PAUL NETTL, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BOHEMIA, and GERMANNESS ■ Martin Nedbal
386 ČLÁNKY / ARTICLES MUSIC HISTORY AND ETHNICITY FROM PRAGUE TO INDIANA: PAUL NETTL, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BOHEMIA, AND GERMANNESS ■ Martin Nedbal Dedicated to the memory of Bruno Nettl (1930–2020) In 1947, musicologist Paul Nettl published The Story of Dance Music, his first book after his immigration to the United States from Nazi-occupied Czecho- slovakia.1 In their reviews of the book, two critics accused Nettl of Czech nationalism and chauvinism. Hungarian-born musicologist Otto Gombosi (1902–1955), who settled in the US in 1939, was particularly bothered by what he called Nettl’s „disturbing overemphasis on everything Slavic, and especially Czech.“2 German musicologist Hans Engel (1894–1970) went even further to make an explicit connection between Nettl’s scholarly work and his presumed ethnic identity. Engel was especially critical of Nettl’s claims that the minuets in multi-movement compositions by eighteenth-century composers of the so-called Mannheim School originated in Czech folk music and that the ac- centuated openings of these minuets (on the downbeat, without an upbeat) corresponded “to the trochaic rhythm of the Czech language which has no article.”3 Engel viewed such claims as resulting from “patriotic or nationalistic 1 Paul Nettl, The Story of Dance Music (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947). 2 Otto Gombosi, “The Story of Dance Music by Paul Nettl,” The Musical Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 1948): 627. Gombosi was even more critical of Nettl’s minor comment about Smetana: “it is chauvinism gone rampant,” he wrote, “to say that ‘Smetana is … a more universal type of genius than Chopin who used only the piano to glorify national aspirations’.” 3 Nettl, The Story of Dance Music, 207; Hans Engel, “Paul Nettl.
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