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

The fourth chapter deals with one of the most prominent, and thorny, issues in nationalist music—the inspiration of folk sources—to provide a new understanding of the relationship between “the folk” and nationalist art and nation building. It begins with a historical overview of how the products of peasant culture (such as songs, dances, or tales) became conceived as “national” through the efforts of nationalist collectors and researchers. I demonstrate how later artists such as Wagner, Smetana, and Grieg regarded these folk inspirations primarily as raw material for a nationalist art. These composers insisted that folk material had to be elevated or “idealized” before it itself could actually count as art. This process of elevating folk sources into a national art, I argue, reveals one of the fundamental goals of the effort to build a national culture: the fusion of the “low” folk inspirations with the “high” artistic forms represents and effects the way the nation was supposed to become one people, unified across the rural-urban divide.

The effort to build a national culture was not without conflict, and in the fifth chapter I explore two bitterly fought conflicts, namely, the conflicts between national cultures, and also within national cultures. These conflicts arose as a result of nationalists’ desires to create boundaries between their cultures and those of other peoples. I explore Wagner’s campaign to free German music from what he saw as the encroachment and corruption of French and Jewish music. Smetana, for his part, was a committed Wagnerian, and he accepted some German influence on Czech music. To other figures within Czech cultural life, however, Smetana’s Wagnerian leanings were traitorous, and they accused him of trying to “Germanize” Czech musical culture. Grieg represents a third variation on this theme, in that he, too, accepted some German influence, but was subsequently attacked mainly by German music critics for departing from the supposedly universal standards of German music to trifle in the particularity of Norwegian folk inspirations. At the heart of the battles in all three of these cases was an obsession with the “purity” of the national culture, and to what extent foreign influence was admissible in national art.