Conference Agenda

The German Vormärz (1815–49) was a time of cultural reform that renegotiated the individual’s place in society through the interplay of aesthetics and politics (Garratt 2010). In this paper I ask how violin concerti from this period interrogate the political through their solo-tutti interactions and techniques of formal dis-unity and incompleteness. Speculation about the socio-political expressivity of concertante works has persisted in the aftermath of the New Musicology (McClary 1986, Kerman 1999, and Tusa 2012), and in hermeneutic responses to the New Formenlehre (William Caplin 2001, Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, and Horton 2017). By contrast, I propose to historicise the hermeneutics of concerto form: the use of politically loaded metaphors to describe the concerto’s solo-tutti interactions served to politicise the Vormärzconcerto’s discourse, e.g. Eduard Krüger’s depiction of the soloist as either a ‘cooperative democrat’ or an ‘eager absolutist’ who ‘creates a state within the state’ (NZfM 41).

Ideas of ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ encompassed questions of national unification of the German lands vs. national particularism and what it meant for an individual to be free or self-determining in relation to a collective. Musicians, politicians, and critics explored these ideas alike, either in decidedly political compositions or through the politicised reception of music (Applegate 1998; 2012). Musicologists previously showed how ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ politicised the individual-collective juxtaposition in sung traditions that make the politicisation explicit through text (Matthew 2016, Daverio 2012). I will show that questions around ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ accumulated in discussions of instrumental music towards the 1848/9 revolutions, shaping both musical practices of formal (dis-)unity – notably in works by Spohr, David and Mendelssohn – and critical responses to specific Vormärz violin concerti in Leipzig. This paper offers a twofold approach: firstly, it investigates how ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘unity’ shaped the musical discourse around and musical practices of the concerto. Secondly, it takes Ferdinand David’s violin concerti Nos. 1–4 (1839–48) as case studies of how either dramatic solo-tutti interactions or features of formal (in-)completeness can be brought into a critical dialogue with ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘unity’ to arrive at an understanding of how musical aesthetics interrogated Vormärz politics.

When Richard Strauss revised and expanded Hector Berlioz’s Traité d’instrumentation in 1904, his admiration for Richard Wagner’s orchestration was clear. Calling Wagner’s scores the “alpha and omega” of his resulting Instrumentationslehre von Hector Berlioz, Strauss lauded Wagner’s mastery of orchestral “sound combinations” to express “unheard-of, great, poetic ideas, feelings and pictures of nature.” Similarly, in his description of the “Liebestod,” Strauss admired how “the theme [i.e., leitmotif], the orchestration, and the poetic idea combine to the most sublime effects.” In this, Strauss described what I call Wagner’s “associative orchestration” as a wellspring of drama, rather than a simple embellishment to it. Wagner’s orchestration expresses.

Strauss’s enthusiasm finds theoretical justification in Wagner’s own Oper und Drama (1851). In a little-discussed passage, Wagner identifies the orchestra as the “pure organ of the Feeling that speaks out the very thing which Word-speech [libretto] in itself can not speak out… This is shewn plainly enough by the Instruments of the orchestra themselves, ... each [speaking] for itself, and infinitely more richly in its changeful union with other instruments.” My paper explores associative orchestration in Tristan by tracing the expressive significance that Wagner’s timbral transformations bring to the leitmotifs conventionally labelled “sorrow” and “desire.”

My dramatic-musical analysis of Tristan draws on Wagner’s middle-stage Orchesterskizze (identified by Robert Bailey in 1970), which contains the full vocal parts with two to four staves of orchestral reduction. During my archival research at the Richard Wagner Nationalarchiv and Forschungsstätte, I uncovered additional pencil marginalia not discussed by Bailey. These marginalia record Wagner’s intentions for the orchestration. Tellingly, they specify groups of instruments for particular moments well before he drafted the complete orchestral score.

I conclude by considering the statements of what F. E. Kirby (2004) calls the Tristan Matrix (the Tristan chord with the “sorrow” and “desire” leitmotifs) and its fragments, noting where Wagner indicated specific orchestration in the Orchesterskizze and when he retained these voicings in his final score. Placing this orchestration alongside the manifold names given to these leitmotifs, my analysis shows the rhetorical and expressive nuance that Wagner’s orchestration lends these motifs throughout Tristan.

The largely unintelligible outdoor premiere of Hector Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale sparked revisions, reorchestrations, and amplifications by the composer. The work, intended to honor the fallen combatants of the July Revolution, was originally scored for military wind ensemble. Several of Berlioz’s orchestrational choices, such as tam-tam, recall music from French festivals and funerals of the early 1790s. After the work’s premiere, Berlioz augmented the military band with string orchestra and choir, instrumental combinations that have intrigued scholars. Peter Bloom referred to the work’s original woodwinds and brass as “uncanny,” and Inge van Rij has suggested that Berlioz’s revisions give the piece an “uneasy” quality that subverts its original ceremonial affect.

Such language requires further examination. I suggest that Berlioz’s orchestrations point to the Symphonie funèbre’s eerily familiar and unfamiliar nature, a Freudian, Gothic “return” of the soundworld of the Reign of Terror. Freud’s definition of the uncanny as a long-ago, frightening experience that was repressed, yet hauntingly resurfaces, is fulfilled by Berlioz’s original and revised instrumentations, which echo the soundworlds of the Revolution and of his early studies. As I argue, the reorchestrated Symphonie funèbre closely resembles Berlioz’s teacher Le Sueur’s own Chant de premier vendémiaire (1800), scored for four orchestras, four choirs, and organ. Berlioz’s recalling of Le Sueur’s piece was not a simple matter of homage, but instead showcases his fixation on the ideals of commemorative works from the Revolutionary era and on the sonification of heroism and grandeur. In particular, Berlioz attempts to reckon with the violent legacies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic ideals through his orchestrational revisions, just as survivors of trauma, Cathy Caruth suggests, often feel compelled to return to the source of their trauma in order to confront it. Berlioz, following that pattern, revisits the sonic specters of earlier soundworlds to try and overcome them. But his massed performing forces create further sonic distress; they embody J. Martin Daughtry’s concept of “belliphonic,” wartime sound and produce, to borrow Carmel Raz’s term, the “neural sublime,” moments of overload—sensory, emotional, conceptual—that lead to cognitive or physical meltdown.