continue to mirror existing social divisions. This view provides a highly productive means of exploring the numerous essays of the period in which musicians seem, on the face of it, to seek to efface the divisions present in musical culture by subduing deviant elements within it. As Gramit argues, the very prestige of art music was dependent on the presence of a lesser other, with the result that such polemics served, in reality, to enforce this divide rather than raise the artistic level of the lower term in the equation.

The success of Gramit's introduction stems, in part, from his circumvention of some of the more problematic aspects of the relation between musical discourse and broader intellectual and cultural trends. He treats music criticism from the period 1770–1848 as a cohesive discourse, in which musicians were united by the concern of raising their own prestige and that of their art. This approach has some benefits, not least that it encourages him to explore how shared social concerns were voiced by musicians whose views, on the face of it, have little in common. Clearly, a number of individuals did share a conviction in the relation between music and cultivation, and championed the societal benefits of heightening the prestige of music. But whether these individuals can be regarded as a unified movement, and lumped together as 'advocates of serious music', is a different matter. In addition, the notion that these concerns remained essentially stable and unchanging from the late eighteenth century through to the 1840s is highly questionable. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the common ideals and goals that Gramit ascribes to this period are often assumed rather than demonstrated: in places, as will become evident, this leads to strained and unconvincing arguments.

Perhaps I am oversimplifying Gramit's approach. But if this is the case, it is at least in part because he does not explicitly state the historiographical and aesthetic premisses that inform it. Little attention is devoted to the aesthetic dimensions of the claims made for music in this period, and, where discussed, the aesthetic stances of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators tend to be treated as more or less uniform. This shortcoming is compounded by the vague use of several key concepts. The most obvious example is Gramit's use of the phrase 'serious music', which serves to indicate the 'particular and limited form of music' championed as 'worthy of consideration as an essential part of human cultivation' in this period (p. 2). For some readers, this phrase may seem unobjectionable, and Gramit is not alone among modern musicologists in employing it to explore the upheavals in musical thought around 1800. This is understandable, since it provides a useful, value-free substitute for the phrase 'art music', avoids the claim of autonomy implicit in the term 'absolute music', was in common use in the period in question, and is also part of the language of the modern (American) concert-goer. But this phrase, if left unqualified, can serve to cloak reductive and misleading arguments: its amorphous nature can lead to an oversimplification of the complex strands present in early nineteenth-century musical thought, while it encourages the construction of misleading parallels between present and past musical discourse.

Recently, for example, Celia Applegate has relied on the phrase in arguing that the activities of Carl Friedrich Zelter mark the emergence of 'a new aesthetic of music in the first part of the nineteenth century' ('How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century', 19th-century Music, 21 (1997-8), 274-96 at 281). But, in reality, Zelter's own use of the phrase almost entirely contradicts the associations assigned to it by Applegate. For Zelter, the category of 'serious music' not only excludes modern instrumental works, but is grounded in a functional and affective conception of art: there is nothing 'new' about this aesthetic, and Zelter's impulse to heighten the social significance of music has little in common with other developments in musical thought around 1800.

Gramit's use of the phrase is problematic on similar grounds. Initially, he appears to use it broadly, to encompass a range of distinct aesthetic and ideological stances: in the preface, for example, he speaks of the 'common basis of the project of defining a culture of serious music' (p. x), a conception that could plausibly embrace Zelter as well as those with very different aesthetic views (such as E. T. A. Hoffmann or A. B. Marx). It soon becomes clear, however, that 'serious music' is not a broad church accommodating a range of perspectives, but a pigeon-hole ill suited to some of the critics under discussion. Early in the introductory chapter, Gramit juxtaposes discussions of Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth and of an essay by Johann Friedrich Reichardt ('To Generous Rulers' (1782)) arguing that Reichardt's ideas on the social value of music form an 'unstated background' to Hoffmann's seemingly 'resolutely asocial' text (pp. 3–4). I am not convinced that our understanding of Hoffmann, Reichardt, or the topic is enhanced by this levelling exercise: here, as elsewhere in the book, Gramit homogenizes competing and contradictory perspectives, rather than acknowledging the pluralism of musical thought in this period.

As in Applegate's article, this problem stems from the broader aims of Gramit's study. Both regard the concept of serious music as a constant within bourgeois musical culture, with the result that their approach to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical discourse is informed by the impulse to explain the origins of present-day prejudices and practices. This goal is in itself unobjectionable, and indeed can be highly productive. But it does threaten to distort our understanding of the multiplicity of different perspectives present in the period under discussion. Over the course of Gramit's monograph, the phrase 'serious music' is increasingly used as a synonym for autonomous instrumental music: in the final chapter, it is associated almost exclusively with professional performances of instrumental works in the concert hall. Yet, even in the 1840s, it would be a mistake to view the symphony concert as the primary forum for bourgeois engagement with art music, or to equate the latter with professional performance: this decade, after all, witnessed the high point of the amateur choral movement in Germany, and it is in relation to this form of music-making that the social benefits of art were most often discussed. To define serious music in opposition to amateur music, and to depict the former as a unified project (p. 2) sustained by a cabal of professional musicians (I exaggerate only slightly), oversimplifies the messy diversity of stances present in contemporary discourse. 'Serious music', if the phrase has to be used at all, should be viewed as a fluid object of debate in this period, rather than as a stable concept.

In other respects, too, Gramit's insistence that the texts under consideration form a unified discourse threatens to distort our understanding of the topic. Building on the work of Sanna Pederson, Gramit acknowledges the presence of competing aesthetic currents in the musical discourse of this period (p. 4). But, unlike Pederson, he is reluctant to outline or even label these currents, instead stressing the extent to which both Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers were united in advocating the social benefits of music: 'even the romantic criticism that explicitly opposed many tenets of the Enlightenment project still depended on arguments for the institutionalization of public life that were solidly based on that project' (p. 7). Although this claim is justified, our understanding of musical discourse from 1770 to 1848 is not enhanced by regarding the multiplicity of aesthetic currents of this period as outgrowths of a single, stable ideology. While Gramit does not articulate this view explicitly, his emphasis on the perpetuation of Enlightenment ideas is sometimes problematic. He argues that 'Enlightenment ideology and rhetoric pervade musical discourse of this period to an extent that has rarely been sufficiently recognized' (loc. cit.), a view that provides a useful corrective—if such is still needed—to the assumption that musical discourse of this period can casually be linked with Romanticism. But it is unhelpful to regard the kind of 'enlightened' ideas found in nineteenth-century texts as simply a perpetuation of eighteenth-century concerns; it is particularly misleading to depict the views of the musical reformers of the 1840s in this way. Perhaps these problems stem from regarding the concept of the public sphere as synonymous with the concept of Enlightenment; in any case, it would have been useful to probe these issues more thoroughly in the introduction. The net result is that Gramit seems on less secure ground in interpreting texts from the 1820s onwards than in dealing with earlier musical discourse.

As Gramit himself remarks, the main body of the book begins with coverage of a topic that might seem 'oddly remote' from the concerns voiced in the Introduction: a discussion of how German musicians represented the music of other cultures, and in doing so, sought indirectly to define their aspirations for German music (p. 27). The central part of chapter 2 presents a thorough exploration of how the music of non-European cultures was treated by the contributors to Gustav Schilling's Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften (1835-42). This useful discussion is, however, preceded by an examination of a source that seems, in my view, to be of limited significance: an 1803 review of a German translation of an English monograph on Indian music. Gramit is surely aware that his six-page discussion of this anonymous review does not provide a propitious opening to this chapter: although he makes some interesting points, this section of the chapter is overextended (especially in comparison with the well-focused, concise nature of much of the rest of the book). He focuses on the hostility of the reviewer, a professional musician, to the idealization of Indian music by musical dilettantes, the author and translator of the monograph (respectively Sir William Jones and Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg). What this discussion reveals is not so much the nationalism of German musicians, but rather the continuing insecurity of the status of music in German culture. Here, it would be useful to compare this debate with contemporary discussions of the value of early (European) music: this clash between professional musicians and dilettantes parallels, to an extraordinary degree, Hans Georg Nägeli's contemptuous dismissal of the idealization of old Italian music (see my Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 47-8).

One problematic aspect of this chapter is the absence of a consideration of the philosophies of history that underpin the material under discussion: we learn little more than that music history was conceived in progressive terms. This omission is compensated for in part by a brief section on Herder's historical stance (which, puzzlingly, overlooks his views on ancient and non-European music). The subsequent coverage of Schilling's Encyclopädie is much more detailed: one of the most useful insights concerns the relative value accorded to folk and art music (Gramit notes that folk music had a wholly marginal role in the various articles on European national musics, a fact that is surprising for a text of this period; p. 55). Throughout the chapter, Gramit approaches the chauvinism and racism exhibited by these texts with sophistication, for the most part resisting the impulse simply to censure the authors under consideration. Even so, the lack of a thorough treatment of the conception of history underpinning the claims of German musicians serves, in my view, to impede his efforts to elucidate this material.

Chapter 3 provides a useful discussion of the relation between art music and popular music in musical discourse, focusing on the ambivalent ideal of the Volkston in this period. Gramit presents a convincing analysis of the socio-political ramifications of the concept in the late eighteenth century, challenging the notion that the folksong movement can casually be identified with socially progressive thought (p. 66). In Gramit's view, musicological accounts of this movement have hitherto oversimplified its political context, perpetuating the 'familiar narrative [of] the ultimately successful struggle of the (good) bourgeoisie against the (oppressive) ancien régime' (loc. cit.); in contrast, he contends that the relation between champions of the Volkston and the public has more in common with the noblesse oblige of enlightened monarchy than with democracy. Although Gramit's analysis of the relation between the composer and the public is convincing in general terms, it circumscribes (and to some extent distorts) his interpretations of individual texts. This is evident in his discussion of Johann Abraham Peter Schulz's well-known preface to the second edition of his Lieder im Volkston (1785). Gramit views this text as exemplifying the idea that the concept of the Volkston, even at the time of its emergence, served to reinforce rather than reduce the distance between high and low culture: 'the opposition of folk and art is established in the first sentence, and the remainder of the passage continues in the tone of an [sic] composer-initiate instructing other connoisseurs' (p. 67). The opposition that Gramit identifies, however, arguably owes more to his translation and to the selective nature of the quotation than to Schulz's text: Schulz seeks to contrast folksong with excessive artistry or artificiality, not with art itself, as is apparent in a subsequent passage (omitted in Gramit's translation) in which the simplicity of (German) song is contrasted with the excessive complexity of (foreign) arias. Elsewhere, too, the revisionist impulse of his account appears to go too far, especially when he argues that Schulz (in a later text) championed Bildung as a means of ensuring a docile populace obedient to the ruling authorities (p. 71).

It would, however, be unfair to regard Gramit as pursuing his interpretative goals incautiously or unreflectively. Indeed, he frequently questions his central argument, noting that his challenge to 'the absorption of Schulz and the Volkston into the narrative of social progress could easily drift to the opposite extreme of portraying Schulz as an apologist for absolutist power or, at best its unwitting tool' (p. 72). Such subtlety also informs his useful discussions of Johann Friedrich Reichardt's political stance and of the broader role of the Volkston in music and criticism around 1800. Yet, as elsewhere in the book, his coverage of the 1830s and 1840s is less sure-footed, and suffers from questionable generalizations. The political significance of the Volkston to music critics of the 1840s—when it did acquire genuinely democratic connotations—is ignored: rather than tracing how the social and political significance of this concept shifted over the first half of the nineteenth century, Gramit seeks to affirm his view that it served aristocratic and anti-democratic ideologies. This interpretation is highly misleading in relation to musical discourse of the 1840s, in which can be found numerous attempts to reinvent the Volkston as a truly popular musical idiom and as a primary vehicle for musical democratization.

Gramit's misrepresentation of the 1840s is apparent in his treatment of Schumann's relation to the Volkston. In discussing his Fünf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102 for cello and piano, Gramit argues that the composer would have regarded the Volkston merely as a form of 'stylistic exoticism' (p. 84), ignoring its relevance to Schumann's political concerns in this period. While these pieces may today seem to be an isolated experiment, the ideal of a popular, national, and accessible tone (Volkstümlichkeit) had a much broader impact on Schumann's music of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Indeed, it is in music and discourse of this period that the ambivalent nature of this ideal becomes most apparent. Gramit notes earlier in his chapter that the idealization of folk music interacted problematically with the concern for heightening the status of art music, primarily because folksong was elevated as a source for creating a genuinely popular form of art. He formulates this problem in social terms, arguing that 'an accessible art with truly universal appeal would leave no basis for claiming distinction based on an elite' (p. 65). What is most striking in musical discourse of the 1840s, however, is that socially progressive critics regarded this as a price worth paying: they sought to challenge, rather than buttress, the distinction between high and low art. As a result, Gramit's conclusion that 'by the 1840s the reordering of the musical world was a fait accompli' is unwarranted: in this decade, arguably for the first time, the contradictions between music as art and as social practice became a matter of heated public debate. I hesitate to fault Gramit for what he doesn't discuss (clearly, no author can cover everything), but as matters stand, his conclusions are a little too sweeping.

While the significance of the Volkston for music and criticism has received some attention from earlier scholars, the following chapter covers a topic virtually untouched by earlier American or British musicology: German music education in the nineteenth century, in particular the pedagogical theories that shaped singing instruction for children. Gramit's primary concern is with how music pedagogy reflects the broader ambitions, and practical limitations, of the champions of serious music. Taking as his starting point the notion, common in the nineteenth century, that the masterpieces of choral music provided a vision of the entire Volk unified through communal singing, he explores attempts to realize this goal and the obstacles that stood in its way. Drawing on perspectives from Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Gramit provides a detailed exploration of the ideas and practices of the most significant music educationist of the period, Hans Georg Nägeli. Given the rigorous regimen advocated by Nägeli, this comparison is surprisingly apt, although I am a little concerned, as before, that Gramit goes too far in regarding Nägeli's egalitarian and democratic ideals as a form of mind control. In addition, Gramit's treatment of Foucault is less than penetrating: he simply presents a 300-word quotation from him, rather than summarizing his arguments or subjecting them to a critique (p. 107).

In exploring how Nägeli's ideals relate to those of other advocates of secular choral singing, Gramit gets to the heart of the contemporary debates on Bildung. If nineteenth-century texts perpetuate Enlightenment conceptions of cultivation, it is because they are informed by the same primary belief: that 'at issue was nothing less than the development of animals into humans' (p. 110). I'm less happy, however, with the socio-political conclusions that Gramit draws from this: while eighteenth-century educationists, such as Pestalozzi, may have conceived of universal education as a means of reinforcing existing social divides, it should not be assumed that his nineteenth-century successors shared this viewpoint (p. 112). The Vormärz was, to a surprising degree, a period of social mobility, and many nineteenth-century commentators argued that choral singing provided an impetus, if not a direct means, for participants from the lower classes to aspire to a higher status (see, for example, '#', 'Das dritte obererzgebirgische Männergesangsfest zu Schneeberg', Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 25 (1846), 80-2, 85-6, 89-90, 97-8). In addition, Gramit exaggerates the extent to which the male-voice choral societies and festivals of the 1830s and 1840s were seen as serving essentially non-artistic goals: rather, they stimulated extensive debates as to how they might provide a broader model for art fusing social and aesthetic functions.

The emergence of the public (instrumental) concert—for Gramit, the primary forum through which the cultural claims of music were validated and promoted—is explored in chapter 5. Summarizing and citing the views of numerous contemporary commentators, Gramit provides a wide-ranging account of the social and economic factors that shaped concert life and were mirrored in its practices. Particularly successful are the sections that explore how critics sought to preserve the concert from the negative aspects of the commodity-driven culture that sustained it: in the writings of commentators inveighing against the individualism of virtuoso performance, the proliferation of arrangements, and the rule of public taste, the contradictory impulses fundamental to bourgeois musical culture are constantly apparent.

In spite of the pertinence of the topic to current musicological debates and the fresh approach that Gramit offers, some aspects of this chapter are frustrating. Its breadth of scope sometimes verges on diffuseness, largely as a result of a failure to pin down the precise object of discussion: there is little attempt to define or distinguish the various types of concert that existed in the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth, or to explore how their changing nature is reflected in musical discourse. While Gramit's main concern is with the emergence of the professional orchestral concert, a lot of the material discussed is tangential to this type of concert and to its economic foundations and social make-up (while he mentions the prestige accorded to the oratorio in this period, most oratorio performances occurred in other contexts, such as music festivals and benefit concerts). In addition, many of the texts discussed are less directly related to concert life than Gramit implies: while Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut did champion the performance of early church music in concerts (p. 139), he goes on to argue that it (and the cause of serious music) gains more from being performed privately; while Heinrich Paris's diatribe against the tastes of the lower orders is fascinating and worth mentioning (pp. 153–4), Gramit should have pointed out that it occurs in a discussion of modern opera, not the concert. Conversely, it would have been useful to devote more attention to authors, such as August Kahlert, who presented detailed anatomies of concert life and prescriptions for its reform.

In spite of the problems that I have with some aspects of David Gramit's account, his book must be regarded as essential reading for students and scholars of German music of this period. (Over the last semester, I—and my second-year students—have found it very useful in studying music, culture, and politics of the Vormärz, not least because broad-based cultural studies of the music of this period are still very thin on the ground.) The standards of its production and presentation are uniformly high, and it is very useful to have so many extensive quotations, together with the German texts in the endnotes. Many musicologists, myself included, will share Gramit's conviction that the topics and issues he discusses are of great importance, and it is to be hoped that other scholars will follow his lead in exploring neglected aspects of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical discourse.