Music and War in Europe: From French Revolution to WWI ed. by Étienne Jardin (review)

Music and War in Europe: From French Revolution to WWI features scholarly contributions selected from an international conference organized in 2014 by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini in Lucca in collaboration with the Palazzetto Bru Zane (Centre de musique romantique française) of Venice and the Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique of Montréal. Of the preface and twenty-four chapters that constitute this multilingual volume, four are in French, three in Italian, and three in German, while two-thirds of the contents are in English.

The volume, prefaced by Étienne Jardin, adds to a growing literature on music and war by contributing a broad range of historical and conceptual perspectives through case studies in the long nineteenth century. The chapters are divided into five themes that outline an imaginary trajectory from the front line to the home front, including the sonorous experience of military engagement ("The Sound of War"); the mobilization of music for political ends ("Military and Political Music"); the administration of music's commercial and educational institutions in times of war ("Publishing and Teaching Music during Wartime"); the reproduction and recomposition of war in works for the opera, the opéra-comique, the Singspiel, the orchestra, or the organ ("Echos of War in the Repertoire"); and the reconfiguration of intimate and social life through the combined experience of music, war, loss, and grieving ("Mourning").

Most of the five thematic sections are organized in chronological order, but half of the chapters effectively focus on the period between 1787 and 1816. Case studies also touch upon the 1830s (one chapter), the second half of the nineteenth century (five chapters), and the First World War (five chapters). Morag Josephine Grant brushes a history of military bagpiping in the Highland regiments of the British Army from the middle of the eighteenth century to World War I. Geographically, the volume explicitly centers on Europe, most notably France (nine chapters), but also Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Austrian empire (Vienna and Bohemia), with some mention of aesthetic and commercial exchanges with the United States, particularly regarding John Philip Sousa's marches (Tobias Fasshauer) and wind instruments designed by Václav Červený (Michaela Fremanová).

As Jardin notes in his preface (p. x), Music and War does not explore colonial conflicts, with the exception of the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859–60 (Sara Navarro Lalanda). Maria Birbili's reading of Gaspare Spontini's Fernand Cortez also touches on the imperial dimension of European history. Birbili suggests that the depiction—in a European musical idiom—of "the primarily exotic, sensorially overwhelming, spectacular experience of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán" (p. 323) should be read as "the first attempt of an anthropological approach to colonialism that occurred on the opera stage" (p. 319). The political complexity of Spontini's opera, however, could further be examined in light of eighteenth-century precedents that, Pierpaolo Polzonetti has argued, already offered a case of "exoticism à l'envers" staging "American civilization" and "Spanish savagery" (Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], 109, 114–127). A long tradition of exoticizing the Spanish national character proved crucial to nineteenth-century military interventions against Spain, including that of the United States in Cuba in 1898 (Ruth MacKay, "Lazy, Improvident People": Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006], 236).

Interesting lines of interrogation emerge from the very variety of the case studies. One such strand of thought is anxiety raised by the relationships between war and music regarding aesthetics and function. Authors wrestle with the notions of propaganda, mobilization, and art. In effect, the analyses of occasional, programmatic, and nonprogrammatic music point to identical compositional techniques, among these parody, borrowing, quotation, allusion, contrapuntal writing, and orchestral crescendos. At...