<i>Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music</i>, edited by Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton

Reviewed by: Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music Susan Wollenberg (bio) Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, edited by Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton; pp. xv + 280. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, £55.00, $99.95. Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, published in Ashgate's Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, takes a fresh angle on music scholarship, arranging its seventeen chapters in three main sections under the headings of "Europe: Continental Connections," "Empire: Britain, Ireland, and Beyond," and "Spectacle: Theatre, Opera, and Internationalism." Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton have gathered together fourteen papers from the fourth International Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain with three additions: Cowgill on the reception of Mozart's Requiem (1791) in England, Rushton on Henry Hugo Pierson, and Corissa Gould on Edward Elgar. Some dozen of the chapters concentrate on subjects falling within the Victorian period; others add context on either side of it, for instance Cowgill's Mozart reception piece and Duncan Barker's account of Charles Harriss's and Alexander Mackenzie's Canadian tours of 1903 (also contributing geographically to the "beyond" promised in part 2). Further extending the scope of part 2, Bennett Zon transfers ideas of "ethnomusicology" to his study of nineteenth-century British musical scholarship. Zon's chapter, considering how nineteenth-century Western scholars dealt with the "Otherness" of non-Western [End Page 155] music, explores in their writings the powerful presence of such binaries as Christian versus "heathen." Zon finds abundant "evidence of the deprecation, subordination, and exclusion of non-Western music in general music histories" (188-89). Claire Mabilat's study of "Empire and 'Orient' in Opera Libretti Set by Sir Henry Bishop and Edward Solomon" echoes some of these ideas. After invoking Edward Said by way of general introduction, Mabilat argues that the chorus lines "E'en let our humbled foes confess that England conquers but to save," from Bishop's Fall of Algiers (1825), express "the early nineteenth-century idea that the 'savage' could be 'civilized' by 'selfless' Christian imperial domination" (221). Mabilat's analysis of Bishop's and Solomon's "oriental" theatrical works also provides context for better-known examples in the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. Anne Widén's "'Le roi est mort, vive le roi': Languages and Leadership in Niecks's Liszt Obituary" joins the recent surge in scholarly interest in the creation of composers' and performers' images. Widén focuses here particularly on the German-born Frederick Niecks's Franz Liszt obituary for the Musical Times (Sept. 1886), concentrating on "images of Liszt's . . . nobility, and his ostensible status as one of the leaders of the musical world" to look beyond the surface imagery in order to "deduce some of the possible agendas and assumptions behind Niecks's opinions" (45). She relates Niecks's literary style to obituary writing in general as well as, ingeniously, to Liszt's own writings, described by Niecks as "too flowery, over-emphatic . . . and not infrequently bombastic," containing "even hollow rhetoric" (47). Michael Allis's recent work on the reception of Liszt in nineteenth-century England has highlighted the central role of the pianist and conductor Walter Bache. Allis considers this topic here with specific reference to Liszt's symphonic poems, introducing his study of Bache's London concert repertoire with a rhetorical flourish provided by Liszt himself: "Truly, dear Bache, you are a wonder-working friend" (55). Allis demonstrates the intricate network of connections between musical "performance . . . , reception, canon, and value" (55). His chapter, like several others, provides useful appendices listing relevant performance data. The Victorian reception of what was called "ancient" music is considered in part 1 by Isabel Parrott (with reference to William Sterndale Bennett's efforts on behalf of J. S. Bach) and in part 3 by Roberta Montemorra Marvin (exploring Victorian Britain's esteem for that ever-popular pastoral, George Frederic Handel's Acis and Galatea [1718]). Marvin draws on a rich range of sources to illuminate her topic, and, apropos of the burlesque versions she traces, concludes that "as one nineteenth-century English writer noted about burlesque, 'There can be no safer criterion of success than ridicule'" (260...

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