Chapter 11 - Nationalists: vernacular language and music

Summary

Nationalist composers, principally in Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and Russia, were not isolated from mainstream European traditions. Their struggle was not, as is often naively proposed, to learn how to compose in countries where musical education was not available. In each of them there was a flourishing operatic and general musical life. But this was dependent on Western European models that represented the culture of alien dominant regimes from which the Nationalists struggled to emancipate themselves. In doing so, they contributed a series of major works to the international repertoire and, equally significantly, introduced or emphasised a number of elements that affected the future development of opera. These included:

• The use of vernacular elements drawn from the life of ordinary people, bourgeoisie and peasantry, especially in music, song and dance;

• In particular cases, the idea of deriving musical lines not just from the broad expression, but the precise shape and rhythm of language.

Nationalist composers are identified by their (musical) roots in folk material. But this is a simplistic and often misleading notion. Despite this, however, it is clear that in part their drive was to create music from sources outside the languages of the international mainstream. This meant that they made a major contribution to the development of music itself, by providing one means of renewing music after the apparent impasse of late Romanticism.