Few intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Europe would deny that the tradition of art music that evolved between the revolutionary watershed at the end of the eighteenth century and the international wars and domestic convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century—a body of musical works from Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Strauss that has been passed down to us in canonized form as the “imaginary museum” of “classical music”Footnote ¹ —was an enormously significant dimension of European cultural and intellectual history, especially in German-speaking central Europe. In the territories of the German Confederation, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, and later in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the production, performance and consumption of classical music was not just an important element in the history of aesthetic and cultural forms but also a privileged site for imagining and enacting the organization of individuals into historical subjects (the Bildung of modern individuals) and for the integration of individuals into collectivities through processes of subjective identification. Broad interest in the relations between agency and identity among historians, including European intellectual historians, should have drawn many of them, one would have thought, toward investigation of the ways the cultural work undertaken by music was connected to, and interacted with, the cultural role of the textual and visual arts, or of how musical performance and experience helped European individuals organize and perform their self-activity and self-consciousness in relation to the past, to other individuals within the networks of communal relations, and to the transcendent. The history of music would appear to be critical for understanding historical experiences of the relations between memory and expectation at both the individual and communal levels.

Yet the history of music has not fully entered the mainstream of intellectual and cultural history. I am old enough to remember reading Jacques Barzun's massive study of Berlioz and Romanticism as an undergraduate and more recently (1985!) to have thoroughly enjoyed Paul Robinson's Opera and Ideas,Footnote ² but these works seem to have been grounded in very personal talents and obsessions of individuals who happened to be European intellectual historians. Neither study had the disciplinary “legs” to enter the mainstream of historical cultural analysis and neither is cited in the works under review in this essay. Carl Schorske's interest in classical and modernist musicFootnote ³ encouraged some of his students, including Michael SteinbergFootnote ⁴ and William McGrath,Footnote ⁵ to pursue their own musical interests in their scholarship, but the primary efforts to integrate the interpretation and history of music into the history of culture have come from historical musicologists in departments of music. In the two essay collections included among the six books under review in this essay, nineteen of the twenty-one contributors are from departments of music, and similar ratios hold true for other recent collections that seek to integrate the history of music into the history of culture.Footnote ⁶ The historical musicologists whose work inspires and informs these anthologies, like Rose Subotnik, Lawrence Kramer, Susan McLary and Richard Leppert,Footnote ⁷ are little known among historians. Even Steinberg, who decries this ignorance, does not really engage the scholarly tradition of “new historicism” in musicology (with which he shares many assumptions and concerns) in his own work, preferring to relate his analyses to the older generation of venerated historicizing musicologists and cultural critics—like Carl Dahlhaus and especially Theodor AdornoFootnote ⁸ —rather than to scholars of his own generation.

Why have historians been so cautious in embracing, appropriating and participating in the project to integrate the history of music into the history of culture?

Two obvious answers to this question emerge from the reviewed materials. One is the abstract formalism that has been so prevalent in the analysis of musical works by musicologists in university music departments during the last half century. The amount of technical expertise and sheer stubborn patience required to comprehend analyses of the internal structures of classical music is formidable. Yet historians are rightly cautious about writing about music in its various historical contexts without the benefits of some non-hermetic language for verbalizing what is actually going on within the music itself. The widely chosen alternative is to write not so much about the music itself as about institutions that support the composition, performance and general consumption of music; about the individuals who compose, perform and consume; and especially about the aesthetic and philosophical commentary that tried to provide a framework for listening to music and construing its meaning at different times and in different places. Even those historians who probably could cite scores and analyze the internal dynamics of formal musical structures in a sophisticated fashion tend to fall back on external descriptions and analyses to escape the confined space of formal musicology and to communicate with their intended audiences. It is noteworthy that none of the historians in the books under review actually cite or analyze musical scores, and that, when they are not talking about the various external factors impinging on the music, they tend to speak about musical works that have texts (operas, lieder, cantatas, oratorios and other choral works) so that the music can be talked about largely through interpretive analysis of the structure and dynamics of the texts and of the perspectives and interactions of the characters who sing the texts.

Another possible approach, perhaps modeled on Adorno's supreme confidence in his ability to say what the music was saying, is to replace discussable descriptions or arguable citations with direct assertions about what the tones must mean. The latter tactic probably connects to a second source of trepidation for historians who want to include music in their analysis of the history of culture—the widespread belief that musical experience is an experience of the ineffable, that what music does cannot be adequately redescribed or represented in words or images, but transcends the representational stances of speaker and observer in other artistic media and merges subjective and objective dimensions in ways that always elude any specific reference to, or representation of, a content beyond its own internal structural components. From this perspective, writing about music can quickly begin to look like, and be judged as, a series of empirically unverifiable subjective responses to a transcendent reality that cannot be rationally described or verbally communicated.

Both the hermetically autonomous structures of musical forms and the ineffable, transcendent, non-referential nature of musical experience constitute cultural constructions of the nature of music that work to isolate music from other cultural phenomena and erect barriers against the specific contextualizing and temporalizing methods of historical analysis and narrative mediation. At the same time however, these ascribed characteristics of musical reality and musical experience are historical residuals of the cultural construction of the tradition of European classical music in the nineteenth century. They are connected to the historical emergence of a particular kind of music at a particular time and place and are thus themselves primary objects for historical analysis. Many historical musicologists and cultural critics have taken note of the paradoxical nature and ideological uses of definitions of music as a self-referential autonomous structure of tones that somehow transcends the conditions of meaningful speech and communication.Footnote ⁹ The emergence of the concept of “pure” or “autonomous” art music after 1800 was accompanied by a flood of commentary and criticism (some of it by composers themselves, like Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann or Richard Wagner) that mediated between the ineffable work and its particular historical audiences, as well as by a systematic aesthetics that provided it with philosophical foundations. In fact most historical analysts of the emergence of classical music take their interpretive cue from contemporary philosophers (like Schelling or Schopenhauer) or literary/cultural critics (like Ludwig Tieck, Wilhlem Wackenroder, Friedrich Schlegel and E. T. A. Hoffmann) who elaborated the concepts of the autonomous purity of musical form and the sublime ineffability of musical experience.Footnote ¹⁰

In this essay I will organize my examination of six recently published books on nineteenth-century classical music around a number of central themes in the intellectual and cultural history of “subjectivity.”Footnote ¹¹ These themes include the problematic relationship between experience and linguistic meaning, the development of historical self-consciousness at both the individual and collective level, the transformation of individual subjective agency into cultural and group identity, and the construction of narrative coherence in the absence of belief in objective meaning. I will ground my hypothetical starting point and organizing assumption on the claims of Michael Steinberg in Listening to Reason, one of the books under review. Steinberg suggests that nineteenth-century “autonomous” art music can best be interpreted and engaged as a “language,” or more aptly and specifically a “discourse,” of subjectivity, as an aesthetic and cultural form that embodies and enacts or “performs” the activity of a thinking, feeling subject as it defines and constructs itself in relation to cultural, social and political realities that make claims to define, appropriate, suppress or “subject” it. This musical “I” is not simply the composer's “I” represented in music but the “I” of the music itself, constantly engaged in negotiating and arguing with, freeing itself from, and surrendering itself to, the claims of representation and identification, of subjection to some cultural other. Subjectivity in this sense, as the constant activity of self-definition, self-construction and self-liberation, as the activity of the subject within the force field of relations between emancipation and integration, is to be distinguished from the Cartesian “subject” considered as the continuous essential center of consciousness and action or from the Lockean embodied individual self with defined properties and rights.Footnote ¹² Musical subjectivity is imagined as a creative agency constantly producing and reproducing itself in intersubjective relations and in relation to already constructed meaningful worlds.

The most obvious affinity of music in this definition is to the post-Kantian conception of philosophy as the dialectical production of conceptual meaning, as the reflective dynamics of meaning-construction that is defined by its own movement, so that its form is indistinguishable from its content. From Schelling and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Adorno, it has been German philosophy that has claimed the mantle of the musical and raised the status of the musical to thought or thinking, and thus asserted music's privileged role as the embodiment of a spiritual becoming that could never be fully represented in other media.Footnote ¹³

From the perspective of the history of subjectivity, the emancipation of art music as an autonomous form becomes a less paradoxical and contradictory phenomenon. The liberation of instrumental music as the maker of its own meaning from its traditional functions as a representation of religious meaning or natural truth, as a support for political power or social distinction, as a servant of visual spectacle or of the written and spoken word, did not necessarily imply that music was somehow purified of its relations to the world, or that it constituted a refuge or escape from mundane reality. Rather, the emancipation of music as an autonomous art form allowed it to act and react as a subjective agent in relation to the world. The autonomy of music as an actor in its own right was thus the condition of its engagement with, and in, the world. As Lydia Goehr has stated, “music is philosophical and political by virtue of being autonomously musical.”Footnote ¹⁴ According to Steinberg, the capacity of music to articulate subjectivity and embody its relations to cultural and political others in a constant process of self-definition and self-creation assumes that music as aesthetic form possesses consciousness and agency. These assumptions are of course “fictions.” We experience or experiment with our own subjectivity in the discursive relations of musical form because we imagine music as acting and speaking in the first person, as an “I” in motion and conversation, as a voice operating in real present time, a voice that does not report or represent a story that has happened but performs the story of itself within the shifting structural horizons of its constructed musical world as we listen.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, Steinberg claims, as a performing subject with the capacity for memory and hope, music itself “listens”; that is, it makes and remakes itself through interaction or dialogue with representations of both past and present cultural realities. In listening to music we hear music listening. We experience music as engaged in a discourse that reflects on its relations to various others, a discourse of critical distancing, appropriation and self-reflection, a discourse of “reason.” The experience of music is thus a critical site for the learning and cultivation of selfhood as critical, reflexive subjectivity, for the cultivation of subjects who come to know themselves as self-reflective actors, whose life is defined in a constant process of negotiation and reconsideration of any particular historically contingent identity, a life of overcoming the fixations and dependencies of representation and identity, a life constantly moving between memory and expectation.Footnote ¹⁶

This construction of music as the articulation and performance of subjectivity on the constantly shifting boundary between autonomy and integration, agency and identity, is itself a useful fiction, an ideal type that opens up reflection on the new cultural potentialities that emerged with the emancipation of music as an aesthetic form around 1800. It helps track some of the changes in musical culture during the nineteenth century and allows intellectual historians to look in new ways at central issues in the history of cultural forms and the history of the modern subject. And it opens the door to the integration of the new historical musicology into the mainstream of intellectual and cultural history.

I. TONES AND WORDS

How should historians construe the relationship between the plethora of words written and spoken about musical composition, structure and performance during the nineteenth century and their own experience of that music through recorded or live performances in the present? Can past musical experience be reconstructed from the documentary record of written responses to that experience? Does familiarity with the musical theory, commentary, criticism and analysis of the nineteenth century allow historians to relate their own present experience of the music to the ways music was experienced in the past? What is the relationship between the history of writing about music and the history of music? Certainly the historical description and analysis of writing about music is easier to connect to other textually articulated forms of intellectual history than the performance of historical subjectivity within the music itself. Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, a collection of essays by a dozen Anglo-American musicologists whose education has been informed by various post-structuralist conceptions of subjectivity, and the monograph by the music historian Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven, provide some suggestions about what might be learned from close readings of writing about music.

Four essays in the first section of the edited collection address the ways in which theoretical constructions of musical experience in the nineteenth century were framed by general assumptions concerning the nature of sense experience, intellectual cognition, the metaphysical foundations of structural relations, and the dynamics of structural transformations in time. What comes across in these essays first of all is the variety of philosophical frameworks informing musical theorizing. An essay by Leslie David Blasius explores the theoretical literature on piano pedagogy and finds it shaped by a robust survival of late eighteenth-century sensationalist and associational psychology. His sources, as one might guess, tend to come from French and English culture, and the study of the piano exercises might perhaps be classified under educational theory as much as musical theory, but it is important to remember that all musical theory in the nineteenth century did not stem from German idealist and Romantic philosophy, and that, as in other cultural dimensions, the conflict and interaction of Enlightenment and Romantic traditions, utilitarian and idealist philosophies, continued through the so-called “Romantic” period. The three essays that follow, by Ian Biddle (on Schelling), Thomas Christensen (on the Hegelian historicism of François-Joseph Fétis), and Sanna Pederson (on the conflicts between Romantic and Hegelian constructions of music at mid-century), moreover, complicate the whole issue of the idealist framework of Romantic theory, and the Romantic theoretical framework of nineteenth-century music. According to Biddle, Schelling's philosophy of art articulates a model of musical structure as organic structure in which immanent meaning emerges from the relations between corporeal realities and the organizing totality of the absolute subject. Biddle claims that Schelling's ideas grounded the theory of autonomous music and the internal structural analysis that emerged from it. But his analysis also makes obvious that the description of autonomous, organic musical structure was originally conceived as the embodiment of a deeper reality, that music, like the other fine arts, was imagined as depicting, or giving corporeal shape to, the dynamic self-fashioning of the Absolute, that the immanent structures of musical form gave voice to a transcendent subjectivity. If Schelling's views implicitly or explicitly informed the ways in which early nineteenth-century listeners constructed musical experience then the subjectivity they enacted in that experience was experienced as an expression of a deeper identification, as a discovery of essence rather than as an emancipation from identity and representation. Musical experience revealed absolute subjectivity as the ground of individual subjectivity. This tendency is made very clear in Bonds's reconstruction of idealist and Romantic aesthetic philosophies—including that of Schelling. Listening to music was presented as participation in a privileged movement of knowing that reached toward and fleetingly embodied philosophical truth, the truth of totalizing synthesis This truth was intimated in experiences of the sublime that the conceptual and representational structures of empirical and rational philosophies could never encompass.Footnote ¹⁷

The essays by Christensen and Pederson, however, also indicate that Schelling's aesthetic philosophy and its particular way of construing musical form as the articulation of subjectivity was in conflict throughout the first half of the century with the Hegelian theory that subordinated musical experience to the progressive articulation of organic totality and subjective autonomy in the self-conscious structures of rational speech. For Hegelians like Fétis, the structures of musical form represented particular organizations of subjectivity in historical cultures, ordered in a progressive sequence moving toward more rational and thus more universal articulation. As Pederson reminds us, and as Bonds tends to forget, it is important to recognize that the so-called “Romantic” theory of autonomous self-relating musical structure had a discontinuous history grounded in shifting historical contexts. It was marked by conflicts with opposing perspectives. Constructions of musical experience were historically contingent and demand contextual analysis. At the same time, these essays on the philosophical framing of theories of musical form reveal that, for most of the nineteenth century, theories of self-structuring dynamic subjectivity as the appropriate form of the arts remained theories of representation of a reality that these arts embodied and performed, but did not constitute. In performing subjectivity, music performed a script written elsewhere. Nineteenth-century theorists may have argued over whether or not music performed this script better than the other arts or other cultural forms, but they never, or rarely, doubted that music derived its power to enact subjectivity from its function as the representation of an infinite subject or absolute existential ground of some sort. The construction of music as the life of a subject structuring and restructuring itself in a series of temporal “presents” may be a useful fiction from our perspective, but the evidence provided in these essays indicates that musical experience of subjectivity was certainly more like a revelatory encounter with the immanent essence of existence for most nineteenth-century European intellectuals.

The second group of essays engages in a close reading of accounts of musical structure in exemplary classical works (symphonies of Beethoven and Berlioz) by contemporary reviewers like E. T. A Hoffmann, Robert Schumann and the influential contributors to the first important journal of public musical criticism—the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. What is revealed in each of these cases is that contemporary critics structured their analysis of the musical work according to a specific mode of communicative and historical hermeneutics, best exemplified by the theories of the Romantic theologian and cultural critic Friedrich Schleiermacher. The music was imagined as shaped by the motives and genius of the composer. What was experienced in the act of listening was an interaction with Beethoven's or Berlioz's subjectivity, not an identification with the musical subject per se. Or rather the musical subject was interpreted in terms of the composer's intentions and creative power in expressing and communicating a personal conception of the underlying infinite ground of subjective life.

Brian Heyr's analysis of a contemporary review of Beethoven's Eroica is especially interesting, because he reverses the direction of the nineteenth-century hermeneutic method he has historically reconstructed in order to develop his own theory of constructive interpretation, in which the listener creates the meaning of the musical structure in the process of listening and relistening. The meaning of a piece, he claims, is constituted by a constantly shifting reinterpretation of the narrative pattern between memory and the future as we learn to connect our expectations to the moving musical horizons that define our experience of being in the music. The listener in this model does not simply project subjective meanings into the dynamics of the musical experience. What happens instead is a type of dialogue or interaction with the increasingly familiar and predictable narrative flow of the notes. It is this dialogic experience that turns an arbitrary subjective construction into an experimental life shaped in a certain way by the musical structure. But contemporaries of Beethoven or Berlioz did not construct their musical experience in this fashion. They claimed to experience an encounter with another subjectivity, not just an interaction with a constructed framework (a fictional universe) for experimenting with possible identities (fictional “I's”) within themselves. It is this disjuncture between the construction of music as thinking by the idealist and Romantic theorists and poststructuralist theories of the movement of subjective agency beyond identity and representation that is missing in Bonds's work. One consequence is that Bonds seems hapless in producing some understanding of how the actual musical compositions may have operated as creative productions demanding constant reinterpretations and reconstructions by generations of listeners.

A third group of essays in Musical Theory in the Age of Romanticism further develops the theme of historical anachronism in musical criticism by rereading specific nineteenth-century theories of musical structure—sonata form (analyzed by Peter Hoyt and Scott Burnham) and the leitmotif (analyzed by Thomas Grey) in their original historical contexts. The analysis in the essays of this section goes in the opposite direction to those of Part I. What is perceived as informing the construction of theory is not so much preconceptions about the essential structures of experience as it is the messy realities of musical practice. Both sonata form and the leitmotif, it turns out, became more philosophical, schematic and universalizing the greater the distance from their origins. Later simplifications of sonata form toward binary structures ignored the complex and subtle theorizing based on intensive engagement in contemporary music by early theorists like Antoine Reicha and A. B. Marx. Listeners seeking a thread of narrative orientation in the complex maze of Wagnerian music—music that had abandoned traditional architectonic and melodic patterns—constructed a network of musical memory associations to structure their experience, and thus helped bring about the elaboration and stylization of a compositional practice increasingly dependent on a network of motivic relations. What emerges here is the way that aesthetic theory should not be read à la Bonds as a set of philosophical preconceptions about subjective agency applied to the passive musical object (the Beethoven symphony), but as a struggle with the agency of musical compositions like Beethoven's symphonies. The creative imagination of Romantic philosophers emerged in interactive relations with aesthetic works, and as a labor of construction that constantly struggled to shape itself in relation to the worlds of constructed aesthetic objects.

Although the contributors to Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism clearly intend their scholarship to help reveal anachronistic interpretation and lack of historical self-consciousness in our musical experience of nineteenth-century classics, only one essay (Heyr's piece on Eroica) really attempts to use these perspectives to analyze a composition in order to show us the way its musical structures organize subjectivity in historically specific ways, and only one essay (Pederson's “Romantic Music under Siege in 1848”) connects the theoretical debates about music in culture to broader and more specific historical contexts of not just musical discourse but also theoretical discourse about music. However, historicism within musical culture and the historical analysis of musical culture are central to Celia Applegate's Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St Matthew Passion and the extended discussion of Mendelssohn's musical historicism in Steinberg's Listening to Reason.

II. MUSIC AND MEMORY: HISTORICAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE ORGANIZATION OF SUBJECTIVITY

One of the defining qualities of the fictional subjective agency that organizes itself in musical discourse is the ability to listen to the past, to shape its present actions in an imaginary dialogue with remembered and reconstituted musical shapings of subjectivity in past eras or cultural moments. An obviously defining characteristic of nineteenth-century classical music is its historicism, its self-conscious revival, remembering and appropriation of the musical monuments of the past in the organization of its own structures and in the creation of a canon of historical works, a constructed tradition that organized both the private cultivation and the public performance and consumption of art music. Applegate's Bach in Berlin focuses on an event, the public performance of J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion by the Berlin Choral Academy under the direction of Felix Mendelssohn on 21 February 1829, an event conventionally considered both an expression and a cause of the emergence of musical historicism in the nineteenth century. Applegate does not question these claims, but aims to reconstruct the social and cultural developments that transformed a public concert into a historical event of such resonance and significance, to explain the conditions that made the event both possible and comprehensible. “Mendelssohn's revival, more than any other single event,” she writes, “laid the foundation stone for the ‘imaginary museum’ of musical works of the past and made music, Bach's music, German music, as essential to what it meant to be German as the language itself.”Footnote ¹⁸ The driving issue in this sentence, and in her book, is how musical historicism organized subjective agency into a powerful experience of subjective identity, specifically national identity, how the public performance and consumption of musical remembering shaped and enacted the construction of collective memory that grounded the temporal continuity and thus supra-individual reality of the “we.” I will return to this issue below, but musical historicism was more than an instrument for the formation of national identities, as Applegate would readily admit, and her analysis of its historical presuppositions deserves separate consideration.

The central chapters of Bach in Berlin provide a wide-ranging, solidly documented reconstruction of the social and cultural developments involved in the emergence of a public culture of serious art music in the Protestant areas of northern and central Germany during the half-century before the Berlin performance of Bach's Passion music in 1829.Footnote ¹⁹ This reconstruction takes the form, first of all, of a sociology of musical institutions, audiences, players, teachers and publicists. The 1829 performance took place in the concert hall of a musical academy and was performed not by a church choir or an ensemble of court musicians but by a mix of devoted amateurs and professionals who had emerged as a significant social component of civil society after the reforms of the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. The performance of 1829 and its public impact was made possible in part by the fact that both performers and audience were prepared to imagine themselves involved in a process of self-cultivation through artistic means. The meaning of the work performed was mediated to an audience of educated listeners and readers through both a well-developed musical pedagogy and ongoing public discussion in the burgeoning print culture of journals and published writings. Applegate traces the multiple, interacting developments through which musical performers were gradually transformed from artisans into self-conscious artist–professionals, how the context of performance shifted from church, court and town square to public concert venues or the intimate settings of family life, how amateur music associations emerged as voluntary forms of communal self-education within the freedoms of an emerging civil society after 1800, and how journals and journalists used the moralizing power of the fine arts as a major component of their program of public cultivation. In all of these areas Applegate tends to emphasize the conditions of imagining individual cultivation as an identification with the community of the cultural “nation,” vaguely defined by overlapping linguistic, ethnic, religious boundaries. Less forcefully presented are the attempts to ground this identification specifically in a construction of a self-conscious relation to a past that was not only “discovered” as different, but also rediscovered as an expression of an essential continuity that transformed difference into identity. The chapters where this issue is more closely addressed and which zero in more specifically on how musical subjectivity was organized through a dialogue with the past are the chapters that focus with more analytic and interpretive intensity on the questions of “why Mendelssohn?”, “why Bach?” and “why the St Matthew Passion?” In fact all three questions really merge into one. What were the reasons for Mendelssohn's conviction that the music of Bach was the historical foundation of his own generation's attempt to organize and perform their individual and collective subjectivity through music and how did his choice, interpretation and performance of the St Matthew Passion articulate that conviction?

Aside from a few suggestive comments in personal letters, Mendelssohn did not analyze or discuss the reasons for his choice or interpretation of Bach's great choral masterpiece. Clearly he was virtually unique within the world of composers and conductors of his time in his access to both Bach's scores (through family connections and musical education) and to the institutional means to perform the larger choral works (through his intimate relations with the Berlin Choral Academy directed by his personal teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter and with the talented professional instrumentalists, singers and potential publicists who frequented his family circle). One can also assume that he shared, perhaps even stimulated and encouraged, his friends' growing conviction that Bach's compositions were not just complex, learned contrapuntal structures through which serious music students, at least in Berlin, honed their technical skills and learned the principles of harmonic structure and composition, but musical universes in which they could experiment and perform the spiritual and emotional content of their own subjectivity. The most revealing articulation of Mendelssohn's relation to Bach's music that expresses both his recognition of its irrevocable pastness as a musical form and his concern to rescue the spiritual content that animates its historical forms and makes them into inspiring, educational, dialogic partners in the subjective processes of identity-construction in the present, occurs in his contemporaneous musical compositions. It is here, in the piano pieces that turn Bachian fugal exercises into Romantic “characteristic” pieces or expressive tone poems, in the Chorale Cantatas (Mendelssohn composed nine between 1827 and 1831) that remake Bach's liturgical pieces for the sensibility of the modern individuals in concert halls longing to still their subjective longing in communal harmonies or transcendent consolation, in the Oratorio Saint Paul, thematically and structurally oriented to the famous Bach chorale cantata Wachet Auf, and perhaps most clearly in the Reformation Symphony in which Bach fugues and chorale harmonizations are ultimately integrated into a Beethovenesque symphonic resolution that transforms an appropriation of the past into a projection into the future, that Mendelssohn made the reasons for his choices and interpretations aesthetically available to the listener. In his pared-down version of the St Matthew score (from three and a half to two hours—a version that favored chorales over choruses and the recitatives of the biblical text over poetically constructed arias) he performed what he imagined as the spiritual essence of the piece—a dramatic story of suffering and salvation in which the pain and sorrow of alienation was overcome by participation in an immanent spiritual community (a community of subjective identification) sustained by the will of a loving, all-powerful, transcendent father. Applegate's analysis of the intensely emotional responses to the 1829 performances indicate that it was this story of death, resurrection and the creation of spirit-filled community that resonated in the ticketholding audience and transformed them at a benefit concert in a public hall into a “sacred” community. But ultimately it is Mendelssohn's own music that contains the subtlety and depth of his historical consciousness and self-examination and might illuminate the historical meaning of the 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion for us. Applegate's study is a powerful contextual analysis of this musical event; it frames the act with the material and cultural conditions that made it possible, but the act itself—the music—is missing.

Considering Michael Steinberg's general argument about the need for historians to focus on the analysis of how the dynamic structures of music articulate and enact the organization of historical subjectivity, it must come as somewhat of a surprise that his own chapter on Mendelssohn's musical historicism is also missing any serious musical analysis. This is especially surprising since Steinberg categorizes Mendelssohn's “canny” historicism as the epitome of the Biedermeier period between Beethoven's abstract heroics of subjective emancipation and Wagner's tendency to subordinate subjective agency to exclusive ideological identification—a period when nineteenth-century art music came closest to his normative idea of a thinking and reflective subjectivity always struggling to transcend the fixation of representation and identity. On the one hand Steinberg asserts that Mendelssohn's music combined the principle of a modern subjectivity, emancipated from fixed identities and engaged in a constant movement of self-formation, with a subtle, multiple, layered and inclusive conception of community as something historically fashioned and constantly refashioned. But despite the self-reflection and irony in this music of subjectivity that treated the past not with conservative nostalgia or abstract rejection, but as a dimension of living consciousness that was constantly in a process of re-imagining itself, Mendelssohn, in Steinberg's view, believed in the possibility of ordering the past in a fully conscious fashion (thus the lack of “uncanny” elements in his performance of the subject's relation to the past). Mendelssohn's music articulated not so much the adventure of subjectivity in experimental motion but the resignation of a subjectivity that had already found an ordered relation to the past, and believed that the historical integration of agency and identity was not a utopian project but an ongoing reality. Thus Steinberg sees Mendelssohn's music for the stage production of Sophocles' Antigone as settling for a position that defends neither the statist ethics of Creon nor the personal subjective morality of Antigone but performs a compromise in which both positions are seen as having legitimate historical claims. As in his discussion of Mendelssohn's relation to Bach and the Protestant Baroque, however, Steinberg does not proceed to an analysis of how this kind of extra-musical resolution works itself out in the music. What he misses is the tension of unreconciled oppositions and the excitement of an experiment in motion. He thus inadvertently falls back, despite all his admiration for Mendelssohn's considered positions about the organization of subjectivity in relation to the past, into the conventional judgment that Mendelssohn's music is not that interesting, somewhat glib, and perhaps even shallow. Mendelssohn, he says at one point, was too much a historian as a musician. He had worked through the most important issues regarding agency and identity in relation to the past by the time he sat down to compose his works, with the paradoxical result that compositions that officially eschew “representation,” and transform extra-musical realities and identities into aesthetic possibilities, ultimately turn out to be, or are experienced as, representations of an already achieved resolution.Footnote ²⁰ My own view is that Steinberg is wrong about this and that more careful musical analysis of what goes on in Mendelssohn's compositions would have made this clear. What Steinberg experiences as the presentation of already achieved resolution is in fact a complex position of how lack of resolution, or a tense balancing of multiple, dynamic possibilities, can be sustained by the musical subject. In Mendelssohn's compositions the relativity and constant transformation of subject positions and communal identifications is sustained by a faith in a transcendent will that both grounds subjectivity and sustains it as subjectivity through its various transformations. In Mendelssohn's musical world this transcendent ground is the will of the father that must be illuminated and discovered through an interpretation of the words of revelation. In his claim that this “resolution” is already there when the music begins Steinberg is right. But it is there only as an item of faith, and needs to be performed in the music to become real. The drama of the music lies in the battle to discover and experientially affirm the knowledge that grounds both autonomy and integration, and to sustain that knowledge against the constant temptation to fall under the spell of particular historical, cultural identifications that claim exclusivity and fail to recognize the historical relativity of all specific religious and communal identities. This is a musical historicism that differs from those of Beethoven or Wagner, but it is a historicism that comes into being in the music, and can only be illuminated through an analysis of the dynamic structures of Mendelssohn's musical compositions. This does not mean that one cannot talk or write about it anymore than one must surrender the right to talk about the construction of a particular historical self-consciousness in the aesthetic forms of the “I” shaping itself in the dynamics of a novel like Madame Bovary or Bleak House. As an aesthetic construct, the work has its own voice, as Steinberg constantly reminds us, and that voice is usually (inevitably?) more subtle and multidimensional than the voice of its author as we might come to know it through other textual evidence.

III. AGENCY BECOMES IDENTITY: MUSIC AS THE SITE FOR THE FORMATION AND EXPRESSION OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The discussion of Mendelssohn's musical historicism by Steinberg and Applegate continually gravitates toward a focus on the way in which the musical experience and imagination of both audience and participants enacts the organization of subjectivity as essentially communal, or integrates individual subjects into an inter-subjective community, how it produces not just a consciousness (mediated through the freedom of aesthetic form) of the emancipation of subjectivity from externally fixed or determined historical forms, but draws emancipated subjects into new possibilities of integration, re-creating historically determined identities as self-consciously chosen identities. The question of how music could become a privileged site for the cultivation and performance of national identity organizes Applegate's study and emerges in Steinberg's attempts to rescue German classical music from this fate and to reveal the historical contingency of its appropriation for national identity-formation. Both write in the shadow of the history of the German classical-music tradition in the twentieth century: its appropriation by ethnic and racial nationalists who transformed “absolute” music into a synonym for German music, and its partial or selective purification after 1945 through the rehabilitation of the ideology of autonomous music as a universal form transcending the mundane, contingent, corrupting influence of nationalist particularity. The music of Johannes Brahms was most effectively rescued from nationalist appropriations in these latter efforts (more effectively than the music of Wagner, or even Bruckner) and reinstated as an exemplar for autonomous “absolute” music, but a recent study by the historical musicologist Daniel Beller-McKenna, entitled Brahms and the German Spirit, questions the legitimacy of this ideological purification and claims that Brahms's music should be understood as an expression of the German cultural and political nationalism that shaped the perspectives of the composer as well as his audience during the period of German unification and the imperial triumph after the creation of the Bismarckian Reich in 1870–71. Beller-McKenna's argument here is not just about the appropriation of Brahms's music as distinctively German but about its contingent particularity as German music. The music itself, he claims, transforms subjective agency into national identity.

Beller-Mckenna's general claims about the centrality of German national identity in Brahms's works are based in part on a judgment that Brahms's treatment of the German Lutheran Bible as a kind of urtext of German culture turned all of the music he composed to biblical texts into statements about German nationality, and in part on descriptions of the specific historical contexts of the production and performance of some of Brahms's major texted works. His extensive analysis of Brahms's collections of biblical passages does produce some interesting insights. The passages Brahms collected and used were usually stripped of their theological content, and selected for their expression of earthly moods, desires and hopes. In fact it would seem that according to Beller-McKenna's own analysis it was Brahms's music that framed the meaning of these selections rather than the other way around. At the same time the connections drawn between historical contexts and musical forms, although sometimes suggestive, often seem to fall into very broad analogies open to conflicting interpretation. What is powerful in the book is Beller-McKenna's ability to tease out complex narrative patterns of structural relations through the detailed analysis of musical form.

At the core of the book are two chapters that dissect Brahms's well-known Ein deutsches Requiem (Opus 45, completed in 1868) and his now virtually unknown Triumphlied (Opus 55, 1871) as musicalizations of an apocalyptic paradigm of historical development, first as expectation and hope and then as triumphant fulfillment. The Requiem is conventionally related to Brahms's personal attempts to come to terms with and seek consolation for the personal losses of his mentor and musical father Robert Schumann, who died in 1856, and his biological mother, who died in 1865. From this perspective the biblical passages are appropriated and musically framed to express the human psychology of loss, grief, commemoration and consolation. Steinberg tends to hear the Requiem and interpret the paradigm of transformation it performs in this way. The representation of personal grief and the hope for external consolation through either conquest of the world or loving acceptance by the world are “resolved” through a revelatory experience of music itself as the site where militancy and consolation, masculine control and maternal love, are reconciled. Beller-Mckenna, however, reads the patterns of temporal and structural relations in the piece within a paradigm of apocalyptic cultural transformation. Inconsolable grief and irresolvable conflict find their resolution in the hope for a radical change within social and cultural structures of immanent community that will create a New Jerusalem or second Paradise where the divisions of temporal life will be dissolved in a timeless eternity. His analysis of the music does suggest a cessation or at least partial suspension of normal temporal order in the outer movements and an experience of alienation and longing accompanied by intimations of promised fulfillment in the five inner movements of the Requiem. The key to the interpretation of this apocalyptic pattern of subjective longing and articulated hope for a home in which that longing will finally be stilled is seen in the political context of Brahms's composition—the movement toward German national unification under Prussian Protestant leadership during the 1860s.

Beller-Mckenna wants to argue that the Requiem represented Brahms's powerful personal identification with the German nation (as shaped by the linguistic foundations and Protestant perspectives of the Lutheran Bible). The work is thus an expression of Brahms's conscious and perhaps also unconscious commitments and identifications. Steinberg, however, hears a combination of personal and collective subjectivity reflecting on itself within the music, giving voice to what he describes as a first-person plural of the “people,” but not representing a preformed exclusionary unity of nation-state or confessional church, or even collective German cultural identity or “spirit.” By comparing Brahms's Requiem to the requiems composed by Verdi (1874) and Dvořák (1890), Steinberg suggests the emergence of a counter-Wagnerian musical rhetoric in the late nineteenth century that examined the issue of collective national experience and voice but resisted the incorporation of subjectivity into national identity and maintained the separation and interaction of personal, cultural and religious dimensions in the discourse of subjectivity. Beller-Mckenna, however, draws his comparisons to Brahms's later work—especially the Triumphlied composed after the defeat of France and the creation of the new German Empire. From the perspective of this triumphalist representation of accomplished national identity defined by the defeat and exclusion of the “other,” Ein deutsches Requiem does begin to look more like a premonitory dream of national fulfillment. Beller-Mckenna's convincing analysis of the Triumphlied as a purely expressive declamation of achieved resolution without the structural dynamics of tonal tensions, conflicts and progressive movement, as a composition he describes as “one great ending”Footnote ²¹ without internal development, however, also highlights how different the Triumphlied is from the music of Brahms that has maintained itself in the classical canon. Like the Requiem, the Triumphlied assimilates parts of the tradition of sacred music—Handel's Halleluja Chorus, the Lutheran chorale Nun danket alle Gott—as a way of connecting German military victory over France to divine judgment and the successful constitution of a community of the saints, but other aspects of the historical appropriation of the sacred tradition evident in the Requiem are absent in the Triumphlied. The biblical narrative of suffering and hope, of loss and recovery, of alienation and reconciliation, is missing, leaving only the celebration of arrival. Applegate noted that the emotional power of Mendelssohn's revival of the St Matthew Passion was due in large part to the subjective enactment of this circular journey (from Eden to the New Jerusalem) of the soul through the formal transformations of musical structure. A traditional religious experience was revived and performed as an aesthetic experience in the dynamic forms of the music. But “salvation” occurred here as an aesthetic experience. The integration of individual subjectivity into a spiritual community occurred within the musical experience. Music allowed individuals to explore such possibilities collectively but it did not represent their extra-musical merger, or express an already constituted historical identity. What Steinberg sees in the musical universes of composers like Mendelssohn and Brahms is an ability to maintain the balance and tension between autonomy and integration, longing and resolution, suffering and consolation, by never allowing art to surrender to representation or expression. The problem with Brahms's Triumphlied, and with much of Wagner, is that they collapse these distinctions.

But there is clearly a problem in this perspective. The power of the narrative of loss, longing and recovery, of exile, alienation and homecoming, is sustained by the belief that the fiction of resolution is a real experiential possibility, that aesthetic experience as aesthetic experience is a real experience that tells us something about our true selves and our historical possibilities. What happens to musical structure when this belief begins to disintegrate, when composers and performers and audiences lose their belief in the metaphysical grounds of the musical narrative, when musical experiences of resolution and reconciliation are immediately recognized not as immanent possibilities but as empty dreams, grounded in futile longings? In many ways this question informs the final chapters of nineteenth-century classical music and is expressed in the works under review in discussions about the meaning of the music of Gustav Mahler.

IV. RECONSTRUCTING SUBJECTIVITY WITHOUT IDENTITY: MAHLER AND MODERNISM

Michael Steinberg concludes his history of the performance of subjectivity in nineteenth-century art music with a condensed, dense and somewhat cryptic discussion of the nine completed symphonies Gustav Mahler composed between the mid-1880s and his death in 1911. The symphonies are divided into two groups, each constituting a distinctive chapter in the interaction between subjectivity and the various possibilities of identity, or “representation,” as Steinberg prefers to call the state of subjectivity's capitulation to, or engulfment by, powers and ideologies that universalize historically contingent possibilities. The musical structures and dynamics of the first four symphonies perform the journey of a homeless outsider seeking the identity of a home through a maze of possibilities (musical representations of resolution or reconciliation) that both tempt and threaten the subject, and can be alternatively resisted, obeyed or transcended. In this period Mahler's work obviously continues the nineteenth-century tradition of enacting subjectivity as a quest for identity, although with a distinctive capacity to articulate musically the emotional immediacy of both the agonies of alienation and the seductive attraction of dreams of fulfillment tied to Arcadian, maternal and religious references.

Steienberg's concluding chapter is entitled “The Musical Unconscious” to highlight another constant element in Mahler's work. For Mahler the problem of representation lies less in memories drawn from historical tradition and embedded in the self-referential network of Western art music than in the uncontrollable and repressed unconscious desires and fears ultimately rooted in natural and psychic depths that transcend the individual self. The fall into representation is enacted by the musical subject acting out these powers. Mahler's ability to produce aural enactments of the emotional drives, longings and dreams of the alienated psyche that were not dependent on expert knowledge of the classical-music tradition but resonated more immediately within the psyches of a general concert audience became one of the sources of his contemporary popularity (alternatively judged as a socially radical populism or as unsophisticated vulgarity) as well as his ability to maintain his influence among audiences divorced from the original contexts of the music's production and performance.

Steinberg, however, focuses on the important transformation that occurred around 1900 and which began to be enacted in the Fifth Symphony. In the last five symphonies he sees a change from symptomatic acting out of unconscious desires in dream images of fulfillment to a conscious working out of, and analytic engagement with, the sources and consequences of surrender to representation and ideology. The mutual respect and admiration apparently expressed in the famous meeting between Mahler and Freud in 1910 provides a touchstone for Steinberg's interpretation. After 1900 Freud and Mahler shared a common agenda—to protect and affirm subjectivity against the temptations of representation or identity even under the most extreme emotional pressures to capitulate to the unquenchable longing for surrender to some supra-personal meaning. The music in these last years, Steinberg argues, becomes itself an affirmation of life as an interminable working through of the temptation to abandon subjectivity for a permanent identity.

The collection of essays published in the Bard Festival volume on Mahler edited by Karen Painter—Mahler and his World—provides discussions of both historical contexts and musical structures that illuminate the somewhat abstract claims of Steinberg's conclusion. Leon Botstein's revealing historical reconstruction of the reception of Mahler's music in the twentieth century posits a radical disjuncture between meanings (psychological and therapeutic) attached to Mahler in his post-1960s revival and the more edgy and ironic, more political and culturally critical, meanings that were heard in Mahler's music in the time and place of their origin in fin de siècle Europe. Music that had originally disturbed and unsettled audiences, by undermining the viability of their strategies to achieve psychic integration and an affirmative identity for their homeless subjectivity, later seemed to provide therapeutic consolation for lost and suffering souls. Botstein's analysis is complex, but the general thrust of his analysis appears to substantiate Steinberg's argument that Mahler's music enacts a critique of ideology similar to that of Freud. Other essays devoted to situating Mahler in his original historical context reenforce this particular interpretation of how the cultural content of the formal dynamics in Mahler's music might be construed. Talia Becker Berio's “Mahler's Jewish Parable” examines Mahler's insider–outside status as an assimilating Jew at a moment of increasing anti-Semitic exclusion as the foundation of his musical performance of a subjectivity both longing for integration and resistant to the ideological integrations that were offered. Essays by Charles Maier and Karen Painter reveal a possible political framework for Mahler's musical performance of subjectivity. Maier describes how Mahler's public roles as musical director and conductor involved an engagement with audiences that aimed not only to deconstruct nostalgic ideologies of reconciliation and identity, but also to construct, in an activist, recognizably progressive manner, the listening public as a new form of cultural community. Like Freud's apparently paradoxical role as the charismatic creator and director of the psychoanalytic movement and thus fashioner of new identities for the analyzed, Mahler's focus on the individual psychic process of identity-formation and identity-unraveling implied the hope for a new kind of affirmative community of the ideologically disabused. His massive musical structures with their often simplified appeal to the psychic conflicts of Everyman, rather than to the expert knowledge of the musical cognescendi, thus suggested a desire to involve mass audiences in the historical experience of subjectivity enacted in his art. Finally, an essay by Peter Franklin on gender implications in Mahler's musical discourse suggests that, like Freud, Mahler imagined the organization of subjectivity as a constant exploration of both feminine and masculine identities in the never completely resolved or fixed gendering of subjectivity.

The four essays devoted to structural and formal analysis of specific musical works and/or passages tend to confirm the suggestions of the contextual essays. In this case at least, historical analysis of the extra-musical context of the worlds in which Mahler composed, performed and was performed, and formal analysis of the autonomous musical universes within which he explored the interaction between subjectivity and identity, cooperate, or at least interact, in ways that open up convincing interpretations of the meaning of the works. Essays by Camilla Bork and Peter Revers on Mahler's settings for Friedrich Rueckert's lyrical poetry suggest that Mahler's contextually defined personal crisis and transformation in 1901 produced a shift in musical form that is consistent with Steinberg's claim of a turn toward a disillusioned, self-reflective, ironic stance in relation to possibilities of identity and resolution as well as toward the construction of aesthetic affirmations of inconclusive, interminable subjectivity. A study of Mahler's late style by Stephen Helfling confirms this pattern. The overall effect on the reader is that Mahler's musical works, like the novels of Musil, Mann or Proust, are an integral part of the history of subjectivity as it evolves from the emancipation of the modern subject, through the transformations and crises of identification, to the self-critical analysis of psychic reality as an ongoing, interminable performance of subjectivity.Footnote ²² In the process of undermining the old narratives of movement toward resolution and identity that provided temporal meaning to human existence, there emerged new kinds of modernist narratives driven by the emergence of a critical self-consciousness regarding the source of the desire for meaning. One could say that the new insight was that narrative meaning can only be found in the story of a search for meaning that culminates in the recognition (and potentially in the affirmation) that all human meanings are constructs imposed on a meaningless reality.

Perhaps the time has come not only to include the history of music as both an autonomous and a central element in the standard intellectual and cultural histories of modern Europe, but also to reimagine the textual and visual elements in those histories from the perspective of the history of music. Forms internal to music seem to be able to embody or enact the flow of subjectivity through the construction and deconstruction of identities more convincingly, more “experientially,” than other cultural forms. Knowledge of these musical forms might open up obscured dimensions in areas dominated by texts and visual images. The construction of masculine and feminine identity in Freud's texts, for example, could be enriched and complicated by examining his texts as sites where subjectivity is performed in a constant negotiation with representations of masculinity and femininity, rather than as expressions or representations of identities already preformed outside the text. Listening to Mahler might illuminate Freud's texts as much as reading Freud illuminates Mahler's music. If music can really teach us to listen, then historians can only gain from listening to music. And intellectual historians, whose work is focused on reconstructing the processes of past thinking, should pay special attention to the ways in which listening to music creates possibilities for engaging texts in a way that not only emphasizes context, encounter and dialogue rather than assimilation, expropriation and transparency, but also reanimates narrative form as a constant movement of reflection from memory to expectation.