Conference Agenda

Secular instrumental music—the symphony above all—has long been regarded as the principal medium of German musical nationalism, the purest expression of what German critics in the nineteenth century regarded as their innate musical genius. Less widely acknowledged, however, is that the discourse around Catholic liturgical music was equally fraught with national frictions. In this paper, I explore these tensions by comparing the discussions of mass ordinary settings in three early biographies of Haydn, those by Georg August Griesinger, Albert Christoph Dies, and Giuseppe Carpani. Whereas most Haydn scholars have heretofore regarded the evident biases in these biographies as obstacles to be read past and compensated for in search of some core truth about the composer’s own life, practices, and views, I argue that they are to be investigated for their own sake as vital examples of a nascent nationalist discourse.

First of all, each biographer evaluates Haydn’s church music in explicitly national terms: Carpani claims Haydn as a sort of honorary Italian who rejected the church music of the German school as dull and monotonous. Griesinger, conversely, argues that Haydn’s masses have elevated the reputation of German music throughout the continent, while Dies lambasts Italian church music as “degenerate” and concludes that Italian composers lack true devotion. Secondly, these evaluations correspond to lines of argument that claim Haydn as a champion of the right sort of sacred music; that is to say, each biographer uses the example of Haydn to articulate and promote a tacit aesthetic theory of what makes good church music. In brief, Carpani judges Haydn’s masses by their effect upon the listener, while Griesinger and Dies look instead to the sincerity of the composer’s personal piety—Haydn’s masses are worthy, for the Italian, because they inspire religious feeling; for the Germans, because they were inspired by it. Not only, therefore, were national tensions at play in the evaluation of sacred music, but the realm of the sacred helped to engender one of the most salient and influential features of German musical aesthetics: the oracular voice of the composer as source of musical value.

Hector Berlioz famously disliked the term “aesthetics.” He avoided using it in his criticism, correspondence, and other published writings, and frequently claimed a lack of adherence to broad philosophical systems of aesthetic ideologies. Equally notable as his disdain for this term was his growing indifference to the doctrines of the Catholic Church. And yet he spilled a considerable amount of ink on the subject of sacred music: in the modern era, he wrote, “sacred music was a rare thing.” It was, for Berlioz, a withering flower that was in danger of “completely disappearing.”

On the one hand, Berlioz’s words are unremarkable, given the toll that the Revolution had taken on religious practice and the composition of sacred music; the Revolution has been cited by contemporaneous critics and modern scholars alike as a point of unbridgeable cultural and musical rupture. On the other hand, however, his words are curious; his misgivings toward church doctrine and its roles in the fraught political environment of the early nineteenth century seemingly contradict his vested interest in the subject. Given the often-contrary history of French sacred music during the time, Berlioz found himself neither within official Catholic structures that attempted to mandate stylistic parameters nor part of musical institutions that taught its composition in any particular style. Berlioz was thus free to form an idiosyncratic aesthetic of sacred music that could, with an eye to the past and an ear to the future, revitalize and transform a dying art form. This paper outlines this Berliozian aesthetic of sacred music, the construction of which is useful on two fronts: if its deployment in works such as the Grande messe des morts (1837) blurred timeworn binaries between devotion and drama, or expression and sincerity, it also recontextualizes the historiographical toward Revolutionary rupture. In the aftermath of the Revolution, when Catholic practice was being actively redefined and sacred music found itself in a state of upheaval, this Berliozian aesthetic of sacred sound formed a sense of musical continuity in ways that institutionalized musical and religious practice could not.

From 1847 to 1849 the hymnodist William Bradbury (1816–68) traveled to Leipzig, Germany in the pursuit of discovering how Europeans taught music. Bradbury chronicled his travels by writing in installments of his experiences for the New York Evangelist.

In addition to Bradbury’s writings for the New York Evangelist, another artifact from his travels remains: an album book that he had in Germany, with inscriptions and signatures from Jenny Lind, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Robert and Clara Schumann, Richard Wagner, and many more. These pages chronicle Bradbury’s friendships with faculty from the Leipzig Conservatory as well as other notable European musicians. Bradbury’s album book resides today at the Library of Congress.

In these pages, one can study and understand nineteenth-century relationships with musicians, and in particular the European mentors who had a direct influence on Bradbury, who would become one of America’s best-known hymnodists in the nineteenth century, writing the music for Savior Like a Shepherd Lead Us (1859), Sweet Hour of Prayer (1859), Jesus Loves Me (1862), and He Leadeth Me (1864).

Additionally, one can find in this album hymns in English set to music by C. F. Becker, Moritz Hauptmann, Joseph Joachim, Louis Spohr, and Carl Friedrich Zoellner, using texts by Emily Taylor and Isaac Watts. Perhaps these Leipzig musicians were paying tribute to the visiting American hymnodist by setting English hymn texts to music in their own compositional style.

A study of the texts and compositional styles of these short hymns found in Bradbury’s album book points to the germination of a cultural exchange: these esteemed Leipzig professors wrote short English hymns for a visiting American hymnodist. Bradbury’s reverence for the European style of music is no secret as he returned to the United States to publish multiple volumes of hymns with music inspired from these traditions. Examining these short hymns in his album book reveals Bradbury’s early inspiration of bringing European musical style to nineteenth-century American hymnody.