160 ❧ chapter sixteen
on history, with its habits of precise demonstrable documentation and distrust
of subjectivity and intuition.
Another element in the picture is the increasing over-ripeness of
Romanticism at the end of the century, and the feeling of living in a
“Spätzeitalter”—in a late age—that in the 1920s comes to a head in the books
of Spengler.
A further element in this background is the increase of interest in archaic
and primitive societies as a result of geographical and historical expansion
and as a legacy of the cult of primitivism which had started out in the eigh-
teenth century as a nostalgia for an imaginary and distant purity and simplic-
ity. Primitivism played a considerable role in the Great Awakening of the early
twentieth century, in the throwing out of nineteenth-century bourgeois values
by such founders of twentieth-century art as Cezanne, Picasso, Brancusi, and
the early Stravinsky. There is a distinct survival of Romanticism in the expres-
sionism of Schoenberg and Berg and in the work of Freud and Jung, but at
the same time a great deal of pseudoscientifi c reasoning lies behind the “Neue
Sachlichkeit”^1 of the twenties and the doctrines of the artists and architects of
the Bauhaus. In all of these activities there is a constant alternation between
getting very dirty and a desire to be clean. The desire to be clean was obviously
a very strong motivation in the revival of early music.
Let us look at the panorama of early music up to 1914. Its roots go back to
the English antiquarians of the mid-eighteenth century, such as John Stafford
Smith, to the historians Burney and Hawkins, to Forkel in Germany, to the
Handel cult that has persisted unabated in England since his lifetime, to the
Bach revival nourished by Forkel and Mendelssohn and brought into full
activity in 1850 with the founding of the Bach-Gesellschaft. There were also
sporadic historical performances, apparently always exceptions in their time
and never representing a continuous tendency, such as the historical concerts
of Moscheles in London in 1837, those of Rubinstein in the same city in the
1870s, and the performances on old instruments by Louis Diémer at the Paris
Exposition of 1889.
The contact of the nineteenth century with the eighteenth in some ways
was much less interrupted by the violence of revolutions and of Napoleonic
Wars than one might expect. In France, there was a remarkable continuity of
ideas and of taste, despite the French Revolution. There were periodic reviv-
als of the monarchy and throwbacks to the values of the eighteenth century.
French eighteenth-century furniture and decoration never really went out of
style, and the French classic tradition survives vividly through such extreme
romantics as Baudelaire and Delacroix. A further renewal of admiration for
- New Objectivity.
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