Reception Histories

Among English-language writers on Western art music few have produced prose of such constant delight to musicologists and theorists as Donald Francis Tovey (1875–1940). Yet despite the numerous insights Tovey's published writings have yielded, particularly for studies of music in the Austro-German canon (Kerman 1967, Rosen 1971, Webster 1978), the sources of his avuncular charm and prodigious musical knowledge remain poorly understood. While several recent publications have offered perspectives on Tovey's intellectual world (Spitzer 2005, Kramer 2005, Comen 2019), these investigations have generally been conducted without reference to Tovey's own rich and revelatory collection of books and musical scores.


In this paper I draw on methodologies from material history to ponder Tovey's multi-facetted, loving, and energetic engagement with the music of J. S. Bach by examining his personal copies of the composer's works held in the University of Edinburgh Library. The surviving volumes include Hans Bischoff's critical edition of Bach's keyboard works, various miniature and vocal scores, and the complete Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe - the latter handsomely bound in green leather and stamped with the initials "D. F. T." Collectively these tomes afforded Tovey the opportunity of making Bach's works his own and they would have been his companions in several impressive feats of intellect and creativity: in the writing of important essays on Bach's music, in the research for his _Encyclopædia Britannica_ article on Bach's life and works, and in composerly tasks such as his production of continuo realizations and his completion of the unfinished fugue from _Die Kunst der Fuge_. The majority of Tovey's Bach volumes carry pencil markings from their former owner and these annotations mix scholarly acumen with witticism and wonderment, variously providing thoughts on performance practice, sharp-tongued complaints about idiotic editors, personal memories of past performances, and penetrating critical commentary. Inspired by approaches to the study of annotations pioneered by historians of the book (The Multigraph Collective 2018), I ask what it means to 'hear' Bach's music through these markings, and seek more generally to comprehend the experience of early twentieth-century musicians attempting to grasp Bach's style through bookish rather than aural encounters with his oeuvre.  

Louis Moreau Gottschalk is the first American musician to earn an international reputation as a legitimate composer in the European art music tradition. Nineteenth-century critics and subsequent scholars alike have routinely considered Gottschalk's incorporation of Afro-Caribbean rhythmic idioms to be the most original aspect of his music (Starr, 1995; Pruett, 2007; Shadle, 2015). His most acclaimed works are those based on the pronounced rhythmic ostinato patterns he encountered in the multicultural New Orleans of his youth and during subsequent residencies in Latin America. We recognize such patterns, often marked by percussive timbres and syncopated rhythms, as "grooves" in subsequent musical styles (Keil and Feld, 2005). As central as grooves are to much of Gottschalk's music, there has been no focused analysis of Gottschalk's rhythmic innovations, nor has any work on Gottschalk been informed by the growing scholarly literature on rhythm, percussion, and groove. I offer a critical analysis of these elements to illuminate how they function in Gottschalk's music. Furthermore, I consider how Gottschalk's problematic "creole" identity, commonly associated with his rhythmic inventiveness, has shaped his performance and reception history, often colored by racist tropes.

Much of Gottschalk's piano music employs what Richard Taruskin (2009) describes as a "hocketing hands-exchange technique," but which might better be considered drumming at the piano. Several works, including _Bamboula_ (1848), _The Banjo_ (1854), and _El Cocoyé_ (1854), engage hand exchange patterns identical to those used in traditional rudimental and Afro-Caribbean drumming. Gottschalk was also the first to bring Latin American percussion instruments into the realm of orchestral music, as in his first symphony (_La nuit des tropiques_, 1859). But the nature of those percussion parts, not fully scored in Gottschalk's manuscript and almost certainly improvised by the _tumba francesca_ ensemble engaged for the symphony's Havana premier, remains unclear and has evaded musicological scrutiny. Recordings of the symphony demonstrate little effort on the part of Western orchestras to understand the nuances of Afro-Caribbean drumming, rhythms, or grooves, resulting in uniformly sub-standard performances. While this study has significant ramifications for performance practice (and informs Laura Moore Pruett's forthcoming edition of _La nuit des tropiques_), it also highlights problematic aspects of Gottschalk's musical borrowings and his subsequent legacy.

Maurice Maeterlinck's play, _Pelléas et Mélisande_, inspired diverse musical settings following its French premiere in 1893, including those by Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Arnold Schoenberg, and Jean Sibelius. Debussy's opera, in particular, has enjoyed sustained critical recognition in the United States over the years, since its New York premiere in 1908. However, it was actually Fauré's setting with which Americans first became acquainted in the early-twentieth century, in both its original context as incidental music, and as an orchestral suite (op. 80). Audiences in New York and Boston first heard the score in 1902 as part of an English-language production of _Pelléas_, starring famed actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. (Fauré had composed this music for her London production four years earlier.) It stimulated a particularly warm response in Boston, a Francophile city that had openly embraced many of Fauré's compositions since the 1890s, to an extent not observable in any other American city. The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed the suite for the first time in 1904, and continued to program it. This offered critics various opportunities to discuss Fauré's approach to Maeterlinck's text, eventually in comparison to Debussy's opera, and, in some cases, to express a clear preference between the two.


This paper considers the American reception of Fauré's _Pelléas_ music, with a focus on activities in Boston and New York, 1902–1912. Contemporary critical writings illustrate divergent responses to Fauré's setting, first as stage music, then as a concert suite. Such discussions expanded to encompass Debussy's opera, upon its introduction to the American stage. For Boston, the ten-year anniversary of Campbell's production offered a unique point of comparison, as _Pelléas_ was featured prominently at the Boston Opera House in January 1912. That month alone brought three performances of the opera, a new staging of the play (in French) with Fauré's score, and a concert featuring the related suite. Indeed, a comparison of these musical interpretations was seemingly encouraged at the time, through shared physical elements of both sets and performers (a novelty underlined by the appearance of Maeterlinck's companion, Georgette Leblanc, as Mélisande in both productions.)