IF YOU are stubbornly bourgeois, you may enjoy the links to recordings of some of the most sumptuously melodic classical compositions of mid-nineteenth century Europe in this entry. If you take the time to listen to these recordings, I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Thomas F. Bertonneau has added some great examples to the list.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

Bruch’s D-Minor Violin Concerto, his Scottish Fantasy, Raff’s C-Minor Piano Concerto, and Lalo’s Norwegian Fantasyhave in common, with each other and with much of mid-nineteenth century “classical” composition, a basis in folk music.  Bruch, Raff, and Lalo, representatively for Romantic composers, strove to write singable melody; they often did this by mining the treasury of actual folksong, in a way that is obvious in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and Lalo’s Norwegian Fantasy,but rather less obvious (but no less the case) in the purely abstract scores.  The snobbism of twentieth century academicism declared peremptorily that such immediate appeal to ordinary and recognizable emotion was “inauthentic.”  (See Theodore W. Adorno.)  On the contrary, music’s “real” function was to unnerve its audience so as to awaken them to their “alienation” and incite them to social change.  Leftwing critics made similar arguments about portraiture and landscape in painting, condemning “figural art” as “bourgeois.” 

But it is precisely by addressing the nature of song that the Romantic composers forged such direct communication with the listening audience.  I also call attention to the non-chauvinism of Bruch andLalo, the one a German composer who drew on Gaelic melodies, the other a French composer who drew on Scandinavian melody.  For both, the primary thing was melody.

                                                                  — Comments —

Stuart writes:

Some great music links. Much appreciated.

John E. writes:

As to the charge by certain leftists that the Romantic’s love of beauty was ‘inauthentic’ that is of course ridiculous. But the charge that modern composers eschew beauty on principle, while not untrue, overlooks certain ways of thinking about music as an art that I believe to be worthy of consideration.

Is Doestoyevsky’s writing “beautiful”? Very well written, I wager, but beautiful in a conventional sense, almost certainly not. Solzhenitsyn and many others are of a very bleak turn of mind. So it is withthe high modern composers working in the aftermath of WWI and WWII.

Also, Adorno is not the only one who thinks that way. Fortuitously, here is a quote from an article I read on AltRight that speaks to the same issue from a conservative perspective.

Flannery O’Connor was an unapologetic, unreconstructed Southerner of staunchly Catholic and profoundly conservative orientation who wrote unsparingly dark, bleak, andviolent stories. This disconcerted many readers, who couldn’t understand why an author who believed in God and adhered to Christian precepts would so often dwell on such disagreeable subject matter.

Miss O’Connor gave reply in a 1957 essay titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” It was precisely secular modernity’s deadening effect on the individual conscience, she asserted, that necessitated her thematic emphasis on the sordid, the depraved, and the grotesque; people needed to be shocked, shaken up, and reminded of what was important. “To the hard of hearing you shout,” she wrote, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures.

So, I think there is room for conservatives to recognise something of value in modern music.

The radical rejection of melody has more in common with the postmodern abandonment of narrative in literature. Doestoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor were not postmodern writers who discarded the conventions of form. Though their subject matter was dark, they created beautiful compositions. Doestoyevsky was beautiful in a conventional sense. Much of classical music explores dark themes.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

It is quite true, thank God, that Adorno did not speak for everyone; I never implied that he did.  Regrettably Adorno spoke for entrenched interests, and his implacable anti-Romanticism dominated departments of music and elite critical opinion from 1950 until the 1990s.  My defense of Romantic tunefulness should not be construed, however, as a blanket dismissal of all modern, or post-Romantic, music.  On the contrary, I would argue for a certain rarefied beauty in Schoenberg’s string quartets and in Webern’s pointillist orchestral miniatures; but John P. would agree with me, I imagine, that the appeal of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet or Webern’s Symphony will never be as wide as the appeal of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, for obvious reasons. 

Nor should anything I wrote be construed as a vote for some Polly Anna-ishformula for art.  The slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is profoundly disturbing, as is the concluding Chaconne of Brahms’ Fourth.  That’s how it should be.  Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is so emotionally éclatant that I doubt whether I could bear to confront it more than once in five years.  Stravinsky’s Sacre du printempsis a necessary element in anyone’s contemporary education.  And so forth.  My interest is, finally, in what is beautiful.  It is a paradox of aesthetic beauty that fell events can be transfigured and that they can be made to transfigure to audience.  Nevertheless, a good deal of self-denominating modern or avant-garde music is, like so much of modern or avant-garde art, cheap goading of the listener and the purveyance of ugliness for the sake of shock entirely.

The best modern composers had the same instincts as the best Romantic composers.  I suggest that the curious listen to the opening bars of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasyand then listen to the opening bars of Bela Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2 (1938).  Amazingly, the same bardic harp is there, accompanying the same pensive fiddle, and yet, in its harmonies (quite astringent) and orchestration (almost no doublings, where Bruch’s score is full of doublings), the Bartok differs remarkably from the Bruch.

John P. writes:

What I will say is that it is a genuine mystery to me that people (and not only conservatives, either) are so universal in their distaste for modern music. I don’t deny that more bad music has been composed in the twentieth century than previously, this was inevitable given the vast expansion of composition and its “professionalisation” in combination with the subsidisation of music in Europe (not so much in the US).

I, myself, find the Schoenberg 4th Quartet, the Webern String Trio, Elliott Carter’s 2nd Quartet, Boulez’s ‘Le Marteau Sans Maitre’, Ligeti’s ‘Lux Aeterna’ and many other modern pieces to be beautiful, powerful, engaging and at times harrowing examples of the musical art. I am by no means untutored in music and have studied the scores of all the aforementioned pieces, as well as the old masterworks such as Bach’s ‘Die Kunst der Fuge’ and ‘Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (I & II), the Beethoven Late Quartets (perhaps we can agree that the C# Minor Op. 131 is one of the most sublime pieces ever written?) andI find them to be convincing.

I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this subject.

Laura writes:

I did not intend a blank condemnation of modern music. My point was not that only very melodic music is beautiful.

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