Journal of Musicological Research

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Musical Biography in the Musicological Arena

Christopher Wiley & Paul Watt

To cite this article: Christopher Wiley & Paul Watt (2019) Musical Biography in the Musicological
Arena, Journal of Musicological Research, 38:3-4, 187-192, DOI: 10.1080/01411896.2019.1644140

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2019.1644140

Published online: 24 Oct 2019.

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JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH
2019, VOL. 38, NOS. 3–4, 187–192
https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2019.1644140

Musical Biography in the Musicological Arena

In one of the best accounts to have emerged recently of the history of biography,
Hermione Lee’s Biography: A Very Short Introduction, the opening chapter sets out
ten rules for writing in this sometimes controversial genre.1 Among these principles
are the requirements for truth, comprehensiveness, accuracy of citation, and objec-
tivity. Lee’s seventh rule is “Biography is a form of history.” Astutely observing that
“There is no such thing as a life lived in isolation,” she supports her view by
quoting Virginia Woolf’s claim that in biography, the subject is the fish and its
milieu is the stream. Lee suggested that the duty of the biographer should be “to
the stream as well as to the fish.”2
Musical biography has historically held something of a problematized or, to
borrow Philip Olleson’s words, an “untidy” place within music history, because it
“steps outside the specialist arena and addresses a wider public.”3 Indeed, musical
biography has long stood outside the musicological arena. As early as 1857,
H. Byerley Thomson’s The Choice of a Profession proposed a tripartite paradigm
of the music profession with the composer at the top of the hierarchal tree, and the
music critic at the bottom—but with no mention of the biographer.4 Musical
biography was to fare only slightly better in later writings. Adler’s celebrated
taxonomy of the fledging discipline of 1885 relegated biography’s status to that of
a supplementary pursuit, mentioned second-last to statistics.5 More recently, John
A. Kimmey’s 1998 classification of different branches of musicology sets forth
twelve categories gleaned from various sources of which biography was located
within the last, listed ahead only of “psychology and psychiatry” and “Etc.”6

1
Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2
Lee, Biography, 13–14. Lee quotes here from Woolf’s unfinished memoir “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being:
Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (London: Hogarth, 1985), 64–159.
3
Philip Olleson, “Musicology and Biography,” in Musicology and Sister Disciplines: Past, Present, Future, edited
by David Greer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 483–85, at 483. For a similar critique of the
problematic place of biography in historical studies and historiography, see David Nasaw, “Introduction,”
American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 573–78; and Lois W. Banner, “Biography as History,” American
Historical Review 114, no. 3 (2009): 579–86. See further, Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). By contrast, according to Richard Bradford, literary biography “has a long
and fairly respectable history.” See Richard Bradford, “Literary Biography: The Elephant in the Academic
Sitting Room,” in Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature, edited by Richard
Bradford (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 121–36, at 121. The fortunes of literary biography
are indeed evident and are borne out historically in classic studies of the genre, including Harold Nicolson,
The Development of English Biography, 3rd ed. (London: Hogarth, 1947); John A. Garraty, The Nature of
Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957); Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1560–1960, edited by
James L. Clifford (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of
Literary Biography in England and America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1965); Paul Murray Kendall, The
Art of Biography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965); and Robert Gittings, The Nature of Biography
(London: Heinemann, 1978).
4
H. Byerley Thomson, The Choice of a Profession: A Concise Account and Comparative Review of the English
Professions (London: Chapman and Hall, 1857).
5
Guido Adler, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft,” Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885): 5–20.
6
John A. Kimmey, A Critique of Musicology: Clarifying the Scope, Limits, and Purposes of Musicology (Lampeter, UK:
Mellen, 1988), 285–89.
© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
188 C. WILEY AND P. WATT

The positioning of musical biography so close to statistics (in Adler’s scheme) and
psychology (in Kimmey’s) is incongruous. Historically, the genre has often been viewed
with some suspicion for its preoccupation with what Margaret Bent has labelled “the
caricature of the obsessive fact-grabbing positivist.”7 Positivism has become a pejorative
term in musicology, in large part due to Kerman’s watershed volume Contemplating
Music, in which positivist scholarship was famously presented as outmoded.8 Bent,
however, has issued a timely reminder that although the writings of positivist scholars
such as Manfred Bukofzer and Edward Lowinsky have been superseded, “their work
nonetheless remains valuable and influential.”9 In relation to the connections between
musical biography and psychology, we see all too clearly the resistance to this relation-
ship played out in the reception of the field.10 Arguably, it took the publication of
Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven biography in the late 1970s to establish the respectability
of psychobiography in musicology.11
Many writers, including Philip Olleson, have argued that biography has enjoyed
more esteem in literary studies because of its appeal to the so-called “popular”
market.12 However, some of the milestone musicological texts have been musical
biographies: Ernest Newman’s The Life of Wagner (4 vols., 1933–46) and Jacques
Barzun’s Berlioz and the Romantic Century (2 vols., 1950), for example, continue to
be praised for their comprehensiveness, wide intellectual reach, and their scholarly
impact on subsequent generations of scholars.13 Yet these books also have wide public
appeal; they were released by trade publishers, and designed and priced for purchase
not just by university libraries and academics, but also by the general reading public, as
correspondence between both writers and their publishers bears witness.14 It is there-
fore necessary to study biographies not only as markers of popular taste or fashion, but
also as scholarship.

Current scholarship
Two publications stand out within recent studies in musical biography in Anglo-American
musicology: Hans Lenneberg’s Witnesses and Scholars: Studies in Musical Biography (1988)

7
Margaret Bent, “Response,” in Musicology and Sister Disciplines, ed. Greer, 191–94, at 192.
8
Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), published
in the UK as Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985), esp. 31–59. More recent scholarship has challenged the perception that
positivist discourses are restricted and narrow; see especially, Catherine LeGouis, Positivism and Imagination: Scientism and
its Limits in Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer, and Dmitrii Pisarev (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997); and Paul
Watt, The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2018).
9
Bent, “Response,” 192.
10
See, for example, Paul Watt, Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2017), esp. chapter 9
on Liszt biography; Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974); and David E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of
Psychohistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
11
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (New York: Schirmer, 1977). For a critical examination of Solomon’s work and the
influence of psychoanalytic thought, see Marie-Elisabeth Tellenbach, “Psychoanalysis and the Historiocritical
Method: On Maynard Solomon’s Image of Beethoven,” Beethoven Newsletter 8–9 (1993–4): 84–92; 119–27.
12
Olleson, “Musicology and Biography,” 483.
13
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1933–46). For a detailed study of this work, see Watt,
Ernest Newman; Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950). On Barzun’s Berlioz,
see Michael Murray, Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind (Savannah, GA: Beil, 2011), 144–57.
14
Watt, Ernest Newman. Correspondence between Barzun and his publishers is held in the Jacques Barzun papers,
Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Box 272.
 MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN THE MUSICOLOGICAL ARENA 189

and Jolanta T. Pekacz’s edited volume, Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms (2006).15
These books represent substantial contributions to the scholarly literature, not least because
they deal in depth with the historical and more contemporary conditions that have shaped
studies of the genre. As points of reference to the longitudinal history of musical biographies,
they are invaluable. Inevitably their coverage is limited by their scope: for example, in
predominantly focusing on canonical composers and texts. In terms of its engagement
with the history of musicology, Lenneberg’s emphasis unavoidably falls on Germany; as
a volume whose title promises the exploration of “new paradigms,” Peckaz’s edited collection
seems to look to historical case studies more than it seeks to activate future directions for the
genre.16 But these are merely symptoms of carving out new areas of research in such a rich
and untapped area, given the need to keep enquiries both confined (in the case of Lenneberg)
and ambitious (in the case of Pekacz) if the boundaries of studies of musical biography are to
be challenged.
At the outset of Lenneberg’s book, the author notes that “At this time [1988] there is
no history of musical biography and none of the standard musical encyclopedias has an
entry under that subject.”17 At least some progress has since been made in this respect:
an entry on “Biography” by Maynard Solomon was included in the second edition of The
New Grove Dictionary in 2001.18 It provides a brief chronological history of the genre
and includes a modest bibliography. Although a welcome addition indicative of an
improvement in the status of the genre within musicological research, there is still
much more work to be undertaken in the area, especially in relation to the complexity
—and also the nuances—of the methods utilized in musical biography.

Musical biography: Myth, ideology, and narrative

This special issue focuses on those various factors—social, political, cultural, and
economic—that shape musical biography. In this endeavor, each of the contributors
has interrogated one or more of three themes: myth, ideology, and narrative. The
articles that follow examine the ideologies of biographers and how they fashioned their
subjects, and the means by which they undertook this task. They investigate how myths
are created, perpetuated, or dispelled, and the critical reaction to those sometimes
15
Hans Lenneberg, Witnesses and Scholars: Studies in Musical Biography (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988);
Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, edited by Jolanta T. Pekacz (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). More
recently, Christopher Wiley has made perhaps the greatest contribution to scholarship on musical biography of
the past 10–15 years in terms of volume and scope, not least in his full-length study, Re-writing Composers’ Lives:
Critical Historiography and Musical Biography, 2 vols. (Ph.D. Diss., University of London, 2008), available online at
http://digirep.rhul.ac.uk/items/51c986f5-ea02-d3b8-03e2-6ab2b962a61f/1/. See further, Christopher Wiley, “‘A
Relic of an Age Still Capable of a Romantic Outlook’: Musical Biography and The Master Musicians Series,
1899–1906,” Comparative Criticism 25 (November 2003): 161–202; “’When a Woman Speaks the Truth About Her
Body’: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian Auto/biography,” Music and Letters 85, no. 3
(August 2004): 388–414; “Biography and the New Musicology,” in (Auto)Biography as a Musicological Discourse,
edited by Tatjana Markovic and Vesna Mikic (Beograd: Fakultet Muzicke Umetnosti), 3–27; “Mythological Motifs in
the Biographical Accounts of Haydn’s Later Life,” in The Land of Opportunity: Joseph Haydn in Britain, edited by
Richard Chesser and David Wyn Jones (London: The British Library, 2013), 195–211; “Music and Literature: Ethel
Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and ‘The First Woman to Write an Opera,’” The Musical Quarterly 96, no. 2 (Summer 2013):
263–95; “Musical Biography and the Myth of the Muse,” in Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons,
Ideologies, and Institutions, edited by Vesa Kurkela and Markus Mantere (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 251–61;
and “Biography and Life-Writing,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth
Century, edited by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
16
See further, Christopher Wiley, “Review of Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, edited by Jolanta
T. Pekacz,” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 215–19.
17
Lenneberg, Witnesses and Scholars, 1.
18
Maynard Solomon, “Biography,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, 29
vols. 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 3, 598–601.
190 C. WILEY AND P. WATT

controversial undertakings. The special issue illustrates how effective narratives such as
nationalism and politics—as embedded within biography—unfold and develop over
time. It also reveals the extent to which particular sources, rhetorical strategies,
metaphors, and tropes carve, argue for, and at times even subvert their subject. We
hope that this issue of the journal promotes musical biography as a genre unto itself
within musicological scholarship, rather than merely as the poor relation to music
criticism, history, and historiography. Our aim has been to demonstrate that biography
is not merely a by-product of, or handmaiden to, musicology. It can, and should, be
front and center of the musicological arena.
The contributors to this special issue therefore uniformly adopt a critically evaluative
approach to music-biographical studies in the wake of the significant shift within main-
stream Anglo-American musicology of recent decades, which has brought issues of
biography to the fore as part of the discipline’s eschewing of positivist epistemologies.
While crystallizing around a combination of issue-based discussions and illustrative case
studies collectively spanning the eighteenth to the later twentieth centuries, each of its
authors has sought explicitly to ground their subject matter within an array of relevant
discourses on life-writing, literature, history, and mythology, by way of identifying their
wider implications to this vast field of scholarly inquiry.
Christopher Wiley examines the development of a single episode in composer
biography—that of the keyboard contest intended to have taken place in Dresden in
1717 between J.S. Bach and Louis Marchand—in order to trace the variant narratives
that emerged in life-writing on both composers as a consequence of the widely
divergent positions presented from the earliest sources, including C.P.E. Bach and J.
F. Agricola’s “Nekrolog” (1754), an account by F.W. Marpurg (1786), and Forkel’s
milestone biography (1802). These discrepancies enabled later authors to craft their
own retellings selectively, partly mindful of pragmatic considerations, such as whether
Bach or Marchand was the focal point of their text, but also, at an ideological level,
owing to the politics of nationality. The episode is possibly unique within musical
biography for existing in completely different versions, sometimes even within the
same publication, depending on these factors. In addition, Spitta’s attempt, in his
influential multi-volume Bach biography (1873–80), to intervene in the mythologiza-
tion to which the story had historically been subjected unwittingly served to send it
along new trajectories by opening up possibilities for fresh embellishments to accrue.
Joanne Cormac investigates the pattern of the biographical motifs of the imagined or
misreported “death” and transformative “resurrection,” or regeneration, in nineteenth-
century life-writing on both Berlioz and Liszt. These themes are first discernible in the
sketches on both composers published by the music critic Joseph d’Ortigue in the early
1830s, where they functioned rhetorically within the narrative to signal Berlioz’s and
Liszt’s emergence as greater musicians having endured periods of hardship, thereby
heralding a new period in their careers. They reappeared in biographies published
towards the end of their composers’ lives, specifically, Berlioz’s Mémoires (publ. 1870)
and Lina Ramann’s Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (1880–94), where a heightened
emphasis is placed on the more literal rather than symbolic aspects of death associated
with particular biographical episodes, lending them additional capacity to function to
mythologize and canonize both subjects for having apparently transcended their own
mortality.
Anna Maria Barry discusses the autobiographical writings of the tenor Sims
Reeves (1821–1900) as an exemplar of the body of nineteenth-century literary self-
narration by British opera singers. Of Reeves’s two volumes (1888–89), the first is
particularly significant for calling into question the very nature of the genre,
 MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN THE MUSICOLOGICAL ARENA 191

alternating between sections of traditional autobiography and short stories written in

the vein of Victorian gothic fiction and sensation fiction, and hence blurring the
boundaries between them. The second, by contrast, provided a conventional chron-
ological narrative of the author’s life. Both volumes sought to negotiate masculinity
and British national identity in light of contemporaneous notions of music as
a feminine activity and of opera as a specifically Continental European pursuit.
Markéta Kratochvílová probes the relationship between biographer and subject through
detailed examination of the writings of Czech musicologist Zdeněk Nejedlý on the composer
and artistic director Otakar Ostrčil (1879–1935), between whom a strong personal relation-
ship developed across more than three decades prior to Ostrčil’s death. Throughout this
time, Nejedlý championed Ostrčil through his influential articles and reviews, as well as his
1929 biography, carving out a leading place for Ostrčil within the widely accepted historio-
graphy he established for the development of modern Czech music, with Ostrčil as
Smetana’s most worthy successor. Nejedlý’s writings on Ostrčil also came to be significantly
inflected by the left-wing political stance that the biographer developed in the early 1930s
(not least in his discussion of Ostrčil’s opera Honzovo království [Johnny’s Kingdom],
premiered in 1934), leading Ostrčil to become an “involuntary hero” for communism—
thereby associating him with an ideological position to which the composer likely did not
himself subscribe.
Emily MacGregor’s article concerns the establishment of the composer Roy Harris
(1898–1979) as the figurehead for the emerging national art-music of 1930s America, set
in relief from its European heritage, within the sociopolitical context of the Great
Depression and increasing colonial expansion westwards. It focuses on the initial recep-
tion of Harris’s earliest symphony, Symphony 1933 (1934), whose published reviews
exemplify the construction of biographical myth-making in the collective depiction of
Harris as embodying a distinctively American national identity through rhetorical
strategies such as the repeated appeals to organic metaphors and insistence upon the
symphony’s virility. The connection forged with the American landscape. Such reviews
emphasized Harris’s agricultural upbringing in the West, analogous to the idealized life
of the pioneering white settler, underlining the claims of his music to being an authentic
reflection of the nation, and leading to the Harris “myth,” which legitimized the racial
presence of white America on the colonial landscape.
Kirstie Asmussen explores a single musical biography, Hubert Foss’s Ralph Vaughan
Williams: A Study (1950), and its remarkable reversal of the position advanced in Foss’s
earlier critical output on the same composer. In his collective writings and radio broadcasts
of the interwar years, Foss championed Vaughan Williams as the leading exponent of
a progressive, identifiably British strain of musical modernism, yet his biography instead
portrayed his subject as having consistently produced more conservative, rural music,
a trope seemingly influenced by shifting conceptions of English nationalism in the aftermath
of World War 2. Foss thereby participated in the establishment of a biographical myth that
remains familiar today: that of Vaughan Williams as a composer who throughout his career
had written pastoral music that embodied the English landscape, celebrating the nation
through his artistic output.
Paul Watt discusses the polarized critical reception of Jacques Barzun’s Berlioz and
the Romantic Century (1950), symptomatic of an identity crisis in Anglo-American
musicology of the mid-twentieth century. Barzun’s landmark text identified a perceived
problem in previous scholarship on Berlioz from Adolphe Boschot to J.-G. Prod’homme,
which—the writer held—had misrepresented the composer while not addressing his
music satisfactorily. Barzun’s biography constituted a reassessment not just of the subject
himself, but also of the stereotypical view of Romanticism, and was accorded a mixed
192 C. WILEY AND P. WATT

reception: reviewers found it overly selective in its portrayal of the composer and
insubstantial in its discussions of his music, and suggested that it misunderstood
Berlioz’s influence on his musical contemporaries.
Richard Parfitt’s article crystallizes around Seamus de Burca’s biography of his uncle
Peadar Kearney (1883–1942), The Soldier’s Song: The Story of Peadar O Cearnaigh (1957),
named for its subject’s claim to history as co-writer of the Irish national anthem.
Examination of the biography’s reception in tandem with wider initiatives to commem-
orate Kearney exposes the disjuncture in the way he has been remembered by his family, as
distinct from the nation at large: Despite the endeavors of de Burca’s biography to promote
Kearney’s case for national celebration. In the main he is considered an inconsequential
figure of interest, primarily for the better-known individuals with whom he associated, not
least his nephew, the playwright Brendan Behan. Kearney’s limited public commemoration
contrasts strongly with that of other Irish songwriters, thereby shedding much light on the
values and ideologies by which certain individuals are held dear to the national myth while
others are not.
Finally, Uri Golomb and Ronit Seter study the emergence, perpetuation, and
reinscription of biographical mythology with respect to Mordecai Seter (1916–94),
one of the five founders of first-generation Israeli art-music. Seter’s reputation as an
Israeli national composer rests particularly on his middle-period oratorio Tikkun
Ḥatzot [Midnight Vigil] (1961), which quickly accrued mythic status as epitomizing
Israeli national music, owing to its stylistic blend of traditional Jewish songs, but also—
more importantly—to its perceived embodiment of the Zionist narrative of exile and
return. Its recognized celebration of the trope of the nation redeemed is further
problematized by the emergence of a second myth in conflict with the first: that of
an innovative yet isolated composer understood only by a culturally cognizant minor-
ity, who kept himself hidden from view and stood apart from both his musical
compatriots and the nation itself.
In sum, this special issue endeavors to address a significant gap in existing scholarly
discourse by reasserting musical biography’s place within the musicological arena. Whereas
its scholarly precursors (such as Lenneberg’s and Pekacz’s volumes) have often been con-
cerned with canonical subjects, the following articles feature discussion of a much wider
range of people and publications, with biographical writings on Great Composers such as J.S.
Bach, Berlioz, and Liszt standing alongside—and on equal terms with—that of a little-known
Irish rebel song composer (Kearney), a prominent Bohemian artistic director (Ostrčil), and
an influential Israeli composer (Seter). If one unintended consequence of seeking to step
outside of the closed circles of common-practice music is that the resulting collection gives
comparatively short shrift to the long nineteenth century—traditionally the focal point of
research on the establishment and perpetuation of canons in relation to Western art-music
—as well as to the last fifty years of music history, at least it may confidently be asserted that
there remains vast potential for further research in the rich and thriving field of music-
biographical studies. In that respect, the essays that follow will provide robust foundations
for future study that may, in time, enable musical biography to occupy a more prominent
(and less “untidy”) position both within and beyond musicology.

Christopher Wiley and Paul Watt

Guest Editors