Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building ...

First, in terms of their art, Wagner, Smetana, and Grieg sought to establish through both their artistic creativity and social activism a uniquely national music, a music that would meet the highest standards of art and hence both enlighten and nationalize the audiences who heard that music. They all viewed the creation of a national art as an essential means of rescuing their nations from a historical and cultural decline. All three employed similar means in the production of their national artworks: they set to music texts in their national language, they evoked their country’s landscape, and they incorporated elements from the history and legends associated with their homeland. They also all relied extensively on sources stemming from the peasant classes—which were perceived as the purest repository of the nation’s cultural values—in order to elevate those folk songs, dances, and tales into a high art.

Second, we will see how these three composers contributed to the creation of a national culture. As part of their projects, they sought to draw boundaries between their nation’s art and that of other nations. They were concerned to create something distinct, different, and unmistakably German, Czech, or Norwegian. At the same time, though, they also wanted to transcend boundaries with their art. They wanted to create music that, through its nationality, would go out into the world to testify to their nation’s cultural achievements, and that would, like all great art, be universal. However, the ultimate function of such art, as a critical element of the national culture, would be to produce national citizens.

Finally, the ideas and tools that Wagner, Smetana, and Grieg employed to achieve their ends simultaneously helped constitute the role of nationalist artists such as composers. Their ideas and tools are essentially identical to those of all European nationalist composers: they are consistently applied, across countries and generations, to meet the previously mentioned two goals of creating national music and national cultures. Within this broadly similar picture, however, the variations in how the composers used these strategies will in fact help reveal the intellectual, artistic, and functional content of the strategies that define the role of the nationalist composer. Through the story of these three composers’ ideas and works, then, we will read the larger story of nationalist music, and indeed, of nation building itself.