"it is Beethoven who leads the Reigen": A. B. Marx and the Dance of Jewish-German Assimilation

Throughout his career as a music critic and theorist, Adolf Bernhard Marx - the "founding father of Formenlehre"- was idiosyncratically fond of the German term Reigen. This article examines Marx's use of the term from three perspectives. It seeks, first, to determine the musical parameters that elicited the appellation; second, to place the word within early and mid-nineteenth-century German discourses and culture; and third, to relate Marx's use of the term to his own fluctuating sociopolitical status as a Jewish-German assimilationist in nineteenth-century Berlin. Ultimately, Marx's usage provides a specific and suggestive case study in the relation between the Formenlehre tradition and the historical, political, and cultural conditions that shaped its production and reception.