After Wagner

Next to the influence of Wagner, the most potent force in the music of the mid-nineteenth century was nationalism, a more or less conscious nationalism springing in practically every case from political causes, generally from political repression. The deliberate Germanness of Weber was a product of the intense national emotion of the War of Liberation against Napoleon ¹ and German national consciousness was kept at a high temperature throughout the century, first by Liberal aspirations and the desire for a unified Germany, then by the victory over France and the establishment of the Empire. (Though success was noticeably a less powerful artistic stimulus than striving.) Chopin, Liszt and Smetana were obviously made patriot-musicians by the repression of their respective countries by Russia and Austria. And it should not be overlooked that Grieg’s Norway, uneasily yoked to Sweden, was much more aggressively conscious of its Norwegianness than the Norway of to-day. Russia was not suffering from foreign domination but she was suffering very badly from a combination of inferiority complex with quasi-mystical imperialism. It is true that Glinka was first filled with the desire to “write music in Russian” by his homesickness in Italy, but the Russian nationalist movement of the eighteen-sixties was a by-product of that strange half-religious, half-political faith in the world-mission of the Slavonic peoples which played such an important part in Russian thought at this period and for some time after. ²