Adagio sostenuto

This third installment introduces a series of essays offering a broad survey, both thematic and chronological, of the many ways in which music has interacted with the political sphere throughout history. If Beethoven’s rebellion against Napoleon may be seen as something of a founding moment in the tension between music and political commitment, it does not, for all that, redefine the older and more ambiguous relationship between melody and power, whereby an ideology can carry entire masses of people along in its wake. Nineteenth-century Europe illustrates with particular clarity how music can simultaneously build nations and become an instrument in their service. In this respect, Giuseppe Verdi offers a revealing example of music’s ability to carry entire peoples by giving musical form to collective trauma. In 1842, he composed the opera Nabucco , which recounts the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II and the captivity of its surviving inhabitants in Babylon.

This series of articles offers a wide-ranging overview — both thematic and chronological — of the various relationships between music and the space of the City across the ages. The first in the series, divided into three parts, examines the origins of the bond between music and 'the' political — both as concept and as practice. It is in eighteenth-century Europe that the debate on music and freedom steps briefly outside its relationship with the sacred to resume an explicitly philosophical form, as it had in the time of ancient Greece. And the credit belongs essentially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. History has certainly retained him as one of the pillars of Enlightenment political philosophy, but his dual condition as composer and musicologist remains largely overshadowed by his philosophical legacy.

This series of articles offers a wide-ranging overview — both thematic and chronological — of the various relationships between music and the space of the City across the ages. The first in the series, divided into three parts, examines the origins of the bond between music and 'the' political — both as concept and as practice. It is somewhat perilous to attempt to date with precision the beginnings of politically engaged music. What is certain, however, is that it did not begin with Bob Dylan, nor with the Negro spirituals , nor even with La Marseillaise … but with music itself — that is to say, in fact, with the very beginnings of the organisation of society and its relationship with the notion and practice of power. It is possible to say, without too much risk of error, that music has constituted, in this sense, one of the means available to men seeking both to govern and to escape that governance.