Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds by Peter Franklin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds by Peter Franklin Erinn Knyt Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds. By Peter Franklin. (Ernest Bloch Lectures; The Fletcher Jones Foundation, Humanities Imprint.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. [xvii, 197 p. ISBN 9780520280397 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520958036 (e-book), $60.] Illustrations, facsimiles, bibliographic references, index. In Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds, Peter Franklin seeks to reassess the importance of a repertoire largely shunned by musicologists because of its popular appeal and its purported historical irrelevancy. As Franklin notes, criticisms of late-romantic music are numerous and scathing. Writing to Alban Berg in 1929, Theodor Adorno, for instance, described one of Franz Schreker’s operas, Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound, 1901–12), after which Franklin’s book is partially entitled, as “palatable only to maidservants; a series of kitsch postcards” (Adorno quoted in Franklin, p. 144). Franklin, however, unabashedly admits his own love for this music that many scholars publicly profess to disdain (even if they secretly like it). He includes numerous descriptions of his own pleasurable experiences listening to the music. Franklin’s delight in the subject matter is also evident from the prose style, which can be as entertaining as the music under consideration, teeming as it is with many colorful adjectives and metaphors. For instance, consider this celebratory description of Franklin’s first experience of hearing Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 2: The silence is broken by a music whose solemn processional only gradually begins to be interrupted by rhetorical outbursts of more urgent emotion. These seem to initiate greater animation, as if in preparation or catastrophe before calming once more. A more sensuous unfolding now quietly takes over; it will shortly embrace us with an impressive new theme that seems to aspire to higher things and grows in self-confidence. It carries our spirits forward, higher and higher, until a dizzying outburst of grandeur confirms the arrival of our heart’s desire—perhaps we visualize a sunburst glory out of the mists of a mountain landscape. Slowly, however, the moment passes and the music quietens with the realization of loss, becomes a nostalgic lament for what was, what might have been. (p. xi) As entertaining as such descriptions are, however, this is not a book for the general public. Any reader expecting light fare will be surprised by complex ideas interwoven into the lively descriptions, many of which can only be grasped through careful contemplation and several readings. It is a book for serious music scholars and aestheticians. If Franklin’s book seems, at times, anecdotal, discursive, and occasionally redundant, this can be explained by the fact that it emerged from a series of six lectures given at the University of California, Berkeley, when Franklin was Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the fall of 2010. Unsurprisingly then, there are plenty of references to the scholarship of Berkeley Professor Richard Taruskin, whose monumental history of Western music (Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. [Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005]) elicits Franklin’s admiration. Even so, Franklin seeks to add “footnotes,” as he puts it, to Taruskin’s scholarship, and to create a more nuanced vision of the importance of late-romantic music (p. 17). Franklin’s six lectures, which make frequent reference to literature and visual art, became six chapters, several with descriptively “late-romantic titles” replete with natural imagery, allusions to emotion, and descriptive adjectives. A few of the more colorful include “Sunsets, Sunrises, and Decadent Oceanics” and “Making the World Weep.” [End Page 181] For someone seeking to “reclaim” a repertoire for scholars and musicologists, Franklin selected a nontraditional methodological approach. Rather than relying on music analyses to uncover hidden significance in the music, Franklin focuses instead on reinterpreting the very feature of the music most criticized: its impression on listeners. He thus includes no excerpts from scores in the text, and favors musical description and the experience of listening over scholarly engagement with the printed notes. The lone score facsimile provided in the book functions more like a photograph or image than evidence for an analytical point (pp. 118–19). By...