The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

Three interrelated productions take their cue from the architecture of Venice’s famed San Marco Basilica: Igor Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (1956), French nouveau roman writer Michel Butor’s literary prose poem Description de San Marco (1963), and Columbia Masterworks producer John McClure’s production of the LP “The Glory of Gabrieli” (1969), recorded in San Marco and dubbed “a stereo spectacular.” This chapter explores homologies between the architecture of San Marco, the polychoral music of Venetian composers, the polyvocal literature of Michel Butor and the stereophonic relief of McClure’s “stereo spectacular” in order to gauge the parallels between sound, space and phonography in these works. Exploring Butor’s photographically inspired writing leads to an examination of a “stereophonic étude” that he devoted in 1965 to another familiar monument, Niagara Falls, and the way this poetic text then got translated into a spatialized cantata by French composer Claire Schapira.

From the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Britons were in thrall to German composers. In 1940, music editor Ralph Hill complained of ‘the fanatical worship of the public as well as the average professional musician for the German tradition’. Instead of any unified Austro-German tradition, this was Britain negotiating a changing set of stylistic currents, played off against other continental identities and shifting ideas of old and new. Before the First World War, British musicians considered Austrians and Germans wardens of traditional styles (Brahms) as well as promulgators of modernism (Strauss and Schoenberg). British composers after Elgar, among them Holst and Vaughan Williams, responded directly to French exemplars and to the emerging folk revival. With Britten and other British composers of the 1930s, there was a marked shift of allegiance away from the musical ‘Hun’ – apart from an increasing interest in Mahler. By the later 1950s, ‘The Hun’ had ceased to be an entity for UK music lovers. Indeed, the Britain-vs.-the-continent duality was already moribund when the young Manchester group brought homegrown rather than continental modernism to London in 1956.

This chapter explores the nature of European celebrity ca. 1900 as a context for Mahler’s mission to promote himself and his works among the public at large. Figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Charlotte Wolter, and Hans Makart found ways in their respective fields to walk the line between popular success and artistic achievement, maintaining highbrow prestige while intriguing the public to a significant degree, particularly among the educated middle class. The growth of a consumer class, and the proliferation of opportunities for that class to consume those celebrities and personalize them in the process, provided a rationale for the lower middle class to push up against the cultural capital of the educated bourgeoisie. In this environment, Mahler’s creative project, as creator and as performing artist, emerged as a recognizable, if idiosyncratic, attempt at artistic fame in the modern sense.