The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (review)

Modes of writing music history have rarely (if ever) been more diverse than they are at the present moment. The postmodern turn in critical and historical discourse represented by Anglo-American musicology of the past thirty years is one that might seem more easily available within the field of nineteenth-century studies than elsewhere, but the challenges to narrative history represented by a whole spectrum of critical, sociological, and indeed cultural critique have decisively altered the complexion and configuration of musical studies across Western culture. One by-product of this intellectual versatility has been a reaction against it: thematic catalogues, source studies, bibliographies, and narrative surveys now flourish with resurrected vigour, and critical editions are made (and sometimes remade) as if to reaffirm the primacy of textual scholarship against the tide of extra-musical ideas that have shaped our recent reception of musical meaning. It is true that many of these ideas pay scant attention to the patient retrieval of long-forgotten repertories or the amelioration of better-known ones, so that the careworn complaint of music historians with regard to an impoverished context limited to a gallery of transcendent masterworks acquires new significance when Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys (so to speak) are rehabilitated as agents of intellectual and social history, without due regard to the thousands of composers trailing behind them. To adapt a remark once made by Carl Dahlhaus, it is very difficult to write a history of music that is also a history of music. It is also difficult to maintain a balance between the claims of music in history (the recovery and performance of neglected repertories) and the critical appeal that now attaches to some music, irrespective of its significance or prestige when it was first composed and heard.

These challenges are particularly acute in relation to eighteenth-century music. For one thing, the sheer stability and ubiquity of a limited number of generic prototypes (especially to 1750) facilitated a compositional practice of fantastic proportions, so that the proliferation of occasional (i.e. specially composed) music in virtually every department of public and private life across Europe now invites a corresponding degree of commentary that is compromised, inevitably, by the historian’s impulse to separate the wheat from the chaff, or at least to proceed under the guidance of some kind of narrative strategy. For another, the atypical reception history that commonly attaches to a very small number of figures in this period (notably Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart) tends to distort those patterns of musical behaviour (generic, social, expressive) that the historian nevertheless attempts to discern.

Simon Keefe and his co-authors in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music tackle these problems with authority and gusto. This does not mean that the volume preserves a uniformity of approach, although as Keefe explains in the preface, the prevailing mode is that of generic (and regional) exposition rather than chronological survey, a strategy intended to promote a sense of ‘interacting and mutually stimulating musical cultures and practices’ at the expense of ‘overtly teleological developments’ (p. xvi). The book (like Caesar’s Gaul) is divided into three parts: ‘Music for the church’; ‘Music for the theatre’; ‘Music for the salon and concert room’. These three subdivide into essays on Catholic, Lutheran, and Protestant church music in Europe and North America (Part I); Italian, French, German, and English opera; Music theatre in Spain and opera in Sweden (Part II); Keyboard music from Couperin to early Beethoven; the serenata; the chamber cantata, and song; Handel and English oratorio; the overture-suite, concerto grosso, ripieno concerto, and Harmoniemusik; the solo concerto; the symphony; the string quartet (Part III). Four essays (a ‘prelude’, two ‘interludes’, and a ‘postlude’) respectively address ‘The musical map of Europe c. 1700’; ‘Listening, thinking and writing’; ‘Performance in the eighteenth century’; and ‘Across the divide: currents of musical thought in Europe, c. 1790–1810’. The volume is rounded off with three appendices: a chronology...