Europe Nationalism in Music and the United States

Nationalism holds that a "people," whether defined in terms of cultural or ethnic roots, constitutes the only legitimate basis for a political state. This belief took root in Europe around the beginning of the nineteenth century, as an outgrowth of German Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and (according to some views) human inclinations. The merger of nationalist feeling and art was accomplished using the model proposed by German poet and philosopher Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) of how an artist might project—for those in the urbanized present who stand in imperfect relation to a more ideal past—either a fuller sense of that lost past (through idyll and elegy), a critical account of the present (through satire), or a believable future restoration. Coupled with the idea of the Volksgeist (the spirit of a people) promulgated by fellow German Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Schiller's structure became a recipe for the nationalist artist: the idealized past, for the nationalist, is the past of a "people" who survive into the present (i.e., in the Volk of the countryside), and the ideal future for which one strives is a "nation" in which they are restored to their earlier oneness with the land of their past. Images, narratives, and projections that instill belief in a people's valued past—that is, mythologies—thus quickly became a core ingredient in the artistic advancement of nationalism.