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The Rebirth of English Music
| Article
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18628 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,100 Words |
| Author
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Robert R. Reilly
Robert R. Reilly's second part of his article on English music
appears in the August 1990 issue of The World & I. |
One can speak rationally of culture, but no one knows the ways of the Muses. They are daemonic and do not answer direct questions. For instance, let us ask Euterpe: Why has Germany had so many great symphonists and Spain so few? Why has little Hungary produced so many great musicians? More to the point, how was it that England, after the Renaissancce, disappeared from the musical map for two centuries? Why did it then reappear? Euterpe does not answer.
England participated fully in the musical Renaissance, even led parts of it under John Dunstable (c. 1390-1453), and was respectably represented by such composers as Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-85), William Byrd (1543-1623), Thomas Weelkes (c. 1575-1623), and Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). But after the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, Euterpe fell virtually silent in England until the advent of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) some two hundred years later. During the extraordinary outpourings of Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, and Johnannes Brahms--in short, throughout the Classical and Romantic periods--the most memorable musical activity of the English was to commission works from others, such as Haydn's London symphonies. England was unkindly referred to as "das Land ohne Musik."
Efforts were made. Native attempts at composition by such figures as Charles Stanford (1852-1924) and Hubert Parry (1848-1918) were competent but hardly on the inspired levels of their continental German models. Not until Edward Elgar was there a musical voice of genius that was distinctively English. The reason for this lacuna of two centuries is as mysterious as was its end in an outburst of English musical creativity that has yet to abate. Instead of fruitlessly dwelling on why it happened (was it Puritanism or the effects of the mechanized materialism of the Industrial Revolution?), it might be better to explore the effects of Euterpe's absenteeism on her unexpected return to Fair Albion.
England's long sleep shaped its awakening. Its island isolation was insulation, not only from the domineering German musical genius, but from the quandary in which the inheritors of that genius found themselves at the turn of this century: What to do after Beethoven, after Wagner, after everything that could be done seemed to have been done? A sense of overripeness, then of exhaustion, of futility spread on the Continent, compounded, if not caused, by the philosophical dead ends of German philosophy in Nietzsche and Marx, who purportedly showed the way to new beginnings. What would the new Autonomous Man do? A
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