Cosmopolitan Ideas: Grieg, MacDowell, and a Tale of Weary Men

Abstract

Though seldom acknowledged in existing literature, Grieg and MacDowell shared a similar goal of dismantling the label of “national artist” in favor of constructing a broader cosmopolitan identity. As their correspondence candidly acknowledges, this struggle did not occur in isolation. Each composer fostered a multilayered worldview based upon the values concurrently advanced by their literary colleagues, including Hamlin Garland and Arne Garborg. An intertextual analysis of the cosmopolitan conditions that simultaneously emerged across disciplinary boundaries will illustrate their similar methods for manufacturing new modes of heterogeneity amidst the shifting of cultural borders. This approach will permit one to better understand the process of marking and unmarking identities in an environment inundated by overlapping (and frequently competing) affiliations. Taken together, this chapter argues for the significance of negotiation over nostalgia, stylistic mixture over division, and disciplinary fusion over separation—all of which flourished within the transatlantic circles of cosmopolitanism.