Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna by Nancy November (review)

Cultivating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna by Nancy November is worth serious consideration by individuals who love and think deeply about music as historical and cultural phenomena and by libraries serving such patrons. In a clear, sophisticated, and carefully crafted narrative, the book takes on three paradigms that November argues have distorted our understandings of the genre: the "near-exclusive focus" on Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven; the overlooking of other composers' music—except perhaps for their string quartets—and then judging them by narrow aesthetic ideals; and the presentation of instrumental chamber music as "'au tonomous,' cut off from social situations and meanings" (p. 2). The challenge of responding to such familiar tropes is in confronting audiences and writers who have been more or less accepting of the general narrative for the past century. Her account, which unfolds through eight chapters and an epilogue, involves critiquing wider concepts of "public" and "private" and of Beethoven's place in the history. She also mines period definitions of chamber music to engage readers in a story of "culturally determined" ideals being "radically renegotiated" (p. 5).

These ambitions noted, November launches into chapter 1 and a definition of chamber music in the early nineteenth century with foci on genre, the dominance of the string quartet, and masculine music making. Along the way, she contrasts history's subsequent generic focus on chamber music instrumentation with the performance parameters that originally defined the genre and, in the process, looks at early nineteenth-century visual metaphors for chamber music and addresses the category of class. The chapter concludes with a subsection in which she engages Wilhelm Windelband's "idiographic" approach, which Eduard Hanslick adopted as he worked toward what he called "eine lebendige Geschichte des neueren Wiener Konzertwesens" (a living history of Viennese concert life; p. 20). She freely reformulates—"following Hanslick's methodology in spirit, although not to the letter" (p. 22)—his path into a twenty-first-century approach of "snapshots and statistics" (p. 20), the latter of which she further nuances as "'sampling,' taking snapshots, or cutting cross-sections" (p. 21). This is perhaps the first major example of her creative approach of seeking life in historical constructs from looking at the past through a historicist's lens.

Embarking on her first snapshots in chapter 2, "Celebrating Haydn, Cultivating Opera," November discusses the influence of Haydn, vocal music, and the theater in Beethoven's Vienna, and she surveys the careers of Paul Wranitzky, Emanuel Aloys Förster, and Adalbert Gyrowetz, drawing on her scholarly expertise in these areas. She seizes this opportunity to discuss musical markets, compositional careers, and the generally "outward-looking character" of Viennese chamber music and stresses that ideals such as homogeneity or "purity" were "not yet shaping aesthetics of chamber music" (p. 59).

The third chapter, "Selling String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna," features short subsections containing her analysis of publishing catalogs from the earliest years of the nineteenth century, which provide a nice contrast to the expository detail of the previous chapter. Her chapter conclusion again engages larger themes: the role of publishers in selling "stability" and "sociability"— themes that will reappear later in the book—and an acknowledgment that string quartets in Vienna around 1800 have perhaps been overemphasized. Her energetic dedication to a close historical reading of chamber music through the book makes this latter point hard not to accept even by readers who might have been guilty of a more complacent approach to the genre.

Chapter 4, "Locating String Quartets in Beethoven's Vienna," paints a cultural landscape of early nineteenth-century Viennese quartet "homes," from music making in actual homes and salons to public concerts and the emergence of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. In her sketch, she makes copious reference to primary sources (including those outside of music) and secondary source citations. (For example, she expands on her reference...