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CHAPTER 25 LISTENING TO TOPICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY JULIAN HORTON HisToricat AND THEORETICAL | CONTEXTS Problems of Topical Analysis and Nineteenth-Century Music ing eighteenth-century music arises gaps between analysis, hermeneu- Agawu's terms, to music’ introversive and extroversive dimensions (Agawu 1 son ofthe eighteenth-century topical us Ratner 1980: 9), drawn from mus ‘ous social functions and ment styles, captures this productive bifocalit at once marks out the terain of eighteenth-century musical style and embodies tan eibly the society from which it arose. The theorys credentials are therefore at base unlike (for example) Schenkerian theory, which in its eighteenth-century applications courts anachronism in its imposition of an organicist mentality on a pre-idealist repertoire, topical approaches coordinate analysis with the musi’ hi torical context. Aswe ener the nineteenth century, however, thes credentials ecome a problematic as they are advantageous. The critical difficulty is that theory and context no longer align inthe way that Ratner describes topicsacquirea conflicted identity in nineteenth-century musi, the sense of which iscapturedin Agawuls remark tha, although “there is. level of continuity between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century styles historical narrative posited onthe existence ofa cate it is nevertheless “equally problematc..to assert a straightforward historical continuity een LISTENING TOTOPICSINTHENINETEENTH CENTURY 643, in the way topics are used” (Agawu 2009: 42). nthe one hand, the eighteenth-century ‘thesaurus persists, but in changed social circumstances, and this renders attempts to read topical discourse as social commentary irreducibly complex, For the generation of composers born in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, classical topics had themselves become historicized, and were thus received less as markers of social ‘meaning, and more as conventions defining an emerging tradition. On the other hand, nnineteenth-century composers also devised fresh topics, which as facets ofa new style are years later: we have by this time to account forthe expansion ofthe urban working class and bourgeoisie in the wake of industrialzation, as well as the accelerating commodi- fication of music and the transference of high-musical cultures curation from aristo- cratic to bourgeois hands. Such changes compel reappraisal of apparent contin Deployment for example, the "Pifa” from Part I of Handel's contexts: the “other” of Lists pastoral music isan ized urban landscape that Handel could scarcely have imagined. ‘music affords particularly clear evidence ofthese developments. Postclassical the extent and speed of such reorie expressesa stylized militarism that resonates with Ratner's terms, drawing from the top ical lexicon in order to present waras social convention. The Finale of Beethoven's Fifth, Jn contrast, reconstrues the march as an agent of utopianism: whereas Haydn reflects 4 social context through a topical style, Beethoven employs a topical style to imagine by locating the march as the goal ofa formal narrative. ‘even more distant from the classical thesaurus, The progress tothe scaffold Is inconceivable without the French-revolutionary experience, but its expressive stance is also a negation of Beethoven's idealism, The ‘march becomes a vehicle for a characteristically romantic narrative, which turns the