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Posted by Martin Walker on March 5, 2008, 11:20 am
Link: MusicWeb page
Message modified by board administrator March 5, 2008, 1:21 pm
I hope that for the sake of the history of Anglo-German relations you will permit me to indulge in a pedantic excursion, Bob. When you say that "that marvellous, and totally spurious, comment from the 1920s was coined that England was "ein Land ohne Musik" you find yourself contradicted by the following quotation from that august source of musicological precision, MusicWeb itself, where Paul Serotsky had the following to say: "“The Land without Music” was an anti-English polemic, penned in 1904 by Oskar Adolf Hermann (!) Schmitz, who didn’t seem to have noticed that this was already no longer true. However, when the idea - that England was the only cultured country without its own music - was first mooted in 1866, it held more than a grain of truth. England, probably too busy with the Industrial Revolution and what-have-you, seemed to have tucked its indigenous “classical” music away in the cloisters." This statement itself must, however, be revised in the interests of accuracy: the originator of the, ahem, calumny upon English music in the 19th century was launched into the world by the German writer and revolutionary Georg Weerth, who was in England from 1843-44 (and was befriended by Friedrich Engels there). I translate from his memoirs of this period - very amusing & Dickensian in spirit: "Unfortunately my hosts had learned that I was a German, unfortunately they imagined that all Germans were musical and idiotically >fond of music> (English in the text - mjw) and now the singing went on all day long! ...the notes stumbled over one another like country oafs tumbling down the church steps...(etc - mjw), the piano groaned as if suffering from raging consumption, the melody...ended suddenly with a heartbreaking cry, with the most horrifying dissonance. (The whole household then begins to sing "God save the Queen" - endlessly and very badly - to cover up the embarrassing silence - mjw).
Pity him who was forced to listen to this concert! Sublime Spirit, thou gavest them all; thou gavest them Shakespeare and Milton, thou gavest them Westminster Abbey so that both great and small might be comfortably buried there, thou gavest them fleets and oceans, India and China, thou madest them supreme above all other nations. Sublime Spirit, thou gavest them all - but not music! The English can neither sing nor play music. An Englishman will sooner learn how to earn a million pounds than how to keep a tune in his head. (etc etc! mjw). The stereotype was thus lodged in the German mind before the mid-century, some time before 1866. It only needs a kind encouraging word from the founder of this august etc site for me to translate the whole passage for the delectation of the readers.
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Martin has agreed to prepare something for MusicWeb. I will add it to the existing page on this topic at the link below.
Len Mullenger
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