# Composers and 'nationality'



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

With THIS the question came up whether Honegger was Swiss or French. Then the old 'is Handel German or English' debate came up. So I thought I'd do a whole thread devoted to these questions.

For some composers, the case is 'cut and dried,' more or less. For example, we consider Lully a French composer, but he was born in Italy.

For others its debatable. Handel as mentioned is one, another one is the cellist Pablo Casals, who to his dying day considered himself not Spanish but Catalan, although he lived outside Spain for about three decades.

Some composers had to leave their country for various reasons. But their hearts and minds remained in their country, so to speak. Prokofiev spent about twenty years abroad but ended up going back to Russia, right in the mid-1930's during Stalin's reign of terror. Prokofiev took that risk to go back 'home.' & its maybe cliche but some people want to die in the country where they were born. But what if Prokofiev had not gone home? Would we now consider him to be something other than 'Russian?'

That's certainly how I see Stravinsky, less Russian and more a composer of the world. Living in France, Switzerland and the USA at various times. He went back to Russia on his 80th birthday, the Khrushchev regime would have been happy to have him come back and live there (good public relations for them), but Igor declined. I have a feeling he did not feel connected to Russia as others like Prokofiev or Rachmaninov had.

Stravinsky was buried, as he wished, in the state of Venice (next to Diaghilev), a place which saw significant premieres of his music after 1945. On neutral territory, nothing to do with his place of birth. So there's the saying that it doesn't matter where you are born or where you die, but what you do in your life in-between those goal posts.

Some other maybe 'borderline' ones open for debate re 'nationality' that come to my mind:

Luigi Boccherini - born Italy, but spent most of his life abroad, esp. Spain
Miklos Rozsa - born Hungary, but spent most of his life abroad, esp. USA
Edgard Varese - born France, but spent significant chunks of time in USA
Vladimir Horowitz - born Ukraine, but lived most of his life abroad, esp. USA
Ernest Bloch - born Switzerland, but lived most of his life abroad, after 1930's (to his death in late 1950's) in USA
Gyorgy Ligeti - born Hungary, but left after Russian invasion in 1956, lived for rest of his life abroad (became Austrian citizen)
Luigi Cherubini - born Italy but spent most of his life in France

*So just seeking comments generally on this issue and also about which nationality you see the borderline cases as being in?

Is it more a case of shades of grey than absolutes?

Does it depend on the life of each composer, and is the saying 'home is where the heart is?' also relevant?

& what do you think of the idea of a person having a 'first' and 'second' nationality? (a bit like dual citizenship).

Discuss, maybe giving your own examples.*


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

Actually I'd consider Lully to be Italian, or more precisely Florentine, so its not as cut and dried as you suppose. Similarly I'd regard Muzio Clementi to be Italian too. Both left Italy at a young age by modern standards but were verging on adulthood by the standards of the day and would already have received the bulk of their formative musical education.

Of course there are shades of grey, but these are just about the two most borderline cases I can think of. The idea that Handel is British is ridiculous to me. Of course he was influenced by living and working in Italy and Britain, but his formative influences as a composer are naturally his native culture and musical education which are German.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^ Yeah, formative years & eg. the place of education is very important. 

I see Lully as French but of course its open to dispute, anything is. Main reason is I can't separate him from the court of the 'Sun king,' Louis XIV. Its like they're one and the same thing to me, almost. But would be interesting to see what others think about him too.

For me, Handel fits in with the dual nationality thing I mentioned in my OP. German first and then British second. & maybe Italian in between. Handel would love to be alive now, I guess he'd be a globetrotter of sorts. He's a guy with itchy feet, he likes to explore the world and get around a lot. He was cosmopolitan in his day as Stravinsky was in modern times.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Some composers remain firmly attached in spirit to their country no matter how far they travel.

One example is Dvorak. He grew up in a small rural Czech town, but his succesful career brought him all over Europe, with long stints in London, and particularly a few years as director of the conservatory in New York - which was much further away than it is now. Still, his music kept its Czech inflections and country spirits and by the end of his life all he wanted was to go home and keep pidgeons and go for walks in the fields. He died a national hero.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

A few errors regarding Handel above. He was argubaly the first _cosmopolitan_ composer. He was German by birth, but his formal musical language was largely Italian, and also French in terms of form and idiom. The critical four years spent in Italy during his early twenties (under wealthy Italian patrons, then the centre of the world on all artistic matters) was where he learnt how to write harmony and where he composed his numerous Italian cantatas, and large scale oratorios, which were all Italian in almost every way. This he took with him to England. There he also studied the manuscripts of Henry Purcell and began to write English Baroque music, especially non-operatic vocal music (anthems, odes, songs, etc) that were of the Purcellian tradition. Later, his English oratorios, including _The Messiah_ gradually sounded more English (for example, there are hardly any _da capo_ arias in _The Messiah_, but more song-like arias and chorus numbers). So yes, he was German by birth but Italian and French in musical idiom, and created then a unique contemporary English flavour of Baroque music that was cosmopolitan reflecting his experience and dealings with singers and instrumentalists who were English and who were continental-European.

I would not consider Handel as German, musically speaking, in the sense that JS Bach was utterly German, or the many soulds at the Berlin court under Alexander of Prussia.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I think a lot probably depends on the composer himself - i.e. did Franck really consider himself French or was he a Belgian at heart?

Handel was about 27 years old when he made Great Britain his home and was offered British citizenship 15 years later (by a German-born British king, no less...) and took it - as with Lully in Paris perhaps there was more than a whiff of career opportunism about his decision but for the standards of the day Handel stayed as true to his adopted country as Lully did to his. Also, Handel - at least nominally - was a Protestant and this may also have made things easier for him bearing in mind the anti-Papist stance in both Parliament and the Court of St. James's at the time: he wrote works to religious texts to commemorate British/Hanoverian success over Charles Edward Stuart and le duc de Noailles on the battlefields of Culloden and Dettingen, although Handel had also composed for the Catholic clergy years before when in Rome so I'm sure he spurred on by patriotic rather than sectarian zeal. One thing - had Handel settled in Italy would he now be referred to as Georgio Andelli?


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

D. Scarlatti was obviously Italian. For many classical music listeners, the (considerable amount) only music they know by him has a distinctly Spanish flavor. He was a court composer, as was Lully; the major European courts were interrelated in their hirelings, so it makes sense to 'tie' such people to their native lands.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

hocket said:


> The idea that Handel is British is ridiculous to me. Of course he was influenced by living and working in Italy and Britain, but his formative influences as a composer are naturally his native culture and musical education which are German.


I agree with *HarpsichordConcerto* about Handel and Italy. When you consider those almost four dozen operas, and all of those cantatas and oratorios which are basically operas in disguise (including the ones written in English), there's really no way to deny that Italy was just as formative an influence on him as anything he learned in Germany.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Personally, I think the division by nation can be a little silly, because even though there are stylistic similarities among many composers from particular countries, there's also huge variation, and I think alot of what we see as such similarity partly stems from simply categorizing them by their birthland (though I am not arguing that many composers don't take inspiration from their fellow countrymen, as has been the case with many great artists). I think this is especially breaking down now as the world is becoming more and more united through things like the internet, its not so much a bunch of countries as a whole world of people, a super-culture. You can see this cosmopolitan nature all the way back with Bach composing in the styles of other nations, like in his Italian Concerto, Chopin being heavily inspired by Italian operas, Tchaikovsky combining his Russian heritage with the more Western influence from his conservatory training, Wagner being basically the heir to the French Berlioz, the almost kinship between the Russians and the French of the Romantic period and early 20th Century and the extreme diverse melting pot style that composers like Satie and Debussy created, taking elements from Asian and American music, and mixing it with influences from Russia and Germany (You could argue that Debussy is something of an heir to Berlioz by way of Wagner X3). Then there's the 20th Century where things just go crazy, but you still have examples such as the American Frank Zappa taking heavy influence from Russian Stravinsky, Hungarian Bartok, German Webern, French Varese, American Cage, and American jazz artists like Duke Ellington and Wes Montgomery and rock artists like Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and Schnittke as well taking equally heavy influence from his countrymen like Shostakovich and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, as well as pretty significant influence from Mahler and Varese and Schoenberg. I'm sure there's way more examples than that, too.

I don't think there's many people who think like this now, but I also want to say that I find it silly that people would criticize a composer's work for not sounding (stereotypically) like it belongs with the country they were born in, like Dvorak criticizing contemporaries of his from America because their music was very Germanic sounding. To me, thats a pretty silly criticism. I don't see anything wrong in identifying with something a world away from the culture you sprang from by accident, and incorporating that thing you identify with into your artistic vocabulary. If you are a person born in Uganda, but you strongly identify with Japanese Gagaku music, and you love it, and it influences your work heavily, I think that is just as beautiful a thing as this hypothetical composer identifying with Ugandan culture more and taking that as direct inspiration. Heh, sorry for that rant X3 I doubt many people really think like that any more.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

BurningDesire said:


> Personally, I think the division by nation can be a little silly


Not only silly but patronizing, especially when nationality becomes one of the standards by which composers' music is measured. I'm reminded of Aaron Copland's remark about how some of the French disliked Stravinsky's neoclassical works because they didn't sound Russian enough. More recently and more offensively, there's David Brown's comment that Chaikovsky's Russianness prevented him from writing quality "normal" symphonies (i.e. symphonies that don't quote Russian folk tunes).


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## beetzart (Dec 30, 2009)

Clementi was Italian born but spent most of his life based in England. He had businesses here and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Johann Baptist Cramer I believe was German born yet lived and died in the UK.


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## regressivetransphobe (May 16, 2011)

Let's get some platitudes out of the way right away

Arbitrary borders!!! Nationalism is for doo-dooheads!!!

Stop being so PC!!! Many people feel that their homeland is important to them!!!


With that said, it's pretty much all semantics with the "borderline" cases. All that should matter is what they chose to identify as, and if they didn't, their national identity is a bit irrelevant.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

When it comes to literature, I organize and shelve my books according to the dominant language spoken and written by the writer. Thus I place Joseph Conrad among the British for the simple reason that he settled in England and wrote in English and is part of the British literary tradition... in spite of having been born and raised in Poland. By the same token I place Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan under German literature in spite of the fact that Hesse was Swiss, Kafka Czech, and Celan Romanian Jewish. They all wrote predominantly in German and are part of the German literary tradition.

I employ a similar approach to ordering music. Jean-Baptiste Lully was Italian, born Giovanni Battista Lulli, but he worked almost exclusively for the French court and was instrumental in defining French Baroque music to such an extent... was such a central part of the French musical tradition that I cannot see him as anything other than French. The same is true of Jacques Offenbach. Jakob Offenbach was born into a German-Jewish family in Cologne... he again lived and worked primarily in France, for French audiences, writing operas and operettas in French that I cannot help but see as wholly French in manner.

In a like manner, regardless of where they lived and worked, both Boccherini and Domenico Scarlatti seem to me to retain an absolute connection with the Italian tradition.

It's Handel, Liszt, Stravinsky... and to a lesser extent, Chopin who are the real challenge. Handel, as member HC suggested, was the first international/cosmopolitan composer. He was born in Germany and took his initial musical training in Halle and Hamburg. The German influence on his work can be sensed in his use of the organ and in his polyphonic choral writing. Yet Handel also was strongly... perhaps even more-so... influenced by his extended stay in Italy where he composed his first mature works, including the _Dixit Dominus_, his cantatas, and his early operas (in Italian). The elegance and transparency of his music is clearly Italianate as opposed to the density, complexity, and intense emotional/spiritual nature of the German composers. But then Handel moves to London at age 25 where he permanently settles. He continued to compose operas in Italian... but anthem-like scoring of the Water Music and Royal Fireworks, show the influence of the English tradition. This is even more true of the great oratorios in English which stressed the chorus... drawing upon the English choral traditions that had carried over from English Renaissance composers such as Tallis and Taverner and continued through Henry Purcell. Ultimately, on might make a strong argument for defining Handel as German, Italian, or English.

Liszt, Chopin, and Stravinsky have just as convoluted a "pedigree" and all produced a body of music that reveals elements drawn from multiple national traditions. There are certainly French aspects to Chopin's music that point toward Debussy... but he also employs forms and rhythms that are clearly Polish. Liszt was born in Hungary, educated (musically) in Vienna, spent his youth in Paris, and later lived in Germany where he can be seen as a major influence upon that most German of composers, Richard Wagner. And Stravinsky goes from Russia, to Switzerland, to Paris, to the US... and his music suggests elements taken from all of these traditions... as well as the Italian. Ultimately, with these composers I simply categorize them under the nation of their birth and have done with it.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Further complicating the issue and exacerbating the semantic issue *regressivetransphone* raised is that "nation of birth" and "culture of birth" aren't always the same thing. Chopin was culturally a Pole but his nation of birth (much to his chagrin) was Russia. The "of birth" stipulation can also be messy: we tend to think of Smetana as a Czech composer and that is indeed how he identified himself in the later part of his life, but "at birth" he was an Austrian. German was his native language; he didn't try to learn Czech until later, and he never truly mastered it.


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

beetzart said:


> Clementi was Italian born but spent most of his life based in England. He had businesses here and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Johann Baptist Cramer I believe was German born yet lived and died in the UK.


Cramer was half English and raised from an early age in England though (indeed he was a student of Clementi's).

As for nationality being a silly way to define composers and not being all important - well, duh! No kidding.

Sid, as for Lully being synonomous with the court of the Sun King -absolutely. Indeed he was regarded as the founder of French opera. Ironically, the main stick Lully's supporters used to beat Charpentier, who had been a pupil of Carissimi, was that he was too Italian whereas Lully had come to be seen to define the French style. I really don't see being influenced by something as changing your nationality though. Is Charpentier italian?


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

SID.
How did Horowitz get into your list above, he was no composer.
Also if you don't think that Stravinsky was very Russian ,listen more carefully as his music is hugely Russian.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Lukas Foss would be another, Born German, whose entire musical training was in Germany, who then became American and did not compose in an obviously 'Teutonic' style or accent 

Stravinsky's last 'Russian' period piece was "Les Noces," which is literally a 'farewell' to the Russia he knew. He had no sense of wanting to return to a post-revolutionary Russia, either politically or out of sentiment for 'being Russian.' He became French, and wrote some very 'French Aesthetic' music while remaining 'Stravinsky,' his particular personal stamp and take on music in general still showing up in anything he later wrote - if one wanted to argue he was all 'Russia' based and inflected, I would not have a problem with it, but what was made, post Russian citizenship, is not resolutely sentimentally or otherwise 'Russian.' By any extant biographic facts, Stravinsky did not seem to 'look back' much at all. Once French, he was European, once a U.S. citizen, he was American - while neither his political or religious views changed much at all. There are no comments on record at all that he 'longed' for the former place once he was in the new one.

First and then Second nationalities: some are very happy to 're-invent' themselves and leave some older skin and cultural sensibility behind. Others take a new citizenship due to political / economic conditions, and all the while then retain their culture, language and most everything else while only slightly accommodating / accepting the new nationality, and then only in the most superficial of ways.

I think of Lully as 'Italian' and the music 'Italianate,' and Haendel as German and the music a product of his German and Italian training - there is nothing 'English' about Haendel excepting he has many works where the language set in the music is English.

I am a firm believer there are numerous occasions where individuals are born in a place where the society and 'ethos' of the place / city / nation is almost wholly not simpatico to the individuals sensibility, and that person is far better off moving to a place where they are 'more at home.' That place might simple be another location within the nation of their birth or entirely without and elsewhere.

When I lived abroad, I met plenty of North Europeans entirely disgusted and fettered by the more ordered, intellectually dry and less spontaneous cultural environments of their birthplaces who moved to Italy, France, Spain -- fleeing the mental climate was most important to them -- and I met a few who decidedly were from the southern more 'romance' nations who felt out of place there and more in place in the northern countries. Not everyone is born in the place they should be, and they do not have to be artists for that condition to exist.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

moody said:


> SID.
> How did Horowitz get into your list above, he was no composer.
> Also if you don't think that Stravinsky was very Russian ,listen more carefully as his music is hugely Russian.


I would think some of his re-workings of those virtuoso paraphrase suites count as 'composition,' they are new material, written down and published....

What is so 'Russian' about Stravinsky's Violin Concerto, Symphony in C, Dumbarton oaks concerto, Concerto in D for strings, The Rake's Progress, the Mass, Cantata, Agon, In memoriam Dylan Thomas, Introitus for T.S. Elliot, Orchestra variations, Septet, Orpheus, Threni, etc.? Do tell.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Thanks to all contributors here. I learnt many things. A note that I included Horowitz (and also Casals) to imply that people can include all types of classical musicians not only composers. I should have maybe made that clear, but my OP was way long already.

But I think the 'consensus' if there is any, is that these types of things can be important:
- Place of birth
- Language/s spoken
- Place of education
- Place/s of residence/work
- Musical style/aesthetic or 'school' (but its true that this is not as strong now as it maybe used to be, music has gone truly global)
- What the composer thinks about his nationality, his attitudes
- Politics, reasons for leaving (or not returning?)

A question I would pose is *Frederick Delius*, who was born in the UK, but to German parents, at a young age he left the UK and went to USA (FLorida), spent time for study in Germany, then the rest of his life in France, dying there. THere is a recent article in BBC music magazine discussing the issue, among other things, as to why is he seen as English? I mean, he didn't really like England, he saw it as a kind of cultural backwater. He was thankful for supporters there, primarily Thomas Beecham, and other composers like Elgar thought highly of Delius too. But to the classical 'Establishment' in the UK, Delius was seen as being a bit too radical. & he was more progressive, compared to 'academic' composers like Stanford and Parry.

My opinion is that I've always heard Delius' music to be different than other UK composers, maybe its that mix of the new trends then (Ravel, Debussy) as well as that kind of depth and darkness one associates with German music sometimes (Beecham talked of this, as Delius' music as depicting heartbreak). That kind of 'pathos.' I am 'working' on appreciating him, he's the hardest UK composer for me to like, and I even like Purcell, who is Baroque which is not my usual 'cup of tea.' So?

But I'm not committed on his 'Englishness' or lack of it, I don't think its a big deal, I think he's just yet another 'borderline' case. What if he'd been born in Germany, or on that plantation his family owned in Florida?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

& re the talk about how composers feel about where they belong, maybe* Mahler *is 'borderline' in that case too? (his famous quote below) -

"I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed."


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## TrazomGangflow (Sep 9, 2011)

Unless a composer exited a country as a young child, I consider him or her to be the nationality that corresponds with his or her birthplace.


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## LordBlackudder (Nov 13, 2010)

depends on the passport they have


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

PetrB said:


> I would think some of his re-workings of those virtuoso paraphrase suites count as 'composition,' they are new material, written down and published....
> 
> What is so 'Russian' about Stravinsky's Violin Concerto, Symphony in C, Dumbarton oaks concerto, Concerto in D for strings, The Rake's Progress, the Mass, Cantata, Agon, In memoriam Dylan Thomas, Introitus for T.S. Elliot, Orchestra variations, Septet, Orpheus, Threni, etc.? Do tell.


I can see that you are one of those "experts" that were being discussed elsewhere, I find it most comforting.
I do not consider what you've described re: Horowitz as composing, it is in fact arranging, except in the case of the "Carmen" Variations. But if you want to call Horowitz a composer I'm sure nobody will mind.
As for Stravinsky, I am not au fait with his complete oeuvre and I don't think I am with any composer.
Music such as "Firebird", "The Rite" and "Petrushka" are very Russian,to me at least.I did not claim that everything he wrote was and I could not really, under the circumstances.
The Dylan Thomas music is certainly unknown to me ,I suppose it couldn't be Russian sounding really could it...but does it sound Welsh,there's the thing?


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## Taneyev (Jan 19, 2009)

Horowitz wrote -and recorded- at least 3 little pieces for the piano: a walz in F, a "Moment Exotique" and a "Dance excentrique". Besides his arrangements. So, you can say that he was a composer.


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## Ivanovich (Aug 12, 2012)

Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert: Germans or Austrians?


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

As an amusing aside: I once tuned into my local classical station to find they were doing a countdown of "Top 10 Countries That Have Contributed To Classical Music" or something inane like that. Each hour was devoted to a different country on the list, and during that hour they played pieces representing that country. I tuned in during No. 2, which was Italy. That hour, they played a Respighi tone poem, a Vivaldi concerto, and finally the most quintessential Italian piece of all... <drumroll> ...Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Eschbeg said:


> As an amusing aside: I once tuned into my local classical station to find they were doing a countdown of "Top 10 Countries That Have Contributed To Classical Music" or something inane like that. Each hour was devoted to a different country on the list, and during that hour they played pieces representing that country. I tuned in during No. 2, which was Italy. That hour, they played a Respighi tone poem, a Vivaldi concerto, and finally the most quintessential Italian piece of all... <drumroll> ...Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.


They missed Tchaikovsky's Cappricio Italien!

:tiphat:


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Odnoposoff said:


> Horowitz wrote -and recorded- at least 3 little pieces for the piano: a walz in F, a "Moment Exotique" and a "Dance excentrique". Besides his arrangements. So, you can say that he was a composer.


OK that took care of the problem---he was a composer !!!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Eschbeg said:


> As an amusing aside: I once tuned into my local classical station to find they were doing a countdown of "Top 10 Countries That Have Contributed To Classical Music" ...I tuned in during No. 2, which was Italy. That hour, they played a Respighi tone poem, a Vivaldi concerto, and finally the most quintessential Italian piece of all... <drumroll> ...Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.


& ironically, the slow movement of that symphony has a tune in the slow movement that scholars think was not Italian but some pilgrim tune from Bohemia (Czech). But it could just be coincidence, Mendelssohn could have made it up. We don't know, and it probably doesn't matter too much. Bartok often labelled things to be in Bulgarian rhythm or style but they are actually Turkish. Of course, there's cross-fertilisation here, the Ottoman Turks colonised Bulgaria for like 300 years. So Bartok mixed them up, he'd studied the folk musics of both (and more of course) countries. & in one of its movements (I think either the 'cavatina' or more likely the 'alla tedesca' bit?) in Beethoven's Op. 130 string quartet has rhythms of Italian (I think Neopolitan) music, but we don't know whether he knew this music. There are many examples like this.


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## Taneyev (Jan 19, 2009)

Paganini wrote 60 variations on all tones for solo violin on a popular "Genovese" Barucabá song. But i somewhere that it was really an old Jewish Sepharaditic Spanish song


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## waldvogel (Jul 10, 2011)

Part of the problem with assigning nationality comes from how the course of history has dealt with the nations involved.

As an example, Charles Villiers Stanford - is he Irish or English? Stanford is an English name. He was born in Dublin, and lived there until he was around 20 years old, after which he lived mostly in Cambridge for his remaining 50 or so years. He was an Anglican, not a Catholic. And, of course, the work that he is most familiarly associated with is his third Symphony - "Irish" - which liberally uses Irish folk music. He also wrote an Irish Rhapsody, and George Bernard Shaw commented that his music showed an uninhibited Irish character. To me, Stanford at his best sounds like Mendelssohn - a writer of music in the Germanic tradition. At this time, Stanford was also the professor of composition at the Royal College of Music - in England, of course. 

The Wikipedia entry classifies Stanford as an Irish composer, despite the fact that Stanford did not have Irish ethnicity, share the majority religion with the Irish, or actually live there for most of his life. Is this because of the successful Irish revolution which gave Ireland its independence? If Stanford would have been born in Cardiff or Edinburgh would he have been called a Welsh or Scottish composer, or English?


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Odnoposoff said:


> Paganini wrote 60 variations on all tones for solo violin on a popular "Genovese" Barucabá song. But i somewhere that it was really an old Jewish Sepharaditic Spanish song


The strangest thing I have come across is a Chinese court tune in Busoni's "Turandot" which turns out to be "Greensleeves"-----how did that happen you wonder?


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

waldvogel said:


> Part of the problem with assigning nationality comes from how the course of history has dealt with the nations involved.
> 
> As an example, Charles Villiers Stanford - is he Irish or English? Stanford is an English name. He was born in Dublin, and lived there until he was around 20 years old, after which he lived mostly in Cambridge for his remaining 50 or so years. He was an Anglican, not a Catholic. And, of course, the work that he is most familiarly associated with is his third Symphony - "Irish" - which liberally uses Irish folk music. He also wrote an Irish Rhapsody, and George Bernard Shaw commented that his music showed an uninhibited Irish character. To me, Stanford at his best sounds like Mendelssohn - a writer of music in the Germanic tradition. At this time, Stanford was also the professor of composition at the Royal College of Music - in England, of course.
> 
> The Wikipedia entry classifies Stanford as an Irish composer, despite the fact that Stanford did not have Irish ethnicity, share the majority religion with the Irish, or actually live there for most of his life. Is this because of the successful Irish revolution which gave Ireland its independence? If Stanford would have been born in Cardiff or Edinburgh would he have been called a Welsh or Scottish composer, or English?


The revolution was not successful in itself and it was southern Ireland that became independent.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I would call Stanford Irish - not everyone born in what is now the Republic of Ireland needed to be Roman Catholic in order to quantify their Irishness (i.e Oscar Wilde, Richard Brinsley Sheridan) but back then the question of Irish/British nationality appeared to be much less defined as so many of the ruling and intellectual elite had non-Irish backgrounds. As the Duke of Wellington - another with Irish roots - allegedly said: 'A man can be born in a stable but that doesn't make him a horse'.


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## quack (Oct 13, 2011)

Absolutes. That is your problem, people want simple labels to confine things, things that in the real world do not conform to labels. Instead of knowing what you are talking about and seeing the detail in someone's life (He was born in A, grew up at B, educated at C, worked at D, died at E...) people wish to reduce it to He was A. This is exacerbated by nationalism where people try to claim famous figures from the past with little regard for how they saw themselves. The other point already made is that the late 19th century map lines hardly gives an accurate view of the world in which these people lived.

Handel wasn't born in Germany, he was born in the Duchy of Magdeburg which was a small area within the Holy Roman Empire. Vivaldi was born in the Republic of Venice, which at that time controlled a little bit of land around Venice, the Adriatic sea and parts of modern day Croatia and Greece. The parts of the Italian peninsular that were not under control of similar city states were divided up between the Pope and the Spanish king.

One of the biggest mistakes of the current nationalism questions here, is in the favourite French thread where the masters of polyphony, des Pres, Dufay, Ockeghem, Lassus and the like are lumped into the French polity despite the whole movement originating in the low counties of modern day Holland and Belgium. A composer like Machaut, one of the few who were born in French territory was still from the same low country region, the cultural movement of polyphony was based in an area not a 20th century country.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^I agree that things like border changes and also the rise of the modern 'nation state' (which largely dates from the late 19th and early 20th century) is of importance here.

Speaking to that in part, I sometimes wonder how we lump together countries of the former Soviet Union, and of course that originated with the Russian tsarist monarchy. Eg. Prokofiev was born in Ukraine (and so was Szymanowski). Many people I think lump Russia and Ukraine together but I think that Ukranians especially don't like that at all. I'm not sure of what Prokofiev considered himself, or whether it mattered, but his _Scythian Suite _(originally the ballet _Alla i Lolly_) goes back to the Scythians who where a pre-Christian tribe that lived in what is present day Ukraine. Is this just coincidence or was Prokofiev emphasising his own Ukranian heritage? (if he was Ukranian, or considered himself that?).


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

Sid James said:


> Many people I think lump Russia and Ukraine together but I think that Ukranians especially don't like that at all.


Yeah these vagaries of geography and identity, slightly different to your initial question, do complicate matters. Though it shouldn't really matter since, as quack implied, the notion of 'claiming' or pigeonholing someone based on nationality is absurd. Sure its interesting to observe schools or traits in music develop on geographical or cultural bases and often they are distinctive but it has little further value.

Anyway, apologetics aside, the notion of identity is also fraught. Ukraine and Russia is a curious one, and has similar problems to that of Germany and Austria. Ukrainians often view themselves as being very different, and Ukraine was a separate country for several hundred years at one time. OTOH Russians regard the real founder of their nation and culture as St Vladimir (who was of course King of Kiev). I have also worked with a Ukrainian who felt strongly that Ukraine should not have split off from Russia so the more popular current view is not universal. Similarly with the Austrians (and german Swiss) it is far more common, post WWII, to emphasise the cultural differences and a separate identity (rather than the rapturous reception Hitler received at the time of the Anschluss...). It was, after all, merely an accident of relatively recent history that the Prussians weren't able to absorb Austria and Switzerland into their new Germany.

If the Germans have a share linguistic culture what about the Francophone one? I'd certainly view Mozart and Haydn as German yet I'd never even consider calling Josquin or Lassus French. Their first languages would've been closely related to French though. Dating back to at least the 11th century however that region has had a strongly independent streak and were a disparate and polyglot but distinct culture in my view. So ,yeah, for whatever its worth, I'd regard the Netherlands as a largely separate culture to France (or Germany on the Flemish speaking side). Nonetheless, it'd be foolish not to note that there were significant cultural ties and cross pollination. The idea of a wider Francophone culture is not so foolish, but becomes a problem when you consider the Flemish speaking composers like Agricola (Ackermann), Isaac, or Clemens non Papa (Clement).

Obviously there is no right answer. I remember having a similar discussion with Sid a while back involving Austria and Germany. The question raised was whether Austrians are Germans or whether the Hapsburg Empire was a separate and distinct culture. The answer is of course both -how you choose to view them is really determined by the context and what is useful or appropriate to those circumstances.


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