Regionalizing the Nation: The Symphonies of Franz Lachner and Emilie Mayer in Relationship to German National Identity

Abstract Historians of nationalisms and national-identity construction increasingly analyze identities at various geographical levels, especially the local, regional, and the transnational. Such work has repositioned and nuanced national identity in relation to other competing and complementary ties. However, there remains a tendency in musicology to overemphasize and simplify the German symphony’s nationalist, unifying role in the nineteenth century by neglecting to probe regional differences in musical tastes and practices. The symphony’s assumed role as national unifier has left little room for analyzing the genre’s capacity to communicate multiple possible political outcomes and national identities. The Vormärz period and its immediate aftermath are understudied in the history of the genre. However, it sheds crucial light on the genre’s relationship to national and regional identity precisely because it was an interstitial time during which composers, audiences, and critics debated the genre’s relationships to the imagined German nation. Crucially, unification was still just one potential political outcome. This article reassesses the role of the German symphony within nation-building processes at midcentury by attending to regional diversity and to symphonies that complicate orthodox conceptions of the symphony’s political and ideological significance. Its case studies—Franz Lachner’s Symphony in C Minor, op. 52, no. 5 (1835) and Emilie Mayer’s Symphony in C Major, no. 3 (1850)—offer two different ways of understanding the German symphony’s relationship to national identity. The reception of Lachner’s symphony reveals clear variances in taste and meaning between listeners in the North and the South that undermine the familiar image of the symphony as a unifying force. Mayer’s symphony complicates the orthodox, monolithic conception of the symphony’s political and ideological significance as a vehicle for a unified, liberal idea of German nationalism, instead conjuring a conservative, dynastic image of German national identity. Together, these case studies demonstrate some of the contested, regional ideological complexity of the German symphony in the nineteenth century.