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In May 1935, Karol Szymanowski reached the Latvian capital, Riga, as part of what turned out to be his last major concert tour. Although the performance of his Symphonie concertante for piano and orchestra (1932) failed to materialise, he did accompany his sister, the soprano Stanisława Szymanowska, and the violinist Wacław Niemczyk in two recitals of his songs and chamber music. Coincidentally, the twenty-two-year-old Witold Lutosławski was also in Riga to perform his Piano Sonata (1934) as part of a student exchange concert. Tantalisingly, this was to be the one and only meeting between two of the major figures in twentieth-century Polish music. Lutosławski later recalled: ‘Szymanowski was extremely kind to our small group. He came to our concert, we walked around the town together and accompanied him to Radio Riga … After our concert, Wacław Niemczyk told me: “Karol liked your Sonata very much; however he wouldn't say it to you.”’ Two years later, on Easter Sunday, 29 March 1937, Szymanowski died aged fifty-four in a Swiss sanatorium, the victim of long-term tuberculosis. For some time, Szymanowski had felt neglected in Poland. As he wrote from his rented home, ‘Atma’, in the Tatra mountain resort of Zakopane in 1934: Polish officialdom (the Government) repeatedly refuses to recognise me. They do so only when I am needed for propaganda purposes, as it is impossible even for them to deny that amongst creative artists (not virtuosi) I alone (and not solely amongst composers but in other fields as well) have already acquired some reputation abroad … The fact is, they care nothing for me here, and that I could die without anyone lifting a finger. My funeral will be a different story. I am convinced it will be splendid. People here love the funeral processions of great men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the passage of anti-Jewish racial laws in Italy between September and November 1938, the Fascist regime banned Jews not only from public schools and universities, but also from academies and learned societies. Almost overnight, Italian Jews were completely eliminated from the Italian cultural milieu. Although in the past decade new research has documented the impact of the racial laws on Jewish teachers, professors, and writers, this chapter examines the position of the Italian academies on admittance of Jewish members before and after the racial laws to the onset of racial persecution in Fascist Italy. In the world of the academies, as well as in universities and schools, enforcement of governmental directives was quick, effective, and accompanied by a “deafening silence” of members of the institutions concerned. Acquiescence, active consent, and concern about exclusion from the cultural milieu made – with a few exceptions – the ban of Jewish intellectuals substantially accepted. Academies were a major element of Italian cultural organizations. They included many different types: some had a long and well-established tradition, whereas others had been founded more recently, such as societies for historical studies as well as some scientific societies specializing in different subject areas. These academies, institutes, and societies constituted an organizational benchmark that served as sites for cultural exchanges. Their publications (serials, collections, papers, and conference proceedings) functioned as a means of cultural and scientific diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MUSIC WITHOUT WORDS One of the most clearly descriptive generic titles of Western music of recent centuries is also one of the most intriguing: ‘Das Lied ohne Worte’, the Song without Words. Mendelssohn published six volumes of forty-eight such pieces in 1832–45, often charming, sometimes deeply moving, in some cases composed simply, very ‘playable’ and in ‘folk’ style, in other cases – rather less commonly – extremely skilful compositionally in ways that are easy to perceive (for example, in the A-flat ‘Duetto’, No. 18, which combines on one instrument the female and male ‘voice’, separately as well as ‘singing’ together, with full piano accompaniment). The very title ‘Song without Words’ triggers unusual questions. Why, for instance, would anyone want to write a wordless song? How do we know in the absence of words that a ‘song’ is what this kind of music is designed to be? And is music of this kind supposed to be instead of song, some kind of complement to the ‘real’ thing, or is it perhaps the best that can be done alone at the piano (assuming that the pianist lacks the ability to sing and play simultaneously to the same standard?), and is it thus a makeshift of some sort? Julian Rushton is right, I believe, to point in his essay ‘Music and the Poetic’ to the aura of heightened expression and what will be called here a kind of ‘transvocality’ in this period, which makes the Song without Words seem a most natural genre in the wider context: An absence of specificity is a vital part of the Romantic project which finds poetry in unmediated sound …[…] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the new musical developments in the years following the First World War, none has been entangled in more controversy than the claim made by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg that their music, and ‘the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another’ on which much of it was based (otherwise known as serialism), represented the culmination of the mainstream of the Austro-German tradition and thus, by implication, of the mainstream of music in general. All three composers maintained that theirs was the one true path, and drew on historical, national, and even metaphysical arguments to justify their claims. Schoenberg's ‘National Music’ (1931) traced his lineage from Bach and Mozart, through Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms, concluding, ‘I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music, which being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition’. In a series of lectures from 1932–3, Webern pushed the origins of ‘The Path to Twelve-Tone Composition’ back past the Netherlanders all the way to Gregorian chant; insisting on the historical inevitability and necessity of twelve-tone composition, he charted a progression from the breakdown of the system of the church modes, through to Wagner's chromatic harmony, the end of tonality, and finally to twelve-tone composition, writing, ‘It's my belief that ever since music has been written, all the great composers have instinctively had this before them as a goal.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Hugo Riemann died on 10 July 1919, only one week before his seventieth birthday, it was evident that the young discipline of musicology had lost one of its cornerstones. A special issue of the recently founded journal Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, which had been planned as a congratulatory volume for him, now had to double as his obituary. Its editor Alfred Einstein appraised Riemann's achievement, with what appears like uncanny prescience, in terms of its historic significance: In Hugo Riemann, a piece of the history of musicological research of the past half-century is embodied. Of all the great names, if his is ignored, it becomes virtually impossible to conceive of this history. It goes without saying that the celebratory-commemorative occasion for which this eulogy was written called for a certain degree of honey-mouthed exaggeration. But even if we treat Einstein's superlative assessment with some caution, what remains nonetheless is that even during his lifetime, Riemann's work was considered a milestone in the history of musicology. His prodigious output encompassed over fifty books, and countless articles and editions. His music dictionary – compiled entirely by himself – became the standard reference work for generations. And his theories of harmony and metre suggested that the basic codes of music had finally been cracked. In short, Riemann was a key player in what is easily stylised into a heroic pioneering age of the history of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the metaphor of musical logic, as discussed in the previous chapter, the metaphor of a syntax of music was prominently employed by Riemann to describe his idea of how music works. Again, its precise meaning and the interrelation between the two metaphors are anything but clear. It is noticeable that Riemann's early works are oriented by various aspects of language: after his dissertation, Musikalische Logik, he embarked on two projects entitled Musikalische Syntaxis (1877) and Musikalische Grammatik, though the latter manuscript remained unpublished and was destroyed when he could not find a publisher. In some ways, the early works would have appeared like a kind of ‘musicological trivium’, in which linguistic aspects of music are determined. The relation between logic and syntax is addressed in Musikalische Syntaxis: If one insists on drawing analogies, one could roughly compare the … simple [cadential] thesis with the sentence of the simple judgement in language. The subject would be the tonic and the predicate the confirmation through Quint-klänge, Terzklänge, etc. The relationship between language and logic that Riemann presents here is marked by a certain uneasiness: although he seems to be talking about language, the ‘simple judgement’ that he mentioned would suggest that he is primarily thinking about logic. Under this ambivalent notion it becomes impossible to tell whether the ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ which he defined in the sentence that follows are supposed to be logical or linguistic terms – or rather, Riemann appeared to underline that he considered the two to be indistinguishable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradox attending Wagner's attempt to limn the structural principles of his ideal musical drama in Part III of Opera and Drama is that these principles had as yet no empirical artistic object. The haziness of so many of the theoretical prescriptions in the Zurich writings is a consequence not only of Wagner's overwrought prose style, but also of the peculiar context of these writings in the creative vacuum of the early years of exile. As has often been pointed out, the ideas of Opera and Drama are awkwardly situated between the “no longer” of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and the “not yet” of the Ring. The shadowy nature of this “theory,” then, is explained to some extent by the fact that it is a theory of non-existent works, unrealized ones: Siegfrieds Tod and Wieland der Schmied. (The abortive musical sketches for Siegfrieds Tod from 1850 are a logical counterpart to the hazy theory of the contemporary essays, not so much because composition couldn't proceed for lack of theory, but the reverse: Wagner couldn't offer a fully coherent, detailed “theory” of works that he had yet to compose.) While Wagner did have in the text of Siegfrieds Tod a concrete object for his observations on Stabreim – however fanciful they may sound – he had none as yet for the specifically musical component of his proposals, most prominently the embryonic theory of “leitmotifs” (the motives of “anticipation” and “reminiscence” expounded in sections five and six of Part III of Opera and Drama) and the concept of a “poetic-musical period” proposed in section three. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]