Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1920 by Deborah Heckert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1920 by Deborah Heckert Christopher Little Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1920. By Deborah Heckert. (Music in Britain, 1600–2000.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2018. [ix, 238 p. ISBN 9781783272075 (hardcover), $99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Deborah Heckert's Composing History is a valuable contribution to scholarship on English music. As its subtitle indicates, it is an exploration of musical and cultural revival of the masque genre in Great Britain. It is also an interrogation of English nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Heckert structures her monograph so that the former becomes a series of case studies of the latter. She succeeds in balancing the two subjects, as well as the format of context and case study in each chapter, so that the monograph feels much longer and weightier than its slim two hundred pages. Heckert intertwines the topics of masque revival and English national identity through the concept of "invented tradition" (p. 4), drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm. She applies his idea of the reinvention of tradition for new social or cultural effect within each chapter, first to particular masques either revived or newly composed during the latter half of the nineteenth century and then to the broader revival of British music during the same period, known as the English Musical Renaissance. To untangle these topics for the purposes of review, Heckert's historiography of the masque explains which features were retained and which were reinvented for contemporary British audiences. The masque originated as an Elizabethan court entertainment, a musical and dramatic spectacle centered around dances performed by the professional company of "masquers," then joined by select members of the court in the final "revels." The story, often slight, consisted of historical or allegorical narratives designed to reify the monarchy and reinforce existing social hierarchy. Important characters arrived onstage in grand entrance processions or underwent spectacular transformation scenes. Dangerous progressive elements were put to flight by the restoration of tradition, history, or a goodness mythologically derived. The courtly masque did not survive the seventeenth century, and two hundred years or so separate its "golden age" from its revival. Rediscovery of the masque began in 1840 as a way to celebrate the marriage of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, and Albert, Prince Consort of Victoria. Heckert notes that this was an opportunity to connect the masque's "impressive pedigree" to the present monarchy as well as to "recapture the masque as a nostalgic, nationalistic genre" (p. 43). Heckert dates the revival of the masque proper to another royal wedding, that of Albert, Prince of Wales, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, celebrated by two newly composed—and rival—masques. As performance opportunities and public interest in the historical genre grew, its audience and purpose changed. It became a genre that spoke to the nation as a whole, straddling high and popular cultures through its inclusion in "rational recreation" (p. 140) aimed at uplifting the new—and newly restless—urban working class. By the end of the century, Heckert argues, the now-reinvented genre became a site where conflicting arguments about an increasingly uneasy English national identity could be played out. Economic and naval challenges from Germany, jingoism and military embarrassment in the Boer War, and social unrest, represented by the success of the Labour Party in the 1905 elections, all contributed [End Page 102] to a desire for a stable "English" identity. The status of the masque as a "historical genre" (p. 14) having "traditional associations with nationalism and patriotism" (p. 24) allowed its dramatic and musical representations of England's past to, as Heckert describes, "forcefully [communicate] messages about England's modern, industrial, and imperialistic present" (p. 13). The contemporaneous revival of national music known as the English Musical Renaissance also sought to address these issues. Heckert devotes much of her contextual discussions to a critique of this movement. Perhaps most fruitfully, she explodes the unity of purpose and organic growth attributed to it by later authors, such as Frank Howes and Michael Trend, by tracing how the goals of the Renaissance changed as members of its founding generation...