JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music. Music andthe Cult of the Classical Adagio MARGARET NOTLEY "Nothing is more a product of the German way than [the] Adagio," wrote Ludwig Nohl in a history of chamber music that appeared in 1885. With the "full awakening of inwardness" in the late eighteenth century, the Adagio had come "almost to seem richer than the entire rest of the [multimovement] form": "the complete mastery of musical technique could be evident and everything still seem empty," but when a composer grasped the purpose established by Haydn and fulfilled by Mozart and Beethoven, "the Adagio in German sonata forms belongs to that which is most beautiful not merely in music but in art altogether."' Nohl thus dwelt on the soulfulness of the late-eighteenth-century slow movement while casually claiming a middle-European repertory as essentially German, two intertwining modes of reception in what appears to have been an intricately textured late-nineteenth-century cult of the Classical Adagio. 19th-Century Music XXIII/1 (Summer 1999). ? by The Regents of the University of California. I would like to thank Richard Boursy, Walter Frisch, and James Hepokoski for their helpful comments on this article. 'Ludwig Nohl, Die geschichtliche Entwickelung der Kammermusik und ihre Bedeutung fair den Musiker (Braunschweig, 1885): "Nichts ist denn auch mehr ein Product der deutschen Art als dieses Adagio der Sonatenform, und es bedurfte des vollen Erwachens der Innerlichkeit, wie sie eben das vorige Jahrhundert kennzeichnet, um diesem . . . einen Gehalt zu geben, der es schliesslich fast als reicher erscheinen lisst, denn das ganze Uebrige der Sonatenform"; "Die v6llige Beherrschung der musikalischen Technik konnte vorhanden sein und doch hier innerlich Alles ode erscheinen"; "das Adagio der deutschen Sonatenform zu dem Sch6nsten geh6rt, was nicht bloss die Musik sondern die Kunst iiberhaupt besitzt" (p. 59). 33 This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:46:00 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH For Nohl and other acolytes of Richard CENTURY Wagner, the history of chamber music had MUSIC peaked and in effect ended with the late string quartets of Beethoven. Consequently, although he devoted considerable space in his Evolution of Chamber Music to the build-up toward the Classical climax, Nohl treated the chamber works of Schubert and Schumann together in one sentence.2 Mendelssohn merited only passing notice, and Brahms (along with any number of lesser-known post-Classical composers) he ignored altogether.As part of what amounted to a blanket critique of modern society, Wag...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.In an account of Brahms's dissatisfactions with the city of Vienna, Max Kalbeck recalled that after Wagner's death "music got mixed up with politics, and obscurantists from various parties had their hands in the matter." Kalbeck was writing here of Brahms's anger in the 1880s at the "anti-German" policies of the Czech-Clerical-Polish coalition then in power in the central government-the composer believed that priestly machinations were behind the unsatisfactory state of affairs-and added that "the musical situation in the imperial city also did not please him." Using the religious theme of Parsifal as a tenuous connective to the previous topic of suspected Catholic intrigues, the biographer seized the opportunity to rail further on his own account at those "sanctimonious demagogues" who found Wagner's music useful because it "suppressed the intellect and unleashed the senses."' In this remarkable ac19th-Century Music XVII/2 (Fall 1993). ? by The Regents of the University of California.A shorter version of this paper was given at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1992. I would like to thank Professors Leon Plantinga, David Brodbeck, and Virginia Hancock for their comments on drafts of that version. I am also grateful to James Webster for having read and commented on a more recent draft. 1"Was hier seinen Unmut erregte, war nicht die deutschfeindliche Politik der Regierung allein, mit der, wie bei allen Gelegenheiten, wo im Trtiben gefischt wird, Urtriebe der Pfaffen Hand in Hand gingen; auch die musikalischen Zustande der Kaiserstadt behagten ihm nicht. Die Musik wurde mit der Politik vermengt, und Dunkelmanner aus verschiedenen Parteilagern hatten die Hande dabei im Spiele. Seit Wagners 'Parsifal' galt der Autor des 'Biihnen-Weihfestspieles' vielen als eine Art von bekehrtem 'Tannhdiuser,' der vielleicht zuletzt noch reuig aus dem Venusberge in den Schof der alleinseligmachenden Kirche zurtickgekehrt ware. ... Jedenfalls Ubte, nach der Meinung scheinheiliger Demagogen, seine den Geist knebelnde, die Sinne entfesselnde Kunst einen zweckdienlicheren Einflutf auf glAubige Gemtiter aus als die Musik des Freidenkers und Haretikers" (Johannes Brahms, 4 vols. in 8 [rev. edn. Berlin, 1912-21], vol. III [1912], pp. 402-03). The "free-thinker and heretic" is, of course, Brahms. 107 This content downloaded from 188.72.96.81 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 18:31:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH CENTURY MUSICcount, Kalbeck-and, of course, by implication Brahms himself-was displaying a complex of attitudes that students of nineteenth-cen...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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