Songs for a Revolution

Given the level of interest in music and politics more broadly, it is perhaps surprising how little musicological research has been dedicated to the 1848 revolution. Aside from sporadic attention from Wagner and Schumann scholars, the entanglement of music and musicians in the revolution has largely been overlooked, while narratives of nineteenth-century music history tend to treat it as a non-event. Indeed, a generation ago Carl Dahlhaus dismissed the revolution as unworthy of musicological attention, on the grounds that it generated mere ephemera rather than works capable of leaving a mark on music history (‘Über die musikgeschichtliche Bedeutung der Revolution von 1848’, Melos, 4 (1978), 15–19 at 17). Even from this narrow view of what constitutes music-historical significance, Dahlhaus’s judgement seems seriously awry: while not all will be convinced of the import of works like Albert Lortzing’s revolutionary opera Regina, one can hardly dismiss the impact of 1848 on Wagner’s Ring or Liszt’s symphonic poems. Dahlhaus’s perspective has been decisively countered by several studies from the last two decades, including Martin Geck’s Zwischen Romantik und Restauration: Musik im Realismus–Diskurs 1848–1871 (Stuttgart, 2001), my book Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge, 2010), and a hefty collection of essays edited by Barbara Boisits, Musik und Revolution: Die Produktion von Identität und Raum durch Musik in Zentraleuropa 1848/49 (Vienna, 2013). Even so, many aspects of the relationship between music and the revolution have as yet not been addressed, and we are far from having a definitive account of the topic.

Art · Art history · Counterpoint · Literature · Musical · Musicology · Narrative · Opera · Politics · Sociology · Symphony · Central European national history · European Law and Migration · History · Law · Musicology and Musical Analysis