The Formation of The Musical Canon in the Romantic Era
This article was previously published on my blog on July 19 2023, based on a paper I wrote in glad school, hence the academic tone.
The “musical canon” is a contentious topic. During the nineteenth century the conception began to emerge of a golden era of “Classical Music” from J.S. Bach to Beethoven. The was encouraged by the performances by Mendelssohn of older works, the publication and re-discover of works by J.S. Bach in a new era of musical publishing, along with the work of critics like E.T.A. Hoffmann. In recent years there have been challenges to the musical canon for its limitations and its over-emphasis on particular genres, nationalities, and identities that favor men over women and German and Austrian composers over those of other nationalities. More than any prior or proceeding era, the notion of a canon of classical music is mostly strongly associated with the Romantic era; this era sees by far the greatest representation in that canon.
First we must ask, “what is the musical canon?” In the introduction to Disciplining Music edited by Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, the authors state, “whenever music is examined under a critical gaze, it is disciplined, ordered and corrected; the canon functions as a basic tool in defining the scope of this disciplining. On the one hand, the canon determines what music is worthy of study. On the other hand, it operates as a measure of the competence of scholars.” What gets canonized is a reflection of a set of values, namely “originality, seriousness, complexity and the necessity of re-reading.” William Weber puts it more succinctly: “if ‘classics’ are individual works deemed great, ‘canon’ is the framework that supports their identification in critical and ideological terms.”
Furthermore we must distinguish the musical canon from the performance repertoire, as Richard Taruskin among others do. The repertoire describes a collection of pieces frequently performed for concert audiences—pieces one would except to see on an annual concert season. The repertoire is thus determined by the tastes and preferences of performers, programmers and audiences and is thus liable to much more rapid changes. The canon, meanwhile, moves at a glacial pace when compared to concert repertoires, since it is determined by critics, academics and composers, worked out via public discourse and codified by publication. These two are clearly intertwined, since repertoire works are capable of becoming canonical and the canon structures and legitimizes concert repertoires. But they are also distinct: there are too many examples to name but there are many pieces of the concert repertoire that do not receive as much praise from critics, as there are also pieces that critics applaud that are rarely performed.
Weber goes even further as far as distinctions within the notion of “the canon,” creating a tripartite schema that shifts through the musical eras. The three canons in his thought are 1. the Scholarly Canon 2. the Pedagogical Canon and 3. the Performance Canon (or repertoire). While each canon is worth studying, we will be concerned with the third one here since it is the one that emerges most clearly during the romantic era.
Institutions
To gain a wider picture of how the canon emerged in the romantic era specifically, we need to look at the convergence of many forces in European society that all played a role. The relationship between facets of a society are complicated and never self-contained and isolated from each others, nor isolated from other societies. That being said, we can look at a few institutions that played a significant role in the formation of the musical canon: the founding of publishing houses, the rise of music criticism and journalism, the establishment of conservatories, and ideological shifts in thought, particularly in Germany after Kant and Hegel.
The late eighteenth century saw the incorporation of many major music publishers, many of which still exist. Breitkopf and Härtel was formed in 1795 upon the partnership of Gottfried Christoph Härtel with Bernard Christoph Breitkopf, who had been publishing musical works in Leipzig since 1754. Schott Music was formed in 1770 by Bernhard Schott of Mainz. In Bonn, Nikolaus Simrock incorporated a publishing house under his own name, N. Simrock. While it had been centuries since the invention of the printing press had caused the spread of literacy through Europe—which some consider a cause for the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing wars—and moveable type had existed for sheet music around the same time, the rise of a new class of bourgeois families and a middle class with disposable income created a new market for published sheet music. Many of those publishers specialized in piano music meant for private performance and study, though there were collections of major works by the mid-19th century. In 1851 the Bach-Gesellschaft began publishing its completed, definitive editions of J.S. Bach’s music with similar collections emerging around the same time for Handel, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert.
This rise in the popularity and market for sheet music coincided with the emergence of new journals and publications for discussions of music. A couple notable ones include Leipzig’s Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, published by Breitkopf and Härtel from 1818-1835, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, famously edited by Robert Schumann and the Journal dés débats in Paris which published the critical works of Hector Berlioz. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft is notable for its publication of critical articles by E.T.A. Hoffmann on the music of Beethoven that would become pivotal in defining the aesthetics of musical romanticism.
This era also saw the establishment of many secular institutions for musical education across Europe. Earlier schools of music had existed in prior centuries, particularly in Naples, but the turn of the 19th century brought forth an explosion in the number of musical institutions of higher learning. The earliest of these was the Paris Conservatory, which had been established in 1784 then re-organized in 1895 by the revolutionary government. Conservatories in Bologna, Milan, Warsaw, Florence, Prague, Vienna and London would soon follow in the coming decades. These schools needed codified curricula, prompting the creation of a standardized musical education via textbooks and instruction based on teaching students what was to become the canon of Germanic composers.
Ideology
These institutions are bound together and influence each other, reinforcing the movements that were already in progress. But it was the ideological foundation provided by critics such as J.N. Forkel and E.T.A. Hoffmann that allowed these currents to coalesce into the formation of a musical canon. Forkel’s biography of J.S. Bach, Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke: Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst, was published in 1802 and was the first major biography of the composer. This publication along with the performance of St. Matthew’s Passion organized by Mendelssohn in 1829 and the publication of the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1801 after centuries of circulation in manuscript prompted the critical re-evaluation of the work of Bach in this era. Bach was thus be seen as the artistic forerunner to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
The Romantic era is also where we see the emergence of a concept that has stuck with us: the musical work. In prior generations, musical compositions were generally considered the expressions of a skilled artisan or craftsman, not an expression of “high” art. It was E.T.A. Hoffmann’s reviews of Beethoven that above all set the foundation for this new idea: music comported with the values of German Romanticism, valuing expressions of deeply individual emotions, sensations and attempts to reach towards sublimity. Earlier pieces of music could not have been considered truly canonic until they were considered on the status of a high art, within the pantheon of the highest achievements of a culture alongside its works of literature and philosophy.
Laura Hamer offers a portrait of how Hoffmann and other critics helped shaped the formation of the canon. Speaking of Hoffmann, she states that, “Hoffmann celebrated pure autonomous instrumental music, liberated from poetic text to give it meaning, and from court, civic or ecclesiastical patronage to provide it with purpose or function. Accordingly, he helped to establish Beethoven’s symphonies as the bedrock of the performance canon, and shaped future writing—and thus understanding—about the composer’s music.” Similarly, in Schumann’s writings in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, “Schumann actively constructed himself as a crusader for serious, progressive music. His prose is saturated with elevations of canonical values, whilst he denigrated what he considered to be artistically valueless, commercialised, populist music.” These quotes point towards the role that critics played in the election of music to a higher plane of existence, one that transcends the earlier limits for what music was and could be.
Both the canon and the repertoire are by nature conservative in their orientation towards history. They are defined as much by exclusion as inclusion. As for what is included or excluded, there are innumerable works excluded—(maybe we should be speaking of many canons outside of the canon). For one example, the influential theorist Heinrich Schenker derived his analytical techniques from the works of a collection of composers whose works he considered of the highest quality: J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Brahms. This seems to be about as uncontroversial as a musical canon could possibly be, even with the conspicuous absences of other popular and highly-revered Romantic-era composers including Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Dvorak, Rossini, Verdi, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. (Moving into the twentieth century the canon begins to fragment, but the capital-c canon has admitted more composers into its ranks including Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Mahler, Strauss, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, all of whom can be considered essentially romantic in their aesthetics and musical language, alongside the modernists Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok and Debussy. The twentieth century also sees the emergence of a popular music canon in the United States along with a collection of avant-garde works from the disciples of Arnold Schoenberg, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives.)
To put it more clearly, the ideological foundations of the canon reside in the cultural values of the society in which the canon was formed. The public discourse surrounding music in such journals reflected the attitudes of a class of high-minded critics, opposed to the more pedestrian and philistine tastes of the public. It seems as though there was a brief moment where those two things were in agreement: the works considered canonical are both highly regarded by critics and popular with mass audiences. It was the more avant-garde (for the time) music of Liszt and Wagner championed by critics like Schumann to the chagrin of audiences that led to this perceived divergence between “high” and “low” art in European culture that has never quite united since. This mass democratic public borne to Europe in the era after the cataclysmic French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars allowed for civic life and participation in politics beyond what was conceivable in the prior decades. But this shift also led to a mass reaction to the perceived changes to culture, such as the loss of older artistic forms and cultures. Out of fear that great works of art will be phased out in favor of inferior, crowd-pleasing pieces, critics came to the defense of what they wanted to be held up as the greatest musical achievements of their culture.
Critiques
Since the 1980s there has been a re-evaluation of the canon by critics of the “New Musicology.” Foremost among them is Joseph Kerman, whose article “A Few Canonic Variations” was among the first in recent scholarship to tackle this question seriously. There are many critiques of the canon stemming from various disciplines, including Marxist critical theory (on the basis of social class values and economics) and critical race theory (on the basis of the exclusion of non-white people), but for this final section I will focus on the feminist critique from Marcia J. Citron.
Marcia J. Citron analyzed the criteria for inclusion (and thus exclusion) from the Western Musical Canon in her 1993 book, Gender and the Musical Canon. Citron’s book among others by Joseph Kerman (Contemplating Music), Susan McClary (Feminine Endings) and Lawrence Kramer (Music as Cultural Practice) sought to expand the methodologies used in musicology, drawing from diverse fields within critical theory including feminist critique, post-colonial studies and queer theory.
Her argument rests upon a theory on the relationship between a culture’s values and its canon. The values of our society inform the “works” that society creates, which then become part of the canon that comes to define the values of that society. This hermeneutic circle privileges those who can intercept this process. Citron identifies broadly speaking three categories of people who determine what is canonized: academics, publishers, and the public. Academics and professors offer works for inclusion upon the basis of literary and aesthetic merit. Publishers—particularly publishers of anthologies—include works based on what they believe will sell to ensembles for performances and to individuals for study and practice. Finally, the public seeks works based on its own tastes, based on what they consider fashionable or trendy at the moment. Of these, each of them are shaped by the prevailing morays of gender in a European society in which women were discouraged from seeking the same opportunities as men and engaging in civic life to the same degree.
She also notes that in our society, creativity is coded as masculine. Objects of creative expression are phallic—the paintbrush, the pen, the baton. Similarly, the trappings of creativity—individual talent, claims to authorship and originality, high social status, and a professional career—are things more commonly associated with masculinity in European society. Thus throughout the 19th century women in music were under the control of their fathers, husbands, and teachers who were consciously or unconsciously hostile towards the idea that a woman could also be an artist. Thus many women found artistic outlets via the salon as a private outlet, rather than public performances in the concert hall. Professionalism itself as a requirement for becoming canonized takes on a gendered dimension since women often had to make the choice between becoming a mother and having a career as a musician. These among other critiques form the foundation for our contemporary discussions of the musical canon.
Conclusions
In my opinion, the notion of a permeable plurality of canons seems most useful. This avoids the exclusionary tendencies with hitherto canons along with allowing for more unorthodox canons to emerge that stand against that which already exists. As Marcia J. Citron notes, there is a tendency for critics of the canon to “stir the pot,” believing that simply adding a wider collection of composers to the existing canon constitutes diversity and inclusion without interrogating the ideologies underling that canon. Additionally, as we problematize the one-to-one relationship assumed between a culture, a nation and a language, this notion of a single central canon becomes less meaningful in a society that is more multipolar and interconnected than ever. On the other hand, it may be counterproductive to demand we throw out the notion of a canon entirely at moment where women and ethnic minorities are gaining well-deserved recognition and placement within the pantheon of the great classical composers.
The canon, despite its difficulties and controversies, still remains a useful topic for scholars and listeners of classical music, even if only as a source for contention.
