Medievalism and Regionalist Identity in Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys

Édouard Lalo’s opera Le Roi d’Ys was one of the earliest manifestations of French musical regionalism to find success on a major Parisian stage. Subtitled légende bretonne, Lalo’s work was set in medieval Brittany, using Breton folk melodies and a conflation of Christian and Celtic legends, intentionally sidestepping the conformist portfolio of fairy tales and grand-operatic French history at the Opéra and the Opéra Comique. Concordant with goals of contemporary regionalist associations such as the Société Celtique and the Félibres promoting the decentralization of French culture, Le Roi d’Ys represents an intentional and nostalgic re-creation of an ancient lineage, geographically and artistically independent from the culture of Paris. Most intriguing are musical links between Regionalist publications of early Provençal noëls and Lalo’s references to medieval ceremonies and rituals in Le Roi d’Ys. As such, the opera is much more than its detractors’ accusations that it was derivative, simply an echo of wagnérisme. Le Roi d’Ys set an important precedent for later regionalist works by Chausson, Ropartz, Widor and others, and was significant to the transformation of musico-dramatic repertory in fin-de-siècle France.

Medievalism and Rued Langgaard’s Romantic Image of Queen Dagmar

Rued Langgaard’s organ piece, Fantasy on “Queen Dagmar Lies Sick in Ribe,” was written in 1942 for a festal service in Ribe Cathedral in connection with the opening of a newly renovated archeological site of a medieval royal castle outside of Ribe where, according to popular traditions, the Danish queen Dagmar had died in 1212. Although Langgaard based his work on a traditional melody for a medieval ballad, his Fantasy does not use medieval compositional procedures, but rather uses the ballad to invoke the legend of Dagmar to give voice to a romantic and nationalist image of the Danish nation.

The Distant Past as Mirror and Metaphor

Historical settings—especially those from the medieval and early modern periods—were central to the aesthetic of grand operas of the 1830s and 1840s. This historical aesthetic is clearly evident in the four works that are the subject of this chapter: La Reine de Chypre, Charles VI, La Juive and Les Huguenots. The enormous popularity of these historical settings reflected a more general fascination with the distant past among early nineteenth-century Europeans, a fascination that was also manifest in genres such as the historical novel. But the music and drama of grand opera also mirrored contemporary events, reflecting the tensions that were shaping the rapidly changing social and political dynamics of the present.

Faith, Fear, Silence, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Medieval Vision of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring

This chapter examines medievalism, music, and sound effects in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960). As with his later work, Bergman uses music and sound in The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal in powerfully unsettling ways. He and Swedish composer Erik Nordgren (1913–1992) aimed for stylized medieval tunes alongside more modern and even jarringly anachronistic scoring. Bergman’s idiosyncratic approach to medievalism fuses medieval sources with northern angst, Strindberg, and Kurosawa in a medieval vision that is quintessentially Bergman’s own. Through deathly silence, music, and sound effects, the soundscapes of these films evoke a “Dark Age” struggle of faith and fear with profound resonance for a modern audience.

The Many Musical Medievalisms of Disney

This essay argues that the Disney Company is one of today’s main purveyors of medievalism. The idea of Disney as a force for medievalism may strike some academic readers as odd, given the still common view of medievalism as a primarily academic phenomenon. Rather, as argued in the first part of this essay, medievalism is a widespread cultural phenomenon, originating in the sixteenth century, out of which academic medievalism emerged in the eighteenth century. As part of this broader cultural medievalism, the Disney Company has played an increasingly important role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rather than the literalist historical medievalism that usually preoccupies academics, the Disney Company has followed a looser approach centered on key stereotypes, in keeping with the earliest and most pervasive concept of the Middle Ages from the sixteenth century onward. In all its medievalist products, ranging from early animated films to Fantasyland’s iconic monument the Sleeping Beauty Castle, Disney has made music a primary concern.

Past Tense

This essay examines a number of key works by British composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins, whose music regularly engaged with medievalism its inspiration, choice of texts, musical borrowing, and in the composer’s broader evocation of historical practices and architecture. Through analysis of pieces composed across two decades, the discussion confronts several tensions between Wilkins’ reception of the medieval past and her emphatically modern aesthetic. Focusing on four pieces—Witch Music (1971), Ave Maria (1974), Revelations of the Seven Angels (1988), and Musica Angelorum (1991)—this essay shows how Wilkins’s medievalism manifests an ambivalent relationship with central compositional aesthetics of the twentieth century such as serialism and modernism.

From Knight Errant to Family Man

Like his contemporaries and predecessors, Brahms frequently engaged the Middle Ages to comment on modern cultural life in a way that would be accessible and meaningful to his audiences. This essay will explore his “Magelone Romances” (the song cycle, op. 33), which present the idealized, fantastical love story of Peter of Provence and the Fair Magelone in Ludwig Tieck’s 1797 retelling of the fifteenth-century romance. In essence, the cycle develops a simplistic fantasy of extraordinary heroism into the comforting reality of middle-class domesticity. In this way, Brahms appropriates medieval tropes that emerged in the early decades of literary and musical romanticism, but uses them to express a later generation’s artistic and social ideals.

Nature, Reason, and Light in Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen

Historical understandings of Hildegard (1098–1179) occupy a central position in the recent revival of the Middle Ages. Viewed as a protofeminist and the first documented female composer, Hildegard is often used as a role model in contemporary times. Through an examination of Margarethe von Trotta’s film Vision, this essay uncovers another image of Hildegard, as an enlightened thinker, deeply invested in the acquisition of knowledge, and as a scientific medical practitioner who abhors the idea of the mortification of the flesh. Using iconic sounds and musical references, the sound design for von Trotta’s film strongly supports this image. In acoustic, as well as in visual and narrative terms, the film epitomizes the contrast between the grotesque and the romantic that is so important to our reception of the Middle Ages.

Romantic Medievalist Nationalism in Schumann’s Genoveva, Then and Now

Prior to Richard Wagner’s dominance of the German operatic scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, a healthy competition to establish a distinctively Germanic tradition of grand opera occupied the minds and activities of several prominent composers. In seeking to establish their own operatic tradition, a number of German composers looked to the Middle Ages for their source material. Schumann’s Genoveva represents an important contribution to the quest for German grand opera as well as the height of the German romantic medievalist aesthetic in opera. Martin Kušej’s 2008 production of Genoveva offers a fascinating twenty-first century reinterpretation of this aesthetic.

“Ramble On”

Although first published in 1954, the cultural impact of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings arguably began in earnest only during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Terrence Malley explained in 1972, Tolkien’s writings seemed “particularly relevant in our own age of anti-heroes, in this time when we can readily identify with the small and the apparently powerless.” This chapter considers the role of The Lord of the Rings in the music of Led Zeppelin between 1969 and 1971, focusing on three songs that directly reference Tolkien’s works: “The Battle of Evermore,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “Ramble On.” By considering previous incarnations of medievalism and romanticism in British history as well as Tolkien’s own participation in antiquarianism and constructions of Britishness, this chapter suggests that Led Zeppelin’s allusions to Tolkien’s literature rely on cultural memory to actively participate in a dialogue of urban criticism and a romanticized vision of rural Britain.