MICHAEL FEND

‘German Bel Canto’: Nineteenth-Century German Singing Manuals in a Political Context

A Conservatoire is the only educational institution which offers students a sense of being intellectually, emotionally and aurally immersed in their subject. In a Conservatoire music is everywhere. Many educationalists have found this fervent activity clearly too much of a good thing, which is why Conservatoires have always been located in separate buildings, away from the quieter practitioners of tertiary education in the Humanities and Sciences. Since their foundation in eighteenth-century Neapolitan and Venetian orphanages, the communal experience of musically vibrating Conservatoires also allowed teachers and students to escape from their often deprived background. The Conservatoires were the starting point for music as a way of life. With growing financial support, which conservatoires received from state governments in nineteenth-century Europe, composers and, later on, music historians adopted musicians’ life aspirations in the belief that their art, as much, if not more than, the other arts enjoyed the status of relative aesthetic autonomy that could justify a purely formal discourse about music among a mostly bourgeois public.

In the twentieth century, criticism of the elitism of classical music culture and the formalist discourse associated with it came, at least at first, from Marxist circles troubled by music’s role in social exploitation. After the declared end of all ideologies in the 1990s, another downside of music culture has come to the fore: its nineteenth-century role in fomenting polarities between European nations, a downright hatred which eventually led to the two world wars and countless other atrocities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we might be inclined to think that nationalism is no longer an issue, at least in the European Union of twenty-seven member States, but every day newspaper reports show nationalism’s malevolent face from around the globe. The extending rows of bookshelves in university libraries dedicated to nationalism reveal its undiminished importance to us and, for example, RILM lists no fewer than forty-two publications on the keyword “nationalism” in music for 2009 alone. “Nationalism” has, in other words, become a crucial issue for scholars working in the intellectual and political history of music.

There is a simple way to gauge a wider change in scholarly approach: while Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart lacks a specific entry in its two issues from the 1950s and 90s, The New Grove Dictionaryof Music and Musicians discussed the term for the first time in its 2001 edition. Based on a considerable body of mostly Anglo-Saxon research from the 1980s and 90s, Richard Taruskin’s article unmasked the parlance of music’s supposedly universal character as itself hiding a “nationalist agenda”.[1] On a terminological level Taruskin took issue, in particular, with The Harvard Dictionary of Music (1969) whose editor, Willi Apel, although himself a victim of racial expulsion from fascist Germany in 1936, is quoted as writing that, “the nationalist movement [in music] is practically nonexistent” in Germany, France or Italy, but that it was “principally embraced by the ‘peripheral’ European nations”, such as Bohemia, Norway, Russia, Spain, Hungary and Poland. Apel is further cited as saying that nationalism exhibited a “contradiction of what was previously considered one of the chief prerequisites of music, i.e. its universal or international character, which meant that the works of the great masters appealed equally to any audience”.[2] Apel’s argument was based on two dichotomies: he distinguished between an earlier and a later concept of music, and detected a compositional practice in north-western Europe at variance with a practice in some other European countries. Taruskin considered Apel’s view ideologically loaded in so far as it both “demotes” later nineteenth-century music created outside the Franco-Italian-German triangle and neglects the nationalist attitudes with which especially German authors propagated their own music as universally valuable.[3]

With a focus on people’s social and ethical attitudes in Germany, Taruskin himself distinguished between an earlier, “liberal or inclusive”, and a later, “racialist, exclusive”, nationalism identifying a turning point in a notorious and ignominious document published in 1850. For him, “liberal” nationalism was exemplified in the public recognition of Mendelssohn when he was appointed chief conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and director of the city’s Conservatory, as well as director of the Berlin Cathedral Choir in the 1830s and 40s; whereas nationalist ideology took a pernicious turn with Wagner’s propagation of a “racialist, exclusive” nationalism in his 1850 article Das Judenthum in der Musik. Taruskin considered this pamphlet “the most vivid symptom to be found in musical writings of a change in the nature of nationalism that all modern historians now recognise as a major crux in the history of modern Europe”.[4] Although Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were Germans, Wagner wanted to highlight their racial difference and cast doubt on their belonging to the German nation, although in 1850 Germany was not even a nation state.

Nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe was motivated by politically active ethnic groups who felt unified by language, religion and cultural tradition, but who did not usually feel represented by their rulers. Depending on the degree of political realisation, a nationalist ideology was a boost to the existing system, as in the case of Britain since the eighteenth century,[5] or a force for rebellion against foreign rulers, as in the case of Italy before its unification in 1861. The ways in which different subgroups of a nation were included or excluded by the ethnically dominant groups (Jews among Germans, Catholics among the British or Sicilians among the Italians) reveal the cultural practice of nationalism. The distinction made in saying that “nationality is a condition, nationalism is an attitude” requires interpretation,[6] as is clear from Wagner’s Judenthum article and its impact on fascists that “nationality” was and is not treated as an unassailable possession. Nationality does not necessarily create a safe haven for its members; instead membership is open to conflict. It is a “condition” which can be annulled by nationalist “attitudes”. That is why nationalism is potentially inherent in a myriad of activities involving many decisions of in- or exclusion, wherever their authors want to add symbolic value to those activities, with the intention of generating a feeling of solidarity among participants.

This complex of activities, ideas and sentiments was communicated through written or spoken language or another symbolic system, such as music. Research into music’s role in fostering nationalist sentiment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has naturally favoured vocal music and has focused on many aspects of opera, such as the attitudes of composers, librettists, critics and the audience at large. What has been less scrutinised are the discussion and practice of singing during this period. In which ways did the opera repertoire and its reception, the singing manuals and their terminology, change? Crudely speaking, in Germany a clear dominance of Italian in all these areas gave way to a German hegemony. The dynamics of an exclusory nationalism in the discussion of Italian singing culture in nineteenth-century Germany are the subject of this article.

There is consensus among music historians that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Italian opera and vocal teaching were prevalent across Europe, with the exception of France. Singers, too, were mostly Italian and their schooling took place in Italy with very few teachers publishing an account of their methods. Depending on the national perspective, opera was an exported or imported art form. Assertions by German and French writers about the superiority of their music were at first eccentric but became numerous after the middle of the eighteenth century.[7] Mozart’s letter of 1785, in which he complained about German singers in Vienna being forced to “remain at the Italian theatre” and in which he ironically enthused about “Germany’s everlasting shame if we Germans seriously started to think like Germans - to act like Germans – to speak German – and even to sing in German”,[8] gives a snapshot of the practical and institutional constraints for the various nationalities of singers in the Habsburg capital under Joseph II. But Mozart’s view may not have been representative of the subsequent repertoire and performing conditions, as the “percentage of German composers [writing Italian operas] markedly decreased in the 1790s”.[9]

In 1813, at the height of the Napoleonic wars, which elicited a first wave of Germanic nationalist fervour, Carl Maria von Weber vented his own resentment against court-privileged Italian opera by sketching a satirical, allegorical representation of a prima donna from opera seria in his fragmentary novel Tonkünstlers Leben. The prima donna is characterised as “a tall, skinny, transparent figure, a face with no features to speak of and an immutable expression which, however, exudes intense sweetness. She is wearing a thin, colourless dress with a train sprinkled with small glittering stones which catch the audience’s eyes”. Her recitative, arioso and stretta consist exclusively of phrases such as “Oh Dio … addio”, “non pianger mio bene”, “per te morir io voglio”, “sorte amara”.[10] Weber’s parodic imagery was not confined to Italian opera. French and even German opera received similar treatment. After his appointment as Hofkapellmeister in Dresden in 1817 Weber fought for the improvement of its German activities, to compete with the court’s Italian opera under Francesco Morlacchi. The association of the court and nobility with Italian opera, epitomised in Spontini’s appointment at the royal theatre in Berlin in 1820, fuelled existing political tensions because his engagement alienated the literary German class from the rising star of Rossini, whose European triumph ran counter to their musical and political aspirations.

Weber’s own position and ideology remained ambiguous. On the one hand he felt undermined by Morlacchi, on the other hand he wrote a number of arias and cantatas in Italian. In his opera criticism Weber adopted some of the topoi against Italian opera which German writers continued to repeat through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, such as his accusation that Rossini’s operas were of a “purely sensual, unspiritual nature”.[11] Still, recent scholarship on Weber has modified the image of him as a German nationalist composer in the wake of his success with Der Freischütz, compositionally inspired by opéra comique and first performed for a middle-class audience at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1821. Weber, whose Dresden repertoire included many opéras-comiques and who would have included Italian operas by Spontini and Mozart, had they not been the prerogative of the court theatre, struck a broad-minded attitude in a letter to his friend Johann Gänsbacher of 1817: “Art has no fatherland and we should treasure everything that is beautiful, whatever the sky under which it was created.” Reviewing Morlacchi’s oratorio Isacco (1817) Weber wrote: “The path to the goal is broad and it takes many forms. It allows space for everybody.”[12]

Weber’s conciliatory tone was not echoed by Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795-1866), composer, music historian, theorist and hugely influential editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung from 1824 to 1831, who canonised the formal analysis of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and, as educationalist,co-founded the Stern’sches Konservatorium in 1850. In Marx’s treatise on singing, Die Kunst des Gesanges (1826), the institutional and personal dominance of Italian court opera and Catholic church music, as well as Rossini’s triumphant reception among German audiences, is declared to be over. In this way Marx concurred with the growing hostility expressed in German music journals towards Italian opera in general.[13] Adopting Hegel’s dialectical scheme of historical progress by necessity as well as a proselytising tone, Marx maintained that “with Rossini Italian music had to abandon everything spiritual and had unreservedly toprofess its principle, namely sensual amusement, and, as perfect, it had to celebrate its international triumph, … so that we [the Germans] can acknowledge with total conviction: our spirit has a higher need, and only this higher something can give us true satisfaction”.[14] As Sanna Pederson has shown, Marx aggravated his historical-philosophical argument with the accusation that Rossini’s operas lacked “dramatic sense” and only provided “fleeting sensual pleasure”.[15] He nowhere defined the “higher something” (das Höhere) which was bestowed only on German music, yet he castigated readers who preferred to remain neutral to his mission. Two nationalistic strategies were at play here. He had recourse to Hippocrates’s and later authors’ climate theory, according to which German and northern music is defined in contra-distinction to Italian, southern music and, simultaneously, he either included or excluded musicians from the German fold, as the fate of Spontini in Berlin was to show.

Marx extended his disapproval of Italian music into the field of music theory and the teaching of singing. He believed that the construction of the tonal system, as well as melodic, harmonic and rhythmic rules had only been introduced to “facilitate the most euphonious sound and the most pleasurable comprehension”, as encountered in Italian opera.[16] Italian and German music was thus reduced to two principles: according to Marx, Italians only compose to give pleasure whereas the Germans demonstrate a “natural striving for idea and truth”.[17] Likewise, the singing profession was perceived as in need of reform: “Nobody is more alien to German music than singers who emerge from Italian training. Many more of them can perform a scena by Rossini than a German song.”[18]He heldItalian singing schools responsible for German singers wrongly emphasising the last syllables of words, adding extra vowels or changing from darker to lighter vowels. In his view the limited success of German opera in the mid 1820s was directly related to singers’ schooling in Italian opera and language which, in his view, “almost exclusively teaches the shaping of the voice, very little theory, and a uniform manner of performance and embellishment”.[19] Marx did not want to substitute the old, exclusively Italian singing practice for a new, exclusively German one, but he was confident that German musicians had appropriated the operatic culture of their neighbouring countries with the result that Italian and French music was “sublated” (as understood by Hegel), that is subsumed within future German opera.[20] In a further bow to Hegel’s scheme, Marx believed that during his lifetime music had “received consciousness only on German soil”, whereas it had previously “existed unconsciously” in other countries.[21]

It is deeply ironic that Hegel, whose ideas A.B. Marx popularised, confessed his intense enjoyment of Rossini’s operas, which were much en vogue in Berlin in the 1820s, while completely ignoring Marx’s hero Beethoven: “Rossini’s music is decried by his opponents as a tickling of the ear. But once we live in its melodies, this music is full of sentiment, spirited and engaging for mind and heart. Admittedly, it does not embark on the kind of musical characterisation beloved by the strict German musical attitude.”[22] On a visit to Vienna in 1824, Hegel vowed to stay put for as long as he could afford tickets for the Italian opera and his journey home. He declared his preference for Rossini’s Barbiere over Mozart’s Figaro, enthused over the soprano Angelica Catalani and the bass Luigi Lablache, concluding that “Italian music is made for Italian singers; everything is made to be sung”.[23] Schopenhauer, too, acknowledged his unbiased delight in Rossini’s operas, castigating German jealousy over their success.[24]

Despite the popular enthusiasm for Rossini’s operas shared by Hegel and Schopenhauer, but opposed by the musical literati, the last institution for the exclusive performance of Italian opera, the Dresden court opera, mounted a dwindling number of productions and was dissolved in 1832.[25] Still, the city remained the German centre for Italian singing instruction. The filiation of teachers and singers included the castrato Vincenzo Caselli, who had moved to Dresden after studies with the Bolognese castrato Antonio Bernacchi (1685-1756).Bernacchi himself had set up a singing school in Bologna in 1738 after a highly successful career in which he had sung in Handel’s London operas. Bernacchi counted Anton Raaff among his pupils, while Caselli was known as the teacher of Johann Miksch (1765-1845). Miksch in turn was made chorus director of the German opera in Dresden in 1820 at the suggestion of Weber, and taught Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient (1804-1860) as well as Heinrich Ferdinand Mannstein (1806-1872) and Ferdinand Sieber (1822-1895). This generation drew very different lessons from their singingteachers. While Schroeder-Devrient became internationally known for her dramatically powerful performances of German and Italian operas, Mannstein became a professional singer and teacher after his theological studies could not provide him with an income.

By entitling his manual Das System der großen Gesangschule des Bernacchi von Bologna,Mannstein may have hoped, like A.B. Marx, to have history on his side, although he was describing singing as practised in the eighteenth century and Algarotti had already upbraided Bernacchi for his obsession with technical difficulties.[26] Still, Mannstein confidently explained that Bernacchi’s singing principles had not been superseded in subsequent manuals and that they could be summarised in the motto: “Place your voice well, breath well, pronounce clearly – and your singing will be perfect”. The nature of Mannstein’s advice, remote from both concrete musical examples and a hands-on approach, is revealed in his distinction between musical “expression” and “performance”, where the latter is considered the “body”, and the former the “spirit” of singing. “Performance” is claimed to resemble “form or disposition in painting”, whereas “expression” is related to the “idea of the divine, which radiates in us when beholding the painting. Only under the best conditions of performance and expression can singing become a work of art.”[27] The rudimentary nature of Mannstein’s advice confirms the long-held view that Italian musicians conveyed their ‘secrets’ orally and little was spelled out in writing. Although Mannstein’s treatise enjoyed a second edition, a further publication shows him hopelessly out of step with operatic developments.[28] His subsequent career move to historical novel writing and to the civil service in Dresden hardly indicates the success of his music teaching.