Musical Europe

‘The story of Jewish emancipation in any of the western European countries’, it has been remarked, ‘could be told separately but not for each country in isolation’. The same may be said of the story of musical development in the same period, and this points to an important element common to both musical and Jewish history – that they stand in flexible relationships to local and political histories of the European states, because whilst subject to the consequences of these, they are also to some extent transcendent, standing above and apart from them.

Artists, like Jews, share a culture independent of geopolitical boundaries, and it could be said that, like Jews, they shared a common language, whether of the representational or musical arts, which enabled them to get on wherever they happened to be. For many centuries it had been traditional for leading practitioners of the non-literary arts to work or study at wherever the centres of those arts at that time happened to be located in western Europe. Often they were attached to courts, and dynastic changes could lead to artistic changes: as when Charles V, becoming king of Spain in 1516, brought with him his Flemish musicians introducing the music of northern Europe to the south. One can sense a way in which European culture was fertilised by travelling practitioners of the arts much as European economies were fertilised by trade.