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

As these ideas and possibilities were applied—that is, translated into actual practice—so these practices came to define the role of the nationalist artist, since the practices are what defines the role: what nationalist artists are is what they do.

Stated succinctly, the effort to create a national music illuminates the emergence of nationalist intellectuals as social actors and lays bare the cultural strategies for “building” nations. That is why the story of nationalist music is such a significant one, because it is inextricably bound up with some of the most far-reaching political, social, and cultural developments of nineteenth-century European history. All European nationalist movements are unthinkable without some cultural content. The culture was, again, what would give meaning to the national identity. And it was the job, above all, of nationalist artists to create that culture. Without them, where would the content of the culture come from? What works, whether of poetry, prose, visual arts, or music, could there be to constitute the nation’s cultural uniqueness? The creation of the national culture, then—along with the other two creative processes, that of the actors who would create the culture (nationalist artists) and of a specific form of that culture (nationalist music)—are all central to the development of nationalism. As they are fundamental to the world phenomenon of nationalism, so too must they be understood as fundamental to world history.

It was the individual nationalist artists, naturally, who fueled this phenomenon, and in order to reach any kind of understanding of these three processes of creation, we have to study individuals who put these ideas into practice. Thus the nationalist composers Richard Wagner, Bedřich Smetana, and Edvard Grieg are my lens for exploring the phenomenon of nationalist art, and of music specifically. Though (in a strange coincidence) they were all just slightly over five feet tall, each man nonetheless assumed a towering position within the nationalist movements in his own country—Germany, the Czech lands, and Norway, respectively. In the course of this book we will follow these composers along the path of the three creative processes they were en­gaged in.