ABSTRACT
It is probably no overstatement to say that Carl Dahlhaus’s Nineteenth-Century Music 1 could alter the horizon of English-language musicology. Whether we wish to take issue with it or to build upon it, the book provides a needed focus for discussion, and it seems likely to remain for some time the single broad argument about the century that professionals will be expected to have confronted. Yet the book is not self-explanatory, particularly for American readers. Much of its raison d’être lies beneath the surface of its compact, often oblique prose, and it presumes a readership involved in methodological disputes taken for granted in West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Not surprisingly, the American response to date has been to sidestep the contextual engagement of its arguments in favor of noting the disturbing contrast between the brilliance of Dahlhaus’s intellectualist approach to the history of music and the vexing reality of his apparent unwillingness to consider non-Germanic music on its own terms, his rigorously judgemental pronouncements, and his occasional errors of factual detail. Thus Philip Gossett, Dahlhaus’s sharpest American critic to date, recently concluded that “the errors [of Nineteenth-Century Music] reveal a systemic failure. Dahlhaus’s central vision is so pervasive that it tends to misrepresent or demean the music it treats.” 2
