Romanticism and Music
Music in the Romantic Era. By Alfred Einstein. (Dent. 30s.) Ti-us is a volume in the American Norton History of Music, but it will not strike the reader as a history so much as a set of studies, of very varying interest, in nineteenth-century music. Part One deals with the new status accorded by the Romantics to music and to in- strumental music in particular, and, without trying to give a single definition of Romanticism, shows how many agreedly romantic char- acteristics made this deification of music almost inevitable. The extraordinary contradictions of the nineteenth-century development of music—the simultaneous rejection and idealisation of the musical past, the cultivation of both intimacy and virtuosity, and the equivocal position of the composer placed alternately in an ivory tower and in the vanguard of popular movements—arc carefully unravelled, though it would be too much to say that they are explained.
Part Two deals with actual musical history, and here Dr. Einstein's wide knowledge of German music gives him an opportunity to place the great nineteenth-century figures in relation to each other and the age in which they lived. It is impossible not to be aware of an intense antagonism not only to Wagner the man, but also to some of his most individual work, the Ring for example. Of Brahms—the " posthumous " musician, as Dr. Einstein happily calls him—he writes with deep sympathy and understanding, as of a man born out of due time and turning with nostalgia back to the past or inward to his own personal world of feeling rather than facing outward and forward. Readers of his Greatness in Music will not be surprised by the high status accorded by Dr. Einstein to Verdi: but in general the book is, perhaps naturally, Germanocentric, and both Berlioz and the Russian nationalists are treated as peripheral. He even perpetuates an old and by now exploded theory when he speaks of Mussorgsky's "careless harmony." Part Three consists of a single chapter dealing with musical aesthetics and musicology.
It is perhaps useless to continue to protest against American translations of German books on music. Certainly we must make up our minds to " measures " and the barbarous "thirty-second notes" for bars and demisemiquavers. But are "negate," " envi- sion " and " repetitiousness " even American for deny, envisage and
repetitiveness? The nadir is reached with " accompanimental" which no adoption or grace can make English. And should not translators know a third language besides German and American? "A serment of reconciliation" must mean very little to a reader who has no French and to translate humanitaire by humanistic makes nonsense of the passage. There are several occasions on which the translator, without writing bad English, has obscured or per- verted the sense of the original. The translation from Goethe, for instance, on p. 174 seems to mean the exact opposite of what it should, and on p. 231 we are led to suppose that Lohengrin, rather
than Elsa, failed in the test. These are extreme examples, but throughout the book there are passages which have to be read twice and seem even then to carry only a very doubtful and hazy meaning. I have the impression that a much shorter book, shorn of catalogues of extraneous information and dealing specifically with German Romanticism in music, would have done far more credit to Dr. Einstein, though it might not find a place in the Norton History of
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