Modern German Music: Recollections and Criticisms

Henry Fothergill Chorley was music critic of The Athenaeum for over thirty years, and published several books on the state of contemporary European music, including Music and Manners in France and Germany (1841) and Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections (1862), both reissued in this series. In the two-volume Modern German Music, published in 1854, he revisits many of the topics and places discussed in the 1841 volume, but views them from the other side of the Year of Revolution, 1848, which, he argues, changed the cultural as well as the political atmosphere of the German states significantly and permanently. Lively descriptions of German cities, their culture and especially their music festivals are accompanied by extended essays on Spohr, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn, but Chorley is by no means an uncritical observer, and his comments on the rise of nationalism and militarism in the German states after 1848 now seem prophetic.