Wagner, Wagnerites and the Early History of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony (original) (raw)
Wagner in Context, 2024
criticism in a broad philosophical sense, conceived as a systematic assessment of music and art epitomized by Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), probably originates in ancient Greece (cf. Plato's Politeia). Criticism as an appraisal of specific pieces, creators, soloists, and performances in newspapers, periodicals, and journals, however, emerges from complex interconnected developments in the 1700s and 1800s, encompassing the democratization and professionalization of concert culture as well as the emancipation of autonomous instrumental music, which proved in need of explanation. While early music journals chiefly reviewed scholarly literature, their focus shifts to reports on musical pieces and performances by 1750-a process generating periodicals such as Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend (1766-70) by J. A. Hiller and Magazin der Musik (1783-87) by C. F. Cramer. The full-time critic, however, did not exist until ca. 1800, when J. F. Rochlitz, founder of Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (AmZ, 1798-1818), and J. C. F. Rellstab, contributor to Vossische Zeitung in Berlin until his death in 1813, answered the growing demand for public musical debate. 1 The increasing relevance of the middle class (Bürgertum) also meant that critics no longer mainly addressed fellow musicians, theorists, and historians as part of (say) aesthetic treatises or manuals 1 For a general outline, see Stephen Rose, 'German-Language Music Criticism before 1800', in The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. by Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 104-24. 16:3). While even at that time Wagner would couple music with issues of culture and wrote about French elegance, German naivety, and Italian fervour, he did not yet deem these qualities divisive but rather strove for their combination as manifest in Meyerbeer's works, which he views as 'deeds of music' that bridge national qualities (SSD 12:27). Although critical verdicts of this kind may not be illustrative of 'mature' Wagner, they show that his views are more complex than generally assumed. 8 When assessing Wagner's critical writings, however, it is important to keep in mind that compared to composers such as Berlioz, Debussy, Schumann, Weber, or Wolff, he rarely wrote proper reviews, usually linking music with broader cultural issues. Wagner's most penetrating engagement with criticism is to be found in aesthetic writings of the 1850s, pondering the purpose and prospect of criticism. Generally speaking, he came to consider criticism a despicable profession early on, while recognizing the merits of good press. He did not shy away from lobbying on his own behalf, for instance, in messages to Schumann, prompting him to publish a review of Rienzi, or August Schmidt, editor of the Allgemeine Wiener Musikzeitung, asking him to retract a negative review (SB 2:169-71 and 322-24). 9 While in 'The Artist and the Public' ('Der Künstler und die Öffentlichkeit', 1841), Wagner had already probed the dialectical relations between the genius and his public of 'pleasure-seekers', 'ignorant wiseacres', and 'jealous, corrupt reviewers' (SSD 1:182), he soon came down hard on criticism in general. 8 His respect for Bellini, for example, did not wane over time; CT 2:54, 508, 835. For Wagner's attitude towards his colleagues, see Friedrich Geiger, 'Wagner und die Komponisten seiner Zeit', in Lütteken, Wagner Handbuch, 459-67. 9 On Wagner's ingenuity in marketing his works, which grew even stronger in later years, see Nicholas Vazsonyi, Richard Wager: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 'Berlioz und Wagner in den Schriften von Richard Pohl', in Berlioz, Wagner und die Deutschen, ed. by Sieghart Döhring,
Min-Ad: Israel Studies on Musicology Online, 2016
The famous theory of the “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom) seems to be insufficient to explain the admiration and reverence for Bach which highly different composers such as Mahler and Reger, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, and Webern and Schnittke have expressed through their work. Despite all their differences and possible anxieties, each of these composers consciously and specifically chose Bach as his desired partner in an imaginary dialogue with the past. At the same time, the image of Bach that each composer created was very different, as is typical in interpreting the abstract drawings of a Rorschach test; therefore, each ‘portrait’ of Bach was also, in a way, a self-reflection of the composer. The main question to be investigated in this article is the reason(s) for the unique persistence of Bach’s influence into the 20th century, incomparable even to that of other major composers of the past. Several crucial points connected with this Bach-renaissance will be examined in an attempt to understand why.
"The Early Compositional History of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony: an Interim Report"
It has taken me a long time-and a lot of study and reflection-to begin to understand the textual history of Bruckner's symphonies with something approaching clarity. By the term textual history I mean the entire history of the texts of these works, from their compositional emergence through their revision, performance, publication, and last but not least, their reception by performers, scholars, and critics over the decades.