Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music. By Michael P. Steinberg.
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- Music and Letters [ 0027-4224 ] ; 2009-05.
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DOI: 10.1093/ml/gcn101
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<article-title><italic>Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music</italic>. By Michael P. Steinberg.</article-title>
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<p>One of the appealing aspects of teaching a survey course on nineteenth-century European music history is that it provides an opportunity to introduce students to a time and place where the cultural significance of classical music required, it seems, no special pleading. It figured overtly and prominently in contemporary public social and intellectual life and could claim, as a book title like ‘Listening to Reason’, neatly reminds us, significant attention from philosophers and political theorists. And yet, one might be forgiven for not associating reason pre-eminently with nineteenth-century music; after all, musical Romanticism, like its antecedents in literature and fine art, is commonly understood to be less concerned with the reasonable per se as with the subjective, noumenal, and irrational. Indeed, in the very opening pages of his book, Steinberg argues that the German philosophy, music, and musicology of this time helped promulgate ‘national and ultimately fascist ideology’ (p. 2). Nineteenth-century music has thus remained susceptible to being incorporated into broader historical narratives about the origins of what could well be described as especially <italic>unreasonable</italic> patterns of thought, such as nationalism and fascism. Whether this music's alleged culpability is merely one of guilt by association, or a sign of a genuinely insidious connection, the academy, Steinberg argues, has had a vested interest in separating nineteenth-century music history from the rest of culture. Today, of course, as the pre-eminence of journals like <italic>Nineteenth-Century Music</italic> attest, musicologists are only too willing to uncover this music's rich cultural context. Now the problem, however, is that the music survives in our own culture only in an ‘increasingly elite and socially marginal form’ (p. 3).</p>
<p>In response, Steinberg sets out to defend the continuing relevance of this music ‘not only as an object of study (or a vehicle of pleasure) but as a mode of cultural experience and understanding and, itself, as a potential language of cultural analysis’ (p. xi). In particular, he focuses on what he sees as the centrality of music in emerging ideas about subjectivity, to be found above all in German Romantic theory, exemplified in the works of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche. It is an ambitious project. Densely written as it is typeset, the book invokes a pantheon of cultural references and strains under the weight of quotations, allusions, and cross-references. The concept of subjectivity itself remains elusive throughout; at best we are informed it is a ‘mode of experience where self and world are difficult to distinguish’ (p. 7). In attempting, no doubt, to honour the significance, but also the slipperiness, of this subject matter, the prose all too frequently becomes overwrought and unnecessarily obscure, punctuated from time to time by forced generalizations.</p>
<p>This is not to say that there are not some rich pickings to be had for those brave enough to persevere. For instance, in his first chapter Steinberg explores the idea that Mozart's da Ponte operas ‘stage subjectivity’. Definitions aside, this is not of itself a controversial supposition, and here he is able to draw upon his earlier work on what he called the ‘ideology of the Baroque’, and how the struggle between Catholic and Protestant systems of power found cultural expression in Austria and Germany. While one might question the monolithic ring he gives to ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Catholicism’, Steinberg nevertheless is able to make some useful observations about some of the cultural forces informing theatrical life in late eighteenth-century Vienna, such as the influence of Counter-Reformation tendencies in Habsburg imperial politics, and the significance of the Habsburg gaze on Spain. The stone guest in <italic>Don Giovanni</italic>, he argues, is specifically a Catholic one, an apparition who should be filtered through the ‘litany of the Inquisition, of Catholic terror’ (p. 37). Thus the Don's resistance to him (and, by extension, Mozart's) takes on a coded Protestant force.</p>
<p>Such critical insights, however, become considerably less convincing when Steinberg seeks to support them through close musical analysis, not least because he fails here and elsewhere in the book to acknowledge or distinguish between the competing claims and limitations of immanent analysis, intentionalism, and reception history. For instance, in <italic>Don Giovanni</italic>, he argues that ‘Mozart moved his cultural critique of baroque patriarchy and ideology into the music, and made music into a critique of the ideology of representation’, thus the opening chords of the opera become ‘an instantiation of a Reformation and Old Testament idea of divine authority, musically prefiguring and opposing a Catholic representational world’ (pp. 27–8). I can't help thinking Mozart would be surprised indeed to learn that he was doing any of this. Sure, we can enrich our relationship to his music through a closer understanding of the cultural history informing its stylistic choices, but we should always acknowledge that the conclusions we might draw remain inescapably ours, not Mozart's.</p>
<p>The chapters that follow take a broadly chronological path from Beethoven to Mahler. Once he strikes the nineteenth century proper, Steinberg is able to draw upon a pre-existing critical tradition that is more overtly in sympathy with his own, and as a form of meta-commentary his style is more successful. Simply put (which, alas, it is not), Steinberg cites in Beethoven's music the beginnings of an aesthetic shift from abstract to absolute music, one that in the music dramas of Wagner becomes mapped onto a shift from ‘subjectivity to identity’, more precisely understood as ‘the reification of music drama as the discourse of the nation’ that accompanied Wagner's passage across the boundary of 1848 (p. 161). The death of Siegmund is thus interpreted as ‘a horrendous allegory for the destruction of subjectivity at the hand of a self-entrapped modernity, where rationality has produced not freedom but Weber's iron cage’ (p. 148).</p>
<p>Steinberg is much more merciful when examining the Requiem settings of Brahms, Verdi, and Dvořák, despite noting that, ‘for their sonic power and—at least potentially—political rhetoric, they have all three the makings of sustained ideological embarrassments’ (p. 163). Indeed, having dealt with Wagner, his book attempts to trace various attempts by composers to recover from what he calls ‘Music Trauma’ (p. 193), leading him thereafter to works by Debussy, Janáček, Bartók, and Schoenberg. At times, particularly in the case of the Requiem settings, this involves attempting to defend each work from what seems otherwise painfully obvious, that they too betray an interest in the ‘unhealthy’ subjectivity that underpins national self-assertion. Then again, this is a book that most certainly does <italic>not</italic> concern itself with the obvious.</p>
<p>In the end, one cannot help thinking that even if <italic>Listening to Reason</italic> remains, as the cover blurb breathlessly states, a ‘pathbreaking work’, the ‘next big statement on nineteenth-century music as a cultural phenomenon’, it would yet be the duty of a reviewer, especially one writing for a journal called <italic>Music & Letters</italic>, to sound a note of dissent. As a matter of course we should expect an author to write about music with a lucidity and incisiveness far greater than Steinberg has been willing or able to do here. Moreover, if nineteenth-century music is as culturally significant as he would claim, we owe it not just to the discipline of musicology, or even just to our own students, but also to the world at large to convey that truth with at least something of the expressive clarity and popular reach we find in the music.</p>
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