Event Report
Beethoven and Rossini: Crossing Musical Cultures
23-25 May 2008
Summary Abstract
The conference attempted to get to the root of the musicological discipline’s construction of nineteenth-century music, seeking ways to deconstruct and transcend the foundational intellectual framework inferred from the Beethoven-Rossini opposition of the conference’s title, best known as the ‘twin styles’. Specialists from the worlds of Italian opera and German instrumental music presented papers that addressed the idea of the twin styles from a variety of perspectives, whether historiographical, reception-based or analytical, while also posing a number of questions about the assumptions and methods of historical musicology today. As a result, the conference addressed how musicologists might bring the ostensibly separate aesthetic cultures of Beethoven and Rossini—German and Italian, operatic and symphonic, authorial and perfor-mative—into productive dialogue.
Conference Review
The conference’s aims were simple in outline: to investigate the oppositional duality of Beethoven and Rossini that arose during the early nineteenth century, and which still underpins the understanding of 19th-century music history and historiography.
Even in the second decade of the nineteenth century, music criticism treated Beethoven and Rossini as a symbolic duumvirate—a pairing that personified a conflict of values and traditions that supposedly divided Western music. By the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German critics from Adolf Bernhard Marx to Hugo Riemann habitually identified Beethoven with the highest values in music—and Rossini with their debasement: lasting German profundity and universality contrasted with ephemeral Italian banality and populism; the elevated genre of the symphony opposed the trivial social practice of opera.
The period of disciplinary self-examination and self-chastisement in late twentieth-century musicology, which often concentrated on its German origins and attendant Germanizing politics, did much to alleviate the Beethovenian bias of the Rossini-Beethoven binary opposition—yet the opposition itself has remained intact. During the 1970s and 80s, the German music historian Carl Dahlhaus presented the most influential restatement of the Beethoven-Rossini dyad as a supposedly value-neutral hermeneutic device, drawing on the early nineteenth-century music antiquarian Raphael Georg Kiesewetter to write of an ‘age of Rossini and Beethoven’. According to Dahlhaus, many of the defining tensions of nineteenth-century music are condensed in the ‘twin musical cultures’ of Beethoven and Rossini—each one a viable yet mutually exclusive aesthetic value-system. Indeed, Dahlhaus envisions a musical ‘clash of civilisations’ inaugurating nineteenth-century music—the Beethovenian ideas of authorial control, the inviolable work, and the immutable text confronting Rossinian pragmatism about changing performance conditions, the varying talents of performers, and the nature of the work itself. The metaphysical aspirations of Beethovenian ‘pure’ instrumental music contrast with the collaborative realism and hybridity of Rossinian opera; the dense thematicism and formal imperatives of Beethovenian symphonic writing oppose the moment-by-moment lyricism and formal mutability of Rossinian operatic composition. To write of an ‘age of Rossini and Beethoven’ is thus to invoke a historiographical vision, an aesthetic tension, a generic distinction, and two radically divergent understandings of the way music ought to go.
While critics have pointed out Dahlhaus’s failure to expunge the vestiges of musicology’s Germanic bias from his work, few in the past had taken issue with his basic premise. Indeed, recent studies that describe and critique the Beethovenian ‘master trope’ that has ostensibly dominated music aesthetics and historiography, as well as operatic studies that polemicise against or revise Beethovenian aesthetic models, only reaffirm the presence and coherence of Dahlhaus’s conceptual scheme. And historians and critics continue to allude to the notional opposition of Beethovenian and Rossinian principles in discussions of much nineteenth-century music: the symphonic writing of Schubert and Mendelssohn has often been described as a problematic clash of lyricism with the imperatives of thematic construction, while discourse about Wagner still struggles with the composer’s own claim to have invested opera with Beethovenian values.
During the conference, this persistence of the idea of the twin styles was examined from a variety of perspectives. The opening session dwelt largely on Dahlhaus’s historiography, and his use of Kiesewetter, while also raising broader questions about possible alternatives. Is the model of the ‘twin styles’ a convenient historiographical fiction? Which composers (or nations) might act as ‘third terms’ to break apart the duality between Italian opera and German symphonic music, and how might we avoid the risk of reinscribing familiar values in other ways, whether by insisting on the unremarked seriousness of Rossini, or the moments of frivolity in Beethoven? Later sessions returned to some of these same questions, but from the perspective of more specific historical or analytical case studies. Recurrent strands included the idea of ‘presence’ in the music of the two composers, and studies of the formation of the idea of the twin styles in different environments. A session on ‘Philosophies’ also included an examination of Schopenhauer’s passion for Rossini in the context of his metaphysics, and the final session, on Sunday morning, offered a variety of perspectives on the twin styles within British musical historiography.
Many of the speakers at the conference commented on its timely nature, and also on the surprising fact that -- even within such a relatively small field as musicology -- there have been few chances in the past for scholars of Beethoven and of Rossini have had the chance to talk across their sub-disciplinary divides. The presence of a good number of major scholars, both from the US and from Europe also ensured a pleasingly high level of discussion.
There were 17 papers in all, together with a summation from Richard Taruskin. Over the past two months we have put these together into a book proposal, which we have submitted to Cambridge University Press, and which has now been sent out for comments from external readers. If reports are positive, we plan to ask for revised versions of the papers early next summer, for a book that would then appear in early 2010.
