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A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity

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A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity SANNA PEDERSON Why does one go to a symphony concert? Not This modest historical observation, however, so long ago, the answer seemed self-evident: to leads to numerous complex ramifications. His- listen to the music on the program. But as a torians-particularly German literary histori- number of recent writers have argued,listening ans-have recently been tracing the emergence to music for its own sake is anything but "natu- of autonomous art with increasing attention to ral."' Indeed, as an expectation of "normal"con- its social, political, and economic implications.2 cert behavior it crystallized only about two cen- The emerging view, in brief, is this: at the end turies ago, as a corollary to what Carl Dahlhaus of the eighteenth century, new ideas were put has called "the idea of absolute music." forwardabout art-above all in Kant's Critique of Judgment-that described the aesthetic ob- ject as purposeless and the subject (the viewer, 19th-CenturyMusic XVIII/2(Fall 1994). o by The Regents the reader, the listener) as disinterested. This of the University of California. "functionless" role for art was in large part a negative reaction to the immediately preceding A version of this essay was read at the American Musico- logical Society meeting in Pittsburgh, 1992. I am grateful efforts of Enlightenment thinkers to implement to James Hepokoski for his editorial comments and sug- art as an instrument for the social good. These gestions. new aesthetic theorists, most prominently Karl 'See Hanns-Werner Heister, Das Konzert: Theorie einer Kulturform,2 vols. (Wilhelmshaven, 1983);Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago, 1989); Leon Botstein, "Listening through Reading: Musi- 2See, for example, the important essays in Aufklirung und cal Literacy and the Concert Audience," this journal 16 literarische Offentlichkeit,ed. ChristaBMirger, Peter B-irger, (1992), 129-45. and JochenSchulte-Sasse (Frankfurt,1980). 87 This content downloaded from 129.15.14.53 on Fri, 7 Jun 2013 02:22:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH Philipp Moritz and Friedrich Schiller, rejected tution in more than the fact CENTURY bourgeois society MUSIC the idea that art should be judged by its effec- that works of art in this very society are pressed tiveness in pragmaticmatters-by, for instance, into service as instruments of schooling how popular a novel or poem was and how [Erziehung]and socialization."6 In short, even readily the "message" or moral was accepted.3 while claiming art's ability to withdraw from Opposing the concept of utility with that of the demands of instrumental rationality, its beauty, they countered the Enlightenment de- proponentswere setting up new social purposes sire to subordinate all things to the principle of and goals for this aesthetic enterprise. instrumental rationality-practical, means-ends To keep sight of this paradox while consid- rationality (the term is Max Weber's)-with ering the establishment of the modern sym- the theory of autonomous art. This new view phony concert, I shall adopt the strategy that held that the only purpose of art was to be treats art as an "institution." According to beautiful and to be experiencedas such.4Music's BMirger,a central theorist of this approach,this claim to "high art" status gained enormous focus can expose "the shaping influence of an ground during this aesthetic turn. What was institutionalized understanding of art on the regardedearlier as its most serious problem, its reproductionand reception of works."'7Biirger's nonrepresentational nature or lack of relation colleague, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, has tried to to the "real" world, came to be transformed distinguish institution theory from more tradi- into its most celebrated quality.5 tional reception history. According to Recent analysis has complicated this history Hohendahl, a study from the standpoint of the of aesthetics, however, by emphasizing how category of the institution of literature-and it autonomous art subsequently flourished by be- is an easy matter to transpose the key terms ing simultaneously perceived both as a purely into musical ones-should address: aesthetic object and as an available medium for furthering certain social projects. For ex- 1. the (social,economic, political) conditions under ample, just as music attained status as high art, which writingand reading occur; music instruction and musical organizations 2. the systemof conventionsand norms for reading and into an were seized on to help consolidate a middle- writing(without falling merely expli- class means of music cationof individualworks or authors); society by appreciating of the own As theorist Peter 3. the particularsignificance and function for its sake. the literary institutionwithin or its relationto other has observed with to German society, Birger regard institutions;and literature: "Nothing appears to contradict the 4. the historicityof the institutionof literatureit- idea that art is set up as an autonomous insti- self.8 Institution theory seeks not to legitimate or evaluate individual works but to provide a cri- 3For an important new, economic view of Schiller's and of the that underlies or consti- Moritz's turn against "instrumentalist" aesthetics, see tique ideology Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: tutes the work. In adaptingthis method to study Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York, 1994). music, then, "absolute music" would be lo- 4The crucial text that precedes Kant in defining the cated not in the works themselves but in the "purposivelessness"of art is KarlPhilipp Moritz's "Versuch einer Vereinigungaller sch6nen Kiunsteund Wissenschaften way that institutions focused the social percep- unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" (1785), tion of musical works as absolute. where he declares that the beautiful object "has no extrin- sic purpose. It is not there to fulfill anything else, but it exists on account of its own perfection. We do not con- template it to discover what use we may make of it; we use it only to the extent that we can contemplate it" 6PeterBiurger, "The Institution of Art as a Category of the (Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nine- Sociology of Literature,"in Peter Birger and ChristaBilrger, teenth Centuries, ed. Peter le Huray and James Day [Cam- The Institutions of Art, trans. LorenKruger (Lincoln, Neb., bridge, 1981], p. 187). 1992), p. 10. 5See M. H. Abrams, The Mirrorand the Lamp: Romantic 7Biirger,"The Institution of Art," p. 6. Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York, 1958), pp. SPeterUwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: 88-94, for a classic account of music's role in this aes- The Case of Germany, 1830-1870, trans. Renate Baron thetic turn. Franciscono(Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), p. 34. 88 This content downloaded from 129.15.14.53 on Fri, 7 Jun 2013 02:22:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions My own attempt to explore the institutional coincidentally) music criticism and the sym- SANNA PEDERSON aspects of the symphony and the symphony phony concert took shape as institutions con- A. B. Marx concert-that is, the extramusical consider- stitutive of autonomous art music. During this and Berlin Concert Life ations that endow works with "aesthetic es- period no one worked more zealously toward sence"-will focus on the nationalism inher- having Beethoven's symphonies performedand ent in the German theory of absolute music. appreciated than the Berlin music critic Adolf From this perspective we may witness an at- Bernhard Marx. Although he is remembered tempt to constitute art music not only aes- today more as a music theorist, Marx began his thetically but also as a relation of nations: at career as the eager editor of the Berliner all- the same time that autonomous music was gemeine musikalische Zeitung, which began being defined as distinctly and qualitatively appearing in 1824.10 His basic strategy was to different and better than entertainment music, delimit the symphony by positioning its German music was being proclaimed as high "other," foreign opera, and by establishing this art by designating foreign music as frivolous, other's undesirablenature. Rossini was his main unsubstantial, and unworthy. Aesthetic and target, but his treatment of Spontini reveals national categories of distinction coincided, the same approach.The obverse of this strategy overlapped, and blurred. What further compli- was to champion the symphony as a national cates the matter is the way that this confusion treasure and the symphony concert as an edify- of categories continues into the present. ing experience. Dahlhaus, for instance, has observed that "the idea of absolute music-gradually and against ROSSINI: THE ANTITHESIS OF THE SYMPHONY resistance-became the esthetic paradigm of German musical culture in the nineteenth cen- The ostensible antithesis to "the idea of abso- tury."9 I would like to suggest the reverse: it lute music" is music dependent on occasion or was the idea of a German musical culture that- text. This assumption, for example, lies at the gradually and against resistance-became the core of much of Dahlhaus's work, who empha- paradigm of absolute music in the nineteenth sized the difference between the musical century. My premise is that "the idea of abso- "work" and the musical "event"; that is, be- lute music" arises primarily out of the correla- tween score-orientedand performance-oriented tion of two systems of differences: one of func- music." Such a claim, though, presumes that tion (music for its own sake as opposed to other this difference lies in the music itself rather kinds of music); the other of nation (German than in the way the music was and is treated. music as opposed to that of other countries). For Dahlhaus, therefore, musical works have Absolute music is distinguished not so much an aesthetic essence, and musical events do by intrinsic properties but on the basis of what not; events can be of historical documentary it (presumably) is not.
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