Euroscepticism and ‘Modernism Bashing’

A decade ago, in the second issue of this journal, Björn Heile described a prevailing scepticism towards musical modernism in English-language musicology, and made a bid for renewal. One factor contributing to the stigmatization of musical modernism, according to Heile, was the tendency to consider Anglo-American musicology as normative, with non-English music studies representing ‘deviations that primarily reflect their particular cultural background’.Footnote ¹ This disciplinary tendency has meant construing musical modernism – which was commonly seen as having been rooted in continental Europe – from an ‘outsider's perspective’, as being foreign or Other, resulting in a ‘degree of distancing and often to a defence of national traditions against the perceived threat of an internationalized avant garde’.Footnote ² More recently, Paul Harper-Scott articulated a similar concern, highlighting how the perception of musical modernism within Anglo-American musicology has been largely conditioned by an ‘end of history’ paradigm, in the sense that:

According to this narrative, Europe's purported foreignness is compounded by the taint of ideology, in contrast to the ideological purity of the Anglophone outlook. Musical modernism, conceived as a product of continental Europe by a discipline predicated on this ‘end of history’ narrative, has thus been equated with decline, and as being antithetical to historical progress.

Musical modernism has also been associated with practices of objectification and abstraction, which have furnished accusations of artificiality. For example, Heile noted that it had become common to associate musical modernism with ‘technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition [. . .] shutting itself off hermetically from any kind of outside influence, be it historical, cultural, or social’.Footnote ⁴ Underpinning these associations is an understanding of musical modernism as making an undifferentiated claim to a position of autonomy. This claim has been understood to include the notion of ‘absolute music’ and questions about the possibility or desirability of musical representation, as well as related problems of analysis and interpretation. It also implies an ethical position whereby music is held to be an end in itself, with no social content or responsibility. In addition, autonomy has been construed as invoking the notion that an artist is able to stand outside of history, implying the possibility of validity claims beyond the local and subjective – a notion that came to be seen as dangerously authoritarian according to the discourse of postmodernity. In its most severe form, autonomy involved the denial of a work's historical situatedness, and the development of practices and techniques of composition designed to ensure music's detachment from its context.

With the ‘new’ musicology being committed to understanding music's constitutive role in society, and wary of formalism's past misdemeanours, the association of musical modernism with these kinds of claims to autonomy incited what Heile described as a ‘vogue of modernism bashing’.Footnote ⁵ Modernism is thereby routinely associated with the decadence and elitism of the early twentieth century, with extremist right-wing politics in the mid-twentieth century, and with the subversion of Anglo-American liberal democracy and global capitalism in the later twentieth century. It has to this extent been a victim of its own rhetoric: of historical rupture, internationalism, detachment and abstraction, objectification and theory. At a more fundamental level, however, its current maligning in musicology reflects an ongoing disciplinary anxiety with practices of autonomy.

This anxiety is not only confined to specialized discourses, but can also been seen in the broader public sphere, as exemplified in current debates about the idea of Europe. Twice a year, the European Commission conducts a survey of how the ordinary people of its member states feel about the institution of the European Union. Over the last eight years, the ‘Eurobarometer’, as it is known, has shown an overall drop in ‘positive’ associations with the ‘image of the EU’ (from 50 per cent to 35 per cent);Footnote ⁶ in ‘trust in the European Union’ (from 38 per cent to 31 per cent);Footnote ⁷ and in optimistic feelings about the ‘future of the EU’ (from 69 per cent to 56 per cent).Footnote ⁸ While these results tend to obscure national-level fluctuations (some of which record an increase in support for the EU over this period), there is undoubtedly a developed rhetoric of ‘crisis’ in relation to the idea of Europe today – an impression strengthened by the unprecedented gains of the ‘eurosceptic’ parties (from France, Britain, and Denmark), and populist voices, in the most recent European parliamentary elections of May 2014.

In response to the election results, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte was reported to say that Europe needs ‘fewer rules and less fuss’ and should focus on ‘where it can add value to things’. British prime minister David Cameron responded similarly, saying that ‘Europe should concentrate on what matters, on growth and jobs, and not try to do so much.’Footnote ⁹ The tenor of these kinds of calls for reform undoubtedly reflects the contracting, nationalist politics of recession, which emphasizes the local or particularized, the practical and the immediate, rather than the normative, abstract, or idealist. In this context, ‘less fuss’ and focusing on ‘what matters’ appear as a muted bids for less intellectualism and technocracy in the EU – for less form and more content, as it were.

England's (and more problematically, Britain’s) relationship with the idea of Europe has always been particularly vexed, and indeed some have argued that contemporary English nationalism primarily defines itself in the negative – that is, against the idea of Europe.Footnote ¹⁰ The sense that the ‘crisis’ of faith in the idea of Europe is due to its failure to attend to the immediate concerns of the people, and its technocratic character, was polemically expressed over a decade earlier in a more extremist form by the aging Margaret Thatcher, who famously described Europe as a ‘classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals’.Footnote ¹¹ Contrasting European integration with American unification, Thatcher wrote that ‘Europe was a result of plans’ as opposed to the ‘events’ and ‘necessities’ that helped forge the USA, and indeed that ‘it was the liberal democratic values of the English-speaking peoples, spearheaded from Washington, which proved the ultimate antidote to communism’.Footnote ¹² Here, in a clear alignment with the problematic associations that have attended musical modernism, we see ‘Europe’ being cast as constructed and elitist, laden with ideology, and divorced from historical realities. Its purported artificiality and foreignness were pitted against the seeming organic naturalness, or ideologically neutral Anglophone ‘antidote’.

Thatcher's neo-liberal emphasis on individualism during her time in office was co-opted by debates about English parliamentary sovereignty during the late 1970s and 1980s, serving as a catalyst to the development of contemporary euroscepticism. Thatcher's casting of individualism as a defining element of English history and national sensibility was particularly influential in the context of these debates, allowing an ideology of personal self-determination to serve the argument for political self-determination in the broader context of Britain's membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). The linking of individualism with English national character has made ‘ever closer union’ with Europe seem antithetical to the natural progress of history,Footnote ¹³ and has ensured that the notion that ‘a government should step in and replace organic and spontaneous relationships with regimentation from above’ has been construed as ‘alien to the Anglo-Saxon tradition’.Footnote ¹⁴ The spectre of an ‘alien’ imposition upon an ‘organic’ creation – or the idea that a constructed, or abstracted system disrupts the historical continuity of national growth from below – evokes very clearly the imagery of modernist rupture associated with continental Decadence, and the practices of objectification and detachment involved in its associated lifestyles, designed as they were to be ‘against nature’ in a variety of ways.Footnote ¹⁵

As a counter-force to these damaging associations, there have been recent calls for renewal in relation to both musical modernism and the idea of Europe. With regards to the former, renewal has generally been sought by claiming that autonomy operated in a dialectical relationship with social engagement, rather than in opposition. Gianmario Borio's contribution to the recent roundtable on ‘Modernism and its Others’, published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association,Footnote ¹⁶ gives a timely historicization of this argument. Borio locates its origins in a debate about the extent to which the arts should evidence ‘commitment’ to social concerns in the wake of the cultural policy of the Soviet bloc, involving Jean-Paul Satre, René Leibowitz, Luigi Nono, Adorno, and Umberto Eco during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹⁷ Borio argues that despite the outward rejection of modernist autonomy in the post-war context, it has in fact persisted in dialectical relation to commitment; for example, in the championing of artistic liberty against state intervention, or against the influence of commercial or ‘market’ interests in music production. This new casting would allow for the transformation of the modernist disposition of autonomy from what had been perceived as a decadent renunciation of ethical responsibility into a critical force for liberation against hegemonic norms. This transformation aims to position autonomy as an attitude of critical distance that is positively necessary to maintaining democratic communication. Thus detachment itself can be viewed as a form of ‘commitment’, whereby private experimentation is acknowledged as necessary for the dynamic functioning of a polity.

Reflecting a similar agenda to these recent calls for renewed perspectives on musical modernism, Jürgen Habermas earlier cast autonomy as being central to democratic communication. Habermas draws out a counter-narrative for the role of autonomy in modernity, casting it not as a withdrawal from reason tout court, but as a critique of subject-centred reason that offers in its place a form of ‘inter-subjective’ or ‘communicative’ reason. Against the narrative of postmodernity regarding the impossibility of validity claims, Habermas imagines a level of objectivity that can operate beyond the local and subjective – and beyond the contingencies of language – which is therefore capable of being productively debated.Footnote ¹⁸

Habermas's conception of the role of autonomy in modernity also plays out in his calls to renew the idea of Europe in terms of a dialectic of detachment and engagement – or in his notion of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’. As a prominent advocate of European integration, Habermas has argued that current constructions of the idea of Europe – as being in opposition to nationalism, or as an absence of affiliation rather than as an ‘actually existing’ political collectivity – focus upon its purely technocratic characterization, noting that ‘Europe cannot take hold in the consciousness of its citizens simply in the shape of a common currency’.Footnote ¹⁹ At the height of the Eurozone crisis, Habermas was stridently critical of German chancellor Angela Merkel's political manoeuvring that ensured that the European Central Bank's financial bailout of the ‘southern countries’ of Europe was contingent upon the implementation of stringent austerity measures. Habermas called Merkel's actions ‘duplicitous’ and ‘opportunistic’ in the sense that it showed that Germany was happy to accept a role as a leading power in Europe without accepting responsibility for its role in the crisis. In other words, its actions were driven by a nationalistic impulse of self-interest, rather than as a citizen of a European polity: ‘her public persona seems to lack any normative core’.Footnote ²⁰

Habermas presents a direct challenge to the characterization of European institutions as artificial impositions upon an organically formed polity, by highlighting the level of intentionality that is involved in citizenship:

Articulating an ideal of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’, Habermas charts a middle-way between national and global identification, or between self-sovereignty and cooperation. The ‘cosmopolitan citizen’ is part of a world community of supranational associations, wherein ‘the member states retain control over the means for a legitimate use of force, though not the right to use them as they please’.Footnote ²² Habermas's notion of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’ in this sense has been considerably sharpened in recent literature from across the humanities dealing with the concept of cosmopolitanism as both a critical attitude and a viable political alternative. Through this literature (which will be considered below), the conventional perception of the cosmopolitan as a detached – and therefore potentially subversive – champion of modernist autonomy has been revised to highlight the ethical position involved in this attitude.

Given the striking similarities between current debates about musical modernism and those about the idea of Europe, it is surprising that the dialectical position latent in these new conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism has not garnered closer scrutiny as a model for a renewed view of musical modernism. In what follows, I aim to make a start at drawing together these two realms of discourse, by looking at the historical intermingling of debates about detachment and affiliation as they related to cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and conceptions of autonomy and engagement as they related to musical modernism, on the other. By examining attributions of cosmopolitan characteristics to Delius in this manner, I aim to highlight the existence of an interlocking series of anxieties that may point to the potential of considering cosmopolitanism as a model for reimagining autonomy and commitment in musical modernism. In addition, the recognition of these interlocking discourses should strengthen the calls for the reconceptualization of modernism as an ‘outlook’ or continuing essence that extends beyond its historical demarcation and suggests that modernism offers a category for investigation that can be a powerful alternative to normative notions of musical identity based on nationality, ethnicity, or gender.

Locating Delius

A century ago, the English composer-critic Philip Heseltine (better known by his pseudonym Peter Warlock) published an article in The Musical Times titled ‘Some Notes on Delius and His Music’.Footnote ²³ The article's impact was such that eighty-two years later, the journal saw fit to republish it under the modified title of ‘The Good European’, noting its significance in terms of paving the way for a more sympathetic reception of Delius's music.Footnote ²⁴ In the article, Heseltine observed that Frederick Delius’s

According to Heseltine, Delius's isolation was compounded by what he termed the ‘elusive problem of his nationality’.Footnote ²⁶

Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1862 to parents who had emigrated to Britain from Germany twenty years before his birth and had become British nationals. Delius lived primarily in Britain until the age of twenty-two, and indeed his Yorkshire upbringing should have attracted strong provincial associations in his critical reception during the inter-war period, given the artistic currency of the ‘myth of the North’.Footnote ²⁷ At twenty-two he moved to an orange plantation in Florida, then to Leipzig for musical training, then to Paris, finally settling in Grez-sur-Loing. He also often travelled to Norway, had many Norwegian friends, and developed a strong love of Norwegian poetry, music, landscape, and mythology.

Delius's Teutonic ancestry (or as Heseltine put it, ‘the superstition that he is really a German’)Footnote ²⁸ would have made him an easy target for criticism in 1915, when Heseltine's article was written. Yet even earlier, Delius's reception in Britain was marked by a pervasive confusion over his national identity. When Delius presented a self-funded concert of his own works in London in 1899 for example, the press coverage was oddly preoccupied with the composer's ‘foreign parentage’ or ‘foreign extraction’, his extensive travels to America, Germany, and Scandinavia, and the broad range of the source material for his works, including American novels, German poetry, and Norwegian plays.Footnote ²⁹ Even sympathetic reviewers felt it necessary to comment upon this seemingly pivotal facet of Delius's compositional persona, one critic writing: ‘Moreover, although of German parentage, and a pupil of the Leipzig and Paris Conservatories, Mr. Delius was born and brought up in Yorkshire, and therefore his abilities should be recognized in this country.’Footnote ³⁰ Arthur Symons, in response to one of Beecham's concerts in 1908, wrote that he had ‘heard no recent English music so expressive, so full of somber poetry’ – a point of distinction that the continentally inspired Symons attributed to ‘Delius's un-English quality of mind’.Footnote ³¹

The ‘elusive problem of [Delius’s] nationality’ continued to characterize the reception of his music after the war, and still persists today. In a review article written in 1927, a critic noted that ‘there is [even] a foreign character in [Delius’s] handwriting, and it will be observed that he spells “characteristic” in the manner of the Latin languages, also that he breaks the word in a way that one accustomed to think and write in English would never adopt (characte-ristic)’.Footnote ³² Lionel Carley explicitly cast Delius as a ‘cosmopolitan’ in his 1983 publication of Delius's life and letters;Footnote ³³ this characterization is echoed in the subtitle to Christopher Palmer's 1976 text on Delius, ‘Portrait of a Cosmopolitan’;Footnote ³⁴ and it persists even in incidental remarks such as Byron Adams's comment that Delius ‘was English only by accident of birth, for in all other ways he was a deeply cosmopolitan composer’.Footnote ³⁵

The pervasiveness of the critical trope of cosmopolitanism in the literature on Delius is striking, and it is often partnered with questions about whether or not he can be claimed as an English composer. In 1922 Sydney Grew began an article on Delius by writing:

Answering this question in the affirmative, Grew proceeded to discuss a number of Delius's works that the critic considered to be in fact ‘more English than that of any other composer’,Footnote ³⁷ and others that supposedly had ‘the same mental and spiritual tone of our race’.Footnote ³⁸

Basil Hogarth reflected with exasperation in 1934 that ‘much polemical ink has been spilt disputing the exact proportions of English characteristics in the music of Frederick Delius’, though he also noted ‘there can be no doubt that Delius was essentially an Englishman by birth, breeding, and temperament. His accent, with its suggestion of the Yorkshire Pennines; his reserve and distrust of artistic cliques and coteries were in keeping with his Northern origin.’Footnote ³⁹

The paradoxical scenario that saw Delius conceived as simultaneously foreign – in national allegiance, in mindset, and in written expression – but yet unassailably English – in breeding, temperament, spirit, and selected works – is difficult to account for. Robert Stradling has viewed instances of Delius's English characterization as part of a politically inflected and calculated effort on the part of figures such as Heseltine, Gray, and Beecham to effect a posthumous repatriation of the composer (both conceptually and literally – Delius's body was moved from Grez and re-interred in a small churchyard in Surrey).Footnote ⁴⁰ The confusion over Delius's status of affiliation was also no doubt spurred by the fact that he was fairly mature by the time his music was heard with any regularity in English concert halls, giving the impression that he had emerged from nowhere – fully formed, as it were – rather than growing organically out of his national and historical context. Yet while the peculiarities in Delius's reception continue to frustrate attempts to ‘locate’ his music historically (especially given the prevailing methodological nationalism of music history), they may also bear witness to the remarkable intersection of political, aesthetic, and ethical discourses in the post-Victorian music sphere. Delius's reception may suggest, for example, the extent to which the language of political and social theory was appropriated by music critics who found themselves grappling with an unprecedented pluralism in musical style, and with questions regarding critical authority in determining the character of musical progress. In particular, it can show how the notion of cosmopolitanism was actively mobilized in relation to Delius not only to signal a political and cultural position, but also to describe a particular attitude – a distanced or detached persona – which applied to both music composition and music criticism.

In viewing this paradox as an opening rather than a closure – as being fecund with interpretative insight and opportunity rather than as a site of incommensurability – we must come to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as something other than a matter of nationality, language or spirit. Delius's apparent transgression of public borders of nationhood was partnered with his ambiguous position in relation to a number of imaginary private borders which continued to hold a striking cultural currency, such as between the aesthetic and the athletic, between the feminine sensitive and the masculine robust, and between passionate engagement and detachment. Embedded within these dualisms were also competing conceptions of history and methods of interpretation and analysis. For example, types of analysis that atomize, fragment, and particularize their object were often pitted against more ‘cosmopolitan’ types that synthesize, unify, generalize, and abstract. And methods of history that forward teleological narratives of national development were pitted against genealogical or episodic approaches. These debates also touched music criticism, such as can be seen in the debate between Ernest Newman, on the one hand, who believed that musical greatness sprang from its time and was always recognized in its own time, and Cecil Gray, on the other hand, who believed that genius was above any temporal or geographical demarcation.Footnote ⁴¹ In the former case a composer's work was evaluated according to the extent to which it contributed to and was expressive of its time and place in a national context, and in the latter, music was evaluated according to the extent to which it represented a contribution to all times and all places – namely, its status as an immortal artwork. These underlying agenda complicate discussions of Delius's cosmopolitanism and Englishness respectively, though they also provide an opportunity to historicize the contemporary concern for exploring ‘post-national’ or ‘global’ perspectives, and to interrogate the interaction between ideas about musical modernism and questions of affiliation more broadly.

The Double-Edged Nature of Cosmopolitanism

In recent years there has been an immense proliferation of cosmopolitanism studies, including in political philosophy, cultural theory, sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism. These have ranged from theoretical explorations of the nature and elements of different types of cosmopolitanism historically, to empirical studies of cosmopolitanism as a lived experience (namely, ‘cosmopolitanism in practice’ or ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’), as well as ideologically and philosophically motivated investigations of cosmopolitanism as a political alternative.Footnote ⁴² Within this extensive literature, cosmopolitanism has been construed variously as an ethico-political programme, a sociocultural condition, an attitude or disposition, and, ultimately, as a scholarly methodology. In ethnomusicology, cosmopolitanism has appeared as a productive model when considering the global circulation of musical repertories, moving beyond postcolonial anxieties regarding authority, appropriation, and authenticity, towards renewed notions of agency and exchange.Footnote ⁴³ And, more recently, Dana Gooley has drawn the topic of cosmopolitanism directly into the purview of historical musicology of the nineteenth century, observing a marked absence of critical reflection on notions of cosmopolitanism from the time, despite substantial scholarly interest in the historical relationship between music and national identity.Footnote ⁴⁴

Part of the difficulty of conceiving cosmopolitanism in the context of historical musicology, Gooley notes, may be ‘identifying its location or site’ – for example, whether it should be viewed in terms of patterns of behaviour (particularly in relation to travel and communication), compositional techniques and musical style, repertoire and institutions, or in the lives and outlooks of professional musicians.Footnote ⁴⁵ In view of this difficulty, Delius's reception as a cosmopolitan in early twentieth-century Britain may suggest a surprising absence of delineation between these ‘locations’ or ‘sites’ in practice, demonstrating instead the multilevel operation of cosmopolitanism.

Historical conceptions of cosmopolitanism in Britain served as ideological precursors to modern euroscepticism, and had a direct impact on the emergence and reception of an artistic consciousness associated with late Victorianism and British modernism. Esther Wohlgemut has traced the impact in the British political sphere of Kant's Enlightenment conception of cosmopolitanism. For Kant, the purpose of human reason was to progress humankind towards Enlightenment, and although the micro-histories of individuals and communities seemed to suggest a blind and chaotic development, the broader concept of ‘universal history’ could reveal the underlying teleological progression of reason. This broader view of history to reveal the constitutive role of reason in a gradual progression towards Enlightenment describes the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of human actions, and therefore ethical behaviour can be determined by its contribution to this overarching ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of universal history.Footnote ⁴⁶ Wohlgemut notes that although Kant believed that every individual had the capacity to reason autonomously, it was the public use of reason that drove the development of this capacity:

So while, for Kant, the autonomous individual or community can utilize their capacity to reason in order to progress towards Enlightenment, overall this capacity was enhanced by its communal expression across humankind. In addition, while universal laws of ethics were internal to and accessible by such autonomous individuals rather than being relative to historical or cultural situatedness (the notion which underpins the concept of immutable human rights), the exercise of behaviour in accordance with these universal laws must accord with the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of human history.

With this dual emphasis on the autonomy of the individual in his or her capacity to reason and access universal laws, on the one hand, and the significance of the broader conception of human progression, on the other, it is perhaps not surprising that Kant's thought in this area became an instrument of both nationalist and cosmopolitan agendas. Here the notions of individual freedom, equality, and self-determination that became central to the emergence of the modern nation were joined with the Enlightenment concept of the ‘original contract’, which described how these aspects of individual (or national) fulfilment could only be fully achieved in their relationship to the global whole.Footnote ⁴⁸

Wohlgemut observes the impact of Kant's political philosophy on debates that emerged in Britain in the wake of the French Revolution, especially that between Edmund Burke and Richard Price. One of the curious aspects of the debate at this historical juncture (namely, in ‘wartime Britain’) is the emergence of a stigma of suspicion attached to cosmopolitanism – a stigma that later re-emerged with renewed force in the wake of the First World War, impacting Delius directly.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Burke's vitriolic attacks against cosmopolitanism or international cooperation of any kind, he developed an imagery that has been appropriated by eurosceptic and modernism-sceptic causes alike. This was an imagery articulated through a vision of Britain as an organic outcome of its historical continuity, in opposition to the artificial abstraction of the ideals of the new French constitution.Footnote ⁵⁰ Burke cast Price's pro-cooperation stance as the

Burke's casting of international cooperation or cosmopolitanism in this salacious light, and as being threatening to national solidarity, drove the position's association with Jacobinism: ‘for Burke, national belonging begins with love of hearth and home and not with the universal rights of man’.Footnote ⁵²

This kind of scepticism towards cosmopolitanism continued well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including, as Rebecca Walkowitz has observed, among ‘British writers opposing German militarism, Irish writers opposing British rule, socialist writers suspicious of rootlessness, fascist writers suspicious of individualism, and postcolonial writers suspicious of non-Europeans who address European audiences’.Footnote ⁵³ Nevertheless, the status of cosmopolitanism in public discourse was by no means consistent. Studies in late Victorian literature in particular have driven a substantial shift in our understanding of cosmopolitanism in recent years. There are three interrelated concepts that have come out of this new work that are of the most immediate relevance for the present purposes, each of which problematize and nuance traditional dichotomies between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. These three interrelated readings of cosmopolitanism will assist us with demonstrating how Delius acted as an example of the enmeshing of discourses on nationalism, musical modernism, and artistic persona.

The first is the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ or ‘new cosmopolitanism’, which opposes the universalism of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and rather than advocating for an ennobled communal culture of global citizens, emphasizes respect for national differences under an overarching humanitarian concern. ‘New cosmopolitanism’ can thus be conceived, in fact, as a type of nationalism that simply does not conform to accepted nationalist models, and which carries with it seemingly conflicting implications.Footnote ⁵⁴ As an example of the divergent response to this kind of cosmopolitanism, Amanda Anderson has referred to the

Anderson notes that some types of nineteenth-century British cosmopolitanism embraced exposure to international cultures (such as through the Grand Tour) precisely for its ‘ennobling effects’ and its role in solidifying bonds with native Britain – in other words, nationalistic bonds.Footnote ⁵⁶ This ethos could equally apply to the role of exoticism as part of a relational process of national self-definition – namely seeking out the other in order to define the ‘us’.

In the pre-war years, Judith Walkowitz describes a ‘double-edged cosmopolitanism’ that shaped the response to the interpretive dancer Maud Allan in terms of a combination of ‘geopolitical associations and bodily dispositions’:

After the First World War, conceptions of cosmopolitanism were shaped by ‘anti-alien sentiment in Britain [. . .] fueled [by] spy stories about an “internal enemy” of moral perverts’, and its adherents were targeted in the ‘cultural backlash against advanced thought and cultural experimentalism’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Regenia Gagnier has noted a similarly ‘double-edged’ phenomenon in relation to the Nazi persecution of gypsies in the lead up to the Second World War. She observes that gypsies, on the one hand, were romanticized as ‘cosmopolitans from below’, their ‘propertyless wanderings represent[ing] freedom [a different kind of mobility to Maud Allan's interpretative dance], closeness to nature and generosity’; yet, on the other hand, they were grouped with criminals and vagabonds, were seen as being ‘work-shy’ and ‘asocial’, and so antagonistic to Western notions of economic progress.Footnote ⁵⁹ The crux of this first notion, then, is that the concept of cosmopolitanism is highly unstable, even within the same historical and national milieu.

The second idea that has arisen in recent scholarship that will be useful in the present context is a notion of cosmopolitanism used to ‘designate the domain of individual feeling or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of ‘inter-’ or ‘trans-nationalism’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Cosmopolitanism considered in this way again encompasses a more complex range of practices that are manifest in different spheres of intellectual activity, be they personal, critical, cultural, or political. Regenia Gagnier's is not merely a broadened definition of cosmopolitanism in order to encompass this complex array of practices (or ‘subject positions’) but rather a recognition of the closer relationship between individualism and the communal in late Victorian commentary, in contrast to the stark dichotomy that was generated during the twentieth century.Footnote ⁶¹ She hearkens back to a time when ‘the cosmopolitan critic of the modern nation could be a “citizen of the world” without falling into the depoliticized idealism that that phrase often evokes today’.Footnote ⁶² This recasting of cosmopolitanism in terms of a ‘domain of individual feeling and ethical toleration’ will be useful for us in our consideration of Delius below.

The third notion of interest is the late Victorian preoccupation with and uses of different ‘forms of detachment’ in intellectual life, of which cosmopolitanism was one manifestation. For Amanda Anderson this preoccupation with cultivating ‘critical distance’

As with cosmopolitanism then, forms of detachment carried both positive connotations – for example, for rigour and objectivity in scientific inquiry and scholarly critical distance – as well as negative connotations – such as that associated with late nineteenth century disenchantment and the alienation of industrialized modernity.

What played out in discussions of Delius's cosmopolitanism was a curious conglomeration of these varying cultural and political interpretations, yet it also signalled the aesthetic and spiritual associations involved in the debate. This suggests that critical discourses about musical modernism in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century constitute an additional, and sometimes unrecognized, aspect of debates about cosmopolitanism at the time.

The Cosmopolitan Purpose of Detachment

In order to map out the interactions between the disparate elements at play in Delius's reception, we must turn back to Heseltine's article quoted earlier. Apart from the perceived ‘problem’ with regards to Delius's nationality, according to Heseltine, there were also other surface features that evidently contributed to a sense of unease in Delius's listening public:

Heseltine provides a link here between what we saw earlier as geographical, geo-cultural and ethnic associations of Delius's cosmopolitanism (namely, his foreign parentage, overseas travel, and sympathies with broader European art), and other aspects related to Delius's refusal to participate in economic, commercial, cultural, and political life, which, as in the case of the Victorian aesthetes and the inter-war gypsies, has traditionally indicated a subversive disrespect for Western notions of economic progress, and therefore should be treated as suspicious. Pushing beyond these surface features, however, Heseltine goes on:

What Heseltine is hinting at here is a concept of cosmopolitanism that has very little to do with either national allegiances or economic participation, but rather something far more integral to how a modern composer conceives of his artistic task. For Heseltine, Delius's cosmopolitanism, or rootlessness, was the very thing that positioned him as a true artist, capable of producing masterworks that would last into perpetuity, beyond their particular time and place (and so history and nation).

Thomas Beecham made a similar link between practices of detachment, or autonomy, and artistic sincerity when he described Delius as possessing ‘those two supreme virtues, honesty and independence’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Far from being disingenuous, thought Heseltine and Beecham, Delius could attain the utmost sincerity in his art because he was ‘unfettered by external considerations’ and did not have to be a ‘servant of the public’ or nation.Footnote ⁶⁷

In his biography of Delius, Heseltine casts the composer's formative period on a Florida orange plantation as emblematic of the critical purpose of Delius's detachment:

The analogy of the seer or sage here emphasizes the apparently altruistic motivation underpinning this type of isolationism, reminiscent of Nietzsche's characterization of Zarathustra, part of which Delius set in A Mass of Life, a work included in Delius's self-funded debut concert in London in 1899. The underlying idea here is that the seer isolates himself not to indulge loosely in his own imagination, but rather to uncompromisingly pursue self-improvement. Nietzsche's ‘Good European’ was also such a figure, alluding to the crucial link between the notion of cosmopolitanism and the project of human betterment. This link is similar to what was described earlier in relation to Kant's notion of the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ of the exercise of reason, though while Kant's cosmopolitan community was to emerge naturally via the dialectical processes of history, Nietzsche's involved a highly individualized ‘praxis’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Interestingly, what Heseltine pinpointed in these few comments was the curious paradox that Delius's isolationism was in fact a condition of his cosmopolitanism – that his self-imposed isolation which had led to the critical bewilderment surrounding his music had been a necessary part of his engaged humanitarian agenda. This perception of Delius was manifest in commentary not only on his music, but also on his personal manner and physique, his mode of dress, his non-engagement with the academy, his lack of self-promotion, his spirituality, and his attitude to nature, emotion, the war, and exercise and sport. In other words, it was not Delius's supposedly ‘elusive nationality’ that made him a cosmopolitan, but rather a deeply ingrained aesthetic sense of how the individual relates to the whole that conditioned both his work and his manner of living. Central to this aesthetic discourse was a latent anxiety about detachment in terms of the individual and the state that were to later play into debates about the idea of Europe.

The Myth of Self-Creation

Allied to the interaction between the isolated pursuit of artistic truths (in service of nothing but themselves) and the purpose of communal progress was a notion of aesthetic independence that was seemingly antithetical to notions of organic evolution in a national and historical sense. In addition to isolation and detachment, this idea of self-creation and non-allegiance to nation, creed, tradition, or history in order to discover a higher overarching beauty was typical of the aesthetic movement, which is why these concepts have hereto been more fully explored in relation to literary rather than musical modernism.

Delius was routinely cast as being without musical progenitors. Critics such as Basil Hogarth, for example, noted that ‘it is a profound error to regard [Delius] as a musical realist, a Zola of the tone art like Moussorgsky or Strauss. Nor is he an obscure impressionist like Debussy, with whom he has often been compared by uninstructed commentators’,Footnote ⁷⁰ and ‘He owed allegiance to no formal school or caste of musical technique [. . .] Even his earliest compositions bear his characteristic imprints’.Footnote ⁷¹ Hogarth concluded that Delius ‘defied categorisation’. Crucially, Hogarth also observed in Delius's music what he described (following Nietzsche) as the ‘pathos of distance’ – an attribute that he also heard in the music of Brahms and Mahler.Footnote ⁷²

Christopher Palmer made a similar connection between Delius's apparent isolation and detachment, his cosmopolitanism, and his artistic uniqueness, characterizing Delius as ‘fundamentally a lonely person’ and writing that

And of course the inimitable Heseltine had put forward a similar line:

And further: ‘No less eclectic composer than Delius ever lived. He derived from nowhere, it would seem [. . .] he descends from the distant ages of man's first struggling efforts.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Without compositional parentage, without national ties or external engagement – not even playing the tambourine – Delius appears as if from nowhere, with a prophetic vision of musical truth.

The view of Delius as being without progenitors is explicitly contrary to notions of progress, contrary to Burkean and later Thatcherite notions of Britain being an organic development of its intellectual heritage, and indeed is controversially ahistorical. It underpins a belief in genius as being above its time, and plays into the evaluative notion that beauty is not a fixed standard, but rather it is whatever the sincere operation of genius defines it to be. In relation to discourses on morality in late Victorian times, this view was often associated with a corresponding problematization of moral norms, and a generally critical attitude to forms of social authority.

The ‘Good European’ and Amor fati

The critical practices associated with cosmopolitanism that have become attributed to Delius were undoubtedly given an additional weight due to his Nietzschean sympathies. As a result, his cosmopolitanism was explicitly articulated as conforming to Nietzsche's idea of the ‘Good European’. Though the persona of the ‘Good European’ was clearly framed within Nietzsche's critique of nationalism in Europe, it embodied far more than a desire for European unification, or political cosmopolitanism. Rather, ‘Good Europeanism’ involved the persistent critique of morality and the ‘revaluation of all values’, aligned with Nietzsche's broader philosophical project.

For Nietzsche, the rise of modern nationalism in Europe was directly linked with secularization. In effect, he viewed nationalism as serving a religious function in the wake of the ‘death of God’, and as a response to the ensuing nihilism.Footnote ⁷⁶ As a part of his critique of nationalism, Nietzsche argued that the desire to find a ‘new idol’ in order to avoid the experience of meaninglessness, incoherence, and contingency – namely, looking to ‘the nation’ to take up the function of God – was not a latent feature of human nature. Rather, this ‘incomplete nihilism’, which still evinced the ‘will-to-truth’, was an attitude that could be traced to a Christian and Platonic existential framework that broadly distinguished between the world of appearances and an underlying ‘true’ reality that is unchanging and eternal. In this respect, nationalism represented a continuation of religious values in secular form, making these values seem natural and grounded in human nature. According to Nietzsche then, the allure of nationalism is based both on a deeper search for meaning and on an assumption that this search for meaning is good, or necessary, or natural.

The task of the ‘Good European’ in this respect is to challenge the Christian-Platonic idea of a ‘true’ reality existing separately from our lived experience, and embrace the contingent and ambiguous aspects of this life. The ‘Good European’ is someone who not only transgresses national identification then, but also more broadly critiques the underlying cultural assumptions on which those identifications are built.

In rejecting the idea that the search for meaning is anything other than culturally conditioned, the ‘Good European’ accepts nihilism completely. Despite this, the figure is a ‘high spirited’ and ‘world-affirming human being’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Nietzsche's positive embrace of nihilism involves a studied practice of loving one's life and fate:

Coming to love one's fate, for Nietzsche, involved joyously accepting that there is only one version of the world, and of your life, and so also accepting the doctrine of an unchanging eternal recurrence of that world and life. This acceptance does not imply a passive fatalism, nor is it necessarily an argument against political action, because one can work to transform one's life and society while still comprehending the inevitability of human struggle and exploitation.Footnote ⁷⁹

Amor fati and its link with the project of Good Europeanism as a holistic critical practice is crucial for understanding the interaction between Delius's public reception as a cosmopolitan and ‘Good European’ in a historical sense, and his personal ethics. In an infamous letter to Delius's biographer Richard Muller, Percy Grainger described Delius as a ‘sex-worshipper’ who ‘practiced immorality with puritanical stubbornness’, and noted that ‘Delius was never lewd about sex, to my knowledge. He never joked about it in my hearing. He worshipped sex, practiced it as part of a cultured and yea-some life (“I am a be-jaende Natur” [sic] he was always saying).’Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, in a letter from Delius to Philip Heseltine in 1912:

Here we see Delius making an association between cosmopolitanism (as embodied in Nietzsche's ‘Good European’) with an ability to question or critique social and aesthetic norms, suggesting a broad congruence with cognitive practices associated with modernism generally, including the withdrawal from social consensus.Footnote ⁸²

This link between cognitive practice, ethos and a particular aesthetic outcome (in this case musical) lies behind much of the reception of Delius's music, and indeed has at times been explicitly articulated:

Palmer here construes Delius in opposing terms that echoed the association of his work and persona with the cosmopolitan practices of Nietzsche's ‘Good European’. Like the ‘Good European’, Delius was seen to have adopted an attitude of distance from the normative assumptions that conditioned his historical moment. This distance allowed him to disassociate himself from national allegiance and, with this, reject his received cultural heritage and the assumption of the possibility of transcendence that underpinned this heritage. In tandem with this attitude of distance, however, was Delius's wholesale embrace of life and fate – an attitude that only intensified with his terminal diagnosis, and the onset of blindness and paralysis towards the end of his life.

Emotion and Intellect: English after all

The mandate of the ‘Good European’ to be detached and yet passionate was borne out in the perceived discrepancy between Delius's personal character and his music. The expression of this dichotomy reveals the ambivalence towards the twin forces of detachment and engagement in early twentieth-century conceptions of cosmopolitanism in Britain, and post-war conceptions of musical modernism in Anglo-American musicology more generally.

Reviews of Delius's London concert in 1899 lighted upon what they perceived as a prominent emotional aspect to his music. John F. Runciman, for example, described the concert first as ‘all was Beauty and emotion’,Footnote ⁸⁴ and then upon reflection a week later in the following terms: ‘Mr Delius always wishes to express some emotion, or give us a distinctive poetic atmosphere.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Quoting a letter from Delius, C. W. Orr noted the composer's view of music as ‘a way of expressing one's feelings; and one ought to follow one's own inclinations entirely, otherwise one will never attain to any intensity of expression or emotion – the two essential things in music’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Affirming this sentiment, Orr added that ‘in music, which ought to be the expression of emotion, only that which is based on emotion is capable of development, and nothing based on technique or on anything objective will develop into anything but mere intellectuality’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus establishing his evaluative criteria, Orr casts Delius as a romantic temperament, a lover of nature, a colourist; as emphasizing harmony over counterpoint; as having a focus on emotion; as being heroic despite his frail and failing body. This type of reading projects an image of Delius's music as internal, emotional, full of feeling – characteristics that mark him as being detached from worldly concerns; as a child of intuition; and that emphasize his auto-didactic, amateur or self-created qualities. Delius's period in Paris during the 1890s and his acquaintance with prominent artists of post-impressionism and Symbolism during this time served to support this aesthetic image of the man. Also from this period was his well-known association with occult and astrological circles in Paris, including his collaboration with Papus (whom he met in 1893), and with whom he wrote an essay casting the orchestra in physiological terms with reference to ‘Cabala’.Footnote ⁸⁸

The aesthetic characterization that these associations invited, however, was explicitly challenged by appeals to an opposing facet of Delius's persona, and it is via this crucial point of opposition that we may again discern the paradoxical implications of Delius's cosmopolitanism:

In his introduction to the second edition of Heseltine's biography of Delius, Hubert Foss noted that ‘the man Delius was totally unlike his music, the one displaying a most purposeful character, the other the vivid nebulosity of dreams’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Foss also quoted Cecil Gray as agreeing with this point when he described Delius the person – as opposed to his music – as a ‘violent, bigoted, doctrinaire atheist’.Footnote ⁹¹ Runciman made a similar point in 1903:

The decisiveness Runciman attributed to Delius's physical presence extended to his impression of the opposing characteristics embodied in Delius's music, and to his evaluation of Delius's musical sincerity (a point which was implicitly at issue in Delius's reception as a cosmopolitan composer):

Runciman further observed that ‘there is no ugliness, no anarchy, nothing but order – logical order, to the point of severity – and beauty and expressiveness’.

Delius appears through these accounts as simultaneously expressive yet severe, dream-like yet purposeful, nebulous yet decisive – dualisms that were apparently articulated through his physique, compositional output, and persona ethos. Even more extraordinarily, this tendency to conflate bodily, musical, and ethical dispositions extended also to the question of national affiliation, with which we began our discussion of cosmopolitanism above:

In 1934 Basil Hogarth made a similar point:

Delius is cast here as being balanced between intellect and intuition, robustness and fancy, professional and amateur, artistic yet business-like, disengaged yet engaged. His robustness and sincerity and lack of exaggeration – or, his restricted emotionalism – was in fact the very thing that marked him as being resolutely English, so that indeed his status as a ‘Good European’ in respect of his balancing of the rational and the emotional was the very thing that rooted him to an English characterization.

In the context of early twentieth-century Britain, Delius's cosmopolitanism presented an unnerving alternative to nationalist interests that appealed to the rhetoric of authenticity and organicism, because Delius's apparent lack of affiliation could not easily be dismissed in terms of the opposing rhetoric of artificiality and foreignness. To be sure, his reception as a cosmopolitan reflected the enduring malleability and complexity of the concept in the sense that it could serve as an indicator of opposing natures. It also suggests how cosmopolitanism functioned as an outlook, and so came to apply across different facets of life and work (or ‘process’ and ‘application’). The term was, and remains today, unstable and ‘double-edged’, just as the prevailing ambivalence towards practices of autonomy across aesthetic and non-aesthetic realms during Delius's lifetime is still apparent in contemporary debates about musical modernism and the idea of Europe, respectively. More crucially perhaps, the intellectual manoeuvre that allowed Delius's cosmopolitanism to become not only decisive evidence of but also a necessary condition to his national allegiance suggests the potential of cosmopolitanism to serve as an anti-polarizing outlook. The historical manifestation of this kind of outlook gives an empirical basis from which to view the dialectical interplay of autonomy and commitment in modernity, and in this sense can support the revision of current constructions of musical modernism.