the performance of “early music” ❧ 161
eighteenth-century art was given by the writings and collecting of the Goncourt
brothers and by the elegant nostalgia of such poems as the Fêtes galantes of Paul
Verlaine.
In Germany and Austria considerable continuity was provided by the invet-
erate Francophilia of both the Austrian and the Prussian courts. French con-
tinued to be spoken in both Berlin and Vienna. Especially in Vienna, many
French words remain to this day in the common language of the people. The
survival of eighteenth-century values has been helped by certain opera librettos
that have never gone out of fashion, such as those of Da Ponte, and by the rem-
nants of a kind of nostalgic eighteenth-centuryism in those of Hofmannstahl,
of which Der Rosenkavalier is an obvious example.
More conspicuous even than the cult of Maria Theresa in Austria was that
of Frederick the Great in Prussia. Its more agreeable aspects are to be found in
the illustrations that the great German draftsman and painter Adolph Menzel
put together from 1840 on. They are unusual for their time in embodying
detailed researches into costumes and general ambience.
In England, the background of the revival of early music almost immedi-
ately takes on the aspects of a crusade. Its roots are in the reactions of the
pre-Raphaelites against academicism and against the Industrial Revolution; in
the social doctrines of William Morris; and in the aesthetics of such artists as
Burne-Jones who, in the 1890s, actually decorated the fi rst harpsichord built
by Arnold Dolmetsch. It is really with the work of Arnold Dolmetsch that the
English revival of early music begins.
The victory of the Bach campaign has been well assured since 1900, when
the Bach-Gesellschaft fi nished its publication of Bach’s works and with the
completion of the works of Spitta (1873–80), Pirro (1907), and Schweitzer
(1908). From Schweitzer’s time dates the beginning of the “Orgelbewegung,”
the movement back—I will not say to the eighteenth-century organ, but
toward it.
At the turn of the century there comes an aesthetic revolution, gener-
ally in the direction of cleaning up. With Busoni, despite all his eclecticism,
we feel the fi rst stirrings of the twentieth-century neoclassicism, as we do in
Webern and even in certain aspects of the otherwise inveterately expressionist
Schoenberg.
Romantic nostalgia for old instruments was particularly strong in the last
quarter of the century, when many of the existing major collections of old
instruments were formed. And from the end of the 1880s, interest was taken
in the building and reconstruction of early instruments. Ensembles of ancient
instruments came into being, more distinguishable perhaps by their quaint-
ness than by the accuracy of their documentation or style. The characteristic
early twentieth-century ensemble of “ancient” instruments usually involved
combinations that had never before existed. In much the same way, the earliest
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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