| Sumario: | The long nineteenth century is bounded by conflicts that significantly altered the relationship between war and music. One musical genre to benefit early on was the instrumental battle piece, whose decline in popularity most scholarship assigns to around 1815. In fact, it can be argued that it survived for another century, transformed from a conveyor of heroic mythology to a politicized palimpsest of national and personal trauma through a process of disavowal, in which authors consciously projected chaos and disorder. Most battle pieces famous in the early nineteenth century, such as Kotzwara’sThe Battle of Pragueand Beethoven’sWellingtons Sieg, feature a set of common ingredients that were poeticized and de-historicized toward mid-century in works such as Spohr’s Fourth Symphony. The tokenistic appearance of the traditional battle elements in Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture, Bartók’sKossuth, and Debussy’sEn blanc et noirsuggests a widespread ontological subversion of the battle-music narrative in the generation leading up to the First World War.
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