Prophets looking backwards: German romantic historicism and the representation of renaissance music

Crucial to understanding the reception of Renaissance music in nineteenth-c entury Germany is an appreciation of the contradictory components of Romant ic historicism. The tension between subjective and objective historicism is fundamental to the historiographical reception of Renaissance music, epito mizing the interdependency of historical representation and modern reform. Protestant authors seeking to reform church music elevated two distinct rep ertories - Renaissance Italian music and Lutheran compositions from the Ref ormation era - as ideal archetypes: these competing paradigms reflect signi ficantly different historiographical and ideological trends. Early romantic commentators, such as Hoffmann and Thibaut, elevated Palestrina as a unive rsal model, constructing a golden age of old Italian church music by analog y with earlier narratives in art history; later historians, such as Winterf eld and Spitta, condemned the subjectivity of earlier reformers, seeking in stead to revivify the objective foundations of Protestant church music. Bot h approaches are united, however, by the use of deterministic modes of narr ative emplotment.