ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, Columbia Records reluctantly agreed to underwrite Leonard Bernstein’s cycle of Mahler symphonies, which my graduate-school mentors characterised as cheap, bloated movie music. Sometimes we budding musicologists would sneak off and buy one of these recordings, festooned with acid-rock covers to attract the counterculture—the only listenership Bernstein thought he could trust at the time. And my teachers were scandalised to see us with this rubbish in their hallowed halls.
Fifty years later, my own students express skepticism when I tell them this story, so uncontroversial is Mahler’s place in the canon. Yet they cringe when I play Rachmaninoff or (worse yet) show a clip from the film Brief Encounter, and they still apologise for programming Tchaikovsky on their recitals. The lessons of High Modernism continue to marginalise those repertories. It is as though learning to scoff at such music is the price for academic respectability.
More than any other musicologist, Peter Franklin has sought to change the ways we regard these repertories—not only the symphonies, concertos, and operas of the Late Romantic style but also the film scores that absorbed its gestures. It is no accident that he works both sides of that cultural divide, explaining how these practices appealed to audiences and also why Modernist critics believed they had to denigrate such musics, converting the most loved and effective compositions of the twentieth century into mere guilty pleasures.
This essay assesses the intellectual brilliance and moral courage with which Franklin confronted these biases. By returning those guilty pleasures to us as proper sites of enjoyment and legitimate academic study, he has stared down those who would deny the centrality of Late Romantic music to our cultural history.
