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6 - Music, Romanticism, and Politics

from Part II - Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Katherine Hambridge
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

Keywords

RomanticismFrancePrussiarevolutionRossiniliberalismdynastic patriotismnationalismWeber
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 92 - 109
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Garratt, James. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hindenlang, Karen. ‘Eichendorff’s “Auf einer Burg” and Schumann’s Liederkreis, Opus 39’, Journal of Musicology, 8/4 (1990), 569–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matala de Mazza, Ethel. ‘Romantic Politics and Society’, in Saul, Nicholas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 191–207.Google Scholar
Meyer, Stephen C. Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Moore, Fabienne. ‘Early French Romanticism’, in Ferber, Michael (ed.), A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 172–91.Google Scholar
Morrow, John. ‘Romanticism and Political Thought in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Jones, Gareth Stedman and Claeys, Gregory (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39–72.Google Scholar
Plantinga, Leon. ‘Beethoven, Napoleon and Political Romanticism’, in Fulcher, Jane F (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 484–500.Google Scholar
Pederson, Sanna. ‘Romantic Music Under Siege in 1848’, in Bent, Ian (ed.), Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57–74.Google Scholar
Reibel, Emmanuel. Comment la musique est devenue ‘romantique’: De Rousseau à Berlioz (Paris: Fayard, 2013).Google Scholar
Rumph, Stephen. Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Walton, Benjamin. ‘Looking for the Revolution in Guillaume Tell’, in Rossini in Restoration Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 257–92.Google Scholar

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