"Einheit", "Freiheit", and Vormärz Aesthetics: Political ventures through formal strategies in Ferdinand David's Violin Concerti

Mitterer, Dominik

Abstract

The German Vormärz (1815–49) was a time of cultural reform that renegotiated the individual’s place in society through the interplay of aesthetics and politics (Garratt 2010). In this paper I ask how violin concerti from this period interrogate the political through their solo-tutti interactions and techniques of formal dis-unity and incompleteness. Speculation about the socio-political expressivity of concertante works has persisted in the aftermath of the New Musicology (McClary 1986, Kerman 1999, and Tusa 2012), and in hermeneutic responses to the New Formenlehre (William Caplin 2001, Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, and Horton 2017). By contrast, I propose to historicise the hermeneutics of concerto form: the use of politically loaded metaphors to describe the concerto’s solo-tutti interactions served to politicise the Vormärz concerto’s discourse, e.g. Eduard Krüger’s depiction of the soloist as either a ‘cooperative democrat’ or an ‘eager absolutist’ who ‘creates a state within the state’.

Ideas of ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ encompassed questions of national unification of the German lands vs. national particularism and what it meant for an individual to be free or self-determining in relation to a collective. Musicians, politicians, and critics explored these ideas alike, either in decidedly political compositions or through the politicised reception of music (Applegate 1998; 2012). Musicologists previously showed how ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ politicised the individual-collective juxtaposition in sung traditions that make the politicisation explicit through text (Matthew 2016, Daverio 2012). I will show that questions around ‘unity’ and ‘freedom’ accumulated in discussions of instrumental music towards the 1848/9 revolutions, shaping both musical practices of formal (dis-)unity – notably in works by Spohr, David and Mendelssohn – and critical responses to specific Vormärz violin concerti in Leipzig. This paper offers a twofold approach: firstly, it investigates how ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘unity’ shaped the musical discourse around and musical practices of the concerto. Secondly, it takes Ferdinand David’s violin concerti Nos. 1–4 (1839–48) as case studies of how either dramatic solo-tutti interactions or features of formal (in-)completeness can be brought into a critical dialogue with ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘unity’ to arrive at an understanding of how musical aesthetics interrogated Vormärz politics.

Citation

Mitterer, D. (2023, December). "Einheit", "Freiheit", and Vormärz Aesthetics: Political ventures through formal strategies in Ferdinand David's Violin Concerti. Paper presented at 2023 AMS Annual Meeting, Denver

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 2023 AMS Annual Meeting
• Conference Location: Denver
• Start Date: Dec 9, 2023
• End Date: Dec 12, 2023
• Deposit Date: Dec 4, 2023
• Keywords: Violin Concerto; Vormärz; Formenlehre; Ferdinand David; German Romanticism
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1981367