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Marching to the Canon examines the history of Schubert's Marche
militaire no.1 from its beginnings, through its many arrangements,
to its impact on dance, literature, film, and music. Marche
militaire is Franz Schubert's most recognizable and beloved
instrumental work. Originally published for piano four hands in
1826, this tuneful march -- Schubert's first of three military
marches -- was arranged, adapted, and incorporated into new
incarnations over the next two centuries. Its success was due to
its chameleonlike ability to cross the still-porous borders between
canonic and popular repertories, creating a performance life
thatmade deep inroads into dance, literature, and film, and
inspired quotations or allusions in other music Marching to the
Canon examines the history of Schubert's storied Marche militaire
from its modest beginnings as aduet published for domestic
consumption to its now-ubiquitous presence. After detailing the
composition, publication, and reception of the original march, the
book analyzes the impact of transcriptions and arrangements for
solo piano, orchestra, band, and other settings. In addition, it
considers the ways the march was used symbolically, even
manipulated, during the Franco-Prussian War and the two world wars,
as well as the diverse creative uses of the piece by significant
figures as varied as Willa Cather, Isadora Duncan, Walt Disney, and
Igor Stravinsky. This study of the reception and impact of the
Marche militaire offers a unique narrative illuminating the world
that enshrined this remarkable score as one of the most memorable
musical works of the nineteenth century. Scott Messing is the
Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and the author
of two works available from theUniversity of Rochester Press:
Neoclassicism in Music and the two-volume Schubert in the European
Imagination.
How Franz Schubert and his compositions were viewed in
nineteenth-century European criticism, literature, and the visual
arts, from Schumann to George Eliot to Whistler. In Schubert in the
European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras,
Scott Messing examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert
as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture. The
concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in
1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's
Mädchencharakter ("girlish" character), by contrast to the
purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. What attracted
Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident
in some of Schumann's own works that echo those of Schubert's in
intriguing ways. Schubert's supposedly feminine quality acted upon
the popular consciousness also through the writers and artists --
in German-speaking Europe but also in France and England -- whose
fictional characters perform and hear Schubert'smusic. The figures
discussed include Musset, Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot,
Henry James, Beardsley, Whistler, Storm, Fontane, and Heinrich and
Thomas Mann. Over time, Schubert's stature became inextricably
entwinedwith concepts of the distinct social roles of men and
women, especially in domestic settings. For a composer whose
reputation was principally founded upon musical genres that both
the public and professionals construed as most suitable for private
performance, the lure to locate Schubert within domestic spaces and
to attach to him the attributes of its female occupants must have
been irresistible. The story told is not without its complications,
as this book reveals in an analysis of the response to Schubert in
England, where the composer's eminence was questioned by critics
whose arguments sometimes hinged on the more problematic aspects of
gender in Victorian culture. Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana
Professor of Music at Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in
Music (University of Rochester Press, 1996).
The first historical and critical study of neoclassicism from the
genesis of the concept in fin de siecleFrance in the 1870s through
the Schoenberg/Stravinsky polemic. By the end of the nineteenth
century the traits of "classicism" in music had become clearly
established. This codification cast long shadows over contemporary
artists, encouraging a movement away from order, continuity and
tradition towards freedom, innovation and novelty - and the term
neoclassicism made its first appearance. This study, the first ever
critical examination of "neoclassicism" in music, provides a broad
cultural context for the investigation of its origins, then looks
in turn at Wagner and the French reaction to him; Saint-Saens,
d'Indy, Debussy, Ravel and their French contemporaries; Germany and
France in the decade which includes the First World War, with
special reference to Thomas Mann and Ferrucio Busoni, and to Jean
Cocteau and the "New Simplicity"; and Igor Stravinsky, the composer
most frequently cited in connection with this term. Reprint; first
published 1988.
Examines the history of musical self-quotation, and reveals and
explores a previously unidentified case of Schubert quoting one of
his own songs in a major instrumental work. Enthusiasts and experts
have long relished Schubert's quotations of his own music. This
study centers on a previously unidentified pairing: "Ave Maria,"
one of his most beloved songs, and the Piano Trio no. 2, a
masterpiece that holds a unique position in his career. Messing's
Self-Quotation in Schubert interrogates the concept of
self-quotation from the standpoints of terminology and authorial
intent, and it demonstrates, for the first time, how Schubert's
practice of self-quotation relates to prevailing practices in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Messing goes on to
analyze in detail the musical relationships between the two works
and to investigate thecircumstances that led Schubert to compose
each of them. "Ave Maria" is one of the few Schubert songs for
which we have documentation of some early private performances, and
the trio stood at the heart of Schubert's only public concert
devoted to his works. Messing establishes that Schubert sought to
convey an associative meaning with this self-quotation, trusting in
his contemporaries' familiarity with the original melody and with
Walter Scott's poem, a text that carried profound resonances in
Catholic Vienna. Scrutinizing this evidence yields the symbolic
purpose behind Schubert's allusion to "Ave Maria" in the piano
trio: honoring the recently deceased Beethoven andvalidating
Schubert as his legatee. SCOTT MESSING is Charles A. Dana Professor
of Music Emeritus at Alma College.
A richly detailed examination of the historical reception of Franz
Schubert in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, with a
concentration on fin-de-siecle Vienna. Schubert in the European
Imagination: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna examines the composer's
historical and cultural reception by Viennese modernists. By 1900,
issues of gender had crossed with those of nationalism, especially
in thecity that came to consider Schubert as its favorite musical
son. As Messing here explains and explores in rich detail,
composers, writers, and visual artists manipulated the conventions
of the composer and gender in ways that critiqued the very culture
that had created this image. In order to expose the hypocrisy of
social relationships, painter Gustav Klimt and writers Arthur
Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Peter Altenberg exploited
the collision between innocence and sexuality, and Schubert was a
readily familiar sign for the former. The composer Arnold
Schoenberg substituted his own formulation of Schubert in place of
the older, popular conceptions of the composer, adding him to an
illustrious list of figures whose significance he sought to
redesign. Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at
Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in Music (University
ofRochester Press, 1996).
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