19th Century Music Criticism Research Papers (original) (raw)

This article is part of a larger research project that develops methods of historical music psychology. It looks into possibilities of researching the impact of particular types of music on contemporaneous listeners. As test subjects are... more

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- Musicology, Music Psychology, Opera, Wagner Studies

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university. The choir’s ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singers’ music lied the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting “Western” art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

- by Shaena Weitz
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- Music History, Piano, Nineteenth Century Studies, Music Criticism
- by Damien Ehrhardt
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- Franz Liszt, History of music, Berlioz, Early 20th-century Music

The period between the outbreak of revolution in 1789 and the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871 is an age filled with the rise and fall of various political groups and philosophical deﬁnitions in France, from absolutism to communism, from classicism to romanticism. Music criticism in this period in France's history is not immune from these ebbs and flows of politics and aesthetic concerns. In this chapter, I examine three critical positions that emerge in this period, whereby the music critic serves: (1) as a self-appointed protector of the listening public in defending ‘taste’; (2) as a holder and keeper of compositional rules to ensure the viability of music as a profession and to educate the public; and (3) as a torch bearer for the past and the future of music composition (i.e. criticism as history and canon formation). By taking such a perspective on French criticism in the nineteenth century, I hope not to walk down a purely chronological path nor to argue that the age belongs entirely to one or two critics, but to present a more neutral approach to the material that highlights the collectivity of the age and its ability to present co-existing musical perspectives that stand as the critical record of a people ﬁnding their voice.

- by Mark A. Pottinger
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- Musicology, Music Criticism, 19th century France, France
- by Pedro Luengo Gutierrez (龙彼得)
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- Opera, Wagner Studies, Philippine Studies, Wagnerism
- by Marica Bottaro
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- Music Criticism, Italian Music, 19th Century (History), Spanish Music

This article presents a case study focusing on the archives of the Massimo Mila Collection housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle. Mila (1910-1988) was one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century and an influential figure in Italian musical and cultural life. He was a music critic and historian, a multi-faceted and culturally engaged character. After a short profile of Mila and a description of his Collection, the article focuses on its most important part, namely the large amount of letters from over 600 correspondents, including musicians, painters, art and music critics, philosophers, historians, political activists, important members of the government, and numerous intellectuals from Italy and abroad. It is mostly unpublished material, with a few exceptions. My research selects all the letters that dates from 1928 to 1956, that is to say from Mila’s debut as a music critic when he was just eighteen, until around age forty-five, when he was already a well-known and established figure in the world of Italian culture. The rise of Fascism, the birth of the Republic and the first phase of reconstruction made this a period of immense upheaval for Italy and many other European nations.
The study aims to underline the immense potential of research carried out on the Massimo Mila Collection, as well as contribute to shedding further light on the wealth of interests and intellectual relationships of a figure who could quite simply be defined as “Mila the prismatic intellectual”.

- by Carla Cuomo
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- Musicology, Music Criticism, History of Musicology, Critical Musicology
- by Damien Ehrhardt
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- 19th Century (History), Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Robert Schumann

The life of the distinguished pianist and conductor Charles Hallé has been the subject of several books based in large part upon an examination of his papers and the English press. This has led to an assessment of Hallé’s achievements largely focused on his activities in England, most notably on his Beethoven piano recitals and on his accomplishments as founder and conductor of the celebrated Hallé orchestra in Manchester. However, Hallé was also one of the first artists to tour internationally as pianist and conductor, travelling, for example, to Germany, Austria, France, South Africa, and Australia. Hallé’s activities in these areas have remained largely unexplored. Based on a search of the RIPM databases of international periodicals, this paper examines Hallé’s reception as pianist and conductor on his tours outside of the UK.

- by Marten Noorduin
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- Beethoven, Reception History, France, Manchester

This study deals with the performances and reception of two compositions by Leoš Janáček in the character of suites for string orchestra, the Suite (1877) and Idyll (1878), and it focuses on analysis and interpretation of programmatic readings of the two works written by Janáček’s friend Berthold Žalud. These programmatic interpretations represent a serious problem for the usual understanding of these compositions as pieces of absolute music.

- by Miloš Zapletal
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- Czech music, Programme music, 19th Century Music Criticism, Leoš Janáček
- by Luís M. Santos
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- Intellectual History, Music, Music History, Musicology

The vogue for historical concerts—understood as comprehensive surveys of a particular repertoire—arose in Italy after 1869, first in association with recitals of keyboard music. Historical concerts had been in existence elsewhere in Europe many decades before they became fashionable in Italy. By the end of the 19th c., Italy was awash in a wave of historical concerts in every media, from keyboard music to religious polyphony and orchestral music. This movement owed much of its vigor to the scholarly work of Oscar Chilesotti, who revitalized historical musicology in Italy. His contributions to the revival of interest in Italy's musical heritage and to the establishment of a performance tradition are examined. Three appended letters from Cesare Pollini to Chilesotti (1888–89) shed additional light on the cultural significance of historical concerts.

- by Marco Di Pasquale
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- Early Music, History of Ideas, Baroque Music, Renaissance music
- by Luís M. Santos
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- Discourse Analysis, Intellectual History, Music, Music History
- by Luís M. Santos
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- Intellectual History, Music, Music History, Musicology
- by Fiamma Nicolodi
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- Music Criticism, Critical Musicology, Music Theatre, 19th Century Music Criticism
- by Fiamma Nicolodi
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- Music Criticism, Italian Music, 19th Century Music, Music criticism/journalism
- by Gilles Benin
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- Music Criticism, 19th Century Music Criticism

This study aims to analyze the relationship between music criticism and aesthetic theory in the review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, published by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1810. In defending a conception of genius as a unity of inspiration and reflection, Hoffmann uses an analytical procedure in order to show that the work is not merely the product of improvisation and enthusiasm of the genius, but it is developed in accordance with the organic laws inherent to the thematic material. Therefore, it is due to this union of a creative enthusiasm and a deep reflection that this symphony, according to Hoffmann, is able to express the Romanticism in music.

- by Mario Videira
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- Music Aesthetics, E.T.A. Hoffmann, 19th Century Music Criticism

As Robert Schumann’s colleague, the composer and critic Carl Banck provided a few articles about opera and vocal music for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in Leipzig from 1834 to 1836. Ten years later he became the main feuilletonist for music in Dresden, where he then commented and criticised the city’s musical life for over 40 years. In this period the Dresdner Journal, which was the first and only daily press in the Saxonian capital after the revolutions of 1848—49 to provide a profound feuilleton including daily music criticism, printed more than 2000 articles by Banck.
With this paper I intend to show that Banck – who is nowadays virtually unknown – played an important role in the education of musical amateurs in Dresden as well as in the development of taste of composers and performers alike. On that account, the daily press is an important source, as it provides countless insights into music and its critical reception. By analysing the main critics regarding Beethoven and his last symphonies, I shall demonstrate that we can gain new perspectives on writing about the contemporary reception of music by equally taking the feuilleton and daily press as well as specialised press into account instead of focusing on the latter. Moreover, this approach offers us a versatile picture of the Saxonian capital and its musical life in the second half of the nineteenth century.
With his constant appreciation of Beethoven’s last works, Banck was able to form and stabilise the opinion of the Dresdener general public, which was interested but mostly uneducated concerning musical matters. I will show that Banck imparted a musical thinking about Beethoven that was strongly influenced by his readings of Adolph Bernhard Marx. Furthermore, he called Beethoven the epic poet of the romantic era – Sorely disappointed by his generation he eventually declared that neither the so-called New German School nor “Brahms the progressive” could follow in Beethoven’s footsteps.

- by Theresa Henkel
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- Music Criticism, 19th-century German philosophy, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner

http://www.fmc.ac.uk/collections/ Collection, edition and digitalization of 47 press reviews following the Paris premiere of Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein in 1867. Considered as one of the main event of the 1867's World Fair, this opera is one of the biggest success of Offenbach and has been widely commented by the press. Reviews come from general periodical press and specialized press, either in music, theatre or other fields (economics, sport, fashion, satirical press, academic press, etc.). The articles are available on the web portal France: Musiques, Cultures (1789-1918)

- by Hugo Rodriguez
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Reception Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Opera