Preface to volumes I and II

Summary

‘Never confuse analysis with mere description!’, Hans Keller used waggishly to say, chastising unfortunate speakers at conferences. To Keller, most so-called ‘criticism’ and ‘analysis’ was an amalgam of the descriptive and the metaphorical: ‘The descriptive is senseless, the metaphorical usually nonsense.’ Most analytical writings boiled down to ‘mere tautological descriptions’. Not even Tovey was beyond reproach: ‘his “analyses” are misnomers’, Keller remarked; they were in his view ‘faultless descriptions’ with ‘occasional flashes of profound analytical insight’; otherwise they contained ‘much eminently professional tautology’. More recently, V. Kofi Agawu has taken one analyst to task for failing to observe ‘the distinction between description and analysis, between a critical, necessarily impressionistic commentary and a rigorous interpretative exercise …’

With censure such as this, what justification is there for entitling the contents of these two volumes ‘Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century’? There are in fact two justifications, one intentional, the other actual.

First, it is upon ‘analysis’ that most of the authors represented in these volumes considered they were engaged. Thus, analysing is what Berlioz thought he was doing when he wrote about Beethoven's nine symphonies in 1838 (‘Nous allons essayer l'analyse des symphonies de ce grand maître’), and when he reviewed the first performance of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots on 6 March 1836, and later its score.