Greece as a margin in Europe
The present issue is dedicated to art music in nineteenth-century Greece. In that time Greece was perceived as a margin: it belonged to a periphery of which Europe was the core. It was viewed as such either by Western dominant readings (its Eastern character defined by the Westerns)Footnote 1 or by Greeks themselves, who, at least during the the nineteenth century, saw their own land as a periphery.
Eurocentrism, however, is no longer a measure to evaluate cultures viewed as peripheries or margins. Since the 1970s and 1980s, awareness of the existence of simultaneous unexplored histories and the subjection of their cultural, economic and historical products to what James Morris Blaut has called ‘the colonizer's view of the world’,Footnote 2 galvanized scholarly work on Eurocentrism and the dynamics of the cultural gaze between Europe and the rest of the world.Footnote 3 Nowadays, the destabilization of the West as a self-perceived entity is an economical, political and cultural reality.
In the field of musicology also, the idea of Western music is challenged as a category against which ‘others’ can be perceived. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, as it is rightly argued, some scholars ‘have questioned the focus on history as the product of great men, great works, great traditions or great innovations. This has led to the study of music as a social force and to histories of musics previously excluded by scholars, many of whom have tended to concentrate on the art music of social élites.’Footnote 4 In the process of re-reading music history, it is a certainty that any contribution to the studies of regional cultures, such as Greek, should enrich our perception of the multiple interactions between central ‘mainstream’ trends and indigenous traditions.
Within this perspective, many recent cultural and intellectual studies are directed towards what was perceived as a margin in a very Eurocentric perception of the world, in order to re-access the intercultural dynamics between centres of aesthetic production and their counterparts in the cultural periphery.Footnote 5 Notably such activities mostly happen in places which were considered to be margins: for example, conferences on ‘rethinking musical modernism’ in Belgrade, Serbia,Footnote 6 post-avant gardes ‘beyond the centres’ in Thessaloniki, Greece,Footnote 7 Greece as an intercultural pole of musical thought and creativity in Thessaloniki, Greece,Footnote 8 and so forth. All this recently developed research sees from ‘inside’ what is perceived as a cultural periphery, even re-accessing the meaning and context of terminology (i.e. modernism, avant garde etc.). Perhaps these views offer a more realistic perspective of regions outside the ‘centres’; as Jim Samson rightly argues, ‘it is hard to deny that the construction of “mainstream” traditions – as much to do with chauvinist politics as with art – has coloured our view of so-called peripheral cultures. That we have identified little of value in some of these repertories is as often as not because we know little about them.’Footnote 9
The five articles of the present issue serve to broaden access to the so-called cultural periphery of Europe, providing critical readings on important aspects of this theme and extending English-speaking readers’ knowledge into an important new region.Footnote 10
Main characteristics of nineteenth-century Greek art music: history and aesthetics
As Haris Xanthoudakis suggests, ‘modern Greece was born during that period that began with the 1821 Revolution and ended ten years later with the assassination of Governor Ioannis Capodistrias’.Footnote 11 At the insistence of the United Kingdom, France and Russia, the 1832 Treaty of London made Greece a monarchy. Otto of Wittelsbach, Prince of Bavaria, was chosen as its first King in 1833.Footnote 12
Art music in modern Greece, as George Leotsakos explains, began in the year 1771 when ‘regular performances helped to develop a musical tradition which gradually expanded to Zakynthos, Cephallonia, Lefkas and, after 1830, to continental Greece’.Footnote 13 Throughout the nineteenth century, Greece was more an amalgam of different cultural regions than a homogenous cultural entity. The Ionian Islands, for example, were, for most of the nineteenth century, under a British ‘protectorate’ and had a quite different cultural development from that of the main part of Greece. These different regions developed separate cultural trends from each other (the most important cultural centres being Constantinople, Corfu and Athens).
In this context we come to understand the co-existence of Eastern and Western influences, such as those of the Orthodox Church and the Enlightenment, in the works of Greek composers, music education and music reception of that period. Enlightenment ideologies, for example, emphasized on ancient Greece as the predecessor of the nation; needless to say, this was the way that Europeans saw Greeks since the West attributed great importance to ancient Greek culture. Intellectuals, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, were eager to embrace Western values.Footnote 14 Even representatives of the Eastern Orthodox Church wanted to mix European trends with the modality of Byzantine chants. A good example of this was, according to Katy Romanou, ‘the harmonization of the Orthodox liturgy, a collaboration of Ioannis Chaviaras and Benedict Randhartinger in 1843/44 done for the Greek church in Vienna which quickly disseminated in many Greek communities in Europe and was very successful in Athens as well’.Footnote 15
Music imported from the West: a tour in time, from Italy to Germany
Central Western culture was selectively imported to Greeks, firstly, by encouraging Italian operatic productions and band music and, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, by their performing and listening to music mostly from the romantic German repertoire.
While throughout most of the nineteenth century, Greek composers, especially from the Ionian Islands, studied in Italy, in the late nineteenth century composers from mainland Greece studied in Germany, and it was they who undertook the leadership of important Athenian music establishments. Thus, the turn to German models was encouraged by quite a few important composers who had received music education in German-speaking countries.
On the one hand, opera, especially Italian, was systematically imported into Greece from the East (Asia Minor and its large Greek communities) and the West; it functioned as an innovation and ‘openness’ to Europe. On the other hand, the first concert with German music (by Mozart) in 1860 is reported to have been a fiasco: only when the performers changed the programme and began to play Italian music, did the audience change their attitude.Footnote 16
Importing European types of music, such as opera, into mainland Greece, however, is a complex issue. Stella Kourbana explains in her essay that opera was welcomed by important men of letters such as Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, and was popular among middle-class and upper-middle-class audiences.Footnote 17 However, as Leotsakos comments, state importation of Italian opera companies for the entertainment of foreigners residing in the capital, often aroused the hostility of local Greeks: ‘neglecting musical education the state spent lavishly on Italian companies until 1868’.Footnote 18 At the same time, the reception of the Ionian composers, such as Pavlos Carrer (1829–1896), in mainland Greece, met with many obstacles, mainly due ‘to the indifference of royalty and politicians, and at times open hostility’.Footnote 19
Thus, the growing musical life in Athens at that time was entirely under foreign influence, mostly Italian, due to the Italian opera companies that visited Athens regularly from the 1840s. One would also expect German influences, because of the military bands of King Otto; however, no attempt to promote German music to the Athenians has been recorded.Footnote 20 Also, the wind bands of the Ionian Islands did not include such works in their repertoire throughout most of the nineteenth century.
Although surprising, it remains an historical fact that Bavarian rule did not make any attempts to counterbalance Italian influence. However, after the marriage of the successor to the throne, Constantine (in Athens, 15 October 1889) to the austere Sofia Hohenzollern, a sister of the Kaiser, also known as Frau Verboten, the situation changed. According to Leotsakos, ‘changes of this sort never proceed exclusively from one person: the German cultural penetration was supported, from very early on, by banker Andreas Syngros (1830–1899), who, in 1888, had enriched a new capital with the beautiful Municipal Theatre which was foolishly demolished during the Metaxas dictatorship’.Footnote 21
It was, consequently, in these last decades that the first symphonic orchestras were established; also, composers started receiving education in German-speaking countries and embodied German aesthetics in their works. The first symphonic orchestra was founded in 1893 under the Italian conductor Riccardo Boniccioli; it was followed by the foundation of other symphonic orchestras in Athens and Corfu. Their repertoire, as well as journalsFootnote 22 which presented works of the German Classical and Romantic composers (especially Beethoven and Wagner), contributed to familiarizing the public with German symphonic music. Moreover, composers such as Manolis Kalomiris (1863–1962), who was considered to be the leader of the so-called National School of Music from 1908, were influenced by German romantic aesthetics in their works, especially those of Wagner.Footnote 23 Finally, in that period, the repertory and the requisites of German music academies and the French Conservatoire were introduced into music education in Athens.Footnote 24
Such a turn towards German models was one of the reasons that accelerated the process of the ‘Westernization’ of Greek culture by the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 25 Another reason might have been the decreasing influence of the Orthodox Church. While up to the beginning of the twentieth century the Church created close links with the Greek people, since the 1910s the political promotion of the Church's role as liberator of the nation was abandoned and the embodiment of Greece into Western Europe took place to a greater extent in a more decisive way.
There are substantial similarities between the revolutionary upheaval of 1821 and the historical conditions that occurred at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in terms of ‘importing’ Western values. While Greeks were fighting for their independence from the Turks at the beginning of nineteenth century, the character of the new nation they would create was being decided mainly by Greeks who lived outside Greece or by philhellenes who thought they were preserving the invaluable heritage of classical civilization (supporting of the ideas of Enlightenment). Thus, Greek society was being shaped from the outside.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries great archeological discoveries were taking place, all made by foreigners. Thus, the Western European idea of Greece as the direct inheritor of the classical tradition revived. Many educated Greeks studied abroad and, as the Greek poet George Seferis observed, ‘burning as we were with the desire to bring back to Greece everything that was Hellenic and seeing signs of Hellenism everywhere, brought back, without looking more deeply into the matter, countless foreign values which in fact had nothing to do with our own land at all’.Footnote 26
‘Nationalism’ in Greek art music
Nationalism in music ‘depends on a network of cultural ideas that must exist outside a work, and the work must engage with these ideas if it is to be interpreted as nationalistic’.Footnote 27 Nationalism was an important force in nineteenth-century European music. The ‘network of cultural ideas’ resulted in the rise of an important body of art music under the impetus of patriotic feeling, in a style whose distinctive features were inspired by the use of folk elements (folklore seen as a collective expression of national identity). Greece was not an exception to that rule.
Throughout the nineteenth century in Greece, the quest for a national voice influenced and shaped musical composition. There is an uninterrupted presence of national elements in the works of composers since Nikolaos Chalikiopoulos Mantzaros (1795–1872), the first important composer of modern Greece.Footnote 28 As George Leotsakos notices, referring especially to music written by the Ionian composers, there is an unbroken continuity of Greek art music, developed with aesthetic and technical consistency and characterized by its ‘Greekness’, ‘a quality which … can be traced as far back as 1847’.Footnote 29
The notion of ‘national’, both in the context of the composition and reception of music, originated in a Herderian concept of folkloristic elements.Footnote 30 Such a concept is to be found mainly in works of Ionian composers influenced by the Italian tradition. This is not only a Greek ‘symptom’: as Samson observes, ‘nowhere did the seeds of Herder's cultural-linguistic nationalism fall on more fertile soil than in East Central Europe’.Footnote 31 Mantzaros has to be seen as a separate case since he embraced more eclectic stylistic tendencies. Like Zingarelli, early in his career he embodied heroic idealism and extreme musical practices, referred to by some as ‘Romanticism’, yet later focused on esoteric sacred music.Footnote 32
In line with the spirit of folklorism, an important tendency of the nineteenth-century Ionian composers was to include folk song in various ways in their works, which were mainly serenades (Ionian kantada). The Ionian composers were in fact ahead of other composers on mainland Greece in this respect, since the earliest example of a ‘national school’ was written by Iossif Liveralis and was entitled Xypnima tou klefti [The Awakening of the Klepht], (1847), as mentioned earlier. Also, Ionian composers, apart from themes they used for many works, not only referred to the Ionian folk song but also to the folk song of mainland Greece. Thus, several kinds of music, especially vocal ones (for example, opera and works for voice and piano), had undoubtedly folkloric elements which comprised a part of these works but were not incorporated into the musical language – starting with Spyridon Xyndas (1810–1896) and Carrer and ending with Dionysios Lavrangas (1860–1941), George Lambelet (1875–1945) and Napoleon Lambelet (1864–1932), Lavrentios Camilieris (1878–1956, with his masterpiece ‘I Xenoula’, and, especially, Spyridon-Filiskos Samaras (1821–1917, with songs such as ‘I Exomologissis’ [‘The Confession’], ‘Manna ke Yos’ [’Mother and Son’] and so forth.Footnote 33 Folklorism is also to be found in operatic works of Ionian composers such as Carrer (Markos Botzaris (1858), Kyra Frosini (1868) and Despo, i Irois tou Souliou [Despo, the Heroine of Souli] (1875), also coupling with ‘patriotic’ themes) and Xyndas (O Hypopsifios Vouleftis [The Parliamentary Candidate] (1867)).
However, in the first half of the nineteenth century and even later, the presence or absence of local Greek colour in operas was of minimal interest to the musical public. Folkloristic colourings of the patriotic works of certain Ionians, especially those of Carrer, were musical elements of the East (and not those of Greek Demotic song exclusively) and Oriental music systems were considered to be incompatible with European ones.Footnote 34 In other words, the public was not ready for folkloristic styles for some time, and the Oriental-style traditional music, either imported or locally created, was kept out of the artistic repertoire.Footnote 35
The romantic ‘organic’ perception of music influenced composers from the end of the nineteenth century, when Greece became familiar with German music and aesthetics, as explained earlier. German models were used by representatives of the so-called ‘National School of Music’, established at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Manolis Kalomiris and George Lambelet. According to them, the way that German composers contend with tradition and, thus, express the ‘soul’ of their people, should be a model for Greek composers. German models, or, the swing towards the symphonic repertoire, resulted in a growing alienation from Italian musical culture in terms of offering aesthetic standards to the composition and reception of music.
Additionally, a theory of Greek historic continuity established in the 1890s, according to which there is an uninterrupted continuation from ancient Greece through Byzantium to modern Greece, ‘restored’ the historical position of Byzantium in the development of Greek culture. In musical terms this meant the social and ideological ‘upgrading’ of Demotic song (Greek folk song that was developed during the four centuries of the Ottoman empire) and Byzantine hymns by the end of the nineteenth century, since they were recognized as potentially useful for the creation of a musical idiom with ‘national’ characteristics; they alone could assure the continuation of Greek musical culture from the ancient years to the present day. So theories were developed by composers like George Pachtikos (1869–1916) and Ioannis Sakellaridis (1853–1938) supporting the idea that Byzantine hymns and folk music evolved from ancient Greek music, and were also encouraged by foreign intellectuals, such as Ugo Athanasio Gaisser, Francois-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoundray.
Composers, mainly representatives of the so-called National School of Music, who reflected this theory in their works, incorporated folk song and Byzantine modes – their rhythm, scales and character – into the musical means of narration no longer as a decorative elaboration of musical syntax, as was the case in the works of the nineteenth-century Ionian composers, but rather as assisting in reshaping this syntax by the systematic use of their rhythms, scales and character. Examples can be drawn in works of Spyridon Filiskos Samaras (1861–1917), Dionysios Lavrangas (1860–1941), George Lambelet, Manolis Kalomiris and other composers of this generation. Herderian characteristics became clearer, corresponding to the notion of ‘nationalism’ of the beginning of the twentieth century, which was more ‘introvert’Footnote 36 in context owing to a series of important historical conflicts in which Greece was defeated.Footnote 37 Correspondingly, the middle-class audience accepted folkloristic styles and the embodiment of tradition in listening to art music because it was in agreement with the current notion of ‘national’ that originated from the theory of historic continuity.Footnote 38
Outline of papers
Anastasia Siopsi's article on ‘Music in the Imaginary Worlds of the Greek Nation: Greek Art Music during the Nineteenth-Century's fin de siécle (1880s–1910s)’, brings the issue of nineteenth-century Greek music into the twentieth century, showing important new tendencies which changed the nature of that world; moreover, she relates them to Greek history and broader social and cultural trends (for example, the linguistic battle between Demotic language and katharevousa, since nationalism became grounded in folk tradition and folk language, and the changing role of women in public life as related to their involvement in the evolution of the roles of art music and bourgeois culture).
The article shows how the influence of Byzantine identity and of Demotic music changed the nature of musical nationalism, and with those tendencies grew an alienation from Italian musical culture. Important changes in the hermeneutics of tradition in art music, originating in the dogma of ‘national unity’ and the theory of historic continuity, contributed in constructing and contextualizing the notion of ‘national’; moreover, these changes were strengthened by the increasing influence of German Romantic aesthetics in the composition and reception of music. The author explains the links between German Romanticism and attitudes to ancient culture which strengthened the idea of the evolution of Byzantine hymns and Greek folk songs from ancient music. These ideas, corresponding to the influential theory of historic continuity, marginalized Italian music as the ‘other’ in the context of constructing a national identity, whereas Byzantine hymns and Demotic song were recognized as potentially useful for the creation of a musical idiom with ‘national’ characteristics.
Haris Xanthoudakis' article on ‘Composers, Trends and the Question of Nationality in Nineteenth-Century Musical Greece’ provides a well-defined overview of how art music evolved in Greece during the nineteenth century. He shows how Greek music was related to the hegemonic framework of Western and central Europe and established its own framework of activity. In this respect, the author combines historical information with the musical aesthetic and stylistic tendencies in the regions of Greece, taking as a main starting point the 1821 Greek Revolution; moreover, he does so in order to shape his main argument, according to which Greek composers were depicting their own ‘images’ of Greece in music since the very beginning of the history of modern Greece.
Starting with the work of Nikolaos Chalikiopoulos Mantzaros, the first important composer in the region of the Ionian Islands, Xanthoudakis analyzes the various ways in which works of important Greek composers embody, on the one hand, European aesthetics and ideas and, on the other hand, the inner need of each of the creators to articulate images of nation by means of Greek language, patriotic themes and folklore, corresponding, more or less, to Herder's notion of Volksgeist. At the close of the nineteenth century, as the author clearly explains, the restoration of an integrated narrative of the Greek historical past (that is, the establishment of the theory of historic continuity) resulted in the creation of a musical idiom with more apparent national, and clearer Herderian, characteristics, since folk music and Byzantine hymns became incorporated into the musical means of narration by the systematic use of their rhythms, scales and character in works of important Greek composers.
Katy Romanou's and Maria Barbaki's article, entitled ‘Music Education in Nineteenth-Century Greece; Its Institutions and their Contribution to Urban Musical Life’, explores the geographical, ethnic and linguistic shape of the three regions (with their capitals Constantinople, Corfu and Athens) through the development of music education and concert life in nineteenth-century Greece. Music education in the new state was greatly determined by the music of the Greek Orthodox church, as developed in Constantinople during the long captivity, and the music of Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, where Italian music was assimilated. It was mainly those two kinds of music that were absorbed and transformed through their confrontation and interaction in the newly founded Greek state. For this reason, this comprehensive description of music education of the Greek people in the nineteenth century travels from Constantinople to Corfu and finally to Athens. At the very end of the century, the achievements of German nineteenth-century music were introduced into musical education and musical life in Greece.
Stella Kourbana's article, entitled ‘The Birth of Music Criticism in Greece: The Case of the Historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1840)’, makes a clear argument that belief in a continuing Classical tradition shaped thinking on music at least for one major Greek intellectual, who was also the Greek nation's premier historian. For Paparrigopoulos, opera was the perfect art form; cultivating the public in the newly established state with this genre of art – a powerful symbol of bourgeois European class – was an urgent need. Such an attitude in a young scholar, later to become one of the greatest historians in nineteenth-century Greece, reflected the demand of the recently established middle class to adopt the same types of education and entertainment as middle classes in Western Europe.
The article relates these first texts of music criticism in Greece of the 1840s with broader issues of opera's reception in Greece, mainly in the independent Greece (i.e. the Ionian Islands are excluded), and with the developing ideas of Paparrigopoulos himself on aesthetics, music, education and, most significantly, Greek modern history.
Kostas Kardamis's article, entitled ‘From Popular to Esoteric: Nikolaos Mantzaros and the Development of his Career as Composer’, explores the career of a key composer of the Ionian Islands, Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros (1795–1872), better known today as the composer of the Greek national anthem. Mantzaros was almost the same age as Schubert, Rossini and Donizetti, and thus belongs to such composers who represent the musical transition from late Classicism to the multifarious nineteenth century.
Mantzaros always considered music and poetry as two inseparable values which could form an organic relationship; as a result, from the late 1820s the composer began setting Greek poetry to music, with Aria Greca (1827) as the earliest setting of Greek language in music. Since then, through an ‘essential’ unity of poetry with music, Mantzaros depicted in various ways (i.e. with patriotic themes, folk-like character of melodies and language) his idea of ‘national’, corresponding moreover to the growing demands for a national identity in modern Greece of that time. At the same time, his aesthetics evolved from heroic idealism and extreme musical practices (referred to by some as ‘romanticism’) to esoteric sacred music, as mentioned earlier.
The broader contribution of this article lies in shedding new light on major conditions and developments relating to the emerging European nineteenth-century music and aesthetics between 1800 and 1848 in the region of the Ionian Islands.
