Romanticism, Music, Nationalism: Joep Leerssen

NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS
NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 20 (4), 2014, 606–627.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12087
Romanticism, music, nationalism

JOEP LEERSSEN
Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
ABSTRACT. In manifold ways, the stylistic and performative features and evolving
genre conventions of nineteenth-century ‘classical’ music reflect the increasing grip of
nationalism on cultural attitudes in Europe. Conversely, music could become an impor-
tant medium for the expression and dissemination of nationalist ideals. A cross-
national, European-wide survey of this interpenetration between musical and
ideological developments is applied towards a tentative typological outline of ‘musical
nationalism’.
KEYWORDS: cultural nationalism, cultural transfer, opera, rhapsody, Romantic

nationalism, Romanticism
Introduction: Liszt, for example
Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies are a standard evergreen on the repertoire

of ‘Classical’ music of the ‘Romantic’ school. (It is typical for musical termi-
nology that the notions of ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’, usually each other’s polar
opposites, can be merged so fluidly.) Originally written for piano but later also
orchestrated, they combine the registers of passion and lyricism (both proper
to the Romantic school); they give free rein to displays of technical bravura on
the part of the virtuoso performer; they evoke the couleur locale of that
country whose national aspirations were so ardently championed by the com-
poser Liszt (1811–1886).
All this makes the Hungarian Rhapsodies a paradigmatic example of the
intersection between musical romanticism and romantic nationalism. That
intersection has in recent decades attracted increasing critical attention; even
so, a proper investigation of the role of music (especially the classical [elite-
professional] art music of the Romantic period) in the development of nation-
alism is largely a desideratum. Although most educated Europeans will be able
to recognise, or hum along with, many of the famous melodic lines that have
trickled from the concert halls into general everyday culture (the Slaves’
Chorus of Verdi’s Nabucco, the Valkyries’ Ride of Wagner’s Walküre, the
themes of Smetana’s Vtlava and indeed of the Hungarian Rhapsody nr. 2) – all
that great social penetration, which had taken hold even before the age of
audiovisual media, is wholly informal and unspecific. These musical works are
usually ‘dateless’, and most people will be hard put to place them even within
© The author(s) 2014. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2014
Romanticism, music, nationalism 607
a decade. (For the record: the Hungarian Rhapsodies are from 1851–1853, with
later additions; Nabucco is from 1842, Die Walküre was composed in 1854–
1856 and premiered in 1870, and Má Vlast, of which Vltava is a movement, is
from 1874–1879).
The very periodisation of the ‘Romantic’ school in music is vague, much
vaguer even than similar periodisations in literary or art history (which them-
selves are no model of rigour or specificity). Music, which stereotypically
enjoys the proverbial status of being the most abstract, least significance-
anchored form of art, is often discussed in terms of its aesthetic effect, in a
mode of criticism derived from subjective impressions. All that makes music
an almost ungraspable corpus to analyse in the frame of developing cultural
nationalism: hot air held together by gossamer, shapelessly afloat in an
ahistorical, ideal sphere of abstracted art. The hard facts that are cited revolve
around connections with social developments: the activist public stance of
certain composers (like Liszt and Smetana; demonstrated from non-musical
sources and then traced in their musical echoes) or the galvanising social effect
of public performances (again, demonstrated from non-musical sources). The
study of musical nationalism shuttles back and forth, like a spinning jenny,
between the style of compositions and the context of social facts.
While by now a substantial body of works exists that analyses individual
cases (often placing a given composer or country in the European context),1
and some scholars have signalled the existence of ‘national music’ as a pan-
European phenomenon,2 a properly comparative treatment (surveying the
assembled individual cases across Europe from a supranationally comparative
point of view so as to weigh the specificities against the generic patterns, and
to establish a diversified typology and developmental timescale) is as yet
largely an ambition for future research. Also, while the topic is gaining recog-
nition as an important perspective in music history – obviously, since music
felt its profound effects – it also deserves to be thematised as an important
element in nationalism studies. In what follows here, I offer some working
hypotheses and starting points for such an aspirational ‘comparative history of
musical nationalism in Europe’.
One precondition must be that historians of nationalism take on board the
insights of Carl Dahlhaus and of the music historians that have succeeded him
in retrieving music from its ideal-aesthetic sanctuary. Music is not an
ahistorical canon of continuously performed instances of timeless beauty; it is
the outcome of historical practices and events. Composers and performers
formed a craft, with rigorous and robustly institutionalised training and career
trajectories, with strong filiations of apprenticeship, influence and rivalry; they
reflected on their art and frequently wrote about it. These meta-musical reflec-
tions are not only useful in order to understand their artistry, and their stylistic
development or the biographical-emotional background to their composi-
tions, but they are often also interventions in public debates of a political or
culture-critical nature, and should be read as an important source in intellec-
tual history. Such an ‘intellectual history’ of musical nationalism will be well
608 Joep Leerssen
advised, not only to develop the habit of chronological specificity (i.e. treating
compositions as dateable events), but also to look at the discursive and
general-cultural ambience of musical life in the nineteenth century: especially
the writings of composers and music critics.
In the case of our chosen example, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, that would
mean: to see them as an early example of the overlap between
ethnomusicology and ethnically coloured composition (brought to a peak by
the generation of Percy Grainger and Béla Bartók), and in particular against
the ‘intertext’ of Liszt’s 1859 essay Des bohémiens et de leur musique en
Hongrie. Written to accompany and to explain the Hungarian Rhapsodies,
that book-length essay not only argues that the proper national music of
Hungary is that of the Romany (‘Gypsies’), but also positions Liszt’s Rhap-
sodies as a quasi-philological quest to retrieve, order and edit the epic roots of
national culture – a practice better known from the annals of literary schol-
arship and Romantic writing (Leerssen 2004a, 2004b). Liszt intended these
rhapsodies as the musical equivalent of rendering to the Hungarian gypsies
their own ‘national epic’ (cf. Salmen 1966: 74–77) – something which for
Romantic intellectuals constituted a formative stage in the self-articulation of
cultural communities finding and proclaiming their identity as a nation. Liszt’s
musical project thus fits in with what, in literature in the 1830s, Lönnrot was
doing in Finland, La Villemarqué in Brittany, Shevchenko in the Ukraine and
Prešeren in Slovenia.3 What superficially might appear to be a flashy piece of
lyrical-passionate music spiced up with local colour and virtuoso bravura
turns out, then, to form part of the patterns of a ‘cultivation of culture’
(Leerssen 2006), which lies at the root of nationalism in nineteenth-century
Europe. Indeed the very genre of the ‘rhapsody’ seems to be typologically
related to the interest in reconstituted epics and the philological investigation
of the relationship between national-foundational epic and anonymous rhap-
sodic fragments.4
The special status of ‘classical music’, as a publicly performed and com-
mercially funded art, composed by conservatoire-trained composers and per-
formed by conservatoire-trained musicians and famous virtuosi, with an
international repertoire and canon, is to some extent a product of the nine-
teenth century, relegating all other forms of musical activity (as local forms of
participatory or amateur sociability or private entertainment) to the margins
(Gelbart 2007). Yet that is not just a reason to deconstruct the very notion or
canonicity of ‘classical’ music but needs to be studied as a historical process in
its own right. Classical music as we have come to habitually understand the
term is to some extent, like nationalism, a product of the Romantic period (one
reason for the anomaly, noted above, that the notions of the ‘classical’ and the
‘romantic’ are such boon companions in musical parlance). With the remem-
brance of Mozart and the revival of Bach (cf. Applegate 2005) the composer
becomes what Foucault ([1969] 1994) would call an ‘author-figure’, a name or
brand whose reputation and publicly known temperament serves to identify,
underwrite and characterise the compositions signed by him; the composer
(Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner etc.) and the virtuoso performer
(Paganini, again Chopin and Liszt) emerge as Romantic characters, publicly
known for their passionate and/or tragic and/or sublime lifestyle.
Both the personality of the celebrity-musician and the canonical status of
‘classical’ music become, in the nineteenth century, a focus of public interest,
and as I shall hope to demonstrate in the course of the following pages, it is this
public interest that gives music its importance in the history of nationalism.
Ironically, while this Romantic cult of the classically trained, artistically driven
composer tends to establish an international set of conventions on what is
increasingly becoming a transnational artistic system, within that system the
composer becomes, alongside his cosmopolitan networks and classical train-
ing, a champion and spokesman for his particular nation.
Run-up: classical music as a transnational-European art system
By 1800, classical music5 (musique classique, klassische Musik) had developed

into a common, established cultural praxis encompassing many countries.
Subsisting stylistic differences and local particularities of genre and convention
are outweighed by an important set of shared features (many of them, like the
accepted technical vocabulary, of Italian origin), diffused across the continent
by a mesh of cultural transfers and by composers and performers often trav-
elling to, and adopting best practices from, masters in other countries. The
genres and musical forms of opera, cantata, symphony, concerto and suite had
become a common reservoir; the symphony crystallised into the formal syntax
of the sonata set for an entire orchestra.
The diatonic system with its standard major and minor keys and harmo-
nising rules; notation; standardised tunings and metronomic tempo notations;
generally accepted instrumentations for the orchestra and voice-ranges for the
choir: all that adds up to the solid fact that by 1800, all of Europe shared a
common musical language, toolkit and genre system. Virtuoso performers
(that notion being in itself an early eighteenth-century development) and
composers became the most mobile and transnational of artists, travelling in
an undifferentiated musical space that spanned St Petersburg, Dublin, Lisbon
and Budapest. Occasional ‘local colour’ or exotic effects (tympani alla Turca,
horn signals to evoke hunting parties, a nod to a fashionable local dance
form in this or that capital) were merely incidental spices. It would seem
as if classical music was as nationally unspecific as mathematics or classicist
architecture.
It was within this common frame of reference and with this shared toolkit
that, in the course of the nineteenth century, ‘national’ schools would emerge.
In the course of the nineteenth century, almost every country in Europe and
almost every major composer, while still working within the aforementioned
common technique, would feel the need to bring a note of national specificity
into their music. ‘National music’ dominates the century from Carl Maria von
610 Joep Leerssen
Weber (Der Freischütz, 1821) to Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). As this last name
reminds us, the national paradigm in classical music outlasts the Romantic
school in which it arose: even post-Romantic, ‘modern’ composers such as
Leoš Janáček (†1928) and Béla Bartók (†1945) deliberately worked in a
nationally inflected vein, as did, across the Atlantic, Aaron Copland (†1990)
and Heitor Villa-Lobos (†1959).
The rise of national-classical music was pan-European. Like many other
forms of Romantic nationalism, it exhibits the paradoxical quality of ‘univer-
sal exceptionalism’: in many different cultural communities, composers
wanted to celebrate their nation’s unique individuality, its being different from
all others – and did so in ways and modes that were general all over Europe
(Thiesse 1999).
The opera and national historicism
The pan-European genre of opera had, to be sure, important national variants,

especially in the musical theatre, but the dominant canonical form emerged
from seventeenth-century court culture. The themes, accordingly, were usually
classical or biblical, and the style in a ‘high’, lofty mode, in accordance with
neo-Aristotelian precepts for tragedy. Nationally specific thematics are in
evidence even in the course of the eighteenth century: the zarzuela in Spain, the
Singspiel in the German lands that uses narrative themes taken from the
country’s own history or society, rather than from the Bible or classical antiq-
uity. Light opera in Italy from the 1770s onwards begins to reflect, increas-
ingly, an awareness of American events (Polzonetti 2011). A particularly
noteworthy, unusually early example of musical theatre thematising national
history is James Thompson and David Mallet’s Alfred, set to music by Thomas
Arne. It was performed in 1740 to commemorate the accession of George II,
thematises the good rule of the Saxon King Alfred the Great, and features the
song ‘Rule Britannia’. Its focus was dynastic rather than national; hence, it
would be anachronistic to call it a ‘nationalistic opera’; yet it uses themes and
featured songs that, in subsequent centuries, could easily acquire a national-
istic function. Similarly ‘proto-nationalistic’ (Dann 1992) pieces of musical
theatre are Charles Burney’s Robin Hood (1750), and the Polish vaudeville Cud
mniemany: czyli Krakowiacy i Górale (1794; ‘The would-be miracle, or the
Cracovians and Highlanders’), by composer Jan Stefani and librettist
Wojciech Bogusławski. With its thinly veiled celebrations of national inde-
pendence in the mode of Enlightenment Patriotism, it was closed down after
three popular performances by the Russian authorities. When it was revived in
1816, under the title Zabobon, czyli Krakowiacy i Górale (‘Superstition, or the
Cracovians and Highlanders’), the libretto (reworked by Jan Kamiński) was
cleansed of patriotic elements, but instead the music (by Karol Kurpiński) was
made more ‘national’ by using folk-derived musical patterns and forms, in a
covert, coded celebration of Polishness (Milewski 1999: 130).
Between the initial and the revived performances of Cud mniemany/

Zabobon, the Polonaise in particular had become a musical type asserting
Polish national ideals, largely because of the piano work of Michal Kleofas
Ogiński (1765–1833), famous for his participation in the Kosciuszko uprising
of 1794. His Pozegnanie Ojczyzny (‘Farewell to the Fatherland’) of 1794
became one of the most widely known programmatic polonaises of the day,
and was evoked by Adam Mickiewicz at the end of his epic poem Pan Tadeusz
(1834) (Nowak-Romanowicz, ‘Oginski’). To the national stature of the Polo-
naise was added that of the Mazurka. As Milewski (1999: 133–34) points out:
Polish musical stage works in the 1820s became increasingly saturated with folk music
elements. But it was the finale in Kurpinski’s and Damse’s fabulously successful 1823
ballet, Wesele w Ojcowie (‘A Wedding in Ojców’), that codified the musical elements of
a Polish folk mazurka to become the prototype for both contemporary and later Polish
composers, including Chopin.
What is more, the idea of using narratives set in the national past or the
country’s local colour was now becoming part of the opera composer’s the-
matic range. Kurpiński had started his career with a classically themed opera,
Pygmalion, but by the 1810s was writing operas with titles such as Jadwiga,
Queen of Poland (1814) and The Castle of Czorsztyn (1819). (Samson,
‘Haunted Manor’ and ‘Kurpinski’)
These pre-Chopin Polish examples show how the emerging genre of
‘national opera’ made conjoint use of nationally themed libretti and of nation-
ally inflected musical styles. Increasing use is made of medieval or chivalric
topics from the country’s history, complementing the time-honoured usage of
biblical and classical repertoire. While writers all over Europe followed the
example of Sir Walter Scott when they used novels to evoke their nation’s
historical roots (Pittock 2007), so too composers were beginning to thematise
their nation’s past operatically.
The key work in this regard is no doubt Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar
(1836) (generally, Frolova-Walker 2007, Helmers 2012). As Richard Taruskin
points out, the choice of topic was predictable
[. . .] at a time in Russian cultural history when ‘national’ in the context of high art
inevitably connoted ‘patriotic’, and ‘folk’ inevitably connoted ‘peasant’. Ivan Susanin
[the opera’s central character] was the quasi-legendary hero of popular resistance to
Polish infiltration [. . .] in the early 17th century. A volunteer militia [. . .] was challeng-
ing the Polish forces abroad in the land in the name of Mikhail Romanov [. . .].
Susanin, a local peasant, concealed from a Polish search party the whereabouts of the
young tsar, the founder of the last Russian dynasty, under torture and at the eventual
cost of his life. (Taruskin, ‘A Life for the Tsar’)
The opera’s ‘Russianness’ is a matter of debate among musicologists; it is

sometimes felt that the ‘national’ status is over-emphasised because of the
work’s pioneering historical position and subsequent reputation, whereas the
musical texture is still largely in the Italian tradition, and its musical
‘Russianness’ is signalled largely by incidental folk elements (peasant dance
612 Joep Leerssen
interludes). What such strictures overlook (and this may be a slanted vision
particular to musicologically trained and musicologically focused scholars) is
the national nature of, precisely, the libretto. It is set in a troubled period of the
country’s history, a narrative-dramatic stratagem also favoured by Walter
Scott and by almost every imitator of Scott. Indeed, the great Russian follower
of Scott, Pushkin, did the same, and drew on the same period, for his Boris
Godunov, written only a few years before Glinka’s Life for the Tsar (in 1831),
which in turn would spawn Mussorgsky’s opera of 1874. We may surmise that
the librettist Yegor Rozen was aware of Pushkin’s historical tragedy when he
was brought in to fine-tune the libretto for Glinka. Rozen himself, in his native
German called Gregor von Rosen (1800–1860; generally belittled by those
critics who follow the slighting comments in Glinka’s own memoirs) was a
Baltic nobleman in the employ of the Russian court, and a prolific writer of
historical tragedies.6
Following Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, operas on national-historical
themes begin to proliferate (Lajosi 2005; Rabb 2005); their libretti often
recycle historical material brought to public attention by Romantic-historicist
writers or historians (on this intermedial recycling of historicist topics, cf.
Leerssen 2004a). The Hungarian Ferenc Erkel is an early outstanding
example; his operas on the national-historical hero-figures of Maria Báthory
(1840), László Hunyadi (1844) and, above all, Bank Bán (1861) mark impor-
tant stages in public mobilisation and Hungarian music history alike (Lajosi
2008).
In the 1840s, national-historical or national-mythological operas come to
be written across Europe: Glinka himself premiered Ruslan and Ludmilla (after
an unfinished libretto by Pushkin, set in Kievan Rus’) in 1842. Early British
examples are George Alexander Macfarren’s King Charles II (1849) and Robin
Hood (1860); Frederik Pacius’s Kung Karls Jakt (1852, on a Swedish historical
theme but with influences from Finnish folk music) premiered in Helsinki
in 1852; Bedřich Smetana’s first opera, Branibori v Čechách (‘The
Brandenburgers in Bohemia’), was produced in Prague in 1866; Ivan Zajc’s
Nikola Šubić Zrinski premiered in Zagreb in 1876 (on the topic of which, cf.
Neubauer 2002).
All these examples hinge around an Italian-German axis. In Italy, there was
not only the figure of Rossini (on whose position in the Risorgimento, see
Grempler 1996), but above all the series of Italian-themed operas by Verdi: I
Lombardi alla prima crociata (1843; on a Walter Scott-inspired epic poem by
Tommaso Grossi); La bataglia di Legnano (1849) and Les Vêpres siciliennes
(1855, based on the historical work of Michele Amari). In Germany, the
various German-themed operas of Richard Wagner dominate the period from
the mid-1840s to the mid-1870s.7
By the 1870s, the national opera had ceased to be an innovation and had
become an institution. Smetana continued his Czech patriotic operatic work
with Dalibor (1868) and Libuše (1881). In the fervent nationalist climate of
Third-Republic France no less than six operas were composed on the theme of
Joan of Arc between 1871 and 1894.8 In Russia, following Dargomyzhsky’s

Pushkin-based Rusalka (1856), the work of the ‘mighty handful’ of Glinka
successors (Frolova-Walker 2007) included operas such as Rimsky-
Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov (1873) and A Bride for the Tsar (1899),
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1874), and Cesar Cui’s The Prisoner of the
Caucasus (premiered 1883) and The Captain’s Daughter (1911). The last three
of these, and even Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa (1884), are based on literary texts
by Pushkin.
By the early twentieth century, the historical-national opera genre has
passed its zenith. Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe (1891) is universally judged a failed
attempt to launch an already outmoded genre in Britain; and although
Rutland Broughton projected an Arthurian cycle to match Wagner’s
Nibelungen, this foundered when he fell out with his librettist Reginald
Ramsden Buckley after the (now forgotten) The Birth of Arthur (1913) and The
Round Table (1916). But although new work in this genre declined, the classics
from the period 1835–1870 continued to be performed and often galvanised
audiences into patriotic fervour.
Behind the national-historicist genre’s rise-and-decline curve between 1840
and 1900 there remains, then, a steadily ongoing reception history. In addition,
we should realise that operas did not need to have national-historical or
national-mythological libretti in order to be perceived as having a ‘national’,
and therefore potentially patriotic or nationalist, flavour. The very prototype
of the Romantic Opera, Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz (1821) was seen as
nationally German because it thematised a folk saga and used instruments
(horns) perceived as belonging to a particularly German local colour. In the
case of Weber, we should also take into account the importance of a musical
intertextuality: the composer’s fame by 1821 rested largely on his song-cycle
Leyer und Schwerdt (1815, based on the national-militaristic poems by the
iconic Theodor Körner, martyred hero of the anti-Napoleonic insurrection)
and his overtly chauvinistic cantata Kampf und Sieg (likewise 1815, but most
successful in its 1816 Berlin charity performance as a fundraiser for invalided
soldiers). Der Freischütz could not fail to be perceived as a nationally German
opera because it was by a composer who had marketed himself as a German
patriot first and foremost (Tusa 2006, with thanks to Kasper van Kooten).
‘National’ is, of course, an ambivalent word, referring either to an ethnos or
to a demos, to a transgenerationally inherited set of historical memories, or else
to a popular, non-elite ‘folk’ stratum in society and culture (Leerssen 2008; and
cf. Taruskin’s above-cited comments on Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar). Operas
(or indeed music in general) could be ‘national’ in either of those two mean-
ings: by thematising the nation’s past, or (as in the case of the early Polish
examples) by showcasing popular culture. Very often the two went hand in
hand. In Erkel’s operas, the use of the verbunkos rhythm evoked native Hun-
garian folk dance and could thus give a folksy overlay to a national-historicist
storyline; similarly, in Glinka’s operas, the national-historicist libretti are
musically complemented by nationally nativist musical motifs involving
614 Joep Leerssen
Russian folk music and dances. And even if an opera dispensed with a histori-
cal libretto altogether, it could still be ‘national’ by invoking folk culture: e.g.
Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, 1893, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchei the
Immortal (1902) and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden
Fevronia (1907), Janáček’s village tragedy Jenůfa (1904), Manuel de Falla’s
Andalusian ‘gitaneria’ El amor brujo (1915). Interestingly, the canonically
‘national’ opera composer of Poland, Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819–1872) used
no national(ist)-historicist storylines whatsoever; yet his operas, with their uses
of Polish dance forms, were deemed highly patriotic. As Jim Samson writes:
Moniuszko had great problems with the Russian censor in Warsaw, but even with their
more overtly patriotic elements removed his operas were bound to be a focus for the
nationalist sentiment of a people deprived of political status. The nationalist element
would often be heightened in production, moreover, by idealizing the world of an
earlier ‘grand Poland’ as a foil to contemporary discontents. In this context the national
dances – polonaise, mazurka and krakowiak – which underpin so much of Moniuszko’s
music carried powerfully symbolic values. (Samson, ‘Moniuszko’)
Operas could, in other words, have nationalism thrust upon them.

Moniuszko’s Freischütz-influenced The Haunted Manor (1865), even though
its libretto had been purged by the Russian censor, proved to enthuse the
audiences so much that the authorities banned it after three performances.
Additionally, operas could receive a generally patriotic slant, which was
only tangentially connected to their thematic nationality. Rossini’s Guillaume
Tell (1829; after Schiller’s play), Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836, on the
Massacre of St Bartholomew), Verdi’s Nabucco (1842, on the Babylonian
captivity of the people of Israel) were seen across Europe as lofty evocations of
the need for tolerance and liberty, and could be freely appropriated by
national movements as being ‘about us’. Especially the Va pensiero chorus in
Nabucco (‘Go forth, my thoughts, on golden wings’) was seen and sung every-
where as an evocation of the yearning for national liberation; it became an
international anthem of national movements across Europe.9
The best-known example of such cross-national transfers of nationalist
meaning is La muette de Portici (1828) by Daniel Auber on a libretto by the
(then hugely famous) playwright Eugène Scribe. Again, the storyline itself
(evoking civic disturbances in mid-seventeenth-century Naples) does not
overtly signal a nationalist intent. As Richard Taruskin (2005) points out, the
moral of the tale is, if anything, that revolt may lead to chaos and despair
rather than liberation; and as such the opera fits the reactionary climate of the
restored Bourbon monarchy. But the significance of a cultural product does
not wholly depend on its intention; the discontent of the Neapolitan popula-
tion is evoked with such empathy that audiences recognised their own political
grievances, and during the liberal revolution of 1830 the opera was revived
under the added hue of a national-liberationist significance. One of the opera-
tive elements was the show-stopping duet, in Act II, which celebrates insur-
rection by seeing it as a legitimate effect of love of the fatherland. Pious
commonplaces of Ciceronian vintage are combined into the typically nation-

alist compound of national liberty, civic loyalty and expulsion of foreigners.
Mieux vaut mourir que rester misérable! / Pour un esclave est-il quelque danger?
Tombe le joug qui nous accable / Et sous nos coups périsse l’étranger!
Amour sacré de la patrie, / Rends nous l’audace et la fierté;
À mon pays je dois la vie; / Il me devra sa liberté.10
And contemporary audiences cannot but have noticed that the ‘hinge’ phrase
‘Amour sacré de la patrie’ (which gave its title to the duet aria) is identical with
the opening line of the second stanza of the proscribed Marseillaise. . . .
Famously, the 1830 revival spilled over from Paris to Brussels, where La
muette de Portici was staged to celebrate the birthday of the unpopular Dutch
king Willem. The audience was inflamed to riots, which eventually sparked the
Belgian secession from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. Thus, a
French opera on an Italian theme was ideologically appropriated by Belgian
nationalism; a good example for the ‘viral’ power of culture to spread and
ramify beyond its context of origin.11
Orchestral music: national branding, programme music and Romantic forms
The Va pensiero chorus and the Amour sacré de la patrie aria, which led lives
of their own outside the context of their operatic libretto, show that other
musical forms besides opera could carry a nationalist charge.12 Operatic ‘out-
takes’ often became popular favourites in their own right; a very early case in
point is the aforementioned ‘Rule, Britannia’, originally part of Alfred (1740).
And alongside opera and the vocal genres, instrumental orchestral music
emerged as the carrier of nationalist sentiment. Even without textual or dra-
matic underpinning,13 music could convey a national-patriotic significance: by
the use of formal motifs reminiscent of popular culture (i.e. ‘national’ in the
demotic sense). Composers surveyed in the previous section use elements such
as dance forms (verbunkos, mazurka, fandango), with characteristic rhythmi-
cal or melodic patterns; ‘national’ instruments such as the pastoral-German
horn, the guitar, bagpipe-style drones; or liturgical chant forms, modal scales
and harmonies reminiscent of religious musical traditions (Russian Orthodox
in the case of Rimskij-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture, Op. 36,
1888; Anglican in the case of Vaughan Williams’s English Hymnal,1905, and
the many pieces inspired by it). The works of Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) and
Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), even when scored for piano or orchestra, often
invoke the harmonies and broken-chord arpeggios peculiar to guitar instru-
mentation and Spanish popular music.14
The widespread habit to ‘sample’ folk music styles in classical music was
rendered explicitly national by mentioning them by name. The titles of musical
pieces often emphatically mention the national provenance (Russian, English,
Iberia, España), almost as if the point (this piece thematises a ‘national’ style)
616 Joep Leerssen
might be missed otherwise. In addition, programme notes provided by the

composer or the producer for the theatre-going public drive the national point
home. National music plays into a trend towards what became known as
‘programmatic’ music: the attempt to make music, that most abstract and
non-figurative of art forms, expressive of a concrete signification. And very
often the scenes that programme music set out to represent tonally were,
precisely, national ones. Smetana’s orchestral suite Má vlast (1874–1879; ‘My
country’) includes the famous tracking of the Vltava river, which Smetana
himself described as follows:
The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small springs,
the Cold and Warm Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the
course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a far-
mer’s wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night’s moonshine:
on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into
the St John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and
then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe.15
While the use of ‘folk’ stylistic elements may vary from case to case (Hungar-
ian and Spanish composers like Liszt and De Falla have a richer and more
characteristically salient store to draw on than Finnish or Danish composers
like Jean Sibelius or Carl Nielsen16), the use of programmatic ‘branding’ is a
constant for all who wish to celebrate their nation musically. Many sympho-
nies use national self-characterisations in their titles: Tchaikovsky’s Little
Russian (i.e. Ukrainian-themed) Symphony (1872), Vincent d’Indy’s
Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886), Bernhard Zweers’s Sym-
phony Aan mijn Vaderland (‘To my Fatherland’, 1890) and Gustav Holst’s
Cotswolds Symphony (1900).
There is a third trend, besides the use of folk-stylistic elements and nation-
alising paratext, which nationalises classical music of the Romantic period: the
development of new genres. Beyond the classical-Italianate form repertoire
that had become established by the late eighteenth century (including the
symphonies and operas surveyed above), we see the emergence of new genres.
Breaking away from the syntactically and formally codified classical forms like
that of the symphony, composers wished to create a flow of themes, melodies
and evocations. The only classical templates that were suitable for this type of
composition were the suite (we have seen examples from Albéniz and
Smetana) and the overture, the latter originally intended as a curtain-raiser for
operas announcing a variety of musical themes, and later becoming an inde-
pendent orchestral form in its own right, involving a free, informal succession
of melodic themes. Examples include Alexander Campbell Mackenzie’s
Britannia overture (1894); Balakirev’s two Overtures on Russian Themes (1858
and 1864); Tchaikovsky’s Overture 1812 (188017).
Among these, and specifically used for ‘nationally’ themed music, none is as
all-pervasive as the Rhapsody, used both for chamber music and for large
orchestral works. Dozens of nationally themed rhapsodies are listed in Walter
Salmen’s (1966: 72–124) history of the genre, which highlights the formative
influence of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. In addition to the dozens of
‘national’ rhapsodies from the second half of the nineteenth century, listed by
Salmen, one can highlight the genre’s popularity with the composers of the
‘English Musical Renaissance’ school, as evinced by Edward German’s Welsh
Rhapsody (1904); Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody (1906), Gustav
Holst’s Somerset Rhapsody (1906–1907) and Fredrick Delius’s Brigg Fair: An
English Rhapsody (1907). Many of these rely on folk themes as collected by Cecil
Sharp (cf. Young 2010), again illustrating the close conjunction between the
rising interest in ethnomusicology (cf. Campbell and Perraudin 2011) and the
flourish of ‘national’ music by classical composers.
From folk to public: popular music, chamber music, concert halls
Collecting popular music as performed in traditionally communitarian set-

tings became an important folkloristic pursuit in the course of the nineteenth
century. After the development of sound recording equipment, folk music
became a standing inspiration for composers from Percy Grainger to Béla
Bartók. The use of ‘folk’ motifs by classical composers relies, fundamentally,
on their availability beyond their rustic origin. This process, like so many
others, can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when music publishers
began marketing music intended for middle-class drawing rooms (involving
voice and keyboard, occasionally also string and wind instruments) based on
folk dances and folk airs. This is noticeable in particular in former metropoli-
tan centres now subordinated to greater empires: Dublin, Edinburgh, Warsaw,
Budapest and, to a lesser extent, cities like Zagreb, Dubrovnik and Riga. Here,
the legacy of Enlightenment Patriotism coincided with the presence of an
affluent elite mindful of their country’s past glories and sympathetic to its local
colour. Irish and Scottish gentry patronised the revival of harping and piping
in the 1770s and 1780s, and musical collections of native airs and dances
appear in increasing frequency towards the end of the eighteenth century in
Dublin and Edinburgh. The airs collected by Edward Bunting and published
in 1796 and 1809 were used by the poet Tom Moore for his hugely successful
Irish Melodies; these often feature patriotic or sentimental effusions of love of
the fatherland and regret for the passing of its former greatness. In turn, the
success of such native melodies supports the concerted collection drive, with
the great cultural historian George Petrie founding the ‘Society for the Pres-
ervation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland’ in 1851 and publishing his
‘Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland’ in 1855 (Ryan 1991, 1995). That
collection in turn was later expanded by Charles Villiers Stanford, in his
1902–1905 edition; and Stanford was, of course, the composition teacher of
many composers of the ‘English musical renaissance’ school.18 That generation
of composers relied on the folk music collections, which were given an impor-
tant boost by Cecil Sharp in the years 1899–1910; Sharp was also one of the
main forces behind the revival of Morris dancing.
618 Joep Leerssen
Thus, a conduit was established, not only from popular music and dance to
the opera stage and the concert stage but also to the conviviality of private and
semi-private assemblies. The third side in that triangle (concert music, folk
music, chamber music) consisted of the widespread use, in the private sphere
or in the ambience of sociability, of piano, voice or chamber music adaptations
of operatic and orchestral pieces.
Fundamental in this respect was the great flourish of the German Lied. It
was heralded by the rediscovery and revalorisation of the simple, ‘artless’ folk
poem or folk ballad by the poets of early Romanticism. The Lieder, ballads or
songs thus recorded or freshly created were then becoming increasingly
popular texts for composers to set to music. And it was not just the lyrical,
sentimental register that was exploited by this new poetic and musical form but
also the moral-political register of patriotism and ‘love of the fatherland’. The
celebrations of Irishness by Tom Moore are anything but an exception; in the
decades following 1900, the genre flourished in the hands of Arthur C. Benson
(whose ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was set to music by Edward Elgar in 1902)
and Cecil Spring-Rice (his ‘I vow to thee, my country’, 1918, was set to the
hymn tune ‘Thaxted’ by Gustav Holst in 1921); in 1916, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’
had been turned into a national anthem by Hubert Parry’s music and Elgar’s
orchestral scoring.
And so it was in almost all other European countries. France had its
Béranger (Touchard 1968); in Germany, the nationalist verse of Körner,
Arndt and Massman found great social spread and penetration in sung per-
formance (as opposed to a dissemination on the printed page, as mere reading
texts). And in Denmark, the many patriotic poems by Nikolaj Grundtvig,
spread through his ‘folk high school movement’, were codified into a song-
book canon (with melodies by Nielsen and others), which became the stock-
in-trade for the collective singing, private, convivial or public, of every
educated Dane (cf. Kuhn 1990).
Work remains to be done on the spread of collective singing (from
Nabucco’s Va Pensiero to Thomas Davis’s A Nation Once Again, from Arndt’s
Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland to Kölcsey’s Hymnus [as set to music by
Ferenc Erkel]). Student associations, especially in Germany, Flanders and the
Scandinavian world, are an important ambience for this song propagation; the
enormous European spread of choral movements and choral societies is
another, which, spreading from the German Liedertafel and the Parisian
Orphéon, become highly important forces of cultural mobilisation in many
areas of Europe: Wales, Catalonia, and especially Latvia and Estonia. In turn,
many composers, like Mendelssohn and Weber, conducted or composed espe-
cially for such choral societies and festivals; and one of the favourite emotional
registers in which these effusions moved was the pious assertion of love of the
fatherland. From the days of the German anti-Napoleonic wars of 1813–1814,
when choral repertoire was being written to cater for nationalist taste
(Methfessel’s Kriegslieder, Himmel’s Kriegslieder der Deutschen and Heinrich
Anton Hoffmann’s Lobgesang auf die Retter Deutschlands) until today, from
the eisteddfod to the Last Night of the Proms and the Baltic massed-choir
festivals (such as the Estonian Laulupidu), such mass-participation events have
a very important nationalist function.19 They add the notion of an embodied
community (Rigney 2011) to its ‘imagined’ counterpart, the mediatised
abstraction analysed by Benedict Anderson. The nineteenth century is not
only the century of the nation-building print media, but also of the mass
demonstrations, and many of these had a musical-performative component.
The impact of music reaches, then, from rustic tradition into bourgeois
culture, and from the intimate domestic setting of the private sphere, by way
of conviviality and sociability, to the public sphere at large. Both the opera
house and the choral festival could become flashpoints of collectively mani-
fested national enthusiasm. The musical theatre was as much an attractor and
generator of emerging public opinion as was the theatre itself (Ther 2006).
Beyond this social position (as what Friedrich Schiller would have called a
‘moralische Anstalt’, cf. Leerssen 2008), the performativity of the musical
genre packed a charge of its own. As Lajosi (2008) argues, the galvanising
function of opera and opera’s public performances was to turn individual
listeners into a collective audience, a ‘public’ also in the Habermassian sense of
the word; hence the specific role also of choruses and of choral singing, which
does the same thing to the performers (many voices blending into one) as the
performance does to the audience. The public impact of certain national
operas (Erkel’s in Hungary, Verdi’s in Italy, Auber’s in Belgium) gains signifi-
cance in this light.
Conclusion: some perspectives
This wide-ranging survey has inflicted a great mass of names, titles and dates
on the reader; my intention was to register and emphasise these many instances
in order to lift an entire musical culture from the status of a mere generic
ambience to that of a recognisable historical phenomenon. Much as in the
famous case of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995), the musical manifestations of
nationalism in the nineteenth century are so all-pervasive and have so much
percolated into the fabric of different cultural pursuits, fields and genres, each
in different social settings, that they become mere background noise, the
general atmosphere of public and cultural life: a context for other things,
rather than a thing in itself. This is a challenge for the historical study of
cultural nationalism generally: the need to retrieve ‘culture’ from its banal and
unnoticeable, static omnipresence and to operationalise it as a dynamic phe-
nomenon with dates, actors and agency, causes and impact.
Having digested various manifestations of musical nationalism in the fore-
going pages, I must first and foremost warn against overbalancing into the
diametrically opposite error. Musical life in the nineteenth century was not
wholly and totally dominated by national or nationalist forms, themes, pre-
occupations and ideals. Much (possibly even the great bulk) of musical
620 Joep Leerssen
production followed classical lines from Beethoven to Bruckner and from

Berlioz to Debussy. The use of national flavourings was a spice rather than a
main basic ingredient. It could dominate the effect without actually providing
the substantial bulk of nineteenth-century musical fare.
Also, it should be pointed out that ‘national flavourings’ are by no means
always nationalistic in intent or effect. The use of local colour is not always a
celebration of the native culture. Significantly, many composers compose in
‘national’ idioms to which they do not themselves belong – a penchant for
Spanish-style music is not the monopoly of Spanish natives such as Albéniz or
De Falla, but also open to Rimskij-Korsakov (Capriccio espagnol, 1887) and
Ravel (Rapsodie espagnole, 1908; Boléro, 192820). In many cases, we see an
accumulation of set pieces from different nationalities, giving a type of tableau
of ethnic flavours: a ball sequence of Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, Italian and
Polish dances features in Tchaikovsky/Petipa’s ballet Swan Lake (1877), and
the Viennese waltzes in Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (1874) are spiced up by a
Hungarian Csárdás and a Bohemian Polka.21 And finally, the use of (mainly
orientalist) exoticism is truly a staple in the ethnic smorgasbord of nineteenth-
century music: as ‘national’ a piece as Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (1876)
features an oriental episode, with the sultry-sensuous ‘Anitra’s Dance’ inter-
lude. Yet again, we should realise that even such orientalism could function as
a focus of national identification in the case of Russian composers, for whom
the Caucasus, the shores of the Black Sea and the Islamic cultures of Central
Asia were as much part of their imperial frame of reference as the Far West
was for Americans. Orientalism in the music of Balakirev (e.g. the Symphonic
poem Tamara, 1867–1882, based on Caucasus-set poems by Lermontov) is
often an extension of Russianness rather than a contrast to it. Similarly,
Balakirev’s symphonic poem Overture on Czech Themes ‘In Bohemia’ draws on
the very opposite of exoticism: it celebrates pan-Slavic brotherhood, as did
Rimskij-Korsakov’s Fantasia on Serbian Themes (which it premiered as a
double bill in 1867) or Dvořák’s Slavic Dances (1878, orchestrated 1886). In
culture, nationality is an elastic medium of identification rather than a fixed
category of identity, and the national self-image exists in constant, complex
exchange with its exoticist ‘Significant Others’ (Beller and Leerssen 2007).
Even with these provisos in mind, and precisely because of them, the study
of music as a vehicle for nationalism remains, I submit, a valuable perspective
in nationalism studies. It is obvious that the rise of nationally inflected,
‘Romantic’ musical styles and genres runs concurrently with, and in many
respects anticipates, the rise of national movements in Europe, in tight cross-
media conjunction with other forms of ‘Romantic Nationalism’ (Leerssen
2013). If, as I have proposed elsewhere, nationalism in nineteenth-century
Europe emerges first and foremost transnationally as a ‘cultivation of culture’
(Leerssen 2006), then music is an important, albeit unusually complex element
in that process. And although many highly informative studies are available to
guide our steps in this field, there is still much work to be done. Musicologists
and music historians have until now looked at the impact of nationalism on
music rather than vice versa. Notwithstanding important and inspiring excep-
tions, they have focused mainly on the fabric of the individual compositions or
the style of given composers rather than on the place and impact of musical
activities in the development of national movements; evenemential chronology
is often neglected in favour of in-depth musical analysis, and discursive sources
(letters and writings of composers and music critics) are often studied merely
to provide ancillary background information to the study of the compositions.
An ‘intellectual history of music’, and a study of what Celia Applegate has
felicitously termed ‘musical intellectuals’ (including the public stature of com-
posers) is an important and as yet largely unfulfilled desideratum for the
history of romantic and cultural nationalism. The links between music and
literature, between music and theatre, and between music and folklore studies,
are, as I hope to have indicated, obvious, and present an exciting challenge for
interdisciplinary cooperation between cultural historians, who are rarely
equally conversant with such different fields. At the same time, the uniquely
cosmopolitan appeal and currency of classical music, and the uniquely trans-
national mobility of composers and performers, should make it possible to
approach this corpus from a comparative perspective and study it as a multi-
national practice. In this way, it would be possible to construct a model of the
transnational diffusion of nationalism in Europe.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the support of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, University

of Göttingen, and the collegial input of its Fellows in the year 2011–2012.
Notes
1 For instance, Applegate 1998, the collection Applegate and Potter 2002, Beckerman 1998,
Brincker 2008, Chryssomallis 2006, Frangou-Psychopedis 1990, Frolova-Walker 2007, Ryan 1991
and 1995.
2 For instance, Bohlman 2004, Curtis 2008, Dahlhaus 1974, the collection White and Murphy
2001, Samson 2002, Taruskin 2005.
3 In the 1830s, Lönnrot and La Villemarqué compiled Finnish and Breton fragments, orally
collected and reworked, into collections intended to function as their nations’ foundational epics:
Kalevala and Barzaz breiz. Prešeren and Shevchenko used national themes and inspiration to
create, as fresh literary productions, ambitious lyrical texts intended to serve a similarly purpose.
Liszt’s enterprise is more puzzling. As a Romantic artist-bohémien, he empathises with an ethnicity
which in his 1859 treatise he characterises (and indeed stereotypes) as wayward, reckless, passion-
ate, prone to errantry and heedless of social conventions. This idealised Romany ethnotype is
reconciled with a Magyar-Hungarian national identification by arguing that Hungarians and
gypsies had uniquely entered into a cultural symbiosis. Thus Liszt manages to have it both ways,
and to have his Hungarian Rhapsodies count as a national oeuvre in the service both of Roma and
of Magyar culture.
4 In the decades between Macpherson’s Ossian (1760s) and F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena
ad Homerum (1795), the rhapsode had come to denote a bardic, impromptu reciter whose
622 Joep Leerssen
semi-improvised fragments are the raw materials of a national epic in statu nascendi (cf. also
Moulton 2005). Accordingly, the Rhapsody arises and flourishes as the favourite genre for
classical composers to give free rein to a taste for non-classical ‘ethnic’ music.
5 The survey draws, throughout the following pages, on the expertise and information assem-
bled in the standard work of reference, the 29-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians (ed. Stanley Sadie and James Tyrrell, 2001) now online, alongside the 4-volume New
Grove Dictionary of Opera (ed. Stanley Sadie, 1992) at www.oxfordmusic.com. A list of entries
consulted is given in the Appendix below; only entries used for specific information or quotation
have been source-referenced separately in the text (by author name and entry title).
6 Wilpert (2005: 187) mentions some 20 historical dramas on the Russian past in all; among them
are ‘The birth of Ivan the Terrible’ («Po#dcnic Ioanna Groznogo», 1830), ‘Russia and Báthori’
(«Possi: i Batorij», 1833, also known as ‘The Siege of Pskov’, «Osada Pskova») and ‘Pyotr
Basmanov’ («Pёtr Basmanov», 1835, again thematising a personality from the troubled period of
Boris Godunov).
7 Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850) culminating in the Ring des Nibelungen cycle. The
Ring premiered in its various parts in the years 1869–1876, but had been in preparation for
decades, on libretti substantially finished between 1848 and 1853 (and themselves based on the
various philological and dramatic renditions of the Nibelungen saga, which proliferated in
Romantic Germany between 1807 and 1845); Ehrismann 1975.
8 By Mermet, Alfred Bruneau, Théodore Dubois, Benjamin Godard, Charles Lenepveu and
Charles-Marie Widor. Cf. Fauser 2001, 94 n. 37; and Krumeich 1989.
9 Nabucco was staged in the Opera di Roma in 2011 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italian
unification. The audience reaction to the Va pensiero chorus was such that the director, Riccardo
Muti, gave it an encore and invited the public to sing along. The remarkable episode is on
YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vQ_uQsITko (last visited 11 April 2012). Also:
Bone 2011.
10 ‘Better to die than to remain in misery; what can a slave fear to lose? Let the yoke which bows
us down be thrown off, and let the foreigner perish under our blows! Sacred love of the fatherland,
give us courage and pride. To my country I owe my life; it shall owe its liberty to me.’
11 To give an example of one thematic tendril in this cultural self-procreation: The theme of
popular revolt against foreign tyrants was picked up again by Scribe, the librettist of La muette de
Portici, in a play on the Duke of Alva (Le Duc d’Albe), partly inspired by Alva’s judicial murder
of the Count of Egmont in 1573, at the beginning of the Dutch Revolt – already thematised in
Goethe’s Egmont (1788), for which Beethoven had provided incidental music (1810). Scribe spliced
this theme with another episode of popular revolt, which had occurred in thirteenth-century Sicily,
and which had been thematised in Casimir Delavigne’s play Les Vêpres siciliennes (1819). The
resulting historical hotchpotch was offered by Scribe and Duveyrier as a libretto to Donizetti, who
left an opera Il Duca d’Alba, begun in 1839, unfinished. In 1855, it was then recycled by Scribe and
Duveyrier for what became Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes.
12 The cantata is such an obvious parallel to opera (although not theatrical in nature, it, too,
combines music with words, i.e. with verbal rhetoric), that I merely mention it in passing; e.g. the
musical adumbrations of Jules Barbier’s play Jeanne d’Arc (which won the Prix de Rome, had
incidental music written for it by Gounod, and spawned a cantata by Gaston Serpette in 1871; cf.
Fauser 2001), or Hamish McCunn’s Walter Scott-derived cantata The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1888), which flaunted its Scottishness stylistically in the form of bagpipe-style drone harmonies.
13 I mention only in passing the genre [a] of incidental music to theatre plays, like Edvard Grieg’s
Peer Gynt Suite (written for Ibsen’s play) or the ballet, which, although it has no spoken text, does
have a narrative structure, and which, alongside a generic penchant for exoticist settings, often
also thematises a ‘national’ local colour, e.g. Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps: Tableaux de la
Russie païenne (1913) or De Falla’s El sombrero de tres picos (1919), both produced by Diaghilev.
14 E.g. Albéniz’s symphonic poem Catalonia (1899) and piano suite Iberia (1905–09), or De
Falla’s Noches en los jardines de España (1909–15). Both composers were active in the homegrown
Spanish tradition of musical comedy, the zarzuela, on which cf. also Asensi Silvestre 2008.
15 Smetana’s programme notes to Má Vlast, in the original Czech, are in Holzknecht 1979.
16 E.g. Sibelius’s Karelia Suite and Lemminkäinen Suite (1893); Finlandia (1899); Nielsen’s Saga-
drøm (1908); En Fantasirejse til Færoerne (1927). On Nielsen and Sibelius, cf., respectively,
Brincker 2008 and Goss 2009.
17 Famous for its ‘programmatic’ use of the French and Russian national anthems, the Overture
1812 follows closely, both in theme and in its programmatic treatment, Weber’s Kampf und Sieg
cantata of 1815, which samples the Austrian Grenadiermarsch, the French Ça ira and the British
God Save the King.
18 Stanford’s position is not unlike that of D’Indy in France, the father-figure to the French
anti-Wagnerian generation. Both had institutionally important positions and were influential
teachers of composition; both had ethnomusicological interests. D’Indy published his Chansons
populaires recueillies dans la Vivarais et le Vercors in 1892, much as Stanford re-edited and
enlarged the Petrie collection.
19 Germany: Brinkman 1970 (also on 1813/14 repertoire; with thanks to Kasper van Kooten),
Klenke 1998, Lönnecker 2003; Wales: Williams 2003; Catalonia: Carbonell Guberna 2000,
Narváez Ferri 2005; Basque Country: Nagore 2001; Serbia: Milojković-Djurić 1985; Estonia: Tall
1985. French Orphéons: Gumplowicz 1987.
20 To add to the complexities: Boléro was written as a ballet showpiece for Ida Rubinstein,
formerly of the ballets russes; but Ravel claimed ‘native’ inspiration from the Spanish tunes sang
to him in childhood by his Basque mother. . . . While the libretto of his opera L’heure espagnole
(1911) is by a Frenchman, and in the same vein of Franco-Spanish exoticism as Meilhac/Halévy’s
libretto for Bizet’s Carmen (1875), based on Mérimée’s 1845 novella.
21 It is an open question what ideological need was served by these multinationally flavoured
confections. In some cases one may suspect mere polymorphous exoticism; in others, a celebration
of the Empire’s multi-ethnicity. Be that as it may, the question itself only emerges as a result of,
and gains its relevance in the context of, this inventorisation of national particularisms.
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626 Joep Leerssen
Appendix
Articles consulted in Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com (cf.

note 5)
‘Albéniz, Isaac (Manuel Francisco)’ – Frances Barulich

‘Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit’ – Herbert Schneider
‘Balakirev, Mily Alekseyevich’ – Stuart Campbell
‘Battaglia di Legnano, La’ – Roger Parker
‘Boris Godunov’ – Richard Taruskin
‘Borodin, Aleksandr Porfiryevich’ – Robert W. Oldani
‘Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek [Frédéric François]’ – Kornel Michałowski and
Jim Samson
‘Erkel 1: Ference Erkel’ – Dezsö Legány
‘Falla, Manuel de’ – Carol A. Hess
‘Freischütz, Der’ – Clive Brown
‘Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich’ – Stuart Campbell
‘Haunted Manor, The [Straszny dwór]’ – Jim Samson
‘Indy, (Paul Marie Théodore) Vincent d’ – Andrew Thomson and Robert
Orledge
‘Kurpiński, Karol Kazimierz’ – Jim Samson
‘Libuše’ – John Tyrrell
‘Life for the Tsar, A [Zhizn’ za tsarya; Ivan Susanin]’ – Richard Taruskin
‘Liszt, Franz (Ferenc)’ – Alan Walker
‘Lombardi alla prima crociata, I’ – Roger Parker
‘Moniuszko, Stanisław’ – Jim Samson
‘Muette de Portici, La’ – Herbert Schneider
‘Musorgsky [Mussorgsky; Moussorgsky], Modest Petrovich’ – Robert W.
Oldani
‘Nabucco [Nabucodonosor]’ – Roger Parker
‘Nielsen, Carl (August)’ – David Fanning
‘Ogiński: (1) Michał Kazimierz Ogiński’ – Alina Nowak-Romanowicz
‘Prince Igor [Knyaz’ Igor’]’ – Richard Taruskin
‘Programme music’ – Roger Scruton
‘Ravel, (Joseph) Maurice’ – Barbara L. Kelly
‘Rhapsody’ – John Rink
‘Rimsky-Korsakov: (1) Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov’ – Mark
Humphreys
‘Ring des Nibelungen, Der’ – Barry Millington
‘Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio)’ – Philip Gosset
‘Sharp, Cecil (James)’ – Frank Howes
‘Sibelius, Jean [Johan] (Christian Julius)’ – James Hepokoski and Fabian
Dahlström
‘Smetana, Bedr(ich [Friedrich]’ – Marta Ottlová
‘Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers’ – Jeremy Dibble
‘Sullivan, Sir Arthur (Seymour)’ – Arthur Jacobs

‘Vêpres siciliennes, Les [I vespri siciliani (‘The Sicilian Vespers’)]’ – Roger
Parker
‘Verdi, Giuseppe (Fortunino Francesco)’ – Roger Parker
‘Virtuoso’ – Owen Jander
‘Wagner (1) (Wilhelm) Richard Wagner’ – Barry Millington
‘Weber (9) Carl Maria (Friedrich Ernst) von Weber’ – Philipp Spitta
‘Zarzuela’ – Louise K. Stein and Roger Alier

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NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

Romanticism, music, nationalism

KEYWORDS: cultural nationalism, cultural transfer, opera, rhapsody, Romantic

Introduction: Liszt, for example

Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies are a standard evergreen on the repertoire

Run-up: classical music as a transnational-European art system

By 1800, classical music5 (musique classique, klassische Musik) had developed

The opera and national historicism

The pan-European genre of opera had, to be sure, important national variants,

Between the initial and the revived performances of Cud mniemany/

The opera’s ‘Russianness’ is a matter of debate among musicologists; it is

Joan of Arc between 1871 and 1894.8 In Russia, following Dargomyzhsky’s

Operas could, in other words, have nationalism thrust upon them.

commonplaces of Ciceronian vintage are combined into the typically nation-

Orchestral music: national branding, programme music and Romantic forms

might be missed otherwise. In addition, programme notes provided by the

From folk to public: popular music, chamber music, concert halls

Collecting popular music as performed in traditionally communitarian set-

Conclusion: some perspectives

production followed classical lines from Beethoven to Bruckner and from

The author acknowledges the support of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, University

Articles consulted in Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com (cf.

‘Albéniz, Isaac (Manuel Francisco)’ – Frances Barulich

‘Sullivan, Sir Arthur (Seymour)’ – Arthur Jacobs

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