The notion that the categories of sacred and secular intersect in nineteenth-century musical composition, practice, reception and thought may seem obvious. This volume of essays, however, persuasively demonstrates the breadth of such intersections and the myriad ways in which musicians, critics, audiences, philosophers and clergy articulated, understood and interpreted them in this period. Published in conjunction with the Society for Christian Scholarship and Music (SCSM), this book is testament to the vitality of music and religious belief and practice as a research area, while also highlighting many areas for potential further enquiry.
The volume is divided into six sections: ‘Religion, Music, and the Romantic Imagination’, ‘Sacred and Secular Drama on the Stage’, ‘Counterpoint and Chorale in Instrumental Music’, ‘Echoes of the Sacred in French Music after the Revolution’, ‘Sacred Songs and Memory in North American Music’ and ‘Music, Rite, and Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia’, and each section is made up of three chapters, apart from the second, which has four. Some of the more interesting themes and connections within the volume also cut across this structure. These include the influences of liturgical or devotional music beyond religious practice, the ways in which national identity, politics, religion and music interact, and the uses and representations of the past.
Joyce L. Irwin's opening chapter draws immediate attention to the importance of examining the liturgical and devotional functions of music. Even with music composed for secular performance, the composer's liturgical background can be illuminating, as many later chapters show. Irwin's chapter is the most closely focused on liturgical music, specifically congregational hymnody, and examines its influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher's concern to reform Christian worship. His proposed solution to low standards of hymnody was to temporarily reduce the number of hymns sung in churches. Irwin demonstrates how he drew on earlier Pietist teachings and also echoed religious poets such as F.G. Klopstock and dramatists such as A.H. Niemeyer in advocating non-liturgical contexts for the performance of sacred music for the devotional benefit of participants. While there is a great deal of interesting detail about Schleiermacher's attempts to reform hymnody and the impact of the Berlin Singakademie on his own spirituality, the central importance of this chapter is the way in which it uses music to highlight the complex ways in which religion and faith, sacred and secular, and theory and practice interact. Irwin argues convincingly that ‘It is the blurring of the lines between religion and Christian faith that enables Schleiermacher to affirm the experience of the sacred outside the institutional church while at the same time striving to increase the sense of the sacred within the church’ (p. 21).
Matthew Hoch's chapter on Sir Arthur Sullivan is more concerned with the musical materials of liturgical compositions, exploring influences in both directions between Sullivan's sacred and secular music. While a welcome inclusion in terms of British representation in the volume, the chapter is one of several that attempt to cover considerable breadth within a relatively short space, sometimes resulting in rather brief coverage of points and examples that invite further exploration. The benefit of a narrower focus in a short chapter is exemplified in James A. Davis's study of the ‘Old 100th’ hymn tune during the American Civil War, which is also one of the best examples of this book's expansion of the contexts in which sacred and secular musical intersections are considered. Drawing on extensive primary source material and with careful consideration of both words and music, Davis shows how the hymn was sometimes used as a marker of religiosity but that it was also enjoyed as musical experience that evoked feelings of comfort and nostalgia. He argues that the prevalence of its use by soldiers and religious leaders on both sides of the conflict means that its status defies easy categorization as sacred or secular, or military or domestic.
Bogumila Mika's chapter on religious music as a vehicle for Polish nationalism in the long nineteenth century provides further interesting insights into sacred and secular interchanges and liturgical music, highlighting how an original religious song composed by Stanislaw Moniuszko for his opera Halka subsequently came to be used liturgically and perceived as a quotation of pre-existing religious melody in the opera. This points towards the importance of stylistic associations, but this is not fully explored. Mika's chapter also discusses Chopin's quotation of Polish religious songs and Szymanowski's use of Polish folklore and religious melodies. The analysis of Szymanowski is focused on the idea of supplication, linked both to the traditional religious meaning, but also, through the use of poetry from the Young Poland movement, to a quest for national freedom. Mika's is one of several chapters that would have benefited from a more consistent use of musical examples across the volume; here, despite detailed descriptions of the ways in which composers embedded quotations from religious music both melodically and harmonically, no notation is provided, while in other chapters short extracts are used to good effect.
Several other chapters explore themes related to national identity in contrasting ways. Chiara Bertoglio explores the Italian reception of J.S. Bach's chorale-based music through the ways in which several composers approached the task of transcribing some of his chorale preludes for organ for the piano. This study is interesting on a technical level, but Bertoglio also addresses intersections with wider issues concerning Bach's Italian reception, notably the challenges of textual translation and differing confessional standpoints, liturgical traditions and theological emphases. These differences, combined with common perceptions of Bach's music as inherently religious and spiritual, created a distinctive musical, spiritual and aesthetic experience for Italian audiences of Bach's organ works.
Barbara Swanson's chapter on Liturgie, an unfinished experimental Futurist ballet-opera devised by Ballets Russes founder Serge Diaghilev, traces the complicated history of this work, conceived as a dramatic presentation of the life of Christ and the Orthodox rite. Discussion of Stravinsky's involvement alongside other creative contributors shows how the tension between Russian aesthetic and religious ideals and Italian Futurism was a significant factor in it never being completed. There is also a tantalizing suggestion of the influence of Jacques Martiain's aesthetics being decisive in Stravinsky's withdrawal. Swanson argues that Maritain's advocacy of art as transcendent stood in marked contrast to the distorted spectacle of the liturgy presented in Liturgie.
Ideas about the past come to the fore in several chapters. David Salkowski's essay on Alexander Kastalsky's Furnace Rite (1907) is a compelling exploration of the balancing of historical scholarship and creative musical experimentalism and the way in which the reconstructed liturgy was able to navigate a path through the potentially competing claims of antiquarianism and the avant-garde. Kastalsky's work was part of a wider scholarly interest in reviving medieval deistvo, or large-scale liturgical drama. The chapter is especially effective in showing how liturgical reconstruction provided a forum for modernist ideas about synthesis of the arts and the desire to emphasize national heritage. Eftychia Papanikolaou's chapter on Franz Liszt's Graner Festmesse makes a strong case for re-examining the composer's sacred music through the spiritual and aesthetic lenses of the period in which they were written. She draws attention to the young Liszt's interest in Christian philosophy, arguing that his discussion of church music in one of a series of essays in 1835 in which social reform and activism were common threads reflects a wider milieu of social liberalism and reform. Against this backdrop, the Graner Festmesse is assessed as a reflection of spiritual, political and national influences. Hanslick's criticisms that Liszt's musical response to the text would engender too many conflicting passions and that the composer's performance of the work in a secular rather than a sacred venue further diminished any sense of the sacred is highlighted as an example of the importance attached to performance contexts and musical materials in the contemporary assessment of nineteenth-century sacred music.
E.T.A. Hoffman features prominently in two chapters in different guises. Joseph E. Morgan explores some of his compositions as musical examples of the role of the wanderer in nineteenth-century art, alongside instances from drama (Zacharias Werner) and painting (Caspar David Friedrich). He argues that the replacement of the cross with the figure of the wanderer in many artworks reflects an early Romantic concern to bring art and religion back together as a means of connecting the inner subjective self and objective reality, as well as emphasizing the relationship between the natural and the spiritual. Arguing that Werner and Hoffmann necessarily translate their intended meanings through words or the use of familiar musical quotations or gestures, Morgan posits that the spirituality of Friedrich's paintings is confirmed by his frequent use of a rückenfigur, that is, a figure viewed from behind who guides the viewer's contemplation. The rückenfigur ultimately removes the need for overt religious symbolism by drawing the viewer into consideration of the relationship between self and nature. This chapter makes a valuable contribution through its multidisciplinary approach and comparison of well- and lesser-known works.
Hoffmann's work as a critic plays a role in Sonja Wermager's reassessment of the motivations behind Robert Schumann's liturgical compositions. She argues that previous views of his Mass and Requiem have either been misguided in linking their composition to mental illness (for which there is no evidence) or missing the point by focusing on the notion of Schumann aiming for completeness of genres (his journalistic writing shows a keen interest in sacred music over several decades). The Mass as a work for sacred and secular performance is an example of the blurring of boundaries in the period, and the influence of Hoffmann and Thibaut is detected regarding authenticity in sacred music and valorization of the past. Wermager argues that both Thibaut's advocacy of a return to older music and Hoffmann's vision of sacred music offering an outlet for Romanticism's ideals about truth can be seen in Schumann's writings in the 1830s and 1840s. His liturgical works are held up as indicators of his devotion to the revival of Bach's music, his reverence for the oratorio tradition, and as an echo of Hoffmann's advocacy of learning from the past to renew the present.
Several essays use analytical frameworks to good effect. Christopher Ruth presents a semiotic reading of fugato passages in Schumann's secular dramatic works, notably the final part of Scenes from Faust. He argues that they signify the conjunction of nature and spirituality but goes further to suggest that the co-presence of these signs points to transcendence. Ruth is concerned to emphasize Robert Schumann's place in representing a particular concern of Romantic thought – a return to or culmination in nature – and highlights the influence of Friederich Schilling and Carl Gustav Carus on Schumann's thinking. While the semiotic readings of fugato passages early in the chapter initially feel somewhat obvious, the later argument regarding transcendence is well made and highlights the value of combining different methodological approaches to understand spiritual influences on musical composition. Siegwart Reichwald and Joshua Waggener both explore different facets of Mendelssohn's music. Reichwart presents a convincing argument for considering Mendelssohn's Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66, in light of the composer's psalm settings of the immediately preceding years and, like Morgan, provides a fresh perspective by adopting a spiritual lens through which to interpret analytical detail.
Chapters by Callum Blackmore and Jennifer Walker offer interesting perspectives on religion and state through music on the French stage. Blackmore examines the many and varied portrayals of clerical and cloistered life in operas of the revolutionary period, paying close attention to their critical reception. He highlights conflicting political readings but also interpretations that eschewed politics entirely. This chapter is a salutary reminder that artistic products like these operas are part of the messy and complex reality of different views and priorities, and that not everyone who engages with them artistically wants to engage on a political level. Walker focuses on a later period in her exploration of religious themed plays in late-nineteenth-century Paris, highlighting, like Blackmore, the complex perspectives they represented. Pope Leo XIII's Raillement policy for the reconciliation of the French state and Roman Catholic Church, the suspicions of both Catholics and Republicans, and the ways in which artists and critics perceived music to have sacralizing powers are all shown to have had a bearing on the composition and reception popular plays. Megan Sarno extends the focus on French music further, with an insightful analysis of Debussy's Trois mélodies de Verlaine, arguing that they represent the composer's understanding of art as religion.
Among several essays on less expected topics, including Matthew Roy's on children's music and Thomas J. Kernan's on Christian imagery in sheet music from the Reconstruction era in the USA, Markus Rathey's account of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ tour to Germany in 1877–1878 stands out. Examining their repertoire and its reception alongside that of other choirs performing in the same venues in the same period, Rathey highlights the racialized reception of the choir's performances, noting how such attitudes continue to exert an influence on musical practice and education.
Taken as a whole, this volume is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on the relationships between music and spirituality. It goes some way to meeting the editors’ aim of broadening the topics for such study and points the way for further research. The essays are all engagingly written and replete with impressively extensive documentation and bibliographies that will be of considerable value to researchers. Some contributions judge the scope of a limited word-count better than others; several, notably the editors’ own chapters and those by Davis, Salkowski and Irwin strike a highly effective balance of detailed engagement with examples and contextualization. The editors are to be congratulated for bringing together the work of PhD and early-career scholars alongside that of more established academics. Though drawing almost entirely from scholars working within musicology, this volume is an important reminder and example of the ways in which interdisciplinary perspectives can enhance understanding of musical repertoire, practice and reception.
