Is This Song about You? Some Reflections on Music and Nationalism in Germany and Ireland

Is This Song about You? Some Reflections on Music and Nationalism in Germany and IrelandAuthor(s): Harry WhiteSource: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Dec.,2002), pp. 131-147Published by: Croatian Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149773 .

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H. WHITE: MUSIC AND NATIONALISM: GERMANY - IRELAND, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 131-147 131

IS THIS SONG ABOUT YOU? SOME REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC AND NATIONALISM IN GERMANY AND IRELAND'

HARRY WHITE

Department of Music University College Dublin BELFIELD, DUBLIN 4, Ireland E-mail: [email protected]

UDC: 78.03:78.06

Original Scientific Paper Izvorni znanstveni rad Received: September 23, 2002 Primljeno: 13. rujna 2002. Accepted: September 30, 2002 Prihvaweno: 30. rujna 2002.

Abstract - Resum"

The rules or laws which underlie the re-

ception of music can be more narrowly understood by examining the formation of musical ideas under the influence of nationalism. In Eu-

rope, the dominance of German models of musical thought has been traditionally contrasted with the counter-claims of folk music in the

emergence of explicitly 'nationalist' pro- grammes of art music. This contrast can be sub- stantially abandoned in favour of a more radical understanding of how art music in Germany itself exerted a formative influence in the development of nationalist ideology. The works of Richard Wagner were particularly instrumen-

tal in this respect, partly by means of their para- digmatic subordination of all considerations to the will of the individual artwork, and partly by means of their afterlife in Nazi Germany. In Ire- land, by contrast, ideologies of musical nationalism entailed a vehement repudiation of the Eu-

ropean (and ultimately Italo-German) aesthetic of art music because of its association with colonial oppression. The verbally-dominated para- digms of music in Ireland, originating in the ap- propriation of indigenous melodies in the works of Thomas Moore, also served to reinforce formative images of nationalist culture.

I

There are rules about music. >>Killing me softly with his song, writing my life with his words<<2 is one thing, but it is unlikely that anyone sitting through a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin would turn to his partner halfway through the

' This paper originated as the keynote address at a conference on music and nationalism held at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, 8-10 September 1998.

2 The opening lines of a song by Roberta Flack, written in 1972 and recorded in 1973.



132 H. WHITE: MUSIC AND NATIONALISM: GERMANY - IRELAND, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 131-147

first act and whisper: >>But this is amazing! This is my story!<<. Except perhaps in Germany. There are rules, especially where music conditions verbal feeling. They operate silently, but their effect can hardly be mistaken. You do not need to be a Californian millionaire to appreciate the emotional tenor of Carly Simon's You're so vain: (>>You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht<<); even if you don't own a yacht you may still think the song is about you. When Otto Beck tells Imogen Langrishe with Bavarian brutality, >>You are quite right. I am cut off here, there is no music, none whatever<<, the two people at the centre of Aidan Higgins' novel encounter a devastating law of diminishing returns: without the right kind of music, life is meaningless, inert, dead. Langrishe, Go Down (1971) is set in Ireland in the 1930s, and what Otto misses there is not just music but every- thing it means to him, from the darkened ecstasies of Bayreuth to something that need not be identified here. (It would spoil the novel to say what this is).

I would like to pursue this German axis of musical thought in the course of these reflections, but before I do that, it may prove useful to think a little further about these rules or laws which appear to govern the reception and indeed the perception of music. Given the conference from which these remarks originated, my main preoccupation will be with the operation of such laws in respect of nationalism, but also with regard to cultural history, which is a term I introduce here with some circumspection. I am circumspect because I don't want to make the problem more complicated than it already is, but the term >>cultural history<< seems to me the right designation for a process of investigation which assumes that music functions not as a hermetic exception to the general laws of human behaviour but as a nexus or expressive conduit of such laws. Let me add in passing, however, that I subscribe passionately to the autonomy of the musical artwork, even if I can perceive therein the reflection and even the advancement of political and social thought. I myself have never been able to understand the >>either/or<< condition which seems to inhibit the reception of music as aesthetic object and as social process at one and the same time.3 The Horst Wessel Lied and the Irish anthem >>A Na- tion Once Again<< are both musical works (I hesitate, betrayingly, to say art works) which are capable of aesthetic scrutiny even if they function preponderantly as something other than themselves. To this also, - and to these two examples - I shall return.

Insofar as cultural history is concerned, I am not particularly concerned here to rehearse long-held theories of nationalism or indeed to make the case for what has been so evidently a binding force in the reception and development of music in Europe since the French Revolution.4 If nationalism is the venom of our age, if it

3 For a germane consideration of this tendency to respond to musical works either as inherent (and self-standing) objects of aesthetic value or as significations of extra-musical meaning (including political meaning), see Carl DAHLHAUS, Foundations of Music History, translated by J.B. Robinson

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 93ff. 4 Although the literature on political and cultural nationalism is vast, the question of musical

nationalism has been much less cultivated, notwithstanding the publication of studies devoted to specific instances of nationalism in the music of individual nation-states. Thus The New Grove Dictionary of




has brought Europe to the edge of ruin, it has also, manifestly, connoted freedom, self-determination, the preservation of liberty. No-one living in the early twenty- first century could afford to use such terms without some degree of caution (if not irony) but they have historical force and precedent nevertheless. If nationalism has engendered the worst crimes known to humanity, it has also signified precisely the impulse to liberation from the unspeakable (but also precise) meaning of what it is to live under a master race. In Ireland, nationalism has variously signified freedom from colonial oppression, aggressive cultural sectarianism, the redemption of a ruined civilisation, and the murder of children in the name of a united fatherland.5 It is almost embarrassing to say so, but it is a catchword for virtually every shade of political and social behaviour, from the most benign to the most bestial, conducted under the aegis of ethnic or racial integrity.

As a stable signifier, I sometimes think the word >>nationalism<< itself is worse than useless because it conveys such contradictions of meaning. But I promise not to deconstruct it here. It is the Gordian knot, and it remains securely tied. Let us at least agree that we have some useful notion of its protean condition of meaning. And given this consensus, we can remark that it has been a dominant theme in the cultural history of Europe since 1789. Never more so than now, perhaps.

With this theme in mind, I would like to define a little more closely what I mean by laws or rules which govern the reception of music. Leaving nationalism to one side for a moment, we are struck, I think, by the drastic re-orientation in European art music which occurs in the wake of the French Revolution. Beethoven, self-evidently, is the central figure in this change, not only in regard to the emanci- pation of the artist as romantic hero (as against the liveried servant of the Ancien Regime), but also in the radical inversion of musical meaning that stems from the anxiety of his compositional influence. The singlemost outstanding example of this, clearly, is the referential status of instrumental genres (above all the symphony and string quartet) which attains pre-eminent significance in the minds of German composers until the advent of Wagner's music dramas. Indeed, the depth of non-verbal meaning acquired by German instrumental music in the nineteenth century - as against its uncertain if decorative stature for much of the eighteenth - forces an extraordinary crisis of meaning itself in European music, most nota-

Music and Musicians (1980) does not include an entry on nationalism, an omission handsomely re- deemed by Richard Taruskin's magisterial consideration of nationalism as a musical phenomenon in the second edition. See Richard TARUSKIN, Nationalism, in Stanley Sadie (editor), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd Edition (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol.17, 689-706. See also Harry White and Michael Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideol- ogy of European Musical Culture 1800-1945 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), including essays by David Cooper, Jeremy Dibble, Stephen Downes, Annegret Fauser, Marina Frolova-Walker, Daniel Grimley, StAle Kleiberg, Michael Murphy, John Rosselli, Joe Ryan, Steve Sweeney-Turner, Robert Vilain and Harry White on musical nationalism in Hungary, Britain, Poland (1), France, Russia, Denmark, Nor- way, Poland (2), Italy, Ireland (1), Scotland, Germany and Ireland (2) respectively. I Varieties of Irish nationalism have also attracted a vast bibliography: for a review of much of this material, see Roy FOSTER, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (Middlesex: Harmondsworth, 1988), especially Foster's >>Bibliographical Essay<<.




bly as between the performative, communicable intelligibility of opera and the

resolutely non-verbal meaning of chamber music. Of course it is true to add that

>>programme music< entails a partial solution to this crisis, but it is not until Wagner, I think, that German music overcomes what is a psychic split between the imma- nence of abstract musical discourse (with its urgent address upon the emotional and romantic sensibility) and the explicit, verbal address of opera. Carl Dahlhaus never tired of insisting upon this duality (as between Rossini and Beethoven) because he understood the development of European music in the nineteenth cen-

tury as a bifurcated phenomenon, which on one side represented a continued advocation of the Italo-French pre-eminence of dramma per musica and on the other a kinetic development of sounding form.6 It is, in a phrase, this opposition between vocal melody and instrumental motive which gives to German music in

particular its plural genius. Certain genres, of course, easily defeat this argument, and the Lied is one of

them. It is here that the melodic and the motivic most fruitfully intersect, and it is here that the romantic sensibility of German poetry - at its most intimate and least histrionic - finds a context which is proverbially domestic. Is there a latent

hysteria in the sheer exposure of feeling which this genre achieves, for example, in Schumann's hands? Is there any useful relationship between the ineffable tender- ness and intimacy of Schumann's Eichendorff and Heine settings and the explicit barbarism of marching songs written under the spell of National Socialism, which nevertheless partake of the same compulsive genius for the alignment of tone and word? 'Zwei Seelen in einem Brust' is the cautious answer to such questions, but it is an insufficient one. It was Lukacs (as cited by George Steiner) who insisted that

every artist was responsible to the end of time for the use made of his music.7 Without doubt, an hysterical, an impossible imperative, but one which draws attention to the inherently moral problematic which attaches to all music, significant or otherwise. Only a madman would blame Schumann for the Horst Wessel Lied, but I'm not sure what to make of those who wept over Beethoven and Rilke in the

morning and went about their business in the Death Camps in the afternoon." And which of us could deny that he has been deaf to the cry in the street even as he remains alive to the anguish in the poem or the sonata or to Elsa's question in

Lohengrin? >>Nie sollst Du mich befragen<: you must never ask me, the hero of that

opera enjoins his bride. You must never look back, only forward. But the historian - for our purposes the music historian - looks back. And

when he does, he sees not just music under the extreme duress of a collective insanity

6 Dahlhaus voices this contrast between Italian and German (and thereby vocal and instrumental) music as a primary theme in his reading of music history. See Carl DAHLHAUS, Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson (California: University of California Press, 1989), passim.

7 See George STEINER, Language and Silence (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 73. 1 These remarks deliberately paraphrase the formulations of George Steiner, whose preoccupa-

tion with the radical split between >>civilised< cultural engagement and the brutal pursuit of barbarism

permeates his writings, notably in Language and Silence, which collects many of the essays in which Steiner first examined this phenomenon. (See especially 'The Hollow Miracle' from that collection).




- as in the case of National Socialism - but a fundamental relationship between the rise of nation states and the development of music as an expression of power.

In certain instances, of course, this relationship is trivial. I don't myself have any difficulty with the opinion that Carmina Burana is unadulterated, fascist trash, even if it is happily sung today without this being a consideration in Munich or London or anywhere else in the world. That Orff was a Munich composer who came to prominence under the Nazis or even that his achievement in The New Grove is summarised as a >>musical theatre of impressive, if brutish force,<c may prompt one to consider whether this relationship (between music and power) is the most distinctive and important feature of Orff's achievement.' For myself, I don't know and I don't care. But I do care about Wagner, and it is a matter of concern to me whether or not his own anti-Semitism and the imperishable association between his works and fascist cruelty have anything to say about Lohengrin as an autonomous work of art and as an outgrowth of German nationalism in the nineteenth century. Hitler's favourite opera (as it is mine)'" is not about German nationalism: if anything, it has to do with the incompatibility between >,the absolute artist< and human need; nor, as Carl Dahlhaus (once again) points out, need we necessarily regard the closing exhortations at the end of Die Meistersinger as chauvinist and bellicose." Nevertheless, Lohengrin resonates with the imperative ascendancy of German redemption: the opera is memorable for its choral inter- ventions in this mode which provide such a powerful background to the doomed relationship between Elsa and Lohengrin and the malevolent self-interest which hastens its end. And at the end, the aesthetic force of resolution - in the transfor- mation of the swan - is at the least political and, indeed, explicitly racial. Gottfried will guide the German people to a new and better destiny (the word which Lohengrin uses to describe Gottfried is Fuihrer) .

Let us suppose, as Dahlhaus does, that Wagner was politically naive.12 He wrote Lohengrin in exile, having fled Germany after the Dresden Uprising and in fear of his life. Dahlhaus dismisses his politics as amateurish, as an essentially second-hand party to revolution: if Wagner fomented anarchy and rebellion, it was to create a society in which the realisation of a total art work might be attained in liberation from the dross of Italian opera and the harlotry of the French version (>>a coquette with a false smile<).'3 Does this naiveted exempt the works them-

'See Hans-Peter KRELLMANN and John HORTON, Orff, Carl, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 13, 707-710. The phrase >,,brutish force<< is used by Krellman on page 707.

"0 See Ian KERSHAW, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 21-2. " See Carl DAHLHAUS, Wagner (1) Richard, in Stanley Sadie, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of

Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 20, 134. 12 DAHLHAUS, Wagner, (1) Richard, 117: >>Political convictions meant nothing to Wagner except

in relation to the idea of musical drama, the measure of all things for him.<<

,3 See DAHLHAUS, Wagner, (1) Richard, 115ff. Dahlhaus is principally concerned to emphasise that the hegemony of Wagner's artistic vision - the subordination of all considerations in favour of the art work - is effectively a projected supervention of German over Italian and French models of operatic discourse.




selves from their monumental insistence on the integrity and supremacy of Ger- man art, a supremacy about which Wagner himself was explicit? This question would be irrelevant, of course, were it not for the sheer scale and genius of Wagner's achievement. But given Wagner's supreme resolution of that crisis between word and tone, foreshadowed in his ambition to restore to German opera what Beethoven had achieved in the symphony, it is a question worth asking. And answering.

Wagner's politics do of course matter. But the question gains urgency because the magnitude of his musical imagination cannot be separated from the context which gave it life and direction. How otherwise can one explain Wagner's preoccupation with German myth, and his effort to recreate in musical and theatrical terms a Germanic integrity which might supervene the petty and fragmented state of that country for much of his lifetime? The demented excess of his Munich pa- tron - Ludwig of Bavaria - ironically counterpoints this effort, insofar as Wagner needed Ludwig's generosity (at what cost, one wonders to the well-being of the Bavarian state itself?) in order to realise his vision of a redemptive, pan-German art. No consideration, it seems, - financial, moral, personal - inhibited this ambition. The imperative nature of Wagner's achievement would have been incon- ceivable in a country less given to the central cultivation of music, as Germany had been for centuries, but by the same token, so also would its realisation. It is not simply that Wagner's aesthetic of German art transcended the boundaries of musical discourse: it is that the works themselves came to define German sensibility as the guarantor of racial integrity. It is no accident that Thomas Mann should have understood Wagner to be the formative example of German art in the twen- tieth century. When Mann came to publish Doktor Faustus in 1949, it was music rather than literature which provided the sovereign exemplar. If Adrian Leverkiihn personifies the German catastrophe, it is music which both intimates and brings about this collapse. Mann chose the invention of serialism as his metaphor for the genius and corruption of total power, but of course it is Wagner and not Schoenberg who stands behind the novel's sweeping assumptions about the prophetic nature of music. There is, moreover, a continuity of cultural discourse between two such radically different but profoundly German sensibilities. The messianic compul- sion that animates Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron not only takes its cue from Parsifal in particular but from the Wagnerian precedent in general. And like Lohengrin, Mann's book is concerned with the incompatibility between artistic vision and human need. The violent ascendancy of one over the other hovers on the brink of madness, as Mann explicitly argues. And where >>artistic vision<< of this intensity informs a similarly intense political vision, then history is Dachau.'4

If there is a law governing the relationship between music and nationalism, and if the former functions as an expression of the latter, then this relationship is not superficially specific to anthems and the like, but pervasive, as in the case I have been discussing here. Nevertheless: the emotional power of national anthems

4 See Mary A. CICORA, Wagner Parody in Doktor Faustus, The Germanic Review LXIII, 3 (Summer 1988), 133-39, for a scrutiny of the influence of Parsifal on Mann's novel.




is unmistakable, and it is the music in such cases which summons the sense of place and history which these invariably convey. Anthems encode security, attain- ment and loyalty. They reach deeply into the psyche and they reassure it. They confer that most vital of human graces which is a sense of belonging and homeland.'5

It would be nonsense to say that Wagner's operas and music dramas were in

any sense a blueprint for Hitler's thousand-year Reich, even if the prostitution of that music within the Reich lay within easy reach and seemed natural and inevita- ble to Hitler himself (to say nothing of the enthusiastic complicities which greeted him at Bayreuth). But it is not nonsense, I would argue, to suggest that the notion of a >total artwork< - especially where it so unmistakably embraces racial destiny - eerily prefigures the totalitarian madness of Herr Hitler and his eager acolytes. Instead of turning away in >>nauseated disbelief<< (George Steiner), the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Beethoven, and indeed of Wagner himself, gave massive echo to the man's demonic vision of das Herrenvolk. To suggest, as some have done, that music was merely corralled by these brutal circumstances, that it had no active part to play in the nightmare, is fatally to underestimate the power of music itself.'b If music is >the supreme mystery in the science of man<< some other explanation is needed. The music itself - and that congeries of political, social and cultural circumstances which produces it - demands an explanation. Germany's pre-eminence in the development of art music in the nineteenth century cannot arbitrarily be divorced from the political and social context which permitted such a development to take place. Moreover, the relationship between music and cultural history and nationalism - to take all three elements together for a moment - is scarcely pitched at a more intense level of engagement than in Germany in the period 1870-1940.17 And the remarkable thing about this engagement is that it

1" See Malcolm BOYD, National Anthems, in Stanley Sadie (Ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 17, 654ff. Boyd remarks that >>The

power of a national anthem to strengthen a nation's resolve was demonstrated during World War II when the BBC's weekly broadcasts from London of the anthems of the Allied Powers attracted an audience of millions throughout Europe<< (654).

'6 I witnessed a recent instance of such an underestimation at the first Wagner conference to be held in Ireland, which took place at the University of Limerick, 8-10 August 2002. The Germanist and Wagner authority Dieter Borchmeyer, responding to a suggestion from the floor that there might be a parallel between Yeats's influence as a poet on subsequent Irish History (memorialised in Yeats's query, ,>Did that poem of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?<<) and Wagner's presence in German affairs long after his death, emphatically ruled out any possibility that The Ring was concerned with the regeneration of Germany as a political entity. This exclusion, it must be recorded, was met with aston- ishment in Limerick.

17 In this connection, it is useful to refer again to Richard Taruskin's account of nationalism and music in The New Grove [2nd Edition]. In a private communication with the author of this paper, Profes- sor Taruskin has confirmed that his decision not to include a direct consideration of music and nationalism during the Third Reich in his article was a strategic omission designed to foreground instead the development of a strong, pan-German sense of musical nationalism during the nineteenth century. Taruskin imputes to Wagner's music and writings a central role in this development and declares Der Ring des Nibelungen to be Wagner's >most overtly racialist work, committed as it was to the principle of blood-purity as precondition for heroic deeds.< He goes on to identify Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg as




disdains almost completely the ethnomusical compound which thereafter is taken to be a sine-qua-non of musical nationalism elsewhere in Europe. I refer, self-evidently, to folk music.

II

Thus far I have tried to argue two things: the first is that there are laws or rules of reception underlying the relationship between music and nationalism as this is understood in cultural history; the second is that German musical nationalism con- tradicts the commonplace understanding of musical nationalism as a species of liberation from the colonial model."8 I have used the example of Wagner to illus- trate that the reception and abuse of his music under National Socialism was facili- tated by Wagner's own conviction that the social function of music, indeed society itself, must be subordinated to the dictates of a total art work. The exposition and realisation of that art work remained for him the goal of social organisation. Ludwig, it is true, worked hard at sustaining that illusion, but it was Wagner who gave it energy and direction. And without the long tradition of music as a central intelligencer of artistic meditation in Germany, such a vision would have been impossible to realise. The notorious afterlife of Wagner's operas in Nazi Germany is an extreme example of music under the duress of nationalism, but the works themselves are no less committed to the integrity of German myth and art. Of course, something similar might be said about the poetry of Yeats, whose strange annexation of Gaelic myth and misconstrual of Ascendancy thought likewise insisted upon stemming the >>filthy modern tide< of bourgeois mercantilism. And if Wagner's fascism is debatable, Yeats's is not."9

The more commonplace understanding of musical nationalism, of course, is as a reaction to the hegemony of German musical thought. Even within the folds of that thought, there was an awareness of a tradition that stood beyond it: Barry Cooper strikingly remarks that 'Beethoven composed more folksong settings than

a work which proclaims the >>emancipatory message<< of probity in German art. (See TARUSKIN, Na- tionalism, 695). Pace Curt von Westernhagen's insistence that Das Judenthum in der Musik is merely an attack on Meyerbeer rather than an anti-Semitic tract [ See Curt von WESTERNHAGEN, et.al., Wagner (1) Richard, section 6: Writings, in Stanley Sadie, (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), 20, 111], Taruskin reads Das Judenthum in der Musik as an explicit endorsement of racist ideology: >>...[Wagner] denied Mendelssohn, or any Jew, the ability to rise above mere glib, social articulacy and achieve the >>expression of an unsayable content<< - in other words, the defining criterion of absolute music for which Germans alone possessed the necessary racial (implying moral) endowment.<( (TARUSKIN, Nationalism, 694).

18 Taruskin points out that the dominance of the German model entailed a specific form (or forms) of reception for non-German composers (Tchaikovsky and Chopin, for example) within the >mainstream" tradition itself. All I would add here is that notwithstanding the >>ethnic(( substance of German nationalism (as in the recourse to myth), the distinguishing feature of certain other European musical nationalisms is a recourse to actual folk melody. This is notably true of Ireland.

1 On Yeats see Seamus DEANE, Celtic Revivals (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), especially >The

Literary Myths of the Revival< [28-38] and >Yeats and the Idea of Revolution< [38-51]




any other genre, and... more of them are Irish than any other nationality.'20 In terms of the German tradition, nevertheless, this fact is strictly meaningless. It is akin to pointing out that Johann Sebastian Bach had four brothers, all of them named Johann. So he had. So what? The same might be said of Beethoven's folksong settings.21 The opportunism and musicality of Beethoven's response to Irish folksong does not alter in any significant way the stature of the Waldstein sonata or anything else for that matter in Beethoven's work. Awareness is one thing (in this case, the characteristic German awareness of the exotic - not a detrimental signification - which has its literary origins in Herder), but relevance is quite another. The rise of the ethnomusical in Europe as a signification of musical nationalism has precious little to do with Beethoven or any other German composer. Except, perhaps, in one magisterial respect: it was the confluence of the German art tradition and indigenous musical structures which gave to European musical nationalism a sense of itself. But this sense was crucially removed from direct political engagement. If Chopin's piano music can be read in part as a narrative of Polish nationalism (which it was and is), its stature nevertheless as the most significant development of pianism after Beethoven (with the possible exception of Liszt) is not diminished or compromised by that fact. Indeed, it is the cross-fertilization of the indigenous and the modernist in Chopin which allows his music to speak unmistakably of Poland while participating at the leading edge of the art music tradition.22 Like- wise with Dvorik and even (or especially) with Bart6k. In each case, Polish, Czech and Hungarian, the distinctive feature by which the ethnomusical more or less modifies the tradition of central European (and specifically German) techniques does not itself unhinge or separate the music from the concept of an art aesthetic. To essay a comparison in literature: the irreducibly Irish nature of Joyce's prose does not detract in the smallest degree from its position at the vanguard of Euro- pean literature in first two decades of the last century. On the contrary: it is Joyce's admixture of Irish subject matter and his command of the English language which confirms his European mastery. Thus when we speak of nationalism in European literature or music, we speak of a confluence of central and peripheral traditions which nevertheless achieves direct and untroubled continuity with the central tradition itself.23 Of course from within that tradition, what mattered was the extent to which assimilation took place. Schumann's famous endorsement of Chopin in 1836 includes the following remarkable assertion: >>The minor interest attaching to the

2 See Barry COOPER, Beethoven's Folksong Settings as Sources of Irish Folk Music, in Patrick F. Devine and Harry White, eds., The Maynooth International Musicological Conference, 1995. Selected Pro- ceedings, Part Two (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 65-81; 65.

21 I mean this criticism only in relation to Beethoven's (opportunistic) interest in the exotic as a typical manifestation of German romanticism and not in relation to Barry Cooper's immensely valu- able scrutiny of this repertoire. 1 See Zofia CHECHLINSKA, Chopin Reception in Nineteenth-Century Poland, in Jim Samson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Chopin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 206-21.

" This reading differs considerably from Richard Taruskin's argument that such composers could only enter the canon of German masterworks by acknowledging their >ethnic<< origins. See TARUSKIN, Nationalism, 699-700.




patch of earth on which he was born was destined to be sacrificed to the universal, and true enough, his recent works have shed their excessively specific Sarmatic physiognomy<<24. I don't think Schumann was being deliberately chauvinistic about Chopin's Polish origins: it's just that he took for granted the central significance of the art tradition itself as one which supervened all considerations of national or local import. For Schumann, as an explicit ideologue of the art music tradition (and once again, the German tradition in particular), what mattered in Chopin's music was the extent to which it confirmed the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. And of course, Schumann was right: the genius of the art music tradition, confirmed again and again throughout the nineteenth century, was its ability to assimilate and confirm independent species of musical imagination, nationalist or otherwise. In simplistic terms, the fundamental law which attaches to this assimilation is that the quality of the music takes precedence over the source of its inspiration.

It is this question of precedence - by which central European genres (opera, the symphony, the string quartet and so on) were renewed and sustained in Bohe- mia, in Poland, in Hungary - which is crucial. And the pre-eminence of purely musical concerns (including musical infrastructures) over questions of national identity entailed an aesthetic coherence which guaranteed to DvoiAk's chamber music, for example, precisely that degree of continuous reception in Germany which Brahms had secured from the precedent of Beethoven. It is only where the nationalistic - the extra-musical - took precedence over the musical, that the process of assimilation broke down. As it did in Ireland.

III

I am not exclusively concerned with Ireland in this address, although the condition of art music in this strange country undoubtedly has something to say about the relationship between music and nationalism at large. In Ireland's case, as I have argued elsewhere, this relationship is especially vexed and intimate, not least because in Ireland it seems that music stimulates nationalism, rather than the other way around. The situation is of course more complex than that simple formula allows, but all I would add here is that the cultivation of music primarily for something other than its own sake is a habit of mind that takes firm hold in Ireland at latest by the middle of the nineteenth century.25

24 Cited in DAHLHAUS, Nineteenth-Century Music, 37, from a review by Schumann published in 1836.

I For a more detailed consideration of this question of music as a direct source of nationalist debate, see Harry WHITE, The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970 (Cork: Cork University Press and Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1998), 36-71. See also Harry WHITE, The Preservation of Irish Music and Irish Cultural History, IRASM 27/2 (1996), 123-138. The key work on this subject is Joseph Ryan, Nationalism and Music in Ireland (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Na- tional University of Ireland, Maynooth, 1991).




>>Why not let classical music die,< asks Kofi Agawu, >>and with it the oppressive cultural system that has supported it for decades?<<26 The new musicology is not afraid to ask anything, although the ironic posture of Agawu's query betrays the real difficulty for the historian of musical culture, namely, the extent to which we distinguish between history then and music now. It is admittedly very difficult to separate the aesthetic impact of music from its force as an historical process located in time and produced in circumstances that we can barely grasp, let alone wholly comprehend. If the historian were to confine himself, for example, to the contemporaneous reception of music in Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century, then Hasse and Telemann would dominate his attention to the extent that Bach would become a curious footnote (except of course as a virtuoso organist and obstinate Kapellmeister of the middle rank). But it turns out that cultural history - and in particular the history of music - is a matter of aesthetic considerations after all, so that the process by which the obstinate Kapellmeister becomes the author of the St Matthew Passion (thanks to Mendelssohn) is a process which signifies not only the reception of Bach's music in 1829 but the retrieval of what was there in the first place: and to be explicit, what was there is an autonomous musical work of consummate power, notwithstanding the circumstances by which it was first created and then consigned to oblivion.

It is this relationship between the musical work - autonomous or otherwise - and the extra-musical circumstances which determine its meaning or reception at a given point in time which lies at the heart of music history as a species of cultural history. And sometimes, when this relationship becomes badly distorted, the >>oppressive culture which supports the art work, as in Kofi Agawu's formu- lation, dominates the perception of the art work to the extent that we begin to talk about letting it die. In another sphere of cultural history, this distorted relationship may be summarised in Adorno's famous dictum, >>no more poetry after Auschwitz<<27. Now there are at least three issues which derive from so stringently moral a reading of cultural history. The first is, that on the contrary, the instinct for art manifestly survives even the most bestial circumstances in which the human condition finds itself. The second is that not everyone is agreed on the moral di- mension of art which is implicit in Adorno's declaration (and I doubt if anyone would have believed him had he said 'no more music after Auschwitz'); and the third is that when people become exercised over the relationship between art and the context in which it is produced (or reproduced), they automatically and justifi- ably assume that art in this sense is the provenance of the very few sustained at the expense of the very many.

But are these issues germane to cultural history, however much we might want them to be? To answer that question, I would like to gloss a story which

26 Kofi AGAWU, review of Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (1995), in: Music and Letters 78:1 (Ferbruary, 1997), 127-9; 129.

27 The remark is cited in Noten zur Literatur III, in: Theodor ADORNO, Gesammelte Schriften, Band II, (Suhrkamp, 2. Auflage 1984), 422.




George Steiner has told many times, and is one which he included in a BBC Proms Lecture broadcast in August 1998.28 Steiner recounts that one evening in 1944 the German pianist Walter Gieseking was giving a recital in Munich which featured Books I and II of Debussy's Images. During the recital, while Gieseking was play- ing, the screaming trainloads of Jewish prisoners en route to Dachau - just a few kilometres away - could be heard in the concert hall. Steiner says that he could just about understand why everyone went on as if nothing had happened (including Gieseking himself) but he cannot understand why or how the music could continue to have meaning in the face of such clearly audible torment. His imagination baulks at the disfunction between Debussy's music and the atrocious indiffer- ence which gave it life that evening.

Now my gloss is this: let us suppose that Gieseking had been indisposed: that instead of attending upon his mastery of French pianistic nuance, the audience was hollering (or simply listening to) the Horst Wessel Lied.

Had that been the case, there would have been music in the hall and screaming outside. But there would have been no story. Because underlying Steiner's distress is the assumption that in Debussy's Images there inheres a sacral presence which justifies the privileged communion of people who understand it. The Horst Wessel Lied by comparison is a tawdry admixture of Gemiitlichkeit, sentimentality and violence which belongs to the thronging cadres of Nazism. It is the music of fascistic thuggery at its worst, but it is music nevertheless.

To maintain that there is a fundamental difference between the Horst Wessel Lied and Book II of Debussy's Images is not to gainsay the contribution of circum- stance. It is just to give music its due, which is another way of acknowledging that however much we want to explain away the immanent power of music, the thing itself - always vulnerable to the perceptions of those who hear it - acquires meaning and confers it at one and the same time.

Something can only be debased if it is not debased to begin with. You cannot debase the Horst Wessel Lied: that is one difference between it and Debussy's piano music. Nevertheless, however great the gulf between a Nazi marching song and the piano works of French impressionism, both belong to the phenomenon which we recognize as music. And in both, consequently, there lies a problematic relationship between expression and reception. Hence Steiner's concern.

It is with this relationship that I would like to close: the rules of reception (the reception of music in cultural history) have in general been my theme in this paper and this last rule seems to me the most fundamental. In certain circumstances, the relationship between expression and reception could not be easier to understand, which is why there are actual laws (i.e. legal strictures) to prevent, for example, the performance of the Horst Wessel Lied in Germany today. The explicit arousal to

" I have not been able to trace a published version of this lecture, but the anecdote itself is summarised in Steiner's lecture at the University of Edinburgh given to mark the opening of the Edinburgh Festival in 1996. The University of Edinburgh website maintains the lecture on line as follows: http:// www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/trans/steiner/




hatred which the song conveys is musical, cultural, verbal and - historically speaking - nationalistic. You do not need to be Jewish to understand what the song represents, nor do you need to know a word of German. The viral hatred of the music - not as an objective force, but as a vital adjunct to the text - is sufficient. And indeed, the semantics of that hatred are not merely verbal: this is the point I am trying to make. The purely musical elements of the song draw upon a complex web of conventions which are quickly understood but very difficult to describe. I will not try to describe them here, but I will say that the melodic-harmonic-rhyth- mic synthesis of which the song is made acted as a powerful signifier for emotional currents that attained to national status for twelve years in Germany. You do not have to be Carly Simon to feel the impact of You're so vain. The same applies to Nazi marching songs and to this one in particular. And to understand is not to endorse.

If the Horst Wessel Lied represents a most extreme example of a clear relationship between expression and reception in the history of musical nationalism, it nevertheless belongs to that spectrum of feeling which is represented by the national anthem as a sub-genre of European music in particular. However debased its appeal, the fact remains that the song must take its place in the history of anthems and thereby in the history of music and nationalism. It partook - however perversely - of that aspiration to nationhood which has stimulated musical re- sponses across Europe since the French Revolution. It reached with tragic exacti- tude into that psychic need for belonging and homeland to which music gives utterance. And in that respect it had its roots not in the wet cigar ash and brutal Oktoberfest of a Munich beerhall but much further back than that, in the movement known in Germany as Junges Deutschland and in Italy as Giovine Italia and in Ireland as Young Ireland. It had its roots in nineteenth-century concepts of nationhood.

I mention Young Ireland here because all the time I have been writing about the Horst Wessel Lied, I have been thinking not just of Germany but of Ireland. I have been thinking about >the little sixpenny book<< of ballad-like songs published here in 1843 entitled The Spirit of the Nation and of the Thomas Davis song A Nation Once Again in particular.29 A Nation Once Again is not (thank God) Ireland's answer to The Horst Wessel Lied, but the sentiments it espouses are not unrelated to those

9 On The Spirit of the Nation, see Georges-Denis ZIMMERMAN, Songs of Irish Rebellion: Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs 1780-1900 (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1967), 75-86. Zimmerman states that some fifty editions were published between 1845 and 1877 and that the fifty-ninth and last edition appeared in 1934. The 1845 edition features simple piano accompaniments to the airs: although the texts of many of the songs were by Davis who >>intended to supersede the miserable street ballads< (Davis in The Nation newspaper, 14 December 1844), the originator and arranger of the actual melodies - some of which were based on traditional tunes - remain unclear. Thomas Davis (1814-1845) was a principal agent in the Young Ireland movement and active in the campaign to repeal the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. He regarded both the Irish language and the corpus of traditional melody as essential constituents of Irish nationhood and identity and agitated for their revival. For a comprehensive account of Davis, see Richard DAVIS, The Young Ireland Movement (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan and Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1987/8).




feelings which National Socialism so brutally exploited." The sentiments of heroic self-determination which the Irish song evinces - together with the integrity of sectarian culture which bound Young Ireland together - have become an idee fixe in Irish nationalism almost up to the present day. But that is another story. My point in adverting to A Nation Once Again is that even in Ireland - and I cannot think of a European country with a more radically different musical history to that of Germany - the relationship between music and nationalism has been notably intimate.31 Indeed especially so in Ireland, where the subservience of music to verbal culture stands in ironic contrast to the German history of musical ideas which I have touched upon here.32 And yet even in Ireland, those laws of expression and reception, of aesthetic understanding and communal function which so habitually define the relationship between music and feeling - nationalist or otherwise - demand to be understood.

If there is a history of feeling and sensibility which can be traced from the German Romantic Lied to the debased coinage of the Horst Wessel Lied, there is no such history of feeling available in the annals of Irish music.33 But nor is there that central engagement with music which augurs both good and ill in the history of German thought. Instead, there is an abrupt discontinuity in Irish musical affairs which prohibits any useful comparison with the development of art music in Eu- rope. This is not intended as a provocation, but as a clarification. The strange history of music in Ireland, entrapped on one side by its servitude to a politically- motivated reading of ethnic culture as a nationalist ideal and on the other side by an ideology of colonial oppression and thereby repudiation of the European aesthetic, entails a different model of thought to the one which applies to music in central Europe." Nevertheless, it is not pushing things too far to suggest that A

3" The first verse of Davis's ballad reads: When boyhood's fire was in my blood/I read of ancient freemen/ For Greece and Rome who bravely stood/ Three hundred men and three men/ And then I prayed I might yet see/ Our fetters rent in twain/ And Ireland long a province be/ A nation once again.

- As a further point of comparison between it and the Horst Wessel Lied, it is salutary to recognize here that A Nation Once Again often functioned as a substitute or companion to the National Anthem of the Republic of Ireland, especially on public holidays in celebration of political independence or before national sporting fixtures, although its public performance has gradually waned during the past three decades of crisis in Northern Ireland.

31 Joseph RYAN, Nationalism and Music in Ireland, formulates this problem thus: >>[this dissertation] suggests that nationalism, that most protean of entities, has exercised a crucial influence on music, far greater than hitherto allowed, and has been responsible for its tardiness in responding to the cultural eclosion of the late nineteenth century<< (v).

32 See WHITE, The Keeper's Recital, 94-123 and 151-160 for an analysis of this subordination of music to verbal culture in Ireland.

- The use of popular melodies and occasionally of popular operatic repertoire in the service of aggressive cultural and political nationalism is, however, a feature of commercial balladry in contem- porary Ireland. >>Song of Liberty<, written and recorded by The Wolfe Tones c.1976, is an arrrangement of Verdi's >>Va, pensiero<< which begins: >>Stand beside me, and fight for old Ireland<.

"I Thomas Davis's hostility to the European art tradition of his own day ('scented, paltry things from Italy') is part of a wider repudiation of art music which gained ground throughout the nineteenth century with the corresponding increase of sectarian (nationalist) culture in Ireland and the equation of >>classical"< music with colonial oppression. I have examined this phenomenon at length in The Keeper's Recital.




Nation Once Again, as with almost all of the music produced by Young Ireland, takes its cue from the precedent of Thomas Moore and his Irish Melodies, which in turn make some address upon music and poetry as equal partners in the advocation of nationalist sentiment.35 Thomas Davis, who wrote A Nation Once Again, explicitly acknowledged his debt to Moore, even if Davis's own preoccupation was with the fostering of an >Irish-like< music which would specifically exclude any due consideration of music itself other than as an intelligencer of romanticised political feeling. Moore's Melodies are not the Irish equivalent of the German Lied, but they are closer to this genre than many people would allow. They are badly in need of re- appraisal, and not simply as precursors of Young Ireland balladry. The very history of their reception in Ireland, indeed, is emblematic of what happened to music in this country: broadly speaking, we find Moore condemned as a confectioner of Irish sentiment for the English drawing room or embraced as a covert advocate of political independence." And we must take this reception history seriously: it explains a good deal of the dislocated presence of music in Ireland for the better part of two centuries. There are no song cycles in the wake of Moore's collections. The Melodies, instead, have become an aide-memoire to national sentiment, as they are in the fic- tion of James Joyce. The impoverished condition of art music in a verbally-dominated culture is all the more apparent. But I would argue that the reception of Moore as national bard does have something to say not only about the perception of art music in Ireland in the nineteenth century but also about the communicative and aesthetic impact of the settings themselves.

This impact had little enough to do with music per se but rather with the idea of music, its symbolic intelligence and suggestiveness. And in that distinction, between music as a central expression of national culture and music as a symbol of nationalism, lies the vital difference between music in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. Between music in Ireland and music in Germany, for example. If the Horst Wessel Lied is finally the debased coinage of a long and central tradition of art music, perpetrated by a criminal state which actively engaged and abused the tradition itself, no such progress is discernible in Irish musical affairs. Rather it is the case that the symbolic force of music as an agent of nationalist discourse supervened any real concern with the thing itself, and confirmed the contingency of music as a symbolic presence in the regeneration of Gaelic culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

A Nation Once Again is about (Young) Ireland, just as the Horst Wessel Lied is about (Nazi) Germany, but the plenitude of German musical experience and the

31 Thomas Moore (1799-1852). Irish poet, novelist and musician. His Irish Melodies, published between 1810 and 1834, consolidated the equivalent status of word and tone in Irish cultural discourse and exerted immense influence in the subsequent perception of music in Ireland as a (vital) enabler of verbal expression. See WHITE, The Keeper's Recital, 36-52.

1 See Terry EAGLETON, The Masochism of Thomas Moore, in Crazy John and the Bishop (Cork: Cork University Press and Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 140-158 and Harry WHITE, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Cultural Stasis of Music in Ireland, in White and Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism, 257-71; especially 261-8.




comparatively impoverished condition of music in Ireland during the nineteenth century must inform any attempt to compare these two signifiers of musical nationalism. The repudiation of any form of art music, German or otherwise, by ideologues of nationalist culture in Ireland can and should be sharply distinguished from the degraded status of music as the mouthpiece of a criminal state in Ger-

many between 1933 and 1945. Notwithstanding the roots of that degradation, which lie partly in the racism of nineteenth-century German musical thought (to which

Wagner's Das Judenthum in der Musik so decisively contributes), the striking difference between Germany and Ireland in this respect is as between a cultural matrix with music at the core and a verbally-dominated cultural matrix with the idea of music as a symbolic intelligence underpinning it. In Ireland, music as an agent of nationalist discourse was dispensable or functional or symbolic. In Germany, it was essential. Irish nationalists in the late nineteenth-century urged the disavowal of any kind of art music because the latter posed a threat to the integrity of a sectarian culture which they sought to promote. In political terms, this threat was per- ceived as the corrupting influence of a colonial culture of oppression.37

At the last, these differences in musical nationalism can be summarised, perhaps, as the fundamental differences between the coloniser and the colonised. But the rules about musical reception - if these differences are to be seriously enter- tained - do require perhaps more discrimination than they have hitherto received. And there can be little doubt any longer that the presence or absence of a central tradition of art music (however chauvinistic its appeal) determines the significance of any word-tone synthesis expressly intent upon the expression of nationalist ide-

ology.

37 See Douglas HYDE, The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland (1892), republished in BreandAn 0 Conaire (ed.): Douglas Hyde: Language, Lore and Lyrics (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1986), 153-70.



H. WHITE: MUSIC AND NATIONALISM: GERMANY IRELAND, IRASM 33 (2002) 2, 131 147 147

Safetak

JE LI OVA PJESMA O TEBI? NEKA RAZMIgLJANJA O GLAZBI I NACIONALIZMU

U NJEMAtKOJ I IRSKOJ

Temeljni odnos izmedu uspona nacionalnih drzava u Europi i razvitka glazbe kao izraza politicke moci moze se raspoznati u propisanim napisima, operama i glazbenim dramama Richarda Wagnera. Tim odnosom odredena su neka pravila koja se cini da stoje u pozadini primalastva glazbe u Europi od Francuske revolucije, ali su isto tako odredena i kulturnom povijescu glazbe s obzirom na knjizevnost i druge oblike umjetnosti.

U ovom se clanku stavljaju u opreku utjecaj nacionalisticke ideologije na primalastvo Wagnerove glazbe u Njemackoj i prihvacanje i/ili odbijanje umjetnicke glazbe u Irskoj s namjerom da se ispitaju neke pretpostavke o tome kako se glazbu prima i razumijeva kao esteticku pojavu u formiranju nacionalnog identiteta. Psihicki raskol u njemackoj glazbenoj imaginaciji izmedu verbalnih modaliteta glazbenog diskursa i apstraktne inteligencije instrumentalne glazbe zacijeljen je u Wagnerovim glazbenim dramama. Premda se opera poput Lohengrina tematski bavi inkompatibilnoscu izmedu umjetnicke vizije i ljudskih potreba, i njezin nastanak i kasniji zivot (kao u nacistickoj Njemackoj) svjedoce o vrijednosti promatranja djela (djelomice) kao modela ljudskog ponasanja pri cemu shvacanja osobnog, i stoga nacionalnog, samointeresa nadilaze opce dobro. Na crti R. Taruskinove analize njemackog glazbenog nacionalizma kao izrazito rasistickog projekta, u ovom se clanku pravi razlika izmedu estetickih zahtjeva djela kao sto su Lohengrin i ocevidnog barbarstva drugih glazbenih djela, urodeno nesposobnih za degradaciju kao sto je Horst Wessel Lied. Wagnerova estetika njemacke umjetnosti transcendira granice glazbenog diskursa tako da njegova djela dolaze do toga da odreduju njemacku senzibilnost kao garanciju ne samo glazbene nego i rasne cistoce. ttovise, Wagnerov pojam Gesamtkunstwerka moMe se legitimno protumaciti kao paradigmu totalitarnosti i u sferi politickog angazmana.

Sredisnje mjesto umjetnicke glazbe u konstrukciji nacionalistickih kulturnih ideologija u Njemackoj stoji u radikalnoj suprotnosti spram marginalnih uvjeta za umjetnicku glazbu u Irskoj, gdje je pojam estetike umjetnicke glazbe postao cvrsto povezan s pojmovima kolonijalnog ugnjetavanja u doba 19. stoljeca. Ideolozi irskog nacionalizma su, insistirajuci na cistoci i integritetu folklornog repertoara, odbacili sredisnjost europske glazbene kulture. Umjesto toga, s ranijim slucajevima Thomasa Moorea i Thomasa Davisa koji su doboko prozeli irsku dusu, simbolicka snaga glazbe kao agensa nacionalistickog diskursa zatamnila je svako obracanje fenomenu glazbe po sebi. tudna povijest glazbe u Irskoj, uhvacena s jedne strane u zamku vlastita sluganstva politiEki motiviranom citanju etnicke kulture kao nacionalistickog ideala i, s druge strane, ideologijom kolonijalnog ugnjetavanja, namece ovdje drukciji model glazbenog nacionalizma od onoga koji vazi za kontinentalnu Europu.



Is This Song about You? Some Reflections on Music and Nationalism in Germany and Ireland

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