UC Santa Barbara

In this dissertation, I analyze presentations of German composer Felix Mendelssohn in English music history books published between 1850 and 1910 in order to explore the cultural forces affecting English music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining different authors’ passages on Mendelssohn, I demonstrate how trends in historiography, taste formation, and nationalism affect the reception of an individual composer. Mendelssohn is a thread that weaves through all these discussions; following it provides a provocative view of a tumultuous period in English music history.

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed many interrelated cultural shifts that affected England’s musical culture: a boom in the publication of books on the history of music, a rise in nationalistic sentiment that spurred English writers to tout their country’s accomplishments, increased interest in ancient music that led to significant discoveries about music in the Tudor era, new historiographical approaches that rendered previous history books antiquated, and a zeal for educating the wider public about music in the hopes of shedding the stigma of being das Land ohne Muisk. These decades also coincide with the peak and decline of “Mendelssohn Mania,” England’s fervent devotion to Mendelssohn that reached its height after his death in 1848 and diminished by the 1880s.

In Chapter 1, I review the available scholarship on Mendelssohn reception and English musical culture during the Victorian era, leading to the English Musical Renaissance. I also provide background information on the authors of the music history books used as sources throughout the dissertation, noting the social networks formed by these historians. Chapter 2 details a major historiographical shift in the nineteenth century which made Mendelssohn less relevant to later histories as they excluded some of his greatest accomplishments. This chapter places five English music history books in a continuum from Carlylean hero worship to Spencerian evolutionary progressions, demonstrating how each author reconciled the two models and the resulting effect on Mendelssohn’s representation. In Chapter 3, I trace various discussions surrounding Mendelssohn’s popularity and how it reflected on the perceived musical taste of the nation. Finally, in Chapter 4, I detail the effects of Mendelssohn reception through writings about subsequent generations of English composers, as they struggled to overcome the perception of being the “Land without Music” and claim a national musical identity comparable to but distinct from the Austro-German hegemony. The chapter examines the reception of three composers from this Dark Age: William Sterndale Bennett, Henry Hugo Pierson, and Arthur Sullivan. As the narrative surrounding the Dark Age and Renaissance coalesces, the ways in which historians portray their relationship to Mendelssohn shifts, as Mendelssohn moves from being a beneficial mentor to English composers to a harmful influence they must discard.