Introduction

Nationalism used to be portrayed, mistakenly, as an offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, portrayed, moreover, almost exclusively as an eastern European phenomenon. We can see now that Weber's Der Freischütz and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen are German nationalist in concept in much the same way that Mikhail Glinka's (1804–57) A life for the Tsar and Modest Musorgsky's (1839–81) Boris Godunov are Russian nationalist works. However, it is true that musical nationalism seems most apparent in those countries where there had been virtually no previous traditions of art music, such as one can point to in France, Italy or the German-speaking areas of western Europe. This is, of course, not to say that music was uncultivated in eastern Europe. Far from it: the Slavonic peoples have for the most part been intensely musical. Bohemian instrumentalists were justly celebrated in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as in most countries, eastern Europe enjoyed a rich cultural heritage of folk song and dance. Nor should we ignore the importance of church music, which had a strong impact on nineteenth-century Russian music. Since eastern European folk music and church music are much less familiar to western ears they seem to have acquired an exoticism and mystique that formerly contributed to the myth of musical nationalism as a purely eastern phenomenon. And one might add that in the nineteenth century social and political forces were strong factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments: political unrest was endemic throughout Europe, particularly between about 1830 and 1870.