Abstract
The revolutions of 1848 had no single underlying meaning. Even within the Habsburg Empire quite separate discontents were interleaved. There was a struggle for social justice, as powerful in Vienna as it was in Paris. There was a struggle for constitutional rights, exercising the liberal intelligentsia in Prague as it did in the German cities. And there was a struggle for national self-determination, impelling Hungary, as it did northern Italy, towards a wholesale war of liberation. Primary causes are difficult to disentangle, but in the eastern empire at least the political issues acquired a particular immediacy, ultimately absorbing the social issues into all-embracing nationalist programmes. It was national rather than class interests which were most obviously at stake in risings against the Habsburgs, not least in their eastern territories.
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Notes
O. Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History (New York, 1950);
see also Borderlands of Western Civilization (New York, 1952).
See A. P. Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom (Cambridge, 1970).
For a fuller account see B. Sárosi, Folk Music: Hungarian Musical Idiom, trans. M. Steiner (Budapest, 1986)
also B. Szabolsci, A Concise History of Hungarian Music (Budapest and London, 1964).
See J. Tyrrell, Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988).
P. F. Sugar, ‘External and Domestic Roots of East European Nationalism’, in Nationalism in Eastern Europe, ed. P. F. Sugar and I.J. Lederer (Seattle and London, 1969).
On the latter, see K.-P. Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1988).
See A. Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: the Case of Poland (Oxford, 1982).
M. Beckerman, ‘In Search of Czechness in Music’, 19th-century Music, x (1986–7), 61–73.
G. Abraham, ‘The Factor of Language’, in The Tradition of Western Music (London, 1974).
See B. Sárosi, Gypsy Music, trans. F. Macnicol (Budapest, 1971).
See D. Legány, Liszt and his Country (1869–1873), trans. G. Gulyas (Budapest, 1976).
J. Lucacs, Budapest 1900: a Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture (London, 1989).
For an outline see the early parts of N. O’Loughlin, Slovenian Composition since the First World War (diss., U. of Leicester, 1978).
See I. Županović, Centuries of Croatian Music, trans. V. Ivír (Zagreb, 1984).
Bibliographical Note Historical background
As I have indicated in the early stages of this chapter, the status of the region as a historical and cultural unit is open to debate. ‘A kingdom of the spirit’ or a region cemented by common elements in its political, socio-economic and cultural past? The debate continues and has been given special significance by major political changes in the Communist world of eastern and central Europe during the 1980s. Some of the main positions have been articulated in issues of The Times Literary Supplement in 1989 (see especially nos.4480 and 4512) and the arguments are rehearsed thoughtfully in T. G. Ash’s The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (London, 1989).
Much of the general literature on the region is informed by strongly held interpretative positions and needs to be read critically. A good idea is to balance the position of O. Halecki (The Limits and Divisions of European History, New York, 1950, and
Borderlands of Western Civilisation, New York, 1952) against that of
R. Portal (The Slavs, trans. P. Evans, London, 1965).
More ‘neutral’ accounts may be found in books by F. Dvornik, including The Making of Central Europe (London, 1949) and
The Slavs in European History and Civilisation (New Brunswick, 1962), and in
Nationalism in Eastern Europe, ed. P. F. Sugar and I. Lederer (Seattle and London, 1969).
Also useful, though more specialized, is H. Kohn’s Pan-Slavism: its History and Ideology (Indiana, 1953).
Music
A central difficulty is that most of the historiography of any value is not in English. G. Abraham’s Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968) and
Essays on Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985) contain interesting studies of miscellaneous topics, mainly Polish and Czech, but offer no overall view.
For the rest, the rather pedestrian (at best) nature of the general studies which are available in English should not be taken as a fair measure of the state of historical musicology in the field. Of books dealing with particular countries, R. Newmarch’s The Music of Czechoslovakia (London, New York and Toronto, 1942) still provides a useful reference point,
more recommendable on the whole than the later study by V. Stepanek and B. Karasek, An Outline of Czech and Slovak Music (Prague, 1964).
A more specialized account of a central aspect of Czech music, and a breakthrough in Slavonic music studies generally, is J. Tyrrell’s admirably thorough and penetrating study Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988).
Hungary is best served by B. Szabolski’s A Concise History of Hungarian Music, trans. S. Karig (Budapest and London, 1964)
and Poland by Polish Music, ed. S. Jarociński (Warsaw, 1965).
The latter pinpoints a problem common to many of the books in this area: translations tend to be hopelessly inadequate and can give a distorted view of the quality of the scholarship. For basic information, however, the English reader often has no choice but to turn to such material. For Romania it would be V. Cosma’s A Concise History of Romanian Music (Bucharest, 1982);
for Croatia J. Andreis’s Music in Croatia, trans. V. Ivír (Zagreb, 1974) or
I. Źupanovićs Centuries of Croatian Music, trans. V. Ivír (Zagreb, 1984);
and for Serbia S. Djurić-Klajn’s A Survey of Serbian Music through the Ages, trans. N. Ćurćija-Prodanović (Belgrade, 1972).
On individual nineteenth-century composers the Czech lands have, unsurprisingly, come out best. B. Large’s Smetana (London, 1970)
is still the best introduction but it has been admirably supplemented by J. Clapham’s Smetana (London, 1972) in the Master Musicians series.
Clapham’s two studies of Dvořák, Antonin Dvořák: Musician and Craftsman (London, 1966) and
Dvořák (Newton Abbot and London, 1979), are the major commentaries on the other leading figure in late nineteenth-century Czech music.
The Liszt bibliography is of course immense. A good general introduction is D. Watson’s Liszt (London, 1983),
but a study which usefully concentrates on his connections with Hungary in later years is D. Legány, Liszt and his Country (1869–1873), trans. G. Gulyas (Budapest, 1976). There are no recommendable books in English on Moniuszko or Erkel.
With later composers there is a rather better spread. Two general books on Janáček, both of value but in some respects a little outdated, are J. Vogel’s Leoš Janáček (London, 1962) and
H. Hollander’s monograph Janáček (London, 1963).
General studies of the operas by E. Chisolm (The Operas of Leos Janáček, London, 1971) and
M. Ewens (Janáček’s Tragic Operas, London, 1977) are distinctly uneven, but
J. Tyrrell’s account of Kát’a Kabanová (Cambridge, 1982) is excellent.
Bartók has generated a vast reading-list, of which we might mention two recommendable general studies: H. Stevens’s The Life and Music of Bela Bartók (New York, 1953, 2/1964) has worn surprisingly well; a more recent,
well-balanced account is P. Griffiths’s Bartók (London, 1984).
For Szymanowski there is a general study by J. Samson, The Music of Szymanowski (London and New York, 1980),
but for Enescu the material in English is confined to a short booklet by G. Constantinescu, George Enescu: his Life and Work (Bucharest, 1981),
together with a special Enescu issue of the English-language Romanian Review, viii (1981).
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Samson, J. (1991). East Central Europe: the Struggle for National Identity. In: Samson, J. (eds) The Late Romantic Era. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11300-2_8
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