Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis dissertation argues that a distinct and highly consequential German moment crystallised in English musical culture between the 1820s and 1850s. Across these four decades, music written by German and Austrian composers went from being received as an esoteric and essentially foreign cultural import to becoming a core part of the middle-class cultural experience in towns and cities across the country. The positive reception of German music by English critics and audiences informed wider cultural understandings of German national identity. German musical imports even presented critics and composers with models for the future of English orchestral music and opera. Situating itself between social, cultural, and intellectual approaches to history, this dissertation tells the story of how this transformation took place. It considers how the efforts of critics, composers, impresarios, set-designers, publishers, music scholars, religious groups, and migrant communities converged to build the ‘German moment’ in English musical life. This was a process of great interest in its own right, but it also exemplified a broader cultural phenomenon; parallels can be drawn with the later globalisation of the German art music repertoire in the United States and in Meiji Japan. One of the legacies of the age of nationalism is that we often frame English and German musical cultures in antagonistic terms, seeing Victorian England as a ‘land without music’ and the German lands as the ‘lands of music’. Yet this binary underplays how tight the connections between the two places were during this formative period for European musical culture. Chapter one explores the stagings of Carl Maria von Weber’s romantic operas in 1820s London against the backdrop of thickening networks of transnational exchange between England and the post-Napoleonic German states. Chapter two looks at how music critics and provincial musical agents constructed Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as a substitute English national composer. Chapter three explores the disruptive challenge the music and operas of Richard Wagner posed to the English musical canon in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. Chapter four focuses on concert life in Victorian Manchester, exploring how migrant musicians erected the German musical tradition at the centre of the emerging musical canon as classical music. This dissertation uses these case-studies to address three connected research questions: How, across the middle decades of the nineteenth century, did English musical life come to be so strongly influenced by German musical repertoire and aesthetics? How did the English musical nationalism of the first half of the nineteenth-century respond to and, indeed, orient itself around these largely positive engagements with the German tradition? And how did the growing ascendancy of German music in England interact with the persistent esteem many participants in English musical life felt towards other musical genres such as Italian and French opera?
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Puckey, Oliver
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Clark, Christopher
Subjects
dc:subject × 7Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.126144
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/396897