Between music and ideologies: Croatian music criticism from the beginning to World War II

Sanja Majer-Bobetko

Abstract

As the Croatian lands were exposed to often aggressive Austrian, Hungarian, and Italian politics until WWI and in some regions even later, so Croatian music criticism was written in the Croatian, German and Italian languages. To the best of our knowledge, the history of Croatian music criticism began in 1826 in the literary and entertainment journal Luna, and was written by an anonymous author in the German language.
A forum for Croatian language music criticism was opened in Novine Horvatzke, i.e. in its literary supplement Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska in 1835, which officially started to promote the Croatian National Revival, setting in motion the process of constituting the Croatian nation in the modern sense of the word. However, those articles cannot be considered musical criticism, at least not in the modern sense of the word, as they never went beyond the level of mere journalistic reports. The first music criticism in the Croatian language in the true sense of the word is generally considered a very comprehensive text by a poet Stanko Vraz (1810-51) about a performance of the first Croatian national opera Ljubav i zloba (Love and malice) by Vatroslav Lisinski (1819-54) from 1846. In terms of its criteria for judgement, that criticism proved to become a model for the majority of 19^th-century and later Croatian music criticism. Two judgement criteria are clearly expressed within it: national and artistic.
Regardless of whether we are dealing with 1) ideological-utilitarian criticism, which was directed towards promoting the national ideology (Franjo Ksaver Kuhač, 1834-1911; Antun Dobronić, 1878-1955), 2) impressionist criticism based on the critic’s subjective approach to particular work (Antun Gustav Matoš, 1873-1914; Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, 1880-1931; Nikola Polić, 1890-1960), or 3) Marxist criticism (Pavao Markovac, 1903-41), we may observe the above mentioned two basic criteria. Only at the end of the period under consideration the composer Milo Cipra (1906-85) focused his interest on immanent artistic values, shunning any ideological utilitarianism, and insisting on the highest artistic criteria.