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RE-WRITING COMPOSERS’ LIVES: CRITICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY AND MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY CHRISTOPHER MARK WILEY VOLUME I ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PhD Copyright © 2008, Christopher Mark Wiley RE-WRITING COMPOSERS’ LIVES: CRITICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY AND MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY Recent musicological discourse, while frequently considering issues of historiography and canonicity, has seldom critically engaged with biography as a genre of documentary significance to reception history for its attempts to shape public opinion of its subjects. In consequence, modern musicology has often taken for granted many tendencies and preoccupations that accumulated in musical biography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thesis presents a historiographical examination of the precedents for and accretions of these assumptions, in terms of the role played by biography both in the establishment and maintenance of ideological canons and in the resultant ‘top-down’ conception of music history as dominated by an elite handful of exalted composers. Exploration of the ways in which biographies constructed their subjects as ‘great’ and ‘exemplary’ – insofar as these concepts were idealized within the communities of readers for whom they were originally written – is conducted through two major studies of the published texts to c.1950 on canonical composers including J. S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. The first investigates the elaboration and distortion of a set of some twenty-five of the most famous myths of musical biography, from their origins in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Continental European texts to their fullest development (and, in many cases, their refutation) in English-language biographies up to the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, the second critically analyzes the twelve volumes of the original ‘Master Musicians’ series (1899-1906) as exemplars of the biographical and musical paradigms of composer life-writing, and as late Victorian period pieces of significance to canon formation for their conception as a closed set of monographs of historically-important subjects appropriated to English ends. The conclusion provides a preliminary assessment of the implications to modern musicology of the findings of this thesis through re-evaluation of elements of recent biographical and hermeneutical scholarship, and proposes that the discipline might usefully adopt a more inclusive, self-reflexive approach to the study of musical biography in the future. TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol., page 1 INTRODUCTION: BIOGRAPHY AND MUSICOLOGY I, 1 PART I: MYTHOLOGY IN MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY 2 Introduction I, 20 3 From Childhood to Maturity I, 36 4 Correspondences in the Lives of the Great Composers I, 88 5 Final Years and Death I, 125 6 Epilogue I, 168 PART II: THE MASTER MUSICIANS SERIES, 1899-1906 7 Introduction I, 180 8 Life and Character I, 207 9 The Music and Musical Connections I, 258 10 Conclusion I, 293 11 CONCLUSION I, 314 BIBLIOGRAPHY I, 352 APPENDIX I: MYTHOLOGY IN MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY II, 2 APPENDIX II: THE MASTER MUSICIANS SERIES, 1899-1906 II, 129 to ELSIE ANNIE CHADWICK (1915-) and to the memory of OLIVE KATHLEEN WILLEY (1922-2001) KENNETH CHADWICK (1914-2004) REGINALD DOUGLAS WILLEY (1918-1988) my grandparents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to… Pauline and Graham Willey Laura Laakso Karine Varley Matthew Mills Anne Widén Sheena Cleaton Deborah Lee Lorna Gibson Sarah Howe Helen Jeffries Joe Broad Richard Devitt Stephen and Jessica Wiley Adrian Wiley and Esther Rousay Tess, McGinty, and Sinta Professor Katharine Ellis and all the staff at Royal Holloway, University of London My colleagues at City University London and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama The Arts and Humanities Research Board The composers and their biographers …there is often much to be learned about a particular period by studying the ways it tells lives and the purposes it conceives for biography. – Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (1996), page 9 1 INTRODUCTION: BIOGRAPHY AND MUSICOLOGY Biography has been of the utmost significance to music history and historiography since their modern origins in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such sources as Walther’s musical lexicon (1732) and Mattheson’s biographical dictionary (1740) placed portions of music history in the public domain decades in advance of the first single-composer studies. The earliest music histories were not only indebted to the biographical approach but also produced by active biographers, such as Hawkins (1776) and Burney (1776-89) in England, and Forkel (1788-1801, unfinished) in Germany; the latter author is also profoundly significant for his early contribution to musical biography in the form of a volume on Bach (1802). The symbiotic relationship between music history and biography at this time is likewise demonstrated by the ‘Sommaire de l’histoire de la musique’ with which Choron and Fayolle prefaced their co-authored dictionary (1810-1: I, xi-xcii), and which was translated in its entirety (by Nicholas Charles Bochsa) for inclusion within Sainsbury’s English lexical counterpart (1827: v-lxxii). The research undertaken for biographies of past musical masters, such as those of Baini on Palestrina (1828) and Winterfeld on Giovanni Gabrieli (1834), afforded greater insights into earlier epochs of music history than had previously been available. And Fétis, best known for his landmark dictionary of musicians (1835-44, 1860-5), subsequently produced a general history of music (1869-76, unfinished). But it was in the increasingly hagiographical climate of the later nineteenth century that musical biography truly flourished. The hero-worship promoted by Romantic biography found much resonance in the field of music in the emerging aesthetic of the idolized Great Composer: the creative genius who ruled the concert hall and (in exceptional Introduction circumstances) the opera house, and whose pieces continued to be popularly performed even after their own day, while those of more minor individuals lay essentially forgotten to history. This environment witnessed the emergence of such enduring multi-volume works as Jahn’s on Mozart (1856-9), Chrysander’s on Handel (1858-67), Thayer’s on Beethoven (1866-79), Spitta’s on Bach (1873-80), and Pohl’s on Haydn (1875-82). Nor did these endeavours emerge independently of one another; for instance, the material that Jahn had collected for his aborted writings on Beethoven and Haydn was inherited by Thayer and Pohl respectively, while Thayer’s German translator, Hermann Deiters (himself an important biographer of Brahms), also prepared the third and fourth editions of Jahn’s text. That the enormous scale of these projects led to no fewer than three remaining unfinished by their original author testifies to their conceived monumentality, which ironically resulted in a low rate of completion. Two of the three were subsequently realized in their entirety, Thayer’s biography by Deiters and Riemann (1907-8) and Pohl’s by Botstiber (1927), while Jahn’s work was substantially revised by Abert (1919-21) and Thayer’s, more recently, by Forbes (1964). Hence a tradition of emulation of older scholarship, and consequently of perpetuating outdated values and 1 preoccupations, became established soon after the advent of mature musical biography. The genre served ideally to foster the emergent domination of the field of music by an elite handful of exalted figures and their works, which in turn led to the construction and subsequent perpetuation of canons of wider historical and ideological importance, over and above mere practical significance as a reinforcement of the repertories at the height of fashion within a particular time and place. And although the Western musical canon came to encompass the broad period from J. S. Bach to Brahms (the so-called 1 A helpful historical outline of musical biography from its modern origins to the present is given by Solomon 2001; for a more detailed (albeit discontinuous) survey, see Lenneberg 1988. 2

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