In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult
  • Daniel M. Grimley
Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult. By Hannu Salmi. Eastman Studies in Music, 34. (University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, 2005, £45. ISBN 1-58046-207-3.)

In a satirical novel entitled Oxygen och Aromasia published in 1878, the Swedish writer Claës Lundin described the deleterious long-term health effects of Wagner's music in a futuristic age of unbridled capitalist consumerism set in the year 2378. In a scene resembling an episode from a current trendy (but low-budget) sci-fi drama, he narrated the story of 'The Music of the Future', from its origins in the nineteenth century, which 'during the succeeding two centuries underwent such development, and achieved such a perfection, not least due to the phonograph, that it became more than the ear could bear'. In compensation for such auditory impairment, Lundin imagined, people would turn to smell as the source of aesthetic satisfaction: 'the laws of olfactory [End Page 355] harmony and disharmony were formulated, first empirically, but then in theoretical terms. Chemistry was able to supply, at a steadily falling cost, the necessary scents, and once the Ododion had been publicly displayed as an astounding piece of equipment, it soon began to be deployed by artists and so, in the course of time, within the home as well. This was the end of music, and the Music of the Future had a future no more.'

Lundin's novel appears in the final pages of Hannu Salmi's intricate survey of Wagner's life and the cult of Wagnerism in eastern Scandinavia and the Baltic countries in the second half of the nineteenth century (p. 235). Though disgruntled residents of Garsington who have recently complained of the noise pollution caused by the local opera festival might wonder whether elements of Lundin's vision have come prematurely true, the novel's real significance is to illustrate the weight of interest in Wagner's music and his theoretical ideas, and their polemical status, across the eastern Baltic region. Lundin's literary satire is only the tip of an iceberg of reviews, pamphlets, journals, societies, piano transcriptions, and performances whose historical depth has hitherto remained largely obscured.

Underpinning Salmi's detailed and meticulously researched account are two larger historical points. The first is that much previous Wagner scholarship, centred on the Bayreuth festival, his employment in Bavaria, the scandal of the 1861 Paris production of Tannhäuser, and his associations with Venice, has tended to gaze southwards, to southern and central Europe as the main focal point of Wagnerian activities. Yet, as Salmi shows, interest in Wagner's music in northern Europe dates from the very earliest years of his career, and gained greater intensity as the century progressed. The second point concerns the significance of the Baltic region as a whole in historical scholarship. Salmi quotes the work of the historian David Kirby, who notes that, while 'the Mediterranean is regarded as the cradle of civilization, the teeming meeting-ground of cultures from time immemorial . . . the Baltic by contrast is usually seen as a chilly, peripheral backwater on the very edge of the civilized world' (p. 4). Wagner scholars have perhaps unwittingly followed Nietzsche's call for a Mediterraneanization of music, ironically reinforcing rather than deconstructing centralized models of musical historical progress as a result. The irony seems all the deeper because, despite the wealth of references to Nordic myth and local colour in Wagner's work, sustained discussion of his influence in those regions is relatively sparse. Salmi's work therefore takes on a pioneering quality at times, unearthing and analysing source material that will be little known to British and American writers on Wagner. But his book is perhaps even more important as the documentary account of a vibrant and thriving musical culture in a complex geographical region that is only just beginning to attract scholarly interest. As Salmi concludes, 'in the history of Wagner enthusiasm and the Wagner cult, the Baltic Sea was thus not a "chilly, peripheral backwater" but an active...

pdf

Share