The 19th century is like a giant duffle bag stuffed with art, literature, music, culture, exploration, science and really big symphonies. Just coming to grips with how rich and deep the cultural soil is, would be itself a daunting task. And they did it all without AI! The century really extends from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (amply chronicled in Victor Hugo's great 19th century novel, Les Misèrables) to the onset of The Great War, later known as World War I, in 1914. In between was a century of relative peace under the umbrella of the Pax Britannica. Incidentally, a great narrative that sums up WWI rather well is Robert Graves' Goodby to All That recounting his experience as a line officer in the trenches.
Between those two events, the century glows with prosperity, peace and cultural exuberance mixed with an underlying sadness that perhaps all this will not last--as it did not. Two symphonies from the very beginning of the century sum up both the exuberance and the misgivings and both are by Franz Schubert. First, the Great C Major, is a paean to exuberance:
And for the misgivings, the bittersweet depths of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony:
As a musician, I tend to look to music to illustrate history while others might choose art or literature.
The musical wealth of the 19th century is unsurpassed by any other era. The emotive beauty of Chopin, the brilliance of Liszt, the depth of Brahms, the rustic grace of Dvořák, the magnificence of Bruckner and the host of other talents. And when you consider literature, the harvest is even greater. I'm not qualified to say anything about 19th century painting and sculpture, but I suspect the same is true there.
The obvious causes of this efflorescence would include the unprecedented prosperity brought to Europe by the Industrial Revolution when for the first time in history the masses began to experience true prosperity. The end of the Napoleonic wars were the end of centuries of sectarian violence among a host of religious and cultural divisions. So, peace, a bit of material prosperity and, most important, some leisure to devote to the arts and science.
I'm not sure I can explain why it all came to an end, perhaps we might consult The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler or From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. In any case, it did come to an end and all that expansive and glorious art and culture was replaced by something smaller, colder and more bitter: modernism. I love modernism in music and art, but I think we have to accept that it is a decline. For a musical illustration we could pick an example from Bruckner:
And for comparison, one from Bartók:
Both great works, but one is a kind of pinnacle and the other is a descent, though a wonderful one.
This is more of a sketch than an argument. I tend to come up with ideas that would really require a full-length book to fully illustrate and defend. But I don't have time for that, so mere hints will have to do.
We can hope that the next stage will be some kind of renaissance...
6 comments:
After thirty years of reading pleas for renewal I doubt we'll see one, especially from people who are looking for it. I'm even a moderate conservative in politics and religion myself yet I see two problems that persist across pleas for renewal/retrieval/renaissance:
1) what actually NEEDS to be recovered? It's surely not the arts themselves, since we can listen to music from Dufay up through Penderecki. We can hear all the keyboard music of Byrd; or the Psalter as set by Sweelinck; or Schutz' setting of Psalm 119 for double chorus; or even get a box set of Michael Haydn's masses. The Puritans have stayed in print for four centuries. In 2030 Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed will be 400 years old. Did it need to be "recovered" all that time? No, because Anglican and Presbyterian and Reformed clergy and theologians and historians kept the Puritans in print all that time. Retrievalists write as if all kinds of things have been lost but the reception histories of the arts themselves belie this rhetoric. If anything we have access to more of the span of human creativity than anyone in the 19th century ever did. We can grab books on the evolution of Babylonian exorcistic rites as medicine these days and compare that to the evolution of Jewish diabologies in the wake of Macedonian conquest (a la the annoying but useful Richard Horsley).
2) Worse, I have not seen any people who have written pleading for renewal and rebirth make any notable contribution to any art beyond the field of metacultural criticism. Renewalists talk a big game ABOUT the arts but don't demonstrate that they are making a contribution TO the arts along the way. Berlioz wrote some scabrous reviews but he also wrote some actual symphonies and that's why we remember him (even if I actually dislike the music of Berlioz). And Berlioz was ranting that people should stop listening to those stupid fuddy duddy composers Bach and Haydn and listen to HIS music.
I have half a dozen Roger Scruton books but who is listening to his music? He really did write an opera. Did it get recorded? How is it that I only heard that Scruton wrote an opera after his death reading an academic monograph discussing Scruton? Was it bad? I don't know. Scruton is probably the best case study in the world for someone who wrote about music in a way where he wanted a renewal/retrieval and for a regard for the Matthew Arnold blah blah blah, but who has heard his music. It's as if the entirety of culture the world over can move along as if Scruton never wrote a note of music because his contribution was in philosophy.
And that might be the parable of our time about plea for cultural renewal. It's one thing to want another Great Awakening but who's gonna be the new Jonathan Edwards to preach the new "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"? Do arts fans want "that" if I put it "that" way?
Take another Future Symphony Institute fellow, John Borstlap. He has books and he sounds off on the need for a renaissance as he has since probably the 1970s but who's listening to his music these days?
Has anyone from The Imaginative Conservative made a contribution to the arts so big that someone at The New Republic felt obliged to write about it? Taruskin wrote about Scruton's writing a little bit, but never about Scruton's music itself.
I DO think there need to be some significant changes in the arts scenes but after thirty year of seeing pleas for renewal lead to no renewal at all I begin to suspect that path is a blind alley.
For guitarist we're living in a fascinating period. Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues are half-way recorded. German Dzhaparidze's 24 preludes and fugues are fully recorded. Angelo Gilardino's catalog is available to be heard and I have been digging the guitar sonatas of Dusan Bogdanovic. Atanas Ourkouzounov is active and he's actually just a few years older than me.
And on top of all that we haven't lost Sor or Giuliani or even hacks like Diabelli and Molitor (Diabelli at least wrote that pretty good F major guitar sonata). Even the hack composers have some ideas worth talking about, say, if we wanted to look at how Diabelli used a Type 2 sonata in Hepokoski and Darcy's taxonomy that was similar to Chopin's Type 2 in the B flat minor piano sonata (where you just never bring back Theme 1).
But a side-effect of the canonization of the 19th century could be to claim Chopin's gambit was daring when it was not that unheard of--it was even somewhat trite in the early 19th century but for Chopin to have used the "don't recap Theme 1" move after theorists had codified that Theme 1 must come back, then it could retroactively seem daring not because it was daring in its time or place but because it clashed with an only recently standardized norm that Chopin may have felt no need to comply with.
That's the canonized composer so let me switch to the hack. In the early 19th century Molitor didn't bring back his Theme 1 in Op 7 and brought back themes 2 and 3 instead. Having studied both the Chopin and the Molitor I can tell you that the Molitor is of merely academic interest. The difference between such a move being daring from Chopin and being rote in a guitarist composer might just be due to reception history, from within the 19th century.
The 19th century canon has not yet gone out of style. If anything, the best odds for a "retrieval" of the 19th century canon may reside in letting CRT and progressive academics thoroughly de-canonize the 19th century arts the way 19th century academics de-canonized Edmund Burke's political thought or figures like Berlioz through Liszt and Hanslick de-canonized Haydn, so that later generations can actually "recover" something that fell out of the academic mainstream
canon. ;-)
I was thinking about Bortslap the other day when I saw that my local library had got a copy of the new Boulez “Le catalogue illustré de l’oeuvre”. It’s a lavish coffee-table book obviously crafted with love by fans, and yet Bortslap – surely the bore at every party – likes to bang on about how this composer supposedly appeals to no one.
Indeed, these kinds of critics are killjoys at best. They can be worse, though: there are now several ideologues claiming to inherit Scruton’s mantle who have veered right into race science and conspiracy theories. If that’s going to be the “renewal” of the humanities, I think I’d be happy with the former stagnation, thanks.
I don't disagree with any of your comments, but you may have slightly mistaken my point. I was saying that the 19th century was a kind of civilizational apogee which suggests that the 20th century was rather a valley, culturally. Not technically, of course, but in terms of moral character and creative richness, perhaps a falling off. Ok, fine. I don't think you are disagreeing with that. But the idea of a renaissance of some kind seems to really bring a lot of resistance. Let's take a look at the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. They were inspired by a great deal of newly encountered ancient literature, but was opera an attempt to re-invent classical tragedy? No, not at all. What it was, was the discovery of new ways of writing and setting text in order to devise more expressive rhetoric. There was no rebirth of ancient anything. So let's just put that notion away. What are we looking for now? Better art, certainly. Better morally and aesthetically and the artists doing it, whoever they may be, are certainly not trying to rebirth anything. They are trying something new. Perhaps Boulez is part of it, perhaps not. Perhaps Arvo Pärt is a contributor. Frankly it is absurd to try and identify who is doing the important stuff. Critical opinions of Monteverdi from around 1600 are equally absurd. Let's wait a hundred years.
Ah, well, then don't use a word like "renaissance" and that helps us out a lot. :) Your comment clarifies things quite a bit, but that word "renaissance" has a wider field of connotations than you might have realized when you hit "Publish".
Anonymous, your comment reminds me that I tuned out the Future Symphony Institute more and more since Scruton's death. If they've added Douglas Murray to their roster that's another reason to steer further clear of them. I may be a conservative type on politics and religion but, phew, I have better things to do with my time than read people who want to go down some race realist path.
I think renaissance is exactly the right word. Here is a new clip by Adam Walker about the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjvnuPbDfK4
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