Dizionari e storie della musica nei paesi slavi dell'Europa centro-orientale. Riflessioni su un rapporto complesso

The essay identifies key patterns in a group of music dictionaries printed in some Slavic Central-Eastern European lands from the time of national awakening to the 20th-century’s post war period. The common approach of first Polish, Bohemian, and Croatian lexica imply the difficulty in choosing between two different criteria. Given that the three lands were under the administration of Prussian, Russian and Austrian governments, the problem emerged either in creating an exclusive list of names based on the concept of nationality, or in writing an inclusive list of “stranger” and domestic musicians, who contributed together to the development of music culture. Except a rare case, the second option prevailed. It seemed a historical paradox to favor only Polish, Czech, and Croatian personalities, who from the Middle ages to the 19th century had been influenced by German, Italian and French colleagues. This trend involves also the 19th-century music historiography. The preferred model in writing modern history of music flourished outside the nationalist frame, that is to say “the music in Poland, in Bohemia, and Croatia” vs. the restrictive unclear definition of “Polish, Bohemian, and Croatian music”. As a symmetrical mirror image, the same difficulty occurred in the second edition of the Musikgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna, 1995). The editors solved in a clever way the problem of the multilingual and multicultural Hapsburg Empire, that covered a wide area from south Poland to the Adriatic sea. The history of music of Austria is due to the joint effort of an enlarged staff of Austrian and stranger musicologists of the countries that belonged to the K.u.K. until its collapse in 1918.