Conference Agenda

The 1920 Amsterdam Mahler Festival was conceived as an event of grandiose proportions, both musically and socially. Over a two-week period, Willem Mengelberg led the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the first cyclic performance of Mahler’s complete symphonic works, assembling an international audience of musicians, scholars, and celebrities for the earliest large-scale music festival in Europe following the First World War. To complement the performances, an extensive Dutch-language program book was written by Dr. Rudolf Mengelberg, a member of the planning committee and distant cousin of Willem. Here, this Mengelberg guides readers through each of Mahler’s works, making a case for their historical significance and constructing a comprehensive argument that the music—and the festival—would serve to reunify the Western world after the divisions wrought by the war. Specifically, Mengelberg argues that Mahler’s music embodies the early-twentieth-century ideals of democracy and internationalism to a greater extent than that of any other composer.

In this presentation, I explore Mengelberg’s musicological approaches, which involve a combination of traditional formal analysis and an atypical methodology relating elements of Mahler’s music to ongoing political and societal developments. Beginning with Christian Thorau’s paradigm of “touristic listening”—which casts the genre of program notes as an offshoot of printed travel guides—I argue that Mengelberg’s book ventures well beyond the traditional scope of the genre, not only providing background information about the works, but further, encouraging readers to adopt his distinct interpretation of Mahler as the composer whose music best “gives shape to” the values of twentieth-century society.

To conclude the presentation, I briefly situate Mengelberg’s analyses (as well as his short biography of the composer published in 1923) among contemporaneous writings on Mahler, demonstrating that his ideas differed from existing norms, but also that certain aspects thereof went on to influence later writings on Mahler by scholars including Paul Stefan and Richard Specht. Through this case study of Mengelberg’s analyses, we will come to a greater understanding of the complex interplay between art and politics in the years after the First World War, when writers sought new ways to explain and intepret music in response to the rapidly changing world around them.

Writing a history of the sacred music of Noto, Sicily, Alessandro Loreto accused the composer and nun Cecilia Macca (c. 1788-1841) of contributing to an ostensible “Rossinification” and “degradation” of sacred music in Italy. Left unexamined is how her work challenges the notion of a closed world of functional music and convent life in early nineteenth-century Sicily that was, in fact, in conversation with the prevalent musical styles outside the walls of the Chiesa di Santa Chiara. Although scant biographical information about Macca exists, around twenty of her works are preserved in Il Fondo Altieri at the Biblioteca Comunale Principe di Villadorata in Noto.

In exploring the extant compositions by Macca, my research adds a gender-studies lens, asking why and how Macca made music in a town that continues to celebrate the legacy of Neapolitan composer Paolo Altieri (1745-1820), her teacher and maestro di cappella for all the churches in Noto, while overlooking her continuation of that legacy in the convent space. My work complements the research of Laurie Strass, Craig Monson, and Robert Kendrick, whose revelations about nuns in Early Modern Italy point the way to Macca’s life. Loreto’s impressive investigation of four centuries of sacred music in Noto, while dismissive of Macca, is also essential in understanding her community and its placement just before the Vatican I musical interventions

In this paper, I will show examples of her compositions, including brief sections of a sacred duet, “Madre Mia datevi pace.” The text may be biographical, as a daughter sings about her decision to become a nun while her mother argues against it. She wrote in the major sacred genres, including masses for two and three voices, several Salve Reginas, and a Te Deum. My archival research reveals that the latter corresponds with a visit from Bishop Giuseppe-Maria Amorelli of Siracusa during the tumultuous 1830s. Her pieces contain elements of late trio sonata form and instrumentation merged with Rossinian melodies. In this way, Cecilia Macca’s compositions are a gateway into the musical lives of early nineteenth-century Sicilians.

In 1922, the Russian violinist Lev Tseitlin gathered sixty Moscow musicians to form one of the early Soviet Union’s most unusual musical groups: a conductorless orchestra. Initially met with bemusement and derision, the First Symphonic Ensemble—or “Persimfans” in Russian abbreviation—proved viable and performed in concert halls, workers’ clubs, and factories for over a decade. The group’s manifesto proclaimed that the creativity and spontaneity of individual musicians would flourish only when freed from the conductor’s authority, a rationale that was broadly understood in the early USSR as proclaiming a Marxist dictatorship of fully equal musicians. Critics and scholars have routinely described the group as a radical utopian curiosity, ultimately incompatible with the conservative Stalinist aesthetics that followed in the 1930s.

But Persimfans is more complex and contradictory than current historiography suggests. The group preserved aspects of nineteenth-century musicking, most obviously in the Romantic symphonic works that dominated its programs. In this sense, Persimfans represented an important point of continuity with pre-Revolutionary ensembles. The group’s unusual approach to performance drew a new and socially diverse generation of listeners to Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and other pre-Revolutionary composers, an impact heightened by a distinct lack of other standing orchestras in the early USSR. Persimfans’s presentation of this music, which also included lectures, preconcert presentations, and extended program notes published as a journal, inculcated distinctly Romantic values—“bourgeois” in Soviet terms—which ranged from formalist discourse to modes of “proper” concert behavior. Moreover, the group’s occasional performances of works by Bartók, Prokofiev, Strauss, and other contemporary composers situated these pieces not in a specifically socialist context, but rather in a broad, pan-European conception of modernism that drew Russia and Western Europe together. In this presentation, I use archival records and publications to reconstruct Persimfans’s activities and situate the group in a broad artistic response to modernity that cuts across eras demarcated by geopolitical shifts. Ultimately, I argue that Persimfans, although radical and utopian in form, served as an important musical bridge between the high Romanticism of the late Imperial era and the “great retreat” of Stalin’s 1930s cultural revolution.