Review: Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Ryan Minor

Abstract

Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Ryan Minor. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. viii, 275 pp. Ryan Minor's Choral Fantasies is one of the few monographs to turn a lens on the widespread phenomenon of choral music making in the nineteenth century. His is a thought-provoking book, and though it focuses on just a handful of works, it sheds light on the significant role choral singers had as representatives of the people's voice in reflecting the political philosophies of (in this case) German society. Its fundamental premise is that the chorus, through its collective choral voice, carries with it great power to reach others and to foster growth for the greater good—spiritual, political, cultural; the interior goals can be varied or shared—by virtue of its essential humanness, and its ability to communicate without needing anything as an intermediary.1 In the opening pages of his introduction, Minor anchors his ideas to the early nineteenth-century philosophies of Hans Georg Nageli and Gustav Schilling, both of whom believed in the collective, participatory nature of art as the “common possession of the people” (p. 1). In Minor's conceptualization of nineteenth-century Germany (and if one widens the lens a bit, the case could also be made for elsewhere in Europe where the struggle for nationhood was taking place, and in the United States), it was a chorus, rather than the individual artist, instrumental ensemble, or star of the opera house, that most directly embodied the Volk in German national identity. And through the collective act of singing together, it is the “political and moral authority” of the chorus, as a kind of nineteenth-century grass-roots organization, that offered composers a unique way to convey political ideas that could (and did) affect the cause—in this particular case, the call to establish and cultivate a German nation (p. 3). As Minor develops his premise throughout the rest of the book, he extends the …