History in Mighty Sounds

Barbara Eichner’s new book announces a new series from Boydell and Brewer, Music in Society and Culture. History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914 certainly makes for an impressive opening volume. Eichner’s choice of time-frame is not arbitrary. Although some mention of the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘long’ or otherwise, is inevitable, she explicitly wishes to concentrate on often little-known works (holding Wagner at one remove or more) from a period that ought to be better understood than it is, a period that is not, as she puts it, merely ‘a transitional state between Herder and the Holocaust’ (p. 38), and which has perhaps received less attention from musicologists concerned with historicism than that immediately preceding. There may well be no Sonderweg (special path) of German history, at least no more than there is with respect to any other national or thematically defined history, yet sometimes we need to proceed as if there were, if only to refute the original claim.

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