The German Moment in English Musical Culture, 1820-1859
The paper will show how a distinct ‘German moment’ crystallised in English musical life in the decades following on from the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This ‘moment’ saw music written by German composers transformed from an obscure cultural import into an integral part of the middle-class cultural experience in English towns and cities. One significant consequence of the swelling esteem for German music was the growing identification of the German lands as the ‘lands of music’.
Yet, as my paper will also show, engagements with the German musical tradition helped to stoke a distinctly English brand of musical nationalism among participants in the country’s musical life. This was because English musical institutions had sponsored the career development of so many significant German composers, from Haydn and Weber to Handel, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven. For many, the fact Beethoven had written his Ninth Symphony and Mendelssohn had written his Elijah for English concert institutions confirmed the supremacy of their country’s commercial-philanthropic approach to the politics of culture. Indeed, by claiming selected German composers as their own, English musical representatives calmed their anxieties about their lack of an internationally distinguished homegrown composer. This cosmopolitan practice of assimilating foreign composers into local canons has often been obscured in nationalist historiographies of nineteenth century music. Rather than taking the ascendancy of the German tradition in England for granted, my paper will ask how these transformations took place. To do this, my paper will foreground some of those mediators – music critics, impresarios, and diaspora communities – who forged closer cultural ties between the worlds of English and German music. In the final analysis, my paper will show how turning to musical life can deepen our understanding of Anglo-German cultural relations in this formative period between the Congress of Vienna and German Unification.
This paper builds upon my recently completed doctoral dissertation in History at the University of Cambridge. It will open by offering an overview of the research project as a whole (research questions, sources, problems, historiography etc.) before presenting one case study on the English reception of Carl Maria von Weber.
(Comment: Kathryn Perry, Leipzig/Vanderbilt)