Other Cultural Perspectives in this Era:
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Music
and Nationalism
Cultural Perspective 9
Introduction : Overview : Issues : Projects : Links
We have noted that musical nationalism can take a number of different forms: it can conjure up images of a particular scene, it can portray a folk hero, or it can retell a legend from folklore. In My Country, a cycle of six symphonic poems, Bedrich Smetana aims to present images of the scenery, the history, and the folk legends of his native land.
Each culture has a value system that lies at the heart of its folklore: children learn right from wrong and prepare for adulthood through folktales, which are transmitted, like folk music, through oral tradition. The characters we find in these folk legends are often rascals whose wrongdoings prove the moral of the story. Such is the case with Peer Gynt, a peasant figure from Norwegian history whose adventures are recounted musically by Edvard Grieg in incidental music to a drama by Henrik Ibsen. Peer Gynt abandons his wife to seek other pleasures, then returns to her forty years later to find her still faithful to him. His wanderings take him to Africa, where he incurs the wrath of the Mountain King for seducing a local maiden. Another famous musical rogue, this one from medieval German legend, is portrayed in Richard Strauss's popular tone poem Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895). Till's adventures include riding through a marketplace and upsetting all the goods, disguising himself as a priest, mocking a group of professors, and finally paying the penalty for his pranks: he is tried and hanged, though his spirit cannot be suppressed.
Folk material also inspired the Russian composer Modest Musorgsky in composing his programmatic suite Pictures at an Exhibition, written for piano and made famous in an orchestral version by Maurice Ravel. The suite is based on an art show commemorating the life and works of Victor Hartmann. One movement, The Hut on Fowl's Legs, describes Hartmann's design for a clock shaped like the house of the witch Baba-Yaga. According to Russian legend, Baba-Yaga lured small children to her hut in the woods, where she ate them and ground their bones in her giant mortar. An equally frightening episode occurs in the famous tale of "Hansel and Gretel," collected and retold by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm; here, the witch's hut is a gingerbread house to which the children are attracted, only to be fattened up for her to eat. This German legend inspired an opera by the nineteenth-century composer Engelbert Humperdinck (whose name was adopted by a twentieth-century pop singer) and was later included as one of a pastiche of tales in the popular Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods (1988).
In addition to Musorgsky, other Russian composers have turned to their native folk traditions for inspiration: the early-twentieth-century master Igor Stravinsky brought life to the Russian fable of The Firebird in an exquisite ballet (1910); and his contemporary Sergei Prokofiev immortalized the well-known story of Peter and the Wolf in a symphonic fairy tale of the same name (1936).
Folklore often transcends national boundaries. The French tales "Sleeping Beauty" and "Cinderella" (both from the 1697 collection of Charles Perrault) were set as Russian ballets (The Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky in 1890 and Cinderella by Prokofiev in 1945); and a fanciful story by the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, in an expanded version by French writer Alexandre Dumas, served as the basis for Tchaikovsky's most famous ballet, The Nutcracker (1892), which we will study in a later chapter.
The theater has traditionally offered an enjoyable means through which to retell these stories, in the form of operas and musicals, as well as ballets. Today, Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty," the Grimms' "Beauty and the Beast," Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," the ancient Greek myth of “Hercules,” and the Arabian folk-tale of "Aladdin" from The Thousand and One Nights are brought to life in Disney animated films, whose images and songs keep these cultural expressions alive for a younger generation.
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Overview:
This Cultural Perspective explores the various ways that nineteenth-century
composers made use of nationalist elements. One of the most popular ways of
doing this was to use national folktales and stories as a basis for musical
compositions. The essay describes how a number of composers did this in their
music.
Issues:
Fairy tales and folktales play an important role in every society because they
teach vital lessons. They appeal to all segments of a society because they deal
with important adult issues in the form of entertaining stories that are enjoyable
for children. If you think back to the stories that you grew up with, you will
notice a number of important issues that they address:
How do we deal with life and death, good and evil, and the unknown?
Projects:
Every society has tales it tells its children. Some carry common themes,
others deal with issues specific to that culture. Use the links below to delve
more deeply into folktales from various societies. Look especially at those
of other cultures and see what themes are constant.
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