Chapter 16
Landscape and Ecology
Landscape was central to the Romantic imagination. Previously considered a merely decorative or ornamental art form, a passive backdrop to more stirring historical events or allegories, landscape’s status underwent a radical change at the end of the eighteenth century. For Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and later for Alexander von Humboldt, landscape became a basis for empirical observation and scientific investigation (Beebee 2002). It was only from an intensive study of local ecologies and environments, they maintained, that a proper understanding and appreciation of human civilization could be gained. For other nineteenth-century writers and artists, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel, landscape was a distinctive mode of aesthetic discourse, a means of mediating subjectivity and the external world. Here lies the key to music’s close interrelationship with landscape in Romantic thought: it is difficult to listen to many nineteenth-century works without invoking ideas of landscape, whether imagined or real. Nevertheless, comparatively little sustained attention has been paid to the ways in which music evokes landscape, or to why certain landscapes invited musical response. Part of the reason has been a historical reluctance to probe too deeply into the relationship between instrumental music and paratextual materials, to develop a fully interdisciplinary methodology for analyzing music and visual or literary imagery. But more significant perhaps has been an implicit scholarly disdain for landscape studies within music history, a feeling that the musical landscape is somehow beneath serious academic critical attention. This might be because of the deceptive ease with which landscape seemingly operates. As W. J. T. Mitchell writes, “landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify” (Mitchell [1991] 2002, vii). Landscape’s elusive indeterminacy is located both in its resistance to easy definition and in its affective range—its capacity, like music, to provoke a response or reflect a particular mood or state of mind without revealing its means of operation. Yet this is precisely why music and landscape were such a crucial part of nineteenth-century thought, and why landscape has remained such an urgent category for discussion. As Mitchell suggests, “whatever the power of landscape might be, and of its unfoldings into space and place, it is surely the medium in which we live, and move, and have our being, and where we are destined, ultimately to return” (xii). Landscape is among Romantic music’s most substantial and sustained legacies, a shadow that lingers in more contemporary music and environmental practice.
This chapter surveys a series of musical landscapes, from the Beethovenian pastoral to Frederick Delius’s colonial-era evocation of an exoticized American idyll, as a means of mapping nineteenth-century music’s obsession with the idea of landscape and place. Distance recurs repeatedly as a form of subjective presence and through paradoxical connections with proximity and intimacy. It is the sound of landscape heard from afar, the chapter concludes, that remains one of nineteenth-century music’s most intensive and problematic modes.
The Hollow Pastoral
There is a curious hollowness at the heart of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (1808), a feeling of inwardness and ambivalence that pervades the work in spite of its outwardly radiant and affirmative character. This hollowness does not emerge so much in passages where the music’s otherwise sunny mood temporarily clouds over—for instance, in the fourth movement’s churning chromatic storm. Nor is it located exclusively at moments where it feels as though the music’s subjectivity is briefly suspended: the bird calls at the end of the second movement. The “Scene by the Brook,” which many scholars have found especially intrusive, might be the most obvious example, whether they are heard as the voice of divine revelation or as a disturbingly literal pictorialism (Wyn Jones 1995, Jander 1993, Knapp 2000). Rather, it is the outcome of the symphony’s very opening bars, the material from which so much of the work is subsequently derived (figure 16.1).
Figure 16.1 Beethoven, Symphony no. 6, “Pastoral,” op. 68, first movement: opening
The music begins with a deceptively easy gesture, a four-bar antecedent phrase that lands on a dominant caesura, implying growth and continuation. What follows is indeed a thematic expansion of this initial gesture, a motivic elaboration that promises balance and symmetrical resolution. Cadential closure, however, proves strangely elusive. The elision of the fourth phrase (beginning in m. 13) creates an anomalous three-bar unit that in turn initiates the most puzzling passage in the whole work: a ten-bar block in which the music seemingly gets stuck, trapped in an immersive ostinato loop on the dominant that revolves around a motivic fragment from the opening phrase. The ostinato grows in dynamic range (reaching forte in m. 20), before receding again, without ever reaching a stable tonic conclusion or point of thematic arrival. Even the return of the opening subject in m. 29 is unprepared, approached via melodic enjambement rather than more conventional cadential articulation. Bars 16–25 are left unresolved. They suggest a radically different state of mind or musical being, a potentially illimitable temporal and spatial aporia whose presence underlies much of the symphony’s subsequent development, and which underpins its evocation of the pastoral.1 At the core of Beethoven’s Arcadian vision therefore lies a blankness or emptying out, a feeling of decentering that blurs the music’s boundaries and the listener’s sense of self. And it is this hollowness that points to the music’s concern with landscape.
Beethoven’s contemporary listeners were clearly puzzled by the music’s ambiguity at a more basic generic level. An anonymous review in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, published two years after the work’s premiere at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 22, 1808, noted that the symphony “is not a representation of spatial characteristics of the countryside, but much more a representation of emotions that we experience upon seeing things in the countryside” (Senner et al. 2001, 133). Beethoven himself struggled to articulate the symphony’s status clearly in his own mind as the composition developed. An annotation in one draft of the score describes the work as a “Sinfonia caracteristisca oder Erinnerungen an das Landleben” (Characteristic symphony or remembrances of country life). In other sources, it is described as a “Pastoral Sinfonie Worin die Empfindungen ausgedrückt sind welche der Genuß des Landes in Menschen hervorbringt” (Pastoral symphony, in which the feelings that the enjoyment of the countryside arouses in mankind are expressed); as a work “wobej einige Gefühle des Landlebens geschildert warden” (in which some sentiments of country life are portrayed); and “worin keine Malerej sondern die Empfindungen (ausgedrückt sind welche der Genuß des Landes in Menschen hervorbringt)” (within which not painting but rather the feelings [that the enjoyment of being in the country brings forth are expressed]) (Wyn Jones 1995, 42).
As later commentators argued, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony belongs in part to an earlier eighteenth-century generic tradition. Charles Rosen claims that the symphony “is still idealized landscape, a form of Classical pastoral; it does not describe a particular site; its stream, peasant dance, and thunderstorm are generalized.” The music, in other words, “does not aspire to the personal tone and the individual particularity of the contemporary lyric description or the topographical picture” (Rosen 1995, 132). Listening carefully to the opening of the symphony, and contemplating the idea of an “idealized landscape” to which Rosen refers in passing, however, points toward a more complex appreciation of the music’s relationship with landscape, consistent with nineteenth-century aesthetic concerns. Landscape in the opening bars of the “Pastoral” Symphony appears autonomous, self-contained, and unenclosed. It is marked by a profound difference from the music that surrounds it: it is dissonant. Elsewhere in the symphony, landscape is more obviously concerned with an act of mimesis, with the familiar idea of nature as spectacle or performance (the bird calls or the tempest). Here, the landscape appears more contained. It can be measured, trapped, managed (or destroyed): it is an observable phenomenon, subject to experiential perception. But elsewhere, paradigmatically in the symphony’s opening gesture, it is more immersive, a means of being-in-the-world. Landscape’s boundaries here have become permeable, porous, and transparent. Landscape in music can hence serve a pictorial or programmatic role: it narrativizes or sutures, creating an impression of continuity. But Beethoven’s landscape is also affective and emotive, even as it problematizes straightforward notions of nature and human agency. Landscape plays with the listener’s sense of scale, from the microscopic to the cosmic, and one of the most disturbing (and simultaneously enticing) qualities of mm. 10–25 is precisely the way in which they evoke an impression both of infinite distance and of intimate proximity. Far from the idealized quality to which Rosen ascribes the landscape in Beethoven’s symphony, therefore, its character is complex and unstable, and it is precisely in this ambiguity that its greatest value and importance can be found.
Images of landscape, as Beethoven’s symphony suggests, lay at the heart of much nineteenth-century musical thought. From sunlit pastures to frozen winter fields, mountain echoes, distant horn calls, and the sound of the wind moving among the pines, landscape was a vivid representational practice, a creative resource, and a privileged site for prospect, voyeurism, nostalgia, escape, and gothic horror. This points to the profound shift in aesthetic practice at the end of the eighteenth century. For William Wordsworth, whose interest in and influence on German Romantic writers was significant (Williams 2009), landscape was no longer simply a static visual spectacle but was also intrinsically musical, an environment saturated in, lived through, and animated by sound. Wordsworth’s poetry is frequently distinguished by its merging of different modes of sensory perception (Jacobus 2012, 81–82), such as the “soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs, / Powerful almost as vocal harmony” that slips through the ash trees in “Airey-Force Valley” (lines 14–15; Halmi 2014, 553), and the “bleak music of that old stone wall, / The noise of wood and water” (The Prelude [1799], I:364–365; Carlson 2016, 98): dual images of a distinctively northern pastoral that are consonant with some elements of Beethoven’s fantasy. Landscape here frequently suggests solace, “an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony” (“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” lines 48–49; Halmi 2014, 67), and the abiding presence of a divine spirit, or “dark / Invisible workmanship,” that resolves the discordant imaginative mind, “framed even like the breath / And harmony of music” (The Prelude [1805], I:354–355; Halmi 2014, 176). But landscape could equally become hostile or indifferent, a hollow sounding board. A later passage from The Prelude, Book I, for example, suggests a more oblique experience of landscape that is simultaneously exhilarating and profoundly empty:
So through the darkness and the cold we flew
And not a voice was idle: with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud,
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away. (I: 468–476; Halmi 2014, 178)
There is little feeling of comfort or the familiar in such chilly images, but instead a chaotic collision of sounds, cries, and echoes signifying nothing beyond themselves. This is a vision (and mode of hearing) remote from any pastoral elegy, despite its sense of loss. Thus, Wordsworth’s feeling for sound in landscape could be ecstatic and/or catastrophic, changing register abruptly, like shifts of mood or weather patterns, between the picturesque and the sublime (McCusick 2000, Ottum and Reno 2016).
For other writers, the value of landscape lay less in its diverse representational character and more in its apparent tendency toward abstraction. As Alice Kuzniar explains, “for the Romantics, the ideal landscape painting would be the blank canvas, one that points to the absence of what it depicts” (Kuzniar 1988, 359). It was precisely the shift from the Kantian view of music as little more than pleasant sound, the essentially empty (nonlinguistic) arrangement of tones, to Friedrich Schiller’s notion of music as sounding form, the pure representation of feeling (rather than content) that suggested the strongest parallels with the Romantic idea of landscape. Kuzniar adds, “Schlegel wondered if landscape should be made the highest artistic genre because it idealizes Schein or, in other words, transforms the medium of perception into its object of depiction.” This explains the inwardness at the heart of the Romantic idea of landscape, a self-referentiality that refers not to the specific trees, rocks, or clouds of the external world, but which, rather, “calls attention to the means, conditions, and operations of its being” (364) in a way that corresponds with the attentiveness and self-enclosure of the listening subject. Thus, Schiller could maintain that:
Once the composer and the landscape painter penetrate the secret laws which govern the inner movements of the human heart, and study the analogy that can be found between these emotions and certain external appearances, they will be transformed from common nature pictures into true soul painters.
For Schiller, both music and landscape painting were a form of emotional topography, shaped and contoured by the fleeting, transient moods of the human spirit. This was a highly influential thesis. At the opposite end of the Romantic era, for instance, the Swedish artist and critic Richard Bergh could still insist that “our century’s hazy spiritual moods … have found in music and landscape painting precisely that intangible, indeterminate expression they demand in order to become alive and perceptible to our consciousness,” and add that “the means of expression in all the other arts are too particular, they specify their content with too much precision” (Bergh 1918, 127).3 Music and landscape for the Romantics hence shared a common epistemology, based both on their affective agency (their ability to evoke powerful moods or emotional states) and, paradoxically, on their resistance to representation. Their attractiveness, for the Romantic imagination, lay precisely in their ability to suggest nothing at all.
This radical epistemological turn provides a way of reassessing the implications of the opening bars of the “Pastoral” Symphony. The glitch created by the loop in mm. 16–25 becomes the Allegro’s principal structural problem: the dissonance that the remainder of the movement seeks to resolve. The exposition, for example, is characterized by a steady process of accumulation and actualization rather than by a more discursive process of tonal modulation or motivic working out. As the anonymous commentator for the Allgmeine musikalische Zeitung observed, the second subject oscillates continuously between V7 and I, and its highly repetitive, associative syntax leads to an expansive assertion of the dominant (mm. 93ff), followed by a closing theme at m. 115 that suggests the same tendency toward circularity and repetition evident in mm. 16–25 (Senner et al. 2001, 134): the codetta closes with a fading ostinato pattern (from m. 127) whose rhythmic layering explicitly recalls that of the earlier loop. Clear cadential articulation, evaded in the movement’s opening bars, is once again blurred or elided. Instead, this ostinato texture provides the platform for the development, beginning with the same subdominant inflection that had pervaded much of the preceding music.
Writing of this passage principally in terms of its timbral character (referring to its broad sound sheets, or Klangfläche—harmonically static blocks of writing animated by intensive foreground rhythmic activity), rather than as representation, Carl Dahlhaus argues that the music “conveys a landscape because it is exempted both from the principle of teleological progression and from the rule of musical texture which nineteenth-century theorists referred to, by no means simply metaphorically, as ‘thematic-motivic manipulation,’ taking Beethoven’s development sections as their locus classicus.” Hence, the music gains its affective force not from any illustrative or descriptive quality, nor from its motivic unfolding, but from the feeling of suspension, the “‘definite negation’ of the character of musical form as progress” (Dahlhaus 1989, 307).4 It is precisely this feeling of inertia, in other words, that generates the movement’s large-scale structural tension, its tendency toward diffusion or dissipation rather than concentration or intensification. This problem is exemplified by the start of recapitulation (m. 279), where the dominant caesura that recalls the movement’s opening phrase (m. 4) is now expanded to become a miniature cadenza for the first violins (mm. 282–288). What had been a crucial moment of re-energization—the arrival of the reprise—in many of Beethoven’s earlier symphonic movements here becomes potentially an even greater point of stasis and immobility (the trill in mm. 282–284 effectively suspends any impression of forward motion). Nor are such tensions adequately addressed in the coda: the movement’s climax (from m. 448) is an apotheosis of the opening loop, based on the exposition’s closing theme, followed by a descent that promises resolution and yet swiftly becomes harmonically blurred. When closure is attained for a final time (in mm. 475–476), the cadence is disconcertingly prosaic. The movement’s final bars serve as little more than a frame, echoed much later by the wistful coda at the end of the symphony’s concluding Allegretto. The work’s principal structural tensions are left open. That feeling of hollowness and ambiguity that had underpinned its opening gesture—the idea of landscape as a quiet, persistent dissonance—remains its lingering impression, its constitutive ground.
For Dahlhaus and earlier nineteenth-century writers (such as Robert Schumann), such gestures point toward an idea of landscape as idyll and place of refuge (Wyn Jones 1995, 82). But the Romantic conception of landscape was rarely so stable or unequivocal, and the feeling of stasis created by the Klangfläche is deceptive. Notions of immersion, and of the Romantic listener as privileged subject, with which such evocations of landscape were invariably associated, could never be ideologically or politically neutral. As Raymond Williams observed, the transformation in nineteenth-century aesthetics took place alongside radical social and cultural changes, especially during the process of large-scale industrialization, that had a profound impact on the way in which landscape was experienced, managed, and understood. Rural landscape became commodified: an increasingly popular leisure resource for a middle-class urban elite, as well as a continuing locus of political power and authority for a landowning aristocracy. Williams hence contrasts the elevated, sublime image of landscape promulgated by writers such as Wordsworth with the more quotidian idea of a working country captured in the poetry of John Clare:
The plough that disturbs this nature connects with the hardest emotions of maturity: dispossession, the ache of labour, the coldness of the available world: a complex of feeling and imagery in the experience of this man and of everyone; of each personal generation and of this generation in history. (Williams [1973] 2016, 202)
Landscape here, for Williams, is anything but abstract or opaque. Rather, it is a site of memory (and, more pointedly, of erasure): the material trace of a working life or pattern of habitation that reveals its own hierarchies, asymmetries, and struggles. And in articulating this idea of landscape as process, subject to the operations of capital and class, Williams draws a parallel between the worked earth and the worked text. “What is then achieved, against this experience of pain,” he suggests, “is a way of feeling which is also a way of writing: a language that is ever green” (202). Landscape in this context becomes a form of inscription and resistance (on all sides of the political divide).
Williams was writing with a highly localized and specific landscape in mind: that of the British countryside or, more particularly, of the English–Welsh border. But many of the political and ecological implications of his interpretation, especially his insistence that “a working country is hardly ever a landscape” (172), might apply equally forcefully to the environment with which Beethoven was familiar. Few writers, however, have asked what Beethoven might actually have experienced upon his walking trips into the countryside outside Vienna in the months and years before he began sketching the symphony, or in what ways changes in agricultural policy or ownership might have impacted upon both the city and the landscape around him. Fridolin Krausmann’s work, building on the Imperial survey of Franciscan cadastre (the local monastic system of land ownership and management) undertaken across Habsburg Austria in 1817–1856, for instance, notes the relatively slow process of industrialization (especially in comparison with other parts of Western Europe) across the upper Danube Valley, and details the cultivation systems upon which the agricultural economy relied. Key activities included forestry and charcoal production, grazing, viticulture, and arable land (still dominated by the three-field rotation system that had been in operation since the early eighteenth century) (Krausmann 2008, 17).5 The Danube remained a primary transport artery and communications corridor, and was subject to increasing rates of land reclamation, drainage, and water management. An ecocritical reading of Beethoven’s work struggles to trace precise ways in which such intensive patterns of land usage might be identified in his music. But that is potentially to miss both the contingent status of representation in early nineteenth-century instrumental music and the deceptive “second nature” upon which Romantic notions of landscape relied. As Stephen Daniels has observed, landscape “obscures not only the forces and relations of production but also more plebian, less pictorial, experiences of nature.” Yet this is precisely the basis for its allure, Daniels explains. Its dialectical quality points toward “an ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipulative aspects cannot finally be disentangled, which can neither be completely reified as an authentic object in the world nor thoroughly dissolved as an ideological mirage” (Daniels [1989] 2002, 206). The Romantic landscape is hence marked by a threefold sense of distance: the distance that indicates remoteness and detachment (from which the landscape can be prospected, observed or perceived); the distance (and simultaneously proximity) that produces blankness or abstraction; and, finally, the distance that suggests oversight or omission—the laborers who are not seen, the working country that is unheard, and the voice that remains silent.
Ghost Country
It is partly for these reasons that Daniels resists attempts to define landscape, “to resolve its contradictions.” Instead, he urges us to “abide in its duplicity” (Daniels [1989] 2002, 217). Indeed, alongside the threefold notion of distance summarized here, the Romantic idea of landscape relies upon a double valence: its material and immaterial qualities (earth and spirit), and its revelatory and opaque character (sunlit and shadowed). In Beethoven’s music, this doubleness is captured in the essential hollowness of the “Pastoral.” For Schubert, it is embodied rather in the gaunt, ambivalent presence of the wanderer who stalks through much of his work. Schubert’s songs, paradigmatically those of his song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, are frequently characterized by a revenant feeling, of the Unheimlich or uncanny. The figure of the Doppelgänger, the subject of one of his most famous Lieder, is the mysterious agent of the unexpected return, of the idea of landscape (both rural and urban) as involuntary memory. The identity of the wanderer is rarely, if ever, revealed. More important is the sense in which the landscape itself becomes haunted, populated by hidden shapes and muttering voices. At times, this landscape remains veiled and enigmatic, the wintry twilight domain of fairytale and the ghost story. At other times, however, it can assume a more storm-blown and spectacular quality, as in a well-known passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude, where the poet-narrator recalls his first crossing of the Alps:
… The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of water-falls,
And every where along the hollow rent
Winds thwarted winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them (VI: 556–564; Halmi 2014, 254)
Recent studies have drawn attention to the new temporality that shapes such images: the disconcerting awareness of history’s embeddedness within the present, and of the inevitable mutability of landscape as it changes across both the seasonal cycle and through geological time (Taylor 2016a, 130–171). “In the Romantic landscape of Thomas Girtin, Turner, and Constable,” Rosen suggests, “the past is even now with us, in fragments, eroding, still decaying, and transforming itself into life” (Rosen 1995, 156). It is this multiple scale, “long-range time and the fleeting sensation of the moment,” Rosen argues, that explains landscape’s sudden prominence in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century aesthetics, and which also counts for the emergence of the song cycle as one of its leading genres. Writing of Die schöne Müllerin, Rosen comments that “the time of this song cycle is that of the Romantic landscape: not the successive events of narrative but a succession of images, of lyrical reflections which reveal the traces of past and future within the present” (181). For the Romantics, music thus captures landscape’s peculiarly contradictory state of being-in-the-world, its simultaneous feeling of time passing and of the world standing still, of presence and instantiation and of dissolution and loss.
Evocations of lyric time and the spectral are not limited to Schubert’s vocal works (Fisk 2001, Mak 2006). Rather, they constitute a distinctive formal and expressive dynamic in his instrumental music, a way of thinking about musical space and register, and not simply a rhetorical device or mode of representation. This is partly what drew Theodor W. Adorno to the idea of landscape in Schubert’s music in his 1928 anniversary essay on the composer. “Schubert’s forms are forms of invocation, of what has already appeared,” Adorno wrote, “it is not an invention in need of a formal process of destiny” (quoted in Burnham 2005, 31–32). The subject of Adorno’s analysis is the Quartet in G major, D. 887, but an equally striking instance can be found in the closely contemporary Piano Sonata, D. 845 (1825): a piece whose opening two movements suggest an obsession with the figure of the wanderer as both aesthetic trope and formal protocol. The first movement is a moderately paced march, whose opening bars already suggest a curious hesitancy or uncertainty (especially given the placement of the ritardando in m. 3, which threatens to bring the movement to a halt even before it has begun). This feeling of caution is evident both in local events and at the larger-scale level of the exposition’s tonal trajectory. The primary subject group, for instance, begins to veer off into the Neapolitan (mm. 21–23), deflected by the early intrusion of a single chromatic pitch (e♭), before the start of the transition forcibly reasserts the tonic, bringing a renewed sense of purpose or direction. The second subject (m. 40), based on transition material, at first seems more confident, but the return of earlier Neapolitan elements again disrupts the sense of progression, resulting in an aporia (m. 62)6 and a shocking return of the primary subject in the mediant minor (fee figure 16.2). This is the most disturbing gesture thus far: the undesired return of the opening theme in the wrong mode.7 The codetta brings little sense of resolution. Although the second subject picks up again at the point where it had left off (m. 77), the recurrence of the primary subject’s opening unison motto is both a preparation for the exposition repeat and an insistent reminder of the movement’s destabilizing potential, its tendency to move in circles or to pursue blind alleys and redundant leads.
Figure 16.2 Schubert, Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, first movement: mm. 51–71
The figure of the wanderer evoked by this music also suggests the act of walking: perhaps the most essentially Romantic mode of engagement with landscape. As Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst have noted, walking is not simply a form of transportation, a means of getting from one place to another, but also an embodied practice, a cultural move that relies upon the careful synchronization of “timings, rhythms, and inflections” (Ingold and Vergunst [2008] 2016, 1). Tracking Schubert’s meandering course in the opening movement of D. 845 suggests a similar process: the diversionary route or excursus as a state of mind (Clark 2011, 87–88). Yet there is still a sense of uneasiness involved in such pathfinding. In Schubert’s landscape, it is all too easy to become lost. Scott Burnham notes, following Adorno, that “a Schubertian theme is an apparition, an Erscheinung, a characteristic truth; it is not an invention in need of a formal process of destiny” (Burnham 2005, 32). To a far greater extent than in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Schubert’s landscape unfolds without being bound or determined by a sense of goal or arrival. It demands a very different subject position or feeling of presence, an alternative order of reference. This is apparent from the very start of the development: the opening head-motif has little sense of harmonic grounding until it lands on the Lieder-like statement of the primary theme on the subdominant, a texture that anticipates the tonality and melodic profile of the opening song, “Gute Nacht,” from Schubert’s Winterreise, D. 911, composed a couple of years after the sonata—the beginning of another bleakly existential journey that evokes homelessness and dispossession. In the sonata, the walking-song gesture initiates a fantasy-like transition, moving first through F minor and then (momentarily) D flat, exiting via a liquidating passage on the dominant of F sharp minor—the relative minor of the tonic major. It is seemingly another lacuna, but the sequence that follows is one of Schubert’s most breathtaking formal and expressive gestures (see figure 16.3): a false reprise that in fact conceals the real tonic return (m. 152), approached via a French sixth and half-cadence. Even after intensive and sustained study, it is difficult to tell exactly how the sonata has reached this point: the wanderer’s tracks seemingly vanish into the snow.
Figure 16.3 Schubert, Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, first movement: mm. 140–155
In some senses, this hidden return is entirely consonant with the movement’s prevailing syntax. Throughout the Moderato, what normatively serves as reassuring—here, the reattainment of the tonic—is frequently rendered disconcerting and unfamiliar, just as the wanderer in “Gute Nacht” finds his hometown suddenly hostile and unwelcoming. Nicholas Marston makes a parallel point about a similar moment of ambivalent return in the opening movement of a later sonata, D. 960. “Far from representing the (partial) integration of the outsider with the insider,” he argues, the reprise suggests the opposite:
The possibility that the condition of outsider might be constructed positively rather than negatively; that the peripheral, the deviant, might challenge and win out over the normative; indeed, that the normative might actively aspire to and attain that other realm, however provisionally. (Marston 2000, 265)
The first movement of D. 845 offers another experience of landscape: not as a site of transformation or inversion but, rather, from the perspective of the nomad or the exile. It becomes a nightmare of fugitive visions and enforced migration. Indeed, the Moderato’s resistance to achieving any lasting synthesis or resolution is exemplified by the remainder of the reprise and the movement’s close. The brief modal brightening at the return of the second subject (m. 200) is short-lived, and the music repeatedly evades structural closure, encountering instead a bewildering chain of half-cadences, deviations, and harmonic non sequiturs. In response, the coda becomes almost completely preoccupied by the problematic e♭ pitch elements from the exposition (see especially m. 270), which, despite the obsessively insistent cadential articulation of the very final bars, feels never entirely vanquished or resolved. There is no firm ground on which resolution could be achieved, the movement appears to suggest, there is only a continual restlessness and repetition—an endless return that brings little comfort or release.
Adorno’s analysis of Schubert’s music ultimately proposes a different sense of shape or topology from that conventionally associated with musical evocations of nature and the picturesque. There is little depth or focus, nor a strongly linear spatiality. Rather, he suggests, the impression is simultaneously suffocating and vertiginous, a spiraling design where:
The ex-centric construction of that landscape, in which every point is equally close to the center, reveals itself to the wanderer walking round it with no actual progress … the first step is as close to death as the last, and the scattered features of the landscape are scanned in rotation by the wanderer, who cannot let go of them.
(Burnham 2005, 36)
Burnham, in turn, reads Adorno’s account as pointing toward “a nascent existential consciousness, one that recognizes subjectivity as all there is, one that recognizes subjectivity as the ultimate imaginary landscape—and also as the only knowable truth” (36–37). This act of self-revelation emerges not only in the final bars of the Moderato but also in the course of the following movement. Like its predecessor, the Andante is a walking song (despite the triple meter): a skillfully choreographed set of variations that, for the most part, traverses sunnier, more optimistic terrain. The mood darkens in the third variation, via the re-introduction of the Moderato’s e♭ elements. This chromaticism is deflected in the florid fourth variation into the flat submediant (A♭), but lingers even after the movement has returned to the tonic, in variation 5. The texture here is saturated by the sound of distant horns, a conventional symbol of farewell and remembrance. The feeling of departure is intensified by the persistent modal mixture, which serves as an echo effect (a final legacy of those dissonant e♭s). But the diatonicism of the closing bars surely offers only an illusory sense of resolution, a temporary point of rest, and the final cadence signals its own emptiness. Unheard, elsewhere, it feels as though the wanderer turns again, and the movement simply begins once more.
Taking the Tour
The essential experience of landscape offered by Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony and Schubert’s Sonata in A minor is an inner emptiness, a subjective gap. This points to an apparent contradiction in nineteenth-century musical aesthetics between music’s richly associative potential and its resistance to fixed modes of representation, its ability to evoke a sense of passing time or place, and its apparent blankness or abstraction. Landscape, similarly, can be understood as an empty frame, a scenic configuration (whose subject frequently remains obscure), and as a phenomenology or means of being-in-the-world. Running parallel with such aesthetic debates, however, was a more prosaic material concern: the rapid commodification of landscape, and its increasing availability for leisure use and consumption by a growing generation of middle-class tourists (Buzard 1993). The Romantic preoccupation with the wild and sublime emerged alongside the development of new transport infrastructures, preeminently steamship routes and railways, which offered substantial opportunities for economic development but which also led to significant cultural and environmental challenges, particularly in areas that had hitherto been remote from major urban centers of population (Urry and Larsen, [1990] 2011). Music’s role in such processes is complex, mythologizing the image of landscape as an untouched site of idyllic charm or stirring historical fiction, a nature space attractively laid out for the tired urban-dweller’s edification and enjoyment, while obscuring the means of production (industrial and commercial) upon which such constructions relied. Or music might equally become part of a more quotidian experience of landscape, the fleeting routines of departure and arrival, and the daily patterns of urban life, social hierarchy, and civic community.
Even works that have since become paradigmatic exemplars of musical landscape cannot fully resolve these tensions. Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture (1832) is a particularly significant case. Composed three years after the composer’s visit to the Western Highlands in 1829, few pieces have been so closely associated with a particular place or have had such a formative effect upon later musical evocations of landscape and nature. The overture’s opening bars, for example, are invariably heard as a musical postcard or souvenir. As Benedict Taylor suggests, “scarcely another work has such an unerring capacity to suggest the delicate nuances of changing colour and flecks of light, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean breakers and wild freedom of the sea” (Taylor 2016b, 187–188). Similarly, Thomas Grey writes of “the utterly original, evocative soundscape that opens the Hebrides Overture—with its masterful evocations of wind and wave, light and shade, and its play of subtly patterned textures” (Grey 1997, 69–70). Far from capturing a uniquely individual response to such sites, however, Mendelssohn’s voyage to the Inner Hebrides followed a well-beaten tourist trail. Scotland’s attractiveness as a destination had been advanced in literary terms by the popularity of James Macpherson’s Ossian poetry, the verse of Robert Burns, and the immense commercial success of Walter Scott’s work, especially the first volumes of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) and his Waverley novels (1818 onwards). George IV’s state visit to Edinburgh in 1822 added heavyweight social and political prestige to the promotion of Scottish tourism in the years immediately preceding Mendelssohn’s visit. Numerous books and pamphlets, such as Lumsden’s Steam-boat Companion; and Stranger’s Guide to Western Islands and Highlands of Scotland (1828) or Thomson’s Traveller’s Guide Through Scotland, and Its Islands (1829), catered for the cultural tourist and provided detailed itineraries and logistical information for visitors in the Highlands, especially following the completion of the Crinan Canal in 1801. In other words, the aesthetic terms of reference that shaped and coloured Mendelssohn’s experience of Scotland were already in place before the composer even crossed the border (McCrone et al. 1995).
The realities of rural life in the Argyll region through which Mendelssohn passed were much harsher. The rate of Highland clearances sharply increased after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the first half of the century, and tenure rights for crofters were not secured until the 1886 Crofters Holdings Act, passed by William Gladstone’s Liberal government (Richards 1983, Gouriévidis 2010). At the same time, much of the basis for the local Hebridean economy (based on kelp production, fishing, and sheep and cattle farming) became subject to sharp variations in market value: contingencies that prompted large-scale migration from the West Coast to North America, Australia and New Zealand. Tourism was therefore an increasingly important and sustainable source of income for the West Highlands. As Jo Hicks has observed, the elevated tone of Mendelssohn’s visit to Staffa was prominent also in the local travel literature, and hence familiar to visitors before they undertook the voyage across the sound from Mull (Hicks 2015). The Stirling and Kenney guide, for example, extolled the natural beauties of Fingal’s Cave in their description of the island:
The original Gaelic name is Uaimh Binn, “The Musical Cave,” a name derived from the echo of the waves. The wonders of this place cannot be thoroughly seen unless it be entered by a boat, by which it is accessible generally in all states of the tide. The entrance to the cave, which is about sixty-six feet high, and forty-two feet wide, resembles a Gothic arch. The stupendous columns that bound the interior sides of the cave are perpendicular, and being frequently broken and grouped in a variety of ways, a very picturesque effect is produced. (Anon. [1825] 1834, 297)
Such accounts meld a number of Romantic preoccupations: the Wordsworthian impression of the cave’s striking acoustic properties, the unusual geological formation of the basalt columns, and the architectural structure of the cavern itself, turning the mind toward images of sunken cathedrals and the gothic revival. Mendelssohn’s overture was in that sense part of a process of heritage curation, the elevation of a particular site for touristic attention and enjoyment, and also of authentication: the promotion of the Scottish landscape as a source of the Romantic sublime. In this context, its wild beauty must almost have begun to seem disconcertingly conventional and routine.
Hearing the “Hebrides” Overture as little more than the by-product of an emergent tourist industry, however, fails to account either for the work’s effectiveness in performance or for its profound and longstanding influence on later nineteenth-century musical evocations of landscape. More worthy of attention is Mendelssohn’s innovative approach to aspects of musical form and texture, the way in which the work builds on existing gestures conventionally associated with landscape but achieves a remarkably heightened intensity. In part, this is the result of the work’s proportions. A relatively spacious exposition and development are followed by an abruptly abbreviated reprise, with a poignantly drawn-out return of the lyrical second subject group in the tonic major (see figure 16.4). This moment of thematic return, with its affective writing for paired clarinets, is one of Mendelssohn’s most strikingly evocative gestures: a nostalgic backward glance rocking gently to and fro that never achieves harmonic resolution but instead initiates an extended secondary development section or expanded Transition zone (from m. 217) which results in rapid textural accumulation. Any sense of lingering retrospection is blown away as the work achieves structural closure in m. 260 with a return of the storm music that had rattled through the second half of the development. The final cadence is drastically foreshortened, a parting glimpse of the primary subject in counterpart with the arpeggiated head-motif of the secondary theme in the flute. The vision fades, and the work finishes amid a rapidly descending gloom, the deadening effect of the string pizzicato extinguishing any sense of light.
Figure 16.4 Mendelssohn, Overture “The Hebrides,” op. 26: mm. 202–216
The power of these closing gestures as landscape music is directly linked to the way in which the Overture opens. The opening eight bars serve as an introduction or preface that contain, in nascent form, the majority of the motivic elements upon which the rest of the work will subsequently be based. At the same time, they also serve as a dawn sequence or threshold that immediately sets the work apart from its surroundings and insists on its feeling of separateness and self-containment (see figure 16.5). Mendelssohn’s handling of the orchestral texture is especially significant. The undulating string figuration has a proto-thematic quality; as Grey suggests, “one reason, perhaps, that the opening of the Hebrides is so immediately recognizable as ‘landscape’ has to do with the absence of any distinctly melodic material” (Grey 1997, 70). Instead, the listener’s attention is caught by the slow timbral brightening in the woodwind, suggesting the growing luminosity of the sky and water at first light or the gradual awakening of a distant memory or recollection. Taylor notes, “there is no solid bedrock to Mendelssohn’s orchestra here. Only the ‘horizon’ formed by the upper pedal is sustained the whole way across the visual field” (Taylor 2016b, 197). Like similar passages in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, upon which it is clearly modeled, the opening of Mendelssohn’s Overture evokes landscape by playing with perceptions of depth and spatial orientation, the apparent emptiness of the texture evoking open space and remoteness just as the scenic object of the listener’s imagination seemingly draws increasingly close. The only elements that indicate potential change are the carefully placed hairpins in mm. 7–8 and the accompanying timpani roll, which suggests a deep undertow or swelling movement of the tide.
Figure 16.5 Mendelssohn, Overture “The Hebrides,” op. 26: opening
The efficacy of such nature passages in nineteenth-century music, Julian Johnson writes, relies upon “a globally static but internally active play … which avoids the linear goal-directed discourse of the musical language with which these moments are often surrounded.” It is this apparent impression of self-generation, the simultaneous “acceleration and retardation of musical time,” Johnson suggests, that momentarily suspends the listener’s sense of agency. “It makes no separation between musical identity and process (i.e., between motif and structure) and thus is not bound up with a discursive activity of the subject” (Johnson 1999, 232). If this is true of much of the primary subject zone in Mendelssohn’s Overture, the first entry of the second theme (m. 47) indeed has a subjectivizing effect, like that of the Rückenfigur in Romantic painting with which it is compared by Grey. But a more radical hearing of this opening gesture might be gained by adopting Tim Ingold’s notion of the weather-world: the open space, of elements and natural forces, in which he suggests the perceiving subject is immersed. Ingold writes after walking on a beach on Scotland’s east coast, the other side of the country from the Hebrides, facing the North Sea (rather than the Atlantic), that “to feel the wind is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but to mingle with them” (Ingold 2007, 19). Responding critically to this immersive experience is not to argue for passive absorption but, rather, to try and capture a feeling of dynamic process. Hence, for Ingold, landscape is populated not by inert objects but, rather, by a more complex interplay of agencies: “it is not a matter of putting life into things but of restoring those things to the movements that gave rise to them,” Ingold argues. “It is not that they have agency; they are agency. The wind … is its blowing, not a thing that blows” (31). Landscape, for Ingold, becomes an interface, a category that might readily have appealed to nineteenth-century writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. It is a zone of mixing and interference, or a “binding of medium and substance.” This might also offer a more rewarding way of approaching the opening of Mendelssohn’s Overture. Over and above its appropriation and commodification of Scotland’s cultural and natural resources, the Overture could be heard as an ecologically grounded allegory of the listener’s active participation in shaping their environment, in “weaving the texture of the land” (33). In other words, the effectiveness of the opening of “The Hebrides” relies not on a sense of separation, the distinction between subject and object but, rather, in its insistence that such binary divisions are always actively blurred. Like the shifting patterns of the weather, the seascapes and storm-blasted cliffs of Mendelssohn’s Overture unveil a landscape in constant motion, where the Romantic creative imagination gains its greatest range and release.
In Foreign Climes
Listening attentively to Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture reinforces the threefold distance at the centre of the Romantic notion of landscape: remoteness, abstraction, and absence (or omission). But it also suggests a fourth category of distance, which became increasingly prevalent as the century progressed: that of the foreign or exotic. Images of alluringly immersive landscapes abound in late nineteenth-century opera, songs, and orchestral works. The quality of remoteness in such evocations is critical to their effect, distancing the listener, or elevating the privileged position of the listening subject, so that the landscape is experienced dispassionately, as if from afar. Here, landscape frequently forms part of an explicitly colonializing process, based on deterministic hierarchies of class and subjugation. As Mike Crang notes, “‘Landscape’ … along with ‘nature,’ ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ is integral to an ongoing ‘hidden’ discourse, underwriting the legitimacy of those who exercise power in society” (Crang 1998, 307). For much of the nineteenth century, such questions of legitimacy were allied to the forcible expansion of a colonial vision that treated landscape as a means of extending and reinforcing Western European dominance (through cultural and aesthetic as well as more violent means). Landscape implied cultivation, civilization, order, and control (often at considerable ecological expense). The politics of landscape hence concerned both territory and governance, creating problems of ownership, occupation, and authority that continue to cast a baleful shadow well into the twenty-first century. The surveying projects of nineteenth-century colonial expeditions in western North America, Africa, Australasia, and the Middle East were the most explicit examples of such imperializing modes of thought. As James R. Ryan explains,
Landscape, as produced by these expeditions, was framed in various ways by the cultural and material value projected onto the environments being explored by the explorers. Furthermore, in the process of visually mapping landscapes these expeditionary practices were simultaneously globalizing a particular landscape vision. Indeed, the very idea of empire in part depended on an idea of landscape, as both controlled space and the means of representing such control, on a global scale.
(Ryan 1995, 74)
Music was arguably no less critical in such processes than other forms of representation. As Edward Said famously observed, the reproduction of foreign landscapes on the European stage was simultaneously a means of domesticating the exotic, rendering it consumable for a local audience, and also a way of fetishizing difference, essentializing notions of cultural and political superiority (Said 1993). Music intensified landscape’s deceptive second nature, its seemingly passive assertion of a highly privileged and asymmetrical worldview. In this context, music’s apparent hollowness or emptiness became an opportunity: a space for the projection and expansion of a colonial fantasy grounded in deeply problematic conceptions of race, class, and gender.
For Frederick Delius, the attraction of landscape and the exotic became almost obsessive.8 Delius was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1862: his parents were first-generation German immigrants, who had moved to northern England with the rapidly expanding textile industry in the 1840s and whose presence significantly contributed to the city’s musical life. Delius was expected to join the family business rather than pursue a professional musical career. After finishing school, he was sent to Florida to manage a citrus plantation leased by his father, forty miles south of Jacksonville on the St. Johns River. Delius left Liverpool for the United States on March 2, 1884, and stayed for less than eighteen months, traveling back up the East Coast via Virginia and Long Island before returning to England on June 12, 1886 (Carley 1983, 1–6). With his father’s reluctant consent, Delius enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatoire, the institution founded by Mendelssohn, in August, graduating two years later. Although he only returned to the United States once, in 1897, America is frequently cited as having had a transformative effect upon Delius’s work. Detailed attempts have been made to trace the influence of African-American musical vernacular practices upon his compositional style, and Delius’s time in the South inspired a series of “American” works, including the Florida Suite for orchestra (1887); two operas (The Magic Fountain and Koanga, 1894–95 and 1895–97, respectively), and a set of orchestral variations “on an old slave song,” Appalachia (1904).
No authorial sources survive from Delius’s first trip to Florida in the mid-1880s. However, a much later document, his preface to the 1927 German edition of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, does offer a vivid impression of his days on the plantation:
When in the evening twilight I would sit out on my verandah, the sound of the singing of the Negroes would reach me from the distance. It seemed wonderful amid such glorious nature. Before me stretched the infinite [unendliche] breadth of the St Johns river and around me the ancient forest [Urwald] with its indescribably strange calls of buzzing insects, of frogs and night birds.
Although I had grown up with classical music, a whole new world now opened before me. I felt this Negro music to be something completely new. It was natural and at the same time deeply felt. I sensed the Negroes were far more musical than any people I had hitherto met. Their music seemed unaffected and uncultivated [ungekünstelt und unerlernt], the expression of the soul of a people who had suffered much. It was almost always sad, almost always religious, and always suffused with personal experience and human warmth. (quoted in Driggers 1999, 26)
In this staging of the Florida landscape as a privileged site of the European Romantic sublime, from the symbolically raised position of the veranda, Delius becomes entangled in familiar myth-making accounts of artistic reverie. A curious threshold for Johnson’s text, it presents a potpourri of essentialized positions: the elevation of the European artist in glorious isolation; the “naturalism” and “originality” of African-American music; the ancient forest world encircling the plantation; the exotically foreign sound of its surroundings; authenticating accounts of the soulful expression of human suffering and companionship; and the fertilizing quality of such acoustic immersion.
Delius’s image of an Arcadian site of natural wonder perpetuates a well-worn colonial fiction, of untouched lands that passively present themselves accommodatingly for the European gaze. This not only misconfigures his social and financial investment in northeast Florida but also flattens out the political and cultural landscape in which he lived. The reality of plantation life was more corrosive, especially for its (largely African American) workforce. Solana Grove was a working landscape that suffered periodically from economic and environmental neglect. Located on the edge of a climatic transition zone, northern Florida was always marginal territory for citrus cultivation, and a series of winter frosts from 1886 onward made ecological and economic conditions intensely challenging. The surviving correspondence with the grove’s resident foreman, Elbert A. Anderson, vividly records the difficulty of achieving a sustainable livelihood from the plot, and Delius’s plantation was eventually abandoned: first for turpentine extraction and later for phosphate mining (Jahoda [1967] 1978, 262). The ethnographer Zora Neal Hurston, born just south of Jacksonville, later wrote of the devastating social and environmental effects of such land-use patterns:
Polk County. Black men laughing and singing. They go down in the phosphate mines and bring up the wet dust of the bones of pre-historic monsters, to make rich land in far places, so that people can eat. … Polk County. Black men from tree to tree among the lordly pines, a swift, slanting stroke to bleed the trees for gum. Paint, explosives, marine stores flavours, perfumes, tone for a violin bow, and many other things which black men who bleed trees never heard about.
(Hurston [1942] 1996, 147–148)
Hurston’s testimony is vital for understanding the ways in which nineteenth-century assumptions about landscape, race, and class continued to have a powerful influence on twentieth-century land usage and its associated cultural and political contexts. The legacy of landscape’s “second nature,” and music’s collusive role in maintaining the distinction between its aesthetic contemplation, on the one hand, and its economic exploitation, on the other, was stubbornly persistent. There is little sense of hard extractive industry, for instance, in works such as Delius’s Florida Suite, which he subtitled “Tropische Scenen” (see figure 16.6). Dedicated “to the People of Florida,” each movement of the suite has a subtitle: “Daybreak,” “By the River” (alluding to the second movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony), “Sunset,” and “At Night.” The work thus programmatically charts a complete diurnal cycle, with the implication that the whole process simply begins again at the end of the piece. This is reinforced by the work’s harmonically open-ended structure (the first movement starts in A minor and ends in D major, mirroring the tonal and modal trajectory of the whole), and by the music’s strongly pictorial character: over and above the obvious paratextual materials (title and subtitles), the work employs a range of topical devices and musical gestures that reinforce its programmatic associations. Florida is hence “placed” both through reference to an actual geographical location (and its historical contexts) and to a well-established tradition of musical genre painting or topography. The opening movement, for example, is prefaced by an extended dawn sequence, similar to that of Borodin’s closely contemporary In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880), suggesting spacious prospects and virgin (unpopulated) terrain.
Figure 16.6 Delius, Florida Suite, “Daybreak”: opening
The musical components of this landscape writing are familiar: a shimmering inverted string pedal (suggesting a remote temporal or spatial horizon), and a drifting downward curtain of carefully interlocked woodwind harmonies that slowly fills out a basic timbral field. Superimposed on top of these “background” elements is a melodic oboe entry with strong modal flavoring and exotically improvisatory rhythmic figuration. The sequential tail of this initial oboe figure serves as a template for later thematic articulation: notably, for example, in the dance theme (“La Calinda,” later reused in the second act of Koanga) from the second half of the movement, which employs the same underlying sequential pattern. This introductory passage is not recalled at the end of the first movement, but only returns at the beginning of the finale, as part of a more complex pattern of reminiscence and return. The main part of the final movement consists of four variations9 upon the solemn horn quartet with which the finale properly begins: music that strongly alludes to the celebrated “Nocturne” from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rather than evoking any distinctively American source. Other references make up cyclic returns of earlier movements: “By the River,” for instance, is recalled in the compound meter and sighing appoggiaturas of the third variation, and by its distinctive descending viola–cello melody. Much more moving is the twofold reminiscence of the “Calinda” theme from the first movement in the finale’s coda (see figure 16.7). Drained of its earlier energy and momentum, the theme here serves to intensify the feeling of wistful retrospection: a parting glimpse or seemingly affectionate farewell at the evening’s end that leaves many of the Florida Suite’s underlying structural and expressive questions unresolved.
Figure 16.7 Delius, Florida Suite, “At Night”: coda (“La Calinda”)
It is easy to resist works such as Delius’s Florida Suite on ideological grounds alone, to object that its evocation of a serene subtropical idyll veils darker truths about the quotidian reality of life in northern Florida for the majority of its working population. But laying such music aside risks reinforcing many of the commonplace assumptions about the meaning and significance of landscape that this chapter has sought to challenge. Landscape always in some sense conceals or excludes. It is never an open, neutral category. This is also the basis for its relationship with music, especially in nineteenth-century thought. For the Romantic artist, landscape could point toward music’s inner essence (and vice versa), but its apparent blankness and opacity merely deflects attention from the complex cultural networks in which ideas of music and landscape were entangled. Listening for landscape in nineteenth-century music does not represent a suspension of critical judgment. On the contrary, it asks compelling and often uncomfortable questions about musical value and subjectivity. Landscape here offers anything but stable ground. Rather, it is constantly shifting and in tension. This is where the idea of landscape as an epistemological glitch becomes significant once again: in the way that it resists any fixed interpretative framework, or in the notion of landscape as dissonance or displacement. Abiding within the landscapes of nineteenth-century music means anything but cozy habitation. Rather, it acknowledges a much deeper contingency, another injunction to listen and reflect upon a site of trauma as much as epiphany. Landscape remains an urgent imperative.
Notes
1. Anecdotally, I can report a particularly vivid experience of this impression, listening to an old LP recording of the work where the needle got stuck at precisely this passage: the mesmeric quality of the glitch was especially disturbing.