Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 9780674033597

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Symphonic Aspirations

Symphonic Aspirations GERMAN MUSIC AND POLITICS, 1900–1945

K A R E N PA I N T E R

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2007

Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Painter, Karen, Symphonic aspirations : German music and politics, 1900–1945 / Karen Painter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02661-2 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-674-02661-6 (alk. paper) 1. Music—Germany—20th century—History and criticism. 2. National socialism and music. 3. Music—Political aspects—Germany—History—20th century. I. Title. ML275.5.P35 2007 780.943'09041—dc22 2007009599

Acknowledgments

At the heart of this book lie a multitude of commentaries, mostly reviews, from the first half of the twentieth century. The labor of locating each individual review by skimming hundreds of newspapers would be a life’s work. This book, therefore, rests on the shoulders of those who gathered many of these texts. Among them is Carl Steininger (1876– 1945), a bank clerk in Dresden who collected thousands of reviews and other materials to document the contribution of Jews to German life and culture from 1840 to 1940—among them Mahler, Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill. Did Steininger see as clearly and as bitterly the fate of German Jews as the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, who wrote from Paris after the Nazi book burning, “We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have sung Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany” (“The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind”). Preserved in the Secret State Archive (Geheimes Staatsarchiv), Berlin, its very existence was a well-guarded secret until some years ago. If Steininger was the exemplary German citizen, the leading collector of Mahleriana, Bruno Vondenhoff (with his wife Eleonore) was a sufficiently respectful German collaborator to be appointed music director of the opera at Halle in 1933, and at Freiburg im Breisgau in 1938, where he remained until 1945. Were his concessions to National Socialism, above all banishing Jewish musicians and music from his opera houses, part of what led Vondenhoff to build up and professionalize his Mahler collection so assiduously, even passionately, after the War and donate the materials to the Austrian National Library? Also exemplary

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of the collector’s zeal for detail is the Anton Bruckner Institut Linz, whose staff undertook the massive project of perusing all Austrian newspapers and music journals for any reference to the composer, however brief, from during his lifetime to the present day. Staff at these and other institutions—in Vienna, the Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, Arnold Schönberg Center, and Herbert von Karajan Zentum; in Frankfurt, the Paul Hindemith-Institute and Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv, in Munich the Orff-Zentrum; and in Paris, the Bibliothèque Gustav Mahler—facilitated this research for this book at every turn. This book grew through the help of many friends and colleagues. I am particularly grateful to those who provided feedback at various stages— Leon Botstein, Reinhold Brinkmann, Joan Evans, Bryan Gilliam, David Josephson, Charles S. Maier, Pamela Potter, Lee Rothfarb, and Morten Solvik. Over the years a number of students assisted in the research for this book: Michael Cuthbert, Giancarlo Garcia, Michael Givey, HangSun Kim, Jessica Peritz, David and Emily Richmond, and, Michael Schachner. Two graduate students in particular offered astute editorial assistance: Robert Koelzer and Danny Bowles. The editorial guidance and support at the Harvard University Press, including Sharmila Sen, Alex Morgan, and especially Tonnya Norwood, were crucial to the final stages of this book. Research was generously supported by Harvard University, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Humboldt Stiftung. Above all, thanks to my husband Richard for his patience and to Elizabeth, William, and Anne, for their welcome and joyful distractions.

Contents

Introduction:

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I Tradition in a Modern Age: Bruckner and Mahler at the Fin de siècle 1. Symphonic Idealism in Crisis

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2. Symphonic Conventions of a World Past 3. Sensuality and Redemption

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II The Politics of Tradition: Mahler and Bruckner, 1914–1933 4. Mahler’s Progressive Legacy and the Aestheticization of Violence 125 5. Bruckner’s Nationalist Legacy and the Aestheticization of Space 167

III Symphonic Traditions under National Socialism 6. Symphonic Ambitions and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony 209 7. Symphonic Defeat Notes

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Index

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Introduction

On December 14, 1930, in the midst of the depression, the Vienna Philharmonic performed Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. It is hard to imagine a better opiate. From a somber, even bitter opening to a rejoicing finale, the Seventh was, in Theodor W. Adorno’s disdainful terms, “a poor yea-sayer,” affirming all that the genre had come to represent over the long nineteenth century.1 In the audience sat Julius Korngold, critic at the Neue Freie Presse since 1901, where he succeeded Eduard Hanslick (parodied by Wagner in unmistakeably anti-Semitic terms in the form of the pedant Sixtus Beckmesser). The Neue Freie Presse remained the cultivated voice of the bourgeoisie in a city still grand, despite impoverishment and the loss of an empire. Korngold, who had been a supporter and friend of Mahler, was piqued at audiences who had no patience for the composer and at colleagues who appealed to an “aesthetic of slogans” in lieu of reasoned judgment. Depending on the rest of the program, Korngold supposed, Mahler would be permitted as an antidote to “diseased” modern music or rejected as Romantic overgrowth. At age seventy, perhaps regretting his own metaphors of yore, Korngold wished that music could be music and not politics. Writing up the concert that evening, Korngold hoped to use his review of the Viennese premiere of the Seventh Symphony twenty years past. But the music sounded different—or how it sounded had to be put differently. Korngold slashed adverbs and adjectives as he copied, eliminating any culturally evocative language. Orchestral colors did not “envelop” the listener and possessed no “stunning vigor” (“in bestürzender

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Verve,” a phrase in quotations in the original). Nor was the orchestration “brutal,” with sharp contrasts that “inflamed the nerves.” Dissonances were no longer “sulfurous” but merely “bizarre.” And the “profligacy” in expression was now mere “exaggeration.” In sum, Korngold banished any moral quibbling over musical style. Vienna faced greater dangers than the loosening of bourgeois mores instigated by a luscious seventh harmony or sensuous brushstroke in the first violin. At the premiere, Korngold had enjoyed the “ecstatic jubilation” and supreme craftsmanship in the finale, even if—to quote his play on words—“the whole roars [rauscht] too much and runs the risk of dissipating [verrauschen].” This was no longer possible in that bleak winter of 1930, when “nothing is harder to endure” than “an extended stretch of joyous shouting and joyous leaping.” But, Korngold had to concede, “the final intensification forcibly throttles the listener.”2 This potency, so disconcerting to early audiences, suited the culture and aesthetics of the interwar years. Soon, however, Mahler’s music would stand no chance. Eight years later, Korngold was on the train to Switzerland, fleeing the forces that deemed Mahler hostile to German culture. This book has as its starting point how Korngold and his colleagues in Germanspeaking Europe listened to Bruckner and Mahler. Korngold, a devoted father to a fault, eventually settled in Hollywood, basking in the success of his son Eric, a film score composer of increasing renown. Among the other critics some fled from Nazi persecution, others perished in the death camps, a few pursued an “inner immigration,” a term of vindication that became popular after 1945, but many continued simply to write. Their varied and tortuous paths—ranging from outright support for Hitler to cautious support for a German readership seeking to escape politics through modern music—form the basis of the final chapters, which examine the sensational success of Paul Hindemith and Carl Orff. But more than a reception history of Bruckner and Mahler, Hindemith and Orff, it seeks to recover the listening habits and aesthetic values these writers aspired to instill in the public, along with the political and cultural values they passionately believed were at stake and at risk.

Symphonic Ambitions Just as “the Frenchman has his revolution and the Englishman his shipping, the German has his Beethoven symphonies.” Listening to

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Beethoven, “a German feels in spirit that he won the battles lost to Napoleon,” Robert Schumann once mused.3 (At the time, in 1839, though a composer of renown, Schumann had yet to compose a symphony.) His observation, if never so bluntly put, remained a truism for generations. A book on “the struggle for German music,” released by a Nazi Party press in 1933, recounted a nineteenth century in which Germans turned to music for influence and power unattainable through politics.4 Few scholars would maintain that political meaning inheres in music, even if certain structures and procedures might allow, or disallow, a political interpretation of one sort or another. The politicization of music required a massive discursive effort by critics and biographers, and a willing readership. That discourse, in its full range of vast insights and malign distortions, is the subject of this book. If music was the most German of the arts, to quote Thomas Mann (and Pamela Potter’s study of musicologists in the Third Reich),5 then the symphony was the most German of musical genres. In the nineteenth century, its history is biography through and through, with great men responding to great men. The story is tired but true: Beethoven, struggling with a loss of hearing, produced a symphonic oeuvre that moved from Mozartian elegance and Haydnesque wit to a genre of unforeseen dimensions, dramatically and otherwise; Wagner believed himself to continue the legacy in music dramas of vast size, developing themes symphonically, in full contrapuntal splendor; Brahms waited until the peak of his career to complete his first symphony; Bruckner, like Beethoven, composed nine symphonies but, forever in the master’s shadow, perpetually revised his scores; and Mahler—his irony and modernist aesthetic notwithstanding—yielded to a nostalgia in tone and theme, completing nine symphonies but, as with Beethoven, leaving behind sketches for a tenth. Here, in the standard texts, the history of the German symphony ends. Mahler’s death (1911) coincides roughly with Schoenberg’s breakthrough to atonality (1908). Yet for years to come, the symphony loomed large in music criticism, even more as the genre dwindled to irrelevance (if not the title “symphony,” which had a long afterlife). The symphony stood for aspiration as much as achievement. Whatever patriotic causes the symphony has served, from Beethoven’s forsaking dedication of the Eroica, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, to Leonard Bernstein conducting the Ninth in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his choristers substituting “Freiheit” for “Freude,” the political stakes were highest from the fin-de-siècle battles against

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modernism into the Third Reich. As a study of the symphony in Austria and Germany in the twentieth century, this book goes against the grain. This century saw the collapse of grand systems into fragmentary insights. Whether one listened to Anton Webern or read Ludwig Wittgenstein, the confident acts of synthesis so common in the nineteenth century gave way to a fascination with detail. As the symphony no longer beckoned to composers, commentators hastened to preserve its ideal of rational and systemic creation. Call their efforts the nostalgia of criticism. It was in some ways an aesthetic counterpart to the so-called crisis of German ideology—the antimodernist critique that historians, until recently, believed catastrophic for German liberalism in the years between Wilhelm II and Hitler. A question lurking behind recent studies of German music, and the work of an entire generation of historians, is how a musical tradition (or society) could evolve from the epitome of cultivation and artistic leadership in the Enlightenment into the barbarism of Nazism. But history is not linear, and the story in this book defies some basic intuitions. For one, references to heroism and violence, strength and unity were more important in symphony criticism after World War I than during the Third Reich. National Socialism ushered in extremes of political rhetoric but did not finally strengthen the role of music as cultural ideology or propaganda. Despite the barriers posed by the technical language of music, scholars cannot ignore its importance to German history. Some historians have focused on music-making, whether at home or in choral societies; others have examined the legacy of Wagner and Wagnerism, by now an industry unto itself. But apart from Beethoven—regrettably, fated to be studied in isolation—scarce attention has been paid to the cultural and political role of the symphonic repertory. As a genre of “absolute,” or abstract, music, the symphony was an open arena to be invested with meaning. Its hallowed structure—preserved or modified—its parameters of thematic conflict, and its orchestral forces all made the symphony prey to the broadest cultural and political claims. More than anything, the symphony promised a transcendence of its own sonority, aspiring to overcome reality. By its very nature, symphonic listening was ambitious. The demand that a listener synthesize an hour or so of music into a single structure challenged many a trained musician. Historically, from the late eighteenth century on, music was a privileged testing ground for reciprocal intelligence and judgment. Music enlightened, it might even transport, but it did not overwhelm. Time-worn metaphors of music as

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seduction, most common in the late eighteenth century, suggest a certain power relation, but the subjectivity (or independent capacities) of the listener was never threatened before the twentieth century.6 From unity to monumentality, the symphony’s defining traits were by no means limited to German music, though one rarely finds paeans to Jean Sibelius or Dmitri Shostakovich in histories of the genre, at least by German commentators at the time (except to mirror ambitions for expanding the Third Reich). The symphony was hailed as quintessentially German in the early twentieth century, when the genre flourished in the United States and elsewhere in Europe, but not particularly in Germany or Austria. (Mahler was in some ways the exception who proved the rule.) Yet Germany, and to some degree Austria, harbored an imaginary proprietary claim to the symphony. The risk of the symphonic repertoire becoming a museum collection rather than remaining a living cultural asset made the ongoing debates over Bruckner and Mahler more urgent. Other genres had tangible political uses, from marches and military songs to community choruses. New oratorios and cantatas, by the thousands, honored the Führer and National Socialism, forcibly, as it were, supplanting the church with the state. But the idea of the symphony served political ideology immeasurably. By its very nature, the symphony thematized and affirmed the relationship between individual and society, including the powerful collective claims behind the political movements that tore European society asunder in the twentieth century. Musical discourse, more than musical scores, contributed to that process. This book will explore the debates around exemplary works, controversial and otherwise, from the threat of fin-de-siècle modernism to Nazism.

The Politics of the Apolitical “Alongside the history of the world proceed, guiltless and unstained by blood, the histories of philosophy, science and the arts.” These were Schopenhauer’s words, but also the epigraph for Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina (1917), history’s most political apolitical opera. Ostensibly a portrait of the Italian composer receiving by divine inspiration the Pope Marcellus Mass, which preserved a role for music in the Catholic Church of the Counter Reformation, the opera’s subtext is anti-Semitic and nationalistic Pfitzner, who aspired to redeem contemporary music through post-Romantic tonality. Schoenberg took his revenge by sketching

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a parody of Pfitzner as Palestrina, inactive and passive, to the point composing while asleep.7 On both sides of the Atlantic, World War I politicized art. Art served the cause of war well, but Thomas Mann, in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918), sustained the myth that art and the humanistic endeavors were a world unto themselves, free from the sins of politics: “Art is a conservative power, the strongest of all; it preserves spiritual possibilities that without it—perhaps—would die out.”8 Mann soon recanted, and his Doktor Faustus glares at Germany’s spiritual collapse through the allegory of a composer who is sublimely inventive as his nation self-destructs. Musicality, once the pride and joy of Germans— including Austrians, who very often identified themselves as Germans, a term that was linguistic and cultural as much as national), was responsible for its own downfall, in a totalitarian regime where the art was misused as propaganda or distraction.9 From Karl Marx to Karl Mannheim, ideology suggests a vision of political power and degree of social equality that are prescribed outright or coded into interpretive language. Music was the art form most capable of embedding ideology, above all in central Europe. Instrumental music, without programmatic guidance, has no concrete meaning to restrict the interpreter. As the most public musical genre, the symphony invited political inspiration and interpretation, from Beethoven and Bruckner to Copland and Shostakovich. In Germany and Austria, the concept of struggle was crucial to the genre, not just in interpreting a symphony but also in understanding the creative process. German cultural history centered around the work ethic (or struggle)—at least since the eighteenth-century and perhaps even since Luther.10 No art form, indeed no genre of music, better captured the idea of striving than the symphony. Despite its charge of unity and control, the genre could also emancipate and empower. This inherent contradiction made the symphony a privileged locus for ideology. The new role of the conductor, entirely different in the early twentieth century from what it had been in the late eighteenth or even nineteenth century, made a dynamic of power unavoidable. The size of the orchestra, especially as augmented by Mahler, inspired comparison with the “masses” harnessed by new political parties, particularly in terms of his Eighth Symphony.11 Finally, the symphony epitomized attempts to preserve art music against the popularity of jazz, film, and dance music. Whatever it offered to proletarian audiences, who sat through long concerts buttoned up in their

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Sunday suits, perhaps not always grateful for the reduced ticket prices, the symphony validated high art and culture.

A History of Criticism The fin de siècle, the Weimar Republic (less so the Austrian Republic), and the Third Reich are each dedicated areas of history and musicology, and historians have developed a vast literature on World War I. Periodization is, however, more difficult in intellectual history, no less in the history of music criticism, hence the tendency to study individuals more than ideas. Critics remained active across three or more decades, some unflinching in their aesthetic stances, others responsive to political exigency. Developments in musical thought do not correlate neatly with the customary periodization dictated by the outbreak of World War I, the founding of the Third Reich, and so on. Music criticism endorsed a vitalism before 1914 and cultivated a radical nationalism before 1933— well before the first Nuremberg rally in August 1927 (namely, in Alfred Rosenberg’s contribution to the Beethoven centennial in March).12 This book is not a study of composers—their creative development or even their response to the political turmoil and world wars—but rather a history of what critics and commentators believed was at stake, artistically and culturally, in the works they reviewed and the composers they presented to the public. At the same time it is not a social history, reconstructing from diaries and letters how individuals encountered symphonic music. Some other themes one might expect to encounter also do not play a large role. The sweeping compositional innovations in the period 1900–1945 were all but irrelevant. Many commentators dismissed Schoenberg and his cohorts, although their presence intensified the polemical defense of tradition. As well, reviews addressed the quality of performance only perfunctorily, and deliberately so: as an art form, music might lose its transcendent value if the aesthetic experience was contingent on the quality and interpretation of playing on a given day, in a particular hall, or on the interpretation of the conductor on the podium that night. Instead, critics sustained a debate about the course of music history: the risks and virtues in the collective mission of preserving a cultural legacy of edification. These debates, from spectacular insights to depraved injunctions, form the subject of this book. Each chapter centers on an aesthetic problem that devolved into ideology, with a particular focus on Mahler and Bruckner. Part I examines

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the attenuation of aesthetic traditions after 1900—from symphonic idealism (Chapter 1) to symphonic conventions (Chapter 2) to the sensuality of orchestral forces (Chapter 3). During this period before World War I, judgment rested on aesthetic abstractions and on comparison to other music, except when comparison to culture or politics served to criticize the music. Hovering between pure aesthetics and cultural ideology, these reviews document a vulnerability to politicization. In part a response to new repertoire, this exigency also came from an erosion of logic and rationality. (Admittedly, this metaphysical asset, musical logic, may never have existed for Schumann and Wagner, to name the most free-spirited among nineteenth-century composers.) The nature and history of this abandonment of reason, still with us today, have been explored by scholars from philosophy to literature to the history of science and art. Its consequences, as yet all but ignored in music criticism, were just as strong. Part II charts the passage from World War I to the Third Reich. Few critics avoided politics altogether, but they sought different recourse. Chapter 4 examines liberal and progressive responses to Mahler. While vitalism was a paradigm for listening, proposed around 1905, a decade hence this critical language devolved to violence and willpower. Chapter 5, retracing the years after World War I, surveys conservatives and nationalists who, ever larger in force and number, promised a return to objectivity, order, and cohesion, through the symphonies of Bruckner. Structure was more important than formal convention per se, and the symphony embodied form in philosophical and cultural dimensions. Bruckner’s symphonies gave rise to a spatial listening that satisfied the need for unity and foundation. Chapter 6 traces veiled debates over the regime and an emerging but never well-defined fascist aesthetics, in the context of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony. Finally, Chapter 7, which touches on the success of Orff’s Carmina burana, submits that music criticism failed to sustain a leading role in the Third Reich, either as propaganda or as resistance. This project emerges from the study of several hundred reviews examined in German and Austrian archives or culled directly from newspapers, along with numerous books addressing the same general public. The numerous critics who remain little more than a name, lost to local history, along with some anonymous contributions, make biographical research impractical or impossible. Without undertaking substantial research on any one of some hundred figures, I often suggest in passing

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how some aspect of a critic’s professional life, geographic location, or creative work might have contributed to the aesthetic views espoused. Some warrant their own study, particularly when correspondence or personal journals have been preserved, but rarely do I trace the development of a single writer.

Critics and Their Craft Hegel once observed that reading the newspaper had replaced morning prayer.13 The public display of newspaper reading, along with the communal café newspaper, made the ritual both performative and intimate. Hegel did not live to encounter the first Boulevardzeitung (a newspaper sold on the street) in October 1877, the B. Z. am Mittag. Still, around 1900 most newspaper reading occurred through subscriptions or shared copies. The rapid consumption, under circumstances of potentially great distraction, forced a language of immediacy, bold metaphors, and extreme statements, all in the spirit of engaging the reader. The front page typically included a lengthy feuilleton, testifying to the importance of the performance or issue at hand. The feuilleton afforded critics space to record their impressions as well as address larger aesthetic questions, often within a cultural context. The linguistic style was so refined and distinctive that some newspapers did not bother to list the author, since the writing itself served as a signature. The competition for readership— Berlin and Vienna each boasting a multitude of newspapers—only enhanced critics’ temerity to reflect broadly and incisively on the performances they reviewed. In the nineteenth century, an abundance (and ephemerality) of music journals and relatively limited number of newspapers brought a certain depth and stability to critical positions—hence the clear battle lines between the Brahmsians and the New German School. Not so after 1900, when a newspaper might target a social class, sex, or political orientation. As concert halls opened to a broader spectrum of potential audiences and newspaper readership grew, along with a host of other factors, aesthetics gave way to cultural criticism. Ferruccio Busoni, prolific as a composer but temperate as an author, blamed the feuilleton— its witticisms, catchwords, and superficial gloss—for the ruination of the Viennese musical public. A diet of these briefest of accounts (if long by today’s standards) stripped the Viennese of “their power of seeing and hearing, comparing and thinking with any seriousness.”14 Then as

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now, composers railed against the power and ineptitude of critics. But for its practitioners, writing about music—a heady mixture of analysis and philosophy, creative writing and history—was an art unto itself. (Heinrich Schenker, the eminent if irascible critic and theorist, fancied himself an artist. His harmony text, the first volume of New Musical Theories and Fantasies, appeared anonymously—“by an Artist,” as stated on the title page.)15 From its tone, if not the sheer number of words, it is clear that music criticism was a strong force in the intellectual and ethical life of many a German and Austrian. It may be impossible to determine the nature and extent of its actual influence on political thought—that of ideologues and followers—but measuring the intended influence in the texts critics produced is imperative, for all the interpretive problems it brings, for all agreed that music was important to the development and demise of Germany and Austria—if, finally, for different reasons. A history of aesthetic and musical concepts leaves little room for probing an author’s political stance. Aesthetic differences between the progressive/liberal and the conservative/nationalist commentators were clear-cut around 1900, yet political and aesthetic views did not always coincide. Searching for any precise connection between party affiliation and musical taste is, in any case, beside the point in the generation before World War I, since most critics, except possibly socialists, wished for music to remain apolitical.16 Moreover, to differentiate on political grounds would be difficult, since prewar Social Democrats subscribed to many of the same musical values as did liberals, in effect extending the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment to the working classes. Between the wars, the political spectrum widened in Austria and Germany to the left and the right, and ideological positions became more determinate. The terms liberal and conservative could still apply to aesthetic orientation, as before, but criticism became more strident, particularly on the Right. A new genre of Marxian criticism, especially in Weimar, emerged to the left of those who had been, and remained, liberal. Critics on the Right were less likely to be outflanked, as the winds of antiSemitism and antidemocratic politics blew stronger by the end of the 1920s; many adjusted their politics and critiques, forging an easy transition to National Socialist commitments. A newspaper’s political orientation typically had little influence on the staffing of its music department, apart from extremes on the Left or Right. Aesthetic conservatives filled the ranks of several preeminent lib-

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eral newspapers. (A further complication is that, at least in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the distribution of newspapers did not correlate with voting patterns, so the choice of newspaper was clearly not determined by political preference.)17 But no matter what their inclinations and judgment, professional critics felt obliged to report on new works with some degree of objectivity (excepting perhaps the nationalistic Deutsche Zeitung, in Vienna). Rudolf Louis, anti-Semite and aesthetic conservative, did not take Mahler seriously in his 1909 book on contemporary German music but meticulously evaluated each symphony in turn when reporting on performances for the esteemed Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. Critics at the leading urban newspapers wrote for a readership that was musically literate, if not necessarily familiar with the repertoire. Many held doctorates, and the sophistication of their observations alone makes these sources valuable. In smaller cities, reviews were supplied more haphazardly by composers, performers, and teachers but remain just as valuable for their immediate and often untutored impressions. All this would change after World War I and revolution swept away any residual elitism. Political publications included music among their subjects of coverage, and even critics at the old liberal newspapers felt compelled to address music in a political context. After January 1933, the linguistic usage hardened, and divergence in critical opinion became attenuated. On the surface, political orientation became easier to measure. Critics who did not support the regime tended to avoid contributing to certain publications and writing on certain topics. Others exhibited varying degrees of involvement, whether driven by ideology or opportunism—from joining the Nazi Party to collaborating on reform to accepting promotions or appointments that entailed, as it were, climbing over the corpse of a Jewish colleague. Excavating the inner beliefs of any one musician or critic is all but impossible, be it Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, or Arnold Schering, to name only a few of the figures whose reputations typically do not suffer from their activities under Hitler’s regime. But political resistance and obeisance, advocacy and compliance can be measured in musical discourse, even with the variance resulting from the work under review, the venue and the historical context. Whatever the mitigating circumstances or critics’ thoughts, their words betrayed the influence they wished to have or, at least, agreed to have. Newspapers and journals were never the sole outlets for music critics, but a signal shift to monographs and other book formats came around

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1910, when writers on music joined the debates that the cultural critics Julius Langbehn and Max Nordau had pursued with unprecedented success, almost twenty years earlier. Before that point, appreciation was usually limited to books on composers. The difference in venue between books and newspapers (or journals) is considerable, although many critics wrote in both formats. A newspaper article, typically consumed in one sitting and then passed on or tossed, would lose immeasurable value within hours, once the midday paper appeared. Books projected a different kind of authority and were usually more polemical. The decision to turn to the more enduring format of the book, which had fewer constraints than newspaper feuilleton, came at a telling moment, coinciding with the dissolution of tonality, the greatest rupture known to music history—if, admittedly, many other factors were at work. Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, op. 10 dramatizes the beginnings of atonality—which in retrospect seemed inevitable, given the tenuous hold of tonality in his First String Quartet, premiered in February 1907—by dissolving the popular Austrian tune “Ach, Du lieber Augustin” in the scherzo; then the sky opens up in the two vocal movements as the soprano is transported by “air from another planet” (the opening of Stefan George’s “Entrückung,” set in the last movement). The riot at the premiere, in Vienna late in December 1908, prevented the music from being heard; a second performance in February ensured that press coverage continued unabated in Germany as well as in Vienna. That same year, 1909, the leading critics—Leopold Schmidt at the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, Paul Bekker at the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, and Rudolf Louis—of three German musical centers published books on contemporary music (or music drama), or so their respective titles claimed, but each study extended back to the mid-nineteenth century. (The final such book to appear before the caesura of World War I, by Walter Niemann, narrated a lineage from Wagner to the present.)18 The timing is, admittedly, more precise than intellectual history allows (although as a rule, music books for the public were written and published quickly). Still, a general anxiety about modernism, intensified by the turn of the century,19 lay behind the critics’ insistence on continuity with the past. This was the predicament of a society enthralled with what tradition had come to mean. The monograph, in turn, grew in weight and cultural significance from the pamphlets on composers, a genre that was popular in the late nineteenth century. Listener-based theories of musical form that devel-

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oped in the 1910s and 1920s were tested on the symphony, as the supreme challenge in aural comprehension. Books on the symphony, few and far between, ordinarily came as the culmination of a life’s work. August Halm began his writing career with a harmony treatise, followed by Von zwei Kulturen der Musik, which interprets Bruckner’s historical significance to be synthesizing two musical cultures, Bach’s counterpoint and Beethoven’s harmony. Only thereafter did Halm undertake a book on the subject “the Bruckner symphony.” Bekker published books for the general reader at a prodigious rate. But at only one point, also midcareer, did he embark on a lengthy study of a symphonic repertoire—in his case, Mahler was the ideological endpoint of the genre. As with Halm, Bekker’s analytic masterpiece was preceded by a cultural history of the symphony that set the stage for the Mahler book. Ernst Kurth wrote a two-volume study of Bruckner, completing what became, in effect, a series of books on the materials of music: counterpoint in Bach, harmony in Wagner, and form in Bruckner. Whether from exhaustion of task, or nostalgia for a genre’s air of finality in Bruckner or Mahler, these authors all changed course, or fell silent, after completing their large symphony book.20 To analyze and interpret works of such complexity and length were indeed daunting tasks. Moreover, books on the symphony typically included broader aesthetic exploration. Kurth confided to Bekker his ambition to establish an epistemology for music and for life. His book on Bruckner “deals with the very foundations of musicology and, above all, issues of form.” Returning to the subject later in the letter, Kurth reiterated that his book would illuminate “the basic formative energies of the nineteenth century,” not fully addressed in his Romantische Harmonik. A book on Bruckner has therefore “became a historical necessity for me.”21 Others, equally inspired by Bruckner, found the goal nearly unattainable. Ernst Decsey, despite being Vienna’s most copious critic, dedicated some fifteen years to a biography of Bruckner, a project that was dear to him. “Penetrated by his [Bruckner’s] pure being, fulfilled by the enormity of his music,” Decsey persevered until completing the book after World War I.22 Bruckner was in some ways a subject for the mature author, late in life—whether Kurth, Halm, or even Louis, whose study of the composer culminates in a chapter titled “The Brucknerian Symphony.” Were there other reasons, beyond their individual life circumstances, that Halm, Bekker, and Kurth turned away from long, analytical works in the mid-1920s, after their respective studies of

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Bruckner or Mahler? Did progressives (a term only partly applicable to Kurth, who was Jewish by birth but adopted a mystical Catholicism in his life and work) recognize that the very modes of listening and comprehension developed at their hand could be and already were being exploited by radical nationalists and anti-Semites? Historians have come to seek continuity across the caesura of 1933, not, as earlier, in order to trace the roots of fascism but to uncover the areas of society, science, and culture that were largely unaffected by the Nazi regime. This research has provided a necessary corrective to the old narratives of a world remade in the fascist image, often exposing a discrepancy between public ideology and social reality. The symphony was an accomplice to this continuity but not thanks to the achievement of its critical custodians. Most were willing to go along with simplified and repressive readings. Nonetheless, the symphony’s contrapuntal traditions, vivid orchestration, and complex structure permitted no easy enlistment to a political cause without explanation or mediation and with a public that the regime considered too unpredictable and insecure. Musical discourse would ultimately be silenced or rendered ineffective. But music would survive.

Aesthetics and Ideology If art music mattered more a century ago, language, too, carried more weight. Was highly charged language, particularly in the years around 1900, more rhetoric than ideology—as Schering put it in 1928, a “reaction to the indifference” of music critics in the previous generation?23 Intention is, of course, impossible to measure. Whatever motivation lurks in the background, the text takes on a life of its own, especially in a medium as public as a newspaper. To penetrate a world of musical discourse and understand its historical evolution require interpreting metaphors. This remains the fundamental problem, but also the virtue, of musical aesthetics. Music, or at least musical listening, was politicized through characteristic metaphors. At the same time, of course, meaning is determined in large part by context, whether the surrounding text, the author’s reputation, or even the venue of publication.24 Some metaphors were specific to an age, such as coloristic ones for timbre at the fin de siècle. But others were embedded in the language of music criticism and theory, arguably more technical than expressive.

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Aesthetics—and, in most cases, music itself—cannot be reduced to ideology. The reverse is true as well. If this book excludes much, especially for readers curious about composers’ lives and scores, it also has relevance beyond its historical purview, as it were, case studies in musical aesthetics. Should the tasks imposed by critics of yore inform our own musical experience? Should we listen to music synchronically (or synthetically), forming a grasp of the whole, or diachronically, focusing on each moment as it passes? Put more abstractly, should form be experienced as a structure or a process? Is there aesthetic merit to interpreting music spatially? The writers under discussion strove to balance cultural criticism with aesthetics and analysis—more, perhaps, than any generation until our own. The pressing ideological issues were different than today, tending to exclude rather than liberate, as we might hope of our own political contribution as composers, writers, and listeners. (To oversimplify, their anti-Semitism or nationalism is replaced by our interest in gender or sexual orientation; their insistence on conformism and hierarchy is supplanted by our democratizing impulse; and so on.) If the methodological dilemmas and perceptual limitations were largely the same, the recourse was different. The generations active from 1900 to 1945 used, or abused, the conventions of language and metaphor, whereas the so-called new musicologists since the 1980s have instead resorted to methodology, adopting gender theory, political ideology, literary theory, and so on. To escape from the shadows of the past, the postwar generation pursued a rigorous course. Yet their claims to objectivity went too far. Analysis trumped cultural interpretation, and musicology reinvented itself by focusing on medieval and Renaissance music. More comfortable with style categories and pure analysis than perhaps we are today, a generation of musicologists and theorists became absorbed in scores, if pursuing many of the same aesthetic issues that had emerged in criticism around 1900 and developed thereafter in theoretical frameworks. Consider the tension between structure and process. To cite but a few examples, Carl Dahlhaus and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling advocated a synchronic approach—the venerable capacity to perceive the work across time as a whole—thereby reviving the predominant aesthetic tradition of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By contrast, the American iconoclast Edward T. Cone insisted on a conception of form as a process rather than the structural approach implied by synchronic listening.25 The tension between structure and process underlying the

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music and writings in this book remains as relevant today, albeit unmoored from ideology. (If aesthetics is less fashionable today, certainly the terms are still as important, though for different reasons. Our own culture of political correctness stresses metaphors of process over metaphors of structure—as if “structure” were complicit with tradition, hierarchy, and repression, while “process” promises flexibility and consensus.) Let a brief sketch of the linguistic life of musical “process” suggest the wider aesthetic and compositional underpinnings of the concepts explored in this book. A vocabulary of process emerged first in music criticism, ranging from expressive imagery around 1900 to formal concepts around 1910 to a theory of process around 1920 and ideological concepts of intensification and willpower. Did postwar composers feel liberated in turning from structure to process? “Musical form,” Edgar Varèse declared, is “a resultant—the result of a process.”26 Others have resorted to process to free themselves from the manacles of modernism. Nonhierarchical music, from that of John Cage to that of Steve Reich, encourages processual models, whether from the natural world or the human psyche. The concept of process has also served analysts well. James Hepokoski reads a plot of form into Richard Strauss’s Don Juan: the hero’s theme transforms form-as-schema into form-as process.27 Leonard Meyer, another postwar iconoclast, proposes a theory of form in which structure and process reside in the listening experience: process on one level becomes structure on another level.28 A vocabulary of process and structure may bring a certain depth to musical analysis, with evocations of philosophy or psychology, but very often little more is involved. This book, however, examines the rhetoric of structure and process—along with the aesthetic values of tradition and unity, and the musical parameters of timbre and rhythm—at a time that their respective advocates believed the fate of culture and nationality depended on the dominance of one or the other. Also instructive for our own generation, which has all but abandoned the pursuit of a national audience for music and writing on music, are the prodigious attempts that were made to preserve an audience in the face of modern trends and new opportunities. Tradition, as a respect for the past and as a specific set of conventions for the symphony, was paramount in all critical orientations, progressive or liberal, conservative or nationalist, and across all generations (possibly excepting some circles in the interwar years). Far from being hidebound in their glance back-

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ward, critics sought to cultivate and nourish listeners by invigorating music and tradition for a new generation. The rampant politicization in musical thought, for all the risks taken and the damage wrought, did require and instill sensitivity toward language and the dynamics of culture. And despite themselves, commentators often made wise choices in the music they wished to illuminate and promote. Bruckner may have been drawn into political debate for his obeisance to symphonic conventions. As the most German among Austrian composers—in popular typecasting of the warm, sensual South and the rigorous, philosophical North—Bruckner was useful to the majority of Austrians who wished for annexation to Germany. If he was Austrian by his heritage and environment, as an artist he was undeniably German, a politically charged biography from 1912 insisted.29 Yet just as relevant was his masterly balance in structure, stunning orchestration, and supreme control over motivic writing. With its expansiveness and yet internally coherent form, Bruckner’s music inspired a new formal vocabulary, as either process or structure or both, depending on the generation. Mahler, in some quarters, became his counterpole, poised as a radical innovator for calling attention to orchestration more than structure and defying the inherited forms. His symphonies often bestirred a reflective stance or irony, appealing to progressive or leftleaning listeners. The tension between the worlds of Bruckner and Mahler, and their associated ways of listening is largely absent today. Reconstructing these ways of listening and thinking is crucial to any historically informed hermeneutic practice as well as important to the understanding of the landscape of history itself.

chapter one

Symphonic Idealism in Crisis

By the end of the nineteenth century, the symphony had attained vast cultural significance in central Europe. After more than a century of development and expansion, it achieved preeminence among genres of art music and affirmed the German claim to a special art and culture. Ironically, at the very height of its cultural prestige, most composers abandoned the form as music history had known it. The symphony had to be defended, and its deviant exemplars had to be disciplined, precisely because so much was expected of so limited a repertoire. The principal challenge came from Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems. The provocative success of program music called into question the contemporary relevance of the symphony at a time of widespread cultural vulnerability. From the waning confidence in materialist science and philosophical idealism to literary realism and the skepticism of reasoned discussion, the foundations of thought and culture were contested in the later years of the nineteenth century. After two youthful symphonies, Strauss abandoned the genre, composing seven tone poems before the century was out and eventually even rejected Franz Liszt’s appellation “symphonic poems.” But Strauss did not entirely forsake the idea of the symphony. During the very years Bruckner remained steadfastly within its traditional confines, Strauss worked in the medium of the orchestra, judiciously exploring the aesthetic traits of the genre from the outside, as it were. Strauss felt drawn to program music throughout his life and yet was unwilling to forfeit the traditions and cultural gravity of the symphony. The evolving nomenclature and variety in subject matter reveal some of

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these deliberations. As a point of contrast, Aus Italien (1886) and Macbeth (1887–1888) had the subtitle “symphonic fantasy.” Don Juan (1888–1889), his most original composition up to that point, was the first to be called a “tone poem,” without any reference to the “symphonic,” as if Strauss felt liberated from tradition in the heat of creativity. Don Juan’s public acclaim notwithstanding, Cosima Wagner was displeased. Denouncing its superficial subject, she urged him to turn to “eternal motives.” Strauss made “a significant advance,” in his view, in Tod und Verklärung (1888–1889) by attempting to represent the tragedy of an artist who can achieve “transfiguration” only in death. This metaphysical statement marked a consummation of sorts, after which Strauss turned to opera. His Wagnerian Guntram was, however, a spectacular failure, whereupon the proven success of the tone poem beckoned. Strauss abandoned his next opera project and developed the sketches into Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche. Seeking refuge in Beethoven, he turned to the Eighth Symphony as inspiration for expanding rondo form through “poetic content.” From this point on, Beethovenian or not, Strauss’s symphonic poems aspired to the monumental in subject matter and length. Strauss’s renewed interest in symphonic aesthetics, broadly construed, coincided with the turn of the century. Anticipated as a momentous rupture—artistic tradition would be abandoned for modernism and political power forfeited to the populace—the year 1900 had a curious and profound impact on a wide range of artists and writers, with the sum effect of bringing an end to the century of idealism. From the conviction that a musical work could be unified (not unrelated to the dream for a German unification) to the hope that the logic of thematic development would bestow reason and discipline on a society of listeners to the belief that program music and opera could solidify a German identity among a sprawling group of communities, nineteenth-century music shared the ideal of progress in the Bildungsroman in literature and confident portrayals of the self in painting. True, the musical moderns pursued different goals late in the century, drawing inspiration from England and France alike, and many critics followed, seeking sensuous pleasure more than moral virtues through art. Once so enthusiastically a “protector of idealism,” music criticism lapsed toward the end of the nineteenth century, Arnold Schering later observed.1 Others defended modern music, finding a deeper meaning beyond its sensuous surface. Mahler’s biographer Richard Specht insisted that for Mahler, music was no “blandishment of the ears but the fulfillment of a metaphysical need, a sounding image of the world.”2

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Strauss, true to character, avoided the darker hues of metaphysics. Symphonischer Optimismus in fin-de-siècle-Form was his original subtitle for Also sprach Zarathustra.3 Enjoying success as a symphonic modernist if not in Weimar, where his career as a conductor flourished, Strauss escaped the stultifying milieu by discovering Nietzsche while on vacation in Greece and Egypt in the winter of 1892–1893.4 In an exuberant moment, his friend Arthur Seidl recalled, Strauss planned to dedicate this manifesto of optimism to “the twentieth century” (other potential dedicatees—Hans von Bülow and Alexander Ritter—having been disqualified by death and a falling out, respectively). Both summary and harbinger, the work adheres to familiar forms while in tone and timbre anticipating the new century. Outstripping the ambitions of Tod und Verklärung, Zarathustra extends beyond the human to the cosmic, purporting to represent nothing less than the creation of the world and the history of humankind. The archetypal symphonic opening that creates a sound world—in Beethoven’s Ninth and Bruckner’s mature symphonies—dramatizes the beginning of the world and life itself. The work surpasses Strauss’s earlier achievements in sheer sound, if not originality of construction (in this respect, however, Don Juan is superior). Zarathustra also provided the context and pretext for branding contrapuntal and harmonic advances as academic and scientific rather than spiritual and vitalizing. Strauss’s attempts to represent anything and everything through orchestral timbre contributed to the desacralization of the symphony. Don Juan inflated symphonic heroism into parody. With its raucous subject matter and alluring orchestral sheen, the work was too much a sensation to promote serious deliberation over the merits of the genre. It was instead the Symphonia domestica (1902–1903) that struck a deeper nerve. Its intimate programmatic portrayal of domestic life, replete with children and conjugal squabbling, proved uncomfortable for many listeners. The residue of symphonic tradition remains strong, especially in the fugal finale, yet the heroic struggle expected of a symphony is satirized as a family quarrel and reconciliation. Symphonic tension between the individual and the universal, almost in the manner of romantic farce, collapses on the conjugal bed, with the mundane and the intimate represented in equal force. The original title was blatantly programmatic, exposing the work’s subject as Strauss’s home, with a “symphonic” portrait of himself and his family. Strauss nonetheless referred to the work as a symphony (occasionally a “symphonic poem” but ultimately he preferred the former designation). However quotidian

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the subject, the work aspires to elevate family life—and Strauss’s own nearly dissolute marriage—to the level of symphonic idealism. The program was not distributed at the premiere, and he later distanced himself from its detailed narrative. From Georg Trakl to Stefan George and from Frank Wedekind to Arthur Schnitzler, literary modernists, including Strauss’s muses Oscar Wilde (Salome) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Elektra), explored controversial subjects. Conservatives, impatient with Strauss’s subjects and techniques, demanded that music avoid any realistic portrayal of the modern world. Art was to transcend the excessive materialism of contemporary life, along with the decadence and vulgarity of modern taste. Aspiring to the universal was not only the psychological paradigm of symphonic listening but also the aesthetic agenda of the critical establishment. Instrumental music should “communicate the most profound and lofty sense of all that is inexpressible in the mind and heart of a human being,” Max Kalbeck, the Brahms biographer and eminent Viennese critic, wrote in his review of Salome, damning at once the subject and the music.5 Even with a lofty subject such as Tod und Verklärung, Strauss’s execution in lucid and colorful orchestration led to a clash between the material forces of the music and its spiritual intimations. As problematic as trading the musical “absolute” for the profane, the precision of Strauss’s communication, in a language so much of the moment, defied the idealism so crucial to the symphonic legacy. The transcendent ambitions of the symphony would finally be revived in perhaps the most profound response to World War II, his Metamorphosen. As a group, Strauss’s tone poems had an illimitable influence on attitudes toward the symphony, both creative and critical. Their triumph in the concert hall made it impossible to dismiss modern music as an aberration. Strauss’s success also fostered doubt over the viability of the symphony in the new century. Mahler, Rudolf Louis winced, is the “only living composer who is exclusively a symphonist.” (The reason, Louis averred, was practical, since Mahler directed excellent orchestra musicians whom he could compel to play his music.)6 The same concerns and debates sparked by Strauss’s tone poems in the 1890s pervaded responses to Mahler in the 1900s, foremost being the charge that orchestration mattered more than melodic invention. By around 1910 critics became disenchanted with the freedom of subject matter and extremity of its treatment so characteristic of the fin de siècle. Older members of the establishment had the least patience

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with music that shirked its ethical purpose, especially a propos of the symphony as the genre that, along with religious music, epitomized moral striving. At age seventy-seven an unrepentant antimodernist, Felix Draeseke felt no qualms about a broadscale attack through a genre that was itself at risk, composing a Symphonia comica to critique the excesses of Strauss and his generation. Walter Niemann deplored the literalism of contemporary music. “There seems to be nothing that music is incapable of depicting: The innate antimusicality and the disintegrating and destructive forces of modern composition are shown nowhere more clearly than in the increased blurring of the boundaries between what can and cannot be musically represented, between music and nonmusic.”7 Loosening the discipline of music could unleash unforeseen dangers in audiences and society as a whole. The symphony became a refuge from modernism. Absolute music, insofar as it categorically refused any task of representation, would not challenge the strictures of what art should represent. Mahler’s Seventh was taken as a rejection of modern decadence. Just as “the perverse and erotic literary excesses of some fashionable poetesses had finally fallen out of favor,” one reviewer predicted, so, too, would “the arbiters of taste turn away from the untruthful angst-ridden works” that resulted from the “exploitation of the symphony to portray emotions that no one understood.”8 No critic failed to notice that the Seventh follows the traditional symphonic paradigm with glistening clarity—from a dark, struggling first movement to the effervescent finale that literally celebrates itself. Mahler’s biographer declared his oeuvre exempt from Hermann Bahr’s indictment of modern art. Once a spokesman and theorist for the younger generation of artists, Bahr condemned contemporary art for coupling virtuosity with interpretive sterility and for displaying “the highest technical ability without a shred of artistic will, soul, or essence.” He continued, in the passage Specht quoted, “Nothing seems out of its reach and yet it is unable to interpret our age.”9 Mahler’s shift in 1900 away from program music to an “outwardly” more traditional conception of the genre resulted in a highly self-conscious reorientation toward the past—although the composer, alluding to this change, spoke of accepting “outward” formal convention and directing his creative energy “inner” details.10 Strauss, too, would soon abandon the modernist camp (after Elektra, in 1908) and, in time, become a stalwart traditionalist—though traditionalism in Strauss’s hands was still a creative, powerful, and even self-satirizing aesthetic force that defies

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easy categorization. And although the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler seemed to represent allied efforts as of the first decade of the new century, they would soon after be endowed with opposed cultural and political resonance.

The Symphony and Selfhood From the baritone’s opening declarations to the concluding chorus, the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth affirms the philosophical mission of the symphony to link the individual to the universal. Yet historically, the universality in the Ninth Symphony was construed in national terms, particularly in Germany and Austria.11 If the Beethoven project was utopian from the start, the unspoken doubt as to whether the individual could survive within society or must yield some rights and aspirations to the good of the whole only made the genre more important. The symphony represented both an individual and an ideal for all humankind. The quintessential heroic symphony, Beethoven’s Fifth, was said to express the composer’s “vital strength at so high a level that everything individual is stripped off or falls away. Beethoven’s own life experience becomes . . . the decisive fate of all mankind.”12 With these words, A. B. Marx codified the legacy of Beethoven, which became the legacy of the symphony itself. No matter what the key area or melodic invention, a symphony was judged, if not also composed, by the same parameters from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. The symphony claimed to portray the actions and emotions of a heroic figure, and therefore of an individual who spoke for the collective.13 In practical terms, a symphony was felt in terms of a protagonist but had to be interpreted as the actions and aspirations of humankind. It was a narrative that gained moral imperative. As a textbook norm, a symphony depicts a struggle in the first movement, most tangibly in the contrasting two themes of sonata form, but also in character and tone. The conflict gains profundity and breadth through contemplation (the slow movement) and affective extremes (the scherzo), only to be resolved in the finale. The emotions and narrative course of a symphony would become the listener’s own. Or, as one commentator put it, the symphonic hero is metaphysical, in that “each individual listener” can become that hero.14 If such identification readily occurs in the private world of recordings and iPods, it seems counterintuitive in the concert hall. How can a throng of some hundred musicians,

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realizing a complicated score, represent the emotions and thoughts of a single individual, sitting perhaps between strangers and within an ordered crowd? Admittedly, much writing on the symphony included armchair reflection, not just impressions from a performance. Schumann invoked the most private literary genre, the novel, in waxing enthusiastic over the “heavenly length” of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony. It reminded him of a four-volume novel by an author like Jean Paul, who, with the best of intentions, never wished to end, “so that the reader could continue creating for himself.”15 Yet at a performance of a symphony, the entire gamut of instruments that has to coalesce and represent the heroic self in its most fundamental state as individual. In that sense, the symphony illustrates the dialectic inherent in art itself, which was undoubtedly another reason why the symphony became allied with national ambition, for as Strauss’s contemporary Oskar Bie put it, “The task of art is to struggle with, and ultimately unify, the extremes that stand in our life—the private and the public, the individual and the general.”16 Every new symphony was presumed to follow the same narrative template as Beethoven’s “heroic” symphonies. More abstract than program music, this so-called plot archetype had the virtue of clarity without specificity. It constrained the emotional experiences of the listener, since the process and the outcome were known even before a note was heard. Herein lay some of the stodginess of critics at the fin de siècle. The slow movement, which has few formal specifications, was just as bounded as the symphony as a whole. The affective reference points in a slow movement were Schubert or Goethe, not Debussy or Baudelaire. If compositional guidelines were culled from contemporary reviews, its expression would need to be straightforward and moderate, without extremes or deviance. The Andante of Mahler’s Second was notable for a “healthy emotion” evocative of Schubert—a point, in this case, made to demonstrate the composer’s failings across the rest of his oeuvre.17 If general discussion of the genre clung to this archetype, individual reviews would note the adoption of the archetype but never its absence. Still, any work entitled “symphony” had to chart a succession and type of emotion that could emanate from a single protagonist. The late eighteenth century spoke as authority. The musicologist Guido Adler quoted Haydn (“Every one of my symphonies is a moral person”) to explain the poetic idea that lay behind each Mahler symphony, as requisite with instrumental music of any aesthetic pretensions.18 The emotions evinced also had to be psychologically plausible. The symphony, as a result,

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would uphold objective reality, barred from the more fantastical thoughts and emotions of a genre for a single performer. Max Graf (father to Freud’s patient “Little Hans”) complained that Mahler’s Third shows the composer as a political agitator, rousing the masses and pulling the individual in one direction after another by every temperament and every predisposition.19 The fiction of self-representation could be exposed by any single distortion. Anxiety about such a representational collapse produced a criticism of musical theatrics. (Mahler himself was suspicious of the theater but interpreted the metaphor very differently from his colleagues, denouncing music as theatrical when it ceased to evolve and develop: “Every repetition is a lie. A work of art, like life itself, must perpetually evolve. Otherwise, duplicity and the theater set in.”)20 The opening movement of the Third Symphony was fraught with dramatic tension that often crossed over into the theatrical, the composer’s advocate Julius Korngold had to concede.21 The Sixth Symphony convinced the eminent Berlin critic Leopold Schmidt that “Mahler’s music has a theatricality typical of modern artists.”22 Yet the success of the Seventh Symphony, so enthusiastically premiered in Prague, led the local reviewer Rudolf von Procházka to propose that Mahler had invented a new genre, the “theatrical symphony,” just as Richard Strauss had invented the “symphonic opera.”23 The autobiographical subjects in Strauss’s tone poems only strengthened the expectation, at least among less sophisticated reviewers, that the narrative and expressive course of a symphony should document the composer’s emotional life. In general, Strauss’s interest lay in the individual, not the symphonic collective, and he all but ignored the tension between the self and society long associated with the genre. His artistic credo became the self-justification of the individual. Ein Heldenleben portrays domestic love more than “heroic life.” The most intimate of relationships, conjugal love, was expounded in the material forces of the orchestra. A violin solo, no less, represents Strauss’s wife, whom he described as a complicated personality, forever changing. However endearing in a spouse or in program music, these same qualities, mutability and utter immediacy, rankled critics who, in Mahler’s case, were judging a work bearing the title “symphony.” “It was once thought that music could express everything or nothing,” was how Hugo Fleischer, writing in 1913, summed up the previous century’s debates between program music and absolute music, in

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faintly parodic terms.24 However inconsistent the terms, not all autonomous music (that is, lacking a program) was also absolute music (defined by aspiration to metaphysical truth).25 Some sarcasm was perhaps in order. Musical meaning was more prone to ad hominem attack than any other form of musical judgment or interpretation. A common criticism of a new symphony was that its emotional expression lacked universality. Historically, a novel idiom has often thwarted the listener’s capacity to rise above the moment in order to grasp some larger shape or process, and hence impute universal meaning. Brahms’s symphonies, too, met rebuke for emotional expression that was merely “personal.”26 The same was said of Mahler’s symphonies, but the observation was updated to refer to “subjectivity”—a quality coded as Jewish during Mahler’s lifetime (if a commonplace in recent criticism and scholarship). Critics ranging from Walter Riezler (an anti-Semite and tutor to the young Furtwängler) to the blasphemous Nazi Karl Blessinger denounced Mahler’s music as “subjective.”27 Joseph Sachs, to the contrary, was proud that Jewish subjectivity encourages artists such as Mahler and Chagall to focus on ethics and emotions to the exclusion of “pure art.”28 At the turn of the century, few critics within the schooled press of larger cities resorted to the term “subjective.” A local critic at the premiere of the Fifth Symphony astutely observed that “Mahler’s subject matter is not, as with Richard Strauss, the relationship of one person to another, or, as with Max Schillings, objective beauty. Rather, he wants to portray subjective feelings toward nature and life.”29 By contrast, the elder statesman of Viennese criticism, Theodor Helm, judged the same work, its emotional palette ranging from the intense to the rarified, deceitful. Mahler “betrayed” listeners by representing emotions he could not himself have experienced. However crude the formulation (“Does this wild orgy of dissonance truly come from the composer’s heart, or does he simply want to lead his trusting and enraptured listener a bit onto the ice?”), notable is, at least, the faith in artistic communication, even despite a composer with family roots so different from those of his audience.30 Kalbeck, at the esteemed liberal Neues Wiener Tagblatt, spoke around the term “subjectivity” in his review of the Sixth Symphony. Themes wandered into realms boundless and supernatural, unmoored by a secure foundation (that is, a strong bass line); the result, he explained, was music “far too personal, intimate, and exclusive in character.31 With other genres, such as chamber music or opera, critics did

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not ask whether the composer had actually felt the emotions expressed in the music. Nor would Mahler have admitted to as much personal investment. In various conversations about the meaning of his symphonies, he alluded to human subjects, but, as a rule, the parameters for interpretation defied any specificity. Despite his original title for the First Symphony, Titan, Mahler denied any influence of Jean Paul’s novel. The subject was, as his companion Natalie Bauer-Lechner put it, merely “a powerfully heroic individual, his life and suffering, struggles and defeat at the hands of fate.”32 Exploration of the human condition finally could substitute for the rationalist agenda. Fleischer’s article on symphonic form proposed just this program of self-realization: “No other art form gives the recipient so much space to put one’s own personality into the work.”33 A listener was to experience the symphony as a struggle involving himself as hero. Music gained cultural preeminence during a period of secularization over the course of the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century reaffirmed its value as a pure and absolute art form. If there was no divine muse for art, then nature and tradition became the basis for distinguishing art from craft, or art from whatever commentators wished to exclude. “The danger of making music, instead of having music come into being, lurks in all genres,” the young Karl Grunsky warned in 1906.34 Heinrich Schenker—who two years later wrote admiringly of Grunsky—developed the same distrust of intellect and intention into a vast analytic system.35 Much of the endorsement, and so, too, the critique, of music in the early twentieth century depended on the presumption that music expressed and portrayed the human spirit.

Authenticity in Symphonic Meaning Few disagreed about the superiority of so-called absolute, or nonprogrammatic, music. Yet liberals specifically stressed the freedom of listening to music that had no program. Eduard Hanslick scorned listeners who preferred the easy route of program music, which required no interpretive work. Program music, in his words, forced a particular course on the listener.36 Friedrich Brandes sought to convey to the literary audience of the journal Der Kunstwart how “enormously exciting” it was to listen to music without a program (“One can therefore think so much for oneself”). At the time, he was reviewing the annual composers’ festival of the pan-German musical society (Tonkünstlerfest des allgemeinen

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deutschen Musikvereins), where he observed that Mahler was one of the few composers not to rely on a program or programmatic title.37 Despite the consensus about symphonic archetypes and the value of absolute music, differences emerged in the interpretive process, reflecting the wider debates over authenticity and the fissures in rationality at the turn of the century. The symphony was exempted from the upheaval in the conception of human consciousness and knowledge—but for various reasons, depending on the aesthetic and political perspective of the critic. Aesthetic conservatives wanted music to uphold the authority of truth and tradition. Emotions were to be “truthful,” and their succession one after another “logical.” The symphony’s implicit narrative of selfrealization appealed to liberals. Its hallowed structures and prescribed aesthetic traditions attracted commentators on the Right. Liberal critics, faced with a huge and challenging work, sought to extract a rational course. This approach faltered with most critics who reviewed Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. One exception was Kalbeck, friend and collaborator of the composer. He responded positively despite, not because of, its “true musical indeterminacy.” Careful not to reject its course and composer as illogical, Kalbeck spoke of a more complicated psychological process, if one that did not win his approval: “It is as if Mahler compels us to posit logical or historical connections” between musical events that “are evidently present but do not, however, enter into the consciousness.”38 While liberal critics acknowledged a role for the imagination, others stressed simple emotionalism and determination. “It is no surprise that listeners today prefer music aimed more at the intellect than at the heart, since every ‘truth’ gives birth, as though through self-generation, to the worm of the question mark,” the crotchety Gustav Schönaich quipped after a performance of Till Eugenspiegels lustige Streiche.39 Niemann legitimized this discourse in his survey of recent music. “In our modern age of industrial capitalism, materialism, and technology, music cannot give birth to a spiritual prophet, for our age no longer has a spirit.”40 There was a deeper purpose to the trivial but pervasive comments about authenticity. If logic was no longer a governing force in the world, music could be truthful only in expressing the composer’s emotions. The power of music to replicate the same feelings in the listener also resuscitated the idea of a musical community. Yet artistic and intellectual developments circa 1890 to 1910 undermined the symphonic imperatives for universality and rationality. Philosophers and psychologists stressed the subjectivity of existence, rejecting

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earlier positivist models from the natural sciences.41 Writers and artists, as Judith Ryan has shown, worked under the principle that there was no single, consistent point of view and perspective.42 And so too, in interpreting Mahler’s symphonies, critics profited by invoking other expressive models, such as an unconscious or multiple perspectives. To do so was an emphatic rejection of the wider attacks on musical modernism. Steeped in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, Max Nordau believed that clearly profiled themes and identifiable formal schemata allow for objective judgment and definitive interpretation. Modern music, however, was fraught with ambiguity. Themes “grow less distinct and more fluid, eventually dissolving into a cloud—a nocturnal fog in which the imagination can envision whatever forms it wishes.”43 The genre of symphony very often faced strictures in the nature of musical expression, not just content. Clarity was paramount. If knowledge had no claims to objectivity, and truth was not absolute, then at least whatever communication did transpire should be crisp and determinate.44 But there was no consensus. Clarity was too easily pressed into service as a conservative ideal. Modern art, according to its defenders, might require some ambiguity. The demand for clarity in artistic expression was called into question in 1900 in the rancor over Klimt’s Philosophy. The art historian Franz Wickhoff lamented the public value placed on immediate comprehensibility and clarity. “The layman is too easily inclined to find a work ugly if he cannot immediately dissect it as understandable,” he explained, pointing out that the Sistine Chapel and Phidias’s statue of Athena Parthenos for the Parthenon are also undecipherable.45 The debates were not limited to Viennese circles. Hermann Kretzschmar, with the practical sensibilities of a choral conductor, turned to musicology after the turn of the century through a series of lengthy articles developing a “musical hermeneutics,” with the stated intention of reducing the “indefiniteness” in interpretation.46 Some critics, however, reacted against clarity in compositional aesthetics, especially programmatic music. Strauss, it was felt, showed contempt for the audience by representing everything out and reducing musical appreciation to the lowest level of cognition.47 Although Strauss was linked to the “moderns” largely for reasons of musical style, the very premise behind the genre of the symphonic poem, in its ambition to convey a particular set of ideas, spoke against the subjectivity that became a hallmark of modernism. Mahler, to the contrary, was never criticized for musical meaning that was too manifest. Even the obvious symbols in the Seventh Symphony—the ser-

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enading lute in the picturesque Andante amoroso, or the brassy C-major ritornello in the victorious Rondo-finale—won acclaim, rather than censure, for their clarity. Mahler’s correspondence with liberal critics reveals a progressive and sophisticated mind-set belying his old-fashioned taste in literature. Stressing music’s resistance to verbal description, he lamented his generation’s confidence in interpretive practices.48 Symphonic music represented the transcendence of the human subject, whether through a symbolic battle or the simple fact that music superseded language. Thoughts of such transcendence figured into Mahler’s compositional aesthetics, even at a time when he wrote only program music: “As long as I can express an experience in words I should never try to put it into music. The need to express myself musically—in symphonic terms—begins only where obscure feelings prevail, at the gate that opens into the ‘other world,’ the world in which things no longer fall apart in time and space.”49 Later, after turning to a purely instrumental medium, Mahler refined his aesthetic thinking. In one conversation, cycling through sundry metaphors he settled on a definition of musical expression as the transition from rationality to the imagination—“the moment when ‘your philosophy’ begins to dream.”50 At this point, in 1901, few of Mahler’s contemporaries so openly jettisoned rationality. When Korngold did so, it was only to invoke a Romantic aesthetics. Very often in Mahler’s Third, he explained, “the understanding arrives at the imagination,” and he cited Friedrich Hebbel’s definition of the beautiful as the moment when “imagination becomes understanding.”51

Jewish Identity and Symphonic Assimilation Following German unification in 1871, an economic crisis coupled with increases in its Jewish population made anti-Semitism a tool for populist politics in the late 1870s and again, even more, in the 1890s. Although antisemitism in the Second Reich never produced so spectacular a case as the Dreyfus Affair, it was a recurrent theme in politics as well as culture. Cultural diagnoses, so fashionable in the years around 1900, were flagrantly anti-Semitic. Far-flung theories by Arthur Gobineau and Wagner’s anti-Semitic philo-Germanic admirer Houston Stewart Chamberlain continued to sustain interest. But at a certain point, cultural diatribes against musical modernism came to serve political ends as well. The difference is not negligible. New art can and should be contested or

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embraced; social and cultural differences may be noted, but with as much deference and discretion as possible. Yet in arts criticism, alleged racial differences can only be baneful and irrelevant. Put differently, if aesthetic judgments borrow vocabulary from another discourse (racial or social difference), can the music critic be blamed for more than, perhaps, narrow-minded artistic sensibilities? It is useful to distinguish between a cultural criticism that drew on anti-Semitic stereotypes and an anti-Semitism that used music and musicians as justification for a wider program of social and political discrimination. The former endeavored to explain musical expression (though the ends did not justify the means); the latter justified their more general exclusion by the example of music. To differentiate the two variants of anti-Jewish argumentation is not to mitigate the damage of one or the other, but only to track more accurately the development of a cultural criticism of music and the evolution of anti-Semitism. Tragically, the agendas eventually merged. For the Jews arriving in the cities of central Europe during the nineteenth century, aspiring for success in business, professional, or cultural life, assimilation beckoned, and often through conversion. Baptism, which Mahler undertook in February 1897, overcame legal but not always social exclusion. (Acutely aware of the anti-Semitism he faced as director of the Vienna Court Opera, Mahler, by one account, hesitated before inviting Bruno Walter to be his assistant conductor because he was Jewish—despite his having been baptized; Mahler had previously dismissed the suggestion of Leo Blech for the same reason.)52 The connection to the German cultural legacy was so deep that the changing religious affiliation often did not seem troubling. The dominant paradigms of musical aesthetics, as inherited from the late eighteenth century, dovetailed with two social phenomena: unity (as a form of musical assimilation) and “intensification,” or Steigerung (a secular conversion, as it were, also implied ascent: steigen means “to climb”). Johann Nikolaus Forkel, writing in 1877, likened Steigerung to rhetorical theory, stressing that the gradual increase occurs in “new ideas” and harmonic richness, not just a crescendo.53 Goethe explored the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the concept, proposing a world in which intensification and polarity were the central processes behind creation itself, and by around 1900, “intensification” became the favored term for musical process. Failure to conform to these norms, whether on the part of an individual or a composition, undercut the idealist aspirations of the nation and the art form. Art music was to obscure or erase cultural identity, providing a higher form of communication in which individual

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differences fell away, thereby facilitating assimilation in the concert hall or more generally through a shared artistic legacy. On the political Right, the question remained whether assimilation or even conversion allowed Jews to absorb a gentile identity and shed the cultural traits that had shaped them or their generations of forebears. Some disputed or sabotaged attempts at assimilation, alleging that Jews were chameleons and did not fully adopt the new culture. They were mimics, not creators, and their true talent was verbal facility, not music, insisted Wagner, whom many would later claim as the spiritual grandfather of modern anti-Semitism. “Jewish” compositions suffered from an incessant and “prickling unrest,” just as Jews themselves lacked a “true noble calm.”54 Strauss and Mahler, however, deliberately favored brief motivic impulses and developed thematic material in unpredictable and dramatic ways. These practices made listening for sequential sections (normally defined by a striking or long-breathed melody) and synthesizing these sections into a calm and noble whole all but impossible. A purely perceptual problem became ideological, especially but not only in the case of Mahler, a formidable conductor and powerful presence in Vienna, whose Wagner interpretations challenged the hegemony of Bayreuth and therefore Germany. There were instances of social and political discrimination—not least in Mahler’s relationship to some crusty members of the Vienna Philharmonic—but more prevalent was a cultural critique that resorted to anti-Semitic stereotypes. Symphonic structure, as a form sacred to German culture, depended on the absorption of themes into a formal scheme. The perceived failure of this process was likened to the behavior and traits of Jews in their inherited milieu before or even despite assimilation. Anti-Semitic tropes offered a trenchant vocabulary with which to disparage the immediacy of modern music. If more measured and often more refined, the practice resembled the critique of modernism leveled by Karl Kraus or Otto Weininger. Never mind that both were Jewish (and Viennese); the very same line of thinking had dangerous consequences, such as those ideas the Wagnerite Dietrich Eckart (Hitler’s mentor), developed in a series of articles entitled “The Jew inside Us and around Us.”55 If music critics at the turn of the century were innocent of all but promulgating ethnic stereotypes in the ostensibly neutral context of a concert report, aesthetic judgment was still compromised. By collapsing an aesthetic world into simple oppositions of the Jew and the non-Jew in the evaluation of creative personality and working method, critics lost much of the subtlety of the listening experience.

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Any reference to ethnicity was necessarily derogatory, in alleging a failure of assimilation. Anti-Semitism was more prevalent in symphony criticism than in other genres, because self-projection was so important to interpretation. Opera could be exotic and historically remote, and while its narrative mode encouraged sympathy for characters and plot, there was rarely any cultural identification with the characters. The string quartet had as its conceptual model a conversation, and the concerto a struggle, and piano music was the expression of the performer. Whereas Bruckner blended orchestral timbres, Mahler consciously did not. In one censorious account of Mahler’s symphonic aesthetic, Robert Hirschfeld insisted that “symphonic structure” required of a composer “inner strength and composure, continuous progress on the same course, in linear pursuit, and the immense mental calm of formal shaping.”56 What appeals to listeners today as the great expressivity of Mahler’s thematic writing—often asymmetrical and irregular, as opposed to periodic and repetitive—proved, if anything, too much for some contemporaries. Its vivid changes in melodic direction, rhythm, and timbre supposedly diverted listeners from grasping the music’s structure, much as gesticulation—to repeat the implicitly anti-Semitic analogy then often cited—might detract from what he was saying. Mahler’s public presence as a conductor only contributed to the tropes on gesticulation, including caricatures such as at the 1899 unveiling of the Bruckner memorial.57 The themes in the Fifth Symphony struck Schönaich as exaggerated, flabby, and declaratory. A “convulsiveness” precluded any articulation of form (to paraphrase his pun, the form cannot be formed): “Mahler composes from his inner self, as he must.”58 For Schmidt, the fact that the Sixth Symphony was “disjointed—to the point of being crotchety and peculiar—vividly gesticulative” expressed Mahler’s “personality” (code word for his being Jewish).59 Assimilated Jews did not spare criticism of their co-religionists on this ground. In 1908 Walter Rathenau went so far as to describe twitching shoulders and gestures with elbows and the palms of one’s hands as fright reflexes to avert being struck.60 Noticeable gesticulation seemed to bar newcomers from central European civility. By the same token, assimilated Jewish critics, and preeminently Hirschfeld, sought to protect music as an abstract language unblemished by social and ethnic difference. Like other middle-class assimilated Jews of central Europe who felt repelled by the so-called Ostjuden, Hirschfeld was even more strident than colleagues who had no personal investment in assimilation.

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Whereas the public display of anti-Semitism was a question of good taste, flaws in aesthetic judgment (perhaps especially on the part of an assimilated Jew such as himself) were a grievous mistake with ethical consequences. This, at least, was Hirschfeld’s position when he wrote Julius Bauer, music editor at the Wiener Extrablatt, in outrage that the critic would allow his newspaper to promote an inferior artist, Joseph Hellmesberger, as candidate for the directorship of the Vienna Philharmonic.61 That was in the summer of 1899, after Mahler’s first season as director, but almost two years later, when Hellmesberger conducted a concert during Mahler’s convalescence from an operation, Hirschfeld applauded the guest conductor’s merely competent but truthful rendition of Beethoven as superior to Mahler’s “foreign” additions to the score.62 And according to one contemporary, Hirschfeld’s harsh reviews precipitated Mahler’s decision in 1907 to resign as director of the Court Opera and move to New York City.63 In conversation, Hirschfeld was prone to regale his interlocutors—including Chamberlain, the archanti-Semite—with anti-Semitic comments about Mahler, typecasting his “mode of expression” as one of complete and consistent negativity.64 Hirschfeld’s anti-Semitic allusions intensified over the course of reviewing Mahler’s music. Writing for the new cultural weekly Österreichische Rundschau in 1905, he dubbed Mahler the “Meyerbeer of the Symphony,” invoking the butt of Wagner’s anti-Semitic tirades. Later that year, when the Fifth Symphony had its first Viennese performance, Hirschfeld reminded readers of the phrase he had coined but which Leopold Schmidt had since adopted. The outlines of the argument would become all too familiar in an anti-Semitism that refuted the possibility of genuine assimilation. Whereas Meyerbeer explicitly aimed at a mass appeal by focusing on “surface” over “content,” Hirschfeld explained, Mahler too focused on surface, all the while posturing as an idealist with a symphonic narrative that promised redemption.65 In a later review, Hirschfeld portrayed this surface as “a cult of trivialities and details” in the score, marked by a nervous twitching and “restless” signals, explicitly rejecting any interpretation of the music as an expression “of the times” and therefore as a sign of genius.66 “Restlessness,” if inextricably tied to Jewish identity, was not unequivocally negative. Faustian “striving and trying” and Jewish “restlessness” were, after all, indistinguishable, apart from rhetoric and attending associations. (Karl Lueger, the long-term mayor of Vienna who won the vote on an openly anti-Semitic platform, reputedly once said, “I like

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Hungarian Jews even less than Hungarians, but I am no enemy of our Viennese Jews; they aren’t that terrible, and we certainly can’t do without them. My Viennese are ready to take a rest anytime, the Jews are the only ones who like nothing better than to keep busy.”)67 Moreover, “restlessness” quickly became outdated as an aesthetic flaw, sounding at best quaint in the aftermath of World War I. In the Mahler literature, the comment would be made only about Mahler’s person or in Faustian references, such as “eternal restlessness.”68 The symphonic ideal was also withheld from Mahler as a conductor. Helm, the consummate Brucknerian, prized serenity and transcendence over a vivacity of the moment. In a performance of Bruckner’s Fourth that Helm reviewed, Mahler undercut the “gripping impression” of the finale by “jumping around randomly in tempo and in nuance,” with his “unfortunate way of exaggerating the accents.” The Vienna Philharmonic and Bruckner, not Mahler, received credit for the little that was “wonderfully executed.” (Inevitably with Bruckner, it was the closure that reviewers most appreciated, and only here did Helm’s engagement with the music overcome his dislike of Mahler. Barely restraining his rhetoric, Helm recounted the “first, powerful appearance of the gigantic main theme” in the finale and the “magnificent recurrence of the theme from the first movement concluding each of the four movements.”)69 While the Viennese witnessed the political and social tensions and successes of assimilation on a daily basis, this was not so for many Germans. There was no strong Jewish presence in Dresden during Wagner’s formative years, 1843–1849 (his anti-Semitic essay dates from 1850), or in Munich in the early 1900s, where Rudolf Louis hammered ideas from Wagner’s execrable tract into his book on “contemporary German music.” Wagner had railed against the Jew who poses as German, and Louis, in turn, claimed that Mahler was “constitutionally” (a word he put in quotation marks, signaling its racist undertones) incapable of composing in the language of Beethoven and Bruckner, Berlioz and Wagner, Schubert and Viennese folk music, despite having learned their “grammar and style.” By manipulating the analogy of music as language, Louis denied Mahler’s symphonies an enduring status as art: “If Mahler’s music would speak Jewish, perhaps it would simply be incomprehensible to me. But I find it repulsive because it judaisizes. That is, it speaks German, as it were, but with an accent, tone, and above all the gestures, of Jews from the East, too much from the East.” This, Louis stressed, “strikes me as so horribly repellent [abstoßend] in Mahler’s music.” Louis exploited to grotesque ends the distinction between music as a performed art and mu-

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sic as an exemplar of German idealism, claiming that Mahler’s music was as “painfully untrue” as a comedian from the Budapest Orpheum (the leading Jewish cabaret ensemble) reciting a poem by Schiller.70 The most caustic anti-Semitism took the form of personification, or explaining musical attributes by reference to the composer’s person. Various expressions built on the violent root stoßen, such as being repelled (abstoßen) or sounds being expelled (ausstoßen), hinted at a core problem in musical performance: an audience member is forced to listen for an undesignated period (often long, with a symphony) in a way a gallery visitor or reader is not. According to Gustav Altmann, “it is physiologically impossible to discern individual thematic lines or hear a structure” in the finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony; the effect on a “refined and sensitive” listener is one of repulsion (einen abstoßenden Eindruck machen).71 The aversion, even violent, response was provoked when music was powerful yet reputedly had no structural integrity. An audience member can feel alienated from brutal instrumentation and dynamics without even trying to listen. Not so with the formal structure, which a listener had to perceive from the sounding music in order to register its absence. Recounting the same movement, Maximilian Muntz described the orchestra as expelling sounds. When an acoustic intensification seems no longer possible, the “symbolic transformed triad” (from major to minor) is “spewed forth . . . This game is continued and repeated until the ear—destroyed—submits to the raw violence in noise.”72 More than any other aspect of fin-de-siècle criticism, personification contributed to a political strain of anti-Semitism in excluding persons on the basis of Jewish heritage alone. Speech metaphors, which played off the exalted theories of music as language, were not uncommon in reviews of Mahler’s music. If such music had no intrinsic value, the point was more to relegate the Jewish musician to the role of performer, not creator (Tonkünstler, literally an “artist of tones”). Anti-Semitic speech tropes had a long life, from Wagner to the Schwatzbude, or “chatter stall”: Jews and liberals merely talk, whereas non-Jews fight and act. Altmann compared Mahler to a conversationalist of “great eloquence and technical skill whom one finds engaging the first evening” each successive night (or symphony) becomes more insistent, smug, and louder in his “recitation of trite matters . . . until one becomes nauseated and takes leave of him.”73 The Viennese correspondent to a German music journal reported on the Sixth Symphony in similar terms. Mahler was a composer who spoke—be he witty, reflective, or trivial—rather than sang. His interest lay in rhetoric (thematic

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development) and presentation (orchestration), not in content (melodic invention). To poke fun at Mahler’s oratorical excesses, the anonymous Viennese correspondent allowed the metaphor to roll off the tongue: “Imagine a speaker who does not develop a theme but only wants to speak his speech.”74 It took Salome, which itself parodies Jewish speech, to incite Viennese critics to develop base metaphors of speech. Yet the wit and levity of reactions to the opera, if anything, encouraged more subtlety. To paraphrase one (unreliable) source, when Korngold complimented his colleague Hans Liebstöckl for his caricatures, adding that one could hardly distinguish between his Jewish accent and that of a Jew, Liebstöckl replied, in a Jewish accent: “There is a difference: I can Jew [jüdeln], whereas you must do so.”75 Even the refined Richard Wallaschek, professor of musical aesthetics at the University of Vienna, partook in the banter that entertained assimilated Jews and their gentile colleagues alike. Wallaschek had every intention of denouncing Mahler’s Seventh but had to concede its success in certain particulars—no less, its brilliant instrumentation, traditional form, and lucid counterpoint. His judgment, however, ultimately rode on the usual antimodernist cavil, thematic invention: “It is as if he felt an enormous pressure to say something to us and therefore incessantly, without knowing it, used the idioms of others.”76 A few bystanders pointed out, if without much influence, that ethnicity was irrelevant to the critique of modernism. However upper-bourgeois and nominally Catholic, Strauss faced the very same anti-Semitic tropes as Mahler, a Bohemian Jew of dubitable stock. The critique of musical modernism in the period 1890–1912 railed against nervousness, a hollow technical ability (that of a Könner, as opposed an artist), dearth of melodicism, and excess of counterpoint, regardless of ethnicity. Arthur Schnitzler was overheard remarking sarcastically that the composer of Salome must be a Jew, and Mahler a German. The opera displayed the composer’s “erotic sensuality, unbridled Oriental imagination, proclivity for outward effect, talent for self-presentation, and, in general, skill at an economic exploitation of his work.” Mahler, Schnitzler insisted, was the consummate German artist in his philosophical outlook and idealism as well as in his compositional aesthetic—transforming the völkisch into the symphonic and “building with gigantic boulders.” Germanness, in sum, was attainable through art, a concept dear to the nineteenth century and particularly to the authority of the Habsburg Empire. Schnitzler was parodying not so much the anti-Semites, who mistakenly censured Mahler as

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“Jewish,” but the antimodernists, who subtly denigrated Strauss with anti-Semitic rhetoric. It is telling, however, that this anecdote was reported as such, rather than adopted as a measure for disciplining the use of racial stereotypes.77 Only in fun and not in sincerity was modernism decoupled from anti-Semitism. The years before World War I saw the exacerbation of anti-Semitism. In particular, revolutions in Russia and central Europe made the political role of Jews as alleged fomenters of socialism, seem ever more sinister. For anti-Semites, conversion was no longer feasible or desirable—the racial attributes of Judaism were allegedly indelible. The change, if far more gradual in music criticism, nonetheless seemed unavoidable. Liberals eventually could no longer avoid the subject of Jewish identity, even as they resisted developing a clear position on its significance and nature. Mahler’s biographer first raised the subject of anti-Semitism in a later book written after the composer’s death (and perhaps also in response to Louis’s anti-Semitic critique from 1909). The “mystical sound of his music,” Specht reported, strikes some listeners as “unnaturally Catholic” and others as “unpleasantly Jewish.” He demurred from any comment of his own and briskly closed the subject with Nietzsche’s observation that “the mixing of races is the font of great cultures.”78 No matter how misguided the attribution of artistic traits to Jewish character, a more dangerous enterprise was to reject music, without further ado, on the basis of the composer being Jewish. Mahler’s detractors did not necessarily protect the composer from anti-Semitism even if they professed more liberal sensibilities. Niemann registered his dislike of anti-Semitic stereotypes, however antipathetic he found Mahler’s music. The fact that it “is not German, that it is often insufferably sentimental, sweet, untrue, deliberately convulsive, calculatingly cold, and outwardly theatrical” did not mean that Mahler’s music is therefore “Jewish,” a word he set off in quotation marks. Niemann, however, protested too much. His dogged listing of Mahler’s failings, if not flagged as Jewish, would have drudged up the same associations. Mahler lacked “self-criticism” and “the ability to sift the noble from the ignoble, and the important from the unimportant” and never proceeded beyond the surface (in his “impulsive yielding to the moment” and a weak in shaping, or Gestaltung). The resulting flaws were numerous, and some very specific: “the oppressive lengths and imbalance, the excessive number of trumpet themes, and the eternally stopped-up brass of his large works.” Mahler’s shifting between different idioms was

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counted among these consequences: “the fluctuation between nonprogrammatic, programmatic, and theatrical music, between inwardness and the most insistent sham, between precision work and masses of noise.” Niemann concluded his litany by dismissing Mahler’s creative persona altogether: “Regrettably, the often ingenious flashes of inspiration do not endure, and his imagination yields to music-making in units of colossal length that are primitive and unrefined in form and content.”79 Even Jews firmly rooted in central European culture were prone to cultural stereotypes, with these most often based on class. Korngold, a highly assimilated Viennese Jew, may have feared that Mahler’s lowermiddle-class eastern European origins and persona, as a conductor of enormous power and energy, contributed to some listeners’ sense of alienation (Befremdung) from the music. He insisted therefore that Mahler’s compositional aesthetics were shared by Berlioz and Bruckner. All three modernized the “formal language used by the great masters of the symphony.”80 In conceding the effect of alienation, Korngold hoped to declare off limits a more visceral anti-Semitism of disgust. Not all Jews shared this artistic evaluation—certainly not Hirschfeld—and not all non-Jews condemned the work. But already in 1900 it was difficult for critics to keep the domains of music and ethnicity apart. Musical interpretation was vulnerable to many factors beyond the score and listening experience. Symphonic idealism depended not only on a particular repertoire and hermeneutic tradition but also on a relatively cohesive social class. Aesthetic purism was often rooted in anxiety about social status and cultural hegemony, at a time when labor unrest and the rise of the socialist movement vigorously challenged bourgeois ascendancy. Across the political spectrum, there were attempts to engage a wider audience for the symphony. Although the first efforts to democratize symphonic music came in the 1890s under the Lueger’s populism, a more sustained attempt to integrate the proletariat into the world of culture occurred in liberal circles. Addressing the “problems in contemporary musical culture,” Adler sounded a clarion call that many of his colleagues chose to ignore: “With our generation, the movement of the lower strata of society into the upper ones is particularly important in art.” Workers’ associations were as dedicated to musical cultivation as was the bourgeoisie.81 Not everyone was deemed a candidate for edification and uplift. The shoemaker, whose tasks were literally close to the ground, became a

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whipping boy. In “Ornament and Crime,” the Viennese architect Adolf Loos singled out the shoemaker as unable to enjoy Beethoven after a day’s work.82 His colleague, the critic Elsa Bienenfeld turned the tables, speculating that for bourgeois philistines “who seek pleasurable distraction after dinner and a cigar,” Mahler’s symphonies “are as inaccessible” as Kant to the shoemaker’s apprentice, who laughs at the question as to whether a boot really does exist.83 If Bienenfeld sat beside a glutted burgher at the Philharmonic, rather than a shoemaker, it was not because the working classes were excluded from art music. To the contrary, the efforts of socialists, and eventually conservatives and nationalists, would seek to assure that all Viennese had access to and valued the symphony. Almost circumvented in the mid- and later nineteenth century, with program music entirely irrelevant to the wider cultural and national agenda, the symphony reemerged around 1900 freighted with, or perhaps denying, all the conflicts of central Europe. Richard Specht found ironic that “‘absolute music’ is nowhere as emphatically and willfully maintained as in Vienna, the home to an imaginative, dreamy and colorful theatrical spirit that thinks in sensual terms.”84 The contested rise of the working class, the assimilation of Jews, the battle between tradition and modernism, were all embodied in the leading genre of orchestral music, as it was composed, heard, and evaluated. An artwork could not be just an artwork. Although the tendency to transform issues of politics and society into questions of art and culture drew on the work of liberal theorists in the late eighteenth century, preeminently Friedrich Schiller, by the end of the nineteenth conservatives and nationalists had more than caught up. To experience life as an artwork, admittedly not an exclusively German tendency, had a nationalist pedigree stretching from Wagner to Chamberlain, Stefan George to Julius Langbehn. Rembrandt als Erzieher, which Langbehn published anonymously as “by a German,” urged Germans to reject materialism and, with Rembrandt as their teacher, to become a nation of artists.85 Progressive and traditionalist critics alike recognized over time that the symphony no longer offered an escape from the battles of modernism. Far from endowing it with transcendence, the iconic role of the symphony would make it hostage to ideology. Even in 1900, the cultural significance of the genre far exceeded its importance to composers. Mahler was the problematic exception, and yet, as we shall see, his own evolving aesthetic did not allow for any simple separation of modernism and tradition.

chapter two

Symphonic Conventions of a World Past

The symphony was the genre that most fully substantiated the claims of art to promote cultivation (Bildung) of the individual and community, and by the century’s end it served as a gauge of social health and integrity. The symphony epitomized the values of logic and control, purity and transcendence and promised a renewal of tradition. The nineteenth century—and with it the rise of the bourgeoisie in status, influence, and self-confidence—brought the enduring conviction that art was a means of self-realization. In its broadest outlines, the argument came from Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher, as quirky as he was reactionary, who insisted that true art could emerge only from a traditional culture that emphasized the Volk, not from a society corrupted by the alienation and fragmentation of industrial capitalism. Conservatives saw the symphony as a bastion against modernization. Among its legacies to be protected was the absorption of sacred ritual into the concert hall that occurred hand in hand with the secularization of society in the nineteenth century saw. When the Viennese heard a work by Mahler in 1904, for the first time in two years, “truly devout believers in the arts” were justified in hissing in response to the blasphemous Mephisto-Mahler, who parodied symphonic tradition in the temple of art, according to Maximilian Muntz: “The Concert Society [Konzertverein] had a mission to fulfill for its orchestra as well as for the public, namely to offer the most sublime and divine music.” A “bizarre work” such as Mahler’s First Symphony belonged instead in a museum.1 A musical world—along with an epistemological and philosophical

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world—seemed at risk in the decades between 1890 and 1910. The nineteenth century, Stefan Zweig observed, reflecting on his youth in fin-de-siècle Vienna, worked under the illusion that all conflicts could be solved by rationality.2 While critics in the latter nineteenth century spoke with conviction of the logic in thematic development, few in the next generation harbored such confidence.3 Developments in thought and the arts liberated and revitalized many artists and some writers, but to many, such innovations seemed degenerate and ominous. If the start of the new century triggered a return to tradition on the part of Mahler and Strauss, it also ushered in a desire for continuity in the sound and structure of music, in large part served by the music of Anton Bruckner. Viennese critics, especially the musically conservative, charged that Bruckner’s music was neglected by performers and unappreciated by the public. After the public success of Mahler’s orchestral lieder in midJanuary 1900, Theodor Helm, dean of aesthetic conservatives, observed that the Philharmonic had played no Bruckner or Liszt thus far in the season, which made Mahler’s programming of his own songs “all the more offensive.”4 Programming decisions were consequential, since the Philharmonic gave only eight concerts per year, along with an additional benefit concert.5 Critics were perhaps more inclined to take issue with Mahler’s choice of repertoire were not announced in advance of the season—much to the chagrin of subscription holders, which included most of the audience. Mahler took pencil in hand, making cuts and other changes to Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, and conducted the work two weeks later at the Philharmonic’s next concert, on January 28, 1900, his reservations notwithstanding: “One cannot really expect the public to listen to these scraps of music and glaring absurdities, even if they are frequently surrounded by sublime ideas and themes,” he confided to Natalie BauerLechner, wondering whether to change the program in the eleventh hours.6 The public response was overwhelming, with sustained applause after each movement and multiple curtain calls for the conductor, Hirschfeld reported, adding that enthusiasm for Bruckner had never been stronger.7 Ten or twelve years before, another critic recalled, the concert hall began to empty after one or two movements of a Bruckner symphony.8 Protesting Mahler’s changes as unnecessary, Helm reminded readers of the enthusiastic applause at each of the symphony’s five performances in Vienna heretofore.9 Altogether, during the first four months of 1900, at least six Bruckner performances were reviewed in the Viennese press.10 Ferdinand Löwe—

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the composer’s unflagging advocate if unscrupulous in preparing his scores for publication—had such success with an all-Bruckner concert in mid-March, featuring the Third Symphony and Die Nullte (so named because Bruckner withdrew the symphony, marking a zero on the manuscript) at his New Vienna Philharmonic, that the program was repeated a few weeks later. The following year, in the spring of 1901, the Viennese Deutsche Zeitung reported on the “great triumph” of Bruckner in Germany.11 The pattern only continued. Two years later, in 1902, the Vienna Philharmonic’s most successful concert of the next season was the final program, which concluded with the Seventh Symphony.12 When the Fifth Symphony was performed in November 1904, the “growing interest in Anton Bruckner” was clear.13 Bruckner and Mahler were counterpoised as symbols of tradition and modernism. Bruckner’s contribution to music history, as Rudolf Louis saw it, was a return to profundity and truth, after—presumably through Brahms—the symphony had become “too intellectual,” drawing its “nourishment” from “reason or reflection,” not from emotion.14 But admiration of Bruckner also extended beyond the conservative camp. The Eighth Symphony was the “culmination” of the 1905 composers’ festival of the Allgemeine deutsche Musikverein. Ernst Decsey, a critic of German-Jewish heritage but advocate of all things Austrian, welcomed its “natural strength” and effect on the soul in a “time of overwhelmingly technical culture and instrumentalizing rationality.”15 While progressives relegated Bruckner to the curbside of history, under Mahler’s baton, the critic at the Neues Wiener Journal conceded, the Fourth Symphony displayed great subtlety. Mahler “brought out dynamic coloring and other nuances in the performance that are not explicitly designated but fully suited the spirit of the composition and heightened its effect.” But it was finally the music of Mahler, not Bruckner, that appealed to the Schoenberg circle. The struggle between old and new was now taking place on the “consecrated ground” of the symphony, Korngold sensed in 1904.16 The camps were by no means ethnically determined, with the Austrian Catholic appealing to conservatives or nationalists and the Bohemian Jew appealing to liberals. But Bruckner’s symphonies did, with good reason, foster a new aesthetic of stability and continuity. The music’s strong bass, profiled melodic line, and complex motivic work all had a secure basis in the symphonic tradition, against which Mahler did sound “modern.” Bruckner’s regularity in the development of motifs and the extended pedal points, often linked to

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the composer’s improvisation on the organ, formed a reassuring foundation, as did his approach to convention and genre.

The Trivialization of Genre The constraints on symphonic composition circa 1900, especially those imposed by aesthetic conservatives, were unprecedented in the history of music criticism. The value of tradition had perhaps never before been so exalted and certainly never had so questionable a basis. In shoring up the symphony against modernist ruin, critics risked inventing a past that never was.17 While form seemed the natural repository of tradition, its significance within aesthetics and music theory had waned in the nineteenth century, leaving behind formal schemata that were little more than labels, irrelevant to the listener. In his theory of musical interpretation, Hermann Kretzschmar insisted that the content of music resides in the theme; the form, he believed, is merely one of various readily identifiable schemata.18 The denaturing of form, so to speak, was not limited to music. Adolf Loos declared that form follow function, by which he meant traditional forms hold no legitimacy in their own right. Yet as a philosophical concept, form could not be entirely dismissed. In a lecture on contemporary poetry, Hugo von Hofmannsthal observed that “one of the secrets of our time is that Form is both everything and nothing. It is full of things that seem alive and are dead, and things that seem dead and are mostly alive.”19 The growth of symphony audiences beyond the bourgeoisie, alongside a decline in musical training, meant that the attributes of form—whether sonata form or conventional movement types—often went unnoticed.20 Whatever the impoverishment of form as an intellectual concept and as a guide to listeners, a composer’s respect for form was paramount to the success of a new symphony. Ironically, the continuation of tradition depended on an aspect of musical experience that was ever more elusive to audiences. The liberal press did not, as a rule, concede any authority to convention per se. Their favored terms were “classical form” and the “old four-movement symphonic form.” The ordering of symphony movements was not dictated by nature or tradition but had a psychological basis and was therefore alterable, given the “psychological motivation,” Eduard Hanslick explained.21 Critics of conservative or nationalist persuasion, on the other hand, believed that form had external validity; they might refer to the “scheme” expected of a symphony or a

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“normal” symphonic form. The subject arose most vehemently with Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which followed a traditional form outwardly but defied so many other aesthetic norms.22 In practice, for aesthetic progressives and conservatives alike, Form meant little more than the four-movement scheme that had been codified in the late eighteenth century and reaffirmed in the symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner. Curiously, then, the weight of symphonic tradition lay in the family traits shared with sonatas, quartets, overtures, and so on. Form, in short, became formulaic—a code that had to be followed. Critics outside urban centers were content to find tradition in the outer trappings of the symphonic form. Viennese critics were marginally more flexible. Richard Robert, in reviewing Mahler’s Fifth, seemed relieved that, despite an unconventional grouping of the five movements into three parts, the requisite Form was “certainly on the whole untouched.”23 Richard Wallaschek spoke of Form in the Seventh Symphony as “confused but unharmed, despite the tremors to its physical foundation.”24 A fluid and flexible concept for previous generations, Form became ossified. The polemics over traditional form never rose above musical debates but in retrospect hold a certain poignancy, because also at stake was the authority of the Habsburg Empire to rule by dint of tradition. Respect for tradition meant a strict adherence to textbook rules of the century past. Yet no canonic composer, even in the late eighteenth century, had felt obligated by the conventions that critics around 1900, at least, held as dictate. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, composers and theorists refuted a narrow meaning of Form as separable from other parameters of music. A. B. Marx was most adamant, stipulating that composers not view form as a constraint on their creativity, imposing conformity without an internal aesthetic basis.25 At the root of the new orthodoxy of formalism lay a resistance to modernism—so strong as to defy aesthetic tenets. Convention stipulated that a symphony have four movements, unless a program justified altering the pattern. Mahler’s expansion to five movements in the Fifth Symphony troubled contemporaries (less so in the Seventh, since, among other reasons, the two movements titled “Night Music” invited programmatic interpretation). Max Graf, a Brahmsian loyalist, brought down the work by quoting literary and philosophical authorities, polemically enlisted to reveal the work’s aesthetic weaknesses. Professing objectivity, Graf offered no views of his own. But as a whole, his litany of quotations confirmed the importance of tradition, comprehensibility, simplicity, and ethical

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purpose in art.26 Friedrich Hebbel underscored the audacity of composing an extra movement: “In aesthetics, as in morality, we should not invent an eleventh Commandment but fulfill the ten preexisting ones”—a quotation that provided the epigraph for Felix Draeseke’s vitriolic attack on modern music the following year, “Die Konfusion in der Musik.”27 And Goethe’s musical friend Karl Friedrich Zelter served to warn that: “genius finds the path to the new through the old.”28 Only a few liberal critics objected to the reification of form. Julius Korngold poked fun at colleagues who, with their elementary sense of form, contested the six-movement design of Mahler’s Third Symphony. In the Secessionist exhibition that year, 1904, Korngold suggested, the painting entitled The Symphony, depicting a “half sphinx and half watersnake, whose front paws extending ferociously,” captured the critical reaction to Mahler.29 The following season, which brought the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, Korngold made a plea to restore Form to its original sense—the organic notion of shape determined by content. Mahler was the “Saint Sebastian of the symphony, whose chest bore arrows carved from the ideal of the classical symphony.” He pleaded the colleagues not discuss “divergences from classical form; they do not scare us.”30 George Bernard Shaw’s Love among the Artists, finally translated into German in 1908, supplied Korngold with an apt metaphor the next time Mahler expanded the symphonic form to five movements, in his Seventh Symphony: symphonic conventions were “childish tricks that could be taught to a poodle.”31 Korngold’s colleague Albert Kauders cited Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as permission for Mahler’s breaking the “aged principles of musical beauty” in his Sixth Symphony. “If you want to use rules to judge that which does not follow your rules, then stop in your tracks and look again for the rules!” (Hans Sachs). Yet Kauders, who was also a composer of bygone sensibilities, warned that true originality requires a connection to tradition: “The tree grows in the nourishing soil of classical art, from which it eternally draws wholesome juice.”32 Bienenfeld, true to her progressive spirit, found a way to reconcile both sides of the debate. An artist must be strong enough to loosen the fetters of tradition yet still express an original idea “in such a way that we seem to have known it long since.” The resulting sense of gratification when this occurred had its own political virtues: “liberated, we breathe a wondrous feeling of happiness.”33 For the aesthetic conservative Robert Hirschfeld, the accrued cultural value of Form trumped the artist’s prerogative of creative freedom. He

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rejected Kant’s insistence on rulelessness (namely, that the artist follow only those rules that ensue from the nature of the artwork’s subject). From Beethoven to Brahms to Bruckner, the symphony “was and remains the most profound and serious genre” across the arts. Tradition must be observed if new music is to permit genuine aesthetic judgment. In a touching attempt to show the bleak consequences of utter subjectivity, Hirschfeld professed: The world has its history, and art has its history—the only thing that it actually and truly and undeniably has. It would of course be much easier for modern artists if there were no history. Then everything would stand on its own and in complete autonomy, therefore great in absolute terms because it is immeasurable—because there would be nothing earlier or later, or any development or deterioration to take into account.

The implications of flouting tradition were clear: “The world, then, would resemble modern art, in which one thing follows another, unconnected, and is ultimately understandable only on its own.”34 Yet to observe the strictures of form challenged another aesthetic tradition, going back earlier than Kant: the need for unity, or a correspondence between form and content. An essay from 1906 on the classical symphony penned by an author all but unknown, Kuno Wolf, faltered in debating these conflicting aesthetic demands. Wolf resolved that a symphony composer should follow tradition unless altering the inherited “outer forms” would better express the ideas at hand. “Rulelessness” for the sake of the self-aggrandizing artist, he warned, does not constitute artistic progress.35 The symphony became emblematic of German musical tradition. “The symphony is the most musical of all that music can produce,” Max Nordau pleaded. “To renounce it is to renounce music as a special and complex art.”36 In this culture of anxiety, Bruckner was interpreted as the guardian of the symphony at a time when, as one biographer put it, a composer seemed only to choose between two alternatives, program music or (Wagnerian) musical drama. Admittedly, one could not simply continue to write “classical” symphonies, but “should the symphony, once prized as the most elevated genre, be condemned to its downfall, as Wagner predicted?”37 Bruckner’s respect for convention, seen in the classical four-movement template along with a host of other procedures and structures, affirmed the vitality and future of the tradition. It was in a review of a Bruckner symphony that Leopold Schmidt reminded his

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contemporaries of the genre’s lofty requirements: the symphony would “sink into an empty pedagogical concept” if it did not inspire “the highest formative and inventive power,” which made it the “greatest form of absolute music.”38 The fact that “tradition” could be located in features as comparatively superficial as the number of movements or tempi indications would drain much of the aesthetic content from critical judgment, creating a vacuum that would be filled all too readily by cultural interpretation. Although debates surrounding symphonic form remained largely artistic, very often the rhetoric of cultural decline crept in.

The Logic of Counterpoint From the eighteenth century on, musical logic was most evident in counterpoint and thematic work (thematische Arbeit, or thematic development). Both became qualities of “symphonic” writing, mandatory in a nonprogrammatic symphony but also prevalent in chamber and piano music, especially that of Brahms. Harmony had its own internal logic, but individual sonorities exuded affect, while counterpoint, like mathematics, remained a field ostensibly free of emotionalism. Once the rules of harmony and the conventions of instrumentation yielded to a wave of infinite exceptions and innovations—whether this occurred around 1900, or in 1859 with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is debatable— the locus of tradition became counterpoint. From the sacred tradition of Palestrina and Bach to the austerity of late Mozart and Beethoven, counterpoint imparted an air of authority. It was at once the most abstract of procedures and the most personal— both a hallmark of late style in withdrawing from the melodic world of the hear and the now, and a catalyst for bodily listening. Brahms and Reger, the preeminent historicist composers of the nineteenth century, worked comfortably within a highly contrapuntal idiom. But the strongest utterances on counterpoint came from composers on the outside, as it were, who consciously identified with German tradition. Mahler spoke almost reverentially of Bach’s influence at a creative juncture in his own development, immediately after the turn of the century, when he turned to a traditional “outer form” (in his words) and intensified his contrapuntal writing in his Fifth Symphony: “It’s beyond words, the way I am constantly learning more and more from Bach (really sitting at his feet like a child).”39 Schoenberg, too, declared Bach his primary teacher, citing above all the contrapuntal writing.40

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The authority of counterpoint as a science, going back to Renaissance theory, became difficult to sustain, partly because of the advances in contrapuntal technique but perhaps as well because of the challenges to the authoritas of science itself. A counterpoint treatise by Max Loewengard, a critic and professor in Hamburg, lamented that in music, more than in the other arts, science had no relevance to practitioners. Composers proceeded in ignorance of the rules of science (counterpoint), as if a musical work could issue forth from the “two harmonic sexes” (Tongeschlechtern), major and minor.41 Loewengard criticized theorists who exaggerate the polyphonic origins of music and grant too little significance to the emotions. His conclusion, left unsubstantiated, was that a listener need not decide between the “horizontal” thinking of counterpoint and the verticality of harmonic listening.42 Without any recourse to science—be the metaphor either ignored or trivialized— counterpoint relied on culture alone for its justification. By its very construction, counterpoint implied an ethical sobriety alongside technical prowess. This was especially so in Germany, from the mid-nineteenth-century Bach revival onward, and especially in northern Germany (Loewengard being a case in point). Another counterpoint manual, by Draeseke, set out from the premise that a “healthy development of music” must involve counterpoint. Draeseke struck an ethical note advisedly. Metaphors of health and sickness—if not uncommon among aesthetic conservatives and anti-Semites43—carried a certain poignancy, as Draeseke, in writing the book, had been deaf for over thirty years (although moralism was perhaps just as determinative in his upbringing in a family of Protestant preachers). Draeseke believed that the study of counterpoint was a necessary measure to counteract the erosion of all boundaries that was occurring in music, as in society. He captured this malaise through the quintessentially modern metaphor of traffic—“under the spell of restless traffic [im Zeichen des Verkehrs],” a phrase he set off in quotation marks.44 A footnote offers the oldfashioned metaphor of timbres and harmonies as colors, curiously updated to suggest that their indiscriminate “mixing” results in an “indeterminate grey.”45 But more was at stake. As a stalwart conservative who had witnessed Dresden’s development into a major city over the past quarter-century, Draeseke cannot have been pleased by the plans for a large exhibition on the metropolis sponsored by the Gehe Foundation the winter his book appeared, 1902–1903. There was so much attention to public policy and the virtues of the metropolis that

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Georg Simmel’s critique, in his celebrated lecture “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” disturbed some of the organizers.46 Karl Grunsky, albeit not a Northern German, was also attuned to the cultural valence of music, including counterpoint (in his case, possibly influenced his early years as a political journalist). His popular book on musical aesthetic warned that a composer “who does not simply mix his voices into a sonic mush takes a natural pleasure in yoking their energies, producing struggle and conflict.” Herein lay the “essence [Urwesen] of music,” Grunsky believed. Put philosophically, counterpoint allows the “struggle and conflict of different forces to conduct their battles detached from the material realm and set into cosmic motion [Bewegtheit].” Failure to structure the intensification in polyphony, he warned, yields “a deadening effect”—nothing but “a loud chatter of endless voices.”47 Music, especially absolute music, very often projected “cosmic” meaning in the years after 1900, perhaps in quiet resignation that social unification was no longer feasible. The universality of the symphony, in effect, became cosmic, supplanting Beethoven’s fraternal love in the Ninth Symphony. If a Bruckner symphony opens by representing the “dawn of life,” a clear allusion to the opening of Wagner’s Ring, according to Georg Gräner, then the third theme in the exposition is “the workplace of the divine—the cosmic world, how it weaves and effects.”48 German critics, again, particularly those from the North, encouraged counterpoint in contemporary music. Loewengard, reviewing the Hamburg premiere of Mahler’s Fifth, observed that no matter how numerous the voices or how ruthless (rücksichtslos) the construction, the counterpoint was “authentic.” Each voice “follows in logical legitimacy and strives with a purposive clarity to one and the same goal.”49 Eventually however, the rigor of Mahler’s counterpoint would pale in comparison with that of Reger or Schoenberg. Surveying the contribution of each of these figures, Adolf Weißmann, Berlin critic par excellence, determined that Mahler failed to achieve “true polyphony,” even with the elaborate “contrapuntal design” of the Fifth and Seventh symphonies, because the scoring is more colorful than the composer intended. Any tension between the lines diffuses into sonic splendor. The underlying problem, in Weißmann’s view, was a “clash” between homophony and polyphony that was technical and aesthetic but also resulted from Mahler’s artistic orientation—his unsuccessful fusion of “natural and metaphysical concepts.”50 While German critics attacked modernist deformations of polyphony,

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especially evident in Schoenberg and late Mahler, in the name of preserving the earlier and purer technique, in Vienna, the site of contrapuntal innovation, critics remained skeptical of the procedure, especially the havoc it wrought on melody and formal cohesion. Helm went so far as to poke fun at German critics who had been impressed by the contrapuntal intricacy of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which was premiered in Cologne. Contemptuous that the performance drew critics from afar, Helm referred readers to accounts in Dresden and Berlin publications, rather than providing his own objective description. Instead, reviewing the reviews of others, he scoffed at the Berlin enthusiast who compared the scherzo to the Cologne cathedral, the summit of German architectural pride. The intricate construction and vast gothic space are not bad visual correlates, particularly the finale. But there was perhaps more to the metaphor. The symphony provoked Wirren or confusion (the term often used) among straitlaced critics, perhaps reminding readers of the so-called Kölner Wirren—the populist demonstrations supporting the ultramontanist Catholic clergy in its long-term conflict with the Prussian monarchy, which had, however, finally led the government to forge a reconciliation that would include funding a significant amount of the vast sum to complete the cathedral. Helm himself heard the scherzo as a “burlesque and grotesque orgy of dance.” Mahler’s “bold exploits” with coarse melodies resulted in “eccentric polyphony,” not the “contrapuntal wonder” reported in Cologne.51 This reaction was not atypical for Vienna, a city that had never fully embraced Bach and, notwithstanding its tradition of counterpoint instruction (with Bruckner, Simon Sechter, and Robert Fuchs, on the faculty at the Vienna Conservatory), had witnessed no authorship of counterpoint treatises until Heinrich Schenker’s Kontrapunkt in 1910.52 Counterpoint held no intrinsic value for Viennese critics. Melodic invention had to warrant a polyphonic treatment. Mahler’s First Symphony explodes the conventional notion of contrapuntal tension, pursuing simultaneity in far-flung registers of the orchestra in vastly contrasting rhythmic pacing. The Brucknerian Hirschfeld, developing a sexual pun, heard a “flagrant counterpoint . . . that positions one voice on top of another rather than against another.53 As Mahler’s counterpoint became bolder and more intricate, the censure intensified. His increasing popularity only raised the stakes, as critics wondered whether these experiments would enshrine counterpoint as a modernist technique. Not even Mahler’s supporters in Vienna welcomed the innovations and expressive extremes of his counterpoint. Korngold’s aesthetic con-

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cerns and the nature of the criticism changed year after year as each new symphony had its Viennese premiere: the Fifth in the winter of 1905–1906, the Sixth in the winter of 1906–1907, and the Seventh in the winter of 1909–1910. The finale was deemed the most “meaningful” movement of the Fifth Symphony, but not by virtue of its brilliant counterpoint. To the contrary, Korngold marveled at the larger melodic process (literally, “flow”) “that conquers all breadth and contrapuntal intensity.”54 Korngold sharpened his criticism the next winter. In the finale of the Sixth, he perceived a “hypertrophy of counterpoint—or whatever it is in today’s terms,” invoking the fin-de-siècle anxiety about a culture of excess. But as a determined liberal, Korngold quickly stepped back from this conservatism and restated the problem as one of comprehensibility alone: “Each voice, catching pieces of themes, wants to fight for its own life.” But, Korngold continued, “there are finally only losers” in this Hobbsian world of a “bellum contrapuncticum omnium contra omnes.”55 This review appeared in the Neue Freie Presse, a newspaper whose writers tended to assume they might influence the cultural politics that riveted Vienna. When Korngold reviewed the same performance in Die Musik, with subscribers across Germany and Austria, he drew a parallel to the visual arts, providing a context for the problem of comprehensibility Mahler faced. The composer is comparable to Klimt in his “contrapuntal confusion” and other “challenges to the philistine” (likely a reference to the scandal around his mural Philosophy) but the painter lacks the composer’s “pathos, driving energy, and painful stirring of nerves.”56 Without hiding his ambivalence over Mahler’s recent compositional development, Korngold recognized the composer’s artistic courage at a time when Klimt had resigned from the Secession and begun his withdrawal into landscapes and portraiture. Counterpoint finally became the scourge of modern music, if not by Mahler’s pen alone. Korngold did, however, decry the independence of the contrapuntal voices in the Seventh Symphony, alluding to questionable political ideals (after all, Mahler was at that point a New Yorker). The “boundless individualization and democraticization of voices and their stark juxtaposition and superimposition,” along with other elements of Mahler’s musical language, were both attractive and repellent. Korngold pleaded with critics to aim their salvos not at Mahler but at “musical moderns” like Schoenberg and Paul Dukas, who were “boundlessly resourceful” in their “unremitting harmonic and contrapuntal developments,” rarely, as they should, using harmony “to fructify melodic ideas.”57

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The Viennese skepticism of counterpoint originated from a longstanding melodic conception of music. Whether consciously or not, Viennese composers clung to the metaphor of melody, even if, compositionally, they felt unconstrained by a melodic view of music. Mahler conceived of orchestration as writing a melodic line for each instrument.58 Schoenberg’s theoretical conjectures about a musical development based on timbre, rather than pitch, led him to coin the term “tone-color melody” (Klangfarbenmelodie) at the conclusion of his harmony textbook. And in an essay on the challenge of listening to contemporary music, Schoenberg’s title addressed “Why new melodies are difficult to understand.”59 Just what melody meant to him remains unclear (one definition he offered was “the recognition of the unity of space and time from a musical perspective”).60 Whatever the differences between individual critics and camps, the Viennese listened for melody, while Germans appreciated a symphonoic heroism achieved through counterpoint and thematic work. The discovery of polyphony in non-Western music prompted debate over what made good counterpoint and therefore distinguished German music from that of other cultures and countries. In an age of imperialism, demarcating the boundaries (and superiority) of German music became important. A performance by Thai musicians visiting Berlin around 1900 revealed a technique that Carl Stumpf, professor at the University of Berlin, named heterophony (by misinterpreting a passage from Plato).61 Counterpoint required planning and foresight, but heterophony—subsequently defined by his colleague Hugo Riemann as the accompaniment of a song melody through an ornamentation of itself— was improvised.62 Guido Adler denigrated modern counterpoint as “heterophony”—setting lines on top of, not against, each other. He compared this use of “primitive forms and means of expression” with the Secessionists’ embrace of “exotic, and especially Asian” forms in the visual arts.63 Adler raised the provocative theory that polyphony, presumed to have been the origin of Western art music, coexisted in folk and non-Western musics. If so, he concluded, the unique value of Western art music would depend on its “high degree of evolution” and not on any historical priority.64 Antagonism toward Mahler stemmed partly from concern about Schoenberg’s ever bolder contrapuntal idiom, spurned as “heterophony” by some critics.65 Mahler never faced this affront, nor did his polyphony become associated with Jewish identity in the way that Schoenberg’s did.

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And while Mahler never explicitly challenged the melodic conception of music (or, for that matter, undertook theoretical writings), Schoenberg predicted, “We are turning to a new epoch of polyphonic style, and, as in the earlier epochs, harmonies will be a product of the voice-leading: justified solely by the melodic lines!”66 In Das Judentum in der Musik, titled after Wagner’s anti-Semitic tract, the young Zionist Heinrich Berl espoused polyphony, in its full “Oriental” splendor, as solving the crisis that European music faced with atonality. Berl recast one of Mahler’s comments to Bauer-Lechner into the extreme declaration that there was no harmony but only counterpoint. Schoenberg, in Berl’s view, instantiated Mahler’s theory. In his Second Quartet, op. 10, First Chamber Symphony, op. 9, and Serenade, op. 24, Schoenberg went back to the “beginning of music, to its oriental and primitive origins.” Unique to his polyphony, Berl observed, was how “each voice and each instrument have their own meaning, which they develop in a free and thoroughly linear manner.”67 It finally became difficult to attest to the cultural value of counterpoint, given its modern permutations and its manifestation in non-Western cultures. Or, at least, making this claim became ideological rather than, as before, chiefly descriptive. Walter Niemann invoked the old association of polyphony with “German thoroughness,” but only as an aside in his discussion of Debussy.68 If the debates over counterpoint would fall prey to nationalists, it was not before the procedure itself became the very symbol of modernism and all that the symphonic tradition aspired to banish.

The Vindication of Modern Polyphony With its deep roots in Western tradition, counterpoint might well have become an emblem of conservative musical politics in the early twentieth century. However, while Reger reinvigorated tonality through sharply profiled counterpoint, the so-called Viennese modernists—Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg—developed polyphony to new extremes, preventing any easy enlistment. Critics often referred to “modern polyphony,” reserving the more traditional term “counterpoint” for Bach, Bruckner, and Reger. The difference is undeniable, whichever term one prefers. In Strauss and Mahler, for example, the tension of pitch-based counterpoint (traditionally note-against-note in multiple, simultaneous lines) is displaced by the sonic munificence of orchestral polyphony, in which timbre, rhythm, and register—rather than strictly pitch—determine

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the polyphonic contour. Modern polyphony rarely imparts the kind of solidity typical of more rigorous practitioners of older methods. The result was to abandon the ethos of struggle and striving associated with counterpoint since the eighteenth century and Beethoven’s symphonies in particular. Without prizing the solidity of tight counterpoint, modern polyphony could achieve effects ranging from sensuous envelopment to ethereal airiness to uncanny disorientation. Under the venerable rules that related musical lines vertically to one another—excluding some juxtapositions, legitimating certain inversions—counterpoint, like harmony, exemplified the value and force of tradition. Bach and Bruckner were the magistri ludi, the Protestant and Catholic wardens of a lawfully structured world. But unbound from its vertical constraints, allowed to wander in willfully autonomous lines that preclude any memory of the cantus firmus from which polyphony had begun six centuries earlier, expressing the relativism, and jangling sensationalism of twentieth-century science and art, polyphony threatened cultural anarchy and modernist nihilism. The twentieth-century symphony, according to its critics, was ransom to that battle. With his characteristic verve and disdain, Strauss deployed counterpoint ironically, poking fun at all that tradition had become. Also sprach Zarathustra treats the subject of science, the modern episteme, as an awesome fugue (“Von der Wissenschaft”).69 Emerging from the low strings, the fugue is built on the nature motif that opens the tone poem (C-G-C, the Ur-pitches 1, 5, 8) so as to imply the intimate connection of science and natural phenomena, a striking moment popularized by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. But the fugal subject lacks a tonic foundation and is developed, as it were, atonally, encompassing all twelve pitches without allegiance to a single key area. Unlike its robust and confirmatory baroque ancestor, this fugue is evasive. Strauss adopts the Nietzschean critique of science—its methodology and institutionalization—as little more than the new faith of a later age, vitiated by an undisclosed but pervasive fear of the unknown. As the fugue builds in intensity, the originally pure and lucid nature motif becomes muddled. Strauss extends the “learnedness” of the fugue almost to the point of absurdity. The music is crushed under the weight of its uncompromising and nearly mathematical rigor. Any truth value inhering in fugal writing is undercut by the “disgust” motive in the countersubject (mm. 338–347). The powerfully unsettling conclusion of the fugue is a stroke of musical irony that reveals science as an obstacle in preparation for the final stage of man’s evolution, the arrival of the Übermensch.

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The revered procedure thus undermined, Strauss felt free to develop what he called “orchestral polyphony,” arguably his most significant contribution to music history, in his next tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, from 1898. In tandem, Mahler defined polyphony as adamantly independent voices, refuting the leitmotivic writing in Wagner’s Ring as a merely figurative development of themes: “In true polyphony, the themes run side by side quite independently, each from its source to its own particular goal and as strongly contrasted to one another as possible.” Contrapuntal rigor did not, however, entail any compromise to melodicism, Mahler had stressed in an earlier conversation, citing a “purity of line” as paramount in composition—“that is, every voice . . . should be lyrical,” including in “the most complicated orchestral texture.”70 Strauss’s most modern counterpoint is the trenchant parody of Jews in Salome. The theological debate is rendered with free dissonance— “pure atonality,” as Strauss put it in 1938, adding that the opera belonged in the recent exhibition of “degenerate” art.71 The imbalance of four tenors offset by one bass underscores the stereotype of Jewish femininity.72 The alien effect lays bare the ostentation and falsity of the characters’ learnedness—an extreme case of Strauss’s ironic practice of using tenors to portray unheroic, comic, or unsympathetic characters. Comic counterpoint had its own operatic tradition, including Die Meistersinger and Verdi’s Falstaff, leading Korngold to dismiss the Jews’ quintet as an old joke in his parody of two Viennese debating the opera. The same interlocutor, presumably an assimilated Jew like Korngold himself, went on to confess, “Doesn’t the whole vocal score of Salome sound somewhat Jewish?”73 Hirschfeld found the polyphony emblematic of Strauss’s modernism: artificial and based solely in sonority and gesture, rather than pitch. His review concluded with a plea for composers to revitalize music. The “limitless polyphony” of the Straussian orchestra, with its “infinite transitions” in the range of timbral color and harmonic fragmentation, reminded Hirschfeld of “chemical experiments” (a play on the old metaphor of counterpoint as alchemy). Modernism was like mountain climbing, each work in turn striving for a new pinnacle of impossibility: “the musical air becomes thinner and thinner; the vegetation of musical art disappears.”74 There is indeed a subjectless quality to counterpoint produced by radically different lines, and here again, Tristan und Isolde is decisive. The final Liebestod is an ecstatic dramatization of self-abrogation, for which Wagner uses no fewer than seven independent lines to portray the dissolution of selfhood. But while Tristan und Isolde all but insists on the listener’s

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absorption into the opera, the profiling of contrapuntal lines in polyphony circa 1900 achieves the opposite effect. The listener’s subjecthood is protected and even exposed, chiefly because the individual musical lines often seem unrelated to one another. Synthetic listening proved difficult, if not impossible. Polyphony seemed to lack a point of orientation in which the musical structure as a whole could be anchored. A cognitive dissonance typified the listening experience: linear processes sound unrelated and, necessarily, were perceived as simultaneous events. The result was an experience in many ways as challenging and abstract as atonal listening. Modern polyphony entailed a new way of listening, not just new procedures. To illuminate his conception of counterpoint, Mahler reached back to early childhood memory, from the woods at Iglau, to convey how themes should contrast as strongly as possible in rhythm and melodic character. (Ives, too, recalled a formative experience of two bands marching from opposite corners of the town, playing in different meters and keys.)75 Scoring enhanced the independence of voices—a prominent example being the solo violin and horn counterpoint in the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony (rehearsal no. 39–40). Rhythmic differentiation could also be decisive, as in the finale of the Sixth Symphony. After each of two hammer blows, violin figuration scurries above a distended brass line—a painfully augmented derivation of the first theme group (mm. 336–351 and 479–519). One is forced to listen between the lines: the registrable gap in polyphonic texture is too great to be bridged. Either one line or the other will sound out of proportion or blurred. Hearing polyphony entailed being in the music: perceiving the relations between its strands, as if surrounded by the voices. If other areas of innovation were felt to be provocative and alienating— thematic invention might seem cold, and the rhythm elusive or restless— counterpoint, as the very fabric of the musical “text,” seemed inevitably to impress itself (and not always in a good way) on the listener. Whether from its play with space or color, modern polyphony did not project the sense of control that came through traditional counterpoint, with its tightly wrought structure of thematic lines proceeding at a similar or identical rhythmic pace. Counterpoint in general does project a clear and unified subject, in the way melodic writing or a clear harmonic progression does. At historical points of social unrest, whether the energy of the masses was liberating or terrifying, counterpoint was likened to a crowd, with all its connotations of unruliness and chaos. Abbé Vogler, who lived in Paris until shortly before the French Revolution, compared

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the independent voices in a fugue to a revolutionary mob. Progressive and feminist that he was, Vogler admired the democratic energy in polyphony: One imagines an unlawful assembly that rebels, an exclamation from a mob of people, where each person imagines himself to be the only spokesman, where each fighter represents himself independently, where all combatants carry out their ideas egotistically, where no one wants to listen to one another. —This tumultuous one-sidedness, this stubborn clashing of completely different melodies, this inflexible combination of so many opposing opinions . . . this apparent harmonic confusion, is a fugue . . . where no one accompanies, no one gives in, and no one plays a subordinate role.76

By the century’s end, with bourgeois liberalism waning, political conservatives took up this vocabulary with a vengeance. Their differences notwithstanding—Nordau a political progressive and artistic renegade, Schoenberg a political conservative and artistic progressive—both men pursued a conservative cultural agenda to suit their own needs and eccentricities. Nordau conveyed vividly the excesses of modern polyphony: from within the orchestra, four instruments, “or instrument groups talk at the listener simultaneously, without heeding each other, until the listener is thrown into the nervous agitation of a someone who tries in vain to understand words amidst the confusion of a dozen spoken voices.”77 Admittedly, Nordau was an artistic hack and Schoenberg an intellectual snob, but the result here was the same. Disparaging the banality of much modern polyphony as a poor substitute for rigorous counterpoint on original thematic material, Schoenberg spoke scornfully of “Rhabarber counterpoint” (a theater term for backstage mimicking of the sound of a rioting mob). Unlikely an allusion to Forkel, this theatricalization of political chaos was possibly the composer’s way to distance from the torch parades and mass gatherings that had marked the National Socialist coming to power a fortnight earlier.78 Discomfort with contrapuntal listening, or at least with some types of counterpoint—whether invigorating or chaotic—may result from the destabilization of the listener’s position. Counterpoint is more like harmony, in that listeners do not so much perceive and therefore feel it (as with rhythm) or appropriate it (as in humming a melody) but instead situate or orient themselves within the harmonic ambience or within the lines of a polyphonic texture. With modern polyphony, a listener is constantly repositioned, yet without any clear orientation with respect to bass and melody. The

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extravagant melodic writing in Mahler’s Sixth lacks any secure foundation, Max Kalbeck observed. In every movement except the Andante, the bass “hardly touches its heels on the ground before it pushes up again.”79 The result was an implosion of the distance that normally exists between the reasoning listener and the musical object. Arnold Zweig’s sketch for a short story on an unnamed quartet movement by Schoenberg (1913) captures the utter absence of any secure bass line in counterpoint. Amid a lengthy account of a performance of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, the narrative slips into first person when the protagonist feels his body move in response to the momentum and power in the music. “The cello curves in waves, up and down like arcs of bridges over all rivers; the foot climbs bridges like arches from a steel net; and the train roars from riverbed to riverbed, full of goods and people who climb into the ship—indeed, soon I too lift my foot.”80 Schoenberg preferred to speak of his lineage as going back to Bach, but as an avid tennis player (who theorized the game, no less), he too sensed the bodily listening entailed by the esteemed musical procedure. In his characteristically ascetic manner, Schoenberg made a drawing counterpoint visually as a contorted figure playing the piano.81 Music became a model for other arts, not merely in a poetic manner, as the immaterial art at the center of Romantic aesthetics, but in a specific, procedural sense, through counterpoint and the concomitant listening experience. Defying any single subject and any unmediated emotional expression—and above all any synthesis—polyphony provided the basis for a modernist conception of abstraction. Abstraction was less an inherent quality of the artwork than an orientation of the artist toward the listener.82 Contrary to the stock explanation of modernism as complexity, simultaneity was the determining attribute—that is, two musical thoughts (or themes) are presented as clashing entities, each in its own world. The icon modernism was the phenomenon of the metropolis, where independence and simultaneity of different lives dominate over any traditional sense of organic community. Counterpoint also had the power to change the spatial orientation of the listener (reader or viewer), stressing the true nature of artistic expression as relative or unrepresentable. Music critics, especially those on the staffs of large urban newspapers, must have contemplated the artistic implications of the new developments in physics that changed the view of the universe—although Einstein, for his part, decried any attempt to seek political, social, or philosophical consequences to the theory of relativity.83 Schoenberg’s music, in particular, provoked allusions

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to “four-dimensional music” and to Einstein. But the relativity of time and space had been anticipated by others in ways more relevant to artistic perception and creation. The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (doctoral advisor of the socialist music critic David Josef Bach) developed a geometric space from the fact that perceived spaces, whether auditory, visual, and tactile, varied over time.84 The new conception of a universe in which absolute measurements of time and space gave way to relativistic frames, according to the location of the observer, suggested that the listener, too, might experience music from multiple perspectives. As a spatial metaphor, counterpoint was most potent for Kandinsky and Klee. It was in part his reflections on counterpoint that led Kandinsky to initiate a long correspondence with Schoenberg on their shared artistic goals: “The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.”85 For Klee, an amateur violinist, polyphony provided a means of mediating between representation and abstraction. The “polyphonic” was a “multivoiced penetration of different shades or colors, with a centrifugal character and transparent light.” Polyphony was also a way to create motion or directionality, as in his Polyphon-Abstractes (1930). Klee adamantly did not seek to translate polyphony into the visual realm. Rather, as he put it, an awareness of polyphony should help the artist “to penetrate deep into the cosmic sphere in order to issue forth a transformed beholder of the art.” The principle of counterpoint is “anywhere and everywhere,” he insisted, not just in music.86 Counterpoint remained important to both modernists and renegades, in composition and in musical thought alike, and yet persisted in the claims to a unique German legacy that were propounded as fascist aesthetics. Rather than reject counterpoint altogether as oppressively German, some dissidents accepted its political nature and saw the power of independent simultaneity, even at its most dissonant. One of the most powerful reflections on the Holocaust is Paul Célan’s poem “Todesfuge” (Fugue of Death) from 1944, later scored for a soprano and sixteen-part chorus by the East German composer Tilo Medek.

Reinventing Traditions of Unity Unity (Einheit) held a central position in German aesthetics from at least the mid-eighteenth century. The later nineteenth century, however, saw a weakening of the cultural underpinnings of unity within the

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Habsburg Empire—where national and cultural diversity was vibrant, if threatening—as well as within the recently unified German state. To be sure, the practical requirement of unity for a symphony remained indisputable, given its diverse collection of instruments, contrast in thematic material, and sheer duration. Yet by 1900, there was little consensus on how to listen for unity across several movements, or even a lengthy movement. As in the past, the listener was to form an overview of a symphony (übersehen), which ensured the unity of the artwork. By many accounts, when a work was composed, studied, or performed, its sequences of parts would coalesce into a single structure. Music replicates, as it were, the process of creating a painting, an analogy that was made very often in the early nineteenth century. Evanescent though it is, music thereby gains solidity and concreteness that permits listening to resemble other forms of reasoned, artistic appreciation. Johann Sulzer’s dictionary of aesthetics, which codified the field of aesthetics into categories suitable for the bourgeois reader of the mideighteenth century, stipulated that the capacity to form an overview was the chief form of artistic perception. (Hegel, to the contrary, had argued that music, unlike the visual arts, achieves no “permanent external existent in space” and therefore can only be enjoyed and not objectively appreciated.)87 Unity and wholeness became requisite in musical aesthetics from the early nineteenth century on, shepherded by writers such as Christian Friedrich Michaelis, a professor of metaphysics and aesthetics at the University of Leipzig who applied Kant to music.88 This curiously abstract form of musical perception proliferated through such far-flung sources as C. P. E. Bach’s keyboard manual (1753–1762), used well into the nineteenth century, and the biographical literature that emerged around the figure of Mozart—in both cases, promulgating the idea that a composer should command a view of the entire musical work.89 Later in the nineteenth century, to form an “overview” entailed little more than identifying the formal scheme, in part thanks to Formenlehren, which drilled the standard musical forms and patterns into generations of composers and listeners. At the endpoint of this tradition was Hugo Riemann, whose textbook explained forming an overview as a straightforward task, at least the structure of a composition had to be clear and recognizable.90 Born in 1849, Riemann came from a generation in which bourgeois musical training fostered a rich comprehension of structure and procedure in listening. A listener who grasped the whole, in effect, replicated the composer’s consideration of the work as

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a whole. Or at least the way the compositional process was envisioned would affect the act of interpretation. Schenker reflected on this phenomenon early in his career (1895), around the time at which his colleagues in music criticism began to question the tradition: “it can happen that the composer’s (or an exceptional listener’s) imagination surveys the entire content—despite its natural succession—from a bird’s-eye view, so to speak. He sorts and balances the characteristics and proportions of all the individual moods. Although this process seems to be a logical operation, it actually is neither logical nor organic in origin.”91 The fin-de-siècle symphony was deeply resistant to forming an image of the whole. Some critics, responding to some works, were thwarted by the sheer length of the composition or its striking sonorities—whether in harmonic language, scoring, or register. Others felt deterred by complex counterpoint or intensive thematic work. Mahler’s symphonies led some critics to contest the worth and relevance of forming an overview. The pedagogue Richard Robert took the practice to be superficial because the structure, when actually comprehended, might be very simple (as in the Fifth Symphony), belying the true nature of the music.92 Countless reviews oversimplified this once revered aesthetic doctrine, producing trite commentary on powerful and complex symphonic music. It was, oddly, a mode of perception more often noted in its absence. The Sixth Symphony provoked the most comments about listening in this manner—some in exasperation—but others were provoked to wonder how to judge a movement that could not be perceived as a whole.93 Forming an overview was finally degraded into a consumerist notion of musical listening, where a work was quickly grasped rather than studied and its inner meaning and structure only gradually approached. Otto Neitzel, author of guidebooks for the concert-goer, introduced the idea of musical form by warning that when the harmonic language becomes either too simple or too complicated, then the listener cannot form an overview of the whole.”94 As originally conceived by Sulzer, forming an overview was impossible in an initial encounter with an artwork; such comprehension entailed repeated encounters with a work. While the complexity of symphonic music put strain on the practice of forming an overview, the tenet of unity was, however, too ingrained to be discarded outright. Instead, the meaning of unity became increasingly ambiguous as critics applied it in a number of different ways or avoided it altogether. The Mahler zealot Ernst Otto Nodnagel devised the expression “formal unity” (a Hegelian sense of musical unity) so that

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the mere fact of the first movement’s main theme returning toward the end of the finale would suffice to demonstrate the unity of a symphony.95 Avoiding the term unity altogether, one Mahler enthusiast declared the genre of symphony superior to the suite because “a spiritual connection ties together the individual movements and makes their interrelations understandable.”96 Aesthetic value, time and again, came from the listener deciphering the interconnections, rather than from the unity’s being manifest. The change took place deep within the aesthetic vocabulary. In the early nineteenth century, cohesion (or, literally, cohesiveness, Geschlossenheit) was a chief aesthetic criterion for thematic material, while unity (Einheit) per se would typically apply only to an entire composition.97 By the start of the next century, the composer (or analyst) grasped the unity of a composition, while the listener perceived cohesion. While the legacy of unity was ignored in concert reviews, this was not possible in theoretical writings on the symphony. Yet authors minimized its significance. In Wolf’s journalistic aesthetics, the stature of the symphony depended not on unity, as before, but on the “logical” and “unifying” development within individual movements. Moreover, coherence, not unity, allowed the listener to apprehend music as an enduring object. Wolf’s authority was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s brief discussion of symphonic aesthetics: “Even the best music, if without coherence, without the innermost connections among each and every part, is a futile heap of sand, incapable of leaving a lasting impression; only coherence makes it into firm marble whereby the hand of the artist is immortalized.” In a common defense that music, pace Kant and Hegel, was not ephemeral, Wolf invoked the metaphor of architecture—a parallel that Arthur Seidl had developed lavishly in a recent lecture and publication.98 Theorists sought recourse to schematic form for this very reason. Only through “stationary forms,” Riemann stipulated, could a listener gain “lasting impressions” of a composition.99 Impractical as it became for the listener, the principle of unity, if anything, bore more philosophical weight than before. It was held to reinforce the integrity of self, all the more important as the objective world seemed to crumble into perceptions, as was so eloquently articulated by Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr. As one alternative to the challenge of hearing unity across time, a unity in (or correspondence between) “inner” and “outer” could assuage the metaphysical doubts raised by modern science, philosophy, and society. In this way, Wilhelm Dilthey

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explained, art provided a model for experiencing the world. “We spontaneously and inevitably attribute something inner to what is given to sense as outer.” This “relation of feeling and image” is the basis of artistic appreciation, in which “stable symbolic relations between sensuous, outer forms and psychical contents develop.”100 The correspondence between form and content in music could be evaluated in philosophical, psychological, or economic terms (does the thematic invention warrant the expenditure of timbre?). Critics seemed gratified to experience a connection between form and content yet made no attempt to justify this demand musically—that is, to explain why the larger shape of a movement depends on the minutiae of thematic working. In the end, perhaps the claim of unity in form and content remained largely a metaphysical assertion, arguable only to preserve distance between form and content. (The union of form and content, or their dissolution into one another, was a hallmark of Decadent art and theory, which first emerged in France and England at the end of the century and remained the bête noire among conservative German arts critics.)101 In practice, unity became a directive for the composer but not the listener. Mahler’s conversations with Bauer-Lechner suggest the fragility of the concept. He rarely spoke of unity, and when he did, it was with the older notion of “diversity within unity” rather than the pure unity esteemed by nineteenth-century aestheticians. Nor was there any consistency in his declarations on this subject. One day, in the context of describing the opening movement of the Third, he would emphasize the great diversity within his symphony movements; the next day its “flow and unity” (in the context of the speed of his work).102 Organicism, more than unity per se, informed his thinking. Mahler demonstrated that the opening theme of the Fourth Symphony issued six further themes within the same movement, explaining that “such a work must contain an abundance of seeds that are then organically and richly developed— otherwise it does not deserve the name symphony.”103 A static sense of unity as an attribute of a musical work was nowhere in his thinking. In another conversation, Mahler defined music as the invention of radically independent voices that the “artist orders and unites into a concordant and harmonious whole.”104 Elsewhere he avoided even the term unity, preferring instead the action of unifying (vereinen). No aspect of music’s naturally unfolding development should be disrupted, he stressed, even if for the sake of a beautiful digression: “Everything should stand in its place, organically connected to the whole and in harmonic rela-

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tionship to all the parts.”105 In sum, unity was an aesthetic requirement of the symphony but also seemed to entail no rigorously definable attributes. It meant little to either interpretation or musical comprehension and very often little to the compositional process, even though underlying value was never challenged. Cohesiveness, by contrast, did not presume any structural unity. The supreme example is the finale of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony—a work celebrated by analysts today for its disunity, in part because its rondo form juxtaposes starkly contrasting segments.106 By one early account, this movement is “formally, the most cohesive and brilliantly constructed.”107 Most of the sections begin as interruptions, and some are radically shortened on their return. The first and most striking such interruption occurs as the opening ritornello (A1) gives way to the first contrasting section (B1). The harmonic center moves from the tonic C major to Aa major (aVI), a shift emphasized in sonic terms by a sudden opening of register and harmonic space (i.e., root position aVI chords in the upper woodwinds). Such harmonic lurches are characteristic of the movement: later, the very same succession, A5 to B4, brings a move from A major to Ga major (aVII of A major). In contrast, Bruckner’s symphonies, with their expansive formal structures and motivic repetition and development, were not noted for their cohesiveness. Citing the “fragmentary character” of Bruckner’s symphonies, the young and brash Mahler declared Brahms superior to Bruckner.108

Fulfillment in Closure As music changed so did its audience. The compound effect of compositional innovations and yet a public whose musical training could no longer be presumed, resulted in a crisis in music criticism. The inherited modes of musical understanding and judgment did not work, although it was difficult to dismiss the need for music that was clear and logical. One consequence was a misapplication of aesthetic criteria. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, for example, was criticized as irrational for so specious a reason as that the opening funeral march mourned a heroic individual whom the audience had not yet encountered.109 But for aesthetic progressives, rationality and conventional forms were superseded by a vitalism of sorts—a conviction that process and energy were essential to music and art, society and nationhood. Critical discourse shifted its em-

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phasis away from the allegedly objective qualities of a composition to what listeners supposedly perceived—cohesiveness (not unity), contrapuntal tension (not thematic content), and formal process (not a rigid formal scheme). This directedness, as it were, was most gratifying in the symphony finale. While deeper unities were accessible only to the musically trained, a strong ending was apparently not lost on any listener. Unity—along with its cultural and philosophical ramifications, such as an ordered world—was replaced by directedness and teleology. A certain mystique developed around the symphony finale. The finale, after all, supplied the transition, if there was to be one, from art to life—from the composition to the concert hall. Together with the Beethovenian tradition of struggle to victory, the peroration or coda of a symphony contributed to a faith in its ability to overcome or sublimate the sensuous elements in music. Closure reaffirmed the moral purpose of what might otherwise have remained the merely pleasurable experience of listening to music. Wagner, in his dogged attempt to elevate music beyond itself, spoke almost apocryphally of the finale as, “in a certain sense . . . no longer music.” Musing on the idea of a transcendent finale, he continued, “Only Beethoven could do it. Last movements are the precipices; I shall take care to write only single-movement symphonies”—ambitions, professed at age sixty-eight, that would remain unrealized.110 (Richard Batka, likewise, did not consider the finale to be part of the emotional course pursued in a symphony; its “rejoicing” stood apart from the rest, as if bringing closure required such a separation.)111 If Brahms’s symphonies, particularly the Second, were a “late idyll”—the composer withdrawing from the symphonic legacy as he reflected back over the nineteenth century112—this longing for an Arcadian musical past became a pronounced feature of symphonic aesthetics for the next generation, particularly in Bruckner and Mahler. The desire for the redemptive symphonic finales had its quixotic side too, as if the problems of the twentieth century could still be met with the Romantic antidotes of music and art. Reviewers and in some reports even the general audience seemed to respond most enthusiastically to the finale of a Bruckner symphony. The opening movement of the Fifth Symphony tired listeners “in its unrelenting endlessness,” one critic observed, whereas the “imposing finale, with its streaming brass choir,” brought great applause.113 Curiously, in the version prepared by Franz Schalk, which was used for the work’s

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premiere in 1894 and all subsequent performances until 1935, the finale lasts about as long as the opening movement—or so the available recordings indicate.114 Just as Schalk had cut a significant portion of the finale from the Fifth Symphony (among other changes unauthorized by the composer) Mahler excised “a highly interesting polyphonic development” before the recapitulation in the finale of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, as one critic noted ruefully.115 Bruckner judged his symphony finales to be superior to the other movements, Helm recounted after the composer’s death in 1896, and the composer especially welcomed praise for the finale of his Fourth Symphony. Helm singled out the thematic invention (Inspiration) and “command [Herrschergewalt] of counterpoint,” but for later commentators, these criteria paled before the forcefulness of closure.116 (Outside the mainstream of professional music critics, there exceptions. In a commemorative article on the tenth anniversary of Bruckner’s death, Karl Senn, a composer and pianist in Innsbruck, singled out the composer’s finales as superior to his other movements in formal breadth and degree of innovation. Brooking no narratives of violence, he took closure to mean an intellectual sense of the whole: each Bruckner finale “develops out of the symphony such that it seems understandable only in connection with the whole.”)117 Ernst Decsey, who studied with Bruckner, judged the finale of the Eighth Symphony to be the weakest in construction, while ceding that a conductor such as Löwe “knew how to elicit a more secure formal shape, so that when the themes from earlier movements tower over one another with gigantic force, listeners are overwhelmed by the violence of the moment.”118 An older generation emphasized refinement over strength. In his popular concert guidebook, Hermann Kretzschmar heard in Bruckner’s Third Symphony a victory that is distinctly Christian in character. The “beauteous and pious finale” closes the whole with the heroic theme of the opening movement.119 Löwe programmed the symphony with overtures from operas on heroic topics—Mozart’s Idomeneo and Beethoven’s Fidelio (Leonore overture no. 3)—along with Bach’s celebrated C-minor organ Passacaglia, BWV 582. The programming (perhaps more than the performance, by a second-tier orchestra, the “new Philharmonic Orchestra”) proved a great success. In his newspaper review of the performance, Helm applauded the symphony’s concluding intensifications as the “most magnificent” across Bruckner’s “titanic works,” and writing for a more

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specialized audience, he quoted extensively Kretzschmar to underline the music’s moral and refined heroism.120 The terms for interpreting Brucknerian closure were changed by Louis, an aesthetic conservative who belonged to the young generation that would embrace World War I (in his case, perishing shortly after the outbreak of hostilities). Historians trace back to 1905 (also the year Louis’s book on Bruckner appeared) the heady nationalism and eagerness for action that typified the early enthusiasm for war.121 Closure, for Louis, entailed pure strength in lieu of inner fulfillment. Bruckner created an “edifice that overcomes human and divine powers alike.” The finale had as its goal to combine and so transcend “the total content of the preceding movements.” Aesthetic success depended on the power, not skill or inventiveness, of the execution. Bruckner “heaves together gigantic blocks as themes, and with unbelievable strength he stacks this unmovable colossus. A mortal struggle is brought about with the unruly material.” The common criticism that Bruckner could not “control” form was turned on its head. It was precisely the difficulty of wielding such massive structures that became a virtue—difficulty interpreted anew as a sign of unbounded ambition. Violent metaphors, so prevalent in the book on Bruckner, were all but absent from Louis’s reviews for Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, the eminent Bavarian daily. In that venue, Louis tempered his rhetoric. His chief aesthetic criterion was the same—a composition must “compel us to follow its course without opposition”—but he quickly turned to gentler metaphors: music must “convince and bring about an effect in us.” The context was his censure of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, but, unlike his book on Bruckner, the review bore no trace of anti-Semitism, however harsh his judgment. (Louis determined that Mahler could never compose “true music—a compelling impression that silences all doubt and produces the feeling of the listener being enthralled.”)122 With Bruckner’s finales, Louis explained, one sensed that the symphony “could never be ‘finished.’” It was the titanic effort to achieve closure that made the finale the most important movement of Bruckner’s later symphonies, he continued. These works demonstrate that “after everything has been said, and can be said, the unspeakable should acquire language.” An aesthetic of intensification (Steigerung) allowed Bruckner to “express the impossible” in the finale, and this, Louis believed, was the “most powerful” instantiation of the composer’s genius. The fugal finale of the Fifth Symphony “brings the greatest dynamic

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and musical effect of intensification in the entire symphonic literature.” “Intensification” was crucial to Louis’s aesthetic thought, applicable to anything, including the sequence of movements. Thus Bruckner, recognizing that a scherzo lacked the substance to “overcome” an Adagio— an unusual comment but revealing about Louis’s violent conception of musical tension—took Beethoven’s Ninth as the model for his own Eighth and Ninth symphonies. This allowed him to produce “an intensification through four movements, from the first to the last note.”123 Musical conservatives were not alone in their fascination with symphonic closure, but progressives avoided a vocabulary of force. The progressive pedagogue and theorist August Halm judged Beethoven and Bruckner superior to Mozart on the basis of their respective approaches to closure. Mozart’s supposed failure to differentiate interim closure from the final closure resulted in a “weak and immature form,” while Beethoven’s and Bruckner’s forms were “robust and animated.”124 Max Morold (pseudonym for Max von Millenkovich), a Viennese bureaucrat and poet who would briefly serve as director of the Court Theater, adopted a similar rhetoric. (In July 1918, after holding in the post for one year, Morold was too conservative, aesthetically and politically—a “Christian-German ideal of beauty,” in his own words—for the more liberal milieu to which Emperor Karl aspired. Morold, in fact, admired H. S. Chamberlain and later became a Nazi sympathizer.)125 In his 1912 book on Bruckner, Morold conceded that the composer’s development sections possessed a certain intellectual character, sometimes serving as “commentary and explanation” of the themes, but he added that Bruckner counteracts the sense of “toning down” in the development section by “forcing an intensification” through the introduction of a new theme.126 The musical observation is unremarkable but there, as elsewhere, Morold deploys a language of force and even violence. With program music, Mahler’s hybrid or even a Beethoven symphony, the strength and force of the finale had a narrative purpose. Less so with Bruckner. Since there was no larger framework in which to understand the energy of the closing gestures, commentators were quick to hear the finale’s course of action as violent. The finale brought the symphony to an emphatic close, without, as in Mahler’s symphonies, a sensuous transgression that required redemption. A vocabulary of redemption entered the reception of Bruckner only later, with the wave of religiosity that

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swept Germany and Austria in the years around 1910.127 Morold adopted this Christian vocabulary to describe the beloved return of the first movement’s opening theme toward the end of the finale, as found in most Bruckner symphonies. “The grandeur and purity” of Bruckner’s thematic culminations “move us, as if redemptive.” To capture the psychological effect, Morold elaborated on the traditional archetype of per aspera ad astra—in his words, the “symphonic development that leads us from light into darkness in order to resurge into the light with greater longing and hope.” The coda in a Bruckner symphony, to paraphrase Morold, strengthens our knowledge of the inner necessity.128 Closure became a process accomplished by the listener, not merely a compositional directive realized through convention or structural logic. Whereas the exuberance of a Mozart or Haydn finale signals closure or participates in a psychological sequence that prepares for the next musical event, the buildup in a symphony of Bruckner, and in some by Mahler, occurs over time and is necessarily recognized by and through the listener. The idea of a teleological closure remained important in twentieth-century music and music criticism. The emphasis on closure is apparently in particular for composers of a more conservative orientation. Lutoslawski, for example, favored a two-movement form in which the first is introductory and episodic, and the second which develops into a central climax. In his String Quartet, the functional difference is indicated in the titles: “Introductory Movement” and “Main Movement.” The emphasis on cohesion and closure, along with the tradition of overviewing (however fragile it had become), had, at the turn of the twentieth century, established the symphony as a monument of objectivity— stability, unity, and structure—at a time when contemporary art projected the radical subjectivity of modernity. Ultimately, however, unity and closure promised a different sense of completion and structure than did Eliot’s view of time, which retained a profoundly Christian sense that revelation preceded and concluded earthly time. The conclusion of the symphony—even for a devout Catholic such as Bruckner—was Faustian, not Christian, restless and even pagan, which ultimately, as its critics would also insist, swept its listeners into a fuller sense of vitality and energy. In the years around World War I, it was the symphony’s access to some universal energy that came to justify its sacred role.

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Vitalism in Absolute Music Once symphonic music was no longer meaningfully explained by reference to genre, counterpoint, or unity, a more flexible vocabulary of process was called into action. Here, music criticism took the lead over theory (although many of the leading theorists were active as critics early in their career). This amounted to a wholesale rejection of Riemann’s emphasis on the architectural nature of musical form over its dynamism.129 A tension between structure and process informed music criticism at various points, both historical and ideological. But the years after 1900 in particular saw a marked shift from structure to process. The move from structural form to processual form encompassed a number of larger changes, including a fascination with energy (Kraft) in writings on scientific materialism, beginning in the later nineteenth century.130 The discovery that energy was the main element of all organic and inorganic material meant that society and nature were indistinguishable at their lowest level of function and character. Writers, philosophers, and the medical professions saw broad consequences in the law of energy conservation. Almost interchangeable with “idea,” energy became a metaphor for work and process in all spheres—mechanical, human, and animal—and even within industrial society at large. Energy became a pervasive model of explanation in Hermann von Helmholtz’s lectures. The philosopher and physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner introduced the principle of energy conservation into psychology, arguing that mental systems resembled physiological processes in their tendency toward equilibrium and stasis. As his student Wilhelm Wundt put it in a widely read text, “the muscular movements that follow from the will, as well as the physical responses to sensuous perception . . . rigorously follow the principles of the conservation of energy.”131 The conceit of process was, broadly speaking, a response to a school of thought known as vitalism.132 The intellectual foundation of vitalism was “process philosophy,” which privileged motion and evolution over notions of permanence, uniformity, or ontology. The worlds of man and nature, in this view, constitute an unpredictable and everchanging process. The primary exponent of vitalism was Henri Bergson, who, like many others in his generation, sought to uncover a force more basic to life than rationalism. His élan vital was a creative, inner power, both individual and universal, that directed the evolutionary development of new forms. It was, in short, a life force, the river of time.

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Physical presence, and not any ontological claims about the thinking individual, constituted consciousness. Widely translated into German in the years 1889 to 1932, Bergson provided a philosophical correlative to scientific materialism and positivism. The emphasis he placed on the self and intuition imparted philosophical value to “duration” (durée) as the datum of consciousness: we know we exist in the flow of time. The ability to represent duration had important implications for musical thought, to the extent that it challenged the need to experience music in purely structural terms. Ironically, philosophers sought to liberate the individual and living experience, but the practical effect of vitalism in many of the arts and in cultural criticism would come to idealize willpower and unrelenting force. The subordination of the spectator became important to Russian playwrights and theorists writing in Nietzsche’s wake in the same years that the Italian Futurists sought the total submission of the theater audience.133 As an aesthetic concept, vitalism was most palpable in contemporary music circa 1910. The rhythmic propulsion in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is as emblematic as the formalized drive in Skryabin’s Prometheus, which develops antiphonally toward a series of climaxes. Determination and drive, in lieu of the ideals of repose or reflection, pervade the oeuvres of Stravinky and late Skryabin. A fundamentally new kind of musical listening developed alongside this compositional aesthetics. For some, Mahler among them, “vitalism” became a fashionable word, tapping into a new Weltanschauung.134 Raw strength, whether in sonic force or length or in thematic construction, is crucial to Mahler’s massive Eighth Symphony, and during the summer of its composition, Mahler reflected on the “symphonic” nature of Nietzsche’s superman Zarathustra. (The context was an interview of unprecedented candor about professional disappointment and creative ambitions. Having witnessed the spectacular success of Strauss’s Salome at its the Graz premiere, Mahler mused that by contrast, public success would never come during his own lifetime, and he compared his musical interpretation of Zarathustra with Strauss’s.)135 The intensity of Mahler’s athletic pursuits during the two months he wrote his “Symphony of a Thousand,” along with his descriptions of composing and conducting the work, suggest an immense energy and strength. August Halm was the chief proponent of a vitalism in musical listening. This Weltanschauung extended across his work as a scholar, teacher, composer, boasted his father-in-law Gustav Wyneken, a pro-

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gressive educator whose students included Walter Benjamin.136 Halm sought to establish an ethical role for art music in the modern world by improving musical listening through a more active vocabulary.137 Music was to remain a pure art form, not a vehicle for communicating any particular meaning or emotion. Halm all but excluded program music or programmatic interpretation, even if it served merely to kindle the listener’s imagination. During his years at the experimental Wickersdorf school, Halm lamented the corruption of musical listening by program music, which reduced art to “psychological effect.”138 Even program music should be experienced abstractly, as though it were a “drama of forces, not a drama of persons.”139 His bête noire was Bekker’s book on Beethoven (1911) with its highly expressive language: “We see the emotional states follow one another, perhaps they are even acted out, but we do not experience them” because, to paraphrase, we cannot associate the emotions with a person or living being.”140 (Bekker, for his part, rejoined that Halm’s language was no less metaphorical.)141 Bekker’s highly wrought language, with overbearing interpretive detail, alienated readers at both ends of the spectrum. Hans Pfitzner, notorious conservative, accused Bekker of musical dissection, without drawing any direct pleasure from the music, “much like a child who tears apart a doll or butterfly.” His analysis amounts to a conceptual rape, in defiance of the individual theme and the larger musical unfolding. For Pfitzner, Beethoven’s music is a world unto itself and resists translation, description and analysis.142 Halm’s criticism of Bekker was so pointed perhaps because during these very years he struggled to expel any hint of impressionism and personality from his own writing.143 As a point of contrast, Halm’s earlier article on music education (1909) resorted to an array of images to evoke the energy and power of harmony. One characteristically long sentence can suffice as illustration. From terms of motion (“Harmony pulls and draws together; splits up again and divides; it aids and hampers; it drives and commands a halt”), Halm turned to natural imagery (“it leads the river to flow, fall, and collapse, and then hesitate and cease”), and finally, to personification (“it walks, runs, drives, hurries, and sneaks; it is fresh, elastic, and again tired and sick”).144 Significant, however, is that the corporeality of the harmony is not degraded into the sensual.145 Within two years Halm renounced all such organic representations in favor of a more austere vocabulary derived from the physical sciences—for example, with harmonic resolution was a “re-

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lease of forces.”146 Psychologized criteria such as “intention, necessity, or power of insistence” became irrelevant. Instead, Halm wished listeners to perceive a “crescendo—and its opposite, a decrescendo—in harmonic activity.”147 The concept of intensification was so prevalent in his writings that Halm coined the word Nahsteigerung to distinguish local intensifications.148 The vitality of music did not emanate from thematic material, which resided in the interior space of the listener—a lied sung in an intimate venue, or a melody hummed to oneself—but in form: “Musical forms are the laws of life for music. They are productive forces by which this art can indeed be envied by the others.” Halm had no patience for the common nineteenth-century view of form as schemata—what he called an enclosing fence, wall, or container into which wine can be poured— and insisted that only the visual arts, which are static and nongenerative, possess form only in an “inferior sense.”149 But what form did entail was less clear, other than that it should guide musical interpretation and analysis. “The greatest intellectual nourishment,” Halm stressed in a pedagogical article, comes from the “the best constructed form of the sonata and symphony . . . Music will be understood most profoundly where the form has ascended steeply [emporgestiegen] to the pinnacle of vitality.”150 If Halm personified musical form in his Bruckner book despite himself, it was as much a philosophical language as one redolent of the composer’s person. Sonata form, for instance, showed an “intensified will to life.”151 Reconceiving of form as a process, rather than a structure, affected Halm’s entire vocabulary. Whatever was not extramusical (that is, a title or program) counted among the processes or energy that make up a composition. Analogies once designed to teach students how to experience musical works as a dynamic process, such as climbing and flowing, pervade his writings. Listening, in sum, entailed being acted on metaphorically by physical forces. At the same time, the spirituality, or full consciousness of the listener, was never compromised. More important than the obligation or insistence that chords follow a particular succession was that “we find ourselves being carried, driven, or propelled forward” in a true harmonic intensification.152 Steigerung was not just a procedure but a mode of being. “The art of intensification” was the main process by which an “invigorated and enriched harmony crests and is crystallized.” Musical process—in his terms, the dynamic will of music and its inner force of activity—depended largely on harmony.153

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Halm’s most important book, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (1913), traced an evolution in his theory of formal process from Bach to Beethoven to Bruckner. Bach articulated formal structure through in a purely linear dimension. He “invented architectural harmony as well as found and governed the forces and virtues of harmony necessary for constructing, holding together . . . and shaping large arches.” Beethoven, in turn, developed process through harmony (specifically, sonata form). It remained for Bruckner to merge harmony and theme.154 More than any other composer, Bruckner suited the new vocabulary developed for formal process. Halm’s only composer study (apart from a book on Beethoven published during the centennial year 1927) was on Bruckner’s symphonies. Halm set out to undermine listeners who believed they were “living in the music itself” and experiencing Bruckner’s own “wishing, struggling, and renouncing.” They were like “primitive men who import feelings into natural events.”155 Bruckner’s control over process was so great, Halm insisted, that performance markings in the scores were superfluous. They “derived from the essence of the activity” within the music itself. Tension would develop concurrently in the melodic writing, harmony, and counterpoint.156 The correlation of these parameters produced a feeling of inevitability—an idea that appealed to a nationalist and conservative writer like Grunsky. In a 1923 addition to his 1907 musical aesthetics, Grunsky explained that an intensification can bring about an effect of “unavoidable necessity” only when it is executed through “purely melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal means.” A buildup in dynamics or orchestration is by contrast merely ephemeral. The more careful the preparation and transition from an intensification, the more enduring its impact, Grunsky suggested, offering the Brucknerian Adagio as exemplary.157 By around 1910, the symphony was poised to assume a new identity. Its aesthetic traditions had been challenged and reinterpreted. Structural unity, which had hitherto encouraged perception of the “whole,” no longer seemed attainable or even desirable—at least musically. Instead, critics looked for the intensity of closure. Conservatives sought to blame the sweeping changes on a single composer—an illogical surrender to charismatic theories much like those emerging in politics. Richard Strauss was one logical choice—the brilliant orchestrator and provocateur who invigorated instrumental music as a lucid narrative by harnessing the new resources of orchestration and counterpoint.

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Mahler was another choice. Equally defiant of the conventions of scoring, he also undermined traditional forms through irony. The remedies were, however, less clear. Bruckner’s massive yet ingenious structures promised a salvation of sorts. Young critics, perhaps motivated by a vulgarized understanding of Nietzsche and Langbehn, were increasingly drawn to vitalism. Where Nietzsche had articulated an aristocratic aesthetic moralism that abandoned the masses to herald the self-sufficient creator, Bergsonian vitalism represented an equally radical aesthetic philosophy—a prophecy not of the superior individual but of the very life processes of durée expressed through the work of art. For Halm, if more than for Louis and Grunsky, the strength of Bruckner’s symphonies came from this channeling of an underlying élan. The composer’s heroism represented less creation ex nihilo than the struggle to channel directly the energies surging through the universe. The symphony evolved from a reputedly autonomous genre into one that revealed cosmic forces (for liberals) or cultural and political identity (for conservatives and nationalists). “Absolute” music—to the extent that it had ever existed in practice—could not be fully retrieved. In hindsight, Halm, like Bekker, managed to remain a progressive. But nationalists and conservatives took the subjection of music to life forces implied by such writers, and stressed another value asserted by Nietzsche and his popularizers: that of the will to power. A political vocabulary of catastrophe, reconstruction and synthesis pushed out the philosophical aspirations of the symphony. Such modes of thought finally became more significant than the ideas communicated through them. The result was a way of listening that was deeper than logic yet involved the uncritical acceptance of powerful musical processes. Precisely because the symphony seemed to embody an almost mystical experience of musical power, its renewal entailed the sacrifice of the aesthetic integrity it traditionally represented. Here Mahler was in many ways a special case. The novelty and significance of his symphonies do not lie in their approach to the conventions of the genre (there, Brahms was the consummate inventor). To study Mahler by examining his approach to tradition—counting the number of movements and aligning them, in character, with the classical norms—would miss the point, as many early reviewers did. The importance of his oeuvre, historically and aesthetically, lies in large part on his orchestration. Mahler’s challenge exposed the crisis of the fin-de-siècle symphony. Could his innovations help to rescue absolute music—as conservatives

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claimed about Bruckner’s massive structures? Or would they further unmoor the traditions of the symphony, sweeping it further away into a current of undisciplined polyphony, sensuality, and timbral excess? These were not stakes for music alone; they stood for the stark alternatives allegedly confronting German and Austrian culture, poised between tradition and modernism, ethnic cohesion and the challenges of cultural (and in significant measure, Jewish) modernity.

chapter three

Sensuality and Redemption

On December 9, 1905, Strauss’s Salome was premiered to astonishing public acclaim in Dresden, despite all hostility from reviewers confronting an opera that challenged the boundaries of orchestration and tonality, along with the core precept of transcendence through art. Mahler was unable to clear a production at the Court Opera with the censors, so the Austrian premiere took place in Graz. Most Viennese had to wait until May 1907, when the Breslau State Theater brought a production to the Viennese Folk Theater—an arrangement only reinforcing the sense that this was a success of the people, not the experts. Against all odds in the press, Salome continued to be staged throughout Germany. Like “Donner’s hammer blow,” one critic observed, “the increasing success of Salome has split the clouds,” irreconcilably dividing the public and the critical establishment.1 The opera’s mix of seduction and necrophilia, supposed Jewish hysteria and parody led to redoubled efforts to preserve the ideal of ethical responsibility in music, eventually trying the patience of some critics. A leading Viennese newspaper parodied a debate over the merits and excesses of Salome. One critic compared contemporary music to a “modern girl” who is educated by pulp novels and prostitutes, only to suffer the warnings of overprotective parents. Music, in other words, had lost its innocence—its idealism—long before Salome.2 Yet the succès de scandale provoked Guido Adler, professor at the University of Vienna, to address the “problems in musical culture” in the same daily newspaper. He pleaded with artists to accept more responsibility in their

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work. Art should aim “not to stimulate or overstrain the nerves but rather to elevate by awakening spiritual vibrations and providing balm and consolation amidst the confusions of our daily struggle.”3 New music was a catalyst, if not the cause, of far-reaching changes in criticism and social thought, as aesthetic judgment and musical analysis devolved into cultural criticism. Aesthetic taste traditionally depended on the shared upbringing and values of an ostensibly homogeneous bourgeoisie. The expanded audiences of the early twentieth century broke the ties of this exclusive community. Good taste, moreover, became anachronistic, as modern opera explored erotic and supposedly degenerate subjects. Timbre, in particular, seemed to provoke a physical experience, signaling the corrosion of bourgeois restraint. As the social foundations for musical rationality allegedly began to erode, writers reaffirmed old patterns of musical thought, such as hierarchy and oppositions. Lacking a theoretical framework for contemporary music, or refusing to adapt the old precepts, critics resorted to figurative vocabulary. Robert Hirschfeld lamented concert-goers who enjoyed music as “an expression of the times” or “a facet of culture.”4 Art, many believed, should transcend, not merely reflect, the circumstances in which it was created. The cultural typologies behind these metaphors seem innocent of the ideology that would later emerge from the same vocabulary. Gerhard Tischer, a highly political critic and publisher, later recounted that before World War I, intellectuals did not think about politics unless they were politicians by profession. “It was almost a dogma to define and reflect on culture in opposition to politics, economy, and religion.”5 The term “politics” had little currency in music criticism, except, for example, a report on protests against Mahler’s appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera, or to discuss reforms in musical life.6

Innovations in Orchestration Across several generations, the composers deemed “modern” by their contemporaries (Wagner and Liszt, Strauss and Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg) all lavished care on instrumental scoring—whatever their other divergences in style and language. Theory and tradition, by contrast, stipulated that timbre should support changes in texture or thematic writing and never call attention to itself, but a saturation of harmony and picturesque scoring characterized late Romanticism (Dvorák and

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Tchaikovsky) and Impressionism. Even so, this music was irrelevant to the German symphonic legacy. At that time and ever since, the fin de siècle, in its full splendor of decadence and sensuality, excess and abandon, was captured by the new techniques in scoring. Strauss’s symphonic poems, as legend would have it, gave birth to new music through their brilliance in scoring. From the start, even some progressives were skeptical of these developments. Strauss’s main contribution to music history, in Paul Bekker’s view, was a “technical refinement” of orchestration. But this refinement was limited to language and not content—“nothing beyond the purely decorative.”7 Strauss’s greatest public success was Don Juan, a subject matter perfectly suited to a sensuous orchestral surface. Across his symphonic poems, and to some extent his entire oeuvre, orchestration—and not form or thematic invention—was the path for developing the aesthetic concept dearest to Strauss: transformation. Mahler and Strauss were reproved for focusing on orchestration early in the compositional process, thereby defying nineteenth-century practice (patently untrue, in Wagner’s case) of composing at the piano and then orchestrating. Mahler once claimed that he composed faster than he orchestrated, in response to the suggestion that he orchestrate his songs because for a master of orchestration to do so would probably only take two hours per song. Conceptually, Mahler argued, it was impossible for him to orchestrate a piano part.8 To generalize, rarely did Strauss and Mahler blend sonorities (as did Bruckner) or alternate winds and strings (as did Brahms). Brahms, as one obituary read, was “essentially not an orchestral composer. His instrumentation always sounded like a piano score transcribed for orchestra,” as if “he painted ‘grey on grey.’”9 Strauss and Mahler, however, separate and contrast timbral threads and superimpose color patches in new contexts. Increased “individuation—the liberation of the individual groups and instruments of an orchestra ever more enormous in numbers of instruments” was how Walter Niemann described the work of the German impressionists, borrowing the term from the controversial historian Karl Lamprecht, whom he admired. In a book on “impressionism in life and art,” the art historian Richard Hamann denounced the “dominant ethos” of Liberalism as an “atomism of actions” and Lamprecht, in turn, described contemporary German culture as “impressionist.”10 Wagner was the acknowledged progenitor of modern orchestration, anticipating its procedures and principles in his musical dramas as well

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as in his prose. Whereas at the fin de siècle, composers were maligned for attending to timbre at the expense of pitch, Wagner did not acknowledge such a hierarchy but described pitch as the vowel and timbre as the consonant, stressing that all German words rely on both components.11 For all his compositional prescience, Wagner was a notorious cultural polemicist, and, regrettably, here his influence persisted. The basest antiSemitic formulation was rejuvenated at his hands in the discourse on timbre. Jews listened to the “surface” of music rather than experiencing its “life-bestowing, inner organicism.” “Modern art” was “Judaisized” in its appeal to the senses, reduced to mere luxury.12 (As inconsistent as his rhetoric was passionate, a mere five years later, having conceived Tristan und Isolde, Wagner confessed to one female admirer that “by nature I am luxurious, prodigal, and extravagant” and later to another, who sent him packages of silk and perfume, that he wore sachets of her perfume in his bathrobe while sitting at the piano to compose Parsifal.)13 Another hallmark of modern orchestration is a distinctive combination of instruments. Mahler’s changes in timbre often do not correspond with the starting points of phrases. Orchestrally vivid transitions sparked analogies of physicality. Too prominent to serve as mere bridges, these passages defy description and parsing into traditional syntax. Whether a shimmering buoyancy (from Strauss’s doubling) or uncanny spatiality (from Mahler’s open polyphony), the effect was alien to the stolid Brucknerian architecture that depends on timbral blending and instrumental grouping by section, not phrase by phrase. Strauss’s orchestration, both enthusiasts and detractors agreed, was brilliant and incisive, subtle and compelling. Mahler’s aversion to doubling led to a masterful sense of otherness. Very often, expectations both emotional and musical are undercut, as if a world vanished before one’s eyes. As Mahler once put it, in the history of orchestration the contribution of his generation was to express the “transition” from one emotion to another as well as “conflicts, physicality and its effect on us, humor, and poetic ideas.”14 A common contrast in expressive meaning—Strauss’s clarity and radiance versus Mahler’s subjectivity and profundity—is partly explained by orchestration. Strauss frequently revised but never changed the scoring; he had a powerful vision of the desired sound and a gift for achieving the effect in one aperçu. Mahler, to the contrary, would constantly alter the orchestration, even after the premiere. In both cases, their innovations often fell on deaf ears, not least because reviewers denied timbre any expressive power.

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Mahler’s additions to the standard orchestral panoply were doomed from the start. The cowbells in the Sixth Symphony conjured up cowsheds and manure, the hammer uniformly met with scorn, and the whip (Rute) became the butt of jokes. Despite Mahler’s iterations in rehearsals, few critics recognized the musical value of nonsymphonic instruments (and then it was usually in response to the more popular Seventh Symphony). And even they did not hide their dislike of the effect. Max Kalbeck observed that the whip and other percussion allow the finale in the Sixth Symphony to “overcome” the sonic force of the opening movement through “the rules of acoustic violence” (and thereby, one might add, bring about the desired closure in the finale)—but he still found the sonority “most gruesome.”15 The Fifth Symphony had the most provocative orchestration, in part because the work directly engages with a fin-de-siècle culture of sensuality that it ultimately seeks to overcome. Following a bleak funeral march (I) and a scene of unremitting horror (II), the central scherzo exudes a pleasure of great immediacy (III); the Adagietto seeks to purify through love, as some heard it (IV), but a full redemption comes through the elevated and controlled pleasures of the finale (V). Whether by virtue of purging contemporary culture or mourning a world nearly lost, the music made many critics uncomfortable, even as they admired the craftsmanship. Whatever the response to an individual work—admiration, enjoyment, or revulsion—all agreed that the attention to timbre posed a threat to music theory and musical culture. Orchestration offered few rules to composers and none to listeners, who responded strongly and often physically. Treatises, the most celebrated of which was Berlioz’s (retranslated by Richard Strauss in 1904), taught by example alone. Musicologists have referred to the “emancipation of color” around 1900,16 but with little historical basis. Arthur Seidl apparently referred to the “emancipation of color” in an 1898 lecture, but the context was the physiology of perception and technological developments such as film and photography.17 It was possibly a Swiss author, outside the Austro-German cultural sphere, who first applied the term to music. In 1900, Hans Merian described timbre as the means of liberation, not that which was liberated: through a rich timbral palette, Wagner “freed music from its architectonic chains”; Liszt and Strauss took this “socalled ‘painterly’” approach in instrumental music. This development surpassed the classical masters, who “had to build their movements architectonically, because the instrumental forces of their orchestra were

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not yet expressive enough for a divergence from the strict rules to be satisfactory.”18 If partly anachronistic, the “emancipation of timbre” aptly conveys the perspective of composers, who had no precepts or models to hinder their course. Moreover, timbre rested on such a complex combination of overtones that it was irreproducible, whereas pitch and form remained identifiable, whether rendered vocally, represented visually in score, or translated into a performance by any number of instruments. Pitch was “measured and determined,” as Kalbeck put it, while timbre was not.19 Faced with novel yet alluring orchestration, Germans and Austrians responded differently, withdrawing into cultural stereotypes at a moment of utmost vulnerability—namely, describing a phenomenon that defied words. Philosophical and preoccupied by organization, Germans focused on the relationship between orchestration and thematic invention. They listed the numbers and types of instruments, as if objective knowledge would control the disarmingly new sounds. The sensual and uninhibited Viennese—as the popular Prussian music biographer Ludwig Nohl described them20—responded to modern orchestration with passion or revulsion, forever seeking to recount their listening experiences in a froth of metaphors. Historically, timbre was never held on a par with pitch—and rarely is to this day. But its relationship to pitch became more highly charged over the course of the nineteenth century. As one pedagogical book from around 1800 put it, instrumentation was the “more mechanical side of music,” while melody emanated from genius.21 Over the ensuing decades, developments in instrument building, a proliferation of orchestration treatises, and refinement in performance practice should have raised the status of orchestration. But for Hanslick, the authority on music aesthetics, timbre remained a “subordinate” parameter, although he did not denigrate its effect. Timbre (Klangfarben—only later did the singular form come into usage) brings “color” to melody, harmony, and rhythm but cannot itself constitute an idea. Hanslick even excluded timbre from his definition of music (“tones and the endless possibilities for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic transformation”).22 Hanslick’s treatise reflected a fundamental change in musical thought: the composition became an object, representable in a score, and an artwork with the potential for transcendent meaning. This so-called work idea distinguished the musical composition from improvisation, folk music, or popular music, encouraging a distinction between what was

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inscribed in the score and what was heard in performance. Pitch, not timbre, was the “permanent foundation of music.”23 In the background lurked the linguistic distinction between good and bad effects (Wirkung and Effekt) that emerged early in the nineteenth century, much like the contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation. Effekt, borrowed from French, suggested mere “surface” and “manifestation,” without structural implications or any substantive content. The German Wirkung, grammatically a process, was an inward or “motivated” activity; it specified a powerful influence on the emotions, and, at the fin de siècle, almost never referred to orchestration. “Instrumentation is not there for the sake of timbral Effekte,” Mahler once exclaimed, “but to express clearly what one has to say.”24 Distinctive orchestration was believed to divert attention from thematic invention and form. When timbre “protrudes visibly,” Grunsky warned, “the form is obscured rather than elevated.”25 But the problem went deeper than the practicality of musical comprehension: “No one should forget that before the instrumentation there must be an idea . . . Musical ideas, their ordering and evolution into tension and release, are the main elements!” Timbre seemed less important than pitch in part because it did not constitute an idea that was reproducible, either by the human voice or through a piano arrangement. “It must be possible to call forth the inner motions of music,” Grunsky explained in a quiet nod to Schopenhauer, through means other than those for which the composition was originally conceived.26 (A century earlier, to the contrary, orchestral music was deficient if it could be reduced.)27 The primacy of timbre in modern music imperiled not just aesthetics but musical culture— the values that accrued from studying and listening to music. For timbre to gain sovereignty, even for a moment, imperiled a bourgeois world in which status depended on the reproducibility of culture. Landscapes and architectural reproductions hung in the home as a sign of respectability and cultivation: the outside world could enter the domestic space in the form of controlled and organized artifacts, hence modest prints on the wall and inexpensive volumes of great literature on the shelf. Piano arrangements and study scores offered a similar replica of an artistic experience, etching the experience of the concert onto one’s memory. The symphony preserved bourgeois edification (Bildung) because concert-goers were expected to prepare by studying a miniature score or playing a piano arrangement.28 How much the practice continued into

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the twentieth century is unclear. Theodor Helm made a point of establishing his authority to review Mahler’s Fifth, citing his “very careful study of the score and fourhand piano arrangement prior to the orchestra performance.”29 Mahler’s symphonies continued to be published in study scores and piano arrangements, carefully timed to each premiere and distributed in the cities of subsequent performances, but such study did not adequately prepare listeners. The problem was not just the dizzying number of staves for the enlarged orchestra, but the “countless performance indications, which make a Mahler score swell into a thick novel.” Herein, Hirschfeld declared in his review of the Sixth Symphony, lies the originality of Mahler’s music.30 To study a symphony at home and then enjoy a public performance epitomized the union of private and public, labor and pleasure. True intellectual pleasure (geistige Genuss) is experienced only after one has studied a score so much that “the resonance between sensuous stimulus and inward feeling is in virtual synchrony,” Kuno Wolf stressed in his 1906 essay on the contemporary meaning of the classical symphony. “Intensive listening” brings about a “complicated and passive state of mind,” since music involves unconscious thoughts that are inaccessible to language.31 Virtuosic orchestration, however, might embarrass listeners lacking the accoutrements of Bildung. Maximilian Muntz heard Mahler jeering at the grief of naïve country people in the “petit bourgeois pomposity of the instrumentation” and “malicious orchestral jokes” in the funeral march of the Fifth Symphony.32 The essence of a symphony, then, lay not in its orchestration, to which the public had only occasional access in the concert hall, but in its organization into pitch, rhythm, harmony, and form. What is crucial to any particular style of orchestration, Grunsky proposed, is not the choice of instrument but by how musical periods are shaped.” If individual arrangements are inadequate, he conceded, still to speak out against their publication and distribution is deplorable and can only contribute to a lamentable “superficiality” musical life. Grunsky aspired to defend a way of life—a social class defined through education and cultivation—not just a musical tradition. Without the possibility of learning symphonic music on the piano, “all of musical life would collapse into hateful disintegration and quickly become impoverished.”33 Such alarmism would have no place after World War I, and Grunsky withdrew from broader cultural claims, if his sentiments went unabated. “We insist that timbre is ornament [Schmuck, literally “jew-

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elry”] and not the pillar of music.” His advice to study orchestral works on the piano became practical rather than ethical. Arrangements “leave much to the imagination.” Moreover, a bad orchestral performance is a “poorer copy” than a compelling piano rendition (and Grunsky did his part, publishing several arrangements of Bruckner’s symphonies that same decade).34 To sanction innovation or even artistic freedom in the area of orchestration was generally unthinkable. One exception was the socialist critic David Josef Bach, who brooked little sympathy for the bourgeois covenant of studying an orchestral work before attending its performance. Merely to attend a concert was difficult for the working classes, much less to find time to prepare for the occasion. Bach, in his review of Mahler’s Sixth, reasoned that as an artist, the composer deserves the prerogative to use new instruments or deploy old instruments in new ways. Why he might elect to do so was an entirely private matter: “No one thinks to ask a painter who conjures up a rush of color on the canvas why he resorted to so many colors and these particular colors, while other, perhaps even greater artists, could manage very well by using fewer.”35 By seizing on the analogy of color, within two years after the Fauves in Paris or Die Brücke in Dresden dramatically altered the palettes of contemporary painting, Bach showed very clearly why timbral austerity was so antiquated an ideal.

Ornament and Color Tension between surface and structure became a hallmark of art and artistic discourse around 1900, inaugurating a century of modernism in Europe and the United States. Louis Sullivan eschewed exterior ornament in his watershed opera house, the Auditorium Building (1885–1889), and any ornament in his Transportation Building (1893) had a structural role. Theory and practice went hand in hand. Sullivan expounded on the idea of “interior function” in his influential essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.”36 His counterpart in Vienna, Adolf Loos, calling for reform in the production and appreciation of art, invoked the symphony, in particular Beethoven’s, as inspiration. Shunning all ornament (presumably, virtuosic cadenzas or solo interludes, in the case of music), allowed the arts to reach “unimagined heights” (insofar as concentration is directed to the powers of invention alone, one might add). Diversion, true enough, was antithetical to the

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teleological drive of a Beethoven symphony, except insofar as the interruptions actually intensify the momentum (if, admittedly, the “heroic” middle symphonies that lie behind this paradigm are small in number). Loos believed that such focused and unadorned music brought about a spiritual, unadulterated state of mind that persisted well after the performance. (Did his austere image of this massive work perhaps derive from Mahler’s wind arrangement of an excerpt from the finale, performed at the unveiling of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze and Max Klinger’s Beethoven sculpture?) Anyone who “goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down to design a wallpaper pattern is either a rogue or a degenerate,” Loos decreed.37 Concerned about the political and economic viability of the Habsburg Empire, Loos and others believed that Austrians were vulnerable to the dangers of ornament and design. Schoenberg— if without the political references—felt compelled to defend Mahler’s orchestration by denying any “ornamental” quality.38 Some German authors, unaffected by the wider political issues at stake, could enjoy Austrian frippery. In 1913, perhaps with a tinge of nostalgia for the Viennese fin de siècle, Niemann linked Mahler’s “love for beautiful timbre” to the “healthy artistic sensuality typical of Austria.” The result, he noted admiringly, was a “decorative” and fresco-like quality to the orchestration.39 Critics at liberal newspapers as a rule objected to the absolute hierarchy of pitch above timbre but did not go so far as to advocate the full independence of timbre as a musical parameter. Julius Korngold, reviewing Salome, raised the subject in good fun: “Melos abdicates, and, in a dangerous overthrow of the current hierarchy of the means of musical representation, collateral musical relatives ascend the throne.”40 Elsa Bienenfeld, who had studied with Schoenberg and assisted in his harmony courses, offered faint praise for Mahler’s Seventh, but her concern was a general indulgence (“the rare naïveté of an unbridled impressionist whom timbres and melodies captivate”), not his orchestration per se.41 It remained for a progressive academic—Adler, father of musicology—to integrate timbre in analysis and interpretation.42 The bias against timbre affected even the naming of the phenomenon. There was no single term for timbre, like the present-day Klangfarbe. The expressions in circulation emphasized color as mere surface—whereas aesthetic conservatives, along with many others, wished for music to aspire to deeper structure. There was some objective basis for linking timbre and color, apart from the potentially severe neurological disor-

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der of synesthesia. In a choleric tract on musical reforms, seeking to restore German musical life after World War I, Karl Blessinger advised composers and opera directors not to link Klangfarbe to “optical colors.” Experiments showed little consistency in the colors individuals visualized in response to the same music, and even if a relationship were determinable, to use it creatively would satisfy only a small number of listeners and restrict the pleasure of the majority.43 The Romantic legacy of seeking unity in the arts affected the nomenclature for timbre. Color tone (Farbton) was a common term in painting, and in the nineteenth century some colors had associations within music, such as the “bright purple glow” and “inexpressible longing” in Mozart’s late Ea major Symphony, K 543 to quote E. T. A. Hoffmann’s mad Kapellmeister Kreisler, who described musical listening as a delirium in which colors, scents, and sounds merge.44 “Color” hinted at sensuousness without admitting any raw sensuality. When a young girl asked Mahler why modern composers needed so large an orchestra, he explained that “in order to protect ourselves against misinterpretation, we are compelled to distribute the many colors of our rainbow over various palettes.” He also justified the historical trend of increased timbral differentiation: “Our eyes learn to see in the rainbow more and more colors and ever finer and more delicate modulations.” Moreover, the “oversized concert halls and opera houses,” compared to those of the early nineteenth century and before, necessitated a greater sonic strength.45 This letter would remain Mahler’s most detailed account of timbre—so little did theorizing interest him. In conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler preferred the more refined metaphor of light. When she reported that the “indescribable timbral effect” in the first movement of the First Symphony was just as vivid on subsequent hearings, Mahler turned the rhetoric from awe to expressivity. Timbre led into new perceptual realms, he explained; the instruments “completely vanish behind a shining sea of sound—as a luminous body is eclipsed by light glow that streams from it.”46 Whether coloristic or luminary, timbral effects were akin to visual experiences yet seemed to defy ordinary perception. At the very least, an overabundance of sensuous stimuli meant that the listener could not process the music conceptually. Critics never invoked specific colors in musical descriptions in the early twentieth century. The point was not to report that the horns sounded purple or the strings a wispy gray but to register the sensuous-

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ness of music as detached from its structure. Color was a cultural reference more than an impression per se. Metaphors of light and color allowed reviewers to deflect attention away from their own sensations. Mahler bid farewell to the “symphonic mission” of Schubert, Brahms, and Bruckner, as Hirschfeld put it, in his attention to the “external nature of sonority, coloristic artifice, and instrumental gloss.” The ostensible reason for a comparison was that Viennese had recently heard two symphonies in C minor, which since Beethoven’s Fifth represents “the struggle and battles of spiritual forces”— Bruckner’s First and Mahler’s Second. But Hirschfeld, himself the son of a rabbi, drew biographical parallels. Brahms was the intellectual among the symphonists in the canon, and Schubert and Bruckner were the offspring of schoolteachers—whereas Mahler, he resisted adding, was born to a liquor manufacturer.47 Coloristic orchestration also drew “modern” music closer to contemporaneous painting. Kalbeck dismissed the apparently common comparison of Mahler to Klinger. Mahler resembled Klimt far more, since the “enchanting power” of his music lay in its colors—or so it seemed when the Fifth Symphony was premiered in Vienna.48 By the time the Seventh Symphony premiered, in October 1908, critics did not need to compare his compositional aesthetics to those of contemporary artists. Nevertheless, the vivid scoring of the second Night Piece (movement 4) suggested parallels to a painting by the Italian Swiss painter Giovanni Segantini, who enjoyed a strong reputation in Germany and Austria, where he had ties to Klimt. A slow movement typically has a highly profiled melodic line against a blended backdrop, but Mahler here differentiates individual instruments in ways that evoke Segantini’s technique of divisionism and careful distribution of light sources. Paul Stefan, reporting on the premiere for the Erdgeist—the same weekly that had published the official catalogues of the Viennese Secession— likened the “magical” woodwind writing to Segantini’s paintings.49 Bienenfeld, who could not presume artistic knowledge in her readers, elaborated on the comparison. Segantini’s paintings “often depict the cold, clear, and transparent air of the high mountains, the very air that gives them their sharp, pure, and distinctive shapes.” And so, too, in the first Night Piece of the Seventh Symphony, “soft voices of nature, hardly perceptible to the ear, hover and float past.” From this visual metaphor, with its resplendent detail, Bienenfeld took a theoretical turn, admiring Mahler’s genius in the “stylization of timbre into mood,” as exemplified

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by the muted cowbells, “which do not symbolize a herd but serve as a purely sonic expression.”50 She could write so confidently of what the cowbells meant because days earlier another reviewer had paraphrased the composer’s utterances about the movement in rehearsal. “Mahler said that the public and critics had apparently misunderstood the meaning of the timbre. The composer never intended to use cowbells to conjure up magically an image of a cow or sheep herd—through tonepainting, as it were. Rather, he wanted to characterize natural sounds [Erdengeräusch] ringing and fading far into the distance. He envisioned that passage in the work as if he stood on the highest peak, facing infinity. This sound alone seemed to him suitable for symbolizing loneliness and disengagement from the world—just as the fading sound of grazing herds floats upwards, symbolizing the last farewell to existence for someone who walks alone on the mountaintop.”51 As soon as a term for timbre developed within music theory, it was challenged. “I cannot accept without reservations the distinction between tone color and pitch, as it is usually expressed,” Schoenberg wrote in 1911, regretting any sense that timbre was merely the outer “color” of sonority. Instead, he endorsed the notion that Klangfarbe, along with pitch and volume, was a facet of sonority (Klang).52 His remarkable discussion of timbre was, curiously, appended to his harmony textbook, completed in the weeks after Mahler’s death. The writing is so free and fanciful in the concluding pages as to suggest the composer’s shock and sense of liberation, realizing that the most celebrated Viennese composer would never set pen to paper again. In the annals of music history, advances in orchestration and scoring include, as perhaps the largest milestone, “Colors” from his Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16 (1909). But there is good reason to question this lineage. True, the composer’s paintings, an activity he took up seriously the year before, show an amateur in the thrall of color, with little technique in line or brush. And when Strauss inquired about conducting the work, Schoenberg emphasized the surface qualities of the Five Pieces: “I promised myself much colossal in them, in particular mood and color. It is only this: there is absolutely nothing symphonic about them. In fact the opposite is the case: there is no architecture, no structure. Merely a bright, unbroken alternation of colors, rhythms, and moods.”53 Yet the title of the third piece, “Colors,” refers to pitch classes (with shifts in harmony and voicing) and not changes in scoring per se. Schoenberg effectively divorced pitch from color, showing the more

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radical possibilities of exploring pitch as color. His true experiment in the color of timbre came later, in Die glückliche Hand (1910–1913), a dramatic work set to his own libretto that proved brilliantly the constitutive power of movement, form, color, and music. Scenic effects were synchronized with constantly changing colored lighting, a concept that was developed at the very same time by Kandinsky in his stage work Der gelbe Klang (1912). Kandinsky, building on the striking parallels between his work and Schoenberg’s, adopted various musical metaphors in his work, including the title “sonorities” (Klänge) for a 1912 volume of his poetry, prose, and woodcuts. The idea of being shocked by timbral color finally became outdated. When the journalistic rhetoric ran its course, so too had the fin de siècle. In 1912 Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang premiered to great success, catapulting the composer into fame. Alexander Berrsche, a critic for the musically conservative Die Musik, embraced the work by parodying color metaphors for timbre. Colleagues who failed to embrace the work, he implied, must have prejudged the music by the piano arrangement. To represent the opera on the piano “was as misguided as photographing [in black and white] a painting whose ideas are expressed solely through color. Timbre was no longer the medium for musical ideas, but the reverse was true: everything that is on paper is only an aid to bringing orchestral colors to light.” To do justice to the music, Berrsche believed, listeners should experience Der ferne Klang as if they had no musical training. “If someone said that Schreker’s ideas would thus lead to the end of music, that is, of course, correct,” he continued, mocking the fatalist readings of contemporary art: “Isn’t it better for music to die from intoxication by Schreker’s colors than to be drowned in the diluted styles of today’s industrious and ubiquitous epigones?”54 Before the outbreak of war turned attention elsewhere, the physicality of musical listening was believed to subvert the nobler constituents of human experience—reason, spirituality, and even emotions. The immediacy of art and physicality of response had been decried since at least the late eighteenth century, when music might tickle the ears or dazzle the eyes. The mind/body problem, if no longer a theoretical question about the priority of experience (Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum”), became acutely practical, as philosophical concerns gave way to psychology and physiology. Did physical sensations lead to psychological conditions, or was the converse true? Sensuous responses to music seemed to affect the spinal cord, the nerves, even the entire body, through expe-

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riences that were intoxicating, seductive, or orgiastic. The dangers were charged in Max Nordau’s Degeneration. As a physician working in Paris, Nordau could invoke quasi-scientific theories and a mass of specious data, along with French theories of decadence unknown to many of his German readers, in his account of the “ecstatic” reactions to modern art: The excited part of the brain functions with such violence that all its other capacities are suppressed. The ecstatic subject becomes completely insensible to other stimuli. There is no perception, no impressions, no grouping of impressions into concepts, or concepts into thoughts and judgments. A single impression, or group of impressions, suffuses one’s consciousness . . . Consciousness is flushed, as with the blinding light of midday.55

Modern music operated in much the same way, Niemann believed: “Ethos, the enormous moral power in all classical music, yields to pathos, in the narrow sense of the suffering modern soul.” What is lost, he explained, are “original musical ideas that directly express our emotions.” Historically, he blamed the infiltration of the German lineage by French music, in particular Debussy’s exploitation of timbre: “The musician becomes a musical painter, the musical full-breed becomes a musical half-breed, and the full musician becomes an impressionistic half-musician—though of course not always.” The listener fell prey to a similar degeneration—from Darwinian progress into cultural regression. “The soul is emptied out. The psyche becomes physis [nature], while physical effects become physiological and pathological effects.” Niemann conceded a certain degeneration (Entartung) but barred the (French) term Dekadenz. The critique of “decadence” carried an ideological freight in German, whereas in English and French artistic circles, creative work was under this very term. Perhaps thinking of his own music, ablaze with impressionistic sonorities, Niemann stressed the tender and delicate timbre in German impressionist music—a “degeneration” paradoxically, “full of possibilities for new developmental stages.” Moreover, “the outer senses are magically led down new roads” and the recipients of art “enriched through magnificent and surprising vistas.”56 Even when the wider cultural ramifications went unspoken, extremism was common in discussions of timbre. “The color of the tone is decisive; what resounds is almost a matter of indifference,” Nietzsche had

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written with scorching irony in his Wagner critique.57 This same point, made in earnest, became the capstone in Hirschfeld’s review of Mahler’s Seventh. “It is not that the theme, which is played on a tenor horn, gains value and meaning, but rather that the tenor horn gains value and meaning because it plays a theme.”58 Alien to the symphony orchestra, this military instrument distracted the listener, or so Hirschfeld believed. Dazzling orchestration could affect more than the perception of composition itself. Muntz recounted the unfavorable “after-effects” of Mahler’s First on Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. “A lethargy and sonic exhaustion fell across the hall, affecting not only listeners but also the orchestra and even the soloist.59 By making traditional works sound tired or worn, or incapacitating the audience, new music risked eroding the canon. A more invasive line of argument speculated on the supposedly cruder mental processes of a composer in thrall to orchestration. Examples abound in reviews of Mahler’s Sixth: “Instead of revising musical ideas that can be improved, he seems to take ideas exactly as they come to him and refines his mastery of the art of instrumentation, aiming to surpass all rivals” (Kalbeck). Or: “Mahler’s imagination was most cultivated with respect to instrumentation: he thinks in sonorities, for which he then finds a melody” (Max Hehemann).60 If lush timbre bore implications of organic degeneration, the conclusion could not be far away that it was the product of a type prone to excess and display but somehow lacking the core virtues of tradition.

Orchestration and the Critique of Modernity Conservatives blamed the waywardness of modern music on novel orchestration when, in fact, the emancipation of dissonance and eventually the dissolution of tonality would have a greater impact. But timbre was an easier target than harmony, since it fell prey to the cultural problem of sensuousness. Liberals and conservatives alike were troubled by the question of how music could fulfill its social and cultural role if listening involved a host of sensations. Conservatives had the easier task, assailing the duplicity of the product—or the impressionability of a democratic public. Nerve stimulation was both a physiological fact about musical listening and a metaphor for unusual and unsettling sensations. Exhaustion of the nerves from smoking, drinking, and “narcotics and stimulants,” as well as city life in general, necessitated

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extremes if art was to have any impact at all. Thus went Nordau’s argument.61 Excessive nerve stimulation was often linked to the Jewish population, and not only by Germans or anti-Semites. The American doctor and medical examiner Maurice Fishberg was one such proponent (and the impetus behind James Joyce’s “Leopold Bloom”). According to Fishberg, writing in 1911, “Nearly all physicians who have practised among the Jews agree that derangements of the nervous system are very frequently met with among them.”62 These controversies revealed a fundamental change in cultural criticism. The problem was as much the reception as the production of art. For example, scientific data findings reputedly showed that train travel caused the deterioration of nerves (again, Nordau), promoted a facile connection between psychological and physical conditions. German impressionism did not develop from the hands of the individual composer, Niemann argued, but draws its inspiration from life itself—from “the lack of heart and soul in our young and youngest generations, who increasingly Americanize, commercialize, and industrialize all of public life, with their pleasure in rousing the nerves, in sensation, and in glittering, superficial appearance as well as from the modern overvaluing of money, fame, material success, personality . . . and boundless sensuality.” Niemann linked the “materialism” of timbre to modern culture. Strauss’s “thematic invention is clearly tailored for the instruments that execute the theme and is born from their character and timbre.”63 The observation was new only in its cultural resonance. A decade earlier, for example, Oskar Bie made a plea, in his criticism of Strauss and his “modern” followers, that thematic invention emerge from the human spirit, not from the technical material.64 Other than to identify the phenomenon, how could a critic evaluate or even describe modern orchestration? Lush scoring, which offered sensuous stimuli unsupported by other parameters, became “deceptive.” The discussion drew from the old philosophical question, Did the outward form represent the idea truthfully? (Or, in the case of modern music, did orchestration realize the thematic invention truthfully?) To probe these questions, Max Graf quoted Vauvenargues’s Maximes in his review of Mahler’s Fifth: “Falsehood in art surprises and dazzles, but the truth in art persuades and teaches.”65 A more refined characterization was that orchestrally conceived events unsupported by parallel changes in the thematic writing or texture were “illusory.” When Adler spoke of the “enrapturing color” in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (Pathétique),

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Mahler dismissed the work “as shallow, outward, and terrifyingly homophonic”; its color had no more substance than a spinning top: “It is actually mere fibbing; sand in the eyes! When one looks closer at the thing, very little is there.”66 Theodor W. Adorno would make the same point about Wagner (his “tendency toward over-orchestration” amounts to “a tendency to represent events as more than they musically are”).67 Mahler deliberately sought an effect of alienation and otherworldliness in his own Sixth Symphony, rejecting the lyricism and sensuality that overrode much of the Fifth Symphony. Most critics failed to notice this conscious invocation of modernist aesthetics. “Mahler is certainly a great colorist,” Leopold Schmidt conceded, “but the excessive timbral effects makes the intensifications often seem illusory.” Kalbeck concurred, condemning “the squandering of instrumental means, some of which are disproportional to his powers of thematic invention and the skill of the thematic development, and some of which made the conception and execution of an organized plan utterly illusory.” Yet he acknowledged the creative potential in orchestration, writing that Mahler “aspired to render the fantastical perceptible through infinitely refined timbral connections.” If debates over the fictive effect of scoring, predictably, filled the liberal press, accusations of utter falsity appeared in the anti-Semitic press. Muntz wrote that the relationship of the thematic material to the excessively refined orchestration and grandiose formal construction in the Sixth defied any element of “inner logic and truth.”68 For hostile critics, Mahler’s virtuosic orchestration displayed the practical skills of a composer who was chiefly a conductor and could therefore grasp the full potential of individual instruments and had immediate contact with the repertoire—thus technique more than creativity. Hirschfeld censured Mahler for exploiting his conducting experience when composing: “The impotence in invention is brilliantly orchestrated; the inability to shape is always interestingly orchestrated.”69 Mahler’s prolific output was likewise held against him. His symphonies were “coldly produced,” wrote Max Vancsa, a Lower Austrian bureaucrat and critic. To complete one symphony each concert season, in the midst of his “grueling profession” as a conductor, degraded the art form. “If one removes the gigantic apparatus” of the orchestra, the Sixth Symphony would have no tragic character whatsoever and a “minimum of invention.”70 Hans Liebstöckl, the critic who participated in the riot at the premiere of Schoenberg Second String Quartet and, more than any other, rankled the composer, assailed Mahler’s productivity in completing a

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new symphony even before the previous one had seen the light of day. “Krupp makes cannons, Mahler only symphonies,” he remarked about the Sixth Symphony, which had its premiere in Essen, also Krupp’s headquarters. The work failed on account of its themes, “which all have a fabricated face, behind which lies a machine. They have no life of their own; they fall down if one loosens them from the orchestral context.”71 Beethoven served as touchstone. The professorial Richard Wallaschek reported that while the older master devoted two hours to conceiving the main theme for the finale of the Eroica—a claim unsubstantiated in modern scholarship—Mahler blithely proceeded from vapid themes to studied orchestration in his Fifth Symphony.72 As mere technique, orchestration was subordinate to other facets of music. Schmidt conceded Mahler’s technical mastery but urged readers to understand that “mastery” more broadly, as tradition (die Alten) had stipulated. With Beethoven, mastery had included “the power to exercise moderation, establish symmetrical proportions, and distinguish the important from the unimportant”—whereas Mahler’s Sixth suffered from “hypertrophy, always reworking and never withholding a single idea or combination” that occurred to him.73 Others found more distinguished sources. “Technique without taste is the most feared enemy of art,” Graf quoted from Goethe in his review of the Fifth Symphony.74 Niemann found justification in Goethe for his wider cultural criticism of modern music: “It is always a sign that an age is unproductive when it becomes so involved with the details of technique, and so too is it a sign of an unproductive individual.” Strauss and his young protégés, according to Niemann, acquired proficiency in scoring—the “techniques of their art”—before developing their “inner musical personality.”75 Salient percussion, as in Mahler’s Sixth, agitated even liberal critics who might have been expected to react favorably. Music was distinguishable from noise by virtue of its organization into pitch, Kalbeck explained. Mahler’s ambition in scoring for enlarged symphonic forces effectively reduced the “orchestral poet” to the “prosaic noise-maker.”76 A curse of the metropolis, noise had no place on the stage of the concert hall. The hammer and deafening percussion led some to dismiss the Sixth as an occasion piece for industrial Essen. “Krupp Symphony” and “Essen Ironworks Symphony” were among its early epithets.77 Nothing in the composer’s communications, or from those close to him, suggests an effort to represent urban life. If Alma Mahler is to be believed, the hammer signified the blows of fate and destruction, and given Mahler’s

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markedly old-fashioned taste in literature and the arts, there is no reason to suspect otherwise. His advocates, true to form, historicized the use of percussion. In good Wagnerian tradition, Albert Kauders heard a “hammering and rattling at a blacksmiths’ forge.”78 German critics, including those from the industrial center of Berlin, with its multiple orchestras and great wealth, alluded to the expense of the scoring. The Fifth Symphony ran amok because of the disproportion between the “thematic invention” and the “material sonic forces,” the Berlin piano teacher Ernst Eduard Taubert explained. His objections intensified with the Sixth Symphony: “To me, this music sounded utterly boundless in its form and in the expenditure of material sonic forces.” Sensible men shook their graying heads in confusion, Taubert reported (himself included, at age sixty-four), whereas “the young ladies broke out in enthusiastic applause,” since, of course, he added sarcastically, “they had understood the complicated construction.”79 Schmidt, a man of conservative taste despite his employment at the leading liberal newspaper in Berlin, feigned open-mindedness. Even if one could aesthetically justify Mahler’s “immoderation” in form and “expenditure of means” for his Sixth Symphony, its power of invention was deficient.80 Outside Berlin, critics winced at the costs involved. Strasbourg, despite its modest population size, managed to program the Fifth Symphony but none thereafter—perhaps thanks to Gustav Altmann’s negative review. Altmann was, however, called to Essen to review the premiere of the Sixth. “The frightening expenditure of means” in the finale reminded him of America, with its promise of “unlimited possibilities.”81 Any concession of Mahler’s skill brought with it a sweeping condemnation. This “ultra-modern symphonist,” the Musikalisches Wochenblatt reported, “is one of our most important orchestra technicians, a colorist of the first order, who handles modern expressive means with astounding refinement.” But the disproportion between the “gigantic expenditure of means,” and the inner content made, was “degenerate”—to the point that normal and healthy humans must reject it.82 Whether it was due to the listener’s response or the score itself, Mahler’s orchestration came to epitomize the fevered pace of urban life. The “painterly” quality of the inner voices, the “graphic” and “realistic” quality of themes, and disjoined development in the Fourth Symphony made Kalbeck “restless and distracted.” A listener, he wrote, “wants to see what he hears, in order to grasp it.”83 That was in January 1902, before Mahler’s acrid encounter with anti-Semitism in the

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Philharmonic and well before mainstream critics resorted to antiSemitic rhetoric. Three years later, perhaps cognizant of these risks and as well the development within Mahler’s compositional language, Kalbeck defended the same qualities in the Fifth Symphony (discussed further below). Only Muntz, inexorable anti-Semite, found an “unbearable distractedness” in the Fifth Symphony and a “decadent individualism” lacking any true creativity. “Complicated and unnatural in mindset,” Mahler resorted to “gruesome instrumental colors and effects.”84 Cultural discourse, if partly to amuse and partly to censure, on the part of music critics, took on more significance as scholars and critics weighed in, examining society and culture with the very same tools. Metaphors, finally, could no longer simply be metaphors. Werner Sombart, one of Germany’s leading economists (later a Nazi sympathizer) attributed the rise of capitalism to the role of the Jews and the search for luxury. Writing in the journal he founded, Der Morgen, Sombart lamented the “restlessness, feverish activity and nervousness” of contemporary life, which he attributed to advertising.85 At the other end of the political spectrum was Hermann Muthesius, a liberal critic of architecture and urbanism who had spent several years in England, who was influenced by the arts and crafts movement. In his 1911 address to the newly formed Deutscher Werkbund (association of craftsmen), Muthesius deployed the very same terms: “The trend toward restlessness, nervousness, fleeting changes of mood that is peculiar to modern life has its impact on art as well . . . The ephemeral is incompatible with the inner essence of architecture, whose inherent qualities are steadiness, tranquility, and permanence.”86 The liberation of timbre both provoked and reflected a wider criticism of modernism, but in a world that could not sustain the challenge.

The Sensual and the Feminine Music was a favored theme for the unleashing of forbidden desires in fiction around 1900, from Ferdinand von Saar in Vienna to Kate Chopin in St. Louis to Leo Tolstoy in Moscow. Very often the provocation was Wagnerian musical drama, but even Beethoven’s compositions might erode traditional moral values to the point of promiscuity or violence, as Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” adduced (narrated secondhand in order to give credence to the bizarre tale of murder). The immediacy of the art form had perhaps always been a problem, whether for the uprighteous

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or the uptight. Piquant harmonies begat culinary imagery late in the eighteenth century and erotic metaphors early in the nineteenth. Thereafter, the systematization of tonality and the proliferation of harmony textbooks served to normalize dissonance. Unusual harmonies meant a rule had been broken—so the pleasure was explicable and controllable. Hanslick, writing in the mid-nineteenth-century, was perturbed by the physicality of rhythm, but he blamed the problem on dance, not the art form of music, which had to rely on rhythm.87 Musicians would attribute a physical response to specific elements, thereby protecting their art from a wholesale attack by outsiders. This phenomenon became common in the later nineteenth century, at a time when music symbolized physicality in art, whether for Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, or Henri Laujol (the sagacious literary critic who was widely translated into German). Above all music critics wished to safeguard the symphony, the most public genre and that closest to the German tradition. Pleasure was never in itself valued in bourgeois society, but prior to 1900 sensuous response in musical listening, if not embraced, was no cause for alarm. At the premiere of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in 1886, the leading Viennese newspaper reported that the “remarkable perfume” and “somewhat strangely seasoned harmonic language” of the Andante enchanted many listeners, distracting from any pure and monumental effect (Wirkung).88 Yet about twenty years later, the essayist Karl Hauer lamented the “narcotizing” effect of modern art on the senses, singling out Strauss’s symphonic poems. The venue—Karl Kraus’s satirical Die Fackel—was, admittedly, far from the seeming objectivity of a large urban newspaper, and the contributor was known for his writings on morality, culture, and eroticism. The same people who with such pleasure and petulance complain that the noise of a metropolis is unbearable, Hauer quipped, “experience the continuous and penetrating noise of a symphony by Richard Strauss as a licentious tickling of the nerves.” Like Nordau, Hauer predicted that a “total deadening of all senses” would result in a taste for the “overseasoned” in art and in life: “meals that sting the palate, drinks that quickly intoxicate, music that whips the nerves, readings that excite, the exotic and half pathological in the visual arts,” and so on. In “physiological” terms, Hauer concluded, “nervousness becomes Neurasthenie (depression), and Neurasthenie becomes neurosis.”89 Under the old “aesthetics of feeling” (Gefühlsästhetik), the listener yielded to the emotions expressed in the music. But the new, radical no-

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tion of a self constituted by the senses, and not by rationality, made physicality (and with it timbre) constitutive of the human condition, rather than a degradation thereof.90 Conservatives rejected this conception of life and art, not least because physicality, which resulted from stimulation, barred any stable state. Physiology, it was commonly thought, stipulated that increasing doses of stimulation were required over time to achieve the same effect. This model was mapped onto music history to account for why composers used more dissonance and stronger timbral color over time. The degree and kind of innovations in orchestration increased, much as the abuse of drugs or alcohol led to intensified need. (Nietzsche had made the same case when he turned against Wagner in 1888: the composer’s music drama reflected the medical condition of hysteria, including “convulsive affect” and an “overexcited sensibility,” leading audiences to develop a taste for “ever stronger spices.”)91 The conceptual bedfellow of sensuality was literary decadence, a style recognizable for attention to the momentary effect and detail at the expense of a unified whole, sensual surface at the expense of logical structure, and intense emotion at the expense of spiritual transcendence. Nietzsche compared Wagner to French literature: “How is literary decadence recognized? In that life no longer dwells in the whole.” Paraphrasing from a recent essay on Baudelaire by Paul Bourget, he continued: The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. This is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disintegration of the will, “freedom of individual,” to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.92

One way to curtail musical sensuality was to reduce it to a female affliction, so that an insurmountable aesthetic and stylistic problem became a more manageable social problem. For Nordau, the female delight in art symbolized the degraded sensibilities of the modern age: “Our understanding of the beautiful in art expresses itself for the most part only in the idiotic shrieks of ‘How charming!’ and ‘How delightful’

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in shrill tones and with upturned eyes by our well-bred daughters at the sight of a cute, shaved poodle.”93 In literature and criticism, women had long been yoked to physicality, and musical listening was no exception. When Hanslick glanced around the opera house, he noticed “ladies involuntarily swaying their heads to any lively, fetching tune” and felt certain that his readers had witnessed the same. The emotionalism of women, in Hanslick’s estimation, suppressed the intellectual and spiritual powers required to compose professionally.94 Even if there was, as a result of socialization, a difference in receptivity to musical sensuousness on the part of women, their experiences could show the utmost refinement. The erudite Kate Chopin (who could have encountered Hanslick in English translation) shunned the conceit of the undisciplined female listener in her novel about the nature of sensuality, The Awakening (1899). While listening to the piano, Edna Pontellier visualizes “a demure lady stroking a cat”—a respectable sublimation.95 The few accounts of Mahler’s female listeners, circa 1900, indicate a degree of comfort with physicality that is entirely absent in their male counterparts. The composer’s friend Ida Dehmel (wife of the poet Richard) initially could not comprehend the course of the finale in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which she heard in rehearsal. But on second hearing, precisely this movement, she said, “engaged me so passionately that I positively drank in every note.”96 Bienenfeld’s very physical memory of the Andante amoroso of the Seventh Symphony was marked by gentility and control: “Above the plucked sonorities of a mandolin a longing melody sways softly and tenderly, as if a loving hand stroked one’s forehead”—melodicism being a safe outlet for the sensuality of music. Bienenfeld also emphasized the influence of Mozart and suggested that this movement evokes a historical era more vividly than any other contemporary music.97 The years around 1900 witnessed a Mozart revival that promised to hold the fin de siècle at bay, with its relentless poeticizing and coloristic pursuit of the mere surface, to paraphrase the music history text at the Vienna Conservatory. Pure and beautiful, his music answered a “longing for ennobling and rejoicing pleasure and for the classical serenity of art.”98 The idea of redeeming Mahler through Mozart returned, ever so quaintly, even after World War I. At a time when the symphony was a closed tradition and the world had forever changed, not least in music, the seventeen-year-old Hans-Ferdinand Redlich felt cleansed by the finale of Mahler’s Seventh, which he compared to the finale of Mozart’s “Jupiter”

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Symphony, K. 551 for its “superior, eternal happiness, like a vision of a new classicism.” Its “drive into higher spheres” provided “a great conclusion” to the symphony, “truly the final pillar of a powerful building.” To paraphrase, the strict form of the finale’s jubilation allowed it decisively to overcome the metaphysical and Romantic intensification.99 Timbre not just symbolized sexuality but seemed to elicit some of the same sensations. The turning point of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, after which Gustav von Aschenbach succumbed to homoerotic desire, comes with his dream in timbre. It began with noises and sounds “sweetly, ominously interspersed and dominated by the deep cooing of wickedly persistent flutes, which charmed the bowels in a shamelessly penetrative manner.” Bacchantes wailed, “at once sweet and savage, like nothing ever heard before.” At the dream’s climax, “everything was pierced and dominated by the deep coaxing flute. He was fighting against this experience—did it not coax him too with its shameless penetration, into the feast and the excesses of the extreme sacrifice?”100 Possibly inspired by the effeminizing, piercing woodwind sonority of the Jews’ quintet in Salome, Mann extended a long tradition of hearing the gentle pull of sensuality in woodwind sonority, the timbre often associated with the human voice.101 The sensuality of sonority was most dramatically thematized in Der ferne Klang, Schreker’s first engagement with fin-de-siècle culture, begun immediately after leaving the conservatory in 1901. The composer’s dissolute lifestyle during the period of initial work on the opera fed into the narrative of the libretto, which he prepared himself. Sonority, a title role of sorts, functions within the plot and music as a modernized spiritual ideal driving the protagonist, Fritz. Music serves as catalyst at each point in the narrative. In act 1, Fritz abandons his beloved Grete in order to search for an alien and distant sound. In act 2, at the house of prostitution in Venice where Fritz rediscovers Grete, she promises herself as a prize to the most affective singer. Act 3 brings the premiere of Fritz’s opera The Harp, during which Grete learns of his fatal illness, and the opera closes as he dies in her arms. For all his daring, Schreker was also Viennese through and through. The sensual appeal of timbre was a lively topic in writings on music in the same city where Klimt and Hofmannsthal, Otto Weininger and Freud, Arthur Schnitzler and Egon Schiele explored the nature of sexuality. Stefan Zweig’s memories about his youth in Vienna lingered on the subject of sexuality, which for him symbolized the threat of anarchy in the empire’s capital.102

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Mahler’s symphonies offered a more traditional framework for modernism. Kalbeck, Viennese critic par excellence, championed the Fifth Symphony as the “most distinguished” among recent premieres—an allusion to Salome, staged two days before in Dresden. Perhaps further hinting at the title character, who strips down to bare flesh after tossing off each of her seven veils, Kalbeck praised Mahler’s “veiled” timbral colors. The symphony was not only a “turning point” for Mahler but offered hope for the future of music.103 Later reviewing the opera itself, Kalbeck warned that the “musical colors” that made Salome’s dance the high point of the opera were ephemeral and came at an “intellectual price.” Michelangelo’s poetic gloss on the Neoplatonic theory of anagogy concluded the review: “Rash and foolish minds derive / beauty (which moves every sound mind / and carries it to heaven) from the senses.”104 The genre of the symphony had to be protected from sexual innuendo at all costs. Even the well-worn tropes of a “masculine” first theme and “feminine” second theme deflected the content of music to the “erotic realm,” one commentator admonished.105 Masculine heroism and strength, long associated with the genre, were part and parcel of the legacy passed on from one great symphonist to the next. When he first encountered Brahms’s First, Hanslick heard an evocation of Beethoven’s “symphonic style” in the “boldness and originality of the modulations, the power of polyphonic shaping [Gestaltung], and above all the masculine, noble gravity of the whole.”106 But in the early twentieth century, the symphony’s gendered history went all but unacknowledged. Masculine tropes, when found at all, referred to the performance, not the music itself, with its intimations of idealism. Richard Specht—aware that Mahler, who was short and dark complexioned, faced feminizing anti-Semitic attacks—summoned the trope in defense in his biography of the living composer. Mahler’s music possessed a “powerful, pure masculinity”—although he hastened to add, a masculinity that “lacks all sultriness of the sexual.”107 By contrast, the more reverential book on Mahler’s music which Specht published in 1913, after the composer’s death, made no mention of masculinity. Gendered terms were rare and mainly limited to biography, where implicit comparison of the work and the man was acceptable. The silent masculinity of the genre was, however, threatened by the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony. An enlarged orchestra was amassed on stage while only the strings and harps played. In his study of Mahler’s “personality and works.” Stefan mentioned an “almost mollycoddled

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Adagietto, written for only strings and harps,” then quickly turned to discuss in greater detail the finale, whose force and energy he relished. (Toward its conclusion, Stefan heard “a development of the gigantic masses of the entire symphony.”)108 Even Mahler’s resolute supporter Ernst Otto Nodnagel felt unsettled by the Adagietto, which he found “indescribably pleasing but somewhat effeminate.” That the main theme was “simple, very loving, and almost too sweet” was all Nodnagel could say further, despite the eleven pages he devoted to his “technical analysis” of the symphony. (In response, Mahler apparently asked whether Nodnagel would advise cutting the movement. Initially Nodnagel shied away from advising the composer, but after hearing the work several times, he recommended cutting the movement in no uncertain terms.)109 In subverting symphonic tradition, and all its implied maleness, modern orchestration faced criticism as feminine accoutrements. The theory, again, came from Loos, who argued that the ornament was dangerous to the economic status of women. Women’s fashion, which appealed to an “unnatural sensuality,” perpetuated a lack of parity.110 Nor was this an exclusively Austrian phenomenon. Sombart registered concern about fashion as consumerism—the “intensive development of fashion in our time and the infusion of the entire social life of the present with fashion.” The phenomenon of clothing style became a model for consumer behavior in general.111 Superficial, yet of economic consequence, fashion and artificial femininity made for potent imagery, especially in Vienna. Hirschfeld set the terms in 1900, reviewing Mahler’s first symphonic effort. The timbral “clothing” was too large for the “ideas”; as a result, the symphony failed to “build” an organic form. In the opening movement, themes were not developed but “dismembered, undressed, shortened, and penetrated, shimmering in ever new colors.” There was “a continuing play of colors instead of a play of constructive forces.”112 Clothing metaphors allowed aesthetic conservatives to concede the appeal of orchestration without acknowledging its structural value. Gustav Schönaich, a Wagnerian éminence grise, was palpably troubled at enjoying the orchestration of the Fifth Symphony and railed against Mahler’s skill as a cover for creative impotence. Disguised in “the most modern garb, a streaming cloak that dazzles through the newest orchestral effects,” the themes “spare the public the shame of having to greet them like old acquaintances on Unter den Linden.”113 The Adagietto in particular, its bountiful thematic restatements expressing the subtle coloration of a string ensemble, prompted metaphors

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of clothing. Richard Robert dismissed it altogether as “‘impassioned salon music,” its main theme taken from “a well-known piano Romanza” by Anton Rubinstein—that in Ea major, from Soirées à Saint-Petersbourg, op. 44, dating from 1860 but included in several collections from the later nineteenth century. (The resemblance is vague, at best, and certainly does not constitute a quotation.) Attempts at rigorous aesthetic judgment, evaluating each parameter independently, spawned fantasies of denuding a symphony of its orchestration. “If one disrobes the symphony of its sparkling orchestral jewelry,” Robert continued, “nothing remains but a barren skeleton.” Resorting to anti-Semitic stereotypes, he concluded that however passionate and witty, Mahler remained “unproductive” and his music “bizarre, artificial, and overdone.” Its small virtues finally amount to nothing more than “pretty girls who walk through an overgrown park”—an allusion to Karl Immermann’s novel, where the Baron von Münchhausen’s eyes glow with bedevilment, penetrating beyond his glaze of inebriation “just as pretty girls walk through an abandoned park.”114 Kalbeck tried to tame the sarcastic repartee of his colleagues, bringing reason to the debates. Muntz, for example, recounted that in the scherzo, “waltz- and Ländler-motifs, robbed of their naïve innocence and cheekily made-up in modern orchestral colors, whirl around in a contrapuntal cancan which gravely runs amok, since a few coarse vaudeville elements join the bustle and threaten with a physical strife.” Kalbeck retorted that Viennese Ländler and waltz themes pay homage to the “symphonic” through the counterpoint yet without losing their “rosy-cheeked nature.”115 With the Sixth Symphony, Kalbeck—to whom Mahler had previously sent a piano arrangement so that he could prepare for reviewing a premiere—probed more deeply than his colleagues, regarding as how musical meaning depends on orchestration: “One may undress the work, removing its instrumental robes and the blood crimson of its billowing drapery, let it parade about in the bourgeois clothes of a piano arrangement, and convince oneself that it still narrates some interesting episodes from the travails of someone buffeted between different emotions. However, it no longer evokes the fear and sympathy of a hero’s fate, a hero who can symbolize humanity as it struggles, suffers and overcomes.”116 Mahler’s continued productivity and increased success incited stronger rebuttal, as the outsider threatened to become an insider. Writing in 1909, Hirschfeld conceded, “The longer we deal with Mahlerian

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symphonies . . . the more strongly we become attached to orchestral undressing and decorating, and to the cosmetics that give the meager motifs the appearance of meaning.” (In the First Symphony, as Hirschfeld had written years earlier, Mahler inserted eighth-note rests, like lipstick, to make the scherzo motif purse up and sound new.)117 The rhetoric of timbral clothing did not subside, even as Mahler’s music fell onto favorable ears. At a commemorative performance of the Fifth Symphony in 1911, the applause following individual movements intensified after the scherzo. The critic at the Reichspost, apparently concerned that the enthusiasm for Mahler exceeded that for Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, also on the program, suggested that after the Fifth symphony is stripped of its “entirely captivating orchestral apparatus,” the “purely musical kernel” would not be superior to the Mozart.118 To take demonstrable pleasure in Mahler’s music was contemptible, some argued. Muntz supposed that even if the audience for the Second Symphony, at the Vienna Philharmonic in April 1899 had been “almost entirely Jewish,” it could not have “sunk to such delight in lavishing praise” on the “banal” inner movements, with their purely outward effect and the usual “tickling of the ears.” An audience so “lazy” as to avoid Liszt, Bruckner, and Strauss was incapable of grasping any “musical core” in Mahler’s symphony. His indictment of the audience is unsurprising, since the performance occurred outside the Philharmonic subscription series, in an annual benefit concert for the musicians’ pension fund, which meant that the ticket-holders deliberately chose to hear the music, outside their regular subscription.119 A critique of sensuality that maligned one group of listeners, such as Jews, women, or youths, might serve to reestablish an elite public (ominously, one based on ethnicity, not education) in a new era when musical training no longer served to maintain the barriers to joining an earlier cultivated bourgeoisie. German critics were more inhibited in reporting the appeal of orchestration. If at all, they spoke of the enjoyment others experienced. Mahler’s astonishing compositional “virtuosity” appealed to listeners “greedy for sensations,” the Cologne critic Paul Hiller wrote after the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. Virtuosity was a concept alien to the symphony going back to eighteenth-century programming practices, when a concerto served to display technical proficiency, while a symphony required the audience to concentrate on the composition itself.120 The symphony remained a genre about profound heroism, not virtuosity.

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For Hiller, Mahler’s musical ideas did not emanate from “deep, inner feelings”; if witty, the music was also unconvincing and, finally, “alienating and repulsive.”121 Even the composer’s German enthusiasts had difficulty articulating their response to the orchestration of the Sixth Symphony. Otto Neitzel, a music professor in Cologne, began with a litany of the new instruments and sonorities, poking fun at the extreme reactions of his colleagues. Thus the sound of a whip striking the timpani rim, in the finale, “gives the impression of a sheet-covered phantom that performs a salto mortale in our bedroom”—a bizarre image left unexplained. To probe more deeply, however, Neitzel spoke through the mouthpiece of an anonymous listener, who complained of “a hypertrophy of timbral expression in the finale.” Neitzel concurred with this description of “an unspeakably painful struggle, whipped by longing.” Playing off the tragic character of the symphony (which nine months later, at its Viennese premiere, would be entitled the “Tragic Symphony”), Neitzel ventured to add only that the “tragic character” of the symphony derives from the fact that “this struggle leaves one unsatisfied, because the longing remains unresolved.”122 This was, put simply, the dilemma raised by modern orchestration. The feelings and sensation evoked by timbre not only remained unresolved but could not even be acknowledged, since they risked undermining not just a musical culture but with it a safely male and bourgeois world view. Eventually the sensuality of timbre became a conversation piece more than real concern, of a piece with armchair cultural studies. Niemann saw Mahler’s “love for beautiful sonority” as a “healthy artistic sensuality” and specifically Austrian. But elsewhere, hewing to north German values, Niemann criticized modernism for its lack of discipline—in instrumentation, breadth of form, emotional expression—which resulted from a spiritual and musical immaturity.123

In Defense of Musical Pleasure The Viennese premieres of Mahler’s symphonies became highly charged public events, to the dismay of some. There was cheering (or shouting, depending on the witness) after the Viennese premiere of the Sixth Symphony, but Muntz attributed the enthusiasm to over-excited fifteen-yearolds and “a mass of dandies with perverse taste,” who welcomed it as “a music of the future.”124 Critics at liberal newspapers sought to defuse the cultural problems posed by modern music. Idioms like saying that one

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was “captivated by” or “forced to admire” the orchestration hinted at a passivity—an inability to quantify or conceptualize timbre in the ways one could pitch, rhythm, and form—but, more importantly, dispelled any guilt over the pleasure taken in orchestration. Any praise of orchestration inevitably alluded to the composer’s control or mastery, again assuring that the potential for excess was held in check. Its “excessive” and “hot-tempered” orchestration notwithstanding, Mahler’s Fifth concludes with “one of the most beautiful symphonic movements known in the repertoire,” Kauders reflected, citing its “abundance of ideas, enrapturing temperament, and compositional mastery.”125 Aglow with civic pride at the world premiere of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony in his own Prague, the liberal critic Ernst Rychnovsky concluded that the “sovereign master” of the orchestra had produced instrumentation “of the greatest splendor”: “Endlessly captivated by subtle details of sonority, we are continually forced to admire the coloring [Koloristik] of the modern orchestra.”126 By this point, 1908, Mahler was no longer the miscreant of modernism. If he had drawn increasingly on conventions and tradition since 1900, the barometer for the avant-garde had also changed, especially in response to Salome and Schoenberg. And, after its premiere in January 1909, Elektra became the apostate of modern music, according to Bekker, who cited its orchestration.127 Open-minded commentators escaped from the entrenched opposition of logic and sensuality by reporting a magical effect, as a realm independent of the human spheres of mind and body. The “unusual” and “eerie effect” in the funeral march of Mahler’s First Symphony, Bauer-Lecher explained, was achieved though intensive work scoring the canon. The instruments sounded “disguised and masked,” proceeding “in strange shapes.” The result was “muted and subdued, like passing shadows.”128 Orchestration might also be defended for its vibrancy and vitality—a heightened sense of consciousness, which, again, was not explicitly sensual. Korngold felt alienated by the opening movement of the Third Symphony—its “ruthless grip on material” was “frightening” and “antithetical to art music.” Resorting to metaphor, he likened the hustlebustle of the development section to the Prater, the celebrated Viennese fairground.129 (Strauss, consummately bourgeois, apparently conducted the movement best when he envisioned May Day at the Prater overflowing with parading workers.)130 At another performance of the Third some years later, Korngold recalled his sense of alienation, but at this point, in 1911, he appreciated how scoring rendered modernism

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more accessible. The “glowing vitality” of the orchestration could make even the “brutal realism” of a street song sound in the opening movement sound “enrapturing.”131 Musical pleasure gained a certain dignity by comparison to canonic repertoire. Korngold reported a “singular inebriation of joy” in the finale of Mahler’s Seventh akin to that in Wagner’s Meistersinger, Handel, and religious music generally.132 Pleasure could also be legitimized, if with some ambivalence, by analogy to Greek antiquity. The political and aesthetic meaning of Hellenism had changed radically since the eighteenth century, as Winckelmann’s edle Einfalt, stille Größe (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) gave way to Nietzsche’s Dionysian fervor.133 The profundity of Greek mythology for Freud and Klimt only helped. But the most exuberant of Beethoven’s symphony finales, the Seventh, had its own Hellenist legacy, dating back to the nineteenth century and codified by an allegory in A. B. Marx’s seminal study of Beethoven from 1860. Twenty years later, at the end of his life, Wagner mused on the Dionysian character of this movement as he pondered composing a symphony.134 Mahler, for his part, invoked Pan and Dionysus to explain that the central issue in his music (“the symphonic problem”) was not how to represent a program but how to convey pure musical strength.135 Elsewhere, he commented that in the opening movement of the First Symphony, a listener should be “swept away by a dionysian mood of jubilation.”136 This curious instruction—at least as applied to the entire movement, not just its conclusion—is nowhere borne out in the contemporary reception and possibly shows the composer reacting to the stringent expectations of a symphony’s first movement. Even if the movement sprang forth from the folklike Songs of a Wayfarer, and perhaps the most quaint song in the cycle, Mahler wished to ensure a historically appropriate and, above all, strong reaction to the movement. Ancient Greek rhetoric was most potent in Vienna, giving liberals license to parody Mahler fans without crossing the bounds of decency. The failings or excesses of a remote, ancient culture, after all, were better than the “feminine” or “Jewish” critique leveled by conservatives. After the Vienna premiere of the Fifth Symphony, Graf regretted the “deafening, Bacchanalian rejoicing that surrounds Mahler nowadays.”137 (Richard Strauss was not immune from such attacks. August Püringer, by no means a liberal, reviled the composer of Salome as “the Dionysus of our time, degenerated into Bacchus through the rush of pleasure of misdirected bliss.”)138 Hirschfeld later developed the

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metaphor, exasperated when Mahler’s symphonies were performed twice in one week and not even on a program planned and conducted by the composer. A Mahler symphony, he lamented, served the same purpose as festivals for the ancient Greeks, releasing the explosive energy pent up in listeners whose days were devoted to subdued bourgeois professions. Mahler’s supporters “ranted like rejoicing bacchantes and maenads.” Once the epitome of bourgeois respectability, the concert hall, in Hirschfeld’s view, degenerated into an orgiastic arena.139 Aesthetic progressives aspired to tame the Greek rhetoric. Felix Adler preferred the less common term dithyramb (an ecstatic choral chant of irregular form) to the morally suspect Dionysian, with its presumed lack of control. He cited “an unprecedented dithyrambian energy” in the finale of Mahler’s Seventh. The consequences, moreover, were purely musical and could therefore not be denigrated: “in its exuberance, the movement confronts the most difficult compositional problems. Mahler plays catch with his motives, one of which is a genuine Carinthian Ländler evoking the most jolly gaiety of the ‘onestep’” [Schieber—a pun for profiteer].”140 Greek imagery followed the same cycle of usage as other forms of cultural discourse: from philosophers, who impart validity to a concept or trope, to arts, inspired by it, to liberal commentators who embrace innovation, to conservatives who intensify and ironize the metaphors, until the trope dissolves into general usage, all but stripped of its original meaning and charge. After the heat of the fin de siècle, Nietzsche became a household name, and with it Greek culture. An elementary introduction to Beethoven’s symphonies nodded at the legacy of Greek metaphors, at least for the finale of the Seventh Symphony, but wove a parable in which women seek to tame wild and intoxicated men.141

Symphonic Redemption Sensuality was not, finally, proscribed from high art, at least not by liberal commentators. But it had to be sublimated. An artist should develop a path from eros to intellectual and spiritual beauty—as Thomas Mann formulated the purpose of art in his sketches for Death in Venice.142 The symphony first and foremost could inculcate this progression. Mahler’s Fifth charts a course from tragedy to sensuality to transcendent joy—a consummately fin-de-siècle variation of the Beethovenian per aspera ad astra. After the bleak funeral march and the horror of the second move-

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ment, Kalbeck heard attempts at consolation: in vain, through sensuous pleasure (Sinnenlust) in the scherzo, and then successfully, through spiritual love in the Adagietto. Without this “liberating and purifying experience,” the finale “would not be possible, would not possess deep justification and would not speak the convincing truths that reside in it.” Kalbeck compared the Adagietto’s “gentle and persuasive” melody to a wife assuaging any longings.143 His purpose was not to listen programmatically, imagining a story in tandem with the music. Rather, mere wisps of a narrative linked to conjugal love—conveyed the processes and events that defied standard compositional practices. (Lacking any such unifying love, Salome failed, in Kalbeck’s view, but not because the story repelled him.)144 Muntz seemed to poke fun at Kalbeck’s faulty logic. Art should instruct better, Muntz suggested, than by encouraging a development from orgiastic physicality in the scherzo to amor (thus an idealized love) in the Adagietto. The appropriate progression, Muntz reminded his conservative readers, was from a blossoming of love into physical intimacy.145 (Tannhäuser too fell into bad straits by telling Walther the same truth, which cultivated liberals at that time found unsettling.) The unabashed pleasure of the Adagietto gnawed at listeners who did not interpret the movement within a larger trajectory. The movement is built on repetition at all levels, basking in the pleasure of its sonority. The melody in the A section of the A-B-A form contains internal rhythmic repetition that has a gentle forward pull, and the entire melody, first heard in the first violins, recurs, warmly elongated, in the first cellos. The music does not progress, as it were, but circles back to an eternal moment in time. (The Adagietto runs some seven times through Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, its tender scoring and ambrosial lyricism capturing the refined homoeroticism amplified in the film version of the Mann novella.) Discomfort at pure sonority, without the discipline imposed by the full spectrum of orchestral timbres or the discipline of an inexorable course through time, led critics to personify the musical procedures. The sensuality, arguably, was no longer their own but belonged to the characters imagined. Korngold heard the harp and strings “busying themselves with the melody, which revels too much in mellifluous sonority” (Wohlklang). But he also saw artistic merit, suggesting that the sentimentality was ironic. The movement would be a reverie, he explained, were it not for the “longing Tristan seventh chord—which itself has become a little bourgeois nowadays.”146

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Perhaps the most striking orchestration in the Fifth Symphony is the juxtaposition of dark perambulation closing the second movement to the brilliance and joie de vivre opening the scherzo. It was impossible to project a single protagonist, heroic or not, across so radical a contrast. One commentator at the premiere heard the symphonic subject torn from his “mute pain” and swept up in a “tempestuous vortex” leading into a “Bacchanalian dance.”147 Kalbeck, however, argued that the orchestration at this juncture invigorates the listener. To explain the effect, he wove an allegory around a string of physical experiences. A mourner, secluded from the world in his dark home, gently dries his tears and steps outside; blinded by the morning sunshine, he finds the fresh air intoxicating and sways as “the fullness of life” floods in.148 This was not unlike Mahler’s own account of planning the work. If to some critics the scherzo would be his most sensuous music, combining dance rhythm with glowing orchestration, Mahler meant to write music at its most vibrant: “It is simply the expression of unprecedented strength. It is a human being in the full light of day, at the prime of his life.”149 Symphonic convention since Haydn and Mozart permitted exuberance in a finale, whether as a raucous dance or rousing melody. All this changed when the genre accrued philosophical aspirations and bourgeois pretensions, with strictures against pleasure for its own sake. The finale then served to reward the listener who had concentrated through the rest of the symphony. A monumental finale or athletic closure was the perfect antidote to any “nerve stimulation” in earlier movements. Musical redemption had its most steadfast proponent in Wagner, whose operatic mission was to succeed Beethoven and especially the Ninth Symphony, in which “the master . . . casts himself into the arms of the poet to perform the act of procreating the true, infallibly real, and redemptive melody.”150 True to his intentions, Wagner pursued a redemptive narrative across his oeuvre, from the early operas to Parsifal. Mahler resorted to the same rhetorical strategy, if not to explicitly religious redemption, to defend the finale of his First Symphony against Richard Strauss’s apparent objection to the length of the chorale. Deploying the traditional vocabulary of the nineteenth-century symphony—heroism and struggle leading to victory—Mahler, however, felt unsure of the word “victory,” placing it in quotation marks. A redemption in all but the word, a “true victory” would have to follow a “breakdown that reaches to the essence,” and, like an act of faith, “victory is furthest from the protagonist just when he believes it to be closest . . . This is the

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nature of every spiritual struggle.”151 The Second Symphony, which brought the composer much satisfaction and success, saw the formalization of a redemptive finale. The closing Adagio of the Third, and more explicitly the vocal finale of the Fourth, with images of celestial pleasure, only continued the tradition. A redemption framework gave the composer more license in expression, if only because absolution follows. Richard Batka heard in the finale of the Fifth “a calm, holy feeling of almost religious enrapturing [that] sweeps away all people.” This allowed him to dissent from judgments, as he reported them, that the Adagietto was effeminate and “almost too sweet” or that the finale unleashed “sensual passion.” There was a purpose to the “psychological development” across the symphony, he insisted: “The Adagietto brings about a catharsis!” The silencing of all instruments but the strings and harp offers a “sweet freedom.” Thereafter, the finale can “proceed afresh into life!”152 Mahler learned from his success, completing the Seventh Symphony a year after the premiere of the Fifth (which had subsequent performances, over the course of that year, in Hamburg and Strasbourg). A slow movement had to contribute to a redemptive process, rather than merely interrupt the heroic narrative for pleasure for its own sake. The second “Night Music” of the Seventh had a programmatic title, Andante amoroso, that gave direction to the listener, who might otherwise bask in its sprawling, repetitive form. (Its lulling ritornello is heard six times.) Its harmonic innovations, exulting in rich sonorities, became unbearable when the movement was performed apart from the rest of the symphony, in a “society concert” in Berlin, 1910. “It is overly sensitive, decadent music that strains the musically attentive listener with its complicated harmonies (or rather, disharmonies) and contrapuntal combinations in such an unusual manner that we do not believe ourselves capable of taking in an entire symphony,” reported one reviewer.153 Such objections never surfaced when the Andante amoroso was part of a narrative course, from the opening heroic struggle, through the “night pieces” of the two ensuing movements, and to the Dionysian celebration of “day” in the finale. Likewise, the finale’s remote tonal regions and “vagrant” harmonies, breathtaking to the analyst today, did not perturb contemporaries, who appreciated the music’s energy and drive. The goal-directedness of a symphony finale allows for pleasure without the risk of passive listening. Hanslick had sought to banish such “unmotivated, empty feelings . . . unworthy of the human mind”—

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nullifying the oldest complaint that music “unnerves [entnerven] and effeminates.”154 For Nordau, a lack of direction was the very problem besetting fin-de-siècle music. It “must continually promise but never fulfill.” Nordau knew little about music, or any arts for that matter, but analogies served him well: “The listener seeks Tantalan moods in the concert hall and leaves it with the profound nervous exhaustion of a pair of young lovers who for hours at the nightly tryst sought to fondle each other through a narrowly grated window.”155 To defend Mahler against such charges, Kalbeck construed the scherzo of the Fifth as emanating from a more dignified Faustian “disquiet and inexhaustible will.”156 Its curative effect came as well from the rigor in its form. “All kinds of musically strict forms are called into use in order to show how man can overcome his anguish,” a local Cologne critic explained. To make narrative sense of the movement, the critic suggested that in this movement, the symphonic hero is comforted, stretches out his arms, and “gives free rein to a strengthened, creative pleasure.”157 Closure was so tangible a musical experience that no reviewer failed to mention it, and typically, with Mahler, in unabashed praise. The finale of the Fifth was the “most perfect” of all the composer’s symphony movements, Kalbeck averred. It was the crown of the work, and the coda a “heaven-rejoicing” means of closing the whole. Greater familiarity extended the perception of closure, so that the entire finale and not only the coda or concluding section conveyed the sense of an ending. At the Vienna premiere, Kalbeck observed that the “streaming” trombones in the coda “fulfill the promise of the first movement” (alluding to the return of the first movement’s culmination toward the end of the work). Some years later, reviewing the work again, Kalbeck heard the entire finale—not, as before, the coda—fulfilling the “joyous promise” made in the opening movement. The “propulsive” character and rich fugal writing brought closure to the whole.158 Pleasure served an ethical and political cause through the notion of a “joy in work” (Arbeitslust), a slogan for the unification of artists and labor reformers. The fugal subject in the finale of the Fifth, unusually, contains thematic work within itself, and visions of labor abounded in the early reviews. The city that premiered the work, Cologne, was a center for research into the science and reform of labor, and Neitzel, reviewing for the local paper, was eager to report that “a cheerful joy in work prevails over the whole.”159 Muntz, in Vienna, the center of socialist developments, heard the finale poking fun at the problems of the

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working class (or “simple people”). In a “glorification of symphonic anarchy,” small ideas fight fiercely, shattering symphonic forms, and motifs from a popular song try to master the situation, organizing “noisy demonstrations,” until, bringing an end to the battle, the heavy brass “advance against them.”160 A bourgeois variant of redemption, often thematized by reviewers, was the Christian notion of pleasure as a reward for labor. Batka heard the “victory chorale” from the second movement of the Fifth, which returns in the finale as a biblical reward (“the crown of life”) as a Faustian figure who is “busily creating.” Thus, Mahler brings “a resolution to the always trying and striving.” The ebullience of the double fugue, moreover, reminded him of “people happily at work.”161 Striving was thematized in nineteenth-century German art and culture, especially in the symphony. The power to engage in worthy struggle and to create one’s own destiny was celebrated over and over again in literature and art. “Whoever strives can be saved,” the angels declare when Gretchen dies, confirming what Faust, the quintessential German literary hero, declares (a theme Schumann highlighted in his rendition): “To be worthy of freedom one must conquer it daily.” Each of Mahler’s symphonies “strives after that which is immeasurable and has its gigantic arms stretched into the distance toward the ultimate matters of existence,” Bienenfeld mused. The context was a review of the Seventh Symphony. She found the finale an “orgiastic victory song” yet, perhaps to compensate for the sensual intimations, emphasized the emotional demands on the listener. “Whoever wants to conquer the world in such glowing, laughing high spirits,” she warned, “must find the energy to overcome their deep pain and passions.”162 Much in the spirit of Halm’s theory of energetics, some commentators likened the verve of the rhythmic and fugal activity in the finale of the Fifth to human consciousness. Arthur Eccarius-Sieber heard the finale “breathing exuberance and vigor [Tatkraft] and representing the victory of the inexhaustible activity of mankind over the misery of existence on earth.”163 Kalbeck, perhaps unconsciously interpreting the music along the same lines, remembered themes that repeat and intensify, “breathing a renewed vital energy [Lebenskraft]”164 Metaphors of breathing captured a vitality without hinting at sensuality. Right-wing critics all but denied that a Jewish composer could represent a German work ethic, much less have access to symphonic redemption. Paul Ehlers, later an ideologue in Hitler’s Germany, invoked Faust to rebuke Mahler’s cul-

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tural aspirations. Quoting Goethe’s promise of salvation to the striving hero, Ehlers doubted, in his review of the Seventh Symphony, whether Mahler would “finally be redeemed in heaven.”165 Since closure was largely a material determination—an increase in volume, number of voices, instrumentation, and rhythmic intensity— architectural imagery served to elevate the process. The cornice was a double metaphor—an architectural peak and literally a crowning (Krönung). By shunning any program, Korngold believed, the last movement of the Third Symphony provided an effective “intensification and culmination” and “imposing cornice.”166 The finale of the Seventh Symphony, according to the Prague critic Victor Joß, had “a rare dithyrambic verve. An ecstatic hymn to the rejoicing of life and the joy of existence, it provides a magnificent cornice to the . . . colossal structure.” The momentum was so great that the first movement, in comparison, was insufficiently directed and to Joß sounded like a mere introduction.167 The scherzo fared no better. Wallaschek heard constant interruptions and “countless undeveloped motifs, like fleeting aphorisms, [that] always promise but never fulfill.”168 Nordau’s Tantalus, if banished from a symphony finale, gnawed at listeners in other movements. The debates over timbre, along with the underlying anxiety about the modernism it represented, disappeared after World War I. Call it postwar retrenchment, a well-worn theme in music historiography; the change affected more than compositional aesthetics, but also how music was heard and judged. Bekker and Schoenberg are perhaps the most salient cases of the changing views toward timbre after the war. Both were fascinated by the sensuous power of instrumental color in the years before 1914, looking to sonority as a liberating force and a font of vitality. “Inexhaustible, brilliant, and intoxicating color” was how Bekker summed up Strauss’s orchestration.169 Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony (1911), which espoused craftsmanship over theory, concluded with a provocation on the subject of timbre: “Who dares here ask for a theory!” He discredited the idea that timbre was merely sensuous and therefore required less intellectual engagement of composer and listener: “I firmly believe that it is capable of intensifying in an unprecedented manner the sensuous, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures offered by art. To understand music that is primarily timbral would require “acute senses” and a “highly developed spirit.”170 Later, after the war, Bekker’s monograph on Mahler’s symphonies

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disallowed any sensual pleasure in sonority. While the New German School was marred by a “wallowing in color,” with Mahler, “contour” is decisive. He “treats all color with an almost contemptuous asperity and ruthlessness.” Bekker perhaps hope that Mahler, at least in this regard, would depoliticize music in the wake of Beethoven. His conception of the orchestra “is no republic [like Beethoven’s], aggregate, or organized plurality that a superimposed Will forms into a unity.” Rather, it was a “unity by nature . . . a sounding cosmos in which countless vital impulses unfold, surge, and overlap, yet each one always only drawing strength and life from the manifestation of the whole.”171 Bekker was at this point a seasoned professional, age forty, not a zealous young critic. A similar fading of youthful exuberance is borne out in Adorno (an admirer of Bekker, for all their differences). As a brash critic in his mid thirties—Adorno insisted on total freedom in orchestration: “It has not been possible to devise a canonic theory of orchestration to match the theory of harmony and counterpoint . . . There is no rule governing the choice of color; it can prove itself only in terms of the concrete requirements for the specific context.”172 Although orchestration was more important to Mahler than to Wagner in their compositional aesthetics as well as in their reception, one would never suspect as much from Adorno’s writings. His critique of Wagner devotes a chapter to timbre (rendered as “color” in the elegant English translation), whereas his comments on Mahler’s orchestration were interspersed into analytic discussion under other rubrics. Nor do the reputed stylistic and ideological differences between Wagner and Mahler hold: Adorno’s criticism that Wagner hides the sound source, as part of the illusion on which the drama and musical creation rest, applies just as well to Mahler. Political context, however, helps account for Adorno’s differential treatment of the two composers: he wrote on the German master in the Third Reich and on the Jewish composer in 1960, at a time when the latter was largely ignored as an artifact of Romantic excess.173 Still, tonal color had lost its disturbing salience. Schoenberg was not immune to the effects of age and maturation on aesthetic thinking, and he, too, eventually came to reject the “individuality” of instruments in modern orchestration—his words, if not aesthetic framework, overturning the lyrical proclamations that concluded his Theory of Harmony. Schoenberg’s venue was more private: a handwritten essay in 1931 on instrumentation, which he opted not to publish. Timbre, he now believed, “serves to underline the clarity of the parts, by making it easier for them to stand out from one another.”

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Otherwise, as mere coloration (Färbung), timbre would have no deeper purpose than “a crude, naïve pleasure in sheer color” akin to the “more primitive pleasure uncultivated peoples, or sections of the populace, derive from explosions and shooting.”174 Does Schoenberg’s arrogance betray a certain discomfort with his own attempts to reach a broader audience? In December 1925, he was taken by surprise at the public success of his student Berg’s Wozzeck, executed in a modernist idiom with orchestration both lush and brash. The very next month, perhaps both envious and inspired, Schoenberg began to cycle through the various performing forces associated with an elite public, in each case making his compositional language more accessible, eliminating complexity in counterpoint. His attention turned from chamber music (the Suite, op. 29, for seven instruments) to symphonic music (Variations for Orchestra, op. 31) to opera (Von Heute auf Morgen, op. 32) and finally to piano solo (Piece for Piano, op. 33a). Schoenberg wanted an audience despite himself, and despite his scorn for the new aesthetic of accessibility (Neue Sachlichkeit) that thrust Hindemith, once shunned as a modernist, into a canon that, as yet, had no place for himself. Privately, the tension Schoenberg felt between popularity and originality was almost unbearable. When Bienenfeld criticized his Chamber Symphony for not appealing to the “masses” (and quoted Bekker’s stipulation that a symphony must appeal broadly), Schoenberg scrawled in the margins of her review, with his characteristic sarcasm, that writing artless and shallow music in order to appeal to as many as possible is indeed ingenious.175 Before the war, luxuriant orchestration provoked concern about excess, amorality, and a degradation of listening. Timbre threatened liberated aesthetics, sexuality, and even gender stereotypes. Conservatives raised the specter of cultural degeneration, and liberals had to find a course of redemption. There was something about timbre that often encouraged ideological response and criticism, even from composers who used it to great effect. But after the war, it was harder to see what the fuss had been about. Composers had to worry about securing an audience and employment, and musical discourse had to grapple with issues of will, power, and conflict, not the seductions of orchestration. The same musical concerns persisted among aesthetic conservatives. Timbre should not deflect attention from formal development, Blessinger insisted in a 1921 article on the “symptoms of decadence in music.” Yet since the old cultural arguments no longer sufficed, Blessinger resorted to science, citing “far-reaching parallels between the “curves of analytical geometry and the curves of affect.” In music, “constancy in the emotional

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line” is the “basic principle behind a truly artistic effect in music.” But the main change, for the witnesses and veterans of World War I, was that aesthetics could no longer ignore physicality. Music history, as Blessinger envisioned it, was a path between the extremes of sensualism and formalism. J. S. Bach had achieved the perfect balance, but the years since Beethoven had seen a shift toward sensualism via an individualization in musical style. Blessinger scorned “the decadent passivity” of modern music and urged a physicality in listening. All laws of music can be traced to two basic bodily movements: a “tightening of muscle and the utilization of that tension, which in some cases leads to a third, relaxation.”176 Among those influenced by Blessinger—who joined the Nazi party before the National Socialists came to power177—was Alfred Rosenberg, the philosopher of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg rejected both extremes of the past: the “sensualist-psychological aesthetic,” which exaggerated the “motor factor,” and the “classical” reaction, which “pushed this element too far into the background.” Most important was the power of music as a call to action. Rosenberg cited a popular song based on the battle in which Frederick the Great routed both the Saxons and the Austrians. The “Hohenfriedberger March,’ “to whose strains millions have marched to their deaths,” shows “how heroic, blaring sound can nurture a physical will that results in great physical energy.”178 The political power of music was most compelling, of course, to outsiders, whether a verbose propagandist such as Rosenberg or an enthusiast such as Helmut von der Steinen, a writer easily swayed to political causes. On the occasion of the Beethoven centennial, von der Steinen declared it unacceptable merely enjoying Beethoven’s symphonies and quartets, listening quietly at a concert or “losing oneself in the ecstasy of playing his works.” Instead, von der Steinen explained, one must “strain oneself while listening” and “experience his rhythm as deed.” The music should be “a challenging summons” to understand a spiritual progress “from dream to the Volk, from the soul to the state.”179 The old debates over orchestration and the physicality of rhythm seem quaint and beside the point. As with so much of National Socialist ideology, a small kernel of truth—in this case, the desiccation of aesthetic values in the face of modernity—became embedded in brutal and pernicious propaganda.

chapter four

Mahler’s Progressive Legacy and the Aestheticization of Violence

Listening to Mahler after World War I, by many accounts, was a different experience from sitting through the premieres or earlier performances of his symphonies in the 1900s. By virtue of its bold orchestration and sheer sonic force, Mahler’s music encouraged critics to invoke concepts of willpower and violence far more than the symphonies of Bruckner or Beethoven did. What these terms meant, whether in music or in general, was by no means consistent over these years, and varied according to the author’s orientation. Mahler’s symphonies commanded the most attention from progressive or liberal critics, though differentiation by politics becomes more difficult after 1914. The contrast between the reception before and after World War I was strongest with the Sixth Symphony, which challenged listeners nurtured on an aesthetic that enshrined restraint and logic. The Kantian sublime permitted a feeling of being overwhelmed, but a stronger, liberal tradition in criticism stipulated that music convince rather than coerce. “We cannot help hearing the most deplorable street organ in front of our house,” Hanslick wrote, “but not even a Mendelssohn symphony can compel us to listen.”1 By virtue of its sheer number of instruments, an orchestra has the potential for great strength in volume as well as in the simultaneity of sonorities. Bourgeois culture required this raw sonic power to be redirected into a specifically musical strength, such as tonal articulation, contrapuntal tension, or thematic writing. Beethoven’s “heroic” symphonies became the touchstone for an expression of strength that did not undermine the aesthetic ideals of logic and moderation. Hanslick admired Brahms’s Third for evoking

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the “healthy, full strength” (Vollkraft) of Beethoven’s middle period.2 But in the years around 1900, metaphors of organicism or physics intimated greater authenticity than the mere display of force. Whatever their stance toward Mahler, liberals, and to some degree most listeners, appreciated being drawn rather than forced into the momentum of symphonic process. Leopold Schmidt enjoyed the finale of the Seventh because it was “full of strength yet unforced.”3 But the preceding symphonies fared less well. A criticism of excess began with the composer himself, who complained to Bruno Walter after the premiere of the Fifth Symphony that Mahler would never be able to master its orchestration.4 Artur Eccarius-Sieber found its “overwhelming strength in shaping” to be “ruthlessly hard.” This brash articulation of form and excessive dissonance were “doubly harmful” because the underlying thematic invention was “pallid.” The result was “almost unbearable” for the listener, impairing any possible “enjoyment.” In effect, the impoverished themes were absorbed into formal processes of massive dimensions, whereas Eccarius-Sieber—a piano professor, not a professional music critic—wanted simply to listen melodically. The problem finally came down to the music’s allegedly crude palette of emotions, which lacked any inner, spiritual expression. Mahler alienated himself from contemporary culture with his “primal instinctual drive [Naturwüchsigkeit, a term antithetical to the German Romantics], which “not infrequently raises the suspicion that the author is a stranger to our ‘culture.’”5 If the trajectory across the final three movements of the Fifth Symphony uplifted most reviewers, the Sixth Symphony proved a different case entirely. Aesthetic conservatives decried the music, whether for its utter absence of “grand symphonic ideas with organic, ferocious energy [Keimkraft ]” or an apparent lack of “thematic generative power [Arbeitskraft ].”6 Liberals searched in vain for the bourgeois virtues of restraint and rationality. Mahler’s generation became transfixed by the question of whether musical strength was legitimate. To channel sonic violence became the moral desideratum. Schmidt warned that if the orchestration in Mahler’s Sixth became the norm, then “musicians and listeners alike would lose all remaining sensitivity and tact, and we would head into an epoch of brutal mass effects.”7 For good reason, with Schmidt’s inclinations and power in Berlin, Mahler avoided the city in arranging for the premieres of his symphonies. But even Schmidt’s counterpart in Vienna, Julius Korngold, took pains to show that the music’s intensity (Häufung, a consciously neutral term) was not limited

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to the instrumentation and dramatic expression but also affected hallowed symphonic qualities. The latter infractions provoked moral outrage: the thematic working proceeds “unchecked,” and there is a “hypertrophy of counterpoint—or of whatever it is called today!” Korngold finally denounced the work for reflecting its cultural milieu. Whatever Mahler’s compositional development since his earlier symphonies, the Sixth “unfortunately also intensifies their realistic character and heightens the nerve-wracking tension.”8 Still two months after the performance of the Sixth, Korngold still remembered recoiling from the finale as an “immense architectural structure.”9 The demon lay not in the sonic force per se. In the outlay of instruments, as Paul Bekker pointed out, the Fifth Symphony outstripped the Sixth.10 Listening for structure did not allow sonic force to have an outlet in the ongoing patterns of tension and release that make up formal process. Elsa Bienenfeld therefore judged the construction of the Seventh Symphony “too impetuous and insufficiently cemented,” as was true of the composer in general. The development section amounted to “masses of sonorities, intensifications, explosions.” Stressing the philosophical nature of Mahler’s music, she, however, conceded that the rough-and-tumble appealed to youths.11 Yet more was at stake than adolescent vigor. A younger generation, under the sway of Nietzsche and an entirely new Weltanschauung, relished the strength and energy of Mahler’s music. Defying the older notion of refinement through art, and with it discipline and reason, Nietzsche advocated willpower and heroism, and in the years around World War I his words, endlessly politicized, became dictum. Offering an escape from ossified bourgeois traditions, Nietzsche’s writings supplied a vocabulary of will, masculinity, heroism, and world aspirations to a range of political parties and publications, from the progressive educator Gustav Wyneken and his journal Der Anfang (The Beginning) to the anti-Semitic publicist Theodor Fritsch and his journal Der Hammer. If high art was thereby salvaged, the full range of possibilities for art shrank. On the Right and on the Left, critics agreed that art had to build morale and character. Walther Hirschberg, twenty years Mahler’s junior, saw the composer as a Nietzschean superman, unfettered by the laws of tradition. In the Fifth Symphony, “Mahler revolts and cranes himself upward, struggling with all gods and all demons and tearing down the old walls in order to build new ones. Throughout the battle he is aglow with faith in an eventual triumph.”12 Despite Nietzsche’s

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profound influence on the composer’s intellectual and artistic development,13 the relationship was by no means simple. Mahler quarantined the one Nietzsche text he did set, Mitternachtslied, within the subdued fourth movement of his Third Symphony, reserving the truly revolutionary power of the composition for the gigantic opening movement, which was entirely his and devoid of text. By around 1910, and particularly after the outbreak of war, power became the central aesthetic criterion. Strength of execution trumped even the originality of thematic invention or melodic beauty. Vitalism, initially a movement within philosophy and psychology, became a cultural banner for the new age and an argument for the relevance of art music. Particularly for younger critics, whose connection to the century of the bourgeoisie was more tenuous, music was a regenerative force more than an embodiment of logic and rationality. Irrespective of political or ideological orientation—nationalist, anti-Semitic, or liberal— commentators on music enjoyed strength and momentum, particularly in a symphony. Rudolf Louis (b. 1870) explained that music becomes art only when it “forces us, without concession, into its course.” The transformation of the recipient mattered more than the inherent qualities of the composition. Louis almost vindicated the listener’s passivity. True music makes a “compelling impression, silencing all doubt, such that one feels captured by the artist.” The context was his censure of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, but, unlike his books on Bruckner and German music, the review bore no trace of anti-Semitism, despite its harsh judgment. (Louis determined that Mahler could never compose “true music—a compelling impression that silences all doubt and produces the feeling of the listener being enthralled.”)14 The same held for Ernst Rychnovsky (b. 1879), on the other end of the political spectrum from Louis. The capacious intensification in the opening movement of Mahler’s Seventh was “overpowering in its logical compactness.” Rychnovsky admired what Mahler “builds from his themes and how grandly he intensifies them until, like boulders, their sheer power leaves the listener breathless.”15 The turn of phrase was new—Robert Schumann once observed that with Mozart the listener has bated breath until the middle of the composition but with Beethoven until the very end. Yet Schumann’s was an intellectual listening, achieved through concentration. Whether with Mozart or Beethoven, reaching the respective arrival point, “where for the first time one can breathe freely: the summit has been climbed and one’s view stretches forwards and backwards,

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clearly and with a sense of satisfaction.”16 The result was a controlled and balanced aesthetic experience, far from the catalytic energy and effect sought by Mahler’s younger contemporaries.

Myths of Building and Destruction in the Sixth Symphony More than any other of Mahler’s symphonies, the Sixth led to an aestheticization of violence. Whatever the provocations of his musical language in general, this work revealed the composer engaging with the ideology behind symphonic tradition more explicitly than in the rest of his oeuvre. Its trenchant structure forced critics to move beyond enumerating how the work diverged from their expectations. Their impressions were so strong and so distinctive that most reviewers struggled to recount what they had heard. A standard image of musical strength, the process of building (bauen), overran accounts of the finale. The close link between compositional practice and interpretive strategies, which from the start had ideological resonance, warrants a careful examination of just how Mahler conveys the act of building across an extended formal structure and why listeners found this process so riveting or so repulsive. The Sixth refutes the Haydnesque tradition of a finale that brings closure to the symphony through its exuberance and drive—a model in spirit, if not in form, for the Fifth and Seventh symphonies. In the rhetoric of the day, the first three movements of the Sixth merely set the stage for the finale: “Mahler wanted to appear very clear and very restrained.”17 The first movement is more classical in formal disposition than that of any of Mahler’s symphonies since his First, including even a repeated exposition and modified recapitulation. This homage to tradition is composed out in the finale, with the two theme groups repeated in reverse order and independent of the narrative unfolding—but to jarring effect, without a hint of the balance and complacence the nineteenth century came to associate with formal repetition. Moreover, perhaps the most unsettling music, which comes from the finale’s introduction, returns as well, interpolated into the disfigured sonata form. With almost no concession to program music, Mahler explores a realm more akin to the finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a witches’ sabbath, than the celestial redemption more typical in his finales. Across the whole of the Sixth Symphony, traditional form is selfconsciously constructed and apocalyptically destroyed. The finale is a movement about building form, and not merely because a huge hammer slams

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down two or three times (depending on the version). The gradualism typical of symphony openings since Beethoven is suppressed until the finale. Through an elaborate series of introductory gestures, processes, and structures, the finale enacts a process of building across several minutes. Some symphonies in Mahler’s conducting repertoire have an introduction to the finale (Beethoven’s First, Schumann’s Fourth, and Brahms’s First).18 But the finale introduction to the Sixth supersedes all these in dimensions and expressive ambition. The opening movement begins abruptly with a five-measure anacrusis, as it were, almost trivial in relation to the force of the march entering in bars 6–56. The finale, in contrast, opens with an extravagant yet eerie cadential figure so unusual harmonically and in instrumental coloring as to conjure up a vastly different world. The feeling of suspension is so strong, with the diffuse “arc” figure reaching into the highest register of the first violins, above oscillating figuration in the rest of the strings, that one arguably hears the harmony as a generic dominant harmony unmoored to a particular key.19 The spectral dissonance and spare ascending melody across the opening eight bars are shut down by a jarring proclamation of the chord that will become the key of the finale, A minor, yet without any satisfaction of harmonic resolution. Force, not logic, determines this sonority to be the home key. With these strong gestures, all that has transpired is erased, and any remnants are absorbed into a new, fantastical realm. At the premiere, the finale was preceded by a long pause—a “restoration pause,” as one critic put it, “so that the public could be ready to face the forty-minute finale with renewed energy.”20 This rupture makes plausible a rebeginning at bar 16, as if the music emerges from nothingness. The themes emerge “one by one,” Richard Specht “arising one by one, as if from chaos—pale, motionless, almost embryonic, in quivering, somber rhythms and grave chorales.”21 There is a lofty tradition for such beginnings, from Beethoven’s symphonies (especially the Ninth) to Wagner’s Ring to Bruckner’s symphonies. Such pieces represent a process of creation by which themes and even tonality seem to come into being. The symphony becomes an organic rather than a staged performance. How to begin this process, at least for Schumann, was the immense challenge posed by the genre. At a time when the young Brahms seemed unable to complete a symphony, Schumann advised him to keep Beethoven’s symphony beginnings in mind and try something similar. “Then the ending will follow of its own accord, he promised.”22

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The directionality and thematic purity of “genesis” openings in nineteenth-century symphonies evoke a natural process that is entirely missing in Mahler’s finale. Here, particles from the world of the preceding movements return yet defy any semblance of reality. Thematic cells hover above acerbic disharmony. The character is one of decomposition rather than any directed growth. Again, unlike in other genesis openings, there is no reaffirming pedal point or bedrock out of which life emerges; the supposed foundation on A is sustained first in a timpani roll, then in the basses. Motifs do not lead to any musical encounter but dissipate into a dark backdrop. Even once the motifs gradually become meaningful, the thematic material is still musically awkward, moving in austere octave leaps, without a hint of lyricism. The same holds true of the formal syntax. Section A does not draw to a close but collapses, falling in register and volume. Section B (mm. 49–64), ostensibly a chorale theme, enters in the darkest register of the brass, so static that it too sounds embryonic. The emergent form that characterizes the A section also extends across the introduction as a whole. The same three sections—the cadence, section A, and section B—return but are compressed into more logical form. The opening passage shrinks into a succinct statement of the fate motto (mm. 65–66), with a true cadential function, concluding the chorale. In the return of the A section (mm. 82–85), the same thematic material is now fully formed. The larger process is also borne out in thematic detail. As just one example, the “anacrusis” motif in section A ends in a single pitch or chord that soon dissipates with unsettling changes in timbre (mm. 19–20, 20–23), while in the return of section A, the motif sweeps the harp into its momentum, ushering in a powerful statement of the fate motto. The return of the B section (mm. 94–97) has an exorable, rather than a tentative quality. The fact that the finale, rather than the symphony itself, begins with a genesis introduction gives the lengthy movement autonomy from the rest of the work, preparing the listener for the brutal world that will be composed and decomposed over the ensuing half hour. The prominent march rhythm in the symphony’s outer movements and, to some degree, the scherzo provides a human correlate to the philosophical abstraction of “building.” The march, it might be said, distills the metaphor of building into a process both concrete (in human action) and philosophical (as progress in time and through space). The opening movement is so carefully constructed, with its self-conscious replication of classical sonata form, that the processual nature of the march clashes with the

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projection of structure. The “perpetual marching,” as one critic put it, “never yields to a flow.”23 In the finale, the omnipresence of the march rhythm, either driving the music forward or eerily lurking in its background, erodes the clear sectionalization of sonata form. Early critics made sense of the Sixth Symphony by focusing on this process of building. In essence, they redirected the sheer sonic strength into the act of construction. The metaphor of building also offered a way to listen for structure without the pedantry of formal schemata. Mahler himself construed his compositional process as building with stones or as “building” in general (and Bekker, in turn, wrote of Mahler’s “instinct for building” and the “architectural” nature of his genius). His work on the Third Symphony, adjusting the length of the first theme group to suit the weighty and lengthy introduction, resembled that of a “master architect.”24 (Around the same time, Ferruccio Busoni, rebuilding a world on shards from Bach’s Art of the Fugue, sketched architectural plans for his Fantasia contrappuntistica. According to the composer, it was his most important work for the piano, apart from his piano concerto, and he proudly displayed the visual plans in the published score.)25 In his capacity to build musical structures, Mahler’s architecture was superior to Bruckner’s, Ernst Otto Nodnagel declared in his analysis of the Fifth Symphony. Unlike Mahler’s facility with powerful thematic blocks, Bruckner attempted more than he could achieve, with thematic “building blocks” which were too massive to “erect a strong structure of supreme height.”26 German critics, much more than Austrian, responded to the power and drive of Mahler’s Sixth. Its musical language was stripped of any “effeminate sentimentality,” even at lyrical moments, reported one of the leading newspapers, the Frankfurter Zeitung: “The whole presents an imposing sonic structure.” In its preference for monumental form over witty representation, the result was “far preferable” to Strauss’s Symphonia domestica (programmed at the same festival).27 Friedrich Brandes respected Mahler for avoiding “the trifles or chromatic filler” so common in recent orchestra music and for scorning the so-called polyphony to which colleagues resorted everywhere and to cheap effect. The result, however, was to damn with faint praise. Brandes found the instrumentation “strong and voluminous” but added sardonically, “No contemporary commands the orchestra so coolly.” Mahler surpasses his contemporaries in thematic development and contrapuntal combinations” (Kombinierungen, a term lacking the tension or struggle nor-

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mally associated with counterpoint), but not in thematic invention. Never conceding the music’s expressive power, Brandes diagnosed a “character of iron, an intelligence of steel, and heart of water and ink,” and concluded the review by stressing Mahler’s literary knowledge (Literaturkenntnis).28 Brandes’s review appeared in the leading arts journal, Der Kunstwart, a curious venue for anti-Semitic allusions. It was quite possibly this article—and the composer’s departure for New York, partly as a result of anti-Semitic machinations at the Vienna Philharmonic—that spurred Mahler’s admirer and acquaintance Richard Batka to write positively about the composer’s Jewish identity in the same publication.29 Following the introduction, the body of the finale violently deconstructs sonata form in a way that technically, but not expressively, hearkens back to sonata-rondo form. The form Mahler devised falls back onto itself twice, when the sonically disorienting introduction returns, drastically interrupting the temporal unfolding of sonata form. “The movement of Babel is built up until the final stone is laid, which occurs under a threatening hammer blow. But there is still no end: the ruler of Babel is not yet wholly satisfied with his giant building. He demolishes it and builds it again from the ground up—still larger in form.” This review, vivid if trivializing, was written by Albert Kauders, who composed operettas alongside his work as a critic. The metaphor of building also figured into his judgment of the music. Mahler, he wrote, “knows how to find the material that is most pliable for musical architecture. The way he stacks and sorts his primitive building stones, towering above, achieves a truly Beethovenian art.”30 It was more comfortable for Mahler’s generation to view a constructive process than to experience brutality. For liberal Viennese critics, allegories of building served to channel music’s power into a narrative of building and destruction. Korngold, Mahler’s exact contemporary, provided a more sophisticated version of Kauders’s narrative, opening his feuilleton on the Sixth: “Mahler builds in his new work—he builds cohesive movements.” Korngold explained to readers suspicious of innovation in the genre of symphony that “the only novelty lies in the percussion, including a hammer and a whip, and even they build. The finale most fully demonstrates Mahler’s intention: it is built up entirely thematically . . . Everything conceivable is planned to structure the mass and make the structure clear.” This most revered of musical elements, thematic work, validated the display of strength. In a world

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where any divergence from tradition met with disapproval, understanding music as a process of building offered a certain bourgeois reassurance. The succession of sections seemed directed and productive, as if the listener were reenacting the creative process. The metaphor of building was also useful for connecting local musical events to larger structure, without forcing a resolution of the tension between structure and process. The visual presence of a large hammer unnerved many critics, perhaps in part by displaying the labor of production. To take seriously and even enjoy witnessing a musical process of “building” at an evening concert was perhaps hard for those who built, literally, in their day jobs—and so, too, was it hard for the socialist David Josef Bach. Recounting the same performance to his proletarian readership, Bach described a towering up of “frightful juxtapositions and superimpositions” only to be again shattered by the hammer blow. But to be frank, with the last hammer blow, everything is over. For the listener, no gigantic building crumbles, but a castle of air collapses.”31 Muntz, addressing a populist readership, criticized the “unbelievable grandiosity in formal construction.” In the finale, “one really cannot speak of construction but rather a musical demolition, because motifs are not subjected to thematic development or fitted together into a whole.”32 When the Sixth was finally heard in the minor industrial center of Dessau, in 1912, the local newspaper reported, with some bemusement, how the hammer had shocked the “genteel critics” of yore, who intellectualized the violence by allusion to Thor’s hammer (the Norse god of thunder), Schiller’s ballad “Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer,” Nietzsche’s “philosophy with a hammer” (Twilight of the Idols), and Wilhelm II’s notorious “zerschmettern” speech, in which he threatened to crush anyone who opposed him. The reference to the kaiser’s ferocity was timely; later that year the kaiser presided at a council of war (Kriegsrat) at which the possibility of preemptive was aired.33 Enthusiasts, if few in number, acknowledged the symphony’s destructive power but found its story compelling. The local Essen newspaper reported, “Despite the grandiose scoring . . . and regardless of the almost oppressive power of the sonic waves that at times besiege the listener with elemental force, the stringently logical structure is so easily recognizable, and the voiceleading so strong and transparent, that a feeling of helpless confusion can never arise, however much the listener is shaken and uprooted.”34 Bekker, too, wanted to hear the taming of

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force, not just its release. Mahler “builds a finale that still bears within itself the chaos of the entire work.” Only in the finale is this chaos brought into order. Although his own analysis proceeded phrase by phrase, with few sweeping claims, Bekker felt compelled, when turning to the finale of the Sixth Symphony, to defend by a comparison to the rest of the composer’s oeuvre: “Mahler in fact always wrote broadly conceived and monumentally perceived finales.”35 In point of fact, the finale’s design is only logical in the most abstract sense. The formal syntax withholds any of the aural reassurance that repetition provides. The palindromic structure, as a literal application of symmetry, means that no sequence of sections is ever repeated, nor is there any of the balance and calm of traditional bi-partite structures (see Table 4.1). The most brutal display of force occurs when the infamous hammer strikes: the brass stretch two earlier motifs (from m. 139ff) almost to a breaking point—the very antithesis of what Bekker called Beethoven’s “extreme compression of thought.”36 The three “recalls” undo the attempts to build, as the thematic material all but dissipates, undermining the traditional narrative sense. The subjectivity of the pastoral interludes within the first two recalls is crushed by the driving march. Mahler often conducted Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (the Pastoral), but there is no sense of rural charm and quietude in the pastoral interludes of his own Sixth. These are eerie moments—with an Table 4.1

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, finale, symmetrical layout

Sectional disposition:

Sonata form:

Introduction First group (m. 114) Exposition Second group (m. 191) Recall of introduction (m. 229) and second group (m. 288) Development Second group (m. 301, closing material) Hammer-blow passage (m. 336) Lyrical interlude (m. 352) First group (m. 378) Lyrical interlude (m. 458) Hammer-blow passage (m. 479) Recall of introduction (m. 520) and second group (m. 575) Second group, closing material (m. 610) Retransition First group (m. 642) Recapitulation Coda: recall of lyrical interlude (m. 728) and introduction (m. 773)

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otherworldly pedal point, fragments of motifs, blurry celesta chords, and harmonic instability. The utter absence of rhythmic regularity gives a sense of timelessness, if without eternal grace. Did Mahler’s Sixth Symphony contribute to an aestheticization of strength and violence in music criticism? In the wake of his Fifth Symphony, denounced for sensual indulgence, Mahler’s ideological contribution was, if anything, to produce a work that stood outside the cultural debates between bourgeois mores and modernism. The fantasies of violence that inhere in the thematic manipulation and sonic power of the finale defy the symphonic narrative of victory. In only two lyrical interludes does the finale withdraw into a realm that evokes nature but in philosophical dimensions—as if the inverse pillars to the brutal hammer-blow passages. True, the work represents violence in a way never before heard in Austro-German music, and rarely since. Mahler’s contemporaries despised the Sixth for this reason, even as they struggled to develop a vocabulary to communicate the experience. The horror of this process, so integral to the meaning and structure of the composition in all its brilliance, was lost on prewar critics. But the Sixth would later find success in a world for which it was not composed. The composer’s motto—later stamped into memorial reliefs and medals— was allegedly “My time will come.” The time for the Sixth, however, would not have been a happy era for its composer.

The Influence of World War I “I esteem the moral values of war on the whole rather highly,” Hermann Hesse wrote a friend on the day after Christmas, 1917. “To be torn out of a dull, capitalistic peace was good for many Germans. It seems to me that a true artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life.”37 Hesse was living in Switzerland and, in his late thirties, was spared the freshness of military camp, much less the lice of the trenches and the splintering impact of shrapnel and machine gun bullets. And to cite him fairly, while he saw war as inevitable, Hesse deplored the renunciation of cosmopolitan culture that accompanied it.38 But not many Germans did. Those who survived until 1918 became hardened in a way that the ill-trained students mowed down at Langemarck in the fall of 1914 were not. The initial enthusiasms of August (“the spirit of 1914”) could not last. Three days into the war, the

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poet Rainer Maria Rilke felt the war god piercing him with a hot iron heart—“Endlich ein Gott.” It is easy to document the artists and cultural commentators swept into the emotions, sensations, and ideologies of war. It is more difficult to ascertain the war’s long-term impact. Many enthusiasts repented, including Rilke; some were killed; and yet the transformations wrought during the long conflict were probably tougher and harsher than the perfervid rhetoric of that hot summer of 1914. Not that the war imposed an entirely new interpretive agenda; rather, it focused and concentrated the recent trends toward vitalism and primitivism. It confirmed the yearning to cast off Apollonian individualism and assume the collective and instinctual—“Glowing into a single new creature that the war god mortally brings to life,” to quote Rilke again.39 Generalizations about the impact of the war on culture must be approached with caution, if we do not merely rely on the testimony of intellectuals who survived and inflected their recollections with analysis and the evolving present. After undergoing weeks of brutal French attacks, one German soldier recounted, “You become strong. This life sweeps away violently all weakness and sentimentality . . . The only way you can tolerate this existence, these horrors, this murder, is if your spirit is planted in higher spheres. You are forced into selfdetermination.”40 Soldiers fell back on companionship, courage when they could, patriotism—and, if they were among the educated elite, drew on hallowed literature: the Latin classics and national Romantic lyrics, for British and Germans. The latter often took Nietzsche’s writings to battle, and pocket editions were published in vast number. Civilian intellectuals also turned to national philosophical traditions. The historians Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Meinecke trumpeted Germany’s idealist tradition as the ethical justification for the national war effort. Unlike the “mechanistic” philosophies of France and Britain, Germany fought for a deeper and more spiritual tradition. Patriotism cut across political differences. Bekker, no friend of nationalism before 1914, wrote that in times of need, such as during the war, the German artistic heritage should “unify, strengthen and elevate . . . From this national treasure, we draw moral strength and the capacity for withstanding.”41 There was little resistance to the politicization of music. A few months before war broke out, the musicologist and critic Eugen Schmitz reprinted his earlier article from the progressive Catholic journal Hochland, in which he stressed that Beethoven identified with Napoleon’s “‘artistic’

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will to success,” not his militaristic character. The first movement of the Eroica represented “not a battle, as is so often asserted, but a struggle in the soul.”42 But once the war broke out, the purely aesthetic value of music fell silent, as potentially unpatriotic. Even in his contributions to Hochland, during the initial years of the war Schmitz wrote almost exclusively on military and patriotic topics.43 Over the course of the war, artistic appreciation was conscripted for crude parallels with military heroism, with few attempts to protest this politicization.44 Soldiers envisaged Beethovenian will as they prepared to go over the top, or so a few highly publicized letters testified. One collection of soldiers’ letters appeared in two editions during the war and at least five more in the Weimar Republic, some sponsored by the German Education Ministry—at a time when Germans chafed at the stipulation that the nation have no armed forces.45 Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ran through the mind of one soldier as he recalled the artillery on the French front. He wrote home, recounting the parallels almost measure by measure. The three pillars of the first movement—the dramatic opening, the buildup in the first theme group, and the throttling retransition—stood for the mobilization orders, war sounds from afar, “violent battles for the fortified positions,” and so on. In 1915, once the massive costs of a war far longer than anticipated were becoming clear, the letter was reproduced in several newspapers with its ample musicological details.46 However private a soldier’s politicization of Beethoven, whether at a vulnerable moment in the trenches, or recuperating in the bunk, it would be publicized in the broadest possible venue. Hugo Riemann, writing in Leipzig in August 1918, after the war had been all but lost—even if many Germans did not realize it until the end of September—introduced a volume of Beethoven’s piano sonatas by stressing that German soldiers were analyzing these scores in their dugouts, which he found exemplified the cultural stakes of the conflict.47 (British officers, on the other hand, were reading Horace and other Latin poets in the trenches.) Futile and seemingly interminable, World War I compelled soldiers to find aesthetic beauty and pleasure in violence and tragedy. War was to be a higher, more sublime form of national existence. In the first months of war, as the Germans suffered challenges but enjoyed a rapid victory in Belgium, one German officer, who anticipated a longer war than planned, wrote of overcoming fatigue almost joyfully. Recounting that he felt best when surrounded by bullets and thundering cannons, the officer found himself without words, then confessed to feeling a “volup-

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tuousness in pain.”48 War was not just the means to an end, or political agenda imposed from above, but a mode of thought and style of language. In the same years, an immediacy came to dominate philosophical and literary developments—Heidegger’s “moment of vision,” Ernst Bloch’s “darkness of the lived moment,” Carl Schmitt’s “moment of decision,” Ernst Jünger’s “sudden fright,” and Paul Tillich’s kairos.49 Heidegger and Jünger, along with Otto Spengler, spoke of Aktionismus, a philosophy grounded in action. Jünger was by far the most widely read. Joining the French Foreign Legion at age seventeen and the German army at the start of World War I, Jünger was a paragon of modern bravery, suffering repeated battle wounds and earning the highest medals. His Storm of Steel (1920) is among the most vivid memoirs of the War, and Fire and Blood (1925) recreates battle in brutal realism. Through Battle as Inner Experience (1922), Jünger inspired a cult of decisionism in intellectuals across the political spectrum. His literary fervor was not, however, without ideological aims. Jünger called for revolutionary nationalism and dictatorship, writing in the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter in 1923. (Nonetheless, his disdain for populist politics led him to resist Hitler’s overtures to a friendship and involvement in the Third Reich.) The mentalities engendered, or at least intensified, by war had a decisive influence on musical listening. An unflagging ideologue, Karl Blessinger believed that military service (in his case, a monotonous desk job) offered insight into the problems of contemporary musical life, in particular into the “unsustainable foundation” on which German art music rested.50 German music should not be limited to that which took place on German territories, explained the nationalist Hans Joachim Moser in setting the foundations for his own history of German music.51 The risk of wholesale aesthetic and cultural disinheritance through the war led critics to see themselves as the tutors less of the composer or the performer than of the listener. Attempts to politicize music were often ventured, at least in part, in order to make it relevant. Writings on music, if still only read by an educated public, addressed a wider audience. The aftermath of war, the conditions of revolution and republic, and the advent of mass democracy all pressed for redefining the objectives of serious music and musical listening. Bekker stressed that “the ideal audience for whom Beethoven wrote and who inspired the momentum of his ideas was a continuation of the powerful democratic movement that led from the French Revolution to the German wars of liberation . . . we feel it

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anew every time we experience the liberating and elevating power of a Beethovenian symphony, because at that moment we become part of the public for whom Beethoven composed.”52 Interpretations of Mahler’s Sixth varied drastically from those given in the period before World War I. The power and energy of the music were never lost on sympathetic critics, but the mores of symphonic listening had proscribed its more brutal processes—a reaction Mahler anticipated and, arguably, built into the construction of the finale. The Sixth relies on the trappings of tradition while challenging its presumption of accessibility and moderation. If Nietzsche’s writings influenced Mahler most explicitly as he worked on the Third Symphony (in the late 1890s), Nietzsche’s thinking influenced him most profoundly in the Sixth. It represents a powerful release from fin-de-siècle sensuality, but a release that few contemporaries could appreciate. Some early reviewers were paralyzed in their tracks, capable of recounting only the presence of the four traditional movement types, three in A minor, and the usual structural conventions within. If the finale defied all formal expectations, the procedures of symphonic legacy—counterpoint and thematic work—were more rigorously followed than ever before. Mahler’s generation lacked the tools for explaining the power of the music, insofar as they could grasp its originality and full force. But precisely this resistance to traditional meanings, in the face of conventional forms, appealed to later critics, whether or not the scorched earth broadened their aesthetic sensibilities. After the war, the idealism of the previous generation and its aversion to witnessing brutal musical strength in the concert hall seemed outmoded. Mahler’s contemporaries had criticized his brute will, a term then coded Jewish. But now willpower was exalted. Anti-Semites had to reject Mahler on different terms (e.g., as an “intellectual”) while others enjoyed his music as never before. Whatever the camp, ideology became more explicit. Blessinger provided the equivalent to Louis’s “Contemporary German Music” (1909), only the title was more pointed: “Overcoming Musical Impotence” (1920), in which Mahler was said to show “the highest degree of impotence.”53 Even cultivation or Bildung, that once-revered bourgeois term, was superseded. Carl Johann Perl, a Dresden critic and translator, leveled a critique at Mahler’s intellectualism that would never have occurred the generation before. A “fantastically clever man,” Mahler possessed a vast knowledge of literature, to the point that his cultivation outweighed any naturalism (or natural

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character, Ursprünglichkeit); as a result, his “ideas” were literary, and only their “clothing” was made of music. What he created were books more than symphonies. Every melody “be it sweet and smarmy, grotesque and urban [ gassenhauerhaft],” had extramusical meaning, as did every rhythm,” but a Mahler symphony was still inscrutable. If an earlier generation would have stopped there, repelled by the incomprehensible, Perl did not. Having witnessed the impenetrable illogic of the war, its flagrations surpassing anything known to Western civilization, Perl spurned Mahler’s artistic vision and nonlinear narrative as an apocalyptic end of the world.54 Assimilation became undesirable or impossible. The critical vocabulary of yore, with its subtle linking of modernism and Jewish stereotypes, seemed trivial in comparison with political anti-Semitism. Right-wing authors very often reduced art to biography. Louis, again, had set the terms, writing that Bruckner’s decision to compose a symphony only first at age thirty-eight suggested a “titanic, heaven-storming Prometheus” and proved his character as both “fighter and hero.” Variance from the symphonic archetype required psychological explanation: the Second Symphony showed Bruckner restraining the “heroism and pathos of his individuality.”55 Liberals still sought to protect music from the politics of anti-Semitism. One of the first accounts of Mahler’s Jewish identity appeared during the war, in Guido Adler’s biography. A highly assimilated Viennese Jew, Adler went to great lengths to discuss Mahler’s Germanness, juxtaposing it to his Jewish heritage, yet refused to associate personal traits with the music. He blamed the censure of Mahler’s eclecticism on Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s racist categories. The only trait that Adler conceded might be considered Jewish—namely, heightened expressive power—also characterized in Wagner’s music, he stressed.56 To interwar liberals, many of whom were Jewish, the concepts of process (often in the metaphor of wave) and structure offered the equivalent of what absolute music had been for the fin de siècle: a freedom from a cultural vocabulary that was weighed down by anti-Semitic tropes. This was as true for Bekker, who became an icon of the progressive Jewish music critic, as for Kurth, whose life in Switzerland seemed far away from his youth as Ernst Cohn in an anti-Semitic Vienna. Despite Bekker’s effort to objectify the symphony into an art form that developed by its own musical logic, the postwar era would not agree to ignore a composer’s ethnic identity or the genre’s legacy. In the

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intensified politics after 1918, the symphony was too important a cultural icon to escape ideological interpretation.

The Symphony in the Age of Socialism Music, least of all the symphony, could not remain immune to mass politics. The long-standing cultural responsibility of music encompassed a broader spectrum of duties in a world that no longer separated the ethical from the political. Adolf Weißmann recounted the “inner resonance” one felt at watching the younger generation grope its way through the contemporary musical world. His book on “music in the global crisis” (to translate literally) ended with the plea that music could combat racial and national hatred by building bridges between artists. “Amidst all hardship, barbs, perplexities, and irresolvable problems,” through music one can “recognize the path to a higher simplicity, the outlines for another world view.”57 Politicization, however, came first at the hands of socialists, who enlisted musicians and music in their cause. Idealism, or at least opportunism, ran high. Socialist musical activities helped assure the employment and output of musicians in Austria and Germany. The Austrian Social Democratic Arts’ Office also pressed for participation in amateur orchestras. The party’s gains in the 1927 Viennese municipal elections were thanks to its cultural programs, the young Egon Stein argued, urging continued efforts to recruit participants for proletarian orchestras. Socialist goals need not be pursued by politicians or through economic means; “the modest musician can move the hearts of many who have the same goal of freedom in thought and partaking in all the beauty that is revealed in culture and art.” To participate in an orchestra, for those who commanded the technical knowledge, was “socialist duty and discipline.”58 In Austria, where socialism stimulated new performance venues, the symphony remained largely intact, an island of artistic conservatism. The Vienna Philharmonic workers symphony concert series (ArbeiterSymphoniekonserte) all but excluded symphonies by living composers, from its first concerts in 1905 to its demise in 1934.59 (The two exceptions were works by Soviet composers, programmed as a show of political affiliation.)60 The bourgeois musical legacy was usurped in whole and in part. The concert commemorating the tenth anniversary of the republic, to turn to one example, placed the span of Western art music at

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the service of the proletariat. The program opened with Bach’s Ea Prelude and Fugue (“St Anne”), BWV 552, orchestrated by Schoenberg for maximum effect and power, and was followed by the supreme bourgeois icon, Brahms (“Beherzigung,” op. 93 song being the most accessible genre). Encompassing Bach, too intellectual for the eighteenth century, and Brahms, too intellectual for the nineteenth, the program allowed workers to overcome historical barriers. The program’s capstone was Mahler, who was, albeit mistakenly, a socialist hero.61 The work was the First Symphony, which progressed from nature (the bird calls at the opening) to the urbane (the “village pub” alternating with “a slow, refined waltz,” according to one reviewer)62 to the archetypal victorious finale. The path from nature to the city was thematically prepared by Schoenberg’s folk song arrangements, “Naturbetrachtung” (Contemplation of Nature), op. 13, no. 3, and “Auf den Straßen zu singen” (Singing in the Streets), op. 15. The following season, the same songs set up the Sixth Symphony, with its inverted relationship between nature and urban modernity.63 In addition to assuming the rights and responsibilities of bourgeois listeners by attending performances of the great masters, the proletarian audience was supposed to shun sentimental and escapist music, which sacrificed politics for sheer pleasure. David Joseph Bach, contributing to a Viennese workers’ newspaper, disparaged the inner movements of Mahler’s Sixth for this reason. Simple, homegrown, and very pretty— “one can even use the word ‘beautiful’”—the Andante was “like a milk dessert too sweet for everyone’s taste.” The scherzo suffered from a parodic smugness (in Bach’s neutral terms, its “great sense of well-being”): “I would prefer to suffer flogging than endure so much happiness in life!”64 In an influential article on the sociology of music, the Viennese socialist, Paul A. Pisk, dismissed the symphonies of the “Romantics” as being escapist and therefore holding no appeal to lower classes of listeners.65 The dearth of suitable contemporary symphonies did not go unnoticed. In 1928 the Social Democratic Party’s Sozialistische Kulturbund (Socialist Cultural Union) announced a competition for a symphony and overture suitable for proletarian listeners and amateur performers. The jury included eminent figures such as Paul Hindemith, the conductor Hermann Scherchen, and the musicologists Alfred Einstein and Georg Schünemann. Their deliberations foundered on the “fatal tension” of attempting to write accessible music without sacrificing “compositional legitimacy” (to borrow Adorno’s terms when, six years later,

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he advised composers on how to nazify music).66 The winner, Hermann Wunsch, received only half the monetary award. Wunsch’s socialist commitment was vague at best. Four years earlier, the twenty-year-old aspired to be the protégé of Heinrich Schenker—the staunch musical conservative and outspoken German nationalist.67 Wunsch would also place first in a competition established by the Rhenish city of Velbert in 1942 to encourage the composition of men’s choral music on texts of “contemporary relevance,” the latter stipulation added by the Propaganda Ministry (Reichministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda). Relevant, judging from submissions, were nationalism and militarism: from Blut und Boden to Germany’s Schicksalskampf (Battle for Destiny), from sacrificing for the Reich to honoring military heroes. Wunsch avoided any risk of the same rebuke from the 1929 jury: the “apotheosis” that ended his submission, Ehrenmal (Monument), was less resounding than it might be, one reviewer speculated, because the composer did not wish to tax the skills of a “capable mass chorus.” The final chorus— coming at the end of a battle depicted through timpani, brass, and percussion—had “supreme expressive power” conveying “the confidence in victory held by a faithful people.”68 This, at least, was the interpretation of a reviewer for the local newspaper, which by that point had become associated with the Nazi Party (and therefore remained in print until the end of the war). The performance took place on April 4, 1944, by which point a German victory was precluded in the eyes of all but staunch ideologues, although no public admission of this prospect was possible. The review appeared in a newspaper—which helps to explain how the long-standing publication survived so late in the regime. Wunsch’s Arbeitersinfonie of 1929 had a proletarian subtitle, Hammerwerk, but the composition is a repository of nineteenth-century conventions (an “unimaginative imitation of bourgeois music,” according to the arts critic at Die Rote Fahne).69 With an eye to accessibility, Wunsch compressed the symphonic archetype into three movements. Marked “Voll Kampfgeist” (driven by a fighting spirit), the first movement evokes the usual “struggling” Allego that opens a symphony. But with its 3/4 meter, momentum, and energy, the movement reminded one reviewer of a Bruckner scherzo. The second movement, a funeral march, concludes with a thematic allusion to the proletarian dirge Unsterbliche Opfer (set by Hermann Scherchen), which is the standard song of the death of a comrade. Less ambitious than Mahler and Bruckner’s finales, which often culminate in a triumphant recall of the main

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theme from the first movement but nonetheless open up a new realm, Wunsch’s merely varies the first in character and thematic material, with “nothing new to say,” according to the same reviewer.70 Hammerwerk exemplifies socialist music and political music generally in resorting to conventions for the sake of accessibility but in wholly unconventional ways. D. J. Bach provided the theory for this practice, inverting the traditional relationship between form and content, whereby the artist infuses the given “form” (which is largely determined by genre conventions) with his own ideas, or “content.” Instead, Bach emphasized, “Form makes it possible for the artist to be an individual—that is, be himself, in his full singularity. The content gives him back to the community.” The content expressed by the artist is “what society thinks and feels at the deepest level.”71 The content or message of an artwork was, in effect, predetermined by social need; only in the presentation of the content could the artist find freedom. The single most important change to musical thought, both inspired and promulgated by the workers’ movement, was interpretive literalism. Universalism came from the bond among listeners (or workers), not from any transcendence or philosophical reflection. Music needed a political purpose, as Beethoven’s symphonies demonstrated. The communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne accused Wilhelm Furtwängler of falsifying the Eroica in a preconcert lecture in Berlin: Beethoven would not have fathomed the refinement and attention to musical detail at the expense of “ideological content.” The symphony must be understood as the battle of the revolution, from its “powerful, manly rhythms and violent fanfares” (the opening movement) to the sacrifice for the revolution (funeral march), from the dancelike reprieve from revolutionary battle (scherzo) to a victorious revolution (finale), which quotes the popular French Revolutionary song “La Carmagnole,” albeit modified to escape the attention of the Austrian censor.72 (It has been suggested that Soviet and French musicologists have often sought to link Beethoven to the French Revolution, and another enthused Communist would later hear “La Carmagnole” in the last movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 31, no. 3.)73 In Germany, Social Democratic policies stimulated orchestral composition. The cultural benefits of the appellation “symphony” outweighed usefulness of genre conventions, with the result that contemporary symphonies appear to have almost nothing in common. Complexity and elitism notwithstanding, the symphony was drawn into German social-

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ism more than any other genre of art music. Composers conjured up new variants for the venerable symphony plot archetype. Edmund Meisel, who wrote the score for the celebrated Soviet film Battleship Potemkin, pursued the traditional program perfectly across the four movements of his “Red” Symphony (1924): (1) Entrance; (2) Struggle and Hope; (3) The Captured; and (4) Victory. Closure, as expected, comes through thematic quotation and an extended buildup. The symphony ends with the “rousing” theme of the Internationale, above which resound “fanatical, Promethean” calls from the spoken chorus, declaiming “Mankind, help us” (reworking the second verse, one of the canonic socialist strophes: “Es rettet uns kein höh’res Wesen, / kein Gott, kein Kaiser, kein Tribun”).74 The mere idea of a symphony appealed to socialists, such as the poem cycle Sinfonie der Arbeit, by the proletarian poet Josef Winckler, which was set to music by Wilhelm Knöchel, a conductor of workers choruses and member of the Central Committee of the KPD (communist party of Germany). Socialist thought influenced a generation of writers on music, even if only indirectly, regardless of their political persuasion. Bekker, for example, insisted that the symphony was not an elite, gilded tradition directed at the musically trained. “Professional concepts of ‘beauty’” were irrelevant; all that mattered were “the specific character and the extent of the power with which the work of art is able to build communities of feeling.” Themes need not be original but only “penetrating and easily comprehensible.” True appreciation required no musical training. Beethoven sought to liberate and elevate the multitudes, not charm “a small and closed circle.” The power of music “to effect” was more important than the beauty or originality of its melodies. The value of an artwork, Bekker averred, lay in the strength with which it built a community of listeners. The symphony and the feelings of community it engendered brought order to the “chaotic mass of the public.” This process, however, required a composer of supreme capacities, such as Beethoven or Mahler, who could achieve “unity” and “determination” across the vast textural and temporal space occupied by a symphony.75

The Will in Music As bourgeois cultivation yielded to collective engagement, and idealism gave way to heroism, a new vocabulary for symphonic composing and listening evolved around the will, or willpower (Wille). The multivalence of the term, for philosophers and cultural critics, socialists and

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anti-Semites, helped demonstrate the relevance of symphonic music and invigorate the listening habits of the mass audience. At the turn of the century, a symphonist might be admired for his determination and will power, but no trace was to remain in the music. Mahler’s Sixth and Eighth were criticized for exerting will, to the exclusion of emotional expression. German commentators in particular attributed music’s drive and energy to an artistic personality deformed by supposedly Jewish attributes. “Mahler’s music is born from the will, not the heart,” one review of the Sixth Symphony commented. “It commands our respect but does not touch us. It is not the language of the soul but the language of the intellect and the will.” The composer’s “willpower and energy” were revealed in “unusually strong and determined rhythms.” This, the review concluded, was Mahler’s main asset and led to a preponderance of marches and dances in his music in general.76 Schmidt conceded no artistic merits to the Second Symphony, holding its narrative power and religious text to be alien to Jewish nature. He described an “obsessive desire to achieve an effect, but in an eccentric manner, and to awaken a profound grandeur that Mahler’s musical nature cannot support.” Again, reviewing the Sixth Symphony, Schmidt denounced Mahler’s “titanic will,” since his “personality” lacked the wellspring for melodic invention and the “power to shape.”77 For Mahler’s generation, willpower was acceptable in a conductor, if not a composer. Anti-Semites, in particular, barred Mahler from full recognition as a creative artist: he remained a conductor, and hence a performer, who merely recreated. When the Seventh Symphony was well received in Munich, Louis conceded the skill of the conductor yet insisted that any communication taking place and any excitement depended on his visual presence (“energetic and ruthless will”), not the music itself.78 While Louis’s reviews, commissioned by a large urban newspaper, were moderate in tone, his book on contemporary German music was not. There, in rhetorical splendor, Mahler was said to suffer from a “total vitiation of creative will—an impotence in ‘desire’ (Mögen) that is devoid of ‘capacity’ [Vermögen, with a stress on the degenerative prefix].”79 The same talent that made him “one of the great conductors”—the ability to “force the orchestra under his will”—marred his music, wrote Walter Riezler. “Mahler’s music has far too much ‘will’—not in a metaphysical sense of the world’s will but in the sense of the individual.”80 Stripped of any anti-Semitic associations, willpower was not a bad characterization of Mahler and his later works. If his emigration to the

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United States, no less to its largest city, was one factor, to construct and conduct his Eighth Symphony (popularly called, then and now, the Symphony of a Thousand) was another. Obituaries, with their laudable task of capturing a person’s essence, served the perhaps unintended purpose of solidifying some anti-Semitic slurs in Mahler’s case. If a composer met an abrupt end at the height of his career, age fifty-one, was it not reasonable for him to have envisaged unrealized goals, in effect, to have will power that exceeded accomplishments? The reviewer at one memorial concert summed up Mahler’s oeuvre (excepting the lieder and early symphonies, with their supreme clarity and “natural” emotion), as emanating “from the feelings of an overwhelming Promethean strength.”81 Enthusiasts and detractors, Jewish or not, regardless of politics, spoke emphatically of willpower in their obituaries of Mahler. His accomplishments as a conductor were uniformly commended, if in language relating to his person more than his musicality. Bienenfeld recalled, “His every nerve and every muscle was always tense. The slender figure was incomparably passionate, both absorbing and projecting back all the changing moods of the music. He was the Will embodied. Most extraordinary in Mahler was his ability to feel so strongly and so unreservedly, and finally to exhaust himself so unconditionally down to the last drop.”82 Bekker, too, believed that Mahler’s “ethical genius” was manifested in his will power. His “profound gravity almost bordering on fanaticism,” Mahler permitted the listener “no choice or liberty: one had to listen and see exactly what he himself wanted. He allowed for no will other than his own.”83 Outside obituaries and the writings of anti-Semites, references to “willpower” were less common. Specht, in his book on Mahler, preferred the broader concept of energy to the politicized willpower. He tried to reconcile the virtue of possessing energy in creative work with the vulgarity of displaying energy in one’s demeanor. Much of Viennese artistic life was owed to its so-called professors of energy, Mahler among them. The term came from Hermann Bahr, describing Max Burckhard (director of the Court Theater in 1890–1898) and Joseph Olbrich (architect and designer) as men who possessed a “calm steadiness, notwithstanding their perpetual surfeit of energy.” Mahler, Specht believed, surpassed both in the “far more elemental continuity” through which his “energy and elasticity” took effect.84 After the war, across the political spectrum there was a turn away from the concept of willpower. Bekker avoided the notion of will altogether in

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a cultural definition of “symphonic style” in his history of the symphony from Beethoven to Mahler (1919). Without putting the matter so directly, he encouraged pride in the symphony as one of the few forms of selfempowerment available to the defeated nation. Instrumental music is “free, free for play, free for a far-ranging imagination, free for thoughts that build into the immeasurable and leap over the conceptual, and free for the feeling that pulls most inwardly, resolving secret after secret and striving toward consciousness. This elusive world of tones, still so profoundly and sensuously” stirring even in the face of “mute, listening masses,” was a symphony concert.85 Bekker’s antipode might be the musicologist Theodor Werner (who taught the young Thomas Bernhard musical aesthetics). Werner disallowed Mahler any genuine willpower. “A particular kind of overeducated, ‘literary’” musician, Mahler had a “need for will that is specific to his race” but forever misdirected: “[his] striving for monumentality” merely resulted in overscoring.86 If the movement of vitalism derived its inspiration from Nietzsche’s writings in general, his later influence on the politicization of willpower came, justly or not, from the posthumous compilation of his fragmented notes and texts, The Will to Power, periodically released in new and expanded editions. Nietzsche defined the essence of life as a will to mastery: “Every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force . . . and to thrust back all that resists its extension.” To think and to feel meant to “will.”87 The aphoristic nature of these notes, along with their lucid presentation, made for a quick read. While Nietzsche’s philosophy focused on the individual, only occasionally subsumed into collective Dionysian ecstasy, it remained for others to expound on the nature of the will within society and the nation. The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between Gemeinschaft (community), which relies on tradition and solidarity, and Gesellschaft (society), which is organized by contractual and market relations. Relationships within a community were determined by natural will (Wesenwille), whereas rational will (Kürwille), based on self-interest, led to the construction of society.88 The generation following World War I, including veterans from virtually every community who had been wounded and mutilated in ways once inconceivable, no longer admired the individual as a vessel of willpower. Nietzsche’s faith in the individual, once a creed for soldiers in the trenches, seemed irrelevant. What remained, especially among progressives, was a general “will” that symbolized the faith and energy they invested in the new republics, German and Austrian.

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The loss of the individual was clearest in writers on the Right. Karl Grunsky’s elementary book on musical aesthetics (1907) had described each musical voice, or contrapuntal strand, as “the bearer of a will,” which, as was the case in all human striving, led to tension and rivalry.89 The revised version, from 1923, collapsed his original, Schopenhauerian distinction between will as a metaphysical force (“the cosmic motion of music” in Grunsky’s terms) and will as a psychological attribute of the individual. “Every masterful composition (and not only dramatic music) arouses in the listener a will . . . that makes him or her stronger and purer.” Music results in “an elevated sense of self, greater happiness, and intensified strength.” What moves the listener is comparable to “a Will without a clear goal, or, a surging and striving.” German art was exemplary in its “expression of longing for will power,” and the symphony, in particular, was “a truly German glorification of the heroic.”90 The right-wing Germanist Carl Petersen, writing the same year, 1923, defined willpower in supremely practical terms in his essay on “The Laws of Music,” a desperate attempt to find law in art at a time when the political arena promised no such norm, at least for a conservative. Some signs of the will—tension, inner compulsion, and inevitability—appeared in Mozart’s treatment of form, Petersen conceded, but not comprehensively and certainly not in harmony or rhythm. Instead, he concurred with Wagner that Mozart’s music lacked true drive. There was no “strict direction toward a single and total goal,” no “inner compulsion and relentlessness of form.”91 The will increasingly became a catchword in politics. As the fate of the Weimar Republic, and along with it democratic liberalism, came under threat, enemies clashed at the ballot box and later in the street. The language of the will could elevate this conflict to an aesthetic realm, thereby softening the political rhetoric. “Willpower” was a pillar of National Socialism, Alfred Rosenberg wrote in 1924. The ruling democrats could not achieve their goals because they lacked willpower—as demonstrated in the condition of modern art: “There was no glorification of the creative power of a man or of a people, which in the desire to create something new storms against all obstacles; there were only rootless abstract conceptions like humanity, the brotherhood of man, and other nice things.”92

Paul Bekker and an Aesthetics of Strength Since the Napoleonic wars, symphonic music has awed by its strength, drama, and energy, its reverberations filling the hall. Yet the comfort of convention and the discipline of form had a civilizing effect. Alongside

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historical developments, two specifically musical changes challenged the balance between force and civility: the ever-increasing size of the orchestra and, over time, the tendency of critical discourse (like any linguistic practice) to intensify, which in turn shaped the evolution of musical aesthetics. Music was to “convince” in the mid-nineteenth century, “compel” at the turn of the century, but “force” or “overwhelm” beginning around 1910. Mahler’s commanding and energetic persona as a conductor brought authenticity to these new aesthetic terms. The rehearsals for the Sixth Symphony affirmed this tenacity—but, interestingly, in an account only published much later, in 1923 (by Klaus Pringsheim, who had studied with Mahler and was Thomas Mann’s brother-in-law). During the finale, apparently, Mahler called out to the trumpeters in a muffled voice, “Can’t you blow stronger?!” The account continued, “Had we heard correctly? Still a couple of times he interrupted and turned to each group: ‘Can’t you play stronger?’ Then a miracle took place: the chaotic masses of sound became meaningfully ordered. The last movement builds, towers peak upon peak—excessively strong, gigantically big in sound, as Mahler had never before imagined.”93 The emergence of an aesthetics of strength is clearest with Bekker. As a young critic in Berlin, Bekker had no interest in preserving a cultural legacy for its own sake or celebrating rationalism in music. He admired music for its vitality and power to excite: “Music should make our hearts beat faster, arouse our senses, and challenge our intellectual powers. A composer should transmit the strongest and liveliest impulses of our age.”94 Toward the end of the war, Bekker resorted to violent rhetoric, in urging composers to write absolute music. He deplored the “paralysis” in contemporary music; the influence of the other arts had, in his view, “choked” music’s inherent powers of expression. “In movement there can never be danger, because it releases powers that stagnation cripples and binds.”95 Most striking, in ideological ramifications, are not so much Bekker’s analytic insights as his linguistic power to mirror the phenomenon he was describing. His highly wrought prose transformed any fixed musical entity into a process. The effect or implication was for the listener not to seek any stable quality or state; every aesthetic quality of the musical work was perceived as existing in time, as an action. In Bekker’s heavy-handed style, adjectival noun formulations replaced nouns: logical consistency (Folgerichtigkeit) rather than logic (Logik), uniformity (Einheitlichkeit) rather than unity (Einheit). Bekker forced on the reader a profound, even philosophical, awareness of what musical listening entailed when it challenged the mind and body to full capacity.96 Whereas

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Bekker’s grammatical permutations respected the essential nature of concepts, making a state into a goal or a process, Blessinger sought a more aggressive means to the same end, in which music became process. He attached the quintessential term Steigerung to any musical structure, speaking of an intensification-cadence, intensification-form, intensification-finale, and so on. But the result was the same: art music became more gripping and more relevant. In practice, if not in theory, music critics had often described a musical procedure, and sometimes an entire work, as a temporal process. But Bekker explained every facet of musical construction and perception in processual terms. Thus Mahler’s “genius in architectonic shaping” was proven by his capacity “to draw together all the conflicting elements of the whole into a grand uniformity of design and logical consistency in construction” in the finale of the Sixth Symphony.97 A symphony necessarily combines process and structure: it is heard diachronically, one movement after another, yet the inevitable linking of the outer movements invites a unifying understanding. Bekker’s philosophically weighted prose hinted at a deeper urn from structure to process. He was fascinated by process (or “shaping”) and did not aspire to perceive structure or control time in that way. As a result, his symphonic ideal was unrelentingly teleological. Mahler’s symphonies had no need for tradition, in his view, because the listener was propelled by other means. Every largescale compositional decision—the structure, the number of movements, their ordering and character—was determined by the meaning of the finale. This end-orientation places the listener in a strange position, either interpreting the present in terms of the future or forgoing any grasp of the present and understanding the work only in retrospect. The result is to strip the listener of any interpretive license. In the Sixth Symphony, “the intensification leads directly to the goal, with ruthless consequence and in a steep course.” Bekker did not much care about the presence of a whole that persists in the listener’s mind afterward—that is, the traditional goal of listening since at least the nineteenth century. Instead, he spoke of the pressure to perceive in a holistic manner.98 In the chapter on the Fifth Symphony, Bekker stressed that Mahler always addresses “the problem of form as one of applying creative pressure to yield the only possible representation and embodiment of the striving within.” Denying any charges of frivolity in the rondo-finale, Bekker argued that Mahler “presents a new solution” to the question of form: “the old scheme is reborn from the innermost will to live.”99

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Power, not beauty or originality, determined artistic merit. Mahler’s contribution to the genre, in Bekker’s view, was a more forceful method of “symphonic construction,” achieved through an architectural build up (auftürmen) and intensification. Strength came not from volume or momentum but the relationship between facets of the artwork (theme and form) or between the artwork and the genre conventions that were alive in the listener’s mind.100 Mahler’s initial symphonic endeavor, Bekker argued, lacked the inner strength required by its external forcefulness. (As other critics had specified, but not Bekker himself, the scoring and volume of the First Symphony were stronger than the thematic working and harmonic language warranted.) In the Fifth and Seventh symphonies, the rondo-finale “grows” out of the earlier movements, “amalgamates their powers within itself, and leads them to great heights with an architectural fantasy surpassing all usual concepts.”101 The recall of the main theme from the allegro—a standard procedure, but in this case from the second movement, not the opening funeral march— at the culmination of the finale, above “a powerful pedal point,” represented “the greatest display of strength [Kraft].”102 The finale of the Sixth Symphony, in turn, won Bekker’s admiration for was distinctive not for its unity per se, but for the strength of that unity—“the power of the formal control and the coherence required to grasp the most varied moods and conflicts as a totality.”103 Bekker never ventured into politics in the Mahler book, nor would he have conceded that his language verged on the ideological. On the contrary, in another context he insisted on the universality of the symphony. The “symphonic” was one of three contrasting types of musical creativity (along with chamber music and opera). “As with great architects,” symphonic creativity was inspired by a vision of the “collective.” Bekker— whose writings often belied a certain discomfort with physicality— explained with palpable enthusiasm how the personal was “stripped away” in the symphonist, whose “vitalism [Lebenstrieb] reaches far beyond the boundaries of the individual. Eros becomes an ecstatic Dionysian energy and cosmic waves.” This orientation explained why, as a rule, “the symphonist avoids the human voice.”104 Notwithstanding Bekker’s philosophical claims for absolute music, the Mahler’s symphonies replicated the mechanism of ideology, insofar as his aesthetic ideal for the music mattered more than how it was actually heard (at least as reviews then and since testify). Deaf to the levity and humor in the rondo-finales in the Fifth and Seventh symphonies,

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Bekker seemed to demand from the listener an unabated concentration and even strain. Aesthetic value, moreover, depended on the composer’s exertion in bringing the work into existence—if, admittedly, Bekker’s allegories of the creative process did not rest on a study of sketches or drafts. In the Fifth Symphony, the fact that Mahler could build a strong finale from a rondo form (a structure all but abandoned in nineteenthcentury symphony) showed “extreme exertion, supreme independence, as well as a deeply rooted and inward will to form.”105 The “power and driving force” of the music came chiefly from fugal writing. The same held true of the Seventh Symphony, although the “joy in craftsmanship” manifest in the finales of the two preceding symphonies (an odd claim, at least regarding to the Sixth) “gave way to a stronger inward will to form.”106 Bekker’s interpretation amounted to a mythic account of its creation: a “vision of present and existing strength, in contrast to the nostalgic moods of the three inner movements,” supplied the composer with the “will and basic idea” (Grundgedanken); this led to a thematic idea, which in turn led to the determination of rondo form.107 Bekker’s aesthetic was so goal-directed that the process paled before the result. In the Seventh Symphony, as well as the Sixth, the themes should not be judged on their own terms but as the “seeds for powerful structures.” Their capacity for “producing action” is why Mahler’s themes may seem “arrestingly primitive” or “lacking in appeal.”108 This radical functionalism, in which the smallest individual unit (the theme) exists only to contribute to the overarching structure, would serve to aestheticize political control later in the same decade, in the hands of Nazi ideologues. Whatever implications might subsequently serve a politics of struggle and mastery, Bekker’s pronouncements still embraced a range of positions and terms associated with liberalism. Was he perhaps reacting to the blatantly cultural ends to which music was used by Blessinger, his counterpart on the Right? Blessinger, too, railed against the erosion of listening skills, but he blamed modern opera, with its sensuality in subject and sounds, and “entertainment concerts” that permitted food, drink, and conversation, with music merely “flowing” in the background. Both encouraged a musical “intoxication.” Regrettably, he continued, the experience did not resemble the Dionysian ecstasy of the ancient Greeks. Instead, the ecstasy of Romantic music was “totally passive.” The result was a feminization of contemporary culture—no mean accusation of a society whose bravest men were, in many cases, dead or

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wounded. Blessinger’s solution was to encourage a transcendence of music, even at the level of phrase: “The cadence overcomes a base sensuality but is not totally removed from the sensuous realm; it elevates people above the everyday, above bodily matters and yet does not transcend the human sphere; it bears a pronounced character of rejoicing in life and in this world.”109 Bekker is in some ways best seen as a writer who rendered in more compelling prose than others the prevailing ideas of his age. To give just one example, his reception of Mahler was more sophisticated than that of Egon Lustgarten, a young music pedagogue who published a lengthy article in 1920 on the composer’s lieder. Lustgarten observed across Mahler’s oeuvre an increased profundity in expression and “an ever greater effort to impose linear form.” He, too, saw music as a “a symbol of the problem of the freedom of the will in general,” but in his case, it was from interpreting the prisoner of Das Lied des Verfolgten im Turm as a soldier, not from perceiving any inherent emancipatory quality in music.110 If Bekker was in thrall to overbearing prose, here, too, he exemplified his era. The 1920s inaugurated an extreme rhetoric in aesthetic thought, as in ordinary language. “I do not doubt that a mind of your sharpness and fanatical search for the truth will achieve a total breakthrough,” Kurth wrote Bekker (regarding the latter’s low esteem for Bruckner).111 Extremism in rhetoric did not equal extremism in politics, but, as the late 1920s and 1930s would show all too clearly, ideologues depended on the language of art for their success. Kurth and Bekker cannot be linked to the fanaticism of Hitler and Goebbels. Still, their disregard for the dangers of extremes remains exceptional in the history of aesthetics, from the poetic oppositions in music criticism circa 1800 to the philosophical insistence on oppositions in Theodor W. Adorno over a century later.

Rhythm and Violence Historical accounts of symphonic music force us to return to a question posed, in both crude and provocative ways, since 1945. How could violence and cultural sophistication coexist in such extreme forms in modern Germany? Various theories have diagnosed its Sonderweg, or different path. “Failed” revolutions confirmed a uniquely defective history; an enthusiasm for dueling persisted long after the rise of the middle class banished the activity in other European societies; crimes of sexual

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violence, or Lustmord, which inspired a generation of artists, represented the larger violence to the body politic.112 The reception of Mahler’s Sixth suggests a complementary theory perhaps more historically apt to this diagnosis: the symphony, as a genre and as a body of works, conspired in the aestheticization of violence. One does not need to look far into Nietzsche, or his literary legacy, to find exultation in violence. Pleasure comes not from satisfying the will, Nietzsche insisted, but from “the will thrusting forward, again and again becoming master over whatever stands in its way.”113 The sentiment was hardly new, although previously never the concern of a philosopher. Yet for the many readers who missed the ontological significance of Nietzsche’s fragmentary pronouncements, philosophy justified violence. Thomas Mann, for one, became absorbed in Nietzsche while working on Death in Venice. Gustav von Aschenbach invoked a new heroism, unflinching in the face of violence—“the concept of ‘an intellectual and youthful masculinity that grits its teeth in proud modesty and stands by calmly while its body is pierced by swords and spears.’” Evoking the homoerotic image of Saint Sebastian, Aschenbach continued, “Composure beneath the blows of fate does not signify mere endurance; it is an active achievement, a positive triumph.”114 Violent images reflected a general trend of conflating vitalism and passivity. “What euphoria lies in loud music! It is stillness that asphyxiates—then, we have listened too long,” Nietzsche once wrote, Specht reminded his readers. By the same token, he continued, in Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies possess an “evil stillness, until a magnificent explosion that liberates.”115 This new orientation extended beyond German artistic circles. Reflections on Violence, the provocative manifesto by the French revolutionary Georges Sorel, predicted that the “myth” of class violence would regenerate the bourgeoisie and workers simultaneously. Sorel stressed that the vitality and dynamism of a new heroic proletariat would overcome an effete bourgeoisie. In the service of this mission, violence became “sublime.”116 The most far-reaching reversal in musical aesthetics was an embrace of rhythm, overturning the earlier judgments of percussion as inartistic and dehumanizing. Rhythm, as a phenomenon in the world as much as in art, was long shunned by the bourgeoisie. But the intellectual premises for this prejudice—the old Cartesian and Kantian priority of mind over body—eroded. The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach postulated that human activity was at the center of human life. Thoughts, he argued, evolve to suit activity.117 The social utility of rhythm was, how-

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ever, first championed by the historian Karl Bücher in his Arbeit und Rhythmus (1897), a book still widely read in the 1920s. Bücher lamented the fact that rhythm, so fundamental to human existence, had become irrelevant to German art and life: “We do not observe it in our movements nor, after Hanslick, do we care about it in art.” Its power to “excite pleasurable feelings” could alleviate the stultification of labor. Rhythm alone, he predicted, could produce art that is accessible regardless of upbringing. Claiming to resolve the philosophical mind/ body problem—whether consciousness is determined by physical sensation and activity or by thought—Bücher argued for the “original unity of humanity’s spiritual and bodily activity” and ruled out any criticism of physical activity.118 His influence notwithstanding, the claim itself was unremarkable, if alien to hidebound German musical aesthetics. In the same decade, F. Matthias Alexander developed the Alexander Technique in England on the same premise that mental habits are grounded in the body and in movement. Rhythm became ever more prevalent in socialist contexts. Typists were encouraged to listen to rhythmic music—preferably dance music or pop songs—to enhance their speed and energy.119 The dynamism and power sought in art was captured through the metaphor of rhythm, particularly outside bourgeois circles. Examples abound in the German Werkbund and Austrian Kunst und Volk. The industrial artist and architect Peter Behrens explained that a rhythmic conception of formal development allows a painting to be grasped as “organic and alive” rather than rigid.120 To demonstrate rhythm in the visual arts, the landscape artist and professor Richard Harlfinger invoked science and philosophy. If matter consisted of “vibrating centers of energy,” then “all of the world’s activity is rhythm.” Rhythm existed in space, not just in time. The ocean waves were perceived by the eyes as if the ears grasped the “rhythmic beating” of the surf. Through “free, creative energy,” an artist sought to correct the world’s imperfections, which ensued from an abundance of energies in conflict with one another. Musicians surpassed other artists in their ability to follow the “rhythmic principle.” The metaphor of rhythm helped explain why the contemporary artist needed freedom in the means of expression. If visual artists aspired to imitate nature, he explained, the result would lack “enlivening ideas.” Painting should not be “cold and photographically realistic” but rather “infused with the warm heartbeat of the artist and purified by the inadequacy of reality.”121 Musicologists, too, stressed rhythm and the physicality of listening, in order to demonstrate the accessibility of music.

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Gustav Becking, influenced by Spengler’s cyclical concept of history, proposed that music could be best understood when one’s head or arm beat time in the air. He illustrated the different movements most suitable to Beethoven and Mozart’s music.122 Rhythm was a conspicuously modern metaphor, by fiat if not intrinsically. The socialist film and theater critic Fritz Rosenfeld stressed that rhythm is the “secret” behind every artwork and lies at “the core of theater.” Not only does each play have its own rhythm, but each performance does as well.123 And so, too, film. The unity achieved through “distinctive rhythm” in Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg (starring Leni Riefenstahl) made it into a “cinematographic symphony,” in Rosenfeld’s words.124 The symphony was a potent metaphor in film and film criticism, for the patent reason that the new technology allowed a synthesis of temporality and structural breath once unique to the symphony. Modern life itself had a distinctive rhythm, in the cultural rhetoric of the day. The new genre of Zeitoper, which drew its characters and action from contemporary life, emerged from the union of the “tempo” of the twentieth century and the “rhythm of our time,” Kurt Weill once explained, leaving both terms in quotation marks.125 Such slogans irked Erich Kästner, who sought to discipline the language usage in the same journal that favored such populism. To demonstrate the “diarrhea of feeling” prevalent in society and culture, Kästner quoted a poem by the Berlin publisher and novelist Hermann Bartel: “Everything is rhythm. / Rhythm is everything. / The soul is a feeling for rhythm. / The mind is rhythm in feeling.”126 The metaphor of symphony, even more than that of rhythm, conveyed a fullness and force at once. The futurists imagined an interactive theater that would fuse audience and actors into a single aesthetic structure by “symphonizing” performance, stirring it with all possible means.127 But in German intellectual history, the metaphor of symphony referred structure more than pure vitalism. If later politicized the metaphor could also refer to the capacity for perceiving forms, both profound and philosophical, such as Spengler’s 1924 speech commemorating the eightieth anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth. Whereas “Goethe lived at a time filled with respect for form,” Nietzsche desperately longed “for forms that had been shattered and abandoned.” If Goethe showed immense facility in imparting worldly form to words, Nietzsche made a painful effort of trying to impose form by resorting to music metaphorically:

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Of all the great German intellectuals, Nietzsche was the only born musician . . . Nietzsche lived, felt, and thought by ear . . . His prose is not “written,” it is heard—one might even say sung . . . He sensed the rhythm of what is called nobility, ethics, heroism, distinction, and master morality. He was the first to experience as a symphony the image of history that had been created by scholarly research out of data and numbers—the rhythmic sequence of ages, customs, and attitudes.128

Spengler’s illumination of the symphony metaphor remained at least allusive and subtle. But increasingly those who found the symphony a Nietzschean mode would ransom the genre to a debased understanding of the philosopher. Rhythm ultimately superseded the symphony as a metaphor for vitalism, in apolitical or socialist contexts, ultimately blurring the distinction between art and politics. The drive to intensify life through rhythm sired the Sprechchor (speaking chorus), both a genre and an ensemble deployed, for example, within an orchestral work. The populace had, quite literally, a venue for artistic expression when two hundred people read the same poem simultaneously. Maria Gutmann, who directed the Sprechchor for the Vienna workers symphony concert series, envisioned its beginnings as an art form: The masses crowd on the streets and make demands. Individual voices are loud, but they are enveloped by space. First there are a hundred, then a thousand, then everyone. The masses cry: unruled, unordered, incomprehensible. One will—and yet one word clashes against another, splits the demands of the masses into the cries of individuals. Suddenly a rhythm connects all voices into one chorus, and suddenly the disorder of individual cries becomes an organized, verbal expression. The will of the masses has prevailed . . . Nowhere is there a clearer organic development of a hot vitalism [Lebensgefühl] into a coherent form of expression, into an artwork.

The mass chorus, she continued, is there not merely to recite a poem but actually to “embody” the artwork: “Today, the means of artistic expression are not only the human voice but also the entire body.”129 The physical experience of music supplanted the lofty ideals of a generation past. But the shift from idealism to interpretive literalism or experiential listening was by no means clear-cut. To convey the meaning of the symphony in 1913, Hugo Fleischer characterized its “drive to victory” in militaristic terms as a struggle to realize a “principle, idea, or deed against

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an enemy or the adversity of fate,” until victory or death. Distorting a highly ironic quotation from Goethe, Fleischer summed up the meaning of the symphony, “I am human, and that means a fighter!” A finale pursued the dual goals of freedom and courage, with the result of empowering the listener: “The liberating and brave element crowns the work and affirms the struggle to arrive at a jubilation and to rejoice in the feeling of strength [Kraftgefühl].” The symphonic protagonist was also Faustian— “trying and always striving,” Fleischer quoted from Goethe. The first theme therefore had to be “definitive and strong.”130 Fleischer’s goal was to describe the “symbolic nature of symphonic forms,” but his interpretation could not have been more literal. No other genre of music or any other medium inspired as much violent rhetoric in criticism as the symphony. Whereas the concerto, as a rule, stipulated a clear-cut dramatic framework through the interaction of soloist and orchestra, the symphony involved sonic forces that overwhelmed the listener. The symphony was unique as an icon of high culture that could wreak violence not just in its expression—its sheer volume and force—but in its very structure, compressing an extended form into a single whole, as Bekker so vividly described. In giving it this role, music critics abandoned the symphony’s responsibility to bourgeois culture as a symbol of logic and bestowed on it a new, mythical status.

Postwar Mahler Violent strains in the Sixth Symphony, for all the horror and shock incited in early commentators, eventually spawned fascination and promised great pleasure.131 The symphony was performed in the German capital two months after the new constitution was ratified at Weimar. Der neue Tag commended the work but not, as had the previous generation, for observing classical form. The power of the music alone warranted awe. The reviewer dismissed the title Tragic Symphony as outmoded Romanticism: “The splendid, the misunderstood, the almost never performed, the powerful—thus should it be called by those who cannot be satisfied with the designation ‘Symphony in A minor’ . . . The symphonic literature knows nothing that is much stronger.”132 The brutality of the music so intrigued Bekker that he could not wait until the chapter on the Sixth, in his book on Mahler’s symphonies, to recount its impact. The introduction, summarizing Mahler’s contribution to the genre, ventured an account of listening to this work: “The finale

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pushes aside the three preceding movements through inward and outward power, reducing them to preludes . . . The entire organism is altered from the inside out. Under the compulsion of necessity that drives to the finale, the preceding structure shrivels up.” That one movement should overcome a grouping of three movements was for Bekker the most important architectural innovation in the history of the genre. He continued, “the full strength of the creative will leads to the finale with boundless force.” Admiring Mahler’s “unrelentingly direct manner of shaping” in the First, Sixth, and Eighth symphonies, Bekker implied that not just the music was shaped but also the listener’s consciousness and aural memory.133 The capacity to overcome the listener was written into music history as a moment to celebrate. The physicality of the experience, including visually brutal hammer blows, surpassed the dramatic and intellectual submission achieved in Beethoven’s symphonies: “The mightiest intensifications Beethoven ever created . . . unroll with the overwhelming logic,” as if “the revelation of an ineluctably consistent event. It has the imperturbability of a mathematical formula, standing before us, from the first moment to its final ramifications, as an elemental fact. It is precisely in the irrefutable logical force of this art that its power resides, the unparalleled effect that Beethoven’s symphonies have even today.”134 The savagery in the finale proved invigorating in a new political milieu, especially in regional cultural or industrial centers. In Braunschweig, fraught with tension between the bourgeoisie and the workers since the 1918–1919 revolution, the local paper embraced the Sixth for its heroism. The hammer represented not fate, as before, but resistance— “a symbol of the raw force that can destroy matter but cannot hinder the mind.”135 Traditional form, and with it the usual ways of processing music, became irrelevant. There was no longer a comfortable space between the listening subject and the object, be it a formal scheme or an architectural image. When the symphony was performed in Hungary several years in its almost genteel authoritarian regime, one reviewer associated the “deeply shocking, inward struggle” with the sixteenthcentury warrior Tinódi Sebestyén: “The battle reaches its high point in the finale, which makes a powerful impression despite its duration of a half hour. Nothing is resolved, nothing exonerated in this sphinx-like finale, which fills the listener like a throttling beast.”136 Such conspicuous politicizing would have seemed outlandish in urban centers where Mahler’s symphonies had a long performance tradition.

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There, the rawness of material and treatment in the Sixth Symphony led inward, to metaphysical despondency and reflections on the victims of brutality. Felix Adler, reviewing a performance in Prague in 1925, forsook his aesthetic views from the turn of the century, writing that “The Sixth is the titanic argument of the self against the world, a work that rises defiantly and wildly, only to end in numb despair.” Reviewing another performance in Prague four years later, Adler found the “pounding” march rhythm and the cowbells alienating. The vastly enlarged woodwind, brass, and percussion “demand a completely different attitude from the listener. The symphony’s unfathomable beauty will be unveiled, and a live performance will be a profound experience, only if listeners are prepared for a massive work unrelated to anything they have known before.”137 Werner did not resort to such personal terms, but perceived the same violent assault, writing that the symphony’s vast size “crushes and shatters an enormous fullness of beauty.”138 Whereas narratives often portray violence, what makes music itself violent? Most often, critics pointed to orchestration. Because so much in the form and character of the Fifth Symphony, not least its central scherzo and finale, was moderate, its moments of forceful scoring had a decisive impact. Most obtrusive, for contemporaries, was the wind writing. While strength in brass sonority has had a long association with fanfare and authority, and forceful string writing typically has a more rounded or musical sound, woodwind sonority, so close to the human voice, has a particularly striking effect at higher levels of volume and prominence within the orchestra. The Berlin critic Walter Schrenk decried the illegitimacy of woodwind’s “massive effects, indeed, their lumbering quality” (Klobigkeit). He recounted “intensifications realized in the gruesome timbre of the winds, which overwhelm with crushing physical strength.” Feigning openness—after all, by 1929 the world had seen much worse, Schrenk continued that all of this could be justified except that with Mahler’s scoring, these events “do not always overcome” the listener through their “inner necessity.” His point, put plainly, was that brutality could be justified in theory but in fact was not in the Sixth Symphony.139 Once the barometer of success became intensity—rather than lyrical themes, compelling thematic development, or captivating scoring— interpretation mattered much more. The potency and depth of the Sixth Symphony, in Adler’s view, required a conductor’s full energy and command. He resorted to the term Führer, unusual in this context, to refer to a conductor who “knows how to drive the orchestra and hold the listen-

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ers unrelentingly in his course.”140 Politics influenced the reception of a conductor, even if not also the conductor’s interpretation. Two extremes among those who conducted the Sixth Symphony during these years were Oskar Fried on the Left and Clemens Krauss on the Right. Fried, of humble stock, was a conductor and composer in Berlin, who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1934. A champion of Mahler (who admired his conducting) and new music in general, Fried’s interpretation was so gripping a performance that it evoked the mood of a premiere: the critic at Der Neue Tag, the shortlived paper founded after the break-up of the Habsburg empire, and to which Joseph Roth contributed extensively. The review mentioned Fried’s “overtowering will and extraordinary ability” but called attention to his “diabolical joy in rhythm.”141 Krauss, later a Nazi collaborator of the first rank, conducted Mahler’s Sixth in Vienna in mid-January 1933. Joseph Marx, one of the city’s preeminent composers, hailed Krauss’s interpretation almost despite the music. From the “allegedly ‘distracted, discomposed, mosaic-like, wild, and chaotic’” symphony, Krauss built “a paragon of massive structure.” The finale “stood there, like the manifestation of a grandeur that reaches into the stars in the boundless idealism of its will.” Such a conductor, Marx explained, projects an unbroken line, such that even silence yielded no rest. The symphony “climbs ever higher in the intensifications, in the ecstatic and stormy moods, to trample over everything conclusively in the final joy of a deafening sonic orgy that almost tears at the ears.” Few possessed Krauss’s superior ability, in Marx’s view, yet his enthusiasm depended less on expressive range and musicality than on a display of power: “The ardent passion of diction is Mahler himself— the whole, fanatic, ecstatic Mahler.” The purported weakness in thematic invention only strengthened Krauss’s dictatorial will: “Everything belongs to him if he takes it in hand. The magic of personality affects in a fascinating way, such that it no longer creates but only shapes.” Marx avoided discussing Mahler’s lyrical moments, reserving space instead for a discussion of the slow movement of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, programmed at the same concert and, unlike the Mahler, claimed as pure “Viennese.”142 At another Philharmonic concert in May, after the Nazis had been in power in Germany for several months, Marx did not wax enthusiastic about the conductor, Bruno Walter, or the music, Mahler’s First. Walter, who was Jewish, had been stripped of his appointment as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and lost his engagement with the Berlin

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Philharmonic. Marx’s change of heart struck at least one colleague, Rudolf Ploderer, as depraved.143 Marx recognized the conductor’s special connection to the music of his teacher and friend, above all in Walter’s “ecstatic gestures” for individual phrases, intensifying with great momentum. However convincing the performance, it revealed no connection to the true Austro-German legacy, in Marx’s view: “One was wrong to take Mahler’s work as the ‘logical continuation’ of the line Beethoven-Schubert-Bruckner.” Mahler could not achieve the wonderful and inconceivably great thematic and formal unity required of absolute music in a “symphonic” sense.144 If Marx was rejecting his generation’s embrace of willpower and violence in order to return to the mild aesthetics of an era past, his intentions were possibly not purely aesthetic. To criticize a Jewish conductor on a Viennese podium and to exclude a Jewish composer from the symphonic canon, however subtly, was to position Austria closer to the Nazi regime in a time of Austria’s own political uncertainties and moral dilemmas. Marx would continue this doubletalk, communicating with the Propaganda Ministry over several years after the Anschluss of Austria, unbeknownst to the exiled Jewish musicians with whom he remained in contact.145 Words remained only words, to be sure, but music was the art form that would bind the two nations culturally and politically, through their most brutal phases in history. Marx was, in the end, only a more reprehensible instance of the many critics who supported a rhetoric and culture of vitalism that prepared the way for the appeals Hitler and other ideologues made for a new Germany. Whatever an artist’s inclinations during the initial years of bloodshed and heroism, few remained impervious to the trends and values that emerged in connection with World War I. An exception was Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (1915). His only true contribution to the genre reflected not on the battlefield at Liège or Ypres but on the death of his friend Mahler, four years past. True, he started the year Mahler died, but the work’s portrayal of twenty-three tableaux was no less placid as a result of the unmistakable buildup to war and the unfathomable destruction in that first year. As reflected in his diary, Strauss’s thoughts were far from war, if not far from politics. The inspiration the Jewish composer had found in Christianity, Strauss wrote, proved that Germany would “achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity.” Far from Christianity and Judaism, the Alpine

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Symphony was to bring out “moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.” If Mahler’s ties to tradition allowed his music to symbolize the world destroyed by the war, his ties to modernism made it the most plausible way to retrieve that world. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on July 28, 1919, and nine months later, the first large postwar festival took place in Amsterdam, featuring all of Mahler’s symphonies. (The Salzburg Festival was inaugurated that same month with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann, but only the following summer was music added—Mozart.) Oskar Bie, longstanding editor at the progressive arts journal Neue deutsche Rundschau, supplied advance publicity: The entire world should know that the first celebration of peace will take place in May in Amsterdam at an international music festival built upon German art. For the first time, the peoples of different lands will gather neither to kill one another nor to discuss the consequences of the killings. They will gather instead to enjoy the art that proved to be exceptionally valuable for the most humane of various ethnicities during the War . . . This art brings consolation, reconciliation, solidarity, culture, and true good for the future.

Without compromising the quality of program or performance, music was to serve political ends: “There will be delegates from all nations. They will shake hands.” When Mahler’s “entire oeuvre finally resounds in Amsterdam, we will all enjoy it, but the best of us will understand it as a document of our time.”146 Later reporting from the festival, Bie stressed the conciliatory power of music: “When speaking about the war, we who were once enemies will experience the same scornful twitch in face and hands. But when we think back to the moment of Amsterdam, our eyes light up, glowing, since we now understand and unite.”147 Some critics chose not to attend the festival. For those of a nationalist orientation or a more conservative taste Beethoven was more relevant and the 150th anniversary of his birth (in December 1920) more important. Among them was Leopold Schmidt. From a generation and intellectual milieu that cherished music as a spiritual art, transcending cultural and political issues, Schmidt stressed the inner strength in Beethoven’s music—more so than in his writings on Beethoven before World War I. The composer’s heroism and “power to effect” lay in “suffering and overcoming,” and less so in actually “doing.”148 Others did

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not constrict themselves to an inward heroism, however well it suited the shackled nation. The musicologist Arnold Schering, highly regarded then and now for his theories of musical meaning—but also known as an early supporter of National Socialism—saw occasion on the Beethoven anniversary to trumpet the power of music to rebuild Germany. Fifty years ago, Schering began, referring to German unification in 1871, Beethoven and his music assured that “the victory of the German spirit, not just the victory of German military, would be accepted as a global historical necessity.” Beethoven’s music had instilled the “moral idealism that led us to war and victory in 1914,” Schering continued (blatantly rewriting history), and “like a flame, jolting and hortatory,” this moralism idealism reappeared upon listening to Beethoven’s music anew. Yet his music could not be celebrated without shame, so long as Germany remained “a broken Volk” and the “we völkisch brothers of the German Beethoven” were subjugated to foreign powers. Crucial to his instrumentalization of Beethoven’s music was its sheer strength, which in Schering’s view surpassed all predecessors except Handel. Interestingly, the music did not invigorate but rather overwhelmed: “enormous sonic masses . . . besiege the listener, then subside only . . . to erupt anew.”149 (By contrast, if the Fifth Symphony evoked terror, dread, and pain, for E. T. A. Hoffmann in 1810 it also awakened an “endless longing.”)150 Art, but above all music, ennobled German military ambitions through philosophy. There was, as before, some resistance to the politicization of Beethoven. At one end of the spectrum, the archconservative Richard Wetz published a brief introduction to Beethoven, stressing the spiritual nature of his creativity. At the other end, the Viennese Workers’ Symphony Concerts avoided the composer during World War I.151 Few would disagree that Beethoven was the preeminent German composer, but there was nothing quintessentially German about Beethoven. While Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner were too Germanic to be programmed regularly by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the world wars, there was no drop in Beethoven performances, and the somber gravity of the funeral march from the Eroica figures prominently in the U.S. army’s propaganda film series for World War II, Why We Fight.152 It would remain for the Third Reich to promote other composers irrefutably and exclusively German, chiefly among them Bruckner.

chapter five

Bruckner’s Nationalist Legacy and the Aestheticization of Space

“We are all aware of the difficult times that lie ahead for our fatherland. If we can find solace and hope, they will come through a faith in our art—its power to build from within and to reconstruct from without.” With these words, Leopold Schmidt expatiated on postwar Germany. Retired from his post in Berlin, Schmidt was gathering his reviews and articles for what would be his final publication. The “world-shattering events” since his last volume, in 1913, struck deep in the “spiritual life” of Germans.1 Aspiring for redemption through art might have sounded hollow in an irrevocably modern world and in a society invested in politicizing its cultural institutions and heritage. But as Schmidt predicted, music figured prominently in recovering national pride and resuscitating Germany’s political identity. Reconstruction was a task, if often merely a slogan, that cut across the political spectrum. It appealed to Social Democrats and men of the center, such as Walter Rathenau, who became the minister of reconstruction in 1921. He envisaged a modern, industrial Germany where labor and industrial leaders worked harmoniously. The project of reconstruction also appealed to conservatives by implying that Germany had moved beyond the revolutionary turmoil of 1918 and that all classes had to commit to political and economic renewal. Reconstruction was no less ambiguous in the realm of culture. Musical thought experienced a wave of conservatism in the very years of such radical inventions as serialism. Nor were the two necessarily disconnected. Schoenberg boasted that his invention of twelve-tone music would secure German cultural impe-

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rialism for a century to come. Schoenberg’s artistic arrogance came at a telling moment. In perhaps the most humiliating episode of his public life, the composer and his family were expelled from their summer holiday in June 1921, when the Mattsee council voted to bar Jews from the lake. The following month, having secured a luxurious alternative, thanks to the Baronness Anka Loewenthal, Schoenberg spoke of his discovery contributing to German cultural imperialism revenge of sorts against the “Aryans” who had excluded him from Mattsee.2 Schoenberg, of course, was Viennese, and for Austria the postwar work was, if anything, more challenging. The newly formed state, with a fraction of its former geopolitical and economic power, was little more than a souvenir of the Habsburg Empire. Austrian nationalism, in the strictest sense, did not exist: the majority of citizens (including socialists) preferred annexation to Germany, which the peace treaties prohibited. Reconstruction, whether in the discourses of political nationalism or musical listening, was permeated by appeals to space (Raum) and structure (Struktur). Figurative language shaped the writings of German and Austrian intellectuals alike. The orchestra—as a deployment of musical forces that were perfectly aligned and visually amassed—seemed to reinforce the priorities of nationhood and security in the wake of military defeat and political revolution. The symphony remained the consummate genre of music with respect to aesthetic values of unity and permanence. Its aura of tradition unmistakable, the symphony became a weapon in the battles against modernism. Nationalist claims on the genre trumped the liberal-socialist uses to which it was put. Bruckner once claimed that the spiritual weakness of the world led him to write forceful music.3 For Germans, this sense of lost strength seemed even more real in 1918 than at any time before.

Brucknerian Polemics Weimar Germany was deeply polarized from the start. On the Left, the communist opposition scorned the republic’s Social Democratic defenders, while intellectuals and young nationalists on the far Right wielded unprecedented influence in their attacks on democracy. Academics, cultural critics, and philosophers aligned against a purportedly shallow, vulgar, and materialist democracy, missing no opportunities to discredit the new institutions. Finding the fractious democratic political system intolerable, the Right yearned to build a new elite around aesthetic and authoritarian principles and called for a “conservative

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revolution,” supposedly along Nietzschean lines.4 Their critique, along with religiosity that swept across Germany and Austria, set the terms for renewed interest in Bruckner. The composer’s oeuvre quickly became a partisan identification that signified hostility toward the Weimar Republic. The resolute conservative Georg Gräner—an early Nazi sympathizer and cousin of Paul Gräner, perhaps the most successful composer in the Third Reich—insisted that Bruckner superseded Beethoven in his treatment of symphonic form. Gräner’s forum could not have been more public: the Bruckner volume of Die Musik, a popular series edited by Richard Strauss. Beethoven, according to Gräner, “needed a thoroughly architectural form” and, as a result, his principal achievement was its structure and construction—a magnificent citadel!” (a martial image adapted by Alfred Rosenberg in 1927). But Bruckner progressed beyond architectural structure to achieve even greater flexibility in form.5 The proposition of Bruckner’s superiority rankled other conservatives, including the irascible Hans Pfitzner, who denounced the idea as symptomatic of the decline in taste during the Weimar years. He found Gräner’s worship of Bruckner of a piece with so many other fashionable judgments unthinkable a decade earlier.6 (Nor was the idea limited to conservatives. Halm’s Beethoven book from 1927 declared “Bruckner’s symphonies more perfect, more beautiful, and more sublime than Beethoven’s.”)7 Pfitzner’s grumblings aside, it is not hard to see why conservatives invested so much in Bruckner. His symphonies convey an indomitable monumentality, in part through stunning choral writing for the strings and brass. The noble edifices of his outer movements rest imperviously on a stable foundation, often through the simple, repeated evocation of a pedal point. The motivic continuity instills a dignity and solidity. Moreover, the ostensible uniformity across his symphonic oeuvre—four movements, each drawing on well-established conventions—seemed to confirm the amaranthine legacy of the genre. Tradition was an imperative, not a resource. In some ways Bruckner seemed more conventionbound than history itself: more than Beethoven, the great innovator of the genre, and more than Brahms, whose Bloomian “anxiety of influence” impelled creative responses to tradition, avoiding formal expectations in everything but the four-movement symphonic plan. Perhaps most important, Bruckner’s symphonies reveal a deep and almost uncanny family resemblance in their thematic organization and formal tropes, above all the opening, expansive gestures and cumulative modes of closure. Excepting the incomplete Ninth (though we can speculate on

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the legitimacy of the Adagio as a finale), each symphony has four characteristic movements, placed almost without exception in the same order and often containing similar formal schemata.8 From the “creation ex nihilo” introduction, in which motifs emerge above an ambiguous background to a culminating finale that quotes from the opening movement, Bruckner’s symphonies follow a single paradigm. His symphonic output as a whole instills confidence in the genre as a set of constraints on the composer and expectations for the listener. Bruckner was first drawn into the political arena not by conservatives but by the Austrian socialists. The Viennese workers’ symphony concerts introduced his symphonies to an entirely new audience. Bruckner programs were initially conducted by the composer’s student and unflagging advocate Ferdinand Löwe. Among these, the Adagio from the Seventh Symphony was recast as “funeral music” mourning the Austrian defeat in World War I. Bruckner’s music was well suited to commemorative occasions, with numerous movements bearing the performance designation feierlich (“solemn” or “celebratory”).9 Roughly one generation after the composer’s death, Bruckner’s symphonies lost their contemporary sheen but were appropriated as political statements, most prominently his First, conducted by Webern during the November 1929 tribute to the Austrian Republic on its tenth anniversary. All but a few of Bruckner’s symphonies were programmed for the workers’ concerts, and the exceptions were predictable: the Sixth Symphony (rarely heard even today) and the last two symphonies, both with ideologically suspect dedications, from a socialist standpoint—the Eighth Symphony, to the emperor, and the Ninth, to God (moreover, this last lacked the traditional finale so important for untrained audiences).10 It was harder to enlist the composer in support of socialist causes. Nonetheless, Kunst und Volk cited Bruckner’s poor reception during his lifetime as proof that he wrote not for the bourgeois concert audience but for students who projected an “image of a future, more generous” world.11 Apart from proletarian advocates seeking to imbue their audiences with bourgeois respectability, Bruckner’s music mainly served conservative and nationalist causes. The virtues that had political implications, such as Bruckner’s connection to folk traditions and consistency in the modern world, emerged most strongly in publications after World War I. At least eighteen books appeared within eight years, until the 1927 Beethoven centennial turned attention away from the later and back toward the earlier composer.12 Son of a provincial schoolteacher, Bruckner

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held an obvious appeal as a pedagogical subject. The Bruckner centennial in 1924 prompted Josef Daninger, a prolific music historian, to write a didactic study sporting the grandiloquent title “The Life and Works of the Great Upper-Austrian Master of Music,” for a scholastic publisher. Progressive pedagogues, too, found inspiration in Bruckner. Erich Schwebsch, from the experimental Waldorf school system, had no formal training in music, but Bruckner remained a lifelong preoccupation for him. His untutored reflections on thematic development (Entwicklung) in Bruckner’s music influenced a generation of scholars, including Ernst Kurth. The grandeur of construction and sublimity of detail led the humble teacher into a realm of abstraction and inextinguishable curiosity.13 Fritz Grüninger, another elementary schoolteacher and scion of a publishing family, saw a political opportunity with Bruckner, as with so many of his publications. A world apart from Weimar modernism, Grüninger’s first book coincided with the Beethoven centennial, offering a brief introduction to the spirit of Beethoven’s personality and works, while his next offered the same guide to “the metaphysical essence” of Bruckner’s personality and works.14 Bruckner’s more substantial advocates were no less political. Karl Grunsky spanned the genres of music criticism in his Bruckner writings, from fin-de-siècle concert guides to political venues during World War I in the Third Reich. By 1920 Bruckner had few champions outside the nationalist sphere, if still programmed at the Viennese Workers’ Symphony Concerts. One was Ernst Decsey, always astute in his choice of subjects and the first to take up the composer after the war.15 Bruckner was a quintessentially Austrian master, whose music worked to unify a fragmented nation bereft of either vision or allegiance. Not one of the leading Bruckner scholars of the 1920s was of liberal persuasion. Alfred Orel and Alfred Lorenz were both National Socialists. Orel, an Austrian, was rewarded with a supernumerary professorship at the University of Vienna after the Anschluss (and after denazification was barred from the university). Lorenz, an influential musicologist and theorist, joined the party in 1931 and published numerous articles on race and nationalism.16 Kurth had more personal reasons for his apostasy from liberalism. Comfortably ensconced in his professorship at the University of Bern, with all the prestige and recognition that his situation afforded him and the anti-Semitism faced as a youth apparently far behind him, Kurth remained apolitical.17 The subtlety and profundity of Kurth’s writings, however, rule out any simple political interpreta-

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tion. For all his allusions to contemporary science and psychology (especially Freud), the larger task Kurth set himself was philosophical: to relate Bruckner’s “life and being” to the “definite forms of basic psychic motions and the dynamic of life.”18 With the Bruckner centennial celebrations, conservatives had their revenge after the Amsterdam festival, in which liberals had claimed Mahler as the symbol of peace in the new Europe. Bruckner became the touchstone, supposedly leading Mahler to sound more modern and “Jewish.” By the time of the festivities in September 1924, if the antiSemitism that had flared so violently between the revolution of 1918 and the assassination of Rathenau in 1922 had subsided, it certainly had not dissipated. The political terrain of Germany had, however, changed since the Mahler festival four years earlier. After the hyperinflation and concomitant putsches in 1923 (albeit unsuccessful) by the communists, Hitler’s National Socialists, and Rhineland separatists, the year of 1924 seemed relatively stable. The immediate emergency appeared to have passed, and Germany seemed to be entering a period of middle-class conservative stability and reconciliation with its former foes. As Hitler’s early successes indicated, anti-Semitism had become a powerful rhetorical weapon for the nationalist Right. More than the revolutionary Beethoven, the staid Bruckner suited the prevailing mood. Back in 1919, in his brash account of “contemporary musical problems,” Karl Blessinger had lamented that even to perform Bruckner required making a strong case.19 But by 1924, August Püringer, the most brassy anti-Semite of his cohort, declared that regular performances of Bruckner had made German audiences “too alert and refined” to endure Mahler. Mahler’s Sixth, with its raucous percussion, including timpani struck with metal hammers, was a “truly Jewish, and therefore ‘sensuous’ reverence of Essen” (where the annual German Composers’ Festival, featuring the premiere, happened to take place).20 Most troubling to Püringer was Mahler’s purportedly reckless attempt to eclipse Bruckner, resulting in “intensification upon intensification,” bereft of emotional content. The single cymbal crash at the culmination of the Adagio in Bruckner’s Seventh was more meaningful than Mahler’s thirty-six cymbal crashes, Püringer maintained—dubiously comparing a slow movement with an entire symphony, and a lengthy one at that (the Andante of Mahler’s Sixth likewise has only one cymbal crash, in bar 86).21 At the climax of the Adagio, in bar 177, close to the end of the movement and the midpoint of the entire symphony comes an homage to Wagner: a tripleforte is supported by timpani, triangle, and cymbal crash.22 Püringer’s

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example was nonetheless well chosen, implicitly defending Bruckner’s decision to compose a single measure that necessitated hiring an additional player for the cymbal crash—a decision the composer may have overturned, depending on how one interprets an ambiguous notation in the manuscript.

“In the Spirit of Bruckner” Bruckner also supplanted Mahler as the presumed master-influence on contemporary symphonies. To confer this pedigree bespoke an unimpeachably German authority, and hence stock response to premieres reviewed in the conservative Die Musik.23 In 1925, the heyday of Weimar modernism, its editor issued a call to arms, renaming the publication the “Journal for the spiritual renewal of German music.” The ambition to preserve the German symphonic empire ultimately overrode the aesthetic precepts of originality and melodic invention. “Renewal” often meant little more than recycling. Once at the core of symphonic composition, originality all but vanished as an aesthetic criterion, especially for amateur composers. Time and again a reviewer would insist that Bruckner’s influence did not suppress the composer’s own voice—which is tantamount to asserting that conformism allows for individuality. Performers and conductors who tried their hands at composition often met this reaction—as if critics were loath to concede the fragmentation that resulted from the professionalization of music, with conductors and virtuosi who were no longer trained and skilled as composers. Gerhard von Keussler, director of the Blüthner Orchestra in Berlin, achieved a “Brucknerian amplitude as well as a symphonic structure and course of ideas evoking Bruckner” in his Second Symphony, according to Bertha Witt (one of the few female critics to publish reviews under her own name). Yet in the very same breath, Witt stressed the “independence and profundity of his musical language.”24 Likewise, Adolf Busch’s E-minor Symphony exhibited the “physiognomy of his other works . . . namely, the compositions of a talented musician who had excellent models (Brahms, Bruckner, and Reger),” the music historian Otto Schmid decreed in one review.25 By citing divergent models so offhandedly, Schmid established little more than that Busch—a virtuoso violinist who had emigrated to Switzerland— was part of the Austro-German legacy. Stylistic imitation, or attribution thereof, was as much an ideological as an artistic statement. Gräner is a case in point. Self-taught, Gräner

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never developed a distinctive compositional style. His music saw regular performances only in the Third Reich, and then merely a sop for his political loyalty. When his First Symphony (the Resurrection) had its Berlin premiere under Hermann Scherchen in 1920, Gräner, age fortyfive, was apparently “completely unknown.”26 But at this point, so soon after the war, and with hope for rebuilding German musical life running high, conservative and progressive camps welcomed the prospect of an able, new composer. The symphony’s subject matter seemed only too appropriate: “the arduous pilgrimage of a soul through the vagaries of earthly life—with the bitter and dark, tender and bright, swirling together colorfully—until reaching the refulgent sanctuary of the eternal spirit.”27 Walter Niemann, in his habitual conservative vein, applauded the work’s “Wagnerian and Brucknerian ceremonial splendor.”28 The telling exception to this endorsement of stylistic conformism was Max Marschalk, one of the last great liberals from Mahler’s circle. Marschalk stressed the “thoroughly individual physiognomy” of Gräner’s symphony but less so the music’s legacy (“if one wanted, one could say that Gräner comes from Bruckner and that Parsifal . . . had an undeniable influence”).29 It was only the composer and poet Georg Stolzenberg, outside the sphere of professional critics, who found in the work an overt influence of Wagner and Bruckner that detracted from the composition. Interestingly, however, publicity fliers for the symphony quoted Stolzenberg’s pronouncement, as if the mere comparison to older masters would benefit the younger symphonist.30 To be inspired by Bruckner became the benchmark of compositional maturity. The pedagogue Richard Greß’s “breakthrough” composition, according to the Zeitschrift für Musik, was his B-major Symphony, op. 46, a work whose alterations to traditional form stem from Bruckner. Whereas Bruckner symphonies characteristically begin with an elemental introduction in which the themes of the first movement emerge from the bedrock of an amorphous pedal point, Greß dedicated the entire first movement (the “Prologue”) to the task. Bruckner’s transformation of the expansive Adagio into the emotional and musical center of his symphonies was taken to its logical conclusion: in Greß’s symphony, an adagio follows the Prologue (in lieu of the expected allegro) and so structurally assumes the place of greatest prominence, as with Bruckner. The adagio, moreover, reveals “interesting points of contact” with Bruckner’s slow movements. Yet Greß’s “chorale finale” does not fulfill the promise, extended in the “Prologue,” of uniting the human and

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spiritual realms; its thematic material lacks the vigor of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, the reviewer commented.31 Some comparisons were so vague as to suggest that “Bruckner” was merely a reference to stylistic conservatism. The Second Symphony of Ernst Peters, a music teacher and pianist in Koblenz, evoked a Brucknerian finale by “resounding in the depths of the soul and unfolding its full strength in the large orchestra.” It is hard to imagine any symphony, except perhaps one with a particular program, that would not achieve depth by drawing on the full resources of the orchestra. Joseph Heinrichs, the critic and Liszt scholar who made the observation, associated Peters’s technique of thematic variation, quite naturally, with Liszt and Richard Strauss but felt compelled to add “and in a certain sense also Anton Bruckner.”32 Two examples warrant further discussion: Siegfried Wagner and the Austro-Hungarian Franz Schmidt. The symphony allowed both men, late in life, to synthesize earlier musical styles, as if defying the march of history. Siegfried Wagner (1869–1930), a more prolific opera composer than his father, Richard, undertook a symphony in the same year that the Zeitschrift für Musik heralded a renewal of German tradition, 1925. His Symphony in C would be premiered only in 1941; its exuberant character perfectly suited the regime’s turn to “bread and circuses” after the defeat at Stalingrad (and the composer’s genealogy didn’t hurt). It would be symptomatic that preserving the German musical legacy was more important than originality per se. Wagner’s talent was most manifest in the scherzo, the Zeitschrift für Musik reported. But without observing any originality, the reviewer applauded the music for “belonging to the world of Bruckner’s scherzi.”33 Schmidt, perhaps the most admired traditionalist of his generation, took leave of the genre in his Fourth Symphony, A Requiem for My Daughter (1933). When the composer conducted the symphony in 1938, at the end of his life, the Zeitschrift für Musik, summing up the events in Dresden that month, found one phrase sufficient: “[The] work mediates between Bruckner and Brahms.”34 The idea of unity was so deeply rooted in the genre that a single symphony could itself encompass historical eras as well, thereby preserving its legacy through the tumultuous present. Taken as a sum, the numerous references to Bruckner in reviews of new symphonies project a desire for cohesion in contemporary musical life. The symphony, such references seemed to say, remained in good health. Its stylistic vocabulary was dictated by the quintessential symphonic composer and, no less, a man of unassailable conservative value.

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If amateur composers, struggling to find their own voices, turned to Bruckner partly from exigency (his stylistic unity was far more imitable than the symphonies of Mahler or Brahms), stronger musical personalities sensed the political potency of the composer. Wetz is an extreme, but not exclusive, case. Increasingly reactionary over the course of the Weimar period, Wetz scorned new developments in composition. Moving beyond his juvenilia, which was written in an ardent Wagnerian and Lisztian vein, Wetz developed a Brucknerian style in his C-minor Symphony (no. 1), composed during World War I. Two more symphonies, similar in compositional aesthetics, followed in the early 1920s; during the same years Wetz published his first book, on Bruckner. Wetz and, following his death in 1935, his music received more support during the Third Reich than before or since but even so, relatively few performances. The most conspicuous among Brucknerians was Wilhelm Furtwängler. Creative limitations, however, possibly played some role in his turn to the Austrian master. Furtwängler’s Symphony in D, composed at age seventeen and premiered in the 1903–1904 season in Breslau (Wroclaw), was a spectacular failure. He began another symphony in 1908 but abandoned the project, and likewise a Symphonic Concerto for Orchestra and Piano begun in 1924. Remarkably, for a conductor who had outstanding orchestral resources at his disposal (he was music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1922–1928 and the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic from 1922 until his retirement), Furtwängler ventured no other orchestral compositions until the Third Reich, when the genre of symphony came into favor. The conductor accepted a number of compromises, eventually moving ideologically closer to National Socialism in the later 1930s, and at the same time saw a period of compositional fecundity around age fifty, sustained thereafter even despite many conducting engagements. Furtwängler completed the Symphonic Concerto for Piano in 1936, incorporated the 1908 Largo into his First Symphony (1938–1941), and composed a Second Symphony (1944–1945). His third and final symphony, begun in 1943, was completed only after the war. Never having had the benefit of an extended period in which to concentrate exclusively on composition and develop his own voice, Furtwängler threw himself into a productive period of orchestral writing largely by turning to Brahms’s thematic development and Bruckner’s orchestration (especially in blocks of contrasting brass and string sonority). Furtwängler’s broader aesthetic orientation, whether swimming against the tide of modernism or

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seeking accommodation within the Third Reich, was to create from and within the laws of organization, including tonal polarities, forever alternating fields of stability and instability.35 Even prolific and successful composers fell under Bruckner’s influence, although influence in this sense might have the salutary effect of enriching the compositional process. The two preeminent conservatives of the First Austrian Republic, Joseph Messner and Johann Nepomuk David, invoked Bruckner overtly yet with great refinement. Sensing the artistic limitations of the symphony for their own generation, both sought recourse to other genres. Moreover, rather than absorb a Brucknerian idiom, both adopted thematic material in new contexts while preserving the larger structure or meaning traditionally associated with the genre. Messner’s Sinfonietta, for piano, soprano solo, and chamber orchestra (1925) defied traditional scoring but still embraced the standard symphonic narrative of struggle and victory. The conservative Emil Petschnig, whose reviews Schoenberg and Berg deplored, welcomed the first Viennese performance of the Sinfonietta, programmed with Joseph and Michael Haydn, Bach, Boccherini, Gréty, and two contemporary lieder, as a concert providing an “oasis amid the gruesome desert of Viennese concert life.” Everything in the music, in his view, “breathed in the spirit of Bruckner”—its “energetic figures and jagged rhythm, a melody as second theme that is beautiful and pulsating, melody, as well as the chorale brass motif that prefigures the ending.”36 Capitalizing on the perception of his Brucknerian allegiance, Messner also composed his Improvisation über ein Thema von Bruckner, op. 19, for organ in 1924, the same period associated with a wider aesthetic turn to the right. Bruckner was an unusual choice for a variation, since his genius lies in the development of material more than in the melodic material itself. His themes possess a strong profile in scoring and rhythmic treatment but are for the most part less memorable from a lyrical standpoint. Furthermore, innovations in counterpoint and form, Bruckner’s two most important contributions to symphonic literature, are inimical to the demands of contrast and sequential form implied in a variations set. But as a political gesture, deploying a theme of Bruckner was astute. David, who moved to German early in the Third Reich, turned to the arch-Austrian composer immediately after the Anschluss for inspiration in his Introitus, Choral und Fuge über ein Thema von Anton Bruckner, op. 25, for organ and winds. Whether real or perceived, Bruckner’s influence was rarely identified

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with specific procedures such as thematic quotation or pedal point. It was instead a style—or rather, in the terms of the day, a certain “character” (“style” implied a self-conscious and artificial approach to composition). For the very reason that Bruckner’s stylistic idiom—distinctive, consistent, and expansive—was inhibiting to composers, it allowed interpreters a good degree of freedom. Bruckner’s symphonies are in many ways conductor’s music. Their expressive power depends as much on the expertise of interpretation as on the raw material of the score. Each work allows an enormous interpretive range. As a provincial organist who possessed little practical experience with the medium, Bruckner wrote symphonies that require a conductor’s keen sense of orchestral balance, formal development, and generation of motivic energy. Tempo and pacing hold immense importance, so much so that Grunsky kept detailed records of the durations of individual movements in Bruckner performances he attended.37 By contrast, the symphonies of Mahler, who was a supremely talented conductor, require among other things careful execution of the intricate performance instructions inscribed in the score. In the 1920s, more than ever before, the conductor—both his presence and his interpretation—affected the listening experience, at least as critics recounted it. The professionalization of conducting in the later nineteenth century coincided with a decrease in the musical training of audiences. In attempting to understand a new or challenging work, listeners seemed to rely more on visual cues from the conductor. Moreover, the emerging field of mass psychology and theories of leadership contributed to new characterizations of the relationship between conductor and orchestra, as well as between conductor and audience. Dictatorial, fiery-eyed, and passionate, Mahler represented one extreme of conducting style, while Herbert von Karajan, who conducted with cool, studied movements (eyes more often closed than ablaze), would come to represent the other. The conductor’s raison d’etre was no longer chiefly managing the ensemble. Rather, assuming a kind of metaphysical role, the conductor brought the composition into being, taking whatever liberties that were required. Bruckner’s symphonies were ideal for this new conception of conducting. Such interpretive liberty, which conductors increasingly took for granted, could be disconcerting. The impression of such license exposed an ontological instability, there being perhaps two or more realizations of the same work of art, neither of which had verifiable authority. This instability, if present with any genre, was most striking with the sym-

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phony. The determination and teleology of Beethoven’s Fifth, for example, would be attenuated by the awareness of two possible interpretations, perhaps even two aural memories, that created a certain cognitive dissonance. Recording technology—or in a large city, coincidences is two conductors programming the same composer during a given week— made it easier to illustrate disparity in interpretation. Critics’ discomfort at variance in interpretation was often registered in racial terms— as if a pure realization of a piece would be masked by any indications of the conductor’s ethnicity or nationality. In November 1923, Cologne witnessed two Bruckner performances the same week, Otto Klemperer conducting the Eighth Symphony at the opening of the opera season and Hermann Abendroth the Fifth Symphony with the Gürzenich-Orchester. Walter Jacobs admired both conductors but contrasted their interpretations of Bruckner’s orchestration in revealing terms: “Whereas Abendroth produced more of a full, Wagnerian sonority, Klemperer achieved a Mahlerian clarity of scoring.”38 Perhaps Klemperer invited the allusion by programming Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder on the same concert. But it is telling that Klemperer, who was Jewish, was linked with the generation’s most celebrated Jewish conductor-composer, whereas Abendroth—who succeeded Walter as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra when the Nazis came to power—was linked with Wagner. In this capacity, moreover, Abendroth programmed conservative fare and provided the services of his orchestra for political occasions such as the 1935 Nuremberg party rally and the 1937 Tag der deutsche Kunst (Celebration of German art) held in Munich.39 Other critics wanted Mahler’s music to sound Brucknerian, even those who, perversely, believed the genuine “Bruckner” sound was unattainable by a conductor of Jewish heritage. Walther Hirschberg, though Jewish himself, used thinly veiled anti-Semitic language to review a performance of the Fifth under Heinz Unger in 1920. Mahler, whom history had by this point rendered a traditionalist of sorts, remained a favorite of Hirschberg, an unremitting aesthetic conservative. Although Unger grasped the melodic fervor and emotional world of the symphony, his Mahler interpretation came under attack for the vaguest of reasons, as is characteristic of anti-Semitic rhetoric: “A supreme inwardness seems to elude the conductor, as do, periodically, a feeling for the structuring of broad dimensions, a long breath, and the capacity for synthesis that is necessary to discover and make perceptible all the connections and

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links within a work.”40 Synthesis, as we shall see, was an ideologically charged term and an aesthetic quality conservatives cherished—and was also reputedly beyond the interpretive capacities of Jewish conductors. It is not surprising that Unger’s Mahler interpretation was distinctly un-Brucknerian. In the previous season, his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic had comprised a series of Mahler programs. (And it had been Bruno Walter’s conducting Das Lied von der Erde five years earlier that convinced Unger to abandon law and pursue a career in conducting.) Over the next seasons, Unger received several more conducting engagements, including a historic invitation, in 1923, to lead the combined forces of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s Eighth. He fled the Nazis in 1933, moved to London, successfully rebuilt his career by touring, especially in the Soviet Union, and eventually settled in Canada in 1948. Hirschberg, for his part, continued to espouse an aggressive nationalism in his writings, becoming one of Berlin’s leading distinguished critics. Finally he, too, would be subjected to the depraved treatment Germany’s Jews received. But after five weeks of incarceration at Sachsenhausen in 1939, he was allowed to immigrate to Paris—a comparatively mild fate that, quite possibly, was due to his earlier exertions on behalf of German nationalism.41

The Consolation of Metaphor and Visions of Wholeness In The World War and German Society: The Testament of a Liberal, Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, grandson of the composer, observed that all confidence in rationality expired during the war. Arbitrary carnage on the battlefield and at home forced a reckoning with the role of chance and catastrophe in the formation of social networks and relationships.42 As ideas of non-causality gained influence—reflected by such scientific advances as quantum theory and Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy43—metaphorical expression emerged as a dominant artistic and intellectual recourse, and so too in music. Since performance was a social product, discussions eventually also encompassed the audience as agent. After World War I, in a democratiziation of aesthetics, musical listening became a subject in its own right. The completion of Ernst Haiger’s Deutsche Symphoniehaus (German symphony hall) in Stuttgart came to symbolize a new listening experience in which individuals were absorbed into a whole. Defying nineteenth-century models, Haiger wished to cover the orchestra, as at Wagner’s Festspiel-

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haus in Bayreuth, resulting in a blend of individual timbres. Sketched in 1907 in a radical Wagnerian aesthetic of timbral blending, the building was only completed after World War I, when symphonic listening took on new cultural and political meaning. For Paul Ehlers, the Deutsche Symphoniehaus fostered a sense of totality and “psychic harmonization.”44 Grunsky, Ehlers’ right-wing counterpart in Stuttgart, declared the building emblematic of the German orchestral legacy in the power to blend and differentiate orchestral timbres.45 Writers across the political spectrum addressed the subject of musical listening and its significance to postwar recovery: “Beethoven did not compose a new kind of music but rather a new kind of listening. A Beethoven symphony springs forth from the idea of a wholly new approach to listening.”46 If Bekker, author of this pronouncement, was an armchair socialist, writing with hope in the very year Germany was becoming a democracy, 1918, the next generation took political idealism to the streets. The young Jascha Horenstein, music director of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, wrote about “the revolution in listening unleashed by Beethoven” in the pages of a proletarian singers’ magazine.47 On the Right, there was little motivation to compromise the primacy of law to adapt to the listener’s skills and limitations. Gräner, in the general introduction to his book on Bruckner, is a case in point. The repetition within sonata form (that is, the tripartite form A-B-A), was in his view, “a concession to the listener’s comfort and satisfaction but does not derive from the inner, organic conditions of music.”48 His statement, however unremarkable, typified the nationalists’ focus on structure and would never have emanated from progressives such as August Halm and Bekker, for whom listening experiences were central to aesthetic inquiry and musical hermeneutics. Nor is it coincidental that the first book on musical listening, from 1938, was by Hans Mersmann, whom the Nazis had stripped of all titles and positions.49 By then, music criticism had been stifled, though this was partly its own doing, and the question was whether any aesthetic space remained for an artistic appreciation free of ideology. Metaphors tended to cluster around two poles, temporal and spatial, each with an elective affinity to a political orientation. The terms, hardly consistent even in German, are difficult to translate into contemporary Anglo-American usage. Still, critics of liberal political persuasion—“liberal” to be understood in the modern American sense as vaguely “progressive” or toward the Left and, in Austria, secular in

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orientation—tended to emphasize temporality, from the development of themes to larger undulations. Critical “conservatives”—which implied a mistrust of broad political participation, antipathy to social democracy, often a nationalist commitment, and, increasingly, anti-Semitism— valued a hierarchical arrangement that posited overarching structures, frozen for time immemorial.50 Today, in the early twenty-first century, metaphors of time and space, if intrinsic to Western thought, have again become ideologically freighted. Postmodernism has undercut any premise of progress through time and the reliability of narrative in general. So too, have developments in modern science, the West’s renunciation of territorial and colonial ambitions, and globalization exposed the ideology behind spatial analogues, so crucial to aesthetic developments over the first half of the twentieth century. In its most essential formulation, the metaphor offers a linguistic equation that defies the outward differences of two objects or ideas. There is a kind of intellectual faith involved in the willingness and ability to grasp an underlying similarity beneath the appearance of difference, and such faith could be reassuring or empowering. Metaphor and image pervade the book that seemed to capture, but also dictate, the historical sensibilities after World War I: Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), perhaps the most ambitious effort at a general historical theory of civilizations since Hegel.51 (The English subtitle does not convey the metaphorical orientation of the original, which would be literally translated as “Sketches for a morphology of world history.”) In his sweeping view of history, as he put it most succinctly in his subsequent “Prussianism and Socialism” (1919), Spengler shared Nietzsche’s concern about the decadence of Western civilization and the inefficacy of rationalism: “The nineteenth century was the century of natural science; the twentieth belongs to psychology. We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that life governs reason.”52 At a time when Germany’s future seemed deeply uncertain, the sheer confidence of Spengler’s philosophical exposition offered solace. Since most civilizations pass through a life cycle, he argued, historians can predict the spiritual forms and meaning, duration and rhythm of future stages in Western civilization. Throughout the book, Spengler stressed form (abstract and enduring) over content (concrete and ephemeral). To think in terms of forms that are permanent, despite historical vicissitude, imparted a sense of knowability regarding the future. In Spengler’s terms, to comprehend history in terms of structure (Gestalt) was invig-

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orating and creative, whereas to perceive the world through arbitrary laws and concepts was intellectually and culturally moribund.53 Spengler later simplified this contrast in Weltanschauung, insisting that the pursuit of knowledge should not involve analytic dissection but “penetration”—a spiritualized living in and through language and images.54 The language of metaphors implies continuity and synthesis, while analytical logic and causality allow for, even emphasize, change and difference. Spengler’s influence spread in various directions, one of which was National Socialism. (Spengler himself, however, parted ways with Hitler after a long discussion in 1933, protesting that Germany needed a “hero” and not a “heroic tenor.”)55 Spengler’s compelling metaphorical rhetoric both confirmed and encouraged an intellectual transformation that was already under way, whereby key concepts were emigrating from one discipline to another—from philosophy to arts criticism to social commentary or politics—and accruing a rich, polysemic resonance in the process. This intellectual mobility was abetted by certain features of the German language—its comparatively limited vocabulary but seemingly infinite capacity for forming compound words and ideas. The deliberate infusion of metaphors, whether motivated by a philosophical argument (Spengler) or propagandistic craft (Goebbels), had the effect of isolating the reader or listener, creating a linguistically thick environment that obscured any realistic perception of the surrounding world. The regnant conceptual metaphor among conservatives was “wholeness.” In his history of German academic intellectuals, Fritz K. Ringer has observed that this metaphor originated within philosophy and the humanities and was transferred thence into pedagogy and finally into politics.56 Myth-making became important in the age of mass politics, as propaganda fed the growth of socialism, communism, and radical strains of nationalism—whether in Germany, France, Italy, or the calls for a Jewish state.57 A new relationship between citizen and state—the absorption of the individual into the collective—was normalized through metaphorical discourse. Artistic developments, some directly in response to the war, such as Dadaism, with its radical, nihilistic aesthetic, and the concomitant popularity of collage among such artists as Max Ernst or Kurt Schwitters, threatened the notion of the artwork as a coherent and unified whole, intensifying a conservative backlash that insisted on a total and totalizing unity. An ideology of wholeness was championed in its most radical form by the historian and cultural critic Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. From

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his youth, Moeller felt drawn to the subject of nationalism—though, it seems, more the idea than the practice of it, since he fled Germany in order to avoid military conscription. In exile, Moeller produced an eightvolume history of the German people, enumerating their inherent psychological types. When World War I broke out, Moeller returned to Germany and began to formulate an aggressive nationalism. His culminating work, Das dritte Reich (1923), described Germany’s mission as “to live not only for ourselves but for mankind” and “to erect an immortal monument” that would preserve the legacy of the German people. Metaphors of “building” and monumentality pervade his writings and legacy. The “will” to build and to create constituted a national identity, as stressed in the posthumous edition of Die Deutschen, titled Das ewige Reich (the eternal regime). The final volume, released in 1935, addressed Germans as a “constructive” society (Die gestaltenden Deutschen).58 The most radical strain in the ideology of national construction was its anti-individualism. In a chapter on “the conservative,” Moeller expounded on the meaning of life for Germans and the German nation, protesting that it could not be “fulfilled in one short span”: “We merely continue what others have begun [so that] others again continue where we break off.” The individual had no genuine ontological status. The conservative observed: “Individuals perish while the whole continues; series of generations at work in the traditional service of a single thought; nations busy in building up their history.” In this worldview, individual freedom of choice—the individual’s ability to execute change— is an illusion to be banished. The conservative knows “that men or nations or even epochs that give free rein to their ego and live according to their own lusts reduce their existence to dirt.”59 Möller’s radical antiindividualism was worlds apart from the high modernism of the Weimar Republic, which stressed personal subjectivity, consciousness, and individualism. From the political perspective of totalitarian parties and increasingly, as well, in writings emanating from the academy, individualism was equivalent to “egotism.”60 Wholeness, objectivity, unity, and universality were aspects of a supervening idea of form that dislodged the traditional priority of individual perception in the interpretation of art and culture, the narration of history, and the execution of politics. If more as an archetype than through a multitude of individual works, the symphony became the metaphor in which all these formal aspects coalesced and became man-

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ifest. The symphony exhibited wholeness in its generic attributes (e.g., its tonal and thematic unity) and directives for the listener (forming an overview of the entire symphony as a single structure). During periods of crisis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers repeatedly turned to the symphony and symphonic analogies to reconcile individuality and totality, citizen and nation-state. The symphony symbolized an ideal wholeness and unity that stood opposed to the atomizing effects of democracy, industrialization, and urbanization. As the lodestone of German culture, the symphony—whether as a performance experience or merely an idea—also provided consolation for the fragmentation of nature and loss of determinism that resulted from scientific advances and especially physics, all reputedly leading to the disintegration, objectification, and materialization of society and culture. Science and physics, in turn, became synonymous with social and political instability.61 The symphony was the metaphor of choice when German academics, such as the historian Ernst Troeltsch, discussed the relationship between the whole and its parts, especially the individual within society. It reconciled the principle of individuality within the confines of the nation.62 The power and appeal of this metaphor drew from the sense that the symphony did not merely present formal unity but created it during the course of its performance. Synthesis (Synthese) replaced coherence (Zusammenhang) as the principle for symphonic understanding. For conservatives, synthesis involved both perception of the whole and a deeply intuitive comprehension that was the opposite of analysis. Synthetic criticism preferred generalization and comprehensive summary to specialized, minute analysis. Music was taken by conservatives to be the consummate expression of synthesis, displaying the idea in its full intellectual and spiritual splendor. In an essay from 1890 on “active and passive listening,” Hugo Riemann stressed that “practice and good will are required to understand a large and complex musical work. A strong memory and capacity for mental synthesis are needed if the whole is not to disintegrate into a series of loosely-attached individual impressions.”63 Musical listening was not a passive activity but, as one critic put it, required “mental work” and “collaboration” with the composer. This labor entailed the “interplay of analysis and synthesis.”64 Riemann, from a generation committed to the aesthetic integrity of music, without a shred of political rhetoric, perceived no opposition between these two modes of perception, analysis and synthesis.

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If unity was the goal of the compositional process, the capacity for “synthesis” described the listener’s ability to grasp that unity. Robert Hirschfeld, musically among Vienna’s most conservative critics, reminded his readers after a performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony that “the symphonic art means not analysis but synthesis.” Avid Brucknerian that he was, Hirschfeld found “synthesis” required thematic and timbral consistency, in effect a tightly woven musical surface. In contrast, he felt, Mahler’s style—his scoring, motivic writing, and harmonic idiosyncrasies—distracted listeners from perceiving larger structures.65 The nature of synthetic listening changed vastly over the ensuing years. Listening for the whole became a prerequisite to musical understanding, not, as for Riemann’s generation, the result of the training and repetition that eventually enabled one to hear how parts fit together. Kurth explained, “One can only proceed to analysis after the synthesis is understood.” And yet the true “challenge,” in his eyes, was “to grasp form synthetically, instead of analytically.” Bruckner’s dynamic principle of form invited synthetic perception because the essential materials of a symphony were not its rigid thematic groups but rather its “energetic events,” which coalesced in “developmental waves.” The formal design of the whole becomes comprehensible, Kurth believed, only in relation to these waves.66 In part, Brucknerians insisted on ideas of synthesis because the composer had faced criticism for a sprawling disunity in his massive works. Max Morold all but conceded this point in 1912. While Beethoven was the master of musical synthesis, Morold wrote, Bruckner’s music proceeds “analytically.” Beethoven’s movements begin with short and simple themes or motifs that are extended, broadened, and transformed, until full melodies issue forth. Bruckner’s method is the very reverse. As a result, after an “infinitely exciting opening,” the “combinations and complications” in the development section “can at first seem dry and pondered” and thus disappoint novice listeners. Morold believed, however, that the analytic procedures in Bruckner’s developments make the recapitulation all the stronger and therefore gratifying to the informed listener. The analytic method in Bruckner, in effect, was localized by Morold to a single part, the development, but actually served to bring greater cohesion to the larger structure.67 Blessinger made the same point about symphonic closure in general. The quotation of an earlier theme at the high point of a finale brings about a “true synthesis.”68 The political analogues were clear: from the aesthetic conservative Hirschfeld to the nationalists Morold and

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Blessinger, synthesis was valued above analysis. In contrast, Halm, a progressive (with an emphatically processual conception of music), rejected Beethoven’s synthetic (synthetisch) approach in political terms. With Beethoven, thematic material is “designed for subordination” to the overall structure, whereas in Halm’s own compositional aesthetics, “the thematic element is not a means, or not ‘material,’ but rather the ruler. The overall form is a ‘result’”—that is, the material dictates the structure.69 The idea of synthesis also had a wider importance in music historiography, as in intellectual history, whatever the political camp. Halm saw Bruckner’s symphonies as a “synthesis” of the cultures of fugue (Bach) and sonata (Beethoven).70 Bach, Blessinger stressed in a polemical article from 1921, achieved “a perfect synthesis” between the two principles of formalism and sensualism.71 The following year Mersmann proposed Beethoven as the final phase of a synthesis in which “the art work is an idea.” In Beethoven’s aesthetic world, “synthesis is no longer an organism.”72 The authenticity of the whole, as a concept within music history as well as composition itself, circulated far more widely than with Schenker, although his systematic analysis remains best known today. “Synthesis,” in his view, is an essential concept in analytical listening, in drawing together parts into a larger process or structure. It referred to the simultaneity of various kinds of musical cognition and, above all, a perception of pitches synthesizing harmonically or contrapuntally into thematic units of greater scale. Schenker’s legitimate assumption that most listeners cannot grasp a composition as a whole evolved into intellectual arrogance in the 1930s, perhaps in reaction to what he saw as the incompetence of the socialist press. For example, after a 1928 performance of Bruckner’s Seventh, the review in the Viennese proletarian press commented that it is possible to appreciate the work as a whole, despite the “gigantic architectural proportions,” because the movements are constructed from clearly profiled thematic material and develop from one another logically.73 Schenker, however, insisted that not just anyone could experience music synthetically: “The masses lack the soul of genius. They . . . have no feeling for the future. Their lives are merely an eternally disordered foreground, a continuous present without connection, unwinding chaotically in empty, animal fashion. It is the exceptional individual who creates and transmits connection and coherence.” Although music was for Schenker a living and evolving presence, the composer’s vision of the work remained an unchanging

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entity that existed outside temporality: “The fundamental structure is always creating, always present and active; this ‘continual present’ in the vision of the composer is certainly not a greater wonder than that which issues from the true experience of a moment in time: in this most brief space we feel something very like the composer’s perception, that is, the meeting of past, present and future.” A genius therefore can perceive “even the largest spans” of musical time.74 Talk of “synthesis” displaced the softer Goethean idea of “organicism” to convey unity, strength, and nationhood. The concept had particular force in fascist ideology, with its toxic mix of pseudophilosophy and pseudoscience. In The Völkish Idea of a State (1924), Rosenberg defined National Socialism as the “quest for synthesis” that lay behind all of Germany’s political goals and territorial acquisitions, from Frederick the Great to the German liberation against Napoleon to the modern present. National Socialism possessed the “fanatical will” necessary to realize a “final synthesis” (a foreboding expression, the terms of which were left unstated). Rosenberg charged Germans to aspire to the perfect synthesis in all realms of life; the past and present would then be “manifested” in a way that would facilitate “the shaping of the future.” In the deadly contradictions of Nazism, “synthesis” referred both to the historical achievements of the German people and to their willing submission to a powerful Führer. Its success as a movement of action (literally, a “fighting movement”), in contrast to the supposedly indecisive Weimar regime, Rosenberg felt, was demonstrated in how Germans had “increasingly been forced to submit to this synthesis.”75 During the Third Reich, facing anxiety about what kinds of discourse would be permitted, music critics and scholars held fast to the concept of synthesis. Hindemith, as we shall see, was greeted as an artist who was “striving for a synthesis of tradition and progress.”76 The synthesis of the past and future became more compelling, at least rhetorically, through the notion of “shaping”—a metaphor for artistic creativity that was integrated into National Socialist discourse. Rosenberg maintained, “German National Socialism fights for nothing other than the preservation of the German nationality and for the shaping of its future”—a claim whose apparently modest and fair rhetoric barely concealed its essentially violent intentions.77

Spatial Listening Historically, discourse on music has relied on spatial terminology. Music does, in many cultures, seem to go “up” or “down,” or correspond

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to other basic spatial ideas. The technical language of theory so thoroughly assimilated this vocabulary that the frisson of metaphorical discourse was lost. But one can also listen spatially in the sense of three-dimensionality. Sonically, a listener might feel enclosed within walls or thrust atop an edifice, descriptions that proliferated in popular writings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whatever the metaphorical approach, the point of reference in these accounts of spatial listening was not chiefly emotional or subjective. This discourse did not involve traditional images, for example, a landscape, but entailed a relationship between the self and the environment: a consciousness of “physical” movements, such as encountering an object or moving through space. A spatial impression might result from a particularly forceful musical gesture or could emerge after the fact, with sonic pillars so stolid that the composition could not be reduced to a schematic structure—that is, to a succession of sections. Spatial listening was important to August Halm as he strove to convey how music could be both corporeal and spiritual. A masterful harmonic intensification, he explained, should be experienced as “gradually overcoming space, fast or slowly, toward greater heights or depths.” On the part of the listener, it involved “overcoming space” in terms of “progress and decline, acceleration and slowing.”78 In his study of Bruckner’s symphonies, Halm guided listeners away from violent or oppressive conceptions of musical power, through the metaphor of space. The finale of the Fourth Symphony, according to Halm was the “best and most powerful finale” in Bruckner’s oeuvre as well as “in the symphonic literature in general.” Yet, he insisted, “it is much better to speak here of a spatial character,” explaining that we cease perceiving the music in temporal terms in order to command a broader view. Far from any mirroring any nationalist aspirations, Bruckner’s development of musical space reminded Halm of the Swiss Carl Spitteler’s Olympischer Frühling (which would win the writer a Nobel Prize in 1919), in particular, his poetic principle of projecting views into regions and events that are not integrated into the narrative actions.79 Spatial metaphors for Halm conveyed how Bruckner opens “views into other regions and processes” that are not necessary “for the coherence of the narrative but serve the situation to be imagined—the space or aura of the action in an almost mystical manner.” Shifting from spatial to historical metaphors, he explained that in Bruckner’s symphonies, as in Spitteler’s epics, through “wide, unimagined distances, other ages come into view like a new horizon.”80

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The spatial or architectural conceptions of music that emerged in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with a growing awareness of public domain as a space. Ideas of space also became more complex; the simple notion of an empty container inhabited by discrete objects (which musicians, intuitively, always rejected) was revised in the sciences, for example, by the idea of “fields” created by invisible types of energy (such as gravitation, electricity or magnetism). In the wake of the railroad and telegraph, and in the emerging consciousness of continual ‘state rivalry, national territory could now also be envisaged as a field of potential energy.81 Spatial metaphors possessed aesthetic merits witnessed in arts criticism as well. Walter Pater, the father of literary decadence, developed visual metaphors that would influence spatial paradigms of literature in the mid-twentieth century.82 Precisely because the formalism behind spatial metaphors was so malleable, it could become an attribute of both modernism (fathered by decadence) and nationalist conservatism. Like other aspects of musical thought, spatial conceptions became politicized after World War I. The idea of symphonic space had special resonance for Germans; the loss of national territory resulting from the Treaty of Versailles had a profound effect on public consciousness. Hitler played on this injured pride everywhere in Mein Kampf (1924), calling on Germans to demand Lebensraum (living space) in eastern Europe.83 The term, popularized by Karl Haushofer (later an advisor to the National Socialists on foreign affairs), had a pedigree going back to the nineteenth century with the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who believed that nations required Lebensraum in order to prosper and grow. German nationalists argued that the postwar borders did not do justice to the true power and importance of German cultural and artistic achievement. Music could imaginatively supply the space owed to Germany. Whereas the language barrier constrained the dissemination of German literature abroad, her music could resound across and beyond Europe.84 The public display of music—the exhilaration that symphonic power could fill a space greater than the concert hall—promoted another sort of spatial listening. If, as it seemed, Austrians were less inclined than Germans to experience music in spatial terms—at least, Austrian critics valued spatial metaphors less—a difference in attitudes toward the idea of national boundaries and identity might be part of the reason. Imperial territory was by nature more mutable than the territory of the nation-state. The postwar emancipation of the non-German

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nationalities within the Habsburg realm did not, for Austrians, generate the same sense of humiliation that Germans experienced over the loss of 15 percent of their national territory (along with the restrictions placed on their sovereignty by Versailles). Moreover, as Austria increasingly withdrew from international politics, national pride and identity found compensation in the sentimentalizing—indeed, commodification—of its history and culture, beginning with the Salzburg Festival, which Richard Strauss and Max Reinhardt established in 1920. Imagining musical space as a proxy for national space was not just a German tendency but, as symphonies of Shostakovich and Copland reveal in both their compositional aesthetics and reception, could also occur in the Soviet Union and the United States. Both societies were involved in highly charged transformative political projects—the Stalinist Five-Year Plans and the New Deal—that swept up artists into the mission of building an empire on idealistic or ideological terms, including Copland, a great sympathizer with socialist and communist causes.85 Rather than accept a simplistic equation of music as space—even if occasionally put in this way thus by a composer or critic, performer or listener, we might agree that a philosophical rhetoric emerging in arts criticism, as well as political and cultural writings, laid the foundation for spatial thinking. The turn to spatial rhetoric in polemical discourse after 1918 invites contrast with another historical watershed, the French Revolution, after which point the sudden changes in society and government compelled a new awareness of accelerating events and of time itself.86 World War I, in contrast, brought a sense of territorial rupture so great that spatial thinking offered the assurance, if illusory, of continuity and permanence. Spatial insight (Sehweise—thus a more practical term than “thought”) permeated the superior perspective of the “conservative,” who commands a “broad and spatial kind of vision over the small and temporal point of view.”87 A guidebook to Nazi thought, commissioned by the U.S. government in 1944, presented Moeller van den Bruck’s ideology of space to explain Geopolitik: We can preserve only what is in space, never what is in time. Things originate in space—in the beginning and forever. Things develop in time— only temporarily and once each time. Space remains, time flees. Only in space . . . is there a possibility of return that guarantees the continuity of all happenings. In time, on the contrary, we may conceive of “progress,” which, however, just because it is temporal does not last long but at once breaks away and falls into decay—leaving us only with space again.88

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Concern with the aesthetics and politics of space extended well beyond the sphere of conservatives. In his 1927 lecture “Writing as a Spiritual Space of the Nation,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal mused on the invincibility of the cultural ties established through art. In France, more so than in Austria or Germany, he argued, literature was the “cultural space of the nation,” by which he meant that it created a national identity comparable to the sense of Frenchness derived from the country’s territory as a living presence. Seeking to undermine German pretensions to cultural uniqueness and superiority, Hofmannsthal’s lecture focused on literature and perhaps deliberately did not address the special status of music in Germany.89 Heinrich Berl argued that spatial thinking was a Weltanschauung determined by the conditions of “Western” culture, whereas a temporal orientation was “Oriental” (Jewish). Traditional harmonic writing, in turn, encouraged spatial listening, whereas Schoenberg’s atonality and polyphony exposed new possibilities in the underdeveloped musical potential of time.90 Schoenberg would have disagreed—especially before he converted back to Judaism in 1933. Keenly interested in both spatial and temporal aspects of music, Schoenberg did not privilege one over the other. “Melody,” he remarked suggestively, “is the unconscious recognition, obtained from immediate intuition, of the unity of space and time.” Schoenberg contemplated the most fundamental aspects of his art in these terms of space and time: “Music is an art which plays in time. But the way in which a work presents itself to a composer (= vision = idea = inner hearing) is independent of this; time is regarded as space. As the work is written down, space is transformed into time. For the listener the process is reversed: it is only after the work has run its course in time that he overviews it as a whole—its idea, its form, and its content.”91 Forever conjoining the radical and the traditional in his oeuvre, Schoenberg had a strong feeling for the old aesthetic tenet whereby the spatial nature of music lent it stature, providing substance and permanence to an art form whose materials were invisible and ethereal. Often monumental in scope, spatial metaphors normalized the sensation of being overwhelmed by a Bruckner symphony. Spatial images, arguably a tool of programmatic interpretation, eventually contributed to spatial listening. Morold’s generalist study of Bruckner is a repository of spatial images. Addressing novice listeners, Morold resorted to imagery to illustrate the contrast between symphonic form in Beethoven and Bruckner. At the culmination of a Beethoven symphony, Morold

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explained, earlier motifs develop into full-fledged melodies, “crowning the splendid temple” of the movement like a “shimmering dome.” This experience would neither overwhelm nor invigorate the self. Morold’s exegesis did not indicate whether the listener is inside the temple (that is, overwhelmed by the musical architecture) or outside that structure, or is empowered by its monumentality. With Bruckner’s symphonies, in contrast, Morold stressed the sensation of awe—walking deep within a forest without any hope of escape, or staring into the dark expanse of a vast dome without dizziness or fatigue. Rather than viewing a Beethovenian construction, the listener was enclosed by the Bruckerian space. Both scenarios differed from the Kantian sublime (das Erhabene)—standing beneath a towering cliff with no sense of threat to oneself—in that the listener did not regain a sense of self through the process. The musical process did not crystallize into a structure in ways that enlightened and empowered. With right-leaning tendencies and later as an early Nazi sympathizer, Morold prefigured a fascist mind-set of submission and loss of individuality.92 In the modern era of airplanes and skyscrapers, the aesthetic tradition of the sublime (with its frequent evocations of remote natural scenery) had become somewhat incongruous. In the twentieth century, the sublime was rarely invoked outside political contexts. Spatial listening often entailed a sense of expansion—in form, texture, registral spacing, rhythmic disparity, or counterpoint—characterized as a shift from two to three dimensions. Dimensionality was an emerging scientific discourse (e.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity, conceptualizing time as a “fourth” dimension) that diffused into the wider cultural realm. Music, it was felt, could also be understood in the ostensibly scientific terms of dimensions.93 The underlying belief, however imprecise and ill conceived, was that the structures and ontological composition of the psyche were parallel to those of the cosmos. The finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony intensifies “inward dimensions” into “outward dimensions,” Blessinger stated, without further explication, in his textbook on musical form.94 What he meant was perhaps less important than the notion that a mystical structure from within could become public and monumental; the privacy of the individual, in other words, dissolves into the power of community. The expansiveness of Bruckner’s symphonies became a common theme, coincidentally abetted by practical musicological developments. The so-called original versions of the symphonies began to enter the

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repertoire, supplanting the unauthorized “cut” (or “Viennese”) versions that Ferdinand Löwe had prepared and promulgated. In 1923, Otto Klemperer became the first to offer a convincing interpretation of an “uncut” Bruckner symphony, according to Jacobs, reporting on a performance of the Eighth Symphony. Jacobs particularly appreciated the awesome intensification in the Adagio—a passage other conductors had excised—that leads to the movement’s climax. And in the finale, the unabbreviated development section revealed a “powerful” opposition, followed by a “contrapuntal crowning of all the symphony’s themes in beaming sonority.” This was also the first Bruckner performance, in Jacobs’s recollection, to win unanimous public approval.95 Brucknerian “expansiveness” could be considered the conservativenationalist counterpart of the much-touted “willpower” of Mahler’s symphonies—or, at least, the timing and shared terms in Bekker (1921) and Grunsky (1922) suggest as much. Grunsky intensified the archetypal symphonic narrative of a struggle that ends in victory. “The heroic dominates space [Raum] in the first movement of a Bruckner symphony, as with Beethoven . . . The music affects the will. Strongwilled listeners will not respond dreamily to the outer movements.” In the middle symphonies in particular, the “ending pulls the listener upward!”96 Dreaminess and reverie were inauthentic responses to symphonic music (if an apt response to Mahler, anti-Semites would later argue). Spatial listening, and the musical qualities behind it, became an aesthetic benchmark, especially in ideological contexts. Blessinger lamented that contemporary composers cannot achieve Bruckner’s “consistent ascent” and “extended intensification,” resulting in music that is “forced and shortbreathed”—a telltale sign of “decadence.”97 Closure—the devices and structures by which a finale culminates and ratifies the entire symphony—was often perceived spatially. At the apex of a final movement, whether in a piano or chamber work, or a symphony (which Grunsky singled out as “the greatest potential achievement of musical form that the German spirit has discovered”), a return to the opening theme should bring feelings of striving and elevation. (Striving also characterized Wagner’s “German dramas,” Grunksy added.) Shunning the abstractions of symmetry or balance so common with earlier generations, Grunksy compared the listener’s experience, in an intensification, to an eagle flying higher and higher—a politically loaded conceit, since the eagle was the German national symbol.98 This “art of intensification” occupies a section within the chapter on musical forms in Grunsky’s musical aesthetics, whereas before, in 1907, it fell within the

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chapter on polyphony. Form, in effect, trumped the intellectual procedure of polyphony, with its various attending problems. All musical forms, Grunsky declared, whether simple or complex, should be shaped through intensification. His chief example was Das Deutschlandlied, which, set to a melody by Haydn, had been designated the official national anthem the previous year, in 1922: Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles, über alles in der Welt, wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze brüderlich zusammenhält, von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt— Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt. (Germany, Germany above all /Above all else in the world/ When it stands in defense and defiance /United in fraternity./ From the Meuse River to the Neman River /From the Etsch Valley to the Great Belt / etc.)

The “gripping tension” in the middle section, Grunsky wrote, produces a feeling of being “lifted in space”—one might add, to attain a bird’seye view of the river-bound borders of the old Holy Roman Empire. Or, Grunsky continued, shifting to temporal terms, one feels as if the passage of time were successively constricted and relaxed. In sonata form, to paraphrase, the listener is pulled upward at the reprise, which allows, literally, an overview of the rest of the movement.99 References to upward motion replaced the idea of musical logic—that proud accoutrement of bourgeois culture. This shift from intellectual to physical metaphors had profound implications for music as an art form, validating, not merely conceding, the immediacy of musical listening. It remained for Kurth to advance a fully-fledged account of spatial listening. His philosophy of form and theory of listening, which appeared within his Bruckner study, integrated spatial metaphors into often obscure prose. In the section “Symphonic style as an expression of the will to form,” Kurth defined “absolute music” as the spirit striving to experience the infinite by “shaping space.”100 As a rule, spatial perception involved long-term goals or procedures, as opposed to momentary effects that were understood within time. In Bruckner, orchestral scoring, harmonic vocabulary, and motivic writing are characteristically consistent or admit only gradual change, producing an effect of “resolute

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[ gedrungenen] expansiveness,” in Kurth’s terms. Such breadth ensured that the basic character (or “motion” in Kurth’s adamantly abstract prose) of Bruckner’s music remained immune to the “urban” idiom of the “high-strung personality [Nervenmensch] typical of the twentieth century,” he wrote, perhaps thinking of Mahler.101 Bruckner’s symphonies were composed by a man averse to the bustling metropolis of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Grunsky’s Der Kampf um deutsche Musik, the inaugural volume on German music in a cultural series he edited at a National Socialist press again relied on a spatial conception of music to declare German superiority. The string quartet, symphony, and sonata were at root German, Grunsky asserted—if not (as he was good enough to admit) in their origins, then in their historical evolution. German composers expanded these forms and achieved a greater profundity of feeling. The “spiritual tension” necessary to “produce” and truly understand a symphony gradually disappeared from non-Germans (Weltschen) as they evolved away from their “German essence.” And in general, Grunsky claimed, “the length of a Bruckner symphony is barely tolerable” outside Germany. “Bruckner’s music has no enduring resonance in their inner self [Inneres], so they remain hapless in the face of the great waves of intensification.”102 Schenker, a Viennese Jew, promoted a cultural, rather than racial, definition of German identity, writing in 1935 that the “strength of the tension and fulfillment” in music “can serve as test for the legacy of the German race.” With respect to the old debates over whether Beethoven was only half-German, Schenker continued, such musical accomplishment is “more certain proof than all the evidence provided by racial science.”103 Spatial listening was never a widespread critical paradigm, not least because its terms and method seemed inherently political. A grand architectural concept of music was, from a socialist perspective, ideologically vitiated by its connection to capital and property. In the proletarian press, it was instead the temporality of music that mattered. Bruckner’s Seventh was acclaimed at a Viennese workers’ symphony concert not for a powerful spatial presence but for the conductor’s skillful shaping and pacing of its temporal contours. (“Webern has made music with such devotion and inner enthusiasm that even the orchestra was enthralled. One is accustomed to hearing the temporal span of this symphony differently . . . For everyone, Webern’s tempi seemed to be the only right ones, because they were performed with total absorption

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in the work and with a resolute sense of inwardness.”) The reviewer at the proletarian newspaper avoided speculating as to the audience’s absorption in the music—a response that reeked of an idle bourgeois pleasure—and instead emphasized the commitment and absorption of the conductor and musicians, who, in effect, represented ideal workers.104 For all its appeal to conservative nationalists, spatial listening was in some ways deeply modern. It mirrored the aesthetic stance of the avantgarde: intense physicality totally devoid of bourgeois moralism. Bruckner’s symphonies chart a powerful ascent, yet the listener is drawn into motivic processes that do not undermine the larger pillars of the overarching structure. Architecture, finally, replaces drama. The aesthetic experience sought by so many commentators of the era aimed at collective exaltation, not celebration of the individual. Fascist ideologues would need little help in developing a discourse of spatiality that sought to transcend time, aspiring to control more space than any European empire since antiquity.

Ernst Kurth and Aesthetic Absorption The Magic Mountain closes with Hans Castorp’s dissolving into a mass of soldiers as World War I begins. The intellectual forces that contended for his allegiance—the rationalism of Settembrini, the dark religious reaction of Naphta, the vitalism of Peeperkorn, and Castorp’s own emerging aesthetic consciousness—are overwhelmed in the violence and confusion of the battlefield. Thomas Mann’s evocation of the individual’s submersion in the fog of battle could well stand for the effect of the war on the heroic tradition of the symphony and the very nature of selfhood in symphonic listening. The outcome was hardly a simple effacement of the self by the collective passions called up by nationalism, war, and revolution. To preserve tradition in a way that would be profound, yet without any explicit political allegiance, entailed a certain withdrawal or passivity. For all their differences, the two most prolific and influential theorists of the interwar generation, Schenker with his pursuit of systematic analysis and Kurth with his psychological and metaphysical explorations, were both fascinated by the deeper structures of music. At the risk of oversimplification: Schenker’s composer listened to the laws of nature, while Kurth’s Bruckner conceived and worked out musical ideas below the level of consciousness (in his sleep, Kurth suggested at one

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point, invoking a tradition that extended back to the early nineteenth century).105 Shrouded in mystery and elevated above ordinary man, genius was a conduit for ineffable natural law or empyreal philosophical truth. Originality, far from entailing a freedom from convention, involved the ability to develop a “foreground” level that had rich connections to a “middleground” level and, through it, one of a few possible background levels. In Schenker’s extreme formulation, the composer is a genius by virtue of his powers to listen to nature and her laws—not, one might add, because he flouts tradition or taps into the inner recesses of his own creativity. Just as any sense of the musical work as freely invented creation conjured up by the composer was irrelevant to the analytic and interpretive worldviews of Kurth and Schenker, so, too, was the bourgeois ideal of a listener who prepared for a concert with a piano arrangement or study score. If Kurth would not have fathomed a passive listening in our sense of background muzak, he nonetheless called for a novel experience of absorption without the constraints of rational understanding or the recognition of tradition. Through dialectical formulations, however, Kurth disavowed a somnambulant passivity (e.g., in its “tranquility,” Bruckner’s music is “buoyant and mobile”; or “only in serene tempi is there room for rapture”).106 Avoiding any sense of an analytic or theoretical system, Kurth developed strategies for listening and analysis that stress the motion of music.107 Whatever his intentions, Kurth’s writings had a particular resonance in the ideological hotbed of the late 1920s and early 1930s—if not as much as Schenker’s. Even if (as American theorists have wished) Schenker’s nationalistic philippic is irrelevant to his musical thought, the implications of his analytic system are troubling, especially in their historical context. For the postwar generation, heroism no longer had any place in art. Gone was the symphony of the nineteenth century, a genre ostensibly celebrating rationality and freedom or at least the vitality of consciousness. A new Weltanschauung made irrelevant any centering on the self, including musical exegesis that referenced the thoughts and sensations of the listening subject. A human presence—presumed or posited by allusion to emotions or physical analogies—had no place in the appreciation of art. Passivity in musical listening, once shunned by many a composer, teacher, and critic, became the norm for the encounter with Bruckner, if rarely identified as such. As an ideal stance, it represented the experi-

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ence of a trained and attentive listener becoming fully absorbed and receptive. Adolf Weißmann compared the experience to being touched by grace. The Brucknerian symphony “must be received in humility, as a blessing. It is the commandment that requires total participation. Only someone who has forsaken all sensory artifice [Nervenkunst]” can listen in this way. Weißmann did not go so far as to construe Bruckner’s music as less demanding intellectually but acknowledged that the composer shunned the “contrapuntal subtleties glorified in modern music and foreshadowed in Schubert.”108 The breadth of Bruckner’s symphonies should not deter listeners, because understanding the formal structure was not necessary, as with earlier repertoire. The grandeur of his music was so awesome that the listener, rather than having to grasp the composition as a whole, was drawn into the work. “The magnificence and sublime grandeur of this sonic world are revealed to each and every person,” reported one local Styrian newspaper. “One needs no education in order to be fulfilled” by this music.109 The responses of a novice, or a listener bent in absolute humility also lay at the root of Kurth’s theory of musical form. “It is no coincidence that Bruckner, the mystic among nineteenth-century composers, achieved the “purest principle of form.” Kurth denied music any specific and fixed qualities. What mattered was not the presence of forms but the dynamic that produces them. Attempts to visualize form were amiss. Since Bruckner often deploys the simplest formal schemes, merely “viewing” a symphony would falsify the music and debase the listener. Anyone can mechanically reproduce the formal scheme of a composition by retracing a form learned from a textbook, Kurth explained. One should instead feel form. With this conceptual shift, Kurth dismissed the entire tradition of “overviewing” music: “To refer to formal intuition, mastery, and coherence, one should speak of the potential to be sensed as a whole [Überspürbarkeit]” rather than, literally, the experience of being viewed as a whole (übersehen).110 In method and language, Kurth’s Bruckner was adamantly metaphysical, infusing musical analysis and interpretation with fuller concepts than had evolved in the critical literature. Yet it shared a vocabulary of ideological fervor. Kurth rejected the idea of music as “sounding architecture” in favor of a philosophical expression that was gaining political currency in the interwar years. Music, in his words, “as it builds, is the will.” Its essential attribute, a “symphonic” quality, was like philosophical yet tinged with violence: the way music is “formed

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from within” and “erupts” into structure.111 In sum, the musical work was not an entity—conceived by the composer, inscribed into the score, and understood by the listener—but a way to generate energy by breaking the barrier from the inside out. In all these ways, Kurth brooked no concepts or procedures that allowed a listener to gain control over the music. Bruckner’s music compelled “one to approach symphonic style without presuppositions.” Convention—the number and kind of instruments or the arrangement of movements—was irrelevant to “symphonic style.” To grasp Bruckner’s genius required tapping into the vocabulary of Freud and the unconscious. To this end, Kurth stripped the listener of the tools developed in the nineteenth century to direct attention and improve musical appreciation. For him, every musical unit—from motivic fragment to multimovement work—should be experienced as a “wave of energy.”112 If the Romantic ideal of process was one influence on Kurth, another must have been the new quantum physics, which dissolved the fundamental particles of matter to wavelike probability dispersals.113 For Kurth, the wave was an ontological model, not a structure laid bare in the score. It was pure dynamism, unbounded by structure either actual or imagined: “Everything in it is full of life and directed at what comes.” A wave, in sum, should be the “motivic material of becoming.”114 To achieve these ends, Kurth renounced melodic listening, which was the most common way of listening, then as now. He instead urged a deeper awareness of musical process: “As splendidly and directly as the theme may shine in Bruckner, what is most important is the animated unfolding of its influence [Wirkung].” Kurth’s listener did not heed syntax—antecedent/consequent structures, thematic contrast, or any other traditional sequence of themes. The meaning of theme groups did not depend on their “arrangement.” Nothing about the organization of music in time could assist one in keeping one’s bearing. Listeners were to suffuse their consciousness with the life force behind the music. They should experience “the current [Strom] of formal shaping” that produced the theme groups and hear them join into “the unity of the flow.”115 Put differently, Kurth sought to eliminate any distance between the listening subject and the musical object, such as exists when the listener responds critically and reflectively. Kurth also defied the time-honored conception of art held by philosophers from Plato to Kant and beyond, namely, that it was engage the listener’s faculties of mind and emotion. His theory, whatever its virtues in promoting a lis-

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tening experience that was absorbing and all-encompassing, finally compromised the individuality of the listener, who all but disappeared from the aesthetic framework. Aesthetic judgment, Kurth acknowledged, depended on the relationship between the inner and outer facets of a composition. Albeit a longstanding philosophical creed, this relationship was evaluated differently in Kurth’s hands. The old demand for balance between content and form (or suitability of theme and its scoring) made the listener an arbiter. Kurth’s notion of a concordance (between inner and outer) hinted at a less measurable and more intimate response. Also potentially disorienting was his stipulation that all aspects of a composition be coordinated. Individual themes—“lines,” in Kurth’s abstract terminology— “should be experienced not for themselves but within the totality from which their entire formation emerges.” The present, in effect, was meaningful not on its own but only within a larger context. More specifically, a sonority or melody could not be enjoyed as a single moment; its purpose was to strengthen the “cohesive view of the symphony.”116 The result of stressing the whole was to evacuate any direct human presence from the aesthetic framework. The mother of all principles for Kurth, Form, encompassed theme, harmony, timbre, formal scheme, rhythm, meter, register, texture, and orchestration, together comprising an overlapping series of waves. In forgoing rational perception—the logic of identifying the formal scheme and judging its realization—Kurth’s listener responded to the dynamic realm of the composition. Music, as Kurth defined it, was a cosmos of possible and actual ways to organize sound in artistic form, only a fraction of which was “physically manifested” in the march of history. His precise terms suggest a double horizon stretching above the individual listener—history and then the greater arc of possibility. The various styles in history were “isolated, always incomplete, time-bound realizations of that great original bounty [Urfülle].” A particular composer, exemplifying a single style, was a speck in the universe—the executor of but a single set of possibilities.117 Kurth’s most extreme proposal, but one characteristic of the reception of Bruckner and the aesthetic of vitalism, was to exclude emotion from musical appreciation. (Hanslick was popularly known for this radical move, but he had claimed only that musical structure was more important than the feelings it evoked.) The preliminary step, taken in Kurth’s study of harmony in Tristan und Isolde, was to reject representation in

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music. Taking seriously Wagner’s claim to transfer phenomena from the external world to the inner world of the protagonist/listener, Kurth emphasized, “Music is not a reflection of nature but rather the experience of nature’s mysterious energies in us.”118 Thereafter, in his book on Bruckner, Kurth radicalized the idea of absolute music. The classical masters composed “absolute music” in a technical sense, “freed from text,” but in an intellectual or spiritual sense of “absolute,” as “freed from the personal and from song” their music was inferior. Haydn and Mozart produced a mere “fiction of absolute music.” Themes were separable from the form (as a “fixed structure”), in that the listener could recall melodies after the performance, possibly even hum them. The realm of possible meanings in classical music was therefore limited to representing people and their “ordinary feelings.” Over time, composers developed “structures and inner forms” that were independent from text. Romantic music, and above all Bruckner’s, evoked “the cosmos and its laws.” A listener accustomed to the music of Mozart and Haydn must therefore “free himself for Bruckner’s formal principle.”119 The difference was not so much in the music as in the interpretation. Long before Kurth’s ruminations of 1925, for example, Halm had insisted, to the contrary, that “the lofty beauty of the individual has materialized more for [Bruckner] than for any of the classicists.”120 Once the listener disappeared from the aesthetic experience—his or her expectations and emotional responses being irrelevant—the symphony was no longer poised between the individual and the universal but could occupy a larger space. For all his philosophizing, Kurth intimated exactly the same arguments as his cohorts. Both forms of process so fashionable for this generation—shaping and building—dismantled the traditional relationship between the self and the world and, in so doing, risked degrading the status of the individual and individual perception. The abrogation of the individual, so sensitively executed by Kurth, came to a crude and violent end less than eight years later, both in deed and in rhetoric. “The epoch of individualism died on January 30, 1933,” Goebbels declared in a radio speech six months into the new regime.121 The sacrifice of the individual in the name of social and political institutions was replicated in art sanctioned by the regime. In the visual arts, any specificity or distinguishing feature was avoided; the human figure was portrayed with as few individual features as possible and typically in historical contexts, without sexual appeal. What remained was a

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symbol of Aryan beauty and template for the master race.122 These deplorable pronouncements did not, of course, share a genealogy with Kurth and did so only indirectly with Schenker, his nationalistic slurs notwithstanding. Whatever the implications in Kurth’s theorizing, his achievement was to provide a more philosophical exegesis, deeply rooted in musical phenomena, in lieu of his contemporaries’ simplistic claims of passivity in the face of Bruckner’s music. As Gräner put it unabashedly, Bruckner was “wholly devoted to the symphony in order to fulfill it as it had never before been fulfilled: totally objectively and musically, without regard to the subjective needs of the listener; completely abandoned to music, to the ideal laws of harmony and the will of the divine spirit.”123 It was a truism that Bruckner avoided the individualism that Mahler relished. Kurth, in effect, spelled out the psychological and aesthetic dynamic that achieved this effect. It remained for others to build a political regime on these premises. Kurth’s aesthetic concepts, if politically laden, were not intrinsically ideological. Once the genre expectations of the informed concert-goer became irrelevant, what remained in the dynamic between the interpreter and the music was an aspiration to control, without any specific goal, such as gaining a command over the formal scheme. Instead of directing the listener to partake in the emotions that had purportedly inspired the composer and lay at the basis of the musical work, interwar critics offered particular modes of experience (whether aspiring to control or being overwhelmed) as a way to internalize the music, at the risk of supplanting the listeners’ sensibilities and selfhood. Bruckner’s abduction by conservative nationalists met resistance more pithy than Kurth’s tomes. In his book on “Music and the World Crisis,” Weißmann regretted that those who “worship” Bruckner were driven by a “German impulse to moralize” whereas the composer himself, with his simple Weltanschauung, was not at all didactic. An ethical orientation, albeit the most “valuable and significant” trait of German music, could become overbearing and thwart creativity. Brucknerians, in short, were the problem, not Bruckner. (To drive the point home, Weißmann’s warning appeared not in the chapter on Bruckner but opened the chapter on Pfitzner.)124 Wagner’s cultural anti-Semitism—which, ironically, became a thorn for the Nazis, since their calamitous pursuit of genetic antiSemitism was undermined by his notion that anyone could be, or compose like, a Jew—has led some listeners to renounce his music (and Israel unofficially to ban Wagner recordings and performances) in part, at

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least, because of its exploitation in the Third Reich. But Bruckner survived unscathed. Nothing in his biography or writings, few that they were, invited political appropriation, try as the Nazis did. The politicization of Bruckner, from Rudolf Louis to Hitler, was quickly forgotten—in the public domain, at least. The staff at the Bruckner-Institut remain suspicious of American scholars interested in sources dating from the Third Reich. But it was the reception of Bruckner before 1933 that abandoned the bourgeois liberal ideal of musical logic. Kurth became the unlikely godfather of the next wave of radicalism. Hailed as the first to overcome rationalistic music theory—by Ernst Bücken, an opportunist who pursued race theory and German nationalist topics after 1933—and profoundly influential on National Socialists such as Lorenz—Kurth would, however, later be vilified in the crude, anti-Semitic terms.125 Apart from a shared vocabulary and aesthetic principles, the experience of musical form did vary across ideological lines. One crucial distinction was whether form was “discovered” (the old liberal perspective) or “imposed” (nationalist ideologues). For Kurth, formal listening was an exploration and aspiration more than a deed. This process, its boundaries and parameters indeterminable, was very different from the imposition of form, which, as we shall see, became a hallmark of ideologues in the Third Reich. In abandoning the intellectual ideals of generations past, Kurth minimized the conscious role of the listener. But at the same time, thinking in terms of process and structure, or the fluidity of Kurth’s “wave” spoke against the principles of conformism and determinism, which, again, were symptomatic of fascist ideology. The right-wing press, unlike Kurth, did not perceive an irreconcilable tension between music as a process and music as a structure. This distinction was just as alien to the nationalist constituency as was Bekker’s proposition of an unsettling interaction between music as memory and music as force. Regardless of the presuppositions of analyst and interpreter, the fact remains that Bruckner—like Wagner or Beethoven and unlike Mozart or Haydn—could contribute to political causes and events. His symphonies possess a sonic power unmatched in the literature; their fugal muscle, perhaps above all, guaranteed the composer a place in the pantheon of German music.126 In an article on “What is German?” (a title borrowed from another of Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings), the ideologue Friedrich Herzog defined quintessentially German music in terms of two Bruckner symphonies—the Fifth and the Ninth—along with

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Beethoven’s Ninth and Leonore Overture.127 If Beethoven’s other finales emit a Dionysian energy unbefitting of monumental presentation, Bruckner’s symphonies possessed a gravity and discipline in their tracing of the per aspera ad astra trajectory. “The basic movement in Bruckner is that of festive ceremony,” Kurth explained. Conductors, he advised, should not rush their tempi, lest they create a superficial sense of unity. The “expansiveness”—his preferred term for monumentality— and solemnity of Bruckner’s music perfectly suited the grandeur and awe cultivated in Nazi public culture. Hitler and his stage managers sensed that this experience prepared his audience to surrender their critical distance. Would they not more willingly welcome their malleability before the seductive power of music and words, which promised alike that they might encompass an unbounded spatiality? There was a particular irony, not lost on Hitler, that both composer and demagogue emerged from the same circumscribed Danubian upland landscape. The designers of the Nuremberg rallies understood that the grandiose ambitions of their leader to shatter these limits could build on the efforts of the composer to transcend the boundaries of his inherited craft. The Nazis’ Bruckner was waiting to be invented.

chapter six

Symphonic Ambitions and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony

The contribution of composers and musicologists to building the Nazi state has been well documented. But music critics, advocates by nature with the power of the press at their fingertips, were often the most zealous. The relationship between political ideology and aesthetics in music criticism was, however, far from simple, as the press surrounding the premiere and early performances of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler symphony in 1934 reveals. To be sure, the regime never dictated how music should be composed, judged, or interpreted. (Goebbels eventually banned “arts criticism” in favor of the description or contemplation of art, but there was no mechanism for enforcement.) But a body of writings by fascist ideologues, along with a multitude of speeches broadcast and published, suggested the desirable qualities in a society and nation, individual, and family. It was the job of music critics, and one many undertook vigorously, to debate what music and ways of listening suited the new Germany. Whether this constitutes a fascist aesthetic is perhaps more a question of semantics. But certainly a characteristic National Socialist discourse on music emerged—if rather piecemeal and in response to specific circumstances rather than mandated by the regime. One week after the Nazis came to power, plans were developed for the presidential decree for the protection of the German people (Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz des deutschen Volkes), mandating the closure of “politically dangerous” newspapers. Announced on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag was burned, the edict decreed the closure of all newspapers of the Social Democratic Party,

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the communist party, and labor unions were shut down. According to official government statistics, 3,298 newspapers had been banned by the end of 1934.1 Instead, Goebbels saw the radio as the chief instrument for the party and state—just as the piano serves the pianist, he explained.2 The Schriftleitergesetz, or editors’ law, announced on October 4, 1933, established criteria for professional writers who could publish in Germany, restricting the privilege to those of “Aryan heritage and not married to a person of non-Aryan heritage.”3 Even music critics unaffected by the closing of newspapers and purging of staff may have felt pressure and uncertainty in ways that affected their writing. Nonetheless, critics held a special position, writing with apparent freedom in the same papers that imposed severe restrictions on political reportage.4 Some journalists, whether from enthusiasm or opportunism, joined in the attacks on cultural “degeneration” that had become ever more common with conservatives and nationalists, including Hitler himself, in the Weimar Republic.5 “We yearn for the rejuvenation of public life that the new government will deliver—an unconditional moral and cultural renewal,” wrote the Berlin critic Walter Abendroth. Art, he submitted, required a revolution no less sweeping than the political one that had taken place. Moreover, politics needed art to carry out its aims: “Intellectual and spiritual capacities are always decisive for the striking power and tenacity of a political movement.” He stressed the importance of music in “the spiritual life of our people” and its “decisive significance in cultural developments [Kulturgestaltung] the shaping of culture.”6 The timing was judicious. Abendroth’s pithy endorsement of National Socialism coincided with intense campaigns for the last relatively free election to the Reichstag, on March 5, 1933. The National Socialists did not secure an absolute majority (but a plurality of only 42 percent), which only intensified Hitler’s fervor. His first speech before the newly elected Parliament on March 23, 1933, which led to a vote yielding full control to the Führer, promised a refined fascism that would sustain the German artistic legacy. Goebbels was the master of this rhetoric. Six months later, the Propaganda Ministry decreed the founding of a Reich Culture Chamber (Reichskulturkammer), also under Goebbels. In a speech at the Berlin Philharmonie, Goebbels justified the new governmental control: “What we want is more than a dramatic party program. Our ideal is a deep marriage between the spirit of a heroic view of life and the eternal laws of art.”7

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Many music critics sought to prove the utility of their art form to the new Germany, whereas only very few found ways to resist. These roles were not always clear. Diverging aesthetic orientations were common prior to 1933, including critics who were nationalist or anti-modernist without any particular affinity to National Socialism. Whether a critic believed what she or he wrote—or did so to protect a spouse who was Jewish or wrote from some other exigency or opportunism is another matter. Still, professional stature and other personal circumstances could affect a critic’s authority. For example, Heinrich Strobel and Theodor W. Adorno both invoked Goebbels in formulating their ideal for contemporary music. Strobel, reporting on the sixty-third annual German composers’ festival, which took place in Dortmund in 1933, warned against a retreat into sensual excesses in instrumentation or dramatic symphonic writing, proposing Goebbels’ “‘steel-like’ romanticism” instead as a guide.8 Adorno, reviewing a group of political choral publications, singled out Herbert Müntzel’s Die Fahne der Verfolgten as exemplary in forging a “new Romanticism perhaps comparable to what Goebbels has designated as a ‘romantic realism.’” The men’s choral cycle was far superior to the other works under review, Adorno explained, citing the selection of texts by Baldur von Schirach (head of the Hitler Youth), which was “consciously National Socialist,” and the music’s “unusual drive to structure.” The venue for Adorno’s review, Die Musik, became affiliated with the Hitler Youth that same month.9 Was Adorno merely resorting to the language of the day? When the review was discovered and republished in 1962, his defense was weak. It is true Adorno had served as the Frankfurt correspondent for Die Musik until late 1933, when he moved to Berlin. But he did not regularly review scores and certainly had no expertise in political choral music.10 Nor did he need the income. Moreover, Adorno inadvertently vindicated Müntzel’s choice of texts in declaring that had the poem “Volk, ans Gewehr!” been set as part of the cycle, then he would have refused to review the composition.11 It remains notable that Adorno, of Jewish heritage on his father’s side, was still able to publish in an increasingly Nazified journal in April 1934, and no less with a byline of his full legal name, Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno (pace Hannah Arendt, who would scorn him as hiding behind his mother’s Italian family name and forsaking his father’s Jewish name).12 Whether or not personal circumstances mitigated their decision to collaborate—or at least not to condemn and not to refuse to publish at

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all—the respective positions of Adorno and Strobel would have influenced their reception. As of September 1933, Adorno was barred from teaching at the University of Frankfurt. In lieu of academic studies, he moved to Berlin to pursue two career paths, music criticism and teaching, only to face new hurdles in both.13 “I would have been able to hold out perfectly well financially in Germany, and also would have had no political objection,” he wrote Ernst Krenek, explaining that the impossibility of hearing his music performed and remaining “effective” led him to move to Oxford to pursue an academic career—although he still returned to Berlin each summer.14 Whatever his reasons for writing the review, political or aesthetic, Adorno was more enthusiastic about the music than was the colleague who reviewed a broadcast of the work for the same journal.15 Strobel wrote from a very different standpoint. Shortly before his review of June 1933, Strobel assumed a position of leadership, accepting the editorship of the new-music journal Melos after Hans Mersmann was ousted as editor for political unreliability. Strobel, moreover, was deemed so reliable that when Melos could resume publication only under a new name (Neues Musikblatt) and Nazified staff, he remained editor. In his future contributions, according to Fred K. Prieberg, Strobel developed an editorial voice that was “distinctly nationalist, if not explicitly National Socialist.” So useful were his writings (and his military service as a young man didn’t hurt) that Goebbels included Strobel on the lists of arts writers who could publish in Germany not only after a March 1934 purge but again after December 1937.16 Like Hindemith, Strobel managed to emigrate—in his case, to Paris, where he remained active for the Reich press—in order to secure the safety of his wife, who was Jewish. Despite the increasing constraints in freedom of speech, music criticism remained, at least for a time, a viable site of aesthetic debates and a vehicle for political expression in the initial years of the Third Reich.

The Symphony as Symbol The idea of the symphony, more than the Austro-German repertory of symphonies or the aesthetic qualities associated with the genre, served political ends long before the National Socialists came to power. In the 1920s, as a disgruntled bank clerk and, after being fired, as a lackey at the Cologne stock exchange, Goebbels wrote a novel about a soldier who meets a valiant death fighting against the French army in the Ruhr.

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Subtitled “a German Fate,” the book took the form of diary entries, many of which aestheticize battle. Enjoying the violent sounds and sights of battle, at one point the soldier exults in a renewed vitalism and strength after envisaging the experience as a “symphony of work.” The next moment he yearns for “the divine loneliness of the mountains and the virgin white snow.”17 This binding of extremes would become a leitmotif in Nazi propaganda, conjuring up the mental willpower to reconcile opposites.18 The symphony embodied this union of opposites, from movement types (each of the usually four movements having its own set of character types) to tension between universalism and individualism. The symphony served as a military metaphor outside German contexts. The Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov, for example, whose diary recounts in his diary the Battle of Kursk, a turning point for World War II, as a “grand symphony”—an expression he left in quotation marks.19 But more broadly, the symphony also became a metaphor for energy, force, and simultaneity—which encouraged its use in early film, at a time when the novelty of the medium, with its potential to draw together images from diverse sources into a continuous process, still bore significance. The associations of symphony were so highly charged as to defy political or aesthetic affiliation. Walter Ruttmann—who would later collaborate with Leni Riefenstahl on the screenplay for Triumph of the Will, which Hitler commissioned to record the 1934 Nuremberg party rally—gave his 1927 documentary on Berlin the subtitle “Symphony of a Great City.” (It was scored by Edmund Meisel, who had invested the genre with political meaning in his Rote Sinfonie, premiered in 1925.) The year after its release, in 1928, Ruttmann was apparently invited to make a nature film to be entitled Sinfonie der Erde.20 And the following year, the Dada artist and filmmaker Hans Richter sought to capture the symphonic power in racing (his brief Rennsymphonie). Even the mere title “symphony” was deemed politically useful and remained popular in German arts criticism during the Third Reich. For example, the Czech director Gustav Machaty’s experimental masterpiece Ekstase (1932) took on a more romanticized title, Symphonie der Liebe, when it was released on January 8, 1935, in Berlin.21 And the 1937 Nuremberg party rally struck one reporter (a music critic, as it happens) as a “symphony of colors.”22 The role of unity and synthesis in the symphony suited perfectly the fusion of temporal and historical divisions of past, present, and future in Nazi ideology. As Alfred Rosenberg, the party’s chief ideologue, put

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it, “Beethoven can and must incite in us a driving will to German shaping. Today we live in the Eroica of the German Volk.” The context was the 1927 Beethoven centennial, but Rosenberg’s aim was to recruit voters. He grouped Beethoven with Wagner and Schopenhauer to demonstrate the directness of German methodology: these men had “stormed the citadel.” (In contrast, he argued that Leibniz, Kant, and Goethe had laid siege to a “fortress” of knowledge.) Germany’s current “struggles” demanded the kind of assault represented by the decisiveness of Beethoven’s symphonies—“to storm over the ruins of a world that is collapsing, the hope for the will to shape a new world, and the reinvigorated joy from overcoming intense sorrow.”23 The orchestra remained a potent Nazi symbol. To justify the press law of February 4, 1933, Goebbels explained, “We emphatically want to avoid everyone playing the same instrument. We merely want everyone to play according to a plan. At the basis of the press’s concert must be a symphony, not the right for everyone to play however he wants.”24 Nazi rhetoric would reverberate throughout Germany, since the speeches of Goebbels and Hitler occasioned mass crowds and were published as an ongoing history of the regime. The management system applied to every organization in the Third Reich was known as the Führerprinzip. It was much like military structure, in which an officer commands complete responsibility and demands full obedience from those below him, answering to none but his superiors. The music critic and publisher Gerhard Tischer, a party member on the Nazified executive committee of the Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein, warned that the Führerprinzip would fail unless the masses are educated to follow true leaders. This task was paramount for professional musicians and fell under the aegis of the Nazi party’s Kraft durch Freude, an organization founded to direct recreational activities of the Volk.25 As political symbol, the symphony was most useful during the period of Hitler’s consolidation of power in 1933–1934. Yet as a musical genre, very little of the repertoire, other than Beethoven’s and Bruckner’s symphonies, served political ends. The symphony also served to implement the primary instrument of propaganda, the radio, which, according to Goebbels, unified “the technical spirit of invention and the political will to shape” and would “illuminate an upcoming millennium with the flames of German spirit and creative will.”26 In the latter part of January 1934, thus coinciding with the first anniversary of the Third Reich, the broadcast of Beethoven’s symphonies inaugurated a radio series, under the auspices of the Propaganda Ministry, designed to pro-

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mulgate National Socialism through the “great men” of German music. The Beethoven cycle was to “conquer the entire German nation for the radio, forging for the Führer the unfailing instrument he must have in order to be close to his Volk, who owe him so infinitely much.”27 The director of broadcasting predicted that Germany would sustain its unparalleled artistic excellence and intellectual traditions “if we march forward from Beethoven to Hitler.”28 Arnold Schering, who was president of the service organization for musicologists during its Nazification, supported the broadcast— whether or not intentionally—in an article that appeared a month later. Schering argued that Beethoven’s political sympathies (which happened to be republican) were irrelevant to his music because the composer lived in an age when the historical conditions were not ripe for true revolution (i.e., for National Socialism). Nonetheless in its political implications, the Fifth Symphony best illuminates contemporary Germans as a Volk that struggles and “finally finds its Führer.” Far from being absolute music, the Fifth was the “symphony of national affirmation” (Erhebung), a designation that evoked what Germans knew as the era of national resistance against Napoleon (das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhe bung).29 Schering permitted no debate, boasting of the “overwhelming clarity” and “inexorable, razor-sharp logic” of his interpretation.30 Interpretation was no longer an aesthetic, contemplative act but one that shackled the listener to contemporary politics. The transformation of the aesthetic into the political, as Schering wished it, resulted in large part from the fact that artistic appreciation had the same inevitability as the government and social organizations in the Third Reich. In the same month as the Beethoven symphony broadcast, the Propaganda Ministry reached an arrangement with the Berlin Philharmonic to assume financial responsibility and ownership of the orchestra and its building. Each member received six hundred Reichsmark and, in return, became a civil servant and, thanks to Hitler’s intervention, fell into a special wage category. As an official Reich Orchestra, the Philharmonic accepted performance obligations for the state. Goebbels followed their activities avidly, as if its patron, writing of “my orchestra” and further enhancing the privileges of its musicians.31 As one of the most complicated and lengthy genres of music, the symphony came into jeopardy in a new culture that stressed populism. In 1934, Tischer lamented the hesitation to program symphonies on the radio and in the concert hall.32 In another article he railed against the popularization of music on Stunde der Nation, a daily prime-time radio

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series on political themes and ideology, first aired on April 1, 1933. On one broadcast, a Silesian worker “announced to the world that he hoped not to hear symphonies or operas, or any Wagner,” but the word Beethoven stirred his revolutionary soul—whereupon the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth was aired. Recounting the broadcast in dismay, Tischer urged efforts to elevate the Volk, rather than pander to popular taste.33 The idea of the symphony, however, met with no apparent objection. Another broadcast of Stunde der Nation, on the Freikorps (paramilitary) soldier Albert Leo Schlageter, took as its title the symphonic poem and German commemoration of heroes.34 The symphony, the pedagogue and critic Reinhold Zimmermann lamented, along with the suite, variation, and fugue, was becoming a foreign word for Germans, “as utterly incomprehensible as Polish or Chinese.” He reminded readers that no musical form should remain alien to Germans, whatever their musical training: “A symphony or even a song is built and therefore has a structure as does a house, in which its occupants live—only one much more beautiful and more artistic.”35 With this, the revered metaphor of music as architecture, which extended back into nineteenth-century aesthetics, dissolved into the crude terms of art as craft. There was good cause for concern that the symphony might not survive the populism of the Third Reich. When Goebbels attended a performance of Brahms’s Second Symphony, the music struck him as “too constructed and in a few passages too skillful.” He found the program inappropriate and insisted that more “foolproof, standard works” be played. In particular, he stipulated, every program should include a Beethoven symphony. Goebbels shared his thoughts with the director, Hermann Abendroth, who obliged and conducted a Beethoven symphony on all future programs.36

The Politicization of the Symphony Enthusiasts of the new regime were hardly alone in ascribing weighty political meaning to symphonic music. As a traditionally ambitious art form the symphony was a target for ideological appropriation both by those who created the music and those who sought to control its significance, especially in the 1930s. If Shostakovich’s work remains perhaps the best-known case of the symphony’s political vulnerability, American symphonists, for example Aaron Copland and Roy Harris, described

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their mission in terms that paralleled the new vitality of music and art in Germany. Asked whether his Symphony 1933 was “pure art” or expressed “the age or time of world progress in it,” Harris answered the latter, citing the American athleticism of the first movement, the spirituality of the second, and “will to power” of the last.37 The ideological valence changed in 1933, even if the genre and musical language did not. Hugo Herrmann found the rubric of the symphony useful for exploring technology in the Social Democratic Republic—a sinfonietta entitled Die Maschine—as well as subjects popular in the Third Reich. The terms changed ever so slightly, from Symphonische Musik, op. 29, in 1927 to Symphonisches Werk, op. 94, in 1937. The latter, titled “An meine Heimat” (To My Homeland), used diary entries from a soldier on the front. His earlier socialist inclinations notwithstanding, in the Third Reich Herrmann was honored by the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (combat league for German culture), which was founded in 1928 to improve the image of the Nazi party and, under Rosenberg’s leadership, became increasingly aggressive after 1933. Herrmann’s 1935 prize competition was a Symphonie der Arbeit. In general, the concepts of national labor and discipline were particularly generous in for accommodating left and right. At the end of World War I, while the Bolsheviks were constructing their own society of labor, Oswald Spengler drew together notions of nationalism and labor in his writings on Prussian socialism. Hans-Jürgen Nierentz, a writer and arts administrator in the Nazi regime, produced a radio play entitled Symphonie der Arbeit in 1934. K. J. Sommer’s Symphonie der Arbeit, which was premiered in 1944 by the amateur orchestra of a worker’s union, bore little resemblance to the traditional symphony: orchestral sections were strung together with “melodramatic inserts” and alternating songs and choruses, much like the Soviet genre of “song symphony.” Far from criticizing the work’s scorn for tradition, a German choral publication applauded its “novel solution to the problem of artistic form” and found the work “gripping from the first moment onward.”38 Through its coordination of an aggregate of instruments and potential for a heroic or tragic narrative, the symphony could be deployed for any political message that stressed the power of mass politics. At the same time, the symphony’s ideological potential called into question the traditional notion of absolute music, since, in its very power and capacity to transport the listener, the symphony signified something beyond pure music. Shorn of its aesthetic and stylistic specificity, the symphony

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could also serve antifascist dissent. In exile during the Third Reich, Hanns Eisler used the genre to reclaim his cultural legacy. The Deutsche Sinfonie (1935–1939) is a massive work, innovative in structure. As evocative of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” as of Beethoven’s Ninth, it expands the orchestral forces to include solo vocalists and chorus across eleven numbers, setting poems by Bertolt Brecht. Karl Weigl responded to the events of January 1933 with his Symphonic Prelude to a Tragedy and, following his emigration to the United States, commemorated the Allied victory through his Fifth Symphony, Apocalyptic, dedicated to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who did not flee Nazi Germany, sought to give voice to the persecuted in his Sinfonia tragica (1940–1943) and adopted thematic material and techniques of composers—Mahler, Berg, Webern, and Hindemith—whose music had place in the regime. Few orchestral works were entitled “symphony” after January 1933, and those that were often bore an explicit political message but few ties to symphonic tradition. Friedrich Jung, a composer of film scores and men’s choral music, returned to the genre in 1942 with a programmatic work, his Second Symphony. Jung followed the Beethovenian formula per aspera ad astra, with a first movement alternating between “deep depression and wavering hope” and a finale leading “in mighty, hymnlike expansions to the sphere of divine and exalted national feeling.”39 Despite its traditional division into movements, the subjects and titles of individual movements defy convention: “Germany 1919 to Germany 1933,” commemorating the soldiers and party members who died during World War I and the “Nazi Kampfzeit”; “Commemoration of heroes”; “Dance of death,” which ridicules Weimar Germany’s democratic parliamentarianism, and an untitled finale. In most cases, the alleged monumentality and the archetypal program of the victorious struggle remained the extent of the political meaning of the symphony, as in the works of Otto Leonhardt. In the finale of his Third Symphony, a “jubilant redemption hymn” followed quotations from the opening movement as if “by force”—according to an enthusiastic review from 193940—but such rhetoric pervaded Bekker’s Mahler criticism and is suggestive of vitalism and not necessarily politics. The vast ambitions of the late Romantic symphony seemed to emulate those of National Socialism itself. Hermann Ambrosius, an advisor to the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft (Reich radio corporation), urged composers to write more symphonies. “The end of the thousand-year struggle of the German Volk for unity” should inspire “monumental

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works [Monumentalwerke] that would reveal the unique legacy of the German Volk and soul and . . . will always stir the German soul.” (His point itself was unremarkable. Indeed, a few months earlier, a Berlin newspaper had diagnosed Weimar Germany and its music as “unhealthy” and “distracted,” and insisted that rebuilding Germany musically would entail a return the monumentality of the “great contemporary symphony” and opera that was either serious or “cheery and folklike.”)41 Ambrosius conceded the accessibility of opera but insisted that the symphony “expresses the emotional life of the German soul in a much purer and more immediate manner.” Moreover, “the self-reflection demanded by the regime leadership [Ambrosius used the term Selbstbesinnung, borrowed from philosophy and psychoanalysis] must compel German composers to the greatest and most beautiful creation of the pure German spirit in the area of orchestral music, to the symphony.” The result would be a heightened political sentience and sharpened national identity.42

New Music for the New Regime In artistic life, the Nazi government brought a period less of totalitarian control than of inconsistent scrambling. In the first two years, a surprising inconsistency still marked cultural life. Writers and artists, composers and architects later to emerge as opponents (or émigrés) might still find possibilities for cultural renovation. As in the Soviet Union during its fledgling years, the ruling regime initially did not interfere with musical life, apart from its egregious actions against Jewish musicians. The government seemed to exert little centralized direction in matters of aesthetic taste. One year into the regime, Germans had faith that regardless of how much control the government required, it would remain lenient regarding artistic matters—thus, at least, the composer Hermann Zilcher reported Goebbels’ assurance in February 1934.43 Yet by November 1934, Wilhelm Furtwängler tested this leniency when he publicly protested the cancellation of his plans to premiere Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler at the Berlin State Opera. The letter appeared in several newspapers on November 25, and at the rehearsal and performance the next day he was greeted by extensive applause, which was reported to Hitler by Hermann Göring. On November 30, Erich Kleiber premiered Berg’s Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu” at the State Opera, a work that some Nazi loyalists embraced but others disparaged.44 The atmosphere was so hostile that Kleiber resigned

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on the very next workday, Monday, December 3, and Furtwängler followed suit on Tuesday, ceding his directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic and the concerts of the Berlin State Opera as well as the vice presidency of the Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer). Reverberations were felt across Germany, even internationally, and cultural figures later recounted their profound disappointment and fear in learning that the Nazis had made an example of Furtwängler had resigned.45 Goebbels, in contrast, recorded it in his diary as “a great moral success for us.”46 Whereas Kleiber left, not to return to Berlin until 1951, Furtwängler gave full reign to ambition. Three months after resigning, he published an apology, regretting any “political consequences” of his letter and stating that he had withdrawn from any involvement in the artistic policy of the regime, which was determined by the Führer and his minister alone.47 The following month, April 1935, Furtwängler was granted a meeting with Hitler, and in September he opened the season of the Berlin Philharmonic to a sold-out audience and continued to flourish until late in the regime. It is unclear why the premiere of Hindemith’s opera was cancelled. The plot, despite recent speculation to the contrary, was no hindrance to a production in Nazi Germany. Set in the Peasants’ War in sixteenth-century Germany, Mathis der Maler explores the tension between artistic pursuits and political responsibility. Mathis decides to abandon painting to join the rebellion, but after he protests the bloodshed the peasants turn on him. He seeks refuge in a forest, where visions appear, leading the artist to return to his work. The book-burning scene (which spurs Mathis’s decision to join the fight for justice) did not, apparently, allude to the Nazi student bookburnings that took place throughout Germany and, in Berlin, next to the State Opera, on May 19, 1933. Certainly the censor reporting to the theater director at the Propaganda Ministry (Rainer Schlösser) did not anticipate any such an interpretation. Less than two weeks after the publisher sent the libretto, in early October 1934, the censor gave sanction to “a good Hindemith, striving for the spirit of our time” and did not anticipate any problems with the libretto, pausing to observe, “The music will be decisive.” He did, however, warn that a Catholic director should be avoided, lest an unbalanced portrayal antagonized Protestants.48 The suitability of the libretto and the appeal of the opera resurfaced in discussions within the Reich Theater Chamber and Propaganda Ministry from 1936 to 1939, although no performance finally took place.49 Hindemith himself was no outspoken opponent of National Social-

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ism; in fact he welcomed the possibility for change and musical reforms under the new regime. By mid-April 1933, he had, so he believed, been “commissioned (though not quite officially) to work out plans for a new system of teaching composition and music theory,” and by the following month Alban Berg had heard that Hindemith was “to reorganize the country’s whole musical life.”50 This pedagogic mission would not materialize, although Hindemith later received permission to undertake a large-scale reform in Turkey, with Germany as a model, much as the Turkish army was reorganized along German lines before World War I. By September 1933, Hindemith wrote his Jewish colleague Ernst Toch, who had already fled Germany, “I have been asked to cooperate and have not declined.”51 In March 1934, Hindemith joined the new leadership council of the Reich Music Chamber and reported attending numerous meetings with Nazi officials on the reform of music education.52 He also participated as soloist and composer in, as he recounted it, “the first official concert of the Third Reich” in Lübeck. Its success, Hindemith believed, was “a good omen.”53 He would never concede or regret his attempts to collaborate, self-serving though they may have been. “I always see myself as the mouse who recklessly danced in front of the trap and even ventured inside; quite by chance, when it happened to be outside, the trap closed!”54 Some, among them Hindemith, believed that Hitler had been “shocked” by his Neues vom Tage in 1929. (The composer felt confident, however, that he could win the Führer’s favor by inviting him to a class and arranging a performance of the cantata from the Plöner Musiktag for the occasion.)55 As the story goes, Hitler left during the performance, disgusted by the scene in which the soprano, clad in a body suit, stands in her bathtub to sing about the lack of hot water—a scene Goebbels would condemn in all but name in a speech after Furtwängler resigned.56 There is no evidence that Hitler attended the performance— and, given his musical taste, it would be surprising if he had.57 If there is any truth to this account, Hitler was probably bothered by the parody of operatic conventions and the modernist idiom more than the staging. The extensive sketches as the aspiring opera designer testify to an interest in experimental staging and, on the rare occasions when he later intervened in Bayreuth productions, he was not averse to innovations on the stage.58 The far more lascivious Salome did not prevent Richard Strauss from being appointed president of the Reich Music Chamber or prevent the opera from being produced at the Berlin State Opera—

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including on February 17, 1944, during the last wartime season at the Berlin State Opera.59 If Hitler himself ordered the cancellation of the opera, possibly it was in order to side with Rosenberg in his conflict with Goebbels—a leadership tactic of pitting subordinates against each other, favoring each in turn, in order to fortify his own position. Another possibility is that Nazi authorities preoccupied with controlling the world of art and culture feared the potentially dangerous success of the staged Mathis in light of the enthusiastic reception of the symphony that had already been extracted from the opera and premiered in Berlin in March 1934. The symphony showed the inconsistency of critics on ideological lines, winning both praise and scorn from National Socialists and sympathizers, if largely positive responses from critics at the old liberal newspapers. Progressive critics had already seized on the Mathis Symphony to show the vitality of unconstrained modernism. Might the opera, with full visual and dramatic force, drive home the point that music and culture more generally could escape ideological manipulation? Most critics lionized the young Hindemith, then age thirty-nine, as representative of a new, decisive generation prepared to seize leadership roles. The composer himself seems to have anticipated the significance his new work would have within the Third Reich, perhaps with its religious character allowing it to stand above politics. (Hindemith welcomed the three-month delay in the premiere of the Mathis Symphony in the Reich’s capital, writing his publisher, “I think it good to wait a little while yet. I have a very strong feeling that people everywhere are sick of the bleatings of the old guard but am of the opinion that they should be given time to reach a state of real longing!”)60 In this light, the composer may have been a force perhaps too challenging for National Socialist cultural ambitions, still relatively unfulfilled in 1934. Some Nazi enthusiasts impugned the composer’s self-professed rehabilitation from his modernist past as insincere. Walter Abendroth, punning on the New Testament conversion story (ingrained in musicians by Heinrich Schütz’s masterpiece “Saul, warum verfolgst du mir,” from the Symphoniae sacrae), hoped that the audience’s enthusiasm for Paul Hindemith would encourage the “Paul of tomorrow” and exorcise the “Saul of yesterday.”61 Stressing Saul (an obvious metonym for Jew), in opposition to Paul (Christian, thus “German”), was merely a subtler means of attacking cultural Bolshevism, with its “Jewish” associations. Echoing Abendroth, Friedrich W. Herzog, director of music criticism in the Reichsverband Deutscher Schriftsteller (union of German writers)

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wondered whether Saul had become Paul. Herzog charged that a pursuit of financial gain, rather than artistic truth, had led to Hindemith’s earlier modernist style, and implied that his current “heartfelt tones of the heart” was merely opportunist. Withal, Herzog had to allow that the Mathis symphony was a musical confession of faith (Bekenntnismusik), with strong ties to the past and present alike.62 Taken as a whole, the reviews show some critics clambering to present themselves as favorable to the “National Revolution” and others in defiance, if also hoping to secure a place for contemporary music in the new Germany. For all their careful formulations, many of the critics could not sit on the fence of modernism forever, and for one reason or another, some would soon come to grief. Hindemith’s music served both constituencies well, as both innovative and respectful of tradition, once the composer himself was absolved of earlier experiments associated with the Weimar Republic. From a progressive aesthetic orientation, Josef Rufer, Schoenberg’s Austrian student and colleague, argued that the Mathis Symphony proved that “young German music, too, has its proper place in the new German cultural world and, with it, the full freedom of undisturbed development.”63 If freedom was the language most comfortable for Rufer’s liberal orientation, it was anathema to Hans-Wilhelm Kulenkampff, editor of the journal published by the NSKulturgemeinde (the Nazi party’s cultural union) in Hamburg, who warned in its pages that Weimar’s “absolute freedom” had been tantamount to “boundless chaos.” Hindemith had the talent to embrace the revolution needed in music as well as in politics, but he also deserved praise for overcoming in his new symphony Weimar’s cultural anarchy and accepting the “new order” with its self-imposed constraints.64 Critics in positions of leadership, past and present, spoke all too confidently of the music’s success. For Hermann Springer, director of the long-standing Verband deutscher Musikkritiker (society of German music critics) from 1921 until the Nazis came to power, the Mathis Symphony proved that new music could respect tradition and yet strictly adhere to the law—a “telling metaphor.” But in an implicit admonition to the Nazi party, Springer praised this inherent lawfulness as the basis for any just social organization, as well as the guarantee for artistic success. His newspaper, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, would cease publication after the next clampdown on the press in mid-April 1934. Predictably, military obedience instead of law, supplied the vocabulary for Fritz Stege, who directed the service organization that had superseded Springer’s in May 1933, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Musikkritiker

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(union of German music critics). He predicted that the Mathis Symphony would garner “supreme admiration, sweeping through Germany with inevitable victory.”65 Stege’s brash support for Hindemith cannot have pleased Rosenberg. Two further displays of audacity that same year did, however, meet immediate rebuke—and one came through Rosenberg’s mouthpiece, the journal Die Musik—and within two months, in January 1935, Stege lost permission to publish in Germany (although he later regained the privilege).66 Notwithstanding his supposedly questionable activities during the Weimar Republic, the timing suggests that outspoken views and rhetoric proved dangerous even to a Nazi loyalist.67 Advocates of new music, irregardless of their political orientation, took a risk in expressing strong opinions. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, in his review of the Mathis Symphony, pronounced an “unchallenged victory” of composer and conductor “over any theoretical doubts”—no doubt an allusion to the composer’s past.68 Later that year, after favorably reviewing the premiere of Berg’s Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu” which led to Kleiber’s resignation, Stuckenschmidt lost permission to publish in Germany.69 It did not help that he was on staff at the B. Z. am Mittag, an Ullstein family holding which epitomized “the Jewish press” for Hitler and was gradually dismantled after the National Socialists came to power. The critics at the once-liberal newspapers and their publishers took different tacks. Two weeks after the premiere of the Mathis Symphony, the esteemed Vossische Zeitung, also held by the Ullstein family, “died honorably,” without sacrificing its political convictions, one colleague recalled.70 Max Marschalk, decades earlier an important figure in Berlin musical life, exemplified the ill-fated resolve that brought down his newspaper. He reported Hindemith had overcome his “earlier playful instinct [Spieltrieb] . . . which has always run him into danger.” But Marschalk still defended the accomplishments of the composer’s Weimar years and favored his continued independence: “[Hindemith’s] recognition of the need to draw on tradition in no way means that he has defected to the compromisers: in essence he is what he always has been.”71 The composer could hardly have been encouraged by the fate of his defender and his paper. More cautious formulations (along with a transfer to Aryan ownership and a purge of Jewish personnel) allowed the Frankfurter Zeitung to continue publishing until August 1943. The newspaper appointed an internal censor, who read from a Nazi per-

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spective, in determining which problems to expose and what developments to encourage. An individual issue might even appear more hopeful about the effects of National Socialism, it has been suggested, than a party newspaper itself.72 Heinz Joachim, the music critic on staff, heralded the premiere of Hindemith’s symphony as the living proof, so urgently needed, that the new state would be hospitable to modern art. Joachim applauded the vision of the music director (in programming the work) and the broader public (in their enthusiastic response) as a way to urge the further support of new music and, implicitly, discourage artistic control; Furtwängler had recognized the danger in the current “profound revolution, internal and external,” that “art works might be destroyed under pressure from an intellectually less acute class.” He had acted judiciously in commissioning the Mathis Symphony and the public had “decided to enlist on the side of new art with singular courage and clarity.”73 As important as musical taste, it was implied, were the courage and logic of the audience’s response. At a premiere, each critic had the opportunity to adjudge to the music before any party line was established—which is precisely why Goebbels came to abhor reviews. Reviewers could embrace the music and its public success, regardless of their political affiliation. The nearly unanimous approval of Hindemith’s Mathis Symphony did not go unnoticed by his publisher, who used the full panoply of political views in advertisements for the score, including the pro-Nazi Zeitschrift für Musik. The format itself is significant. Two excerpts from the liberal press (Springer and an unsigned review at the Frankfurter Zeitung) were followed by two from National Socialists (one by Stege and another published anonymously in the party newspaper, Der Angriff ). Thereafter came briefer quotations from the modernist defender Stuckenschmidt, from two National Socialists (Abendroth and Herzog), and finally, as a local touch, a neighborhood newspaper (Steglitzer Anzeiger).74 But that was springtime for Hindemith; precisely the terms of his critical acclamation would undermine him by December.

The Turn against Hindemith Amid the enthusiasm the morning after the premiere of the Mathis Symphony came a scathing attack from Paul Zschorlich, in a newspaper that had clear allegiance to the Nazi party, the Deutsche Zeitung. No music, he supposed was less connected to the German soul than Hin-

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demith’s mixture of exoticism, potpourri, and Gebrauchsmusik; the audience that so embraced the music had a reputedly higher Jewish population than otherwise at Furtwängler’s concerts.75 An author of flamboyantly negative reviews for decades, particularly of Mahler and Schoenberg, Zschorlich would lose interest in music criticism two years later and retire to compose in Bavaria—at a time when, as Abendroth explained, “the period of struggle and conflict was over” (and, implicitly, such stringent advocates were no longer necessary).76 Or, put differently, Zschorlich’s sarcastic pen had no place in a regime where journalism fell under such scrutiny. The day after his review, the main organ of the Nazi party, the Völkischer Beobachter, came out against Hindemith. The contributor was Hugo Rasch, a musician of limited talent whose party loyalty brought him influence early in the regime.77 Rasch repeatedly invoked the old cultural critique of the composer as a Könner, or craftsman, implying mere competence without creativity, and a term earlier applied to denigrate Schoenberg and Mahler, for their “Jewish” command over technique at the expense of melodic writing and other spiritual dimensions of creativity.78 After the coverage of the premiere, which was positive by a wide margin, Zschorlich published another article on Hindemith in general, scorning his allegedly “internationalist” and un-German activities.79 Furtwängler was apparently disappointed by these reviews, grumbling that “National Socialist newspapers were against him, just as the Marxist writers had been earlier.”80 Hindemith had faced some problems even before the premiere of the Mathis Symphony. There was some objection to his joining the leadership council of the Reich Music Chamber.81 And even earlier, the Nazi party newspaper had objected to Hindemith’s international style, insisting that he could not serve as a leader (Führer) in the development of a “new German music in the spirit of Hitler.”82 Most damaging was the antagonism of Rosenberg, the hard-line ideologue, who was apparently troubled that Hindemith’s wife was Jewish—and that various family members had held prominent positions in the Weimar Republic.83 It did not help that Hindemith’s colleague and advocate Gustav Havemann had defected from Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in the spring of 1933 to found the Reichskartell der Deutschen Musikerschaft (Reich cartel of German musicians’ unions), which became the core of the Reich Music Chamber when it was established later that year, in November.84 Only months after the premiere of the Mathis Symphony in March 1934, Hindemith encountered problems. In June his music was briefly banned from radio broadcast. His publisher blamed Strauss, whose

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sense of competition with Hindemith was well known, but Hindemith was under investigation for imprudent comments he had made about Hitler while in Switzerland.85 The challenges he faced that summer were by no means part of a general clampdown. For example, the Reich Radio determined that Stravinsky was no longer problematic, and Stravinsky’s music saw wider acceptance and performances. In the fall, protests against Hindemith intensified. The Leipzig Kulturwoche (cultural festival week) in early October 1934, which the NS-Kulturgemeinde organized with the Saxon NS-Lehrerbund (teachers’ union), opened with a speech by Herzog attacking the composer (“German music and the Nordic spirit”). In response, Hindemith threatened to emigrate and refused to participate on the music planning committee for the 1936 Olympics.86 (Herzog, for his part, would soon suffer for his strident positions, finding himself deported to a concentration camp that same winter.)87 Also in October, when queried about the composer, Hans Hinkel, who was state commissar at the Prussian cultural ministry (Preußisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Volksbildung), responded that Hindemith’s music was “hardly in accordance with what we mean by art in our present National Socialist state.”88 Finally, late in October, the Leipzig Radio and the Gewandhaus Orchestra yielded to threats from the local Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, agreeing to cancel scheduled performances. Early in November 1934 Rosenberg’s NS-Kulturgemeinde leveled its harshest attack to date, declaring Hindemith “intolerable” in “cultural and political” terms and warning that it would terminate support for any organization that performed his music.89 This bluster, however, did not curtail the success of the Mathis Symphony when performances did take place. When Mathis was played in Breslau on November 4, the critic at the local paper, Wilhelm Sträußler, invoked the higher laws of art. While the experts might battle over his personality and his music, Hindemith himself was “a true musician who . . . feels a duty to create music constrained only by the categorical imperative of his inner self.” His masterpiece was in no way programmatic, Sträußler continued but followed “its own legality.” If not a symphony in the traditional sense, it possessed “the same basic ethos.” Its “symphonic manner” derived not from intellectual procedures such as thematic working and counterpoint, Sträußler explained but from clarity in phrase structure.90 Other reviewers adopted a different tone, if only in response to the new constraints on journalism. In a speech to the Reichsverband der

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deutschen Presse (German press association) in April 1934, Goebbels charged newspapers to be more “responsible” and journalists more courageous. New blood was needed—thus went his litany. The editor of the most widely circulated weekly, Die Grüne Post, published by Ullstein, defended the press and laid bare Goebbels’s dislike of the nonparty press (“Herr Reichsminister—A Word Please”). The regime’s reaction was swift and signaled a willingness to crush any opposition. The issues of the newspaper were confiscated and destroyed; the editor was imprisoned and forbidden to publish in Germany; and a threemonth ban on the publication forced the sale of Ullstein to Deutsche Verlag, held by the Nazi party. These events seized the attention of the public, especially in Berlin, and Goebbels’s machinations were exposed in the foreign press.91 Music critics, who fell under the same administrative branch, must have reflected on how Goebbels’s command affected their activities. In an editorial that same month Tischer defended Goebbels as consistent in his directives to the press: “[The minister] always explains that he wants manly words from independent thinkers and that a responsible criticism is indispensable” (original italics).92 The test of strength was a performance of the Mathis Symphony scheduled in Essen in the fall of 1934. The music director in place since 1933, Johannes Schüler, was an advocate of contemporary German music. (He had conducted the German premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1929 and, ironically, after the premiere of symphonic excerpts from Berg’s next opera led to Kleiber’s resignation at the Berlin State Opera, the position was offered to Schüler.) The critic at the leading Essen newspaper, Alfred Brasch, published a lengthy preview in support of the music. Although Weimar’s radical milieu might have temporarily led Hindemith astray, he conceded, the work “embodies all the aspirations of new music and yet is tied to the great tradition of the German Romanticism and classicism.” He praised the “symphonic logic” (Konsequenz—a more forceful term than Logik), from the “Bach-like strictness” of the first movement to the emotionalism of the middle movement to the struggle and apotheosis of the final movement. The “symphonic progression” was in fact “superior to the original altarpiece.” Brasch drove the point home by including musical examples and photographs of the Isenheim triptych, with its depiction of the Annunciation, the Angels’ Concert for Madonna and Child, and the Resurrection, corresponding to Hindemith’s movement titles, “Choir of Angels,” “Entombment of Christ,” and “Temptation of St. Anthony.”93

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Although the performance was scheduled outside the regular subscription series, which received financial support from the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, the event still seemed in jeopardy. The subject of Hindemith surfaced at meetings of the Reich Music Chamber without any consensus. At a meeting in Essen on November 5, 1934, Herzog brought an anti-Hindemith pamphlet published by the Kampfbund urging conductors not to program his music.94 Yet the following week, at the annual meeting of the Prussian division, Havemann named Hindemith, Strauss, and Pfitzner the three living icons of German music and beseeched colleagues to protect “true genius” from “petty strife and infighting.”95 These conflicting messages did not dampen the response to the Essen performance. Headlines in the non-partisan press reported “a great success for Hindemith” and “applause for Hindemith,” as if to report that the composer had trumped politics, and one review began by asking “whence the fuss over Hindemith?”96 Much of the credit went to the conductor, who was a sufficiently safe figure to remain in place through the end of the war and into the German Democratic Republic. Whereas the music itself was baroque in idiom, Brasch wrote, Schüler “emphasized the symphonic” with his strong dynamic tension, thus making the music more motivated and more convincing.97 In effect, Schüler Germanicized the music, or so critics recounted. The young musicologist Richard Litterscheid, a strong advocate of National Socialism, waxed enthusiastic over Schüler’s “carefully chiseled” interpretation; his “most ecstatic conducting,” which conveyed the greatest vitality of sound. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which had followed the Hindemith, had been dull by comparison. Litterscheid allowed that the Mathis Symphony might be the sort of masterpiece achieved only once every decade or so, yet the underlying reason was neither the composer’s genius nor his craftsmanship, but rather the profound response of the audience, which “contemplates man’s products as a form of grace.” As if to stress that the critic was not a judge but merely reporting on the performance, Litterscheid’s headline was “A Public Success.”98 Although no critic condemned the composer or the work, they avoided acknowledging Hindemith’s achievement or repeating the exalted rhetoric of the previous spring’s reviews. Goebbels was apparently displeased with this ambiguous an outcome. A few weeks later—and two days after Furtwängler’s resignation— Goebbels condemned Hindemith’s music at a rally for the anniversary of

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the founding of the Reich Culture Chamber, on December 6, 1934. The composer had misused his technical mastery to create “purely mechanistic music” that was “devoid of content.”99 Subsequent performances were canceled, and Hindemith took an indefinite leave from his teaching post. Any further action against the composer, who had numerous ties to the United States and Europe, could have been a liability to the regime, with its enduring popularity. (His Violin Sonata in E major was performed at the first annual Baden-Baden contemporary music festivals in April 1936 to such acclaim that the last movement was repeated.)100 Goebbels took no further steps until after the Olympics, held in Berlin late in the summer of 1936. Securing the participation of the United States and other nations required that the regime moderate its public signs of anti-Semitism and egregious repression. But the very week that the international guests and journalists departed, more openly aggressive policies were announced, and within two months, in October 1936, Goebbels ordered Peter Raabe, who followed Strauss as president of the Reich Music Chamber, to ban public performance of Hindemith’s works. With few professional remaining opportunities, Hindemith withdrew. In 1937 he resigned from his professorship and began traveling to the United States; the following year he emigrated to Switzerland and, after the outbreak of war, eventually found refuge within the walls of Yale University, where he developed a reputation as an authoritarian teacher and artistic conservative. Hindemith’s publisher continued to issue and sell his scores through 1939, in at least one case (the second volume of his theoretical work, Unterweisung im Tonsatz) without seeking approval from the censor.101 Later, his New York published scores were smuggled into Germany through Lisbon and reissued photographically.102 There were even occasional performances. Hitler apparently became enraged in 1943 after reading about a successful performance of Hindemith’s music for the Hitler Youth in Linz.103 The composer’s supporters, including Nazi collaborators and Nazis sympathizers, remained reluctant to disavow Hindemith, however cautious they were in their treatment of him. In an ideologically charged history of German music (1940), Otto Schumann commended Mathis der Maler, both the opera (which finally premiered in Zurich in 1938) and the symphony, for their “folk” character and “responsibility” in the pursuit of “true art.” Even Hindemith’s earlier music from the Weimar Republic was not dismissed outright. Passages of “harshly chis-

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eled beauty” were juxtaposed with stretches of “unbounded immoderation.” Significantly, however, Hindemith found no place in the mainstream of German music history. Schumann relegated the composer to the chapter on “new music and Jews,” for the absurd reason that his teachers had been Jewish—Arnold Mendelssohn (great-nephew of Felix Mendelssohn and a crucial contributor to the revival of Protestant church music at the turn of the century) and Bernhard Sekles.104 The same year, 1940, Hugo Distler cited Hindemith’s definition of musica mundana but banished the composer’s name to a footnote.105 The Case of Hindemith, as history has called the episode that brought international attention to musical politics, demonstrated as much inconsistency as fervor: a composer initially willing to be a fair-haired exemplar of the new, wholesome German music but falling out of favor with a regime perhaps unable to tolerate his popularity; critics divided between their initial exuberance and the need for prudence and conformity that soon followed, an art form praised as quintessentially German yet soon to be reduced to banality.

The Politics of Interpretation Hindemith’s new style, which many contemporaries linked to National Socialism, emerged well before 1933 and at a time when the composer had no interest in or sympathies with Nazi ideology. Though few in the Third Reich made the observation, this new compositional voice had emerged in the late 1920s, in part in collaboration with the Left (Brecht). Aspiring to write orchestral music more accessible than a symphony, Hindemith composed four “Concert Musics” from 1926 to 1930. The strength and clarity of the last, op. 50, led Claus Neumann to champion Hindemith in 1933 as the future of modern music. Shunning any blending of instruments or soft winds, Hindemith was, in his view, superior to the other main school of composition (that of Richard Strauss).106 Can music acquire political meaning in a new context, different from the circumstances in which it was composed? Certainly the circumstances of later performances mattered. Hindemith remained proud of the Concert Music, op. 50, and chose to conduct it—rather than his most recent variations for orchestra, the 1932 Philharmonisches Konzert—at the Erste Deutscher Komponistentag (first German composers’ convention) in Berlin, when he was inducted into the leadership council of the Reich Music Chamber. (It was typical of the

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regime’s chaotic arts policy to announce an annual festival only to terminate the tradition after one year.) Hindemith’s new lucid style, including stolid instrumental groupings and controlled musical unfolding— if typical of an aesthetic orientation in the United States and in the Soviet Union—had an obvious appeal in a regime that emphasized the Volk over the elite. Reporting on the event, Herzog, a staunch Nazi, admired Hindemith’s “taut” and “acerbic” voice-leading as well as the “clenched [geballten]” formal language. The symphonic procedures of Opus 50 were “among the strongest ideas in contemporary music.” The music was “powerfully shaped, without compromise.”107 The same qualities were heralded in the work of pro-Nazi composers such as Distler, inspiring the young theologian and musicologist Walter Blankenburg to write of the unquestionable “benefit of harshness and acerbity, because they sound much more elemental, truer, and purer than what we are accustomed to hearing.”108 Whereas the Concert Music became political only by virtue of its later use, and not its composition history, the chronology of the politicization, in the case of Mathis der Maler Symphony, is simpler. Hindemith prepared the symphonic extract from his opera project after the National Socialists came to power and was aware that the work would be premiered by an orchestra that was an official organ of the regime. During the first season in this capacity, 1933–1934, the Berlin Philharmonic performed at the opening of the Reich Culture Chamber, the Totenfeier and Heldengedenktage (commemoration days for the dead and for war heroes). But even before that point, the orchestra showed its political acquiescence, for example, when Bruno Walter’s guest appearance was canceled in March 1933 and the orchestra invited Strauss to replace the Jewish conductor—which he did, after some coaxing from Rasch and Julius Kopsch.109 There is little disagreement that Mathis der Maler, and in turn the symphony extracted from it, suited the völkisch aims of National Socialism, and not just because Hindemith quoted old German folk songs.110 From translucent counterpoint and tonal idiom to balanced phraseology and momentum, accessibility prevailed in Hindemith’s new style, and particularly the Mathis Symphony. Hindemith himself stressed the ethics of accessibility, crafting program notes that would play into the hands of the National Socialists: “All music written with its roots in our great tradition and with the most responsible seriousness can demand of the listener good will and active participation.”111 Even

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if Hindemith did not set out to write political music, in the sense of setting ideological texts or dedicating works to Hitler, as did so many of his contemporaries,112 it is indisputable that Hindemith aimed to write a work that would be a public success in the Third Reich. (And the same reasoning led him, two years later, to accept a commission from the Luftwaffe.)113 Premiered four months after the establishment of the Reich Music Chamber, which would rise to a membership of 95,000 within a year, the Mathis Symphony offered a platform for addressing the role of music in the regime. Developing a style suitable for the new Germany was the most pressing charge for art and for the education of the Volk, Otto Steinhagen, a Berlin critic and teacher, wrote in his review: “A contemporary musical style can emerge only from a foundation of National Socialist thinking and feeling.” Paramount was to expunge any elitism. All Germans should be the beneficiaries of German musical culture, he declared. The question to pose was whether a composer’s course “is essentially rooted in National Socialism and whether he leads to the desired goal, namely, a new German musical style” that is contemporary but accessible. Steinhagen looked to Hindemith, twenty years his junior, to adumbrate the “spirit of the new music.”114 The Mathis Symphony did not need to be distorted in order to serve the regime, even if its political valence emerged in the process of interpretation rather than from the score itself. Critics remembered, or perhaps decided to report on, either one quality or the other usually on the basis of their political orientation. Generalizations warrant some caveat, particularly since classification by political view or involvement is as crude as it is difficult, particularly with minor figures all but lost to history. Critics who were active party members or held prominent positions in the regime provide the benchmark by which the writings of sympathizers, or others less closely affiliated with the regime, can be interpreted. The permanent staff at old liberal newspapers offer another set of criteria; such publications, prior to seizure by Nazi or puppet management, would not have hired anti-Semitic or nationalistic writers. (Goebbels, much to his chagrin at the time, was never able to secure a job as a journalist back in the 1920s.) Ideologues admired the sharp and acerbic timbres in the Mathis Symphony, while critics in the other camp—formerly liberal newspapers— prized the relaxed and sensuous scoring. Symphonic music can, of course, be riveting and propulsive just as it enjoys lyrical moments. If

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they agreed on the effect of a particular movement, liberals felt convinced by musical logic, Nazi sympathizers felt gripped by its force or determination. Predictably, liberals “heard” the empowerment of the individual listener, whereby music heightened consciousness or embodied personal freedom. Nationalists heard the subordination of the individual to the whole, an effect that, architecture excepted, music achieved better than any other art form. It was not uncommon to extract symphonic music from an opera, but the designation “symphony” for this purpose was rare and, given the ideological freight of the genre. (Berg called his excerpt Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu,” whereas Sergey Prokofiev, whose compliance with Stalin exceeded that of Shostakovich, had prepared two symphonies from larger dramatic works in progress from 1928 to 1930.) In an article seeking to demonstrate the “unified front” of German composers, Herzog dubbed the Concert Music, op. 50, the “Boston Symphony” (it had been commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra).115 The title “symphony” (or the quality “symphonic”) often had politically charged meanings. Karl Westermayer, at the capital’s most powerful liberal organ before 1933 (the Berliner Tageblatt), did not mind that Mathis was drawn from an opera and defied traditional symphonic form. Like musical progressives circa 1900, he focused on the procedures of symphonic music (the work’s “intrinsic value” depended on being “symphonically worked out”).116 Party newspapers, on the other hand, referred sarcastically to Mathis as an “alleged symphony.”117 Critics who were active in the regime, or contributed to proregime press, resembled aesthetic conservatives of a past generation in insisting on an adherence to the traditional structure of the symphony. Steinhagen, writing for the politically well-positioned Berliner Börsen Zeitung, supposed that any symphony “rethought” from another genre was doomed to fail.118 Ignoring the composer’s intention to write a symphony, Stege declared Mathis an “operatic suite” comprising three “images” (not symphony movements). Once the work was unfettered by any symphonic expectations, Stege was able to praise its expressive richness—the tenderness in the first movement and “surprising individuality” in the instrumentation of the third movement.119 For reviewers at the old liberal papers, the Mathis Symphony afforded an alternative vision of life, one that shunned an aesthetic of strength. Rufer found the music “freer and more relaxed, liberated from the harshness” of Hindemith’s earlier style. Rufer perceived a relation-

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ship between part and whole that did not entail subordination: “[How Hindemith] connects the seemingly resistant elements elastically to the whole, molding them into truly dramatic expression, shows an expansion of the intellectual and musical horizon, a journey of formal feeling, and a mastery of construction that arouse admiration in and for itself, just for the results.”120 Hindemith “rejected all rigidity and asperity, and all that is merely aggressive,” Joachim wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung.121 Westermayer challenged the idea of monumentality, so important to fascist ideology and architecture. He acknowledged the “epic” orchestration but denied any resulting sense of being overwhelmed. Rather, the Mathis Symphony—“as active as it is nervously mobile, tightened through constructive logic and clear polyphony”—engaged the listener’s intellect. The outer movements displayed Hindemith’s “familiar, bold pleasure in music-making, along with his joy in driving motion and contrapuntal friction”—qualities alien to the monumentalism associated with some fascist art.122 Orchestration, with its own freighted past at the fin de siècle, provoked different reactions along political lines. Hindemith’s precise and arresting scoring, which was well coordinated with formal junctures and changes in thematic writing or texture, won admiration all around. Yet the expressive valence of the orchestration varied from reviewer to reviewer. Hindemith relied on the stock symphonic device of the finale surpassing the earlier movements via thematic culmination and sonorous transcendence. Predictably, critics recounted the ending with palpable pleasure. Marschalk, on the staff of the liberal Vossische Zeitung for decades, was moved by the differentiation of orchestral forces and the process of closure, while Herzog spoke deliberately (in two different reviews of the performance) in terms of control and ecstasy, central terms in fascist rhetoric and ideology. Marschalk found an “extraordinary richness of contrast,” while Herzog heard music “governed by ecstatic coloration.” In the coda (the Alleluia), the “architectonic Hindemith masterfully controls the form,” which meant for Herzog a “celebration of irresistible force and splendor.” Marschalk, by contrast, seemed disappointed that a finale beginning in such an unusual way would conclude with an idea so “characteristic,” if, admittedly, intensifying into a “grandiose effect that there is no resisting.” To oversimplify, the old liberal remembered the imaginative scoring and regretted being swept away by the ending, like the Brown Shirt sitting beside him. Marschalk also stressed the phosphorescent orchestration of

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the Mathis Symphony, transfiguring the old German song “Es sungen drei Engel” into a stunningly modern idiom.123 Critics attempted to guide the listener, as in generations past, and perhaps even more so. Motivation is, of course, impossible to measure. Whether to compete with propaganda all around them or to indoctrinate readers into the discipline of the regime, critics sharpened their vocabulary. It would be a mistake to understand Mathis harmonically, the Berlin critic Heinrich Hofer warned (curiously, because the music is emphatically tonal). The work epitomized “an art of voice-leading, whose individual lines are strongly profiled and harshly juxtaposed, driving forward through the intrinsic momentum and connected to the whole through rhythm.” This “linearity” evoked the “inexorability, indeed cruelty” and “elemental strength” of the Isenheim altarpiece, which had inspired the symphony.124 Voice-leading offered rigor and strength to a composition—an aesthetic masculinization that compensated for the sensuous beauty of sonority and the lyricism of Hindemith’s melodic writing.

Redemption and the Effacing of Genre Whatever their politics, enthusiasts of the Mathis Symphony reported being uplifted, especially in the final movement. References to purification and redemption abounded. If some critics recalled the generative power and transcendent endings of Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler, others had in mind the calls to “cleanse” society and institutions, redeeming them from the supposed decadence of the avant-garde modernism or cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschevismus) of the Weimar Republic. The Mathis Symphony served both aims brilliantly, and no less by alluding to the great Renaissance triptych. According to Hindemith’s program notes, the symphony did not depict the altarpiece but was inspired by the emotions it aroused. Few of his contemporaries mentioned the religious iconography—not surprisingly, since the Church had no secure role in the Third Reich. The intensity of the imagery evoked by the music seemed, for many reviewers, to purge the modernism of the Weimar Republic—or, perhaps for others, to rise above the bleak political milieu. The historical distance of the Isenheim altarpiece suited the dominant artistic sensibilities of National Socialism. Renaissance and medieval art offered idealized human images—from the Bamberger Reiter to Uta

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von Naumburg, displayed at the exhibition of “great German” art that ran alongside the exhibition of “degenerate” art.125 Archaism, a hallmark of the musical style developed by Nazi party members and sympathizers—most explicitly in the context of religious music—ensured distance between the viewer or listener and the artwork, much as with the monumental architecture of the 1930s.126 Paul von Klenau—a Dane who curried German favor in 1933 by espousing serialism as an invention of Joseph Hauer, not Klenau’s own teacher Schoenberg, who was Jewish—won over critics by using German folk melodies in his twelvetone opera, Michael Kohlhaas (sixteenth-century topic taken from a classic 1810 narrative by Heinrich von Kleist). Hermann Roth welcomed Hindemith’s Mathis Symphony as a similar but more emphatic demonstration that composers should seek inspiration from archaic models. Far from nostalgic, Roth explained, this material is developed and integrated into the fabric of the composition. But his terms were telling: the absorption of old motifs into the music did not admit any individuality. Stressing the accessibility of the symphony, Roth insisted that this music did not “aestheticize historicity” (language that in the Third Reich reeked of intellectualism). Instead, the Mathis Symphony recreated the “historical atmosphere when ideology was fundamentally transformed.”127 Perhaps the most political manifesto of the new archaicism was Distler’s preface to his Organ Partita on the chorale “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” (1935). Composers should “blend the spirit, language, and form of our time with the hierarchical and strict art” of times past. How this should occur remained vague at best, but Distler explained the process in clear ideological terms. The influence could not entail merely a “blood transfusion” of older styles, which would produce a “weak Neo-Nazarene [i.e., Jewish] style and claim no space [Lebensraum] of its own.” Instead, drawing inspiration from the past was “a process of utmost sublimity, which found justification in part by the voluntary kinship to past generations and centuries”—evocative of the permanence claimed for the Third Reich. Composers now in the thrall of modernism, with its chaos, primitivism, and barbarism, would develop a “will for restraint and discipline” by cultivating an archaic influence.128 Later in the regime, when ideological fervor had no place, Distler relegated to a note his observation about the archaism in contemporary German music, particularly choral music. But his enthusiasm was still clear: “pure intervals” (including parallel fourths and

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fifths), had become prevalent, particularly choral music, producing the “most strident and strictest consonance,” and “a robust, ruthless, and unconstrained voiceleading.”129 An archaic tone, by fiat, subdues any individuality or subjectivity. In another context, a few months after the premiere of the Mathis Symphony, Ambrosius denounced the “downright grotesque overvaluing of a composer’s individual style” in contemporary music. Moreover, the compositional process should involve as much attention to the ethics of the musical work and its emotional expression as to the techniques deployed.130 He could have found precedent in Schering, who in the late 1920s had refuted the very notion of a composer’s style, writing that Klangideal—the aspired tone or sonority—was not a matter of personal choice but was dictated by race, culture, and society.131 Metaphors of redemption had patently political overtones in the early years of the Third Reich. (The only religious publication to cover the premiere of the Mathis Symphony avoided such rhetoric, writing judiciously that the themes were “purified through transformation and a filter of colors.”)132 Litterscheid heralded the Mathis Symphony “as a redemptive word spoken amid the confusion of ‘modern’ music,” commenting that the work is so powerful as to resemble “religious grace.”133 The work pointed to an “inner, foundational change,” wrote Fritz Ohrmann (an organist and harmonium virtuoso): “The ethos behind this symphony fills the listener’s soul. Sonority is no longer despiritualized and desensualized.” Yet spirituality itself somehow involved a loss of individuality. The orchestral voices, Ohrmann continued, were “no longer arrogant autocrats.” In the tradition of the great symphonists, Hindemith brought them into “larger groups that became the bearers of great ideas in massive chords.”134 Much as in a Bruckner finale, redemption came in a resplendent fullness of sound. Reviewers were fascinated by the question of whether or not the Mathis Symphony was programmatic. A few, in the old progressive tradition, claimed the aesthetic values of “absolute” music. In his introduction to the work, Strobel explained that the thematic development is “strictly linear, and even the most magnificent instrumental effects are structured with compelling logic.” But the music’s gestures, he conceded are “so strong that one could be misled into superimposing a poetic interpretation.”135 The erstwhile social activist Hans Boettcher proclaimed the Mathis Symphony absolute music in the “highest sense,” despite its movement titles. The program is only the means to an end,

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which is to grip listener with an “inherent formative musical will.” The “motoric force” of the composition derives “from the pure laws of music,” he stressed.136 The Mathis Symphony was, of course, program music, with titles for individual sections as well as movements. Any interpretation as absolute music meant the detachment of the music from its material reality. Herzog, like other overtly political reviewers, ignored Hindemith’s programmatic titles.137 Musical interpretation brought the license to reject the compositional agenda or intention behind a given work. Kulenkampff considered it irrelevant that the Mathis Symphony was drawn from an opera. To the contrary, the existence of the symphony proved the “instrumental foundation” of the opera. It was “profound and purely felt music of great strength in terms of invention, expression, and form.” Far from making the universalist claims of absolute music, Kulenkampff believed the Mathis Symphony to be so thoroughly German in “diction” that it would not be fully understood in other countries.138 Hans Pfitzner made the same point in a speech three years later, discussing his nationalistic cantata Von deutscher Seele. “The music was ‘the guiding power’ that provided ‘secret instructions’ for his organization of the text, allowing him to shape a ‘unified whole.’”139 Demanding to listen to the work in absolute terms—or conceive of a vocal work in instrumental terms—entails stripping the listener of customary interpretive tools, namely, envisaging a musical narrative based on the titles of the movements. The effort to listen ideologically resembled the conception of National Socialism as a “movement” and “action,” an overcoming of reality as the party (its ideology and the nation under its command) pressed forward into the future. A parallel emerged in the political interpretation of absolute music and the “absolute” interpretation of vocal or program music. Coercion of musical appreciation itself represented a kind of ideological transformation in its endeavor to transcend the raw, sonic material of music. The hermeneutic strain required to interpret music in a way so apparently divergent from how it was intended replicated the mechanism by which ideology presented the sociopolitical world differently from how it appeared to the uninstructed. In so doing, art criticism proved more dangerous than a bald statement of National Socialist values—a task to which propaganda was limited. While propaganda merely presents its message, however manipulative and misleading, works of art, as interpreted, could convincingly represent the values and claims of ideology.

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The tropes of purification and redemption, shaping and control, pervaded writings on music in the crucial transition years of 1933–1934, facilitating the transformation of the National Socialists from a party of the streets to a movement sweeping up German intellectuals, artists, and professionals. State control or racial “cleansing” was normalized— or at least acquired a patina of justification—in part because the same processes of purification occurred within this most German art form. In the early years, National Socialists sought to win support and gain validity through the promise of music’s vitality, strength, and order. Critics and scholars were essential to the success of these efforts, although their work depended on the tradition of symphonic aesthetics long in place. What critics heard does not seem to have differed in any consistent way along political lines. But the metaphors and accounts of their musical impressions did. Although the political orientation of a critic can often be discerned from context and implication, readers, admittedly, may not have perceived such fine distinctions in the degree of receptiveness toward Nazi ideology, particularly within the ephemeral venue of the newspaper. As Goebbels advised Reich Radio management, the “secret of propaganda” is that “whomever it seeks to capture is thoroughly imbued with the ideas put forward by the propaganda, without realizing at all that he is thus imbued.”140 The virtue of music criticism, and the reason that Goebbels would ultimately seek to ban it, is that with guidance from a reviewer, a listener must finally re-experience the energy of musical sound and the power of musical form on his own terms, refuting the political implications of the review. Early in the 1930s, ideologues deployed figurative language to imbue the musical object with a kind of subjectivity, a commanding presence and a living energy, much as in Rosenberg’s distortion of the sublime, the aesthetic category revered since Kant.141 Yet so long as musical listening was recounted in concert reviews and other writings, readers had access to authentic experiences that they could reconfigure ideologically as they saw fit. If music did not encourage resistance in these early years of the regime—as the actual impact, of course, is immeasurable—the public, and not just the critic, were to blame. Later, when music criticism had evolved into biography and reportage, with little attention to the listening experience, then any political gesture other than conformity or withdrawal became difficult. Metaphorical thought is no longer liberating when it fails to preserve the subjectivity of the cogito.

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The irrelevance of genre—the fact that Hindemith chose to present his operatic excerpt as a symphony, rather than a suite or other programmatic work—signaled a further breakdown in the cultural value of the art form. Genre, as a way to orient the listener, or as a contract between composer and listener,142 had no role in this regime of the Volk. Composers no longer sought to respond to conventions but merely absorbed whatever they wished. Whether on the part of composers or critics who recast absolute music as programmatic and operatic music as symphonic, the attempts to fuse the aesthetics of opera and symphony— traditionally the two most complex and monumental genres—revealed a totalizing drive, such that the individual artwork, in its immediate presentation, overwhelmed the listener. As genre boundaries eroded, artistic appreciation now meant being absorbed in that single experience and no longer reflecting on how the artwork played with conventions and traditions. It is no coincidence that Wagner, whose aesthetic ideology was the most strongly prefigurative of fascism, among all composers,143 from his utopian aesthetic to his virulent anti-Semitism, regarded the dissolution of genre as one of his chief goals. Listeners were suspended between the antipodes of representative music (opera and program music) and absolute music (symphony) so that they experienced compositions of each category in terms of the other. Even more than experiencing a work without reference to genre, to perceive it in terms of a different genre entailed a degree of fantasy and willpower, ambition and control. The psychology of totalitarian control (which admittedly the regime did not always achieve, and its actual governance structures and practices worked against) and mass domination through politics, was recapitulated aesthetically by merging the incompatible expectations of symphonic unity and operatic drama. The regime sought unity within— with dictatorial control and the exclusion of Jews—by means of expansion outward, with uncontainable military aggression. At the Nuremberg party rally every year through 1938, Hitler presided over a massive rally in which the choreography of lights, music, and procession apotheosized the drama and display of opera. As the utmost instantiation of aestheticizing politics, Nazi rallies were acutely Wagnerian in their attempt to sweep audiences into ecstatic response and shape all dimensions of human consciousness. Hitler’s ambition, to oversimplify, was to control time (i.e., “purify” the future German society according to eternal archetypes and values) and space (i.e., build a vast empire). Time

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and space, conceived no longer as forms of historical change, were to coalesce in a way analogous to the symphonic aesthetics of redemption and unity. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra resumed its performances soon after liberation, on July 8, 1945. With an astute eye to political alliances, Hermann Abendroth entitled the first concert “A Greeting to the Red Army” and included in it Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’s Egmont Overture—a symbolic gesture of Germans welcoming the Soviet occupation. The second program, in effect an apology to German Jewry, was devoted to Mendelssohn and Mahler. But Hindemith’s Mathis Symphony was the centerpiece of the third, on August 9, 1945.144 The Bielefeld Philharmonic Orchestra followed suit, or so Hans Werner Henze recalled. It was an astute move by the music director Hans Hoffmann, who survived denazification unscathed. The political ambitions of the program were unmistakable to the young Henze: “It went down with a discreet cultural frisson of ‘We’re permitted to, we’re able to, we have the freedom to play Hindemith. We can listen to Mathis der Maler, even if we hadn’t actually missed this music.’” The symphony could again redeem, even if the work had been so promising to the young Nazi regime. Henze continued, “There was also an undertone of ‘Now that Hindemith can be played again, our guilt is removed, everything is right with the world again, isn’t it?’ Fascism had been no more than a bad dream.”145 Hindemith, too, remade his own history. If partly from exigency (with no opera commissions beckoning), the idea of the symphony became a guiding force for Hindemith in the New World. Call it nostalgia or the conservatism of the immigrant community—however the composer rationalized his fleeting success in Nazi Germany with his first symphony, drawn from Mathis der Maler—the genre held his attention over the next eighteen years, across six new symphonies. Soon after he arrived in the states, he completed the Ea-major Symphony for Sergey Koussevitzky, who had commissioned the Concert Music, op. 50. The end of the war inspired the Symphonia serena. Even more far afield, in quick succession, Hindemith composed the E-major Sinfonietta, the Symphony for concert band, a symphony drawn from his opera project Die Harmonie der Welt, and finally his Pittsburgh Symphony, which quotes from Pete Seeger and Webern’s Symphony, op. 21.

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Virtually no composer still in Germany—except perhaps Henze, although he composed in exile in Italy from 1953 to 1965—pursued the legacy of the symphony. Prior to the socialists’ adoption of the genre in the years around World War I, the symphony’s preeminent cultural achievement had been to portray a heroic individualism through contrapuntal and harmonic tension alongside powerful orchestration. It had simultaneously allowed the most intense subjectivity (culminating perhaps in Mahler’s counterpoint and Strauss’s orchestration) and deployment of mass sonic resources, all held together by the capacity to command on the part of composer and conductor. Both poles, of course, had made the symphony the perfect metaphor for the ideologues who looked forward to an authoritarian but heroic state. And yet when the time came, on January 30, 1933, and the regime of symphony was finally installed, the genre could not finally live up to the artistic syntheses it had hitherto facilitated. But neither could its traditional prestige simply be abandoned or forgotten. New music in the late 1930s, as Carl Orff would demonstrate, had to undertake a ritualistic and affirmative vocation. When it accomplished this task, as commentators praised Orff for doing, the composer’s work would still be celebrated as “symphonic.” The idea of the genre trumped the actual musical form. After the collapse of the Third Reich it would be difficult to pick up a tradition that had been so laden with political expectations and eventually with debased political programs. The Soviet experience, authoritarian though it was, still allowed the symphony a valid vocation because it could give voice to the huge heroic effort of World War II. For postwar German composers the rehabilitation of a musical tradition led them back to the Second Vienna School and the modernist Weimar Left, with its recourses to montage and brevity. When after a series of brief symphonies Henze worked up to the grand claims of a “Ninth,” he, too, would choose an antifascist theme and program. With a motif drawn from Anne Segher’s Das siebte Kreuz, a novel of heroic antifascists, Henze’s Ninth bore witness to both the ravages of Nazism and the promise of resistance. Did it in its musical craft and powerful choral ensembles finally reaffirm the humanistic ambitions the genre had assumed, before succumbing to contending ideologies? Or did it confirm that the symphony could never have been just music?

chapter seven

Symphonic Defeat

Whatever the ambitions of ideologues and accomplices, the Third Reich did not usher in a triumphant era in the history of the symphony commensurate with the achievements of Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev in the Soviet Union.1 With a political history stretching back to 1800, the symphony might have dominated public musical life in the Third Reich. Hitler’s fascination with opera and Wagner is only part of the reason it did not. After the Nazi consolidation of power around 1935 and especially after the 1936 summer Olympics, composers and critics, and eventually Hitler himself, turned away from the genre of symphony or minimized its utility. Ideologues and technocrats no longer had to win the approval of ordinary Germans. A 1937 press memorandum from the Propaganda Ministry announced that “the inner political Kampfzeit has ended . . . The Führer has been successful in bringing an end to the war of all against all” (Kampf aller gegen alle)—a reference to Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes. The combative (kämpferischer) journalist of the past, to paraphrase the memorandum, need no longer look for occasions to go on the attack. The dominant concept is that of the good guy (des ganzen Kerls).2 Thus was banished the ideological fervor that had motivated such writings as Karl Grunsky’s 1933 book on “the struggle for German music,” which warned of the “danger that music cripple the will.” Historically, he explained, emotional responses to music had often been enervating. By contrast, the greatest masters of the past century, he continued, citing Beethoven, Wagner, and Bruckner, “confront and call forth the fount of the will, even though, as a result, they alienate or leave some petit-bourgeois unmoved.”3

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The political potential of the symphony to glorify heroic struggle and national unity eventually became superfluous. Moreover, political music proved disappointing at best. In April 1935 Hitler forbade any further dedications in his name, and two years later, during the preparations for the 1937 Nuremberg party rally, Goebbels noted in his diary the Führer’s dislike of the music that had been commissioned.4 Music gradually ceded its ideological ambitions, whether in the production of new symphonies, in performances, broadcasts, or critical discourse. Escapism and simple gratification prevailed. The cultural aesthetic changed from “heroic symphony” to “eternal harmonies,” to cite the titles of Fritz Grüninger’s books on Beethoven (1940) and Mozart (1943).5 Beethovenian heroism, meanwhile, took on a different meaning, when the Fifth Symphony, with its triumphant finale, was aired to commemorate the “sacrifice” of the Sixth German Army in the battle at Stalingrad, in a broadcast following the protocol of victory announcements.6

Bruckner in the Third Reich As the regime stabilized, the virtues of Beethoven’s heroism and defiance gave way to Bruckner’s reverence—the title of a popular biography from the Third Reich.7 Even Bonn, the city of Beethoven’s birth, founded a branch of the Bruckner Society in the winter of 1943–1944, amid blistering air raids. The political significance of the ceremony was unmistakable, with the presence of Richard Ohling, the propaganda leader for the Cologne/Aachen branch of the Nazi Party (Gaupropagandaleiter) and Karl F. Chudoba, who was university rector as well as the academic liaison to the party and regime (Gaudozentenführer).8 Bruckner’s symphonies performed a range of political functions in the Third Reich, beyond their regular programming in the concert hall. If Beethoven’s symphonies seem to compress the passage of time (again, to cite Theodor W. Adorno), Bruckner’s symphonies, lasting an hour or more, project a vast structure by means of orchestration that pits the registral extremes against one another. The spatial expanse of the music, along with its monumental passage of time, may be one reason why Bruckner, and not Beethoven, was programmed as part of Hitler’s cultural campaign to win the allegiance of Saarland residents, who faced a vote in 1935 on whether to rejoin Germany or remain part of France; one is ostensibly absorbed into a Bruckner symphony yet swept away by Beethoven. The western tour of the National Socialist Reich Symphony Orches-

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tra (NS-Reichssymphonieorchester) to Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate proved so successful that the Saarland Nazi Party chapter met with the orchestra’s spokesman and the Saar-Sängerbund (choral society) to organize an extension that would include five of its six districts. At the final concert in the state capital Saarbrücken, the audience numbered over two thousand. The Prelude to Meistersinger—Wagner’s paean to Table 7.1 Chronology of Symphony Broadcasts Year

Beethoven

Bruckner

1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

2 [9]

— —

7 6 7 6 5 8 8 10 9 1

3 5 2 7 5 4 0 2 4 5 2

Table 7.2 Repertoire of Broadcasts in the Third Reich Beethoven

times broadcast

Bruckner

times broadcast 1 2 2 6 6 2 0 8 2 8

Symphony 1 Symphony 2 Symphony 3 Symphony 4 Symphony 5 Symphony 6 Symphony 7 Symphony 8 Symphony 9

8 7 7 8 12 7 9 8 6

D minor Symphony Symphony 1 Symphony 2 Symphony 3 Symphony 4 Symphony 5 Symphony 6 Symphony 7 Symphony 8 Symphony 9

Total:

72

Total:

37

The counts are taken from contemporary broadcast listings, Schallaufnahmen der ReichsRundfunk G.m.b.H. (volumes for late 1929 to early 1936, and early 1936 to early 1939), and supplemented by data at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv from 1999.

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German nationalism—was followed by Reger’s most accessible orchestral work, Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin, op. 128, and Bruckner’s Fourth. As propaganda, the press coverage possibly even trumped the performances. Although the symphony was programmed elsewhere on the tour, the reported singled out the Saarbrücken performance to address the conductor’s compelling interpretation and audience’s enthusiasm. The symphony (which the composer had named the Romantic) became “a hymn of love for the German homeland.”9 Hitler’s efforts were rewarded; in the plebiscite on January 13, 1935, 90 percent of the Saar electors voted to rejoin the Reich. Bruckner’s symphonies were broadcast throughout the Third Reich. Accurate counts are impossible, given bomb damage, but a partial reconstruction is possible (Table 7.1). Although Beethoven was broadcast more than Bruckner, the disparity had more to do with the frequent broadcasting of Beethoven’s Fifth and the unpopularity of certain symphonies of Bruckner. It may be that some Bruckner symphonies were heard as much as, or more than, some Beethoven symphonies (Table 7.2). The musicologist Erich Valentin, who took every occasion to advance National Socialism, berated broadcasters for not giving airtime to Bruckner. The occasion was the fortieth anniversary of the composer’s death, in October 1936. Valentin counted only one broadcast, which was conducted by Hermann Stange, a Nazi loyalist of limited talent but whom the Propaganda Ministry favored as Furtwängler’s shortlived successor at the Berlin Philharmonic. Without commenting on the performance itself—in deference to Goebbels’ ban on arts criticism and support of the conductor—Valentin observed only that through the choice of program, Beethoven’s Sixth and Bruckner’s Third, the German Broadcast Orchestra (Rundfunkorchester Deutschlandsender) “pursued a unified representation of the great German symphonic literature through a logically developed line.”10 The Eighth Symphony had a politically inopportune dedication to the Austrian Franz Joseph I but in 1939 Karl Laux called it the “Symphony of the German.”11 The year Bruckner’s symphonies were broadcast the most—as often as Beethoven’s—was also the year that plans materialized for the Anschluss, which Hitler announced in Linz on March 13, 1938. Bruckner had become a German composer a year prior with all due pomp and circumstance in Regensburg when his statue was installed in Valhalla, commissioned a century earlier by Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, to celebrate Germans who excelled in art, music, literature, science, and poli-

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tics by housing their busts in a replica of the Parthenon.12 Hitler presided at the ceremony, and Goebbels delivered one of his most political speeches on music, epitomizing the surrender of aesthetics to biography that lay behind his ban on arts criticism. The power of the symphony as a genre was mentioned only in the recounting of the creative act—in a “warrior-like will to act” that “sweeps the listener along with it” and that inspired all of Bruckner’s mature symphonies. In Goebbels’s hands, Steigerung no longer captured the composer’s formal writing but his biography, in particular a reputed turn from church music to “an absolute, symphonic art.” The catalyst for this “revolutionary change to the sonic shape [Gestalt] of his musical language” was Wagner. Retelling it in the present tense, as befitted a master propagandist, Goebbels explained that this shift awakens in Bruckner “the tidal force of the great creative act.” Only at this point does he emerge as a “distinctive symphonist.” Bruckner is “filled with the triumphant intoxication of imparting form [Formgebung]. A boundless feeling of freedom roars through his soul.” Through Goebbels’s strategy, listeners would not feel empowered by the gigantic intensification in a Bruckner finale but instead reflect on the composer’s creative power (and German cultural legacy).13 Goebbels’s Bruckner speech found a warm reception in Austria, at least so it seemed in some circles. A newspaper in Wels, upper Austria, reported that the local Nazi party office was selling the novel Bruckner: Der Roman der Sinfonie at a discounted price. Summing up the book, the review noted, the “once insignificant church composer and organist recognized his true calling, which compelled him to take up the symphony.”14 After the war, however, Grüninger, one of the most politically attuned of writers on music, reversed this Bruckner mythology, emphasizing the spirituality of the composer, in a book on the “master of St. Florian.”15 It could be that musicians were skeptical of Goebbels’s pronouncements. Paul Ehlers, though a loyal National Socialist with a long history of anti-Semitic rhetoric in his writings, presented his report on the Valhalla ceremony as merely a local event, under the title “The Regensburg Bruckner Experience.” By contrast, party publications as far-flung as Mannheim recounted the occasion as news.16 Some musicians, ever so discreetly, depoliticized the composer. Presiding as the new president of the Reich Music Chamber, Peter Raabe bestowed moral dignity on the passivity once associated with Bruckner’s music. For the receptive listener, he explained, Bruckner “is a return to the ‘mother lode,’ to emotions that cannot be reached by thought, knowledge, or research, but

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only the Will, small before the infinitude of creation but great in its striving for the good.”17 The Bruckner ceremony at Valhalla bestowed an official status to the composer, whose music accompanied Hitler’s presence at cultural state occasions. Early in the War, as the composer Dieter Schnebel recalled, the crowning appearance of the trumpet melody from the Third Symphony became the theme for the Reich Radio music program Unsterbliche Musik deutscher Meister.18 Bruckner’s symphonies remained crucial to the cultural mission of National Socialism. The select audience at the cultural congress within the Nuremberg party rallies, at which Hitler always spoke, witnessed Bruckner performances by Germany’s leading orchestras. In 1937 the finale from the Fifth Symphony, with the Munich Philharmonic under Siegmund von Hausegger, closed the festivities (a repertoire decision that was reputedly Hitler’s own), and in 1938 the Seventh Symphony, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Hans Weisbach, set the stage for Hitler’s speech—what would be the final cultural conferences.19 Although Bruckner was deployed to political ends, the interest in his music also seemed personal, possibly even genuine. In 1941, to celebrate the third anniversary of the Anschluss, Goebbels and Hitler flew to Linz and visited the St. Florian monastery, where the composer had taught in 1845–1855. Goebbels reflected on the “farm boy who conquered the world with his music”—this, at a time when the German prospects of victory looked good. They visited the grave of Hitler’s parents and discussed plans to develop his “beloved” Linz into a cultural center “as an antipode to Vienna,” which, Goebbels took note, “had to be gradually shut done, as it were.”20 With its magisterial pace of development and awesome spatial constructions, Bruckner’s music was well suited to retreat and contemplation. When the conductor Hans Herwig protested radio broadcasting of music as a dangerous mixture of art and life, what most perturbed him seems to have been the desacralization of Bach or Bruckner. “In the mere possibility of hearing the St. Matthew Passion or a Bruckner symphony in a smoke-filled beer hall, where attention was devoted to cardplaying, conversation, and debauchery, lie the seeds of the death for our art.”21 In fact, orchestral music, in particular with the spatial dimensions of a Bruckner symphony, did lose much of its sonic power in early radio transmission, unlike opera, with its emphasis on melodic character and the individual singer or line of the chorus. Although Beethovenian drama generated energy, the continuity of Bruckner’s motivic development encouraged contemplation—a category

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of aesthetic experience popularized by Goebbels’s ban on arts criticism in favor of the “contemplation” of art. This motivic expansiveness and the alleged transcendence of worldly concerns were the qualities stressed by the editors of the “original” versions published in the 1930s under the aegis of the Bruckner Gesellschaft. The endeavor began in 1930 but only in the mid-1930s did the method and reception of the editions become politicized.22 The sweeping claims made for the new editions seemed wholly unjustified to a reviewer at the Musical Times who compared the two scores of the Fourth Symphony while attending a 1936 performance of the Leipzig Radio Symphony under Weisbach at Queen’s Hall. (“The case had been overstated in regard to both the quality of the masterpiece and the effect of the restoration.”)23 At the same time, whatever politics contributed to the reception of the “original” editions, little changed after the fall of the Reich. In his 1947 reflections on “Bruckner today,” Fred Hamel spoke out against the omission of a lengthy development (122 bars) in the finale of the Fifth Symphony. “Through this powerful effect of the chorale, the thematic opposition escalates from the dramatic into the ritualistic, and the idealistic power of the symphony evolves into the religious.”24 The search for a “pure” Bruckner score, free from intrusion of his colleagues, went hand in hand with a performance practice developed by Weisbach. As director of the Vienna Philharmonic (renamed after the Anschluss), he conducted a number of Festliche Dunkelkonzerten (festival concerts in the dark) beginning on November 17, 1939. Each featured a Bruckner symphony performed in complete darkness, and other works— including Mozart for example, in concerts on November 15 and December 6, 1940—in semi-darkness.25 Inspiration for the practice was probably not artistic—although precedents for adjusting the lighting to dramatic ends existed in opera, along with some earlier reforms in Lieder performances.26 More likely is that the air-raid practices were elevated into an artistic context. Perhaps, too, the second-tier director wished to emulate Herbert von Karajan, who conducted everything from memory, with his eyes firmly shut, and had recently gained so much attention from the press. With its capacity for transcendence and gravity, Bruckner’s music served as commemoration—real or imagined—at the end of the Third Reich. Sequestered in his bunker in February 1945, Hitler drew comfort from envisioning buildings, including a bell tower in Linz whose a carillon would, on special occasions, chime a “motif” from Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. In recounting these conversations, his architect

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Hermann Giesler sought to portray the dictator’s humanity: “‘This melody, which moves me so deeply, is suitable for a glockenspiel.’ He stood up, grasped my arm, and said, ‘You understand me, Giesler.’”27 Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, warned his friends and the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic that when Bruckner’s Fourth was performed—a work “especially dear” to him “for its architectonic final movement”— they should escape from the Soviet army by fleeing to Bayreuth, which would be taken over by American soldiers. On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Speer changed the program to include the most celebrated finale in the operatic literature, the immolation scene of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto—a work of immense pleasure and intimacy—and, as a sublime ending, the Bruckner.28 Afterward, uniformed Hitler Youth allegedly stood at the exit doors holding baskets of free cyanide capsules to distribute to those who feared the ravages of the Soviet army. And finally the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony, that iconic commemoration of Wagner’s death, was broadcast on Hamburg Radio (the only surviving remnant of the Reich Radio), along with excerpts from various Wagner operas, to prepare for the announcement of Hitler’s death, to be made by the commander in chief for the north, Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler’s will designated as his successor as Führer. The recording was the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwängler (1942). What made Bruckner so quintessentially German, at least in the Third Reich? The composer seemed to embody a Parsifalian naïveté: the ingénu from the Großdeutsch rural landscape whose genius was nevertheless undeniable. When Reinhold Zimmerman set out to write a book on “racial identity in German music,” his focus was Bruckner, not Beethoven or Bach.29 Admittedly, Beethoven’s racial pedigree had long been called into question, as a man of darker complexion (in some paintings). It is not difficult to find reasons why, coincidentally, Bruckner’s music suited National Socialist ideology. Yet the fact remains that many accounts of actual performances avoided the subject of the music itself. The instrumentalization of the Seventh Symphony is a case in point. Bruckner’s Seventh, and not a Beethoven symphony, was programmed at the inaugural concert of the SS “artistic appreciation” series (Bekenntnis der SS. zur Kunst) in November 1934, featuring the Munich Philharmonic. Oscar von Pander, student of the anti-Semite Rudolf Louis, saw “unimaginable significance” in the event, by its placing culture at the service of National Socialism. But his report, despite its length and the

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venue (a music journal), included nothing about the composition or performance except that this was Bruckner’s Eroica (on account of its heroic character as well as the allusions of its slow movement to the funeral march of Beethoven’s Third Symphony). He did, however, recount that afterward the audience (Völker, a politically resonant term) broke into song, and several impromptu songs concluded the concert.30 Raabe programmed the Seventh Symphony (along with Handel and Reger) when, as president of the Reich Music Chamber, he returned to Aachen to conduct the Städtisches Orchester, where he had been music director. On the program each composer was listed by family name except one, hailed as “the Master Bruckner.” In his report on the concert Zimmermann, who was based in Aachen, wrote nothing of Raabe’s interpretation or, again, the music. Yet he lingered over the reaction to this highest ranking musician in the regime. The enthusiasm and stormy applause “surpassed all expectations and overwhelmed even the most staid occupants of the concert hall.” Wary, perhaps, that the response to Raabe verged on Führer adoration and could challenge a regime and culture in which Hitler alone commanded such attention, Zimmermann assured that Germans rarely pay homage to an individual; they do so only in cases of the most obvious merit.31 In August, 1944, Goebbels closed down all theaters and concert halls, exempting only the Berlin Philharmonic. Despite the thinning of its ranks and changes in performance venue, the orchestra persevered, including a recording of Bruckner’s Ninth under Furtwängler from October 7, which is unsurpassed in its intensity and intelligence, profundity and power.32 The choice of the Ninth was eminently suitable—a symphony ostensibly left incomplete, thus without a victorious finale, the Adagio serves as a more profound conclusion. The circumstances that, if anything, encouraged an escape from the imploding regime on that Saturday afternoon, as the musicians and conductor gathered in the hall, with a few Nazi echelons sitting quietly in the front row during those fifty-nine minutes. The United States Army had launched its first attack on German territory on the Western Front on Monday, successfully breaking through Hitler’s much-cherished Siegfried Line on Tuesday. The German counterattack on Wednesday had failed. On Thursday, the conscription age was lowered to sixteen and hospitals were placed under military control. Friday saw heavy air raids on Berlin during the day and night. Furtwängler had neither the will nor the courage to extricate himself until, three months later, Speer had warned him that de-

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feat was near and advised emigrating to Switzerland. Furtwängler was able to cross the border on February 7, 1945, under the pretense that he would return.33 Despite complications in Switzerland, Furtwängler succeeded, although denazification would last until December 1946, and its ratification came only in April 1947.

From the Symphony to the “Symphonic” For all the ideological hue and cry, few symphonies were composed during the Third Reich; of those that were, still fewer were by overt Nazi sympathizers or party members. This avoidance reflected less an “anxiety of influence,” as befell the generation after Beethoven, than an uncertainty about the creative statement to be made through the genre. The problem was not unique to Germany but elsewhere the political stakes of the genre were not high. Nor was there encouragement from above. When Peter Raabe organized a conference on the role of German composers (Reichstagung des Berufsstandes der deutschen Komponisten) in the summer of 1936, the symphony had no place in the agenda set by Hans Hinkel as to “what we expect from German composers”: music for Nazi celebrations, entertainment music, opera, music for amateurs.34 In the very era when the symphony had become so politically freighted, the genre seemed in jeopardy in Germany—and especially in Austria. Josef Reiter, an Austrian born two years after Mahler, pursued nationalistic topics as early as his 1899 Deutscher Siegesmarsch (German Victory March) for orchestra. An avid supporter of National Socialism in the 1920s, Reitler dedicated his only undertaking in the genre, the Goethe-Symphonie (1931), to Hitler. Johann Nepomuk David, an Austrian who accepted a position at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1934 and curried favor with the political establishment, wrote only three symphonies during the Nazi regime, despite his total output of eight symphonies and three sinfonias (as well as two epigonic symphonies that he later destroyed). A subvention from the Reich Music Chamber for an orchestral composition led him to compose a set of “symphonic” variations on a theme by Heinrich Schütz (1942). Its baroque theme notwithstanding, David pursued the military character and narrative that were historically allied with the genre of the symphony, including the movement titles (1) Battle procession, (2) Fear and worship, (3) Portent for the enemy, and (4) Battle, victory, and thanksgiving.

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Joseph Messner, despite being organist at the Salzburg Cathedral for most of his life, did not shy away from political compositions. In 1930, at a time when many Austrians hoped for unification with Germany, Messner arranged the national anthem for organ, Paraphrase über die “österreichisch-deutsche Volkshymne.” After the Anschluss he provided a new setting of a popular song by Mahler, “Der Himmel hängt voller Geigen,” which was banned from performance in the Third Reich. And in 1943, he set texts by Heinrich Lersch (a proletarian poet and Nazi enthusiast): Schicksal der Deutschen, for baritone, male chorus, and orchestra, and composed a cantata to honor Germany, Deutschlands Ehre. After his student years (during which he composed a symphony in the Beethovenian key of C minor), he turned to the symphony at a few political moments. His Second Symphony in F minor, “Savonarola” (1926), is a biting critique of the First Austrian Republic. His last venture in the heroic genre took a full three years, coinciding with last years of World War II. Messner, however, attempted to reinvent the symphonic ideal in other genres, writing two sinfoniettas, 5 symphonische Gesänge, op. 24 from the period of the Austrian Republic, and Symphonische Festmusik, which premiered in 1937. The different nomenclature offered more freedom. Thus the Sinfonietta, op. 20, could pursue the “psychological program of struggle and victory,” as one early reviewer put it, but over the course of three movements (an Allegro, Adagio, and scherzo), without the usual finale.35 Symphonic music—a term used for orchestral music of various types—had a stronger presence in Nazi Germany than in Austria. The symphony itself, however, was very often little more than a milestone for conservatory students or abandoned many composers after completing their training in conservatory. One of the regime’s most feted composers was Max Trapp, an early supporter of National Socialism and member of Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur who, in turn, won greater recognition and performance opportunities than before or after the Third Reich.36 During the Third Reich, Trapp largely eschewed symphonic form as such but worked productively in orchestral genres. He composed a Sinfonische Suite (1933), two concertos for orchestra (1935, 1939), and later—at a time when Goebbels ordered “light” music to be broadcast on Reich Radio to lift the spirit of German citizens— orchestral works of more modest dimensions: an Allegro deciso (1942), the Kleine Spielmusik for chamber orchestra (1944) and Symphonischer Prolog (1944). Before he joined the Nazi Party in 1928, Trapp had

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composed four symphonies, and after the War he would compose two more. But the only symphony dating from the period of the Third Reich was his Fifth, performed at the 1936 international music festival in Baden-Baden. When Hermann Grabner, a member of the Nazi party teacher’s union (Nationalsozialistische Lehrerbund) and the SA, revised his popular music textbook in 1940, striking any references to composers and theorists who were Jewish or supposedly modernist, the Mahler examples were replaced by works of Trapp and the neo-Romantic Austrian Egon Kornauth.37 Hans Pfitzner’s late interest in symphonic composition was unusual for a composer working in Nazi Germany. Unlike Richard Strauss in his late period, Pfitzner turned away from the genres most familiar to him in an effort to contribute to the symphony, the genre cherished by conservatives and National Socialists, just as he had already composed five operas—the other genre esteemed by the regime. In the period following the Nazi seizure of power, Pfitzner produced only three choral works (in 1941), including two for the historically political genre of male chorus. The symphonic recomposition of his quartet, from 1932, was only one of his attempts to contribute to the symphonic genre. In 1939, at age seventy—after avoiding the genre for his entire creative life—Pfitzner composed his “small symphony [Kleine Symphonie],” despite the unwieldiness of the genre for his compositional voice, and the following year he wrote a one-movement symphony in C major. The tendency to compose symphonic works in lieu of symphonies was a phenomenon strongest with amateur composers who had an orchestra at their disposal. Furtwängler composed an unnumbered symphony at age seventeen but only returned to the genre three decades later, in the Third Reich. His role as a collaborator, if dismissed by a few scholars, became amply clear when he sought to prove his ideological loyalty, particularly once the young Herbert von Karajan’s success threatened to overshadow his own.38 In the period 1936–1945, Furtwängler completed his Sinfonisches Konzert (symphonic concerto), his First and Second symphonies, and no other works except two sonatas for violin and piano. The challenge facing composers was considerable: to write music that would be both clear and folk-inspired and that at the same time would make use of the modern, large-scale orchestra. A contemporary idiom that would reflect the Nazi embrace of modern technology and culture, was difficult in the medium of the orchestra, as the history of music had

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amply demonstrated—all the more so in a cultural and aesthetic context that prized clarity. Franz Achilles, a critic in Aachen, professed his “painful impression” that recent composers, pale imitators of their great predecessors who mixed timbres [Klangmischer], cannot elicit any resounding orchestral force.39 The imposing associations of symphonic form, embodied in the colossal dimensions of the post-Mahlerian orchestra, encouraged composers to turn away from traditional conceptions and pursue “symphonic” qualities in other genres, both new and canonic, that offered a more lucid, comprehensible structure. Aachen’s new conductor, the thirty-eight-year-old Karajan, had won praise for his supreme control over large orchestral forces. He achieved such powerful unity in Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Achilles recounted, that the total effect was that of a symphony.40 The same views became doctrinaire in Otto Schumann’s 1940 history of German music. Schumann declared Wagner’s tendency toward the “symphonic” to be Nordic. Other “undeniably northern attributes” were captured in an earthy style that suited the Nazi aversion to aesthetics and intellectual abstraction: a tendency towards polyphonic writing (Viellinigkeit—an uncommon term that dodged any Latinate affectation), traditional and untainted forms (“the fulfillment of old German forms without dross [schlackenlose]”) and the “piling up of numerous essential thematic ideas into the most highly wrought ‘work,’ as well as a pattern of struggle and the tightly packed force of many motives.”41 Applying “symphonic” principles, however indeterminate they might be, to more accessible genres such as opera or the concerto became the favored route for composers in the 1930s, both ideologically and artistically. Cesar Bresgen composed a Sinfonische Suite and a Sinfonischer Konzert for piano and orchestra but avoided the symphony in his output until, toward the end of World War II, he composed a Symphony in C# minor. Bresgen, however, enjoyed a prolific output during the period of the Third Reich, including numerous commissions for various Nazi celebrations and contributions to Hitler Youth songbooks. Of a piece with the prevailing völkisch aesthetics, instrumental works were programmatic, with the exception of the concerto, historically the most accessible genre of untexted music. Orchestral arrangements afforded yet another way to draw on the color and monumentality of the symphony without adhering to its formal strictures. In 1937, Schoenberg turned to Brahms, the least ideological of German masters (at least in the Third Reich), at a time when

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he had forsaken Germany and, struggling to adjust to his new life in Hollywood at age sixty-three, was composing relatively little. From May until September, he arranged the G-minor Piano Quartet, op. 25, for orchestra, a project he found fulfilling.42 In 1932, Pfitzner—also sixty-three and facing the same kind of difficulties, creative and professional, that were to beset Schoenberg—orchestrated his own Second String Quartet in C# minor, op. 36, but to a very different end. The arrangement displaced the intellectual sphere of the string quartet with the grandeur of the symphony, and, unusually, Pfitzner designated the new work a symphony. The work was well received at its premiere on in Munich on March 23, 1933, particularly in the pro-Nazi press. The fact that a string quartet could be recomposed into a symphony revealed the imperturbable logic of its “formal cohesion,” as one reviewer put it, who favored the monumentality of the symphony. “The intensity of the string quartet, with its harmonic and linear points of friction, the individual debates of the four solo instruments with and against each other, and the delicate expressivity of individual players, are renounced to good end. Through coloration, music that is grand in its own right undergoes a masterful clarification.”43 Pfitzner’s arrangement entered the repertoire as a milestone in the contemporary symphonic literature against which future exemplars, including Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, would be judged.44 The shift away from the genre of symphony was also perceptible in concert programming. Some repertoire was excluded on political grounds—above all the symphonies of Mahler and Mendelssohn, which could only be performed by the Jüdische Kulturbund (Jewish cultural association for Jewish audiences). Mahler’s music, with its consummate blending of tradition and modernism, testified to the continuing vitality of the symphony at the turn of the twentieth century. In Austria, despite the political upheaval and powerful influence of the Nazi Party, there was no official ban or large-scale protest against Jewish musicians and music. Yet Austrians sympathetic to Nazism reacted swiftly to the regime change in Germany in 1933, adopting both ideological and aesthetic principles from the new Reich. The composer and professor Joseph Marx, an avowed Mahler advocate, was only the most flagrant example of anti-Semitism that flared up after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. When Mahler’s Sixth was performed in midJanuary (as discussed in Chapter 4), Marx’s encomium invoked the rhetoric of ecstasy, power, even fanaticism.45 Four months later, reviewing

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another Mahler performance after the establishment of the Third Reich across the frontier, with its initial legal actions having been taken against Jews and the parliamentary government in Austria suspended, Marx wrote more critically of Mahler.46 Although he continued to correspond with Jewish exiles, Marx entered into detailed communication with the Propaganda Ministry in their purview over Viennese musical life after the Anschluss. In 1935, concerned about rumors that he had a Jewish ancestor, Marx had the conductor Ludwig Kaufmann deliver an account of his ancestry to the Reich office in the Silesian district, so that “there won’t be any more doubt on that one!”47 How should we make sense of these trends, as life altered over the historical span of the Third Reich from early, energetic confidence in the regime and national destiny to, later in the war years, somber awareness of impending destruction? Some of the most profound interpretations of the Brahms symphonies hail from this era: Furtwängler recorded the symphonies during the rare respites in the Allied bombings of Berlin. Had these great symphonies become the expression of tragic transcendence? Was Goebbels, who had politicized the symphony as the expression of a revived nationalistic spirit, now sanctioning performances to convey a tragic collective destiny, such as his diary entries also described? Increasingly the symphony had little presence in the everyday life (such as it was) of the Third Reich, while genres deemed more popular and entertaining—even to jazz, which had been banned–flourished. But the artistic values that the symphony had come to represent were, in the last years of the Third Reich, rendered more seemingly sacred than ever— whether in the rare performances that testified to extraordinary tragic destiny or through the abstract quiddity called the “symphonic” that was now to be found in other forms, such as opera. After a generation or more in which musical writers had attributed increasing ideological significance to the symphony, the values invested, in effect, achieved a Platonic life of their own as practical, compositional interest in the genre withered. Instead, the qualities of the symphonic hovered ever more meaningfully over even the grotesquely ideological musical commentary of the 1930s, even when the symphony eventually withdrew as a cultural presence. Music had adamantly practical purposes, to which the symphony contributed little, particularly given the challenges of staffing and finding performance space. Wartime losses had the greatest consequence on orchestral music, where balance and timbral diversity were crucial; even opera had a tradition of performance with reduced forces, including piano accompaniment. An article of January 1944 on “music as a source

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of energy” had no reference to the symphony. Instead, the author singled out the exemplary work of musicians who played for troops on the battlefield, citing their program of a Brandenburg concerto, a Schubert lied, and a Beethoven piano sonata—thus few musicians. But even the logistical constraints of these performances do not account for the inattention to the symphony. Also mentioned, among the beneficial effects of the war on artistic life, were new productions of The Magic Flute in Salzburg and Die Meistersinger in Bayreuth.48

The Waning of Symphonic Ideals In their capacity as music critics, musicologists adapted to prevailing practices, to the point of trivializing the symphony. The essence of Ernst Peters’s Second Symphony, Joseph Heinrichs reported in the Zeitschrift für Musik, was its imitation of the countryside. Sunshine, the exuberance of spring, and murmuring water came to mind—far from Beethovenian struggle. The symphony’s worth, Heinrichs commented in an odd formulation, was proven by the orchestra’s enjoyment and the audience’s enthusiasm.49 More established figures had some reservations. Reviewing the second annual Baden-Baden contemporary music festival in March 1937 for a Nazi musicology journal, Joseph Müller-Blattau asked, in a section entitled “Symphonic Problems,” whether the old form of the symphony could still “bear the weight of musical shaping.” In his view, while Europeans had “clarified and purified” melodic writing, rhythm, and sonority over the past two decades, Germany had shown no signs of developing its symphonic language. The highlight of the program, Trapp’s Fifth Symphony was no exception. Thematic writing was “decisive” (not, as a liberal would have it, logical). But since the requirement of the time was for entertainment music, Trapp “wisely” confined himself to a “joyful, happy, affirmation of life.”50 The symphonic offerings at the Baden-Baden festival were no more earnest the following year. Among them, Winfried Zillig thematicized dance in his Tanzsymphonie, a work notable for its coloristic effects, percussion, and rhythmic intensity, according to one reviewer.51 The same year, Werner Korte posed the same question as to the symphony’s fate, only more emphatically than Müller-Blattau. Could the symphony, incontrovertibly linked to a nineteenth-century ethos that had become “individualistic” and “selfcentered” adapt to the völkisch milieu of the Third Reich?52 Critics might have proved useful, as in past generations, by conveying their impressions of music, whether the intended result was to inspire

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resistance and heroism by illuminating the power of symphonic structure. Early in the regime, Walter Abendroth had singled out Pfitzner’s Palestrina for counterpoint and thematic work that were “bolder” than in any of his earlier music. The “strength, grandeur, and expansiveness of thematic invention” contributed to the work’s monumentality and unity.53 But eventually a rhetoric of strength, so important in German musical thought since at least 1800, was limited to biography or plot description, not music per se. Six years later, when Herzog recounted an intensification that seemed beyond comprehension and an “overwhelming” effect in Palestrina, he was referring to the plot alone.54 So, too, Müller-Blattau’s 1940 book on Pfitzner drew mainly from the composer’s letters; any musical description included no aesthetic judgment.55 Abendroth in turn titled his 1941 book on Pfitzner a “life through pictures,” explaining that the “essence and influence” of Pfitzner’s music remained “indescribable and inexplicable.” One paragraph sufficed for the composer’s masterpiece, Palestrina, since “the work in itself needed in no way such additional explanation.”56 Reviews continued to be written, if as reportage more than evaluation. The prohibition of arts criticism, if aimed at concert reviewing, had the perhaps unintended effect of inhibiting the practice of lively musical discourse within other contexts. The impact was especially strong in books about composers, the genre that, following the ban, became the chief venue for addressing the public. In surrendering its own claim to find metaphors that bridged musical experience to life itself, music criticism in effect silenced itself. Critics presumed no knowledge or training in their readers, or at least some so professed. For some, this was an ideological move. Others, however, saw music as a form of retreat. Oskar Loerke, a poet and long-standing editor at the S. Fischer publishing house, withdrew from public life in 1933, retiring to write and play music. His most substantial book undertook the familiar “inner migration” through writing on Bruckner, admiring the composer precisely because his music was accessible to those “little versed in abstractions.” Novice listeners could sing or whistle the melodies, or, with Mozart’s music, at least “feel” the melodies as a “sensuous presence”; they knew the course and meaning of the symphonies by heart, as with the structures of Beethoven’s symphonies.57 The shift from analysis to biography proved useful to some ideologues: “I have forged a weapon, a Beethoven festival, and with this weapon, youth will go to battle,” Otto Klemperer’s student, Artur Haelßig, wrote

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in October 1938. Perhaps reflecting on the Reich’s expansionist drive, Haelßig fantasized about a Beethoven orchestra made up of Hitler Youth that would travel throughout the Reich “like a giant sower that goes out to plant his seed”—an image that Haelßig found “almost intoxicating.” Beethoven’s fertile music would purify youth and breed Germans of determination and conformism, undeterred by “liberal or foreign influences.” Both music and the Reich stood to gain from such an orchestra: “What a community of listeners would be bestowed upon German music! What a powerful resource would be revealed for the German people!” To drive his point home, Haelßig recounted the ecstatic mass response at a recent Beethoven performance—“the glowing fire in the eyes of the boys and girls who grasped what had occurred here and surrendered to Beethoven without reservation.”58 The idea of an orchestra that transcended the limits of time or space suggests the powers of concentration and aggression that, or so Haelßig dreamed, in vain, would become music’s purpose. It would be misleading to suggest that musical commentary, and much less music, became totally subordinated to ideology. Music might still offer inner fortitude in a private encounter with chamber music or the quietude of the individual listener pitted against a vast Bruckner symphony. Many authors, however, turned away from the highly charged venue of the newspaper. A few understood serious endeavors, indulging in private reflection on music, its structural complexity and its spiritual resources. Nonetheless, this very “inner immigration” of musical discourse meant that the powers and purposes ascribed to music would change again, even before the future of the regime and the nation became far more ominous after the grave defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–1943 and the growing toll taken by the air war. Some commentators replaced their early political enthusiasm with a resigned acceptance of the status quo, withdrawing from vague ambitions for reform and eventually also from an increasingly bleak military situation. Critical language now tended to rehabilitate an inwardness and secular spirituality. The safest outlet, after Goebbels’s edict against music criticism, was biography. Abstraction and philosophical vocabulary prevailed, if only as a verbal recourse of withdrawal. Consider two references to “willpower,” a decade apart. In 1932, Richard Eichenauer, a former highschool teacher, joined the SS and published a book on race and music. Mahler’s music bared its “Asian” character, he declared, in the “preference for the numbing, primeval [urtümliche] effect of endlessly repeated

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rhythms,” and “endless Nomadic marches” . . . which in Europeans induced a “dreamy decadent pleasure,” rather than awaken a “will to build.”59 Will, in Eichenauer’s influential text, remained a decisive quality of Germans, who were highly disciplined and primed for action— although he, too, took a spiritual turn later, writing on polyphony as “the eternal language of the German soul” (Polyphonie, die ewige Sprache deutscher Seele, 1938). This sense of “willpower” all but disappeared, even if the terms lingered, shorn of any real strength. Thus in an essay in a volume honoring Friedrich Klose (anti-Semite and Brucknerian par excellence), the repeated references to struggle and energy (Kraft) meant little more than that the composer had remained active from youth into old age.60 Pedagogy remained an acceptable venue for aesthetics, since student musicians required instruction in ways that the Volk, for ideological reasons, could not. Writing in 1936 in a new journal on völkisch music education, Stege wrote, “No music is itself National Socialist,” urging artists to seek inspiration and a spiritual awakening from fascism but not to pursue any political aims: “A symphony that, as absolute music, shows no visible connection with National Socialism can under certain circumstances be more National Socialist than a work that is superficially shaped to be ‘National Socialist.’”61 Stege’s disavowal possibly had a personal dimension, coming shortly after his dismissal as head of the service organization for music critics. But his retreat into reflection was emblematic of the larger changes in musical life and criticism in the later 1930s, as National Socialism increasingly closed down the interstices of conditional dissent that had survived the Machtergreifung. At the 1938 Nuremberg rally, Hitler claimed that music should have no political role, and he specified that the symphony was the least effective genre to serve political ends.62 But, in fact, the time had not yet quite arrived for ideology to relinquish music.

Orff’s Carmina burana Despite Ambrosius’s predictions that the Third Reich would inspire the composition of monumental symphonies and operas, the most successful work produced during the regime was neither. Whatever else the work meant at its American premiere in 1954 and at thousands of performances since, in Nazi Germany Carmina burana was music that lent itself to a synthesis of enthusiasm, obedience, and naïve celebration of

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secular collectivism—and this in a society where the media had been largely reduced to channels for propaganda and where political debate had disappeared from the public sphere. The premiere took place at the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937. The timing of the performance on June 8, the day after the ceremony in which Hitler and Goebbels installed Bruckner’s statue at Valhalla, meant that critics at the premiere had been reminded of music’s political significance, whether they heard the speech or merely read reports of the ceremony. The performance, expected to be the “largest musical event of the year,” drew its audience from afar.63 Orff learned months in advance that the director of music in the Hitler Youth, Wolfgang Stumme, had plans to travel from Berlin to attend and seemed favorably disposed toward the work.64 From performances in metropolitan centers to community productions—for example, in Görlitz, Silesia— the work seemed to radiate “epochal meaning.”65 The novelist Julius Lothar Schücking, in his review of Carmina burana, conceded, “German writers of the same generation have not yet achieved anything of commensurate significance and exemplary of the new age, with its will to great and strong form.”66 Fritz Stege, writing in 1941, averred that “in recent years, no work on the opera stage has been anything close to as substantial, original, and influential.”67 Whatever a composer’s politics, it remains notable, to paraphrase Alex Ross, that in the Third Reich, Orff produced his best composition and Richard Strauss his worst (Friedenstag).68 “I was certainly no hero but neither was I a Nazi,” was the extent of Orff’s self-indictment, according to one young acquaintance.69 He accepted performances or honors bestowed on him by the Nazi Party and government, including a commission for the 1936 Olympics (as did Strauss). He encountered no political hurdles during the regime and enjoyed performances through May 1944, three months before Goebbels forbade any further public performance, again, with the exception of the Berlin Philharmonic. Nor was his support limited to his own Munich; the local propaganda offices as far north as Braunschweig and South Hannover organized an Orff festival in February 1942.70 Notwithstanding the ink spilled on this subject, Orff’s politics—or the relationship between opportunism and ideological conviction—are less important to understanding this period of history, and the role of music in politics, than the phenomenon that Carmina burana became in Nazi Germany, as is documented in several hundred reviews and articles

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collected for the composer.71 Whereas Hindemith developed his new idiom before the Third Reich, Orff remembered boasting to his publisher, after the dress rehearsal for Carmina burana, “Everything else I have written before, which you unfortunately have already published, can be pulped. My collected works begin with Carmina burana.”72 The composer did not shy away from publicity. Young, handsome, and determined (he sat for several photographers, developing a large publicity portfolio), Orff had all the qualifications for assuming the role that had proved fleeting for Hindemith early in 1934. Yet by the summer of 1937, the press did not take up Orff as a hero of new music; it was the music alone they extolled. Many composers and musicians, Hindemith among them, had fallen from favor, and the cult of the Führer would scarcely script a heroic role for a composer.73 Reviewers conveyed the success of Carmina burana as one of the regime, not the composer. Its popularity, but even more the reviews explaining its appeal, brought an end to a long era of symphonic aspirations. From its utterly simple counterpoint and repetitive cellular thematic material to its preharmonic structures, Carmina burana shuns tradition. A few commentators, however, clung to the aesthetics of a past era. Conceding the “danger of merely threading together songs,” the young musicologist Horst Büttner noted Orff’s thoughtfulness in shaping the individual numbers into a single, large structure. Yet to hear the twenty-seven songs as one configuration, in anything but the most superficial sense, is exceedingly difficult. Büttner all but admitted he had to strain to hear this unity. Despite finding the staging effective, he wanted to listen with eyes shut in order to grasp its “musical value.”74 Walter Dirks, a journalist at the Frankfurter Zeitung but not on the music staff, wrote of the “disciplined musical form” that resulted from shaping the song cycle into four parts, the second of which reminded him of a symphony scherzo.75 Even to discern the most basic element of form—that each number has a recognizable contour, beginning, and ending—required grand aesthetic claims. Schücking, for example, stressed that Orff was a musical “architect,” on the basis of “captivating and widely stretched arches throughout his choruses.”76 As a commonplace about Bruckner symphonies, the observation was downright bizarre as a response to Carmina burana. A rare criticism of Orff’s treatment of form in Carmina burana was tentatively phrased: “The musician will be able to say: in some places, the effect could have been much stronger had the

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music been more profound and penetrated the space more deeply.” Despite the vivid orchestral color, the reviewer continued, “The music as a whole does not expand into the depths in the way a Handel oratorio, for example, commands space”—a politically astute choice.77 A few reviewers registered concern about the aesthetic premises of Carmina burana. The young enthusiast Ernst Laaff dismissed the negative reaction as emanating from “professional musicians and, above all, an older generation”78—who had been disenfranchised by the new regime. Among them, Fritz Droop expressed his reservations indirectly: “Not every enthusiast of serious choral music willingly forgoes the polyphony of fugal passages.”79 There was no trace of “the large symphonic form” at the new music festival where Carmina burana was premiered, observed the correspondent for the German edition of the London Spectator. Oblivious to the fate of Mahler’s music in Nazi Germany, the correspondent reported that “the leading German newspapers, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, had determined that the Third Reich had not yet produced a Bruckner or Mahler.”80 Carmina burana absolved the listener from any “symphonic” engagement: that is, from an active listening that necessitated musical work, such as following complex counterpoint or perceiving thematic development, as had long been requisite of serious German music, for Bildung, and above all the appreciation of “symphonic music,” be it a Brahms quartet or a Beethoven symphony. The music would survive the Third Reich to remain one of the most popular artworks of all time, even finding a home in Israel after its premiere in 1966. To protect Carmina burana any of the stigma of its political origins, advocates have exaggerated the number of its detractors and their influence in Nazi Germany. It is true that the prominent National Socialist Herbert Gerigk railed against the music in a party publication but it is unlikely, as the New Grove Dictionary claims, that this denunciation “caused many of Germany’s opera Intendanten to fear staging the work after its première.”81 But with at least thirty-six productions over seven years, Carmina burana hardly suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

The Ethics of Music Criticism Across several generations, from 1900 to 1945, critics helped sustain the relevance of art music and its public support—but at what cost? Paul Bekker’s insistence that Mahler followed in the Beethovenian lineage of

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the symphony had political as well as artistic implications. His unremitting, heavy-handed mobilization of aesthetic ideologies did its part, for better or worse, to reshape musical discourse and listening for his generation and a readership thereafter. His laudable intention, as a Jewish author advancing the music of a Jewish composer in an anti-Semitic era, turned on itself when Bekker became intoxicated by the power of music. Like so many in his generation, Bekker turned attention away from the aesthetic object to the aesthetic experience. The same move might be said to characterize musical thought today, at least musicology of the past decades. Attempts to retrieve ideological tension from the historical layers of a composition and its reception admit, even invite, the politicization of music. Ideology by its very nature resides in the performative—in the way values and belief are promulgated and instigated.82 Whether reporting on a listening experience or championing a way of listening, critics have associated the dynamic and power of music with the larger system of values they believe in—or wish to undermine. Did music journalism help inure its public to more general appeals to political ruthlessness? And did some modes of listening unwittingly encourage behavior and values that exemplified and validated fascism. If critics held some degree of responsibility for the political exploitation of their judgments and rhetoric, the degree and nature of that guilt changed over time. Fin-de-siècle writers, for whom aesthetics were largely a matter of culture but not politics, played with metaphors, seeking to entertain and edify, without compromising the independence of artist and art. The anti-Semitic stereotyping many of the conservatives introduced, however, inevitably introduced a new political dimension to the discourse around the symphony. Even for those untainted by anti-Semitic categories, as critics experienced the politicization of their art form and their profession, far greater care in language and more circumspect claims for the power of music needed to prevent its enlistment in politics. For music to remain an art in the most profound sense, responsive to the surrounding world, capable of inspiring listeners, and not to be reduced to a political tool, critics had to develop a language and create expectations that preserved the integrity of the listening subject. The fact that some critics suffered under anti-Semitism and aspired to promote a composer whose Jewish identity became indelible in the eyes of the public did not in turn make it wise to deploy their own extreme linguistic and aesthetic measures. And the fact that Bekker’s generation faced the task of preserving art music in a society more concerned about jazz and film than the concert hall goes far to justify his position. By resorting to

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the language of vitalism and power to praise the producers of music, and notions of plasticity to describe its listeners, Bekker and his colleagues sacrificed philosophical virtues of the medium that had emerged over the previous century. The nature of the symphony drove writers to metaphors and myths that prepared for violence and subordination, often at odds with the political or aesthetic sympathies of the individual critic. The dominant issue was less one of individual responsibility than of how ideologies emerged and took root in cultural and artistic criticism, thereby having an influence wider than just among those who responded directly to political propaganda. Quite apart from a composer’s intentions and execution, ideology can emerge within the act of communication, in that triangulation between the musical work, the performer, and the listener set within his or her own cultural parameters. Moreover, ideological values adhere not necessarily to the actual listening experience but to the reconstruction of this experience through language. Ideology requires both qualities inherent in the composition and a charged context in which the work is performed and heard. The potential for exploitation is greater with Beethoven’s Fifth than Mozart’s “Jupiter.” What, then, is the moral burden of a music critic who experiences a symphony in violent terms? Esteban Buch laments a political application of Beethoven that perseveres to this day, arguing that we project responsibility onto cultural emblems without ourselves accepting moral responsibility. To commemorate through musical compositions without subjecting them to ongoing criticism means that they “may well fall silent.”83 What values are promoted in musical listening: freedom, individuality, and courage, or submission, mass strength, and violence? We should take seriously the imagery used to report musical listening, for this language mediates between the artwork and the society in which it is received. The change in music criticism from 1900 to 1945 was not just rhetoric—the intensification of tropes and metaphors that tends to occur in language over time. There was a shift away from evaluating the composer’s work to describing music’s power to shape the listener’s consciousness. The artifact mattered less than the effect it produced on the listener. In philosophical terms, the distance between the listening subject and the musical object collapsed. Earlier, a symphony earned praise for its clarity; listeners were to follow the entrance of each theme, often with the help of the thematic guides distributed at concerts. Eventually, beginning around 1914, the symphony unleashed an almost mesmerizing process. Appreciation reputedly required no musical training. The

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bourgeois institution was handed over to the Volk or those who claimed to speak on its behalf. After the German Reich lay in ruins, those who sensed the role of music in that downfall held Wagner responsible as the prophet of Nazism— for his German nationalism, hatred of Jews, penchant for myth, aesthetic of seduction and yet monumental sound—and all this before the extent of Hitler’s operatic psyche and Wagnerian dreams were fully disclosed. Entrusted with filming the Nuremberg rally of 1934, Leni Riefenstahl had Hitler descend from the clouds to the accompaniment of the Meistersinger prelude. German music was profoundly entwined in the seventyfive-year trajectory of the German Reich, as Thomas Mann understood when he created Adrian Leverkühn, whose tortured compositions kept pace with the hubris and destruction of his country. But for all the elements in Wagner—indeed for all his utopian claims about a musical art that subsumed all the others—it was not his music that was central to the career of German nationalism. It was rather musical discourse—the contextualization, interpretation, and conversation about music—that carried the political values of overwhelming the listener and the massed obedience of the German people. That conversation or discourse was largely about the symphony—a symphony that, ironically, most commentators traced, with some exaggeration, to a composer, Beethoven, who celebrated freedom and brotherhood. The symphony bore the giantism of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois aspirations of deferred gratification across its four movements, and renunciation of resolution until the finale. It was a genre built on the motifs of struggle, which, envisioned as the testimony of personal and creative struggle in the nineteenth century, became an allegory for collective and national struggle. The material conditions of the orchestra, with the development of new instruments and techniques of scoring, liberated tonal color—whether brilliant or enveloping, alluring or chilling. The symphony stretched over monumental gulfs of time, projecting a paradigm for historical temporality. But for many critics, the symphony envisaged space, intimating such vast territorial regions as might be mastered by a Bruckner or conquered by a nation that needed a continent. The individual symphony could embody all these qualities as the legacy of tradition, embodying German historicity—or, as some feared, it could decay into hypertrophic and neurasthenic excess, the product of a febrile Jewish modernism. The composition grew more monumental, and its discursive claims more ambitious.

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This book has been written in the wake of a generation that sought to complete the process of denazification, which in the area of music had remained woefully flawed. The practical reasons for denazification were manifold, if also partly symbolic—including scrutiny of individuals who were deceased or too old to be stripped of their positions of authority. But these efforts, if partly successful in disentangling the histories of individuals, failed to produce an adequate explanation of how musical thought, above all through the venues of journalism and criticism, proved to be so powerful a force in the ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century. Seventy years later, with any participants in the Third Reich in all likelihood deceased, the task remaining is not one of Nazihunting but rather a critical examination of the society and culture that nurtured and permitted fascism. Research on musical listening in the Third Reich is still not value-neutral but should at least serve as a negative example to guide musicians and listeners, whatever the repertoire. Germans knew they were a musical Volk. Each of their modern “races,” or so some implied, contributed to that genius—the melodicism of Vienna and Catholic Austria, the counterpoint of the Protestant North, and although some repudiated it, the vivid orchestration and profound innovations of assimilated Jews. But by 1900 the discourse about music became as important as the music itself. A nation supposedly needed to learn how to listen. Composers of genius would always exist in Germany and Austria, exemplary in melodic inventiveness, polyphonic rigor, and architectural structures. But the audience was not necessarily an audience of genius: it had to be formed. Musical meaning was not intrinsic to the creation, despite what the commentators implied; it was instilled into the audience as if a determinate message were the only possible outcome, when in fact it emerged out of controversy and conflict. But the conflict and debates were not just products of the Third Reich. Indeed, the Nazis came to power deploying concepts developed in symphonic reception from the late nineteenth century. They were the beneficiaries of a musical discourse long formed, not because the critics at the turn of the century had propagated proto-Nazi values per se, but because the terms of musical debate—the categories of shaping, of forming the audience, of encompassing rhythm, architectural structure, and collective harmonies—could lend themselves to the most extreme political demands that subjugate individuality. What this book has endeavored to present is not a history of musical composition; neither is it an analysis of musical forms that might have

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an affinity to fascist psychology, such as rhythmic acceleration, massing, and the like. Nor is it, strictly speaking, an account of “reception,” which suggests too passive a process. It is a history of what the Germans call Sinnstiftung: endowment with meaning—of musical discourse, perhaps; the proposing for wordless sounds conceptual analogues that became more and more explicitly ideological as the twentieth century succeeded the nineteenth and made all life into politics. Hitler’s Brown Shirts would have had their torchlight parade on the night of January 30, 1933, without the symphony and symphonic discourse. But would Hitler’s claims about power and racial community have been so imperative and totalizing without two generations of symphonic discourse? Would they have been so easily accepted by cultivated circles without the guidance and assurance of respected critics? The question is not entirely fanciful. Talk about the symphony shaped the categories of politics as well as the categories for music. Ultimately the regime itself silenced the talk, encouraged an absorbed listening, and created the verbal silence out of which, despite their wishes, music itself could be performed and eventually be listened to once again for itself. How that process resumed must also be a history of discourse, but also of the reassessment and even perhaps the dismantling of a critical tradition—but that is another story. Most critics in the Third Reich were willing to participate in simplified and repressive readings. Nonetheless, the symphony’s long-evolving complexity the innovations of counterpoint, orchestration, and structure— even despite the weight of tradition—allowed no easy enlistment of its music into a political cause without an effort at explanation or mediation with a public that the regime considered too unpredictable and insecure. Musical discourse would be rendered ineffective. If critics betrayed the art they had earlier sought to make more accessible—in so doing, they inadvertently helped music to survive on its own, since listeners had to find their own path within the music. Music would survive, with its potential to liberate and its power to suppress. Whatever the responsibility of musicians, critics, and listeners in promulgating and normalizing the ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century, in these dark chapters of history there are some lessons for our own century. Music mattered. Interpreting music also mattered, and despite the assumptions with which critics began the century, the interpretation did not always emancipate or enlighten.

Notes

Introduction 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), p. 137. 2. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 6 Nov. 1909, trans. in Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 329–330, 332. Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 16 Dec. 1930. 3. Robert Schumann, “Neue Symphonieen für Orchester: G. Preyer, C. G. Reissiger, F. Lacher,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 11, no. 1 (2 Jul. 1839): 1; the article is included in Robert Schumann, Music and Musicians: Essays and Criticisms, trans. and ed. Fanny Raymond Ritter (1877; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1972), p. 38. 4. Karl Grunsky, Der Kampf um deutsche Musik, vol. 1 of Der Aufschwung: Künstlerische Reihe, ed. Karl Grunsky (Stuttgart: Erhard Walther, Verlag für Nationalsozialistisches Schrifttum, 1933), p. 12. 5. Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doktor Faustus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961), p. 123. Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). On the irony in Mann’s use of the expression, see Albrecht Riethmuller, “Musik, die ‘deutscheste’ Kunst,” in Verfemte Musik: Komponisten in den Diktaturen unseres Jahrhunderts, ed. Joachim Braun, Heidi Tamar Hoffmann, Vladimír Karbusick´y, 2nd rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Lang, 1997), pp. 93–97. 6. The variance among listeners is, and undoubtedly has always been, immense. In referring here and elsewhere to a single listener, I do not propose any uniformity among concert audiences and other listeners but rather address the readership that critics and other authors aspired to reach.

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7. Schoenberg, Pfitzner (Drei Akte der Revanche von Palestrina), Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. 8. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Unpolitical Man (1918), trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), p. 290. 9. Alex Ross, “World War II Music: ‘In Music, Though, There Were No Victories,’” New York Times, 20 Aug. 1995. 10. See Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work: The National Debate, 1800–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 11. Karen Painter, “The Aesthetics of Mass Culture: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and its Legacy,” in Painter, Mahler and His World, pp. 127–156. 12. “Beethoven,” Völkischer Beobachter, 26 March 1927, in Alfred Rosenberg, Blut und Ehre: Ein Kampf für deutsche Wiedergeburt: Reden und Aufsätze von 1919–1933, ed. Thilo von Trotha (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1935), pp. 225–227. 13. Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben (1844; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), p. 543 (“Aphorismen aus der Jenenser Periode”). 14. Busoni, letter of 19 Oct. 1907, in Ferruccio Busoni, Letters to His Wife, trans. Rosamond Ley (1938; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1975), pp. 120–121. 15. Heinrich Schenker, Harmonielehre (1906), vol. 1, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, trans. by Elisabeth Mann Borgese as Harmony, ed. Oswald Jonas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. v. 16. The exception proves the role: beginning in 1905, extreme criticism of Schoenberg’s music provoked metaphors of political violence. See Esteban Buch, Le cas Schönberg: Naissance de l’avant-garde musicale, Bibliothèque des idées (Éditions Gallimard, 2006), p. 92. 17. The Neue Freie Presse and Neues Wiener Tagblatt, for example, had a subscription base far in excess of the voter turnout for the liberal political parties. Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 16–17. The standard source on newspapers and subscription numbers is Kurt Paupié, Handbuch der österreichischen Pressegeschichte, 1848–1959, vol. 1 (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1960). 18. Leopold Schmidt, Aus dem Musikleben der Gegenwart: Beiträge zur zeitgenössischen Kunstkritik (Berlin: Hofmann, 1909); Paul Bekker, Das Musikdrama der Gegenwart: Studien und Charakteristiken (Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder, 1909); Walter Niemann, Die Musik seit Richard Wagner (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913). 19. The inaugural issue of Die Musik, founded in 1901, heralded the new century in archaic splendor, with an epigraph from the “Wach’ auf!” chorus of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (the final scene of act 3) and lead article on J. S. Bach and “contemporary German music” (which, moreover, skirted any discussion of truly contemporary music). On this “Bach ideology,” see Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 139–140. See also Marc-André Roberge, “Le périodique Die Musik (1901–1944) et sa transformation à

Notes to Pages 13–16

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

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travers trois périodes de l’histoire allemande,” Revue de musicologie 78, no. 1 (1992): 109–144. After his study of Bruckner’s symphonies, Halm focused on composition until financial enticement led him to publish an essay collection and a volume for the Beethoven centenary. Bekker’s rate of publication fell after his book on Mahler’s symphonies, as he shifted to broader issues of musical life, phenomenology, and the sociology of music (with the exception of a general Wagner survey). Kurth completed his Bruckner volumes at age thirtynine. He remained on the faculty at the University of Berne for some twenty more years but only published one further book. (Instead he undertook revising his earlier publications—all but the Bruckner book, too massive an undertaking.) As with Bekker, Kurth turned thereafter from repertoire to abstraction, devoting his final book to the psychology of music. Letter of 17 Dec. 1923, Paul Bekker Collection, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, transcribed in http://www.musik.unibe.ch/unibe/ philhist/musik/content/e308/e368/files540/VolltextbriefeKurth_Vers3.pdf. Ernst Decsey, Bruckner: Versuch eines Lebens (1919; rpt. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag, 1922), p. 5. Arnold Schering, “Aus der Geschichte der musikalischen Kritik in Deutschland,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1928 35 (1929): 23. Peter Williams, for example, observes that at the 1927 Freiburg conference on German organs, references to das deutsche Volk and the education of the Volk, were not “political slogans” linked to National Socialism but, in fact, alluded to Schoenberg’s essay in Richtlinien für ein Kunstamt, ed. Adolf Loos (1919), a text reproduced as http://www.schoenberg.at/ 6_archiv/paintings/catalogue/texts/richtlinien.htm. See Peter Williams, “The Idea of Bewegung in the German Organ Reform Movement of the 1920s,” in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 147. Schoenberg’s writings of course, had their own ideological resonance, and his political views as a royalist and supporter of a Großdeutschland were well known. Edward T. Cone, “Inside the Saint’s Head: The Music of Berlioz” (1971), in Music: A View from Delft: Selected Essays, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 223. Edgar Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound,” Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (1945), exp. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1998), pp. 196–208; excerpted in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. ed. Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), pt. 7, ed. Robert P. Morgan, pp. 1339–1346 (quotation, p. 1345). James A. Hepokoski, “Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 135–176. Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology, Studies

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in the Criticism and Theory of Music (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 90–91. 29. Max Morold, Anton Bruckner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912), p. 10.

1. Symphonic Idealism in Crisis 1. Arnold Schering, “Aus der Geschichte der musikalischen Kritik in Deutschland,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1928 35 (1929): 22. 2. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), pp. 158–159. 3. The projected subtitle is mentioned in Arthur Seidl, Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst: Gedanken eines Kulturpsychologen um des Jahrhunderts Wende 1899/1900 (1901), 2nd rev. ed. (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1912), p. 131n. 4. Julia Liebscher, Richard Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra: Tondichtung (frei nach Friedrich Nietzsche) für großes Orchester op. 30 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994), pp. 9–10. 5. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 28 May 1907, trans. in Leon Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics (1896–1924),” in Richard Strauss and his World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University, 1992), p. 341. 6. Rudolf Louis, Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (Munich: Georg Müller, 1909), pp. 180–181. 7. Walter Niemann, Die Musik seit Richard Wagner (1913), rev. ed., Die Musik der Gegenwart und der letzten Vergangenheit bis zu den Romantikern, Klassizisten und Neudeutschen (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), p. 185. 8. B. F. Goldstaub, Der Merker 1, no. 23 (10 Sept. 1910): 943. 9. Specht, Mahler, p. 41, quoting from Hermann Bahr: Inventur (Berlin, S. Fischer, 1912), p. 18. 10. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 131, conversation from summer 1899. 11. Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 185–187. 12. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (1859; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1979), 2:66. 13. On this tradition, see Scott G. Burnham, Beethoven the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ch. 4, “Cultural Values: Beethoven, The Goethezeit, and the Heroic Concept of Self,” pp. 112–146. 14. Hugo Fleischer, “Der symbolische Gehalt der symphonischen Formen,” Der Merker 4, no. 15 (1 Aug. 1913): 566. 15. Robert Schumann, “Die 7. Symphonie von Franz Schubert,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 12, no. 21 (10 Mar. 1840): 82, trans. by Paul Rosenfeld in Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. (1946; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 110. The re-

Notes to Pages 27–29

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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view is discussed in Anthony Newcomb, “Schumann and Late EighteenthCentury Narrative Strategies,” 19th-Century Music 11, no. 2 (1987): 168. One factor in Schumann’s likening the symphony to a novel, with the implied privacy of consumption, was perhaps that he had discovered the Ninth Symphony in 1838, in a manuscript that had never been played. This fantasy of extending a musical genre, far into time, was but one facet of the tension between reality and the imagination so important in the nineteenth century. Oskar Bie, Intime Musik, Die Musik (1906), 2nd rev. ed. (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel, 1920), pp. 4–5. Leopold Schmidt, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 63, nos. 65/66 (15 Nov. 1905): 1176–1177. Guido Adler, “Musikalische Kulturprobleme unserer Zeit,” Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1906, trans. as “Problems of Musical Culture in Our Time,” in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” p. 327. In quoting Haydn (“Jede meiner Symphonien ist eine moralische Person”), Adler may have misremembed the statement in the composer’s biography that he “had often portrayed moral characters [Charaktere] in his symphonies.” Georg August Griesinger, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn (1808–1809), ed. Franz Grasberger (Vienna: Paul Kaltschmid, 1954), p. 62, trans. by Vernon Gotwals as Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-century Gentleman and Genius (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. 62. Max Graf, Neues Wiener Journal, 20 Dec. 1904. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 147, conversation of 13 Jul. 1900. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 9 Dec. 1911. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 Jun. 1906. Rudolf von Procházka, Neue Musik-Zeitung 30, no. 1 (8 Oct. 1908): 16. Fleischer, “Gehalt der symphonischen Formen,” 565. This notion of absolute music is espoused in Felix Maria Gatz, ed. MusikÄsthetik in ihren Hauptrichtungen: ein Quellenbuch der deutschen MusikÄsthetik von Kant und der Frühromantik bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1929), p. 48, cited in Sanna Pederson, H-German (Apr. 2006), review of Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=281791159040852. See, for example, Ludwig Speidel, Fremden-Blatt, 18 Dec. 1895, review of Brahms’s First Symphony, cited from Margaret Notley, “Volksconcerte in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, nos. 2–3 (1997): 434–435n51. Karl Blessinger, Die Überwindung der musikalischen Impotenz (Stuttgart: Benno Filser, 1920), p. 80; Walter Riezler, “Rundschau: Gustav Mahlers Achte Symphonie,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 7, vol. 7 (Nov. 1910): 604–606. The one positive observation of “the great subjective truth of Mahlerian music,” made by the Bavarian composer and critic Anton Würz, was, ironically a comment about the composer’s least subjective

276

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

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Notes to Pages 29–32 work, the Eighth Symphony, in Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 11 Oct. 1925. Joseph Sachs, Beauty and the Jew (London: Edward Goldston, 1937), p. 234. As the forward explained (n. p.), the book reprinted the author’s articles from South African periodicals. Sachs subsequently published The Jewish Genius (London: Edward Goldston, 1939). Rheinische Musik-und Theater-Zeitung 5, no. 25 (29 Oct. 1904). Theodor Helm, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 37, no. 2 (11 Jan. 1906). Max Kalbeck, “Pastoral- oder tragische Symphonie,” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 157, conversation from the 1900–1901 concert season. Fleischer, “Gehalt der symphonischen Formen,” 565. Karl Grunsky, “Wagner als Sinfoniker,” Richard Wagner Jahrbuch 1 (1906): 228. Schenker referred to Grunsky as “a very well-known writer on music and reviewer,” in a letter of 22 Jul. 1908, to his publisher Emil Hertzka, in the Universal Edition Nachlaß, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, trans. in Schenker Correspondence Project (http://www.columbia.edu/~idb1/schenker/ 000685.html). Eduard Hanslick, Neue Freie Presse, review of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie pathétique (1895), trans. in Henry Pleasants, ed., Hanslick’s Music Criticisms (1950; rpt. New York: Dover, 1988), p. 303. Friedrich Brandes, Kunstwart 20 (Jul. issue no. 2, 1906): 427. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. See Sandra McColl, “Max Kalbeck and Gustav Mahler,” 19th-Century Music 20, no. 2 (1996): 169; Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 306–308. Gustav Schönaich, Neue Musikalische Presse 2 (1 Dec. 1896), excerpted in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” p. 322 (trans. emended). The program included symphonies by Mozart and Bruckner, as well as Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (“Fingal’s Cave”); the strategy of juxtaposing modern with traditional music did not help the reception of the Strauss, Mahler, or Schoenberg. Walter Niemann, Musik seit Wagner, rev. ed. Musik der Gegenwart, p. 122. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (1961), rpt. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), p. 64. Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 19. Max Nordau, Entartung (1892), 2nd ed. (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1893), pp. 24–25, trans. as Degeneration (1895), rpt. ed., intro. by George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 13 (trans. emended). Kevin Mulligan, “The Expression of Exactness: Ernst Mach, the Bretanists

Notes to Pages 32–35

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46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

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and the Ideal of Clarity,” in Decadence and Innovation: AustroHungarian Life and Art at the Turn of the Century, ed. Robert B. Pynsent (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 33. Franz Wickhoff, “Was ist häßlich?” (lecture), summarized in “Professor Franz Wickhoff über die ‘Philosopohie’ von Klimt,” Fremden-Blatt, 15 May 1900. Hermann Kretzschmar, “Anregungen zur Förderung musikalischer Hermeneutik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1902 9 (1903): 51, trans. from Music in European Thought: 1851–1912, ed. Bojan Buji´c, Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 118. On Kretzschmar’s views and theory, see Lee A. Rothfarb, “Hermeneutics and Energetics: Analytical Alternatives in the Early 1900s,” Journal of Music Theory 36, no. 1 (1992): 46–50. Leon Botstein, Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914 (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1985), p. 1235. See, for example, the undated letter to Richard Batka, probably from 1896, in Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), pp. 175–176. Mahler’s private conversations with his student and companion Natalie Bauer-Lechner suggest a certainty about what his music means and how he achieved that effect. Whether the authoritarian stance toward his student was a role or his intellectual flexibility toward liberals was feigned is difficult to determine. Letter of 26 Mar. 1896 to Max Marschalk, in ibid., p. 179 (trans. emended). Letter of 22 Jun. 1901 to Max Kalbeck, in ibid., p. 252. Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1904. I have been unable to locate the source for the Hebbel quotation. Walter was offered the position in October 1898. Ludwig Karpath later recalled Mahler’s deliberations over Walter as a candidate as well as Mahler’s comments on Blech, over a meal at the Café Imperial with himself and Engelbert Humperdinck, in his Begegnung mit dem Genius: Denkwürdige Erlebnisse mit Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Hans Richter, Max Reger, Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Franz Lehar und vielen anderen bedeutenden Menschen, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Fiba, 1934), pp. 178–179, trans. in Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 105–107. In these recollections, Karpath promises Mahler that he will secure Prince Montenuovo’s approval of the appointment. Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788–1801), rpt. ed., Claudia Maria Knispel (Laaber: Laaber, 2005), 1:58. K. Freigedank [pseudonym], “Das Judentum in der Musik,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 17 no. 19 (3 Sept. 1850): 101–107; no. 20 (6 Sept. 1850): 109–112, quoted from Richard Wagner, Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (1892–1899; rpt. New York: Broude Bros., 1966), 3:93.

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55. Dietrich Eckart, “Das Judentum in und außer uns,” Auf gut Deutsch: Wochenschrift für Ordnung und Recht, 1, no. 2 (10 Jan. 1919): 28–32; no. 3 (17 Jan. 1919): 45–48; no. 4 (24 Jan. 1919): 61–64; no. 5 (31 Jan. 1919): 79–80; no. 6 (7 Feb. 1919): 95–96; no. 7 (14 Feb.): 109–112. 56. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909, review of Mahler’s Third and Seventh symphonies. 57. Kikeriki, 2 Nov. 1899, reproduced in K. M. Knittel, “Polemik im Concertsaal: Mahler, Beethoven, and the Viennese Critics,” 19th-Century Music 29, no. 3 (2006): 314. 58. Gustav Schönaich, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 316. 59. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 Jun. 1906. 60. The comment is found, along with others on Jewish-German identity, within a series of fragments “Ungeschriebene Schriften” that include misogynist and anti-modern reflections. Walter Rathenau, Reflexionen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1908), p. 239. That same year, and in 1907, Rathenau traveled to East and West Africa, and his travel diary likewise contains reflections of a racist nature. See Walther Rathenau: Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual, and Politician: Notes and Diaries, 1907–1922, ed. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, trans. Caroline Pinder-Cracraft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Hans F. K. Günther quoted Rathenau’s comments on Jewish gesticulation in his Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes (1930); rpt. ed. (Bremen: Faksimile, 1992), p. 252, a text that originally appeared as an appendix to his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1922). 61. Letter of 23 Aug. 1899 to Julius Bauer, from Triest, Music Collection, Austrian National Library, cat. no. 1810, 579/48. 62. Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 343. 63. Paul Stefan, moreover, accused Hirschfeld of a bias against Mahler, observing a shift from positive to negative reviews after Mahler canceled the productions of a Mozart opera (Zaide) Hirschfeld had arranged. Stefan, Gustav Mahlers Erbe: Ein Beitrag zur neuesten Geschichte der deutschen Bühne und des Herrn Felix von Weingartner (Munich: H. von Weber, 1908), p. 23. 64. Letter of 4 March 1899, in Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel, 1888–1908, ed. Paul Pretzsch (Leipzig: P. Reclam, 1934), p. 555. Chamberlain was in Vienna for Mahler’s production of Siegfried Wagner’s Bärenhäuter. La Grange, Mahler, vol. 2, pp. 157–158. 65. Robert Hirschfeld, Österreichische Rundschau 5, no. 1 (Nov. 1905–Jan. 1906): 405, citing his article in vol. 1, no. 10 (Nov. 1904–Jan. 1905). 66. Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909. 67. Sigmund Mayer, Die Wiener Juden: Kommerz, Kultur, Politik 1700–1900 (Vienna: Löwet, 1917), p. 475, quoting a private conversation with Lueger. 68. See, for example, the positive references in Niemann, Musik seit Wagner,

Notes to Pages 38–43

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

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rev. ed. Musik der Gegenwart, p. 148 and Adolf Weißmann, Die Musik in der Weltkrise (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), p. 108; the book has been trans. by M. M. Bozman as The Problems of Modern Music (London: J. M. Dent, 1925). Theodor Helm, Deutsche Zeitung, 29 Jan. 1900. Louis, Die deutsche Musik, p. 182. On the Budapester OrpheumGesellschaft, see Philip V. Bohlman, “Jüdische Lebenswelten zwischen Utopie und Heterotopie, jüdische Musik zwischen Schtetl und Ghetto / Jewish Worlds between Utopia and Heterotopia, Jewish Music between the Shtetl and the Ghetto,” Lied und populäre Kultur 47 (2002): 55. Gustav Altmann, Die Musik 5, no. 19 (Jun. issue no. 1, 1906): 50. Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 6 Jan. 1907. Altmann, Die Musik (1906): 49. Signed “rm,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 34, no. 4 (25 Jan. 1907): 62. Otto Hauser, Die Juden und Halbjuden in der deutschen Literatur (Danzig: E. Schade, 1933), pp. 12–13, cited in Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 2. Several scholars, I among them, have relied on an unpublished paper on Liebstöckl by Irit Youngerman. Richard Wallaschek, Die Zeit, 20 Sept. 1908. This incident was recounted by a Prague critic, who noted with palpable pride the “political” significance that a fellow Bohemian could become the “general music director of Austria” and even be accepted as a “representative of modern German art.” Richard Batka, Prager Tagblatt, 20 Sept. 1908, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 322. Specht, Mahler, pp. 37–38. The quotation is from the philosopher’s late papers (fall 1885 to early 1886), in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1980), 12:45. Niemann, Musik seit Wagner, rev. ed. Musik der Gegenwart, p. 148. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1904, review of Mahler’s Third. On Mahler’s gesticulation, see K. N. Knittel, “Ein hypermoderner Dirigent: Mahler and Anti-Semitism in ‘Fin-de-siècle Vienna,’” 19th Century Music 18, no. 3 (1995): 258, 268–272. Adler, “Problems of Musical Culture,” pp. 331–332 (trans. emended). Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen” (1908), trans. in Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, trans. Harold Meek (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 231. Elsa Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 324. Richard Specht, “Neue Musik in Wien,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 3, nos. 13–14 (Sept. issue, nos. 1/2, 1921): 246, cited in Christopher Hailey, “Between Instinct and Reflection: Berg and the Viennese Dichotomy,” in The Berg Companion, ed. Douglas Jarman (1989; rpt. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), p. 225. [ Julius Langbehn], Rembrandt als Erzieher: Von einem Deutschen

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Notes to Pages 44–45 (Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1890). See also Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), p. 79.

2. Symphonic Conventions of a World Past 1. Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 12 Nov. 1904. Others more objective than Muntz also reported a mixed reaction, perhaps attributable to musical politics. The conductor, Ferdinand Löwe, had not informed Mahler about the plans for a performance, so the composer refused to attend rehearsals (as reported in the press) and the performance. HenryLouis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 3, Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 67–68. 2. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (1941; rpt. New York: Viking, 1943), p. 69. 3. Emblematic is Adolf Schubring’s declaration “Thematic work is the logic of music.” He went on to lambaste the composer who ignores the requisite technical procedures and instead seeks to “delight the untutored multitudes.” Such a composer, he concluded, is in no way “a logical musician.” Adolf Schubring, “Schumanniana 11: Die Schumann’sche Schule: Schumann und Brahms: Brahms’s vierhändige Schumann-Variationen,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 3, no. 7 (12 Feb. 1868): 49, trans. from Walter Frisch, “Brahms and Schubring: Musical Criticism and Politics at Mid-Century,” 19th-Century Music 7, no. 3, Essays for Joseph Kerman (1984): 275. 4. Theodor Helm, Deutsche Zeitung, 15 Jan. 1900. 5. On the Vienna Philharmonic, see Knittel, “Polemik im Concertsaal,” pp. 291–292. 6. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahleriana, partly unpublished manuscript, Bibliothèque Gustav Mahler, Paris, trans. from Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 231. 7. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 31 Jan. 1900. 8. Scheu emphasized that the public showed ever-growing interest in “modern” music. Josef Scheu, Arbeiter Zeitung: Zentralorgan der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie, 3 Feb. 1900. 9. These performances included the premieres of the so-called second version (1881) and third version (1888) as well as performances in 1892, 1896, and 1897. Theodor Helm, Deutsche Zeitung, 29 Jan. 1900. 10. These included the Fifth Symphony, under Martin Spörr, in mid-January in Graz; the Third Symphony on Palm Sunday in Linz; and the New Philharmonic under Adolf Tandler, in mid-April in Vienna. Spörr was known for merging the Wiener Tonkünstler-Orchesters and the Orchester des Wiener Concertvereines into the Wiener Sinfonie-Orchester. Tandler later became the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Notes to Pages 46–49

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11. Unsigned, “Ein neuer großer Triumph Bruckners in Deutschland,” Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Apr. 1901. 12. Richard Wallaschek, Die Zeit, 22 Mar. 1902. 13. Hans Stieber, Wochenschrift für Kunst und Musik 2 (1 Dec. 1904): 403. 14. Rudolf Louis, Anton Bruckner (Munich: Georg Müller, 1905), p. 226. 15. Ernst Decsey, Die Musik 4, no. 20 (Jul. issue 2, 1905): 137. 16. Neues Wiener Journal, 30 Jan. 1900, transcription, Vondenhoff collection, Music Division, Austrian National Library; Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Press, 17 Dec. 1904. 17. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have spoken in other contexts of “invented tradition and the inculcation of values and norms of behavior through repetition.” Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Tradition,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–2. The focus of their book is European social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 18. Hermann Kretzschmar, “Anregungen zur Förderung musikalischer Hermeneutik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 9 (1903): 64. A related passage from the same article is translated in Music in European Thought: 1851–1912, ed. Bojan Buji´c Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 120. 19. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (1906), in Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, Prosa, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1951), p. 268. 20. On the decline in musical training and the impact of listening habits, see Leon Botstein, “Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1985). 21. Eduard Hanslick, Neue Freie Presse, review of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie pathétique (1895), trans. in Henry Pleasants, ed., Hanslick’s Music Criticisms (1950; rpt. New York: Dover, 1988), p. 303. 22. See, for example, Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 6 Jan. 1907. 23. Richard Robert, Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, 11 Dec. 1905. 24. Richard Wallaschek, Die Zeit, 20 Sept. 1908. 25. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch, zum Selbstunterricht, oder als Leitfaden bei Privatunterweisung und öffentlichen Vorträgen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1857), 3:598. See Carl Dahlhaus, “Gefühlsästhetik und musikalische Formenlehre” (1967), in Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber, 1988), p. 342. 26. Max Graf, Neues Wiener Journal, 15 Dec. 1905. 27. Friedrich Hebbel, “Vorwort, betreffend das Verhältniß der dramatischen Kunst zur Zeit und verwandte Puncte,” Maria Magdalene: Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel in drei Akten (1844), in Hebbel, Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke, Werner Keller, and Karl Pörnbacher (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1963), 1:317. Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik: Ein Mahnruf,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 24 (Oct. 1906): 1, reprinted in “Die Konfusion in

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28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

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Notes to Pages 49–51 der Musik”: Felix Draesekes Kampfschrift von 1906 und ihre Folgen, ed. Susanne Shigihara (Bonn: G. Schröder, 1990), p. 41. I have been unable to locate this quotation in Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter, 1799–1832, ed. Max Hecker (1913–1918; rpt. Frankfurt: Insel, 1987). Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1904. The nineteenth Secessionist exhibition, from 1904, included works by Ferdinand Hodler, Cuno Amiet, and Munch. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 12 Dec. 1905. Saint Sebastian, a captain of the Roman pretorian guards in the third century, was ordered by Diocletian to be shot to death with arrows for having aided other martyrs. After recovering Sebastian confronted the emperor for his cruelty and was beaten to death with clubs. “They are showing one another why [my music] ought not to have been written—hunting out my consecutive fifths and sevenths, and my false relations—looking for my first subject, my second subject, my working out, and the rest of the childishness that could be taught to a poodle. Don’t they wish they may find them?” George Bernard Shaw, Love among the Artists (1900), in Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, Novels (New York: W. H. Wise, 1930), 3:143. Korngold could have read the trans. by Wilhelm Cremer and Alfred Brieger as Künstlerliebe (Berlin: Franz Ledermann, 1908). Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 6 Nov. 1909, trans. in Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Painter (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 331. Albert Kauders, Fremden-Blatt, 5 Jan. 1907. The Meistersinger quotation is from act I, scene, “Wollt ihr nach Regeln messen, / was nicht nach eurer Regeln Lauf, / der eignen Spur vergessen, / sucht davon erst die Regeln auf!” Elsa Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 14 Jan. 1902, review of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, citing Kant, Critique of Judgment, sec. 46. Kuno Wolf, “Die klassische Symphonie und ihre Bedeutung für die Gegenwart,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 73, no. 20 (16 May 1906): 440. Max Nordau, Entartung (1892), 2nd ed. (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1893), p. 360; trans. as Degeneration (1895), rpt. ed., intro. by George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 203 (trans. emended). Max Morold, Anton Bruckner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912), p. 13. Leopold Schmidt, Aus dem Musikleben der Gegenwart: Beiträge zur zeitgenössischen Kunstkritik (Berlin: Hofmann, 1909), p. 298, review of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 170, conversation from summer 1901. Arnold Schoenberg, “National Music [no. 2]” (1931), in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (1975; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 173.

Notes to Pages 52–54

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41. Mahler likewise described the creative process through metaphors of sexual intercourse and gestation—at least in his letters to male colleagues. To consider whether the creative process involved a program was for him “idle talk . . . like someone who fathers a child and then only afterwards wonders whether it really is a child, whether it was conceived with the right intentions, etc.— He simply made love and proved himself. Basta!” (to Bruno Walter, summer 1904). Or, “When I have given birth to a work, I enjoy discovering what tones it sets vibrating in the ‘Other’” (to the critic Richard Batka, probably in 1896). Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), pp. 280, 176 (trans. emended). 42. Max Loewengard, Lehrbuch des Contrapunkts (Berlin: Dreililien, 1902), pp. 1–2. 43. Draeseke’s anti-Semitism was later endorsed in the Third Reich, in Erich Roeder, “Felix Draeseke als Judengegner,” Die Musik 28, no. 6 (March 1936): 425–427. 44. The same phrase was used for the title of a volume by the director of the German railroad, Otto de Terra, Im Zeichen des Verkehrs: Kritische Streifzüge und Reformgedanken (Berlin: Vita, 1899). 45. Felix Draeseke, Der gebundene Styl: Lehrbuch für Kontrapunkt und Fuge (Hannover: Louis Oertel, 1902), 1:5–6. 46. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, vols. 7–8: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, 1901–1908, ed. Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt and Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 7:116–131. 47. Karl Grunsky, Musikästhetik (Leipzig: Göschen, 1907), pp. 74–77. The book had four print runs in 1907, was reprinted in 1909 and 1911, and appeared in a revised edition in 1923. 48. Georg Gräner, Anton Bruckner, Die Musik (Leipzig: F. Kistner & C. F. W. Siegel, 1924), pp. 57–58, 62. 49. Max Loewengard, Hamburgischer Corrrespondent, 13 Sept. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 305. 50. Adolf Weißmann, Die Musik in der Weltkrise (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), pp. 110, 114; trans. as Problems of Modern Music, pp. 108, 111–112. 51. Theodor Helm, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 37, no. 2 (11 Jan. 1906): 34. On the Kölner Wirren, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), pp. 415–421. 52. Kurth’s “Foundations of Linear Counterpoint,” to translate literally, was more a study of “Bach’s melodic polyphony,” as its subtitle reads, than a counterpoint treatise per se; and in any case it was the work of an Austrian émigré living in Switzerland. Schoenberg aspired to write a counterpoint treatise, but inquiries to his publisher went unanswered, and his sketches from 1911 never developed to fruition. Rudolf Stephan, “Schönbergs Entwurf über ‘Das Komponieren mit selbständigen Stimmen,’” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 29, no. 4 (1972): 239.

284 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

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Notes to Pages 54–57 Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 20 Nov. 1900. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 12 Dec. 1905. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 8 Jan. 1907. Julius Korngold, Die Musik 6, no. 11 (March issue 1, 1907): 327. The classic discussion of Klimt’s Philosophy is Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 208–278. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 6 Nov. 1909. “The most important thing in composition is purity of line—that is, every voice . . . should be lyrical . . . so must the laws of voice-leading in vocal composition [der reinen Führung des Vokalsatzes] be observed even in the most complex orchestral texture.” Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 75, conversation of Sept. or Oct. 1896. Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (1911), 3rd ed. 1922, trans. by Roy E. Carter as Theory of Harmony (1978; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 422; Arnold Schoenberg, typescript for “Warum neue Melodien schwerverständlich sind,” Die Konzertwoche (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1914), Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna, trans. in Bryan R. Simms, “New Documents in the Schoenberg-Schenker Polemic,” Perspectives of New Music 16, no. 1 (1977): 115–116. Josef Rufer, Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen (1952), trans. by Humphrey Searle as Composition with Twelve Notes Related only to one Another (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 48 (trans. emended). Carl Stumpf, “Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen,” in Beiträge zur Akustik und zur Musikwissenschaft 3 (1901): 131. Plato does not define heterophony, a word that in any case was not a musical term in antiquity. Frieder Zaminer, “Heterophonie,” in Riemann Musiklexikon, vol. 3, Sachteil, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 12th ed. (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne 1967), p. 371. Hugo Riemann, “Heterophonie,” in Musik-Lexikon, 6th ed. (Leipzig: Max Hesse, 1905), p. 565. A few years earlier, in 1902, the debates over Klimt led Friedrich Jodl to devote his inaugural address as professor of aesthetics at the Technical University in Vienna to the use of primitive forms in modern art. Friedrich Jodl, “Über Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Aesthetik in der Gegenwart,” Neue Freie Presse, 20 Apr. 1902, cited in Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, pp. 243–244. Guido Adler, “Über Heterophonie,” Jahrbuch des Musikbibliothek Peters für 1907 15 (1908): 17–18, 24. I have made this argument elsewhere regarding early performances of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Schoenbeg’s First String Quartet that took place in close succession and even within the same festival. Karen Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58, no. 3 (2001): 201–230. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 389. Heinrich Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1926), pp. 170–171.

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68. ”If one wanted to speak of the elements of music in the old sense, his music would have to be rejected outright as lacking form and contour, as melodically impoverished and rhythmically atrophied, and—especially by the standards of Germanic thoroughness—as polyphonically immature and undeveloped.” Walter Niemann, Die Musik seit Richard Wagner (1913), rev. ed., Die Musik der Gegenwart und der letzten Vergangenheit bis zu den Romantikern, Klassizisten und Neudeutschen (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), p. 237. 69. This discussion of Also sprach Zarathustra was influenced by Robert Koelzer’s analysis of the work for an undergraduate seminar. 70. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 116 (conversation from May 1898), p. 76, conversation from Sept. or Oct. 1896). 71. Conversation of summer 1938 with the exhibition’s organizer Hans Severus Ziegler, as recounted in Ziegler’s letter of 18 Jan. 1965 to Fred K. Prieberg, quoted from Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (1982; rpt. Cologne: Dittrich, 2000), p. 212. 72. Sander L. Gilman, “Strauss and the Pervert,” in Reading Opera, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 319–320. 73. Julius Korngold, “Richard Strauss’ Salome: Ein Gespräch,” Neue Freie Presse, 28 May 1907, trans. in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” p. 348. Botstein erroneously lists the newspaper as the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. 74. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 26 May 1907, trans. in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics” p. 336. See David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 2, “The Alchemy of Bach’s Canons,” as well as his “Alchemy and Counterpoint in an Age of Reason,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 2 (1998): 201–243. 75. Henry and Sidney Cowell, who reported this experiment of Ives’s father, saw in this childhood experience the germ for the composer’s complex polyphony. See their Charles Ives and His Music (1969; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1983), pp. 144–145; Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, pp. 155–156, conversation of 5 Aug. 1900. 76. Georg Joseph Vogler, System für den Fugenbau, als Einleitung zur harmonischen Gesang-Verbindungs-Lehre (1811; Offenbach: Johann André, ca. 1817), p. 28. 77. Nordau, Entartung, p. 24; trans. as Degeneration, p. 24 (trans. emended). 78. Arnold Schoenberg, “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea,” in Schoenberg, Style and Idea, p. 120. This lecture, delivered at the University of Chicago on May 16, 1946, was revised from a typescript completed on February 10, 1933, “Neue und veraltete Musik, oder Stil und Gedanke,” according to the composer, based on a lecture he had delivered in Prague and would give in Boston in 1933 or 1934. 79. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907.

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Notes to Pages 62–64

80. Arnold Zweig, “Quartettsatz von Schönberg” (1913), in Zweig, Novellen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1961), 1:336. Zweig does not specify which of Schoenberg’s two quartets was performed in the fictional account. But Schoenberg himself had referred to Opus 7 as “Quartett in einem Satz,” and Zweig would have no reason to envision the programming of a movement extracted from Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, op. 10. On Zweig’s sketch, see also Leon Botstein, “Schoenberg and the Audience: Modernism, Music, and Politics in the Twentieth Century,” in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 27–29. 81. Schoenberg’s sketch of 1921 is reproduced in Severine Neff, “Schoenberg as Theorist: Three Forms of Presentation,” in Frisch, Schoenberg and His World, p. 73. 82. Weißmann attributed the prominence of counterpoint in Schoenberg’s musical language to the composer’s tendency toward “dialectics,” in Die Musik in der Weltkrise, pp. 187–188. 83. Loren R. Graham, “The Reception of Einstein’s Ideas: Two Examples from Contrasting Political Cultures,” in Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives: The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem, ed. Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 107–108. On this epistemological shift in spatial models in literature and art of this period, see Oliver Simons, Raumgeschichten: Topographien der Moderne in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur (Paderborn: Fink, 2007). 84. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 133, discussing Ernst Mach, Space and Geometry in Light of Physiological, Psychological, and Physical Inquiry (1906; rpt La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1960). 85. Kandinsky heard the Munich premiere of Schoenberg’s Opus 7, with the Rosé Quartet, on January 2, 1911, and two weeks later initiated a correspondence with him. Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky, Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente einer außergewöhnlichen Begegnung, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch (Salzburg: Residenz, 1980), pp. 19–20. See also Magdalena Dabrowski, “Kandinsky and Schoenberg; Abstraction as a Visual Metaphor of Emancipated Dissonance,” in Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, ed. Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman (New York: Jewish Museum, 2003), pp. 79–93. 86. Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee, ed. Jürg Spiller, trans. Ralph Manheim, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1964), p. 296 (trans. emended). 87. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (1975; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988–1998), 2:905. 88. Christian Friedrich Michaelis, Über den Geist der Tonkunst: Mit Rücksicht auf Kants Kritik der ästhetischen Urtheilskraft: ein ästhetischer Versuch (1795–1800; facsimile rpt. Brussels: Culture et civilisation, 1970), pp. 88–89, cited in Mark Evan Bonds, Haydn’s False Recapitulations and

Notes to Pages 64–67

89.

90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

98.

99. 100.

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the Perception of Sonata Form in the Eighteenth Century (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1988), p. 182. C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753–1762), ed. Wolfgang Horn (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994), sec. 31, p. 133, quoted in Heinrich Schenker, Der freie Satz, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, vol. 3 (1935); trans. by Ernst Oster as Free Composition (New York: Longman, 1979), ch. 5 (Form), p. 128. Bach uses the term Absicht, suggesting a flexible concept more than literally “overviewing” (übersehen). Lotte Thaler, Organische Form in der Musiktheorie des 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts, Berliner musikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten (Munich: E. Katzbichler, 1984), pp. 99–100, in reference to Hugo Riemann, Grundriss der Kompositionslehre (Musikalische Formenlehre) (1889), 5th ed. (Leipzig: Max Hesse, 1916), pp. 4–5. Heinrich Schenker, “Der Geist der musikalischen Technik” (1895), trans. by William Pastille as “The Spirit of Musical Technique,” in Theoria 3 (1988): 86–104. The quotation is from a section entitled “Künstlichkeit,” trans. in William A. Pastille, “Heinrich Schenker, Anti-Organicist,” 19thCentury Music, 8, no. 1 (1984): 36. Richard Robert, Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, 11 Dec. 1905. An example of the latter is Albert Kauders, Fremden-Blatt, 5 Jan. 1907. Otto Neitzel, Beethovens Symphonien, nach ihrem Stimmungsgehalt erläutert (Cologne: P. J. Tonger, 1912), p. 1. Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Gustav Mahlers Fünfte Symphonie in Cis-Moll: Technicalische Analyse,” Die Musik 4, no. 4 (Nov. issue 2, 1904): 245. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:897. Richard Batka, Prager Tagblatt, 20 Sept. 1908, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” pp. 322–323. The context was a review of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. For example, an early reviewer of Beethoven’s Third Symphony noted that “an uncommon abundance of ideas is displayed sumptuously and gracefully, and nonetheless cohesiveness, order, and light, rule overall,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6, no. 32 (13 Feb. 1805): 321, quoted in Mary Sue Morrow, “Of Unity and Passion: The Aesthetics of Concert Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” 19th-Century Music 13, no. 3 (1990): 199, 199n27. Wolf, “Die klassische Symphonie,” 439, quoting from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 27th piece, entry of 31 Jul. 1767. Arthur Seidl, Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst: Gedanken eines Kulturpsychologen um des Jahrhunderts Wende 1899/1900 (1901), 2nd rev. ed. (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1920), pp. 88–89. Thaler, Organische Form, in reference to Riemann, Kompositionslehre, pp. 4–5. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Ästhetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe” (1892), trans. by Michael Neville, in Wilhelm Dilthey,

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103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

111. 112.

113. 114.

115. 116.

117. 118. 119.

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Notes to Pages 67–70 Poetry and Experience, Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 5:210. See Linda C. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian fin de siècle (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 66, conversation of 27 Jul. 1896. The quotation from the conversation on 28 Jul. was not included in the English translation; see Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen, ed. Herbert Killian (Hamburg: K. D. Wagner, 1984), p. 65. Ibid., p. 178, conversation of 12 Oct. 1901 (trans. emended). Ibid., p. 156, conversation of 5 Aug. 1900. Ibid., p. 235, conversation of 16 Jul. 1896 (trans. emended). Martin Scherzinger, “The Finale of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: A Deconstructive Reading,” Music Analysis 14, no. 1 (1995): 69–88. Jonathan D. Kramer, “Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time,” Indiana Theory Review 17, no. 2 (1996): 21–61. Paul Ehlers, Der Sammler, 29 Oct. 1908, p. 8. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 37, conversation from Jul. and Aug. 1893. Gustav Schönaich devoted most of a paragraph to this subject, in Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” p. 314. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–1980), 3:749–750, entry of 17 Nov. 1881. Batka, Prager Tagblatt, 20 Sept. 1908. See Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Signed “H. St—r,” Wochenschrift für Kunst und Musik 4 (1 Dec. 1904), clipping, Bruckner-Institut, Linz. In Hans Knappertsbusch’s recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic (1956) and Munich Philharmonic Orchestra (1959), the finale is exactly as long as the opening movement—in fact, four and five seconds shorter, respectively. However, in the significantly faster interpretation by Leon Botstein conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1998), the finale is shorter than the finale (thirty-one seconds). The outer movements in Knappertsbusch’s recordings are each over two minutes longer than in Botstein’s. Signed “G. v. B.,” Reichspost, 31 Jan. 1900. Theodor Helm, “Anton Bruckner als Tondichter,” Österreichische Musikund Theaterzeitung (1896), reprinted in Amtliche Linzer Zeitung, 28 Oct. 1900. Karl Senn, “Anton Bruckner,” Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 10 Oct. 1906. Ernst Decsey, Die Musik 4, no. 20 (Jul. issue 2, 1905): 137. Hermann Kretzschmar, Führer durch den Concertsaal, vol. 1, Sinfonie und Suite, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: A. G. Liebeskind, 1891), pp. 779–780.

Notes to Pages 71–74

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120. Theodor Helm, Deutsche Zeitung, 18 Mar. 1900; Musikalisches Wochenblatt 31, no. 15 (5 Apr. 1900): 202. 121. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (1961; rpt. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), pp. 337–338. 122. Rudolf Louis, Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 29 Oct. 1908. 123. Louis, Bruckner, pp. 216–217. See the discussion of Louis in Chapter 4, p. 128. 124. August Halm, Die Symphonie Anton Bruckners (1914), exp. ed. (Munich: Georg Müller, 1923), p. 37, trans. from Lee Rothfarb (personal communication). 125. Chamberlain’s publisher used Morold’s enthused words from December 1927 as publicity (http://www.hschamberlain.net/comments/comments.html). Morold also wrote enthusiastically about Chamberlain’s relationship with his mother-in-law Wagner’s widow and her anti-Semitism, in Max Morold, Cosima Wagner: ein Lebensbild (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1937), p. 411. After the Anschluss, Morold published his memoirs, with a title that embraced the new Germany: Vom Abend zum Morgen: Aus dem alten Österreich ins neue Deutschland: Mein Weg als österreichischer Staatsbeamter und deutscher Schriftsteller (Leipzig: P. Reclam, 1940). 126. Max Morold, Anton Bruckner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912), pp. 42–43. 127. August Halm, who wrote that Bruckner established “a new religion of art,” is an extreme but special case. Not unlike Nietzsche, Halm insisted that culture and art were substitutes for religion. The Weltanschauung and vocabulary of religion were, as Lee Rothfarb has pointed out, part of Halm’s milieu and upbringing. His father and grandfather as well as uncles and cousins were ministers, and he studied theology at the university. Wyneken, cofounder of the Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf, was likewise the son of a minister who had rejected religion. And in a telling reversal, Halm finds proof of not religiosity but humanism in Bruckner’s dedication of his Ninth Symphony to God. “Music is not received as a gift of God [donum Dei] but rather offered as a gift to God [donum Deo].” Halm, Die Symphonie Bruckners, p. 221, trans. from Lee Rothfarb (personal communication). 128. Morold, Bruckner, p. 43. 129. See the discussion of processive versus architectural conceptions of form in Dahlhaus, “Gefühlsästhetik und musikalische Formenlehre,” pp. 344–347. 130. This discussion draws from Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 46, 56–68. 131. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie (1896), 11th ed. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1914), p. 400, citation from Rabinbach, Human Motor, p. 67. See also Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Energie, Wissen und Können (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1908).

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Notes to Pages 74–76

132. The term was promulgated by the psychologist and prolific author Hans Driesch in Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1905) and became popular in philosophy and psychology in the years around World War I. The genre of symphony provides the musical example in Frederick G. Henke, “A Note on the Psychology of Vitalism,” American Journal of Psychology 30, no. 4 (1919): 406. A good discussion of vitalism, if not always by the same term, is found in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), e.g., pp. 52, 313. 133. Betsy F. Moeller-Sally, “The Theater as Will and Representation: Artist and Audience in Russian Modernist Theater, 1904–1909,” Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (1998): 350–71. 134. What mattered in a composition, Mahler once asserted, is its “vitality and permanence”—not how one might judge the form and the thematic material. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen, ed. Herbert Killian (Hamburg: K. D. Wagner, 1984), p. 33, conversation from Jul. or Aug. 1893, translated as Recollections, p. 37 (trans. emended). 135. Bernard Scharlitt, “Aus einem Gespräche mit Gustav Mahler,” Neue Freie Presse, 25. Mai 1911, excerpted in “Mahler-Nekrologe,” Die Musik 10, no. 18 (Jun. issue no. 2, 1911): 380. In the interview, Mahler also confided his grave disappointments as director of the Court Opera. Excerpts trans. in La Grange, Mahler, 3: 354, 392, 399. 136. Gustav Wyneken, introduction to August Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (1913), 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1947), p. viii, cited from Alexander Rehding, “August Halm’s Two Cultures as Nature,” in Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 160. See also Lee Rothfarb, “The ‘New Education’ and Music Theory, 1900–1925,” Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), pp. 449–471. 137. See also Lee Rothfarb, “Music Analysis, Cultural Morality, and Sociology in the Writings of August Halm,” Indiana Theory Review 16 (1995): 171–196. 138. August Halm, Musikalische Bildung,” Wickersdorfer Jahrbuch: 1909–1910 2 (1911): 48–73, reprinted in Halm, Von Form und Sinn der Musik: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Siegfried Schmalzriedt (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1978), p. 220. 139. Halm, Kulturen der Musik, p. 50. 140. August Halm, Die Rheinlande 12 (1912): 175–178, review of Paul Bekker, Beethoven, rpt. in August Halm, Form und Sinn, p. 174. 141. Paul Bekker, “Wohin treiben wir?,” reprinted in Bekker, Kritische Zeitbilder (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921), p. 256, cited in Rehding, “Halm’s Two Cultures as Nature,” p. 157. On the evolution of Bekker’s thought regarding abstraction in musical listening, or formalist aesthetics, see Andreas Eichhorn, “Annäherung durch Distanz: Paul Bekkers Auseinandersetzung mit der Formalästhetik Hanslicks,”Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 54, no. 3. (1997): 194–209.

Notes to Pages 76–83

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142. Hans Pfitzner, Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz: Ein Verwesungssymptom? (1920), rpt. in Pfitzner, Gesammelte Schriften (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1926–1929), 2:155, trans. in Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 53–54 (trans. emended). 143. Siegfried Schmalzriedt, “August Halms musikalische Ästhetik: Versuch einer Darstellung,” in Halm, Form und Sinn, p. 34. 144. Halm, “Musikalische Bildung,” 212. 145. See Lee A. Rothfarb, “August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music,” 19thCentury Music 29, no. 2 (2005): 121–141. 146. Halm, “Von der Dynamik,” Die Rheinlande 12 (1912): 104–105, rpt. in Halm, Form und Sinn, pp. 92–93 (quotation). 147. Halm, Kulturen der Musik, p. 111. 148. Ibid., pp. 110, 112. 149. Ibid., pp. 28–29. 150. Halm, “Musikalische Bildung,” 212. 151. Halm, Die Symphonie Bruckners, p. 51. 152. Halm, Kulturen der Musik, p. 109. 153. Halm, “Dynamik,” 92. 154. Halm, Kulturen der Musik, p. 15. 155. Halm, Symphonie Bruckners, p. 100. 156. Halm, “Dynamik,” 93. 157. Karl Grunsky, Musikästhetik, 4th rev. ed. (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1923), p. 70.

3. Sensuality and Redemption 1. Signed “O. K.,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 20 (23 July 1907): 430. 2. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 28 May 1907, trans. in Leon Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics (1896–1924),” in Richard Strauss and his World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1992), p. 344. 3. Guido Adler, “Problems of Musical Culture in Our Time,” Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1906, trans. in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” p. 333. 4. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909, review of Mahler’s Third and Seventh symphonies. 5. Gerhard Tischer, “Das musikkulturelle Ziel,” Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 33, no. 18 (22 Oct. 1932): 157. 6. See Karl Storck, Musik-Politik: Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musiklebens (Stuttgart: Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1911). Sandra McColl addresses political topics but not in connection with musical interpretation, in Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 7. Paul Bekker, Das Musikdrama der Gegenwart: Studien und Charakteristiken (Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder, 1909), p. 35.

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Notes to Pages 83–85

8. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 234–235, conversation of 16 Jul. 1896. 9. Richard Wallaschek, Die Zeit, 10 April 1897, Brahms obituary, p. 27, quoted from Sandra McColl, “Richard Wallaschek: Vienna’s Most Uncomfortable Music Critic,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 29, no. 1 (1998): 56. 10. Walter Niemann, Die Musik seit Richard Wagner (1913), rev. ed., Musik der Gegenwart und der letzten Vergangenheit bis zu den Romantikern, Klassizisten und Neudeutschen (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), pp. 178 (quotation), 182 (on Lamprecht). Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst (Cologne: M. Dumont-Schauberg, 1907), pp. 154–155. Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte der jüngsten Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912–1913). 11. Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama (1851), in Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer, Jubiläumsausgabe, 10 vols. (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983), 7:309; trans. as “Opera and Drama” by William Ashton Ellis in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (1892–1899; rpt. New York: Broude Bros., 1966), 2:316 (trans. emended). 12. Richard Wagner, “Das Judentum in der Musik” (1850, rev. 1869) in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871–1883), 5: 66, 74, quoted from Wagner’s Prose Works, 3:82, 88. Borchmeyer decided not to include the essay in his centenary edition of Wagner’s writings on the grounds that a “gift edition” and did not need to tarnish the composer’s reputation by devoting space to “ideological and speculative” writings available elsewhere. Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften, 10:x (Nachwort zu dieser Ausgabe). 13. Letter to Leonie Praeger on 3 Nov. 1855, in Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, vol. 7 (März 1855–März 1856), ed. Hans-Joachim Bauer and Johannes Forner (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1988), p. 306. See Egon Voss, “Die ‘schwarze und die weiße Flagge’: Zur Entstehung von Wagners Tristan,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 54, no. 3. (1997): 211. Letter of 1 Oct. 1877 to Judith Gautier, in Die Briefe Richard Wagners an Judith Gautier, ed. Willi Schuh (Erlenbach-Zürich: Rotapfel, 1936), pp. 146–147. 14. Letter to Gisella Tolney-Witt, 7 Feb. 1893, in Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), p. 148. Tolney-Witt was eight or nine at the time. 15. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. 16. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music (1980), trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 243. 17. Arthur Seidl, Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst: Gedanken eines Kulturpsychologen um des Jahrhunderts Wende 1899/1900 (1901), rev. ed. Regensburg: G. Bosse, 1920), p. 15. It is possible that the passage is

Notes to Pages 86–88

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

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not in the first edition or in the lectures, which were in delivered in Munich in 1898–1900. Hans Merian, Richard Strauss’ Tondichtung: Also sprach Zarathustra. Eine Studie über die moderne Programmsymphonie (Leipzig: Meyer, 1900), p. 9. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. Ludwig Nohl, Mozart (Stuttgart: Friedrich Bruckmann, 1863), p. 74. W. A. Mozart’s Leben: nach Originalquellen von Franz Niemetschek (1798), facsimile, ed. Ernst Rychnovsky (Prague: I. Taussig, 1905), p. 69. Niemetschek, a teacher and acquaintance of Mozart, approached the subject of the composer’s life and music as general instruction on musical listening and aesthetic. See Karen Painter, “Mozart at Work: Biography and a Musical Aesthetic for the Emerging German Bourgeoisie,” Musical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2002): 186–235. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik in der Tonkunst (1854); the corresponding passage is On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 59. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. Mahler apparently made the comment after the cellos overemphasized the dynamics at the opening of the slow movement of his Fourth Symphony. If this is true, the comment reflects his anxiety about the critique of timbre, for his instruction had more to do with volume than timbre per se. BauerLechner, Recollections, p. 178, conversation of 12 Oct. 1901. Karl Grunsky, Musikästhetik, 4th rev. ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1923), p. 79. Karl Grunsky, Musikästhetik (Leipzig: Göschen, 1907), pp. 141–142. Mozart’s and Beethoven’s piano concertos, it was said, lost value in a twopiano arrangement, whereas a new composition by Karl Zeuner had such a meager role for the orchestra that “nothing important” would be “lost” in a solo keyboard transcription “Intelligenzblatt der Annalen der Literatur und Kunst in den österreichischen Staaten (Apr. 1807): 176–177, quoted from Mary Sue Morrow, “Of Unity and Passion: The Aesthetics of Concert Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” 19th-Century Music 13, no. 3 (1990): 195n5. The publication of a piano arrangement was coordinated with the timing of the symphony’s premiere. The four-hand piano reduction of the Sixth Symphony, for example, was commissioned from Alexander von Zemlinsky in autumn 1905 and was available for purchase at the beginning of May 1906, in time for the Essen premiere late that month. Theodor Helm, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 37, no. 2 (11 Jan. 1906): 34. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 10 Jan. 1907. Kuno Wolf, “Die klassische Symphonie und ihre Bedeutung für die Gegenwart,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 73, no. 20 (16 May 1906): 440. His

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

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Notes to Pages 88–91 terms are difficult to capture in English—“gleichzeitige Resonanz zwischen sinnlichem Reiz und geistigem Empfinden.” Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Dec. 1905. Grunsky, Musikästhetik (1907), pp. 140, 142. Grunsky, Musikästhetik, 4th rev. ed. (1923), pp. 79–80. David Josef Bach, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 10 Jan. 1907. Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s Magazine (Mar. 1896), reproduced at http://www.njit.edu/v2/ Library/archlib/pub-domain/sullivan-1896-tall-bldg.html. Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen” (1908), trans. in Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, trans. Harold Meek (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 231. Siegfried Kracauer later developed a similar ideology of ornament in his contributions to the Frankfurter Zeitung, reprinted in Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963). See also David Morgan, “The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, no. 3 (1992): 231–242. Arnold Schoenberg, “Gustav Mahler” (1912, rev. 1948), in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (1975; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 463. Niemann, Musik seit Wagner, rev. ed. Musik der Gegenwart, p. 147. Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 28 May 1907, trans. in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” p. 346 (trans. emended). Elsa Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909, trans. in Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 326. The categories of analysis, which include instrumentation, are set forth in Guido Adler, Der Stil in der Musik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1911), and Methode der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1919), pp. 128–146. See the discussion of Adler in Stephen Parkany, “Kurth’s ‘Bruckner’ and the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 11, no. 3 (1988): 265. Karl Blessinger, Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart: Benno Filser, 1919), p. 103. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Beethovens Instrumental-Musik,” Zeitung fur die elegante Welt (1813), reprinted as Kreisleriana, no. 4, in Hoffmann, Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier: Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusiasten, mit einer Vorrede von Jean Paul (1814), in Hoffmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hartmut Steinecke (Frankfurt: Deutsche Klassiker, 1993), II, 1:53–54, trans. by Arthur Ware Locke as “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” Musical Quarterly 3, no. 1. (1917): 128. The essay is a revision of Hoffmann’s review of the Fifth Symphony and Piano Trios,

Notes to Pages 91–93

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

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op. 70, in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12, no. 40 (4 July 1810): 630–642; no. 41 (11 July): 652–659. Letter to Tolney-Witt, 7 Feb. 1893, in Martner, Letters of Mahler, pp. 148–149 (trans. emended). Mahler wielded a somewhat inflated scientific rhetoric (“prismatic colors” in lieu of the more idiomatic translation as “rainbow”) and concluded “perhaps you will object, as women will, being almost never convinced, at the most persuaded.” Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 159, conversation from the 1900–1901 concert season. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 17 Dec. 1907. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 311. Carl E. Schorske has addressed other artistic and biographical parallels in “Mahler and Klimt: Social Experience and Artistic Evolution,” in Gustav Mahler Kolloquium 1979, ed. Rudolf Klein (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981), pp. 16–28, reprinted in Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 29–49. Paul Stefan, Erdgeist 3, no. 18 (10 Oct. 1908), clipping, Vondenhoff Collection, Music Division, Austrian National Library. On Segantini, see Vivien Greene, “The Path to Universal Synthesis: Boccioni’s Development from Divisionism to Futurism,” in Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avant-garde in Milan and Paris, ed. Laura Mottioli Rossi (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 2004), pp. 23–33. Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 326. Edgar Istel, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 35, no. 45 (6 Nov. 1908): 797–798. Stefan summarized Mahler’s comments in his Gustav Mahler: Eine Studie über Persönlichkeit und Werk (1910), rpt. of 1912 ed., Munich: Piper, 1981), pp. 125–126. Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (1911), 3rd ed. 1922, trans. by Roy E. Carter as Theory of Harmony (1978; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 421 (trans. emended). Schoenberg’s various titles for the work and individual movements arose only in discussions of performance opportunities. The composer himself clearly hesitated to link the music to a program. The movement was untitled in the manuscript, first edition, and Webern arrangement. When the publisher requested titles for the individual movements, Schoenberg worked out possibilities in his diary that he felt did not reveal too much or were purely technical in nature, such as “chord colors” for the third movement. The various titles for the third movement in the period 1920–1925 had programmatic allusions; still, these were parenthetical and became increasingly abstract—the “Traun Lake at morning,” then “morning at the Traun Lake,” and finally “summer morning on a lake.” It was only in the reduced score that Schoenberg prepared in September 1949 and that was printed after his death that the title itself became programmatic: “summer morning at the sea (colors).” Reinhold Brinkmann, “Schoen-

296

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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Notes to Pages 94–99 berg, Op. 16,” in Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, 1986), pp. 63–70. Alexander Berrsche, Die Musik 13, no. 13 (Apr. 1914): 50, trans. in Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker: 1878–1943: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 53 (trans. emended). Max Nordau, Entartung (1892; 2nd ed., Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1893), p. 116; Degeneration, rpt. ed., intro. by George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 63 (trans. emended). Niemann, Musik seit Wagner (1913), rev. ed., Musik der Gegenwart, pp. 177, 233–234. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner (1888), in Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–) 6/3:18; trans. from “The Case of Wagner,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), sec. 6, p. 624. Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909. Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 12 Nov. 1904. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. Max Hehemann, Essener General-Anzeiger, 29 May 1906. Nordau, Entartung, p. 75, trans. from Degeneration, p. 41. Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (1911; rpt. New York: Arno, 1975), p. 324. The book is also discussed in Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 63. Niemann, Musik seit Wagner (1913), rev. ed., Musik der Gegenwart, pp. 122, 178, 210. Oskar Bie, Die moderne Musik und Richard Strauss, Die Kultur, ed. Cornelius Gurlitt (Berlin: Bard Marquardt, 1906), p. 26. Max Graf, Neues Wiener Journal, 15 Dec. 1905. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 166, conversation from the 1900–1901 concert season. It is not hard to see in these conversations Mahler’s search for identity as a German composer and his concerns about the response to his orchestration. He was so critical about timbre as a parameter precisely in the period he sought to develop a contrapuntal voice and claimed J. S. Bach as his teacher (p. 170). Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner (1938), trans. by Rodney Livingstone as In Search of Wagner (London: NLB, 1981), p. 79. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 Jun. 1906; Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907; Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 6 Jan. 1907. Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909, review of Mahler’s Third and Seventh. Max Vancsa, Die Wage 10, no. 2 (1907): 37–38. Hans Liebstöckl, Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt, 5 Jan. 1907. Schoenberg wrote a lengthy response to Liebstöckl’s article that questioned whether a composer has the “legal right” to produce a work such as Schoenberg’s First and Second String Quartets. Both documents are translated in Arnold

Notes to Pages 99–103

72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

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Schoenberg: String Quartet in F-sharp minor, Opus 10, ed. Severine Neff, Norton Critical Scores (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 215–222. Richard Wallaschek, Die Zeit, 9 Dec. 1905. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 Jun. 1906. Graf, Neues Wiener Journal, 15 Dec. 1905 (original italics), quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1897–), pt. I, vol. 48, Schriften zur Kunst: 1800–1816, Maximen und Reflexionen über Kunst, Aus dem Nachlaß, p. 212. Niemann, Musik seit Wagner (1913), rev. ed., Musik der Gegenwart, p. 179, quoting the entry of 11 Feb. 1831, in Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann (1930), trans. John Oxenford, ed. J. K. Moorhead (rpt., New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 378. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. These recollections about the premiere are from a later review in the Anhaltischer Staatsanzeiger, Dessau, 9 Feb. 1912. Albert Kauders, Fremden-Blatt, 5 Jan. 1907; Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler, Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and trans. Basil Creighton, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1973), p. 100. Ernst Eduard Taubert, Die Musik 5, no. 12 (Mar. issue no. 2, 1905): 446, and Die Musik 6, no. 3 (Nov. issue no. 1, 1906): 182–183. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 9 Oct. 1906. Gustav Altmann, Die Musik 5, no. 19 (Jun. issue no. 1, 1906): 49–50. Signed “Fr.,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 37 (21 Jun. 1906): 462. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 16 Jan. 1902. Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Dec. 1905. Werner Sombart, “Die Reklame,” Der Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur 2, no. 10 (1908): 281–286, cited from Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 94. Hermann Muthesius, “Wo stehen wir?” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 1912: Die Durchgeistung der deutschen Arbeit: Wege und Ziele in Zusammenhang von Industrie/Handwerk und Kunst (1913): 24, rpt. ed. Bernd Nicolai (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1999). Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, pp. 117, 123. Gustav Dömpke, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 Jan. 1886, quoted from Margaret Notley, “Volksconcerte in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, nos. 2–3 (1997): 438. Karl Hauer, “Die Hinrichtung der Sinne,” Die Fackel 139/140 (Dec. 1907): 20, 21, 23–24. See also Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 51. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, pp. 16–17, trans. as The Case of Wagner, sect. 5, p. 622. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, p. 21, trans. as The Case of Wagner sect. 7,

298

93. 94. 95.

96.

97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

105. 106.

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Notes to Pages 104–106 p. 626. Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Études littéraires (1883), ed. André Guyaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 14, trans. from Havelock Ellis, “A Note on Paul Bourget” (1889), in Ellis, Views and Reviews: A Selection of Uncollected Articles 1884–1932 (London: D. Harmsworth, 1932), p. 52. The idea that “Decadent” literature subordinates the whole to the parts comes, in turn, from the literary scholar Désiré Nisard (1806–1888). See Linda C. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de siècle (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 133; and Jan Kamerbeek, “‘Style de décadence,’” Revue de littérature comparée 39 (1965): 268–286. Nordau, Entartung, pp. 369–370, trans. as Degeneration, p. 208 (trans. emended). Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, pp. 103, 117. Kate Chopin, The Awakening: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Margaret Culley (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 25. The first translation, by Gustav Cohen, was Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music. A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Aesthetics, trans. (London: Novello, 1891). Dehmel, diary entry of 22 Mar. 1905, p. 6, Dehmel-Archiv, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg. This passage is quoted in Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler, p. 90. The translator introduces an opposition of logic versus sensuality that is absent from the German. Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909, trans. from Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 326. Adolf Prosniz, Kompendium der Musikgeschichte, 1750–1830, für Schulen und Konservatorien (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1915), p. 157, translated in Leon Botstein, “Aesthetics and Ideology in the Fin-de-siècle Mozart Revival,” Current Musicology 51 (1993): 8–9. Hans Ferdinand Redlich, “Die Welt der V., VI. und VII Symphonie,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 2, no. 7/8 (Apr. 1920): 266–267. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1911), trans. Clayton Koelb, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 112. On this tradition around 1800, see Painter, “Mozart at Work,” pp. 211–212. Stefan Zweig, “Eros matutinus,” in The World of Yesterday (1941), trans. Cedar and Eden Paul (1943; rpt. London: Cassell, 1987), pp. 61–78. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 308. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 28 May 1907, trans. in Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” pp. 341–342. The quotation is from one of Michelangelo’s poems to Vittoria Colonna (no. 164), and the translation is from James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: an Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 322. Hugo Fleischer, “Der symbolische Gehalt der symphonischen Formen,” Der Merker 4, no. 15 (1 Aug. 1913): 566. Eduard Hanslick, Neue Freie Presse, 19[?] Dec. 1876, trans. in Henry

Notes to Pages 106–109

107.

108. 109.

110.

111.

112. 113. 114.

115.

116.

117. 118. 119.

120.

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Pleasants, ed., Hanslick’s Music Criticisms (1950; rpt. New York: Dover, 1988), p. 127 (trans. emended). His purpose was to contrast the unimposing presence of the conductor with the vigor of his music. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler, Moderne Essays, no. 52 (Berlin: Gose & Tetzlaff, 1905), p. 53. Stefan, Mahler, p. 123. Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Gustav Mahlers Fünfte Symphonie in Cis-Moll: technicalische Analyse,” Die Musik 4, no. 5 (Dec. issue 1, 1904): 318–319. Colleagues noted the imbalance in his assessment of Mahler in comparison with other composers; Nodnagel’s career ended prematurely in insanity. Adolf Loos, “Damenmode,” Neue Freie Presse, 21 Aug. 1898, trans. as “Ladies’ Fashion,” in Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays. 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 99. See also Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 50–54. Werner Sombart, Wirthschaft und Mode: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der modernen Bedarfsgestaltung (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1902), p. 14, trans. from Schwartz, Werkbund, pp. 27, 29 (trans. emended). The book was based on a chapter from Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 20 Nov. 1900. Gustav Schönaich, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 314 (trans. emended). Robert, Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, 11 Dec. 1905, quoting Karl Leberecht Immermann, Münchhausen: Eine Geschichte in Arabesken (1838), ed. Hans-Joachim Piechotta (Frankfurt: Insel, 1984). Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Dec. 1905. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 311. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 Jan. 1907. Mahler sent Kalbeck the piano arrangement of his completion of Carl Maria von Weber’s Die drei Pintos, to assist his preparation to review the premiere. Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 20 Nov. 1900, and Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909, review of Mahler’s Third and Seventh. Signed “M. Sp.,” Reichspost, 7 Nov. 1911. Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 10 April 1899. Mahler waived his royalties for the performance, but some complained that the fees to hire extra musicians would exceed the box-office earnings, thereby undermining the contribution to the pension. These allegations, made by two of the cellists, were fed to the same publication, Deutsche Zeitung, which boasted being the only anti-Semitic daily newspaper in Vienna, and the article appeared April 8, on the eve of the performance. Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 2, Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 1897– 1904 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 148–149. Elaine R. Sisman, Mozart: The “Jupiter” Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 7.

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Notes to Pages 110–113

121. Paul Hiller, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 71, no. 48 (23 Nov. 1904): 852. 122. Otto Neitzel, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 64, no. 41 (6 Jun. 1906): 690–691. 123. Niemann, Musik seit Wagner, p. 152. 124. Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 6 Jan. 1907. 125. Albert Kauders, Fremden-Blatt, 8 Dec. 1905. 126. Ernst Rychnovsky, Die Musik 8, no. 2 (Oct. issue no. 2, 1908): 126. 127. The “intense stimulation” and “extraordinary assurance” in achieving “artistic effect” revealed a brilliant “cerebral creative power.” Bekker, Musikdrama der Gegenwart, pp. 52–53, trans. in Hailey, Schreker, p. 53. 128. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 159, conversation from the 1900–1901 concert season. 129. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1904. 130. Strauss apparently made the comment to Richard Specht, recounted in Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), p. 249. 131. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 9 Dec. 1911. His term was Klänge, or sonorities, which refers to timbre as well as harmony. 132. Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 6 Nov. 1909. 133. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Malerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (1755), in Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, 2nd ed., Walther Rehm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), p. 43, translated as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1999). 134. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (1859; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1979), 2:193–207; Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978–1980), 3:587, entry of 31 Dec. 1880, citations from Thomas Grey, “Metaphorical Modes in Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism: Image, Narrative, and Idea,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 101. 135. The context Mahler’s was working on the Third Symphony, and these names appeared in a sketch for the first movement. Mahler, letter of 18 Nov. 1896 to Richard Batka, in Letters of Mahler, ed. Martner, pp. 197–198. 136. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 157, conversation from the 1900–1901 concert season. 137. Graf, Neues Wiener Journal, 15 Dec. 1905. 138. August Püringer, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 34, no. 12 (22 Mar. 1907), review of Schoenberg’s String Quartet, op. 7 (original italics). 139. Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 5 Nov. 1909, review of Mahler’s Third and Seventh. 140. Felix Adler, Bohemia, 20 Sept. 1908, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 320. 141. Otto Neitzel, Beethovens Symphonien, nach ihrem Stimmungsgehalt erläutert (Cologne: P. J. Tonger, 1912), pp. 71–73.

Notes to Pages 113–118

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142. Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Koelb, working note no. 4. 143. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 311. 144. In Salome, “no strong tone issues from the heavenly depths of the unconscious to order and rule over the whole.” Instead, “the thousands and thousands of tone particles that are shaken up in kaleidoscopic fashion, colorful images, and bright constellations emerge as if of their own volition and attempt to condense the billowing fog into a world.” Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 28 May 1907, trans. from Botstein, “Strauss and the Viennese Critics,” p. 340. 145. Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Dec. 1905. 146. Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 12 Dec. 1905. 147. Signed “-a-,” Rheinische Musik- und Theater-Zeitung 5, no. 25 (29 Oct. 1904). 148. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 311. Kalbeck faced criticism for his tendency to poeticize “absolute music,” as he would acknowledge in 1908 in Johannes Brahms II/1, 3rd ed., 1921; (rpt. Tutzing: Schneider, 1976), p. 58n, cited in Sandra McColl, “Max Kalbeck and Gustav Mahler,” 19th-Century Music 20, no. 2 (1996): 171. 149. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 173, conversation from summer 1901 (trans. emended). 150. Wagner, Oper und Drama, 7:110, trans. as “Opera and Drama,” p. 107 (trans. emended). 151. Mahler, letter to Richard Strauss, Jul. 1894, in Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss: Correspondence, 1888–1911, ed. Herta Blaukopf, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 37. 152. Richard Batka, Bohemia, 4 Mar. 1905. 153. Signed “–e,” Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung 20 Jan. 1910. 154. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, p. 129. Verweichlichen came to mean “to effeminate,” rather than “to soften,” at some point in the midnineteenth century. The newer usage appears in G. J. Adler, A Dictionary of the German and English Languages (New York: D. Appleton, 1877), p. 470. 155. Nordau, Entartung, p. 25, trans. as Degeneration, p. 13 (trans. emended). 156. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 311 157. Rheinische Musik- und Theater-Zeitung, 29 Oct. 1904. 158. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. from Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 312. Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 6 Nov. 1911. 159. Otto Neitzel, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 62, no. 65/66 (30 Nov. 1904): 1192–1194, reprinted in Gustav Mahler, Werk und Interpretation: Autographe, Partituren, Dokumente, ed. Rudolf Stephan (Cologne: Arno Volk, 1979), pp. 112–113. 160. Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Dec. 1905.

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Notes to Pages 118–122

161. Batka, Bohemia, 4 March 1905. “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life” (James 1:12), and “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (Rev. 2:10). 162. Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” pp. 325–326. 163. Artur Eccarius-Sieber, Neue Musikalische Presse 13, no. 20 (19 Nov. 1904): 326. 164. Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12 Dec. 1905, trans. from Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” p. 312. 165. Paul Ehlers, Der Sammler: Belletristische Beilage zur Augsburger Abendzeitung 77, no. 131 (29 Oct. 1908): 8. Early in the Third Reich, Ehlers became the Munich director of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (combat league for German culture), but over twenty years earlier, around the time of his Mahler reviews, Ehlers argued for the eradication of the Jewish race by full assimilation. Paul Ehlers, “Zum Rassenproblem in der Musik: Eine Erwiderung auf Prof. Dr. Robert Holzmanns Aufsatz in Nr. 29), Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 37, nos. 41–42 (1910): 873–874, 911–912, 940–942. Among his publications in the Third Reich is “Die Musik und Adolf Hitler,” Zeitschrift für Musik 106, no. 4 (Apr. 1939): 356–362. See also Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 16. 166. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 17 Dec. 1904. 167. Victor Joß, Deutsches Abendblatt, Prague, 21 Sept. 1908. 168. Richard Wallaschek, Die Zeit, 20 Sept. 1908. 169. Paul Bekker, Musikdrama der Gegenwart, p. 35. 170. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, pp. 421–422 (trans. emended). 171. Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921; rpt. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), p. 28. 172. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 72. 173. For a more theoretical investigation of what it meant to take on Wagner, in Adorno’s own development and within the political milieu of fascism, see Andreas Huyssen, “Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner,” New German Critique 29, The Origins of Mass Culture: The Case of Imperial Germany (1871–1918) (1983): 22, 29–37. 174. Arnold Schoenberg, “Instrumentation” (handwritten, 23–25 Nov. 1931), in Schoenberg, Style and Idea, pp. 330, 333–334. 175. The Bekker quotation is from the Neues Musikalisches Journal, 5 Jun. 1918. Elsa Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 13 Feb. 1907, clipping, Schönberg Center. 176. Karl Blessinger, “Die Symptome der Dekadenz in der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4, no. 3 (Dec. 1921): 172, 177, 179. 177. On Blessinger’s biography, see Potter, Most German of the Arts, p. 189. 178. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (1930; Munich: Hoheneichen, 1937), p. 431, trans. by Vivian Bird as The Myth of the Twentieth

Notes to Pages 122–128

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Century: an Evaluation of the Spiritual-intellectual Confrontations of our Age (Torrance, CA: Noontide Press, 1982), p. 264. 179. Helmut von der Steinen, “Beethoven-Feier,” Gewissen: Unabhängige Zeitung für Volksbildung 9 (28 Mar. 1927), quoted from David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 127. Celebrating the spiritual bond with one of Germany’s allies in World War I, von der Steinen published Die Bulgaren und wir: Betrachtungen über die innerlichen Beziehungen der beiden Völker (Berlin, 1917).

4. Mahler’s Progressive Legacy and the Aestheticization of Violence 1. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik in der Tonkunst (1854), trans. by Geoffrey Payzant as On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 60. 2. Eduard Hanslick, Neue Freie Presse, 4 Dec. 1883, trans. in Henry Pleasants, ed., Hanslick’s Music Criticisms (1950; rpt. New York: Dover, 1988), p. 211 (trans. emended). 3. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 21 Sept. 1908. 4. Walter concurred, writing that “the orchestration failed to bring out clearly the complicated contrapuntal tissue of the voices.” Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler (1936), trans. Lotte Walter Lindt (New York: Knopf, 1958), p. 54. 5. Artur Eccarius-Sieber, Neue Musikalische Presse 13, no. 20 (19 Nov. 1904): 325. 6. Wilhelm Mauke, Neue Musikalische Presse 15, no. 22 (1 Dec. 1906): 459; Maximilian Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 6 Jan. 1907. 7. Leopold Schmidt, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 June 1906. 8. Julius Korngold, Neue Freie Presse, 8 Jan. 1907. 9. Julius Korngold, Die Musik 6, no. 11 (March issue no. 1, 1907): 327. 10. Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921; rpt. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), p. 210. 11. Elsa Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Nov. 1909, trans. in Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig, “Mahler’s German-Language Critics,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 326. 12. Walther Hirschberg, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 78, no. 37 (15 Sept. 1920): 879. 13. Late in the fall of 1891, Mahler wrote to his friend Emil Freund about Nietzsche, “In the last few weeks I have been reading something so remarkable and strange that it may very well have an epoch-making influence on my life.” Undated letter in Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), p. 140.

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Notes to Pages 128–132

14. Rudolf Louis, Münchner neueste Nachrichten, [29] Oct. 1908, clipping, Vondenhoff collection. 15. Ernst Rychnovsky, Die Musik 8, no. 2 (Oct. issue no. 2, 1908): 126–127. 16. Robert Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 4, no. 29 (8 Apr. 1836): 123, review of Moscheles’s Fifth and Sixth piano concertos, cited in Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 203. 17. Max Vancsa, Die Wage 10, no. 2 (1907): 37, clipping, Vondenhoff collection, Music Division, Austrian National Library. 18. Hans Rott’s E-minor Symphony also has a lengthy slow introduction to the finale. Mahler studied the work in July 1900, with an eye to programming it at the Vienna Philharmonic. Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 146, conversation from the 1899–1900 concert season. 19. The chord is spelled as a German sixth in C minor (a dominant seventh chord on Aa, spelled Aa, C, Ea, and F#, enharmonically Ga), but the key signature changes before the key of C minor is established. The pedal on C, which makes the chord enharmonically an Aa-major seventh in first inversion, heightens the feeling of suspension. The effect is so striking because of the sonority is harmonically from the A-major chord that follows at m. 9. Of the other seventh chords that share no common tones with A major, Ea major and Ba major would provide a feeling of continuity with the Ea major Andante, and G major would produce a traditional cadential structure when the passage is recalled at mm. 520ff., with a “tonic” resolution to C major/minor. 20. Signed “Fr.,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 37, no. 25 (21 Jun. 1906): 463. 21. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913), p. 297. Specht’s embryo metaphor is apt, since the thematic material derives from the first theme of the finale’s modified sonata form, the so-called march theme (mm. 115ff.) and the entire horn theme from the second group at mm. 288ff. 22. Letter of 6 Jan. 1854 to Joseph Joachim, in Robert Schumanns Briefe: Neue Folge, ed. F. Gustav Jansen, 2nd exp. and rev. ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1904), p. 390. 23. Theodor Wilhelm Werner, “Mahlers tragische Symphonie,” Hamburgischer Correspondent, 2 Feb. 1931. 24. Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, pp. 40, 60, 67, 131; the conversations took place in summer 1895, 28 Jun. 1896, Aug. 1896 (probably), and the period of 8 Jun. to 29 July 1899. Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, p. 20. 25. Letter of 3 Mar. 1910, in Ferruccio Busoni, Letters to His Wife, trans. Rosamond Ley (1938; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1975), p. 156. 26. Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Gustav Mahlers Fünfte Symphonie in Cis-Moll: Technicalische Analyse,” Die Musik 4, no. 4 (Nov. issue no. 2, 1904): 245. 27. Frankfurter Zeitung, 30 May 1906, reprinted in Gustav Mahler, Werk und

Notes to Pages 133–138

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

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Interpretation: Autographe, Partituren, Dokumente, ed. Rudolf Stephan (Cologne: Arno Volk, 1979), p. 114. Friedrich Brandes, Kunstwart 19, no. 20 (Jul. issue no. 2, 1906): 427–428. Richard Bakta, “Das Jüdische bei Gustav Mahler,” Kunstwart 23, no. 20 (Jul. issue no. 2, 1910): 97–98. Batka’s article, in turn, may have inspired Moritz Goldstein to publish his seminal article on German-Jewish synthesis in the same journal, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß,” Kunstwart 25, no. 11 (Mar. issue no. 1, 1912): 281–294. Albert Kauders, Fremden-Blatt, 5 Jan. 1907. David Josef Bach, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 10 Jan. 1907. Muntz, Deutsche Zeitung, 6 Jan. 1907. Anhaltischer Staatsanzeiger, 9 Feb. 1912, quoting from Wilhelm II’s speech of 5 Mar. 1890, in Reden Kaiser Wilhelms II, ed. Axel Matthes (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1976), p. 327. See also Ernst von Reventlow, Kaiser Wilhelm II und die Byzantiner (Munich: J. F. Lehmann (1906), p. 42. Signed “R.,” Essener Volks-Zeitung, 29 May 1906. Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, pp. 225–226. Ibid., p. 18. Letter to the composer and conductor Volkmar Andreae, in Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Ursula and Volker Michels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973–), 1:255–257. Hermann Hesse, “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 3 Nov. 1914,” reprinted in Hesse, Krieg und Frieden: Betrachtungen zu Krieg und Politik seit dem Jahr 1914 (1946), pp. 17–26, trans. by Ralph Manheim as If the War Goes On: Reflections on War and Politics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), pp. 9–14. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fünf Gesänge: August 1914,” no. 3, in Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe, ed. Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fülleborn, Horst Nalewski and August Stahl (Frankfurt: Insel, 1996), vol. 2. Gedichte 1910 bis 1926, pp. 106–111. See also The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Gerhart Pastors, letter of 16 Apr. 1915, in Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten, ed. Philipp Witkop (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1916), pp. 49–51, cited in Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 202. Paul Bekker, “Kunst und Krieg II” (1915), reprinted in Bekker, Kritische Zeitbilder (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921), p. 193. Eugen Schmitz, “Zum Verständnis von Beethovens Eroika,” Hochland 9, no.1 (Mar. 1912): 747–752, reprinted in Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 44 (1 Jun. 1917): 362–366. One of his articles, “Eine Kriegserinnerung in Beethovens Missa,” Hochland 13, no. 2 (1916) 218–223, was reprinted in the Deutsche Militär-MusikerZeitung 38 (1916): 153, quoted in David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 80–81.

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Notes to Pages 138–142

44. On resistance to the militarization of Beethoven, see Dennis, Beethoven, pp. 78–83. 45. The first edition was fifteen pages and appeared in the Deutsche Monatsschrift für Politik und Volkstum; the second edition grew to 115 pages, and by the later 1920s, the editions were over three hundred pages. Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten, pp. 14–15, 83. 46. The soldier was a student from Leipzig who served in the artillery near Soissons. “Beethovens C-moll-Sinfonie im Schützengraben,” Deutsche Militär-Musiker-Zeitung 37 (1915): 4, trans. in Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, pp. 75–76n.141. According to Dennis the letter also appeared in the Vossische Zeitung, although he does not provide its date. 47. Hugo Riemann, “Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage,” L. van Beethoven: Sämtliche Klavier-Solosonaten: Ästhetische und formal-technische Analyse mit historischen Notizen (Berlin: M. Hesse, 1919–1920), 1: n. p., cited in Michael H. Kater, introduction to Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), p. 9. The entire statement appeared in italics in the original. 48. Letter of 14 Sept. 1914, from Werchter, Belgium, in Gottfried Sender, Blätter der Erinnerung für seine Freunde: Aus seinen Feldpostbriefen, ed. Moritz Spanier (1915), 3rd rev. ed. (Hamburg: Glogau, 1916), p. 24, cited in George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 112. Sender’s works were included in a collection of poetry by Jewish soldiers who perished in World War I; he received an Iron Cross in Berlin in 1915 and was killed in action later that year. 49. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger. Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 173. 50. Karl Blessinger, Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart: Benno Filser, 1919), p. iii. 51. Hans Joachim Moser, Geschichte der deutschen Musik (1920), 2nd ed. (1923; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 1:viii. 52. Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), p. 16. A revised version was included in Bekker, Gesammelten Schriften, vol. 3, Neue Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1923), pp. 1–40. 53. Karl Blessinger, Die Überwindung der musikalischen Impotenz (Stuttgart: Benno Filser, 1920), p. 81. 54. Carl Johann Perl, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 6 Oct. 1920. The specific analogy was an “unwritten book” hidden with seven seals, a reference to Revelation, and the context was a review of the Eighth Symphony. 55. Rudolf Louis, Anton Bruckner (Munich: Georg Müller, 1905), pp. 185, 195–196. 56. Guido Adler, Gustav Mahler (Leipzig: Universal-Edition, 1916), p. 53, trans. in Edward R. Reilly, Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Records of a Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 42–43. 57. Adolf Weißmann, Die Musik in der Weltkrise (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1922), p. 240. The quotation is a free rendering of “Denn es ist,

Notes to Pages 142–144

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

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durch alle Härten, Stacheln, Verworrenheiten, Unentschlossenheiten hindurch der Weg zu einer höheren Einfachheit, zu einem anderen Umriß zu erkennen.” My translation draws from that by M. M. Bozman, The Problems of Modern Music (London, Toronto: Dent, 1925), p. 224. Egon Stein, “Proletarische Orchestermusik,” Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle 2, no. 6 (1927): 7. In Thomas Baum’s Grenzpass (1995), Egon Stein, a young Austrian pianist and celebrated journalist, witnesses a busload of war refugees being refused entrance into Austria. Another contributor recounted the joy of orchestral playing from the perspective of a double bassist (in particular, contributing to the funeral march from Mahler’s First Symphony). Otto Böhm, “Der Mann am Kontrabass,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 3 (Nov. 1929): 83–84. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Sinfonietta hardly counts as new music. The work, composed by the fifteen-year-old prodigy and son of the critic Julius Korngold, was programmed in the 1930 New Year’s Day concert of Viennese music. The complete programs are listed in Johann Wilhelm Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus: Zur Musikrezeption der österreichischen Arbeiterbewegung im späten Kaiserreich und in der Ersten Republik (Vienna: Böhlau, 1989). The Austrian socialists, unlike the German Left, had not split with the communists and therefore sought to show their support for the Soviet experiment. The Soviet works were Vasily Kalinnikov’s First Symphony (1895), performed in November 1924, and Nikolay Yakovlevich Myaskovsky’s Fifth Symphony (1918), performed in March 1928. See, for example, “Eine Mahler-Anekdote,” Kunst und Volk 3, no. 3 (Nov. 1928): 62. August Beer, Pester Lloyd, 21 Nov. 1889, facsimile in Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years: Chronicles and Commentaries (1975, rpt. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), p. 151. Mahler’s contemporaries occasionally referred to the urban character explicitly. One right-wing critic decried the “brown, urban rhythms” characteristic of Mahler’s music, in a review that also lamented the “industrialization” of musical life in Munich. The occasion was the Munich premiere of the Seventh Symphony. Paul Ehlers, Der Sammler, no. 131 (29 Oct. 1908): 8. Bach, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 10 Jan. 1907. Paul A. Pisk, “Zur Soziologie der Musik,” Der Kampf: Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift 18, no. 5 (May 1925): 186. The new music programmed on the workers’ symphony concerts suggested otherwise, with a suite from Karl Lafite’s fairy-tale opera The Fantasy Kingdom (1923) and the symphonic poem Arcadia (1930), composed by a R. Stimmer. Georg Schünemann, “Die Arbeiter-Sinfonie,” Deutsche Arbeiter Sänger Zeitung 30, no. 9 (1929): 177, quoted from Werner Fuhr, Proletarische Musik in Deutschland, 1928–1933 (Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1977), p. 116. Theodor W. Adorno, Die Musik 26, no. 9 (Jun. 1934): 712. Hermann Wunsch, letter to Schenker, 29 March 1924, OJ 15/31, [3],

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69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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Notes to Pages 144–149 Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside, transcribed in http://www.columbia.edu/~idb1/schenker/002170.html. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (1982; rpt. Cologne: Dittrich, 2000), p. 271, quoting W. Krautwald, “Ein musikalisches Ereignis in Velbert,” Rheinische Landeszeitung: Volksparole: Niederbergischer Beobachter, 4 Apr. 1944. Alfred Durus [pseudonym for Alfred Kemény], “Arbeitermusik: Revolutionäre Chöre—reformistische Orchesterwerke,” Die Rote Fahne, 12 Dec. 1929. Der Weckruf 1 (1931): 47, quoted from Fuhr, Proletarische Musik, p. 115n72. According to Fuhr, there are no extant copies of the score. David Josef Bach, “Sozialismus und Kunst,” Kunst und Volk 5, no. 5 (Jul. 1931): 92. Signed “Gamma,” “Des Bürgers Beethoven-Ehrung: Der verfälschte Beethoven,” Die Rote Fahne, 26 March 1927, partially quoted in Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, p. 95n63. Furtwängler’s lecture took place in Berlin. Natan L. Fishmana associates the piano sonata with the letter in which Beethoven refused to compose a “revolutionary” sonata, as requested by his publisher, but agreed to follow the proposed commission in general, “aesthetic” terms. Letter of 8 Apr. 1802 to Franz Anton Hoffmeister, in Ludwig van Beethoven, Briefwechsel: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg (Munich: G. Henle, 1996–), 1:105–106. N. L. Fishmana, Kniga Eskizov Beethovena za 1802–1803 Gody (Moscow: Gos. Muzykal’noe izd-vo, 1962), as reviewed by Boris Schwarz in Musical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1963): 523. “Revolutions-Sinfonie,” Die Rote Fahne, 28 Dec. 1924, cited in Inge Lammel, Arbeitermusikkultur in Deutschland, 1844–1945: Bilder und Dokumente (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1984), p. 195. Bekker, Sinfonie, pp. 10–11, 15–19. Signed “H.,” Essener General-Anzeiger, 29 May 1906. Leopold Schmidt, Signale 63, nos. 65/66 (15 Nov. 1905): 1176–1177, and Berliner Tageblatt, 2 Jun. 1906. Louis, Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 29 Oct. 1908. Rudolf Louis, Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (Munich: Georg Müller, 1909), p. 183. Walther Riezler, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, no. 7 (Nov. 1910): 605. Mainzer Anzeiger, 21 Dec. 1911. Elsa Bienenfeld, Neues Wiener Journal, 19 May 1911. Paul Bekker, “Gustav Mahler” (1911), reprinted in Bekker, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Klang und Eros (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), pp. 220, 225, 227. This obituary is different from what Bekker wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung, trans. in Painter and Varwig, “Mahler’s Critics,” pp. 348–351. Specht, Mahler, p. 41. Paul Bekker, “Der sinfonische Stil” (1919), reprinted in Bekker, Klang und Eros, p. 321.

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86. Theodor W. Werner, Hamburgischer Correspondent, 22 Aug. 1925, review of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. 87. One “strives for a maximal feeling of power; essentially a striving for more power; striving is nothing other than striving for power; the basic and most innermost thing is still this will.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1885–1888), trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), no. 689. 88. Ferdinand Tönnies, Die Sitte (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1909). 89. Grunsky, Musikästhetik (1907), p. 71. 90. Ibid., p. 27; Grunsky, Musikästhetik, 4th rev. ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1923), pp. 121–122. 91. Carl Petersen, “Vom Gesetz der Musik,” in Das Schicksal der Musik von der Antike zur Gegenwart, ed Erich Wolff and Carl Petersen, Werke der Schau und Forschung aus dem Kreise der Blätter für die Kunst (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1923), pp. 184–185. “In the sonatas and symphonies we sense, if subdued, the stuff of the essence of the emerging desire, even if here also the closed melody, which elevates the undivided theme,” which Mozart then “like a game divides contrapuntally into ever smaller parts.” I have not identified the Wagner source that Petersen quotes. 92. Alfred Rosenberg, Der völkische Staatsgedanke: Überlieferung und Neugeburt (Munich: self-published, distribution by Deutschvölkische, 1924), excerpted in Nazi Ideology before 1933: A Documentation, trans. Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 69. 93. Klaus Pringsheim, Neues Wiener Journal, 15 Sept. 1923. 94. Paul Bekker, Das Musikdrama der Gegenwart: Studien und Charakteristiken (Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder, 1909), p. 53, cited in Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker, 1878–1943: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 45. 95. Paul Bekker, “Futuristengefahr?” Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 Jan. 1918, reprinted in Kritische Zeitbilder, pp. 294–295, 267–268. The reprint erroneously gives the date as 1917. 96. The noun form Einheitlichkeit was not included in Grimm’s Wörterbuch, dating from the nineteenth century, but was, however, included in the preeminent philosophy dictionary, where it was defined as “a state of being unified.” Rudolf Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1904), p. 244. 97. Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, p. 226. 98. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 99. Ibid., p. 197. 100. Ibid., p. 20. 101. Ibid., p. 174. 102. Ibid., p. 200. 103. Ibid., p. 225. 104. Paul Bekker, “Klang und Eros: Brief in die Ferne” (1922), reprinted in Bekker, Klang und Eros, pp. 349–350. It is quite possible that Ernst Kurth, who corresponded with Bekker in the 1920s, borrowed from him the idea of music as cosmic “waves,” which I discuss in Chapter 5.

310 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

113. 114. 115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

120.

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Notes to Pages 154–157 Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, p. 196. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., pp. 261–262. Ibid., p. 241. Blessinger, Probleme der Gegenwart, pp. 12, 23, 82. Egon Lustgarten, “Mahlers lyrisches Schaffen,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 2, nos. 7–8 (Apr. 1920): 271. Letter of 17 Dec. 1923, Paul Bekker Collection, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University. http://www.musik.unibe.ch/unibe/philhist/musik/ content/e308/e368/files540/VolltextbriefeKurth_Vers3.pdf. Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of ‘Habitus’ in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989), trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 696. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1911), trans. Clayton Koelb, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974), Nachgelassene Fragmente, IX/1 (fall 1885–early 1886), p. 41 (fragment #155), quoted in Specht, Mahler, p. 38. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), ed. Jeremy Jennings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ernst Mach, “On Mental Adaptation” in Popular Scientific Lectures, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (Chicago: Open Court, 1895), p. 220, cited in Sidney M. Kwiram, “Tones for Thought: Arnold Schoenberg and the Culture of Scientific Modernism in Fin-de-siècle Vienna” (honor’s thesis, Harvard University, 1999), p. 16. Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (1896), 2nd rev. ed. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1899), pp. 357–359, 362. Helga Weigel, “Musikalisher Rhythmus als Mittel der Leistungssteigerung bei der Schreibmaschinenarbeit,” in Musik und Gesellschaft: Arbeitsblätter für soziale Musikpflege und Musikpolitik, ed. Fritz Jöde and Hans Boettcher (1930–1931) rpt. ed. Dorothea Kolland (West Berlin: Das europäische Buch, 1978), pp. 60–61. Peter Behrens, “Einfluss von Zeit- und Raumausnutzung auf moderne Formentwicklung,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 3, Der Verkehr (1914): 7, citation from Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 208. Richard Harlfinger, “Der Rhythmus in der bildende Kunst,” Kunst und Volk 1, no. 3 (Apr. 1926): 8. To think about the visual arts in musical terms would have come naturally to Harlfinger, who was also a book il-

Notes to Pages 158–161

122. 123. 124.

125.

126.

127.

128.

129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134.

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lustrator, including Unsere Lieder: Singbuch für Österreichs Wandervögel and an edition of farmers’ music. Gustav Becking, Der musikalische Rhythmus als Erkenntnisquelle (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1928). Fritz Rosenfeld, “Das Theater Tairoffs,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 8 (Apr. 1930): 247. Fritz Rosenfeld, “Der heilige Berg,” Völkermagazin [no date given], reprinted in Berge, Licht und Traum: Dr. Arnold Fanck und der deutsche Bergfilm, ed. Jan-Christopher Horak with Gisela Pichler (Munich: Bruckmann, 1997), pp. 210–211. Kurt Weill, “Zeitoper,” Melos 7, no. 3 (Mar. 1928): 106–108, reprinted in Weill, Musik und musikalisches Theater: Gesammelte Schriften mit einer Auswahl von Gesprächen und Interviews, ed. Stephen Hinton and Jürgen Schebera with Elmar Juchem (Mainz: Schott, 2000), pp. 64–67. “Alles ist Rhythmus / Rhythmus ist alles / Seele, ist Gefühl für Rhythmus / Geist, ist Rhythmus im Gefühl,” in Erich Kästner, “Diarrhoe des Gefühls,” Kunst und Volk 5, no. 3 (Jan. 1931): 64. Filippo Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra, “The Futurist Synthetic Theater” (1915), in Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 128. Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890–1950: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 201–206. See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 201. Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche and His Century” (1924), in Spengler, Selected Essays, trans. and ed. Donald O. White (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), pp. 181–182. Maria Gutmann, “Sprechchöre,” Kunst und Volk 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1928): 14–15. Hugo Fleischer, “Der symbolische Gehalt der symphonischen Formen,” Der Merker 4, no. 15 (1 Aug. 1913): 566–567. Many of the reviews discussed here have been transcribed in Stefan Hanheide, Mahlers Visionen vom Untergang: Interpretationen der Sechsten Symphonie (Osnabrück: epOs-music, 2004), which is available on-line. Signed “K.,” Der neue Tag, 12 Oct. 1919. Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, p. 21. Ibid., p. 16, trans. from Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), p. 64 (trans. emended). The reviewer was perhaps revising the claim made in the authoritative interpretation by Bekker, which was more pessimistic, seeing the hammer as a “crushing effect against which mankind can no longer fight” (Bekker, Mahlers Sinfonien, p. 209). Neueste Nachrichten, Braunschweig, 8 May 1923. Early reviewers interpreted the hammer as a symbol of fate—for

312

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140.

141. 142.

143.

144. 145.

146. 147. 148.

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Notes to Pages 161–166 example, Robert Hirschfeld (Wiener Abendpost, 10 Jan. 1907) and Max Vancsa (Die Wage 10, no. 2 [1907]: 37–38). Signed “G. M.,” Prager Zeitung, 25 Jan. 1927. Felix Adler, Bohemia, 24 Apr. 1923 and 25 Feb. 1927. Werner, Hamburgischer Correspondent, 2 Feb. 1931. Walter Schrenk, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 Nov. 1929. It didn’t help that the program included the skeletal Tenth, a work that some believe should not be performed as such, since its austerity can project a “late” style onto Mahler’s oeuvre when in fact the symphony was never completed. Adler, Bohemia, 25 Feb. 1927. Adler acknowledged that the conductor in this case, Alexander von Zemlinsky, achieved the requisite degree of control and impact on the listener. Other assessments of his conducting were, however, less enthusiastic. At this point, age fifty-six, Zemlinsky held a modest appointment as kapellmeister at the Kroll Opera under Otto Klemperer. Signed “K.,” Der Neue Tag, 12 Oct. 1919. “One senses in every measure how much the Vienna Philharmonic loves its Schubert”—tender sonorities, “sweet inwardness” in the melodic writing, and “bucolic winds.” Marx went on to point out that Krauss does not conduct this work like a “symphonic problem (as it can easily be for unViennese musicians) but rather has the music bloom and sing from within itself.” Joseph Marx, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Jan. 1933. That summer, Krauss would take over the premiere of Strauss’s Arabella in Dresden when Fritz Busch was driven away on political grounds. Rudolf Ploderer, “Marx und Mahler,” 23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift, no. 11/12 (Jun.1933): 13–17. The journal was founded in 1932. Ploderer helped found the journal in 1932 as a corrective to lapses in Viennese music criticism. Ploderer pointed out that Marx, one of the city’s eminent composers, had begun to associate Mahler with the Jewish poet Heine and saw a genius in Wagner he had never before perceived. In February of that year he published a lengthy review of Richard Eichenauer’s Musik und Rasse and, despairing about the political situation in Germany and Austria, he committed suicide on Sept. 10, 1933. Joseph Marx, Neues Wiener Journal, 11 Apr. 1933. Marx, letters through 1944 from the Propaganda Ministry are housed at Austrian National Library. Marx’s correspondence from 1938 to 1945 has not survived. Oskar Bie, Die neue Rundschau 31, no. 4 (Apr. 1920): 483–485. Oskar Bie, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 25 May 1920. Leopold Schmidt, “Beethoven” (15 Dec. 1920), reprinted in Schmidt, Musikleben der Gegenwart (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1922), p. 154, in contrast to Schmidt, Aus dem Musikleben der Gegenwart: Beiträge zur zeitgenössischen Kunstkritik (Berlin: Hofmann, 1909), p. 225. Arnold Schering, Beethoven und der deutsche Idealismus (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1921), pp. 3–4, 17, lecture of 16 Dec. 1920.

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150. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12, no. 40 (4 July 1810): 630–642; no. 41 (11 July 1810): 652. 151. Beethoven was absent at two other points in its thirty-year history, the year after the 1927 centenary—during Beethoven fatigue of the highest order— and the final four seasons, during political turbulence that ended when the performances were banned in the wake of the February 1934 rebellion. 152. Why We Fight was produced and directed by Frank Capra, with scoring by Alfred Newman and Dimitri Tiomkin.

5. Bruckner’s Nationalist Legacy and the Aestheticization of Space 1. Leopold Schmidt, Musikleben der Gegenwart (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1922), p. iv. 2. Arnold Schoenberg, letter of 26 Jul. 1921 to Alma Mahler, transcribed in E. Randol Schoenberg, “The Most Famous Thing He Never Said,” in JMI International Forum for Suppressed Music, no. 4 (2002), http://www.jmi.org.uk/suppressedmusic/newsletter/ifsm_news4.html#7. In its oft-quoted formulation, the statement has a dubious lineage: a comment Schoenberg made to his young student Josef Rufer, whose recollection was published only the year of the composer’s death, in a book by his colleague, H. H. Stuckenschmidt, who recounted it in Arnold Schönberg (Zurich: Atlantis, 1951), trans. by Humphrey Searle as Schoenberg: His Life, World, and Work (London: Calder, 1977), p. 277. Recent commentators have found the comment surprising or implausible, apparently on the assumption that the anti-Semitism at Mattsee would have led the composer away from German cultural imperialism. Ena Steiner, “Schoenberg on Holiday: His Six Summers on Lake Traun,” Musical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1986): 39–40. 3. Bruckner’s undated letter of 1874 to an unknown addressee, was quoted from Max Leyrer, Anton Bruckner: Essay, Dichtung der Gegenwart, vol. 41 (Graz: Stiasny, 1956), p. 17. 4. Armin Mohler coined the term “conservative revolution” in Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932: ein Handbuch (1950), 6th ed. (Graz: Ares, 2005). The classic study of German academics is Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (1969; rpt. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), pp. 395, 401–403. 5. Georg Gräner, Anton Bruckner, Die Musik (Leipzig: Kistner & Siegel, 1924), p. 18. Gräner’s musical orientation, even before the book on Bruckner, was open to more modern and processive approaches to form. He had written several guides to Strauss operas as well as to the orchestral works of Reger, the master of fugal and processive form. On Rosenberg, see chapter 6, p. 169. 6. Hans Pfitzner, “Marschner’s Vampyr” (1924), in Pfitzner, Gesammelte Schriften (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1926–1929), 1:126.

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7. August Halm, Beethoven (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1927), p. 13, trans. from Lee A. Rothfarb, personal communication. 8. Beginning with the Eighth Symphony, the scherzo comes before the Adagio, a rearrangement that occurred to Mahler in early performances of his own Sixth Symphony. 9. The second movement of the Second Symphony was marked feierlich, and the second movements of the Sixth and Seventh symphonies sehr feierlich. Three movements in the Eighth Symphony include the designation feierlich (midway through the first movement and at the opening of the third movement and fourth movement). Two movements of the Ninth Symphony are designated feierlich—the first movement and third, which was the last movement Bruckner completed. 10. Additional performances of Bruckner in the Viennese Workers’ Symphony Concerts included the Third Symphony in 1919 (under Löwe), the Fourth Symphony in 1922 (Rudolf Huber), the First Symphony in 1923 (Ludwig Rüth), the Fifth Symphony in 1925 (Franz Schalk), the Seventh Symphony in 1927 (Anton Webern), and the Third Symphony in 1929 (Rudolf Gerhard Schwarz). 11. The context was a politicization of Mahler, about whom Stefan made the same point: Mahler wrote for the entire people, not just his bourgeois audiences. Paul Stefan, “Mahler für Jedermann,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 3 (Nov. 1929): 82. 12. Books on Bruckner appeared the following years: in 1919 by Ernst Decsey; in 1921 by Franz Gräflinger, Albert Knapp, and Erich Schwebsch; in 1922 by August Göllerich (who had studied with the composer), Karl Grunsky, Richard Wetz, and Hans Tessmer; in 1923 by Max Auer; in 1924 by Josef Daninger and Oskar Lang; in 1925 by Alfred Orel and Ernst Kurth; in 1926, again by Orel; in 1927 by Gräflinger (a revision of his 1911 book); in 1930 by Fritz Grüninger; in 1932 by Max Auer; and in 1933 by Max von Oberleithner. 13. Ernst Kurth makes several references to Erich Schwebsch, in Anton Bruckner: Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis von Entwickelungen in der Musik (Stuttgart: Der Kommende Tag, 1921). Schwebsch’s extensive writings have appeared as Bruckners Symphonien, ed. Jürgen Schriefer (Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben & Urachhaus, 2003). 14. The abstraction and religiosity of Grüninger’s approach made these books irrelevant during the National Socialist regime, but both were reissued after 1945. 15. Born in Hamburg to Hungarian parents, Decsey remade himself into a Viennese through his fiction and musical writings, including biographies of Joseph Marx, Vienna’s most prominent living composer, and two of Austria’s most popular composers, Johann Strauss and Franz Léhar (the former subtitled “A Viennese Book”). Decsey’s final book on music, of 1924, took up Schubert, the quintessential Viennese composer. 16. Lorenz, on the faculty at the University of Munich, offered courses on Bruckner each academic year, 1928 to 1933 and again in 1938–1939; he

Notes to Pages 171–175

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18. 19. 20.

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24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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also published numerous articles on the composer’s music. See Stephen McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner’s Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology (Rochester. N.Y.: University of Rochester, 1998). Kurth addressed his isolation in poignant terms in letters to Halm on 6 Aug. 1923 (no. 69.833/6) and 22 Feb. 1926 (no. 69.833/12), Halm estate papers, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach. I am grateful to Professor Rothfarb for providing me with transcriptions of these letters. Ernst Kurth, Bruckner (1925; rpt., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971), 1:vii. Karl Blessinger, Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart: Benno Filser, 1919), p. 58. Beyond the questionable claim that Mahler would pay reverence to the city of the premiere (indeed, one to which he had no particular connection), it is unlikely that the location of the 1906 annual festival of the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein was determined by the summer of 1903, when Mahler had completed two movements of the symphony and sketched out the other two in his head. Richard Strauss probably only later invited Mahler to participate in the 1906 festival. August Püringer, Deutsche Zeitung, 2 May 1924. There are ten cymbal crashes in the first movement (not counting the repeated exposition), five in the second, one in the third, and twenty in the finale—a total of thirty-six. In the Adagio in the Eighth Symphony—the only other Adagio in which Bruckner uses any cymbal at all—a similar moment occurs. At m. 249, very close to the end, the timpani, triangle, and cymbal play in unison at triple-forte. The same gesture appears four bars later, in m. 253. This instance is therefore unlikely to be the subject of the quotation, because it referred specifically to “one” cymbal crash in Bruckner’s Adagio. Overblown statements of Bruckner’s influence were identified as early as in commemorations for the tenth anniversary of his death. Numerous “modern symphonies” were construed as inspired by Bruckner and very many composers falsely claimed as his students. Richard Wallaschek, “Zu Bruckners Todestag,” Die Zeit, 11 Oct. 1906. Bertha Witt, Zeitschrift für Musik 95, no. 4 (Apr. 1928): 237. Witt was better known as the author of two popular erotic and romantic novels. Otto Schmid, Zeitschrift für Musik 95, no. 11 (Nov. 1928): 649. Paul Ertel, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, n.d. This and subsequent reviews of Gräner’s symphony are quoted from publicity of the Robert Lienau publishing house. I am grateful to Saskia Bieber, at Robert Lienau, for providing me with a copy. Marschalk, Vossische Zeitung, 8 Feb. 1922. The source is given as Zeitschrift für Musik but I have been unable to locate the review. Marschalk, Vossische Zeitung, 8 Feb. 1922. Georg Stolzenberg, Die Welt am Montag, 26[?] Dec. 1921. Gerhard Kaschner, Zeitschrift für Musik 98, no. 7 (Jul. 1931): 623–624. Joseph Heinrichs, Zeitschrift für Musik 104, no. 4 (Apr. 1937): 449. Hans Eberle, Zeitschrift für Musik 108, no. 12 (Dec. 1941): 791. Wagner’s

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34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

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Notes to Pages 175–181 entire orchestral output, apart from two symphonic poems, was two scherzi. Eugen Schmitz, Zeitschrift für Musik 105, no. 1 (Jan. 1938): 79–81. Later in the Third Reich, Furtwängler composed two violin sonatas, and completed a piano quintet begun almost two decades before; his other compositions in the period 1933–1945 were orchestral. On Furtwängler’s insecurity and aspirations as a composer, see Günter Birkner, “Furtwänglers Selbstverständnis als Komponist,” Furtwängler-Studien 1, Symposium der 1. Wilhelm Furtwängler-Tage, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, ed. Sebastian Krahnert (Berlin: Ries und Erler, 1998), pp. 36–45. See also Bruno d’Heudières, “Wilhelm Furtwängler als Komponist: das Ethos eines Künstlers,” Furtwängler-Studien 1, pp. 52–56, 63; Hans-Hubert Schönzeler, “Furtwängler und Bruckner,” Bruckner Jahrbuch (1987–88): 113–116; and Urs Weber, “Wilhelm Furtwängler und Anton Bruckner,” Mitteilungsblatt der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft 27 (1986): 15–19. Emil Petschnig, Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 2 (Feb. 1925): 87. Lionel Tacchini has compiled a list of the performance timings found in scores from Karl Grunsky’s estate papers, home.arcor.de/lionel.tacchini/ Grunsky_Bruckner_Timings.htm. Walter Jacobs, Kölnische Zeitung, 30 Nov. 1923. Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 205–206. Walther Hirschberg, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 78, no. 37 (15 Sept. 1920): 879. See Christine Rosenlöcher, Rudolf Walther Hirschberg: Leben und Werk (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 18–37 (“Walther Hirschberg—nationalgesinnter Deutscher” and “Die Verfolgung”). Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s reflections were published posthumously as The World War and German Society (1937; rpt. New York: H. Fertig, 1971). See Paul Forman, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 1–115. Paul Ehlers, “Das Deutsche Symphoniehaus,” Almanach der deutschen Musikbücherei auf das Jahr 1920 (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1921), pp. 50–55. See Andreas Eichhorn, “Diskursivität und Intuition als polare Formen musikalischen Denkens,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 49, no. 4 (1992): 291. Karl Grunsky, Musikästhetik, 4th rev. ed. (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1923), p. 79. Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1918), p. 16. Jascha Horenstein, “Arnold Schönbergs Chorwerke,” Deutsche ArbeiterSänger-Zeitung 28, no. 7 (1927): 125, quoted from Arnold Schoenberg, Sämtliche Werke (Mainz: Schott, 1966–), V/18,2 p. xlii.

Notes to Pages 181–185

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48. Gräner, Bruckner, p. 53. 49. Hans Mersmann, Musikhören (1938; rpt. Hamburg: H. E. Monck, 1964). 50. Historians of Germany and Habsburg Europe will know that this use of “liberal” differs from local usage. After the 1860s, liberalism in central Europe tended to freeze into an increasingly elitist stance, sometimes laissez-faire, sometimes nationalist, often redolent with claims to high culture. Still, in Catholic states or localities such as Austria and Bavaria, liberalism remained secular. And its attraction to the Jewish bourgeoisie in both Austria and Germany was not readily susceptible to the antiSemitic currents that could animate a nationalist Right or a populist radicalism. 51. The comparison to Hegel comes from H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler (1952), rpt. New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992), p. 8. 52. Oswald Spengler, Politische Schriften (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1932), p. 84. 53. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte trans. by Charles Francis Atkinson as The Decline of the West (1926; rpt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), p. iv, preface to 1922 revised version. This discussion draws from H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (1961); rpt. New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), p. 375; and Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 53. 54. Spengler, Decline of the West, p. xiv. 55. Tracy B. Strong, “Oswald Spengler: Ontologie Kritik und Enttäuschung,” Spengler heute: sechs Essays, ed. Peter Christian Ludz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980), p. 98. 56. Ringer, German Mandarins, p. 394. 57. See in particular Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism and the Making of the Jewish State, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 58. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich (1923), 3rd ed. (1931), rpt. Bremen: Faksimile, 1985), trans. by E. O. Lorimer as Germany’s Third Empire, condensed and authorized ed. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1934), pp. 256, 258. A copy of the first edition, inscribed to Hitler by a Herta von Treuenfels, is housed, with his private library, at the Library of Congress. 59. Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, pp. 187, 190; Germany’s Third Empire, p. 203 (trans. emended). 60. Ringer, German Mandarins, p. 219. 61. On these wider changes in the history of science and culture, see Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity, Cambridge Series in the History of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 287. 62. Ernst Troeltsch, Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik (Berlin: Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1923), pp. 13–15, lecture for the second

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

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Notes to Pages 185–188 anniversary of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, cited in Ringer, German Mandarins, p. 397. Hugo Riemann, “Passives und aktives Hören,” in Grundlinien der MusikÄsthetik [Wie hören wir Musik?] (Leipzig: M. Hesse, 1890), 2:23, trans. from Stephen Parkany, Bruckner and the Vocabulary of Symphonic Formal Process (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1989), p. 72 (trans. emended). Ernst Otto Nodnagel, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 33, no. 9 (3 Mar. 1905): 165, analysis of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Robert Hirschfeld, Wiener Abendpost, 14 Jan. 1902, review of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Kurth, Bruckner, 2:279, 537, trans. in Kurth, Selected Writing, pp. 151–152. Max Morold, Anton Bruckner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1912), pp. 42–43. Karl Blessinger, Grundzüge der musikalischen Formenlehre, Musikalische Volksbücher, ed. Adolf Speman and Hugo Holle (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachfolger, 1926), p. 282. August Halm, “Selbstkritik,” Die Freie Schulgemeinde 10 (1919): 16, reprinted in Halm, Von Form und Sinn der Musik: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Siegfried Schmalzriedt (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1978), pp. 280–281, quoted from Lee A. Rothfarb, “August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music,” 19th-Century Music 29, no. 2 (2005): 127. August Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (1913), 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1947), pp. 250–251. Karl Blessinger, “Die Symptome der Dekadenz in der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4, no. 3 (Dec. 1921): 172. Hans Mersmann, Beethoven: die Syntheses der Stile, Kulturgeschichte der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen (Berlin: J. Bard, 1922), p. 51. Arbeiter Zeitung, 12 Jan. 1928. Heinrich Schenker, Der freie Satz, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien 3 (1935), trans. by Ernst Oster as Free Composition (New York: Schirmer, 1979), p. 18. On Schenker’s elitism, see Richard Littlefield and David Neumeyer, “Rewriting Schenker: Narrative—History—Ideology” (1992), in Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, ed. Adam Krims (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998), pp. 113–155, a view contested in Hellmut Federhofer, “Zur Demokratisierung von Heinrich Schenkers Musikanschauung,” in Festschrift Christoph-Hellmut Mahling zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Axel Beer, Kristina Pfarr, and Wolfgang Ruf (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1997), pp. 331–339. Schenker was also dismissive of folk music. See Wolfgang Suppan, “‘Musik der Menge’: ‘Volk’ und ‘Volksmusik’ in den Schriften Heinrich Schenkers und seines Schülers Viktor Zuckerkandl” (1997), rpt. in Werk und Wirkung. Musikwissenschaft als Menschen- und Kulturgüterforschung, ed. Suppan (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2000), pp. 322–333. Alfred Rosenberg, Der völkische Staatsgedanke: Überlieferung und Neugeburt (Munich: self-published, distribution by Deutschvölkische

Notes to Pages 188–191

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

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Buchhandlung, 1924), excerpted in Nazi Ideology before 1933: A Documentation, ed. Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 65, 69–70. Fritz Ohrmann, “Der innerlich gewandelte Paul Hindemith?” Germania, 14 Mar. 1934, review of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony. Rosenberg, Staatsgedanke, excerpted from Miller and Rupp, Nazi Ideology before 1933, p. 70. August Halm, “Von der Dynamik” Die Rheinlande 12 (1912): 104–105, reprinted in Halm, Form und Sinn, pp. 92–93 (quotation). August Halm, journal notes, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach/Neckar, protocol number Halm 69,446, folder 2 (Konvolute Notizen und Aufzeichnungen vermischten Inhalts), quoted from Rothfarb, “Halm on Body and Spirit,” p. 134. Halm, Die Symphonie Bruckners, pp. 115–117, 143, trans in Rothfarb, “Halm on Body and Spirit,” p. 134. See Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), and Stephen Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). Joseph Frank, writing in 1945, was the starting point for this more philosophical notion of spatiality. See Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). See also Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to “Mein Kampf” (1928), ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, trans. Krista Smith (New York: Enigma, 2003). There was a long tradition of German cultural diplomacy through music, especially in the United States. See Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: The Politics of Art, Music and Emotion in German-American Relations, 1870–1920,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (2003): 585–613. Richard Taruskin, “Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony,” Shostakovich Studies, ed. David Fanning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 17–56, and “Shostakovich and Us,” in Shostakovich in Context, ed. Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–29. Elizabeth B. Crist, Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Reinhold Brinkmann sees the Eroica as Beethoven’s response to a reconceptionalization of time in the wake of the French Revolution, as described in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (1979; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). See Reinhold Brinkmann, “In the Time(s) of the ‘Eroica,’” trans. Irene Zedlacher, in Beethoven and his World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 1–26. Möller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich p. 187, translated as Germany’s Third Empire, p. 201.

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Notes to Pages 191–196

88. Heinz Paechter, with Bertha Hellman, Hedwig Paechter and Karl O. Paetel, Nazi-Deutsch: A Glossary of Contemporary German Usage: With Appendices on Government, Military and Economic Institutions (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1944), p. 116. In accordance with wartime regulations on paper usage, the guidebook was published without lengthy citations or references (p. 3), and I have been unable to locate the quotation in Moeller van den Bruck’s writings. 89. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation (Munich: Bremer, 1927), p. 13. 90. Heinrich Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1926), p. 170. 91. These statements come from the memoirs of Schoenberg’s student Josef Rufer, Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1952), pp. 49–50, trans. by Humphrey Searle as Composition with Twelve Notes Related only to one Another (New York: Macmillan, 1954), pp. 48–49 (trans. emended). 92. Morold, Bruckner, pp. 42–46. Morold was an enthusiast of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and his laudatory words were apparently used for publicity by Chamberlain’s publisher. http://www.hschamberlain.net/ comments/comments.html. 93. On the discussion of “dimensions” in musical listening, in particular Schoenberg’s Quartet, Op. 7, see Karen Painter, “Form, Innovation, Modernism: Early Responses to Schoenberg’s First String Quartet,” Music of My Future: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff. (Cambridge: Harvard Music Department, 2000, distributed by Harvard University Press), pp. 25–38. 94. Blessinger, Formenlehre, p. 283. 95. Jacobs, Kölnische Zeitung, 30 Nov. 1923. 96. Karl Grunsky, Anton Bruckner, Musikalische Volksbücher (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachfolger, 1922), p. 24. 97. Blessinger, “Dekadenz in der Musik,” 181. 98. Grunsky, Musikästhetik, 4th rev. ed. (1923), p. 68. 99. Ibid., pp. 68–69. See also Jost Hermand, “On the History of the ‘Deutschlandlied,’” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 251–268. 100. Kurth, Bruckner, 1:271. 101. Ibid., p. 290, trans. from Kurth Selected Writings, ed. Lee A. Rothfarb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 162 (trans. emended). 102. Karl Grunsky, Der Kampf um deutsche Musik, vol. 1 of Der Aufschwung: Künstlerische Reihe, ed. Grunsky (Stuttgart: Erhard Walther, Verlag für Nationalsozialistisches Schrifttum, 1933), pp. 9–10, 12. 103. Heinrich Schenker, Der freie Satz: das erste Lehrbuch der Musik, Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien 3 (Vienna: Universal, 1935), pp. 18–19. This passage was omitted in the postwar edition (1956) and not restored in the English translation (1979). See William Pastille, Ursatz:

Notes to Pages 197–200

104.

105.

106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115.

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The Musical Philosophy of Heinrich Schenker (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1985), p. 34. Arbeiter Zeitung, 12 Jan. 1928. Other newspapers, however, regarded such emotive terms of judgment with disdain. Later that year, after Webern suffered a breakdown in rehearsals for a performance of Mahler’s Second in the same workers’ series, the reporter at the Wiener Zeitung asked coolly, “Do ecstasy, devotion, and obsession suffice [for achieving a superior performance]?” Wiener Zeitung, 18 Nov. 1928. Kurth generalized from two anecdotes: a dream recounted to Hans Richter, in which a violist played the first theme of the Seventh Symphony, and another in which Ludwig Spohr sang a theme to him. Kurth, Bruckner,1:189n. Kurth may also have been responding to a mythology about creativity and the unconscious that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, as seen in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s protagonist Ludwig (from “The Poet and the Composer”) and lore about the creative process, as promulgated about Schubert after his death and claimed by Wagner regarding the opening of the Ring. Kurth, Bruckner, 1:290, trans. in Kurth, Selected Writings, pp. 161– 162n17. Lee A. Rothfarb, introduction to Kurth, Selected Writings, p. 2; Geoffrey Chew, “Ernst Kurth, Music as Psychic Motion and Tristan und Isolde: Towards a Model for Analysing Musical Instability,” Music Analysis 10, no. 1–2 (1991): 171–193; and Dolores Menstell Hsu, “Ernst Kurth and his Concept of Music as Motion,” Journal of Music Theory 10, no. 1 (1966): 2–17. Adolf Weißmann, Die Musik in der Weltkrise (1922), pp. 82–83; the corresponding passage in the free translation by M. M. Bozman is The Problems of Modern Music (London, Toronto: Dent, 1925), p. 84. When Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, op. 9, was premiered in Berlin in Mar. 1912, Weißmann complained of the “ruleless polyphony” that “besieges the ear,” reminding him of an American aesthetic (“made at home,” he quoted in English). Adolf Weißmann, “Aus dem Berliner Musikleben,” unidentified clipping, Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. Karl Werner, “Anton Bruckner: Gelegentlich des 25. Widerkehr seines Todestages (11 Oktober 1896),” Steyer Tagblatt, 12 Oct. 1921. Kurth, Bruckner, 1:235, 245–246. Ibid., 235, 271. Ibid., 102, 271. There were also more immediate sources for Kurth’s metaphor of wave; for example, Grunsky’s Musikästhetik (1907), pp. 54–56, 69. As Rothfarb points out, Kurth’s terms “kinetic energy” and “potential energy” came from physics, although he used them in a different sense. Lee Rothfarb, Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 51n1. Kurth, Bruckner, 1:281. Ibid., pp. 249, 279.

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Notes to Pages 201–205

116. Ibid., 283, trans. in Kurth, Selected Writings, p. 152. 117. Ernst Kurth, Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Einführung in Stil und Technik von Bachs melodische Polyphonie (1917), rpt. of 1956 ed. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1996), p. 165. 118. Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners “Tristan” (1920); rpt. of 1923 ed., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), p. 4, trans. from Rothfarb, introduction to Kurth, Selected Writings, p. 19. 119. Kurth, Bruckner, 1:261–262. Halm, too, had declared Bruckner superior to the classical masters, whose music he found “short-breathed.” August Halm, “Musikalische Bildung,” Wickersdorfer Jahrbuch für 1909/1910 2 (1911): 48–73, reprinted in Halm, Form und Sinn, p. 220. 120. Halm, Kulturen der Musik, p. 251; I am grateful to Professor Rothfarb for the translation. 121. Joseph Goebbels, “Die zukünftige Arbeit und Gestaltung des deutschen Rundfunks,” 25 Mar. 1933, Haus des Rundfunks, Berlin, to the managers and directors of the Radio Corporation, in Goebbels-Reden, ed. Helmut Heiber, vol. 1: 1932–1939 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), p. 82. 122. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173, 177. 123. Gräner, Bruckner, p. 56. 124. Weißmann, Musik in der Weltkrise, p. 86. 125. Lorenz, moreover, dedicated his book on Tristan and Isolde to Kurth. Karl Blessinger decried Kurth’s notion of linear counterpoint in the vaguest of terms, as “the source of so many soulless and arbitrary constructions,” in Judentum und Musik: Ein Beitrag zur Kultur- und Rassenpolitik (Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1944), p. 125, trans. in Ludwig Holtmeier, “From ‘Musiktheorie’ to ‘Tonsatz’: National Socialism and German Music Theory after 1945,” Music Analysis 23, nos. 2–3 (2004): 251. Ernst Bücken, “Ernst Kurth als Musiktheoretiker,” Melos 4, no. 7/8 (1925): 358, cited in Rothfarb, Kurth, p. 3. On Bücken, see Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 46, 100, 112. 126. See Benjamin M. Korstvedt, “Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and after: An Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (1996): 132–160. 127. Friedrich W. Herzog, “Was ist deutsche Musik? Erkentnisse und Folgerungen,” Die Musik 26, no. 8 (August 1934), 802; the article is discussed in Bryan Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation,” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (1994): 590–591. Richard Wagner, “Was ist deutsch” (1865; rev. 1878), in Wagner, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer, Jubiläumsausgabe, 10 vols. (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983), 10:84–103, trans. by W. A. Ellis as Wagner, Prose Works (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893–1912), 4:149–169.

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6. Symphonic Ambitions and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony 1. Joseph Wulf, ed., Presse und Funk im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Joseph Wulf (1964; rpt. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1989), p. 30. 2. Joseph Goebbels, “Die zukünftige Arbeit und Gestaltung des deutschen Rundfunks,” 25 Mar. 1933, Haus des Rundfunks, Berlin, to the managers and directors of the Radio Corporation, in Goebbels-Reden, ed. Helmut Heiber, vol. 1: 1932–1939 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), p. 106. 3. Reichsministerium des Inneren, Reichsgesetzblatt (Berlin: Reichsverlagsamt, 1933), 1:713ff., quoted from Wulf, Presse und Funk, p. 72. 4. There were, however, requests for implementing greater control in the cultural press. Kurt Hasse complained to Hans Hinkel, who was state commissar at the Prussian cultural ministry (Preußische Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung), about the “lack of guidelines” for the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, particularly regarding music. Citing the attacks on Karl Grunsky’s Der Kampf um die deutsche Musik as antiNational Socialist, Hasse pleaded, “Couldn’t you monitor somewhat, so that our press doesn’t take on something that violates our movement [Bewegung]?” Letter to Hans Hinkel, 17 Jun. 1933, quoted from Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Joseph Wulf (1966; Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), p. 68. 5. Ian Kreshaw’s expression “working toward the Führer” is apt for those who, in order to win the attention and support of the regime and party promoted doctrines they believed Hitler would like. See his Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), pp. 527–531. 6. Walter Abendroth, “Musik im neuen Staat,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 4 Mar. 1933, quoted from Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 58. 7. Joseph Goebbels, “Die deutsche Kultur vor neuen Aufgaben,” speech of 15 Nov. 1933, in Goebbels, Signale der neuen Zeit: 25 ausgewählte Reden (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1934), p. 332, cited in Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (1982; rpt. Cologne: Dittrich, 2000), p. 64. 8. Heinrich Strobel, “Das Tonkünstlerfest in Dortmund,” Melos 12, no. 7 (Jul. 1933): 242, partial quotation in Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, p. 311. 9. Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Die Musik 26, no. 9 (Jun. 1934): 712. 10. The other scores Adorno reviewed were more logical choices, given that his mother was Italian and that he had a special connection to the Second Viennese School: Piero Coppola’s A-minor Symphony, published in 1925 but reviewed in Nov. 1927 and chamber music by Schoenberg (opp. 29 and 30, published in 1927 but reviewed the following year (May 1928). 11. The review was reproduced in the Frankfurt student newspaper Diskus (Jan. 1963); see Evelyn Wilcock, “Negative Identity: Mixed German Jewish Descent as a Factor in the Reception of Theodor Adorno,” New German Critique 81, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2000): 178–180.

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Notes to Pages 211–213

12. Letter of 4 July 1966, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Köhler und Hans Saner (Munich: Piper, 1985), p. 679. 13. In Nov. 1933 Adorno applied for permission to continuing publishing in the Reich; official acceptance was still pending in Apr. 1934, as he wrote Walter Benjamin. He hoped to secure a position as music critic for the Vossische Zeitung, which ceased publication on Mar. 31, 1934. Adorno abandoned plans to take the teaching qualification exams when he learned that he could teach only “non-Aryan” students. 14. Letter of 7 Oct. 1934, in Briefwechsel: Theodor W. Adorno und Ernst Krenek, ed. Wolfgang Rogge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 44, cited from Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 137. 15. Werner Oehlmann, Die Musik 26, no. 9 (Jun. 1934): 687. 16. Strobel faced potential difficulty on several fronts as a new music advocate and erstwhile critic of nationalism and anti-Semitism, and from 1927 as a contributor to a newspaper that the National Socialists associated with “international” Jewry (Berliner Börsen Courier, published by Rudolf Mosse). After it folded into the Nazi-oriented Berliner Börsen Zeitung, Strobel joined the staff of the once-liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, pp. 53, 310–317. 17. Joseph Goebbels, Michael—Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1928), p. 210, entry of Sept. 15; cited in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (1966; rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 108–109. Goebbels kept amending the novel as he had new experiences, completing the work in 1926. It took two years to find a publisher—that of the Nazi Party. But in the Third Reich the book found its following, appearing in at least seventeen editions by 1942. With a new, fictionalized title that deemphasized its German origins, Michael: A Novel, the book was translated by Joachim Neugroschel in 1987 and released by the sensationalist Amok Press, apparently hoping to secure a readership curious about the aspiring Warhol assassin, the fascist diarist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and a range of murderers—to cite its other recent publications. 18. On the binding of polarities in fascism (technology and modernism versus traditionalism, Left and Right, revolutionary and conservative, populism and elitism), see Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 25–35. This binding appears in the etymology of “fascism,” from fasces, the wrapping of rods around an ax to symbolize power, and characterizes the psychological mechanisms associated with fascism. Hal Foster, “Prosthetic Gods,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 2 (1997): 9.

Notes to Pages 213–215

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19. Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (New York: Delacorte, 1971), p. 455. 20. The proposed film was to express “the aural [hörbare] melody of the world alongside its visual [bildliche] rhythm.” Walter Ruttmann, “Melodie der Welt,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 4 (Dec. 1929): 106. 21. The premiere nonetheless provoked a demonstration, leading the police riot squad to clear out the hall, in part because the lead role, played by the Jewish dancer Hedy Kiessler, has a nude swim. Two other examples are MGM’s Vogues of 1938, directed by Irving Cummings, which was announced in a German Prague newspaper as “Farbensymphonie 1938,” and Hans Bertram’s Symphonie eines Lebens (1942). 22. Erwin Bauer, “Musik auf dem Parteitag der Arbeit,” Die Musik-Woche (9 Oct. 1937): 6, quoted from Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 248. 23. Alfred Rosenberg, “Beethoven,” Völkischer Beobachter, 26 March 1927, reprinted in Rosenberg, Blut und Ehre: Ein Kampf für deutsche Wiedergeburt, Reden und Aufsätze von 1919–1933, ed. Thilo von Trotha (1934; Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1935), pp. 225–227. 24. Gerd Rühle, Das Dritte Reich: Dokumentarische Darstellung des Aufbaues der Nation, vol. 1: Das erste Jahr, 1933 (Berlin: Hummel, 1934), p. 82. 25. Gerhard Tischer, “Kraft durch Freude,” Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 35, no. 3 (March 1934): 19. In the fall of 1933, the Führerprinzip had been implemented in the service organization for musicologists (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft) but had not yet been imposed on other organizations. Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 67. 26. Joseph Goebbels, “Geleitwort,” in Rundfunk im Aufbruch: Handbuch des deutschen Rundfunks 1934, mit Funkkalender, ed. Heinz Weiss [Reichsverband deutscher Rundfunkteilnehmer] (Lahr: M. Schauenburg 1933), p. 10. 27. Mitteilungen der Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft, 18 Jan. 1934, cited from Nanny Drechsler, Die Funktion der Musik im deutschen Rundfunk, 1933–1945 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988), p. 36. 28. Eugen Hadamovsky, Dein Rundfunk: Das Rundfunkbuch für alle Volksgenossen (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1934), p. 78, quoted from Drechsler, Musik im deutschen Rundfunk, p. 59. 29. Friedrich Meinecke, Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung, 1795–1815, amateur ed., Monographien zur Weltgeschichte, no. 25 (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1906). In later editions, the dates in the subtitle changed to 1795–1813, a change that stressed the year of Prussian recovery and German victory, rather than the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna, with its attending frustrations for German national aspirations. The same title had

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30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

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Notes to Pages 215–216 been used by Rudolf Goette, yet covering the years 1807–1815 (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1891–1892). Arnold Schering, “Zur Sinndeutung der 4. und 5. Symphonie von Beethoven,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 16, no. 2 (1934): 83, 77. Schering attributed the considerable criticism of this article, along with his Beethoven in neuer Deutung (1934), to the fact that his first attempt at “a new interpretation of Beethoven,” which applied his theory more cautiously, did not appear until after the former two publications. See his “Die Eroica, eine Homer-Symphonie Beethovens?,” Neues Beethoven Jahrbuch (1934), trans. and commentary by Glenn Stanley, in Current Musicology 69 (2000): 89n1. The endorsement of Hitler is uncharacteristic of Schering’s writings, who did not join the Nazi party (Glenn Stanley, personal communication). Schering did not, in fact, refer to Hitler (although the term “Führer,” which he used, was permitted only in reference to Hitler). The same paragraph associates the tragic heroism of the symphony with a tradition of heroic leaders going back to Moses and Judas Maccabeus. Joseph Goebbels to the Prussian Finance Ministry, 27 Oct. 1936, housed in the Geheime Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem, rep. 151/1054, fol. 53; Goebbels to Generalintendant in Dresden and Munich, 9 Mar. 1934, Geheimes Staatsarchiv, rep. 151/216, citations from Pamela M. Potter, “Musical Life in Berlin from Weimar to Hitler,” Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), p. 95. Gerhard Tischer, “Sorgen,” Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 35, no. 5 (May 1934): 35. Tischer, “Kraft durch Freude,” p. 19. “Sinfonische Dichtung: Deutsche Heldenehrung—Albert Leo Schlageter” was produced at the Westdeutche Rundfunk and broadcast nationally. Stephanie Schrader, Von der “Deutschen Stunde in Bayern” zum “Reichssender München”: der Zugriff der Nationalsozialisten auf den Rundfunk, Studien zur Geschichte des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 76. Reinhold Zimmermann, “Volkssinfoniekonzerte,” Deutsche MusikZeitung 36, no. 1 (Jan. 1935): 4. Zimmermann contributed to the Third Reich through his larger studies as well: in 1939, with a book on Bruckner and “race in German music” and in 1942, two years after the Nazi invasion and occupation of France, with a biography of Cesar Franck with a subtitle that stressed the composer as “a German musician in Paris.” Franck, whose mother was German and father Belgian, is not considered German in the scholarly literature. Germany had, of course, taken over Belgium, and Zimmerman, who lived on the old border city of Aachen, contributed to the cultural claims the Reich made over the territories it appropriated. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, 19 vols. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998–2005), 4:33, entry of 3 Mar. 1937. The encounter is discussed in Claudius Böhm, “Ein wirklich deutscher, national

Notes to Pages 217–220

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

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empfindender Kapellmeister,” GewandhausMagazin 50, zum 50. Todestag Hermann Abendroths (2006): 39. Roy Harris, the First Program of the Composers’ Forum Laboratory (3rd series), 6 Oct. 1937, at the WPA Theatre of Music, 254 West 54th St, New York, transcripts of the Composer’s Forum Laboratory, II, box 1, RG 69.5.3, National Archives, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. I am grateful to Laura Manion for the citation. Deutsche Sängerbundes-Zeitung, Berlin, 1/2 (Feb. 1944); clipping, Orff Zentrum, Munich. Anton Würz, “Musik in München,” Zeitschrift für Musik 109, no. 4 (April 1942): 306, discussed in Reinhold Brinkmann, “The Distorted Sublime: Music and National Socialist Ideology: A Sketch,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, p. 52. Erhard Krieger, “Ein Werkleben: Otto Leonhardt,” Musik-Woche 7 (1939): 116–117, cited from Brinkmann, “Distorted Sublime,” p. 52. “Kunst zwischen gestern und morgen. Die Musik: Rückkehr zum Gemeinschaftsgedanken,” Berliner Volkszeitung 17 Mar. 1934. The author, Lothar Band, was a choral director. The following year Arnold Schering made the same argument in an academic venue: “Über den Begriff des Monumentalen in der Musik,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1934, 41 (1935): 9–24. Hermann Ambrosius, “Die moderne Sinfonie im deutschen Musikleben,” Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 35, no. 5 (May 1934): 37. The term was common from the decades spanning the two world wars, from Kurt Tucholsky’s poem “Selbstbesinnung,” dating from World War I, to Richard Kroner’s Selbstbesinnung: Drei Lehrstunden (1958). Hermann Zilcher, “Zur deutschen Musikerziehung,” Zeitschrift für Musik 101, no. 9 (Sept. 1934): 925, cited in Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 11. Hugo Rasch’s review, which appeared in the National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter, so displeased Rosenberg that he terminated Rasch’s relationship to the newspaper. Rasch, letter to Richard Strauss, 6 Dec. 1934. Music Division, Austrian National Library, Vienna, 975/15–6. Berta Geissmar, The Baton and the Jackboot (London: H. Hamilton, 1944), p. 158. See also the diaries of the writer and theater director Erich Ebermayer, Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland: Persönliches und politisches Tagebuch von der Machtergreifung bis zum 31. Dezember 1935 (Hamburg: P. Zsolnay, 1959), p. 505, cited in Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock, N. Y.: Overlook, 2003), p. 292. Goebbels, Tagebücher, III/1:192, entry of 2 Mar. 1935, trans. from Spotts, Hitler and Aesthetics, p. 292. “Furtwängler bedauert,” Die Musik 27, no. 6 (Mar. 1935): 437, excerpted in Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 378. Bundesarchiv Berlin Akte R 55/20170, document 50, dated 18 Oct. 1934. I am grateful to Reinhold Brinkmann for providing me with this material.

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49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

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Notes to Pages 220–221 For a discussion of pro-Nazi elements in the libretto, see Kater, Twisted Muse, p. 180; and Claire Taylor-Jay, The Artist-operas of Pfitzner, Krenek, and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), p. 182. In June 1936, the Reich Theater Chamber reiterated its support of the opera in a meeting at the Propaganda Ministry, and in 1937 Rosenberg became enthusiastic about the libretto. Goebbels solicited the opinion of the scenic designer at the Berlin State Opera, Emil Preetorius, who saw the Zurich production in Amsterdam in April 1939. But the director of Berlin State Opera, Heinz Tietjen, preferred instead to approach Hermann Goering for permission to produce the opera. Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man behind the Music: A Biography (London: Gollancz, 1975), p. 166. Hindemith, letter to Willy Strecker, 15 April 1933, in Selected Letters of Paul Hindemith, ed. Geoffrey Skelton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 69. Letter of 16 May 1933, in Alban Berg, Letters to his Wife, ed. and trans. Bernard Grun (New York: St. Martin’s, 1971), p. 413. Hindemith, letter of 23 Sept. 1933, Ernst Toch Archive, Music Library, University of Los Angeles, quoted from Kater, Twisted Muse, p. 179. Hindemith, letter to Willy Strecker, 5 Feb. 1934, in Skelton, Letters of Hindemith, p. 76. Hindemith, letter to Willy Strecker on 9 Feb. 1934, Paul HindemithInstitut, Frankfurt, quoted from Gudrun Breimann, Mathis der Mahler und der “Fall Hindemith”: Studien zu Hindemiths Opernlibretto im Kontext der kulturgeschichtlichen und politischen Bedingungen der 30er Jahre (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 35n64. Paul Hindemith, “Das private Logbuch”: Briefe an seine Frau Gertrud, ed. Friederike Becker und Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott, 1995), p. 357, entry from 1939, trans. from New Grove Online (http://www. grovemusic.com.ezp1.harvard.edu/shared/views/article.html?section= music.13053.5). The author of the Hindemith entry for Grove Music Online, who is also the long-standing director of the Hindemith-Institut, presents a more favorable view of the composer in the Third Reich than do Claudia Maurer Zenck, in her comprehensive “Zwischen Boykott und Anpassung an den Charakter der Zeit: Über die Schwierigkeiten eines deutschen Komponisten mit dem Dritten Reich,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 9 (1980): 65–129, and Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 33–42. Hindemith, letter to Willy Strecker, 18 Nov. 1934, in Skelton, Letters of Hindemith, p. 85. Joseph Goebbels, 6 Dec. 1934, in the Berlin Sportpalast for the first anniversary of the founding of the Reich Culture Chamber, reproduced in Curt Riess, Furtwängler: Musik und Politik (Stuttgart: A. Scherz, 1953), pp. 188–189. It is possible that Hitler and Goebbels did not know the opera firsthand and only learned of the scene from Karl Grunsky, Der Kampf um deutsche

Notes to Pages 221–224

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

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Musik, vol. 1 of Der Aufschwung: Künstlerische Reihe, ed. Grunsky (Stuttgart: Erhard Walther, Verlag für Nationalsozialistisches Schrifttum, 1933), p. 25. There are few records of Hitler’s day-to-day whereabouts at the time of the premiere at the Kroll Opera in Berlin, in 1929. Secondary sources, when they provide support at all, cite the memoirs of Geissmar, Furtwängler’s childhood friend and later personal secretary (Baton and the Jackboot, p. 129). Geissmar emigrated to London in 1935, eventually holding the same position for Sir Thomas Beecham, manager of Covent Garden. Jens Malte Fischer, “Wagner-Interpretation im Dritten Reich: Musik und Szene zwischen Politisierung und Kunstanspruch,” in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloss Elmau-Symposion, ed. Saul Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), pp. 142–164. Richard S. Hill, “Concert Life in Berlin: Season 1943–44,” Notes II, vol. 1, no. 3 (Jun. 1944): 21. Hindemith, letter of 9 Oct. 1933 to Willy Strecker, in Skelton, Letters of Hindemith, pp. 71–72. Walter Abendroth, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 13 Mar. 1934. Friedrich W. Herzog, “Bedeutsame Sinfonie-Uraufführung in Berlin,” National-Zeitung, Essen, 16 Mar. 1934. Josef Rufer, Berliner Morgenpost, 14[?] Mar. 1934, quoted from Schott publicity material. The review was titled “A New Hindemith.” I am grateful to Ann-Katrin Heimer at Schott for this information. The Berliner Morgenpost, where Rufer was on the staff from 1928 until 1940, when he joined the air force, underwent significant change in the Third Reich. The Ullstein family members were ousted from the board early in 1933 and forced to sell their media holdings to the Deutsche Verlag, whereupon the Berliner Morgenpost became a mouthpiece for director of Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central Nazi press. Hans-Wilhelm Kulenkampff, Blätter für Kunst und Kultur, 5 Oct. 1934. Despite his support for new music, Kulenkampff managed never to fall out of favor. Along with Walter Tieszler and Heinrich Anacker, he was secretly commissioned by Goebbels to craft a song text for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Set to music by Norbert Schultze within a deadline of twenty-four hours, “Das Lied vom Feldzug im Osten” became a symbol of national victory. Axel Jockwer, “Unterhaltungsmusik im Dritten Reich” (PhD diss., Constance University, 2004) pp. 228–229. Fritz Stege, Der Westen, 13[?] Mar. 1934, quoted from the Schott publicity material. Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 272. At the eighth meeting of the presidential board of the Reich Music Chamber on 26 Mar. 1934, Stege proposed censuring a pianist for programming atonal music but was overridden. Kater, Twisted Muse, p. 19 n. 80, quoting from the minutes, Richard Strauss-Archiv, Garmisch. His outspoken defense of Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream was rebuked the following month by Herzog. Fritz Stege,

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67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

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Notes to Pages 224–226 “Berliner Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musik 101, no. 10 (Oct. 1934): 1033; Friedrich W. Herzog, “Eine neue Musik zum Sommernachtstraum,” Die Musik 27, no. 2 (Nov. 1934): 110. A hit song (Schlager) he wrote as a student was mentioned as a reason for Stege’s unsuitability to direct the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Musikkritiker; Johannes Günther and Friedrich W. Herzog, letter of 17 Oct. 1933 to the presidium of the Reichsverband Deutscher Schriftsteller, excerpted in Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 218. Stege had also published a book in 1925 on occultism and metaphysics in music and contributed to a journal under Jewish editorship (Alfred Einstein), Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft. Ibid., p. 214n3. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, B. Z. am Mittag, 13 Mar. 1934. The title was “The Triumph of New [jungen] Music.” Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, p. 228. Reto Caratsch (Berlin correspondent), Neue Züricher Zeitung, 19 Jan. 1947, quoted from Günther Gillessen, Auf verlorenem Posten: Die Frankfurter Zeitung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), p. 95. The Vossische Zeitung was at greater risk from its orientation toward the upper end of the Berlin readership, the Bürgertum (whose stature derived from education and property). Michael Bosch, Liberale Presse in der Krise: Die Innenpolitik der Jahre 1930 bis 1933 im Spiegel des “Berliner Tageblatts,” der “Frankfurter Zeitung” und der “Vossischen Zeitung” (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976), pp. 298–299. Max Marschalk, Vossische Zeitung, 14 Mar. 1934. Marschalk’s positive review of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony (Vossische Zeitung, 22 Feb. 1907) triggered what contemporaries called “the case of Schoenberg.” See Esteban Buch, Le cas Schönberg: Naissance de l’avant-garde musicale, Bibliothèque des idées (Éditions Gallimard, 2006), p. 138. Gillessen, Auf verlorenem Posten, pp. 192, 199. See also Friedrich J. Bröder, Presse und Politik: Demokratie und Gesellschaft im Spiegel politische Kommentare der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, die Welt und der Süddeutsche Zeitung (Erlangen: Palm und Enke, 1976). Prior to 1933, the Frankfurter Zeitung was closest to the left-liberal Democratic Party. Heinz Joachim, Frankfurter Zeitung, review of the 12 Mar. 1934, clipping, Hindemith-Institut, Frankfurt. Advertisement, Zeitschrift für Musik 101, no. 5 (May 1934): 569. The score was published in January 1934, but the advertising followed soon after the premiere in March. The longer publicity pamphlet followed a similar format. Hindemith may have been thinking of this review by Herzog when he wrote of hoping to avenge the critic by finding the critic’s “laudatory references” in earlier reviews. Letter to Willy Strecker, 15 Nov. 1934, in Skelton, Letters of Hindemith, p. 84. Paul Zschorlich, Deutsche Zeitung, 13 Mar. 1934. Walter Abendroth, “Ein Beispiel deutschen Kritikerums: Paul Zschorlich zum 60. Geburtstag,” Zeitschrift für Musik 103, no. 5 (May 1936): 590.

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77. Hugo Rasch, “Das vorletzte Furtwängler-Konzert,” Völkischer Beobachter: Norddeutsche Ausgabe, Berlin, 14 March 1934. When Hitler authorized Max von Schillings to reorganize German musical life in February 1933, Rasch, chiefly a voice teacher and writer, was among the loyal National Socialists appointed to the administration of the composer service organization (Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer) which Schillings chaired. Rasch was first discovered as a composer when Max Donisch, the new music director of German Broadcasting, tried to promote contemporary German composers in the summer and fall of 1933. Prieberg, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 165. Rasch remained deeply involved in the Reich Chamber of Music under Strauss’s stewardship. Rasch was offered the Berlin Hochschule für Musik professorship of Oskar Daniel, who was Jewish, but recognized his own academic limitations and found a political pretext for declining. Kater, Twisted Muse, pp. 154–155. 78. The leading cultural conservatives had used the term Könner for Mahler (Leopold Schmidt and Rudolf Louis) and, later, for Schoenberg (Tischer). Alfred Brasch defended Hindemith against this charge: “If others attribute to him a scrawny talent [Können] for Niggermusik, Hindemith trumps them and cheekily demands that the piano be used solely as percussion.” Alfred Brasch, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 21 Oct. 1934. 79. Paul Zschorlich, “Der Internationale Hindemith,” Deutsche Zeitung, 17 Mar. 1934. 80. Rasch, letter to Richard Strauss, 2 Apr. 1934, Music Division, Austrian National Library, 975/14–18. 81. Friedrich Welter, “Hindemith—Eine kulturpolitische Betrachtung (Ein Nachwort zum 1. deutschen Komponitentag),” Die Musik 26, no. 6 (March 1934): 417–422. On Welter’s writings in the Third Reich, see also Michael Meyer, “The Nazi Musicologist as Myth Maker in the Third Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History 10, no. 4 (1975): 655. 82. Wilhelm Jensen, “Musik und Volkstum,” Völkischer Beobachter, 12 Oct. 1933, quoted from Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, pp. 62–63. 83. Getrud’s father, Ludwig Rottenberg, was music director of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, and her brother, Hans Flesch, headed the radio program Berliner Funkstunde until he was removed by the National Socialists and placed for a period in the Oranienburg concentration camp. On Flesh, see Michael H. Kater, “Social, Cultural and Political Controls: Radio in the Third Reich,” in Talk about Radio: Towards a Social History of Radio, ed. Theo Mäusli, Colloqui del Monte Verità (Zurich: Chronos 1999), p. 61. 84. Kater, Twisted Muse, p. 17. 85. According to the composer, his remarks, once confirmed by the German embassy in Bern, became the pretext for the ban. Letter to Willy Strecker, 28 Oct. 1934, in Letters of Hindemith, pp. 81–82. 86. Hindemith, letter to Ludwig Strecker, 22 Oct. 1934, Hindemith-Institut, excerpted in Breimann, Der “Fall Hindemith,” p. 37.

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Notes to Pages 227–230

87. Herzog, letter to Richard Strauss, 18 Jan. 1935, Music Division, Austrian National Library, 975/15–11. 88. Letter to Hamburg Volkshochschule, 11 Oct. 1934, Hindemith-Institut, quoted from Kater, Nazi Era, p. 35n29. 89. The ostensible basis for repudiating Hindemith was his music from the 1920s. Decisive, the journal claimed, was that even after the National Socialists came to power, Hindemith continued to make recordings with Jews (Simon Goldberg and Emanuel Feuermann). He was “tainted [versippt] as a non-Aryan.” NS-Kulturgemeinde, “Paul Hindemith— kulturpolitisch nicht tragbar,” Die Musik 27, no. 2 (Nov. 1934): 138. 90. Wilhelm Sträußler, Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten, 8 Nov. 1934. 91. See Peter de Mendelssohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin: Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der deutschen Presse (1959), 2nd exp. ed. (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1982), pp. 436–440, which also reproduces Thomasa Trimm [pseudonym for Ehm Welk], “Herr Reichsminister—ein Wort bitte,” Grüne Post, 29 Apr. 1934. 92. Tischer, “Sorgen,” 35. 93. Brasch, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 21 Oct. 1934. Perhaps concerned that the Essen public was less sophisticated than in Berlin and would need guidance with the new work, Brasch stressed the programmatic aspects of the work, titling his article “Music for the Isenheimer Altar.” 94. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, p. 112. 95. Havemann’s speech was summarized in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 Nov. 1934, trans. from Kater, Twisted Muse, p. 24. 96. Signed “B—r.,” “Mathis der Maler siegt. Hindemith im ersten Sonderkonzert,” Essener Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 Nov. 1934. 97. Alfred Brasch, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 22 Nov. 1934. 98. Richard Litterscheid, National-Zeitung, 23 Nov. 1934. Litterscheidt published on anti-Semitic or nationalistic topics in Die Musik virtually every month from autumn 1935 to autumn 1938. 99. Joseph Goebbels, speech of 7 Dec. 1934, summarized in “Dr. Goebbels auf der Jahreskundgebung der Reichskulturkammer,” Berliner LokalAnzeiger, 12 Dec. 1934, quoted from James E. Paulding, “Mathis der Maler—The Politics of Music,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 5 (1976): 108–109. 100. Joan Evans, “‘International with National Emphasis’: The Internationales Zeitgenössisches Musikfest in Baden-Baden, 1936–1939,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, p. 105. 101. Kim H. Kowalke, “Music Publishing and the Nazis: Schott, Universal Edition, and Their Composers,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, pp. 181–182. 102. Dena J. Epstein, “Buying Music in War-Torn Germany with Richard S. Hill,” Notes 37, no. 3 (1981): 510. 103. The concert took place under the aegis of the director of the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz, Adolf Trittinger, who recounted being sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen as a result. See his letter to Fred K. Prieberg, 1 Dec. 1963, quoted from Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, p. 394.

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104. Otto Schumann, Geschichte der deutschen Musik (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1940), p. 373. 105. Hugo Distler, Funktionelle Harmonielehre, mit Beiheft: Lösung sämtlicher Aufgaben (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1940–1941), p. 6. 106. Claus Neumann, “Moderne Musik—Ein ‘Ja’ oder ‘Nein’?” Zeitschrift für Musik 100, no. 6 (Jun. 1933): 546–547. The preference for Hindemith over Strauss appears to be motivated by Hindemith’s dedication to “absolute music.” 107. Friedrich Herzog, “Die Einheitsfront der deutschen Tonsetzer: erster deutscher Komponistentag in Berlin,” Die Musik 26, no. 6 (Mar. 1934): 429–431. 108. Walter Blankenburg, “Hugo Distlers ‘Jahrkreis,’” Zeitschrift für Hausmusik 2, no. 5/6 (Sept.–Dec. 1933): 87, quoted from Jörg Fischer, “Evangelische Kirchenmusik im Dritten Reich: ‘Musikalische Erneuerung’ und ästhetische Modalität des Faschismus,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 46, no. 3 (1989): 214. 109. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, p. 44. 110. Zenck, “Boycott,” 119; Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, p. 63; Albrecht Riethmüller, “Die Dreißiger Jahre: Eine Dekade kompositorischer Ermüdung oder Konsolidierung? Zusammenfassung der Diskussionen,” in Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress, Bayreuth, 1981, ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Wiesmann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1983), pp. 179–180. For a more favorable interpretation, see Stephen Hinton, introduction to Paul Hindemith, in Sämtliche Werke, II, 2: Orchesterwerke 1932–1934: Philharmonisches Konzert; Symphonie “Mathis der Maler,” ed. Hinton (Mainz: Schott, 1991), p. ix. 111. Program notes, Hindemith-Institut. 112. By one estimate, 20,000 political compositions were written during the twelve years of the Nazi regime (Kater, Twisted Muse, p. 13). Some 275 are housed in the Nazi Imprint Collection at the Sibler Music Library of the University of Rochester. See Kowalke, “Music Publishing and the Nazis,” pp. 181, 213n50. 113. By composing “something really good” that would be “reasonably successful,” Hindemith hoped to secure a production of Mathis der Maler at the Berlin State Opera. Letter of 8 Jul. 1936 to Willy Strecker, in Letters of Hindemith, pp. 93–94. Hindemith postponed the project, he claimed, due to a lack of time. Letter of 23 Oct. 1936 to Strecker, in the Hindemith-Institut, cited from Taylor-Jay, Artist-Operas, p. 185. 114. Otto Steinhagen, Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 13 Mar. 1934, review of the Mathis der Maler Symphony. 115. Herzog, “Einheitsfront der deutschen Tonsetzer,” 429–431. 116. Karl Westermayer, Berliner Tageblatt, 13 Mar. 1934. 117. Hugo Rasch, Völkischer Beobachter, 14 Mar. 1934. Paul Zschorlich, Deutsche Zeitung, 13 Mar. 1934. 118. Steinhagen, Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 13 Mar. 1934. Walter Funk, editor since 1922, left the newspaper in 1930 to become Hitler’s advisor in the

334

119. 120. 121. 122.

123.

124. 125.

126.

127.

128. 129. 130. 131.

132.

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Notes to Pages 234–238 Nazi Party; on Jan. 30, 1933, he was named the new director of press in the Reich government. In March he moved with his press branch into the new ministry and became Goebbels’s secretary. Gillessen, Auf verlorenem Posten, p. 152. Fritz Stege, Zeitschrift für Musik 101, no. 4 (Apr. 1934): 401–403. Rufer, Berliner Morgenpost, 14[?] Mar. 1934, clipping, HindemithInstitut. Joachim, Frankfurter Zeitung, Mar. 1934. Westermayer, Berliner Tageblatt, 13 Mar. 1934. Westermayer employed a vivid style deemed more suitable for his newspaper’s audience: the new “middle class,” rather than the educated bourgeois readership catered to by the Frankfurter Zeitung. Marschalk, Vossische Zeitung, 14 Mar. 1934. Friedrich W. Herzog, National-Zeitung, Essen, 16 Mar. 1934; the subtitle of his review was “significant symphony premiere in Berlin.” Herzog’s other review, also quoted here, appeared in Düsseldorf’s Der Mittag, 16 Mar. 1934. Heinrich Hofer, Das 12 Uhr Blatt, 14 Mar. 1934. A frequent commentator on Uta von Naumburg was Eberhard Preime, who received his training in musicology with an ideological dissertation, Musik, Musikwissenschaft und Wert: Probleme einer gestalterischen Wissenschaft (Düsseldorf: Nolte, 1935). See Wolfgang Ullrich, Uta von Naumburg: Eine deutsche Ikone (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1998), and Esther Sophia Sünderhauf, Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik: Die deutsche Rezeption von Winckelmanns Antikenideal, 1840–1945 (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), pp. 301–303. Distler is perhaps the most prolific example, along with Ernst Pepping and J. N. David, whom Distler mentions in the preface to his Organ Partita on “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1935), cited from Fischer, “Evangelische Kirchenmusik im Dritten Reich,” 212. Roth, Hamburger Nachrichten, 25 May 1934. Two months later Schenker complained about Roth’s fickle and haughty personality, including his quarrel with Furtwängler. Schenker, postcard of 29 Jul. 1934 to Oswald Jonas, Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, University of California, Riverside, transcribed in http://www.columbia.edu/~idb1/schenker/001738. html. Over 85 letters from Roth to Schenker survive from the period 1912 to 1933. Distler, preface to “Wachet auf,” n.p. Distler, Funktionelle Harmonielehre, p. 6, cited in Fischer, “Evangelische Kirchenmusik im Dritten Reich,” 215–216. Ambrosius, “Die moderne Sinfonie,” 37. Arnold Schering, “Historische und nationale Klangstile,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters für 1927 33 (1928): 31–43, cited in Potter, Most German of the Arts, p. 170n20. Der Reichsbote: deutsche Wochenzeitung für Christentum und Volkstum, 18 March 1934. The reviewer did not, however, shy away from the rheto-

Notes to Pages 238–242

133. 134.

135. 136.

137. 138. 139.

140.

141.

142. 143. 144. 145.

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ric of fascism, writing, for example: “With his ecstatic will power, Furtwängler forced the victory of a competent [Könner] Hindemith.” Litterscheid, National-Zeitung, 23 Nov. 1934. Fritz Ohrmann, Germania, 14 Mar. 1934; the subtitle posed the question of whether Hindemith had been “transformed inwardly” (innerlich gewandelte). Germania was the paper of the Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), which, under pressure from Rome, provided the decisive two-thirds to give Hitler absolute power for five years. Heinrich Strobel, “Hindemiths neue Sinfonie,” Melos 13, no. 4 (Apr. 1934): 130. Hans Boettcher, Die Musikpflege 5, no. 7 (Oct. 1934): 247–248. Boettcher, with Fritz Jöde, edited the short-lived political magazine Musik und Gesellschaft: Arbeitsblätter für soziale Musikpflege und Musikpolitik (1930–1931), rpt. ed. Dorothea Kolland (West Berlin: Das europäische Buch, 1978). Herzog, National-Zeitung, 16 Mar. 1934. Kulenkampff, Blätter für Kunst und Kultur, 5 Oct. 1934. Pfitzner’s speech on Von deutscher Seele was summarized in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 16 Dec. 1937, quoted from Hans Pfitzner und Wien: Sein Briefwechsel mit Victor Junk und andere Dokumente, ed. Elisabeth Wamlek-Junk (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1986), p. 199. Joseph Goebbels, “Gestaltung des deutschen Rundfunks,” 95, trans. from Benjamin M. Korstvedt, “Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: an Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception,” The Musical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (1996): 135 (trans. emended). Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (1930; Munich: Hoheneichen, 1935), pp. 419–422, trans. by Vivian Bird as The Myth of the Twentieth Century: an Evaluation of the Spiritual-intellectual Confrontations of our Age (Torrance, CA: Noontide Press, 1982), pp. 257–259. See also Brinkmann, “Distorted Sublime,” p. 47. Jeffrey Kallberg, “The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor,” Nineteenth-Century Music 11, no. 3 (1988): 243. In this extreme formulation, I refer to the Adorno’s 1938 In Search of Wagner. Claudius Böhm, “Ein wirklich deutscher, national empfindender Kapellmeister.” Hans Werner Henze, “German Music in the 1940s and 1950s,” in Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953–1981, trans. Peter Labanyi (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 36. The performance apparently made such a strong impression that Henze misremembered the chronology, claiming that it was the orchestra’s first postwar concert. According to city archives, the Rudolf Oetker Hall reopened with a performance of Mozart’s Requiem, on Sept. 30, 1945. My thanks to Andreas Hansen, mayor of Bielefeld, personal communication, 30 May 2007.

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Notes to Pages 244–245

7. Symphonic Defeat 1. See Wolfgang Osthoff, “Symphonien beim Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Strawinsky, Frommel, Schostakowitsch,” Acta Musicologica 60, no. 1 (1988): 62–104. 2. “Was ist ein kämpferischer Journalist?” NS-Pressebrief, no. 4, 1937, quoted from Presse und Funk im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Joseph Wulf (1964; rpt. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1989), pp. 192, 194. 3. Karl Grunsky, Der Kampf um deutsche Musik, vol. 1 of Der Aufschwung: Eine Schriften-Sammlung, Künstlerische Reihe, ed. Grunsky (Stuttgart: Erhard Walther, Verlag für Nationalsozialistisches Schrifttum, 1933), p. 12. 4. Hugo Rasch, letter to the Propaganda Ministry, 24 Apr. 1935, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, R55/1177. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998–2005), 5:395, entry of 26 July 1937. Citations from Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 13. 5. Fritz Grüninger, Heldensymphonie: ein Lebens- und Schaffensbild Ludwig van Beethoven (Paderborn: Ferninand Schöningh, 1940); Grüninger, Ewige Harmonien: Schaffen und Schicksal Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts (Munich: F. H. Kerle, 1943). The ideologically suggestive title “heroic symphony” was omitted when a Swiss publisher reprinted the book. 6. Ernst Kris and Hans Speier, Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts during the War, with Sidney Axelrad et alia (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 431–432. The plans for programming the broadcast of the announcement underwent changes over several days as the line of propaganda was finalized. Hans Hinkel to Goebbels, “Rahmen Programm um die Meldung Stalingrad,” Captured German Documents, Propaganda Ministry, T-580, roll 682, Ordner 562, National Archives, Washington D.C., cited from Jay W. Baird, “The Myth of Stalingrad,” Journal of Contemporary History 4, no. 3, Urbanism (1969): 198–199. As Baird further points out, many broadcasts also included Beethoven’s Eroica. 7. Fritz Grüninger, Der Ehrfürchtige: Anton Bruckners Leben dem Volk erzählt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1935); the book appeared in multiple editions into the 1950s. The following year, the theologian Adolf Köberle stressed the piety of Bach and Beethoven alongside Bruckner, in his Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner als Symbolgestalten des Glaubens: Eine frömmigkeitgeschichtliche Deutung (Berlin: Furche, 1936). 8. Signed “J. Sch.,” Musik im Kriege 1, no. 9/10 (Dec./Jan. 1943–1944): 197. Chudoba edited the publication of the university’s war lecture series Der Kampf um den Rhein: Kriegs-Vorträge der Rheinischen FriedrichWilhelms-Universität. Over one hundred lectures, include several by musicologists, were published individually and collected within two large volumes.

Notes to Pages 247–249

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9. Erwin Bauer, “Westmarkreise des N. S. Reichssymphonie-Orchesters,” Zeitschrift für Musik 100, no. 9 (Sept. 1933): 919–922. 10. Erich Valentin, “Musik im Rundfunk: Deutschlandsender und Reichssender Berlin,” Zeitschrift für Musik 103, no. 11 (Nov. 1936): 1402. On Stange, see Fred K. Prieberg, Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Third Reich (1986), trans. Christopher Dolan (London: Quartet Books, 1991), pp. 156–157. 11. Karl Laux, “Anton Bruckners Sinfonie des deutschen Menschen,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 66, no. 27 (24 Nov. 1939): 619, cited in Mathias Hansen, “Die faschistische Bruckner-Rezeption und ihre Quellen,” Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 28, no. 1 (1986): 60. 12. By Ludwig’s designation, Valhalla honors any great men and women “who spoke German, for they can be considered Germans.” These include Peter Paul Rubens, William III of Orange, and Catherine the Great, as well as Austrians such as Maria Theresa, Haydn, Schubert, and Bruckner. 13. Goebbels, Bruckner address, 6 Jun. 1937, in Goebbels-Reden, pp. 281–286, trans. by John Michael Cooper as an appendix to Bryan Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation,” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (1994): 605–609. 14. Welser Zeitung, 12 Aug. 1938. L. G. Bachmann’s Bruckner: Der Roman der Sinfonie appeared in several editions in 1938, along with subsequent editions in 1939, 1940, 1946 and 1955. Bachmann may have used her surname initials because—whereas the genre of fictional biography was open to women—she also published biographies and other historical writings. Beginning in 1937, with her first book, Bachmann published on topics favorable to the National Socialists (Bach, the Gothic sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, and Mozart). Soon after the Anschluss she was appointed Professor at the Wiener Lehrer-Akademie. 15. In his first book after the war, Grüninger played to the broken nation, writing on Schubert and nostalgia, Musikgewordenes Heimweh: Franz Schuberts Weg zur Unsterblichkeit (Landau: Eichenlaub, 1948). 16. Paul Ehlers, “Das Regensburger Bruckner-Erlebnis,” Zeitschrift für Musik 104, no. 7 (Jul. 1937): 745–748. “Anton Bruckner zog in die Walhalla,” Hakenkreuzbanner, 7 Jun. 1937, excerpted in Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Joseph Wulf (1966; Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), pp. 155–157. 17. Peter Raabe, “Anton Bruckner: Rede,” Zeitschrift für Musik 104, no. 7 (Jul. 1937): 744, trans. in Benjamin M. Korstvedt, “Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: An Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception,” The Musical Quarterly 80 (1996): 134. 18. Dieter Schnebel, “Der dreinige Klang oder die Konzeption einer LeibSeele-Geist-Musik (Zu Bruckners Dritte),” in Musik Konzepte 23/24: Anton Bruckner, ed. Heinz-Klaus and Rainer Riehns (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1982), p. 15, cited in Korstvedt, “Bruckner in the Third Reich,” 152.

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Notes to Pages 249–252

19. Erwin Bauer, “Musik auf dem Parteitag der Arbeit,” Die Musik-Woche (9 Oct. 1937): 6, quoted from Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Joseph Wulf (1963; Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1983), p. 249. Nicholas Attfield, “Bruckner in the Theatre: On the Politics of ‘Absolute’ Music in Performance,” Music, Theatre, and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich, ed. Nikolaus Bacht (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 165–168. 20. Goebbels, entry of 13 Mar. 1941, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998–2005), 9:185. See also Gilliam, “Annexation of Bruckner,” p. 587. 21. Hans Herwig, “Was jetzt nottut!” Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 34, no. 15 (Dec. 1933): 128. 22. Korstvedt, “Bruckner in the Third Reich,” pp. 141–146. 23. “London Concerts,” Musical Times 77, no. 1126 (Dec. 1936): 1127. 24. Fred Hamel, “Bruckner Heute,” Musica 1, no. 5/6 (Sept.–Dec. 1947): 304. 25. Gilliam, “Annexation of Bruckner,” p. 596. 26. See Paul Ehlers, “Die Verdunklung der Konzerträume,” Die Gesellschaft 1 (1902): 308–316 and “Zur Konzertreform,” Die Musik 3, no. 2 (Oct. issue 2, 1903): 109, and other literature discussed in Edward F. Kravitt, “The Lied in 19th-century Concert Life,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 18, no. 2 (1965): 217–218. The right-wing Karl Blessinger railed against the practice of lighting in Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart: Benno Filser, 1919), p. 103. But the practice continued to flourish as “Farblichtmusik,” as documented in Jörg Jewanski, “Die Farblichtmusik Alexander Lászlós,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60, no. 1 (1997): 12–43. 27. Hermann Giesler, Ein anderer Hitler: Bericht seines Architekten: Erlebnisse, Gespräche, Reflexionen (1977), 5th ed. (Leoni am Starnberger. See: Druffel, 1982), pp. 215–216. See also Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 99. 28. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 463. See also Nicolaus von Below, At Hitler’s Side: the Memoirs of Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant 1937–1945 (1980), trans. Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill and Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 2001), p. 234. 29. Reinhold Zimmermann, Um Anton Bruckners Vermächtnis: Ein Beitrag zur rassischen Erkenntnis germanischer Tonkunst (Stuttgart: Friedrich Bühler, 1939). 30. Oscar von Pander, “SS.-Konzerte,” Die Musik 27, no. 3 (Dec. 1934): 206. 31. Reinhold Zimmermann, “Der Präsident der Reichsmusikkammer in Aachen,” Zeitschrift für Musik 104, no. 3 (Mar. 1936): 315. Zimmermann’s political orientation was clear early on, in his postwar manifesto for developing a “new German citizen” through education. On his later political publications, see p. 326n32. 32. The performance was originally issued on Deutsche Grammophon LP 18

Notes to Pages 252–257

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

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854 in 1964 and has been reissued on Wilhelm Furtwängler: An Anniversary Tribute (Deutsche Grammophon 477 006–2), in the Original Masters series. My thanks to Robert J. Dennis for this information. Prieberg, Trial of Strength, pp. 322–326, quoting Albert Speer, interview with Lothar Seehaus, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 7 Feb. 1979. Hans Hinkel, speech transcribed in Zeitschrift für Musik 103, no. 6 (Jun. 1936): 700, discussed in Albrecht Riethmüller, “Komposition im Deutschen Reich um 1936,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 38, no. 4 (1981): 252. Emil Petschnig, “Austriaca: Aus Oper und Konzertsaal,” Zeitschrift für Musik 91, no. 2 (Feb. 1925): 87. Trapp was described as “a composer winning ever-growing recognition.” Paul Frank, Kurzgefasstes Tonkünstlerlexikon für Musiker und Freunde der Musik, rev. ed. Wilhelm Altmann, 14th ed. (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1936), p. 638. See also Wilhelm Matthes, “Max Trapp,” Zeitschrift für Musik 104, no. 10 (Oct. 1937): 1073–1085. Hermann Grabner, Allgemeine Musiklehre als Vorschule für das Studium der Harmonielehre, des Kontrapunktes, des Formen- und Instrumentationslehre, 3rd rev. and exp. ed. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1942). The fourth edition of 1943 was unchanged. The 1946 edition only tentatively reintroduced Jewish composers and theorists, but subsequent editions reinstalled the Jewish musicians to their pre-war stature. Grabner was a member of the NS-Lehrerbund (teachers’ union) at the Leipzig University branch (1 Sept. 1934 to 1 Aug. 1935) and joined the SA on May 1, 1933, remaining a member for two years. Ludwig Holtmeier, “From ‘Musiktheorie’ to ‘Tonsatz’: National Socialism and German Music Theory after 1945,” Music Analysis 23, nos. 2–3 (2004): 251, 265n67. Grabner composed numerous songs for use during the Third Reich, especially to texts by Heinrich Anacker and Baldur von Schirach. Oliver Rathkolb, Führertreu und Gottbegnadet: Künstlereliten im Dritten Reich (Vienna: ÖBV, 1991), pp. 217–219. Franz Achilles, Aachener Anzeiger, 18 Jan. 1941. The context was his admiration of the lucid textures in Carmina burana, which stripped the massive orchestra into a folk ensemble. Franz Achilles, Volksfreund (?), Aachen, review of the 9 Jan. 1942 performance, clipping, Herbert von Karajan Zentrum, Vienna. Otto Schumann, Geschichte der deutschen Musik (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1940), p. 310. Grunsky’s son would later take an even more radical stance, analyzing the third act of Tristan—often criticized as a formless monologue reflecting Tristan’s ailing state—as a standard fourmovement symphonic form with an Allegro, Adagio, scherzo and finale. Hans Adabert Grunsky, “Tristan und Isolde: Der symphonische Aufbau des dritten Aufzuges,” Zeitschrift für Musik 113, no. 7 (Jul. 1952): 390–394. Schoenberg stressed his intimate connection to Brahms’s music through years of study when he explained to the music critic Alfred V. Frankenstein

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43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

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Notes to Pages 257–262 why he orchestrated the quartet. Letter of 18 Mar. 1939, Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. Wolfgang von Bartels, Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 34, no. 8 (Apr. 1933): 61. The young H. H. Stuckenschmidt embraced the Mathis der Maler Symphony as “by far the most significant German orchestral work since Pfitzner’s C#-minor Symphony,” in his “Triumph der jungen Musik: Hindemith-Uraufführung bei Furtwängler,” B. Z. am Mittag, 13 Mar. 1934. Joseph Marx, Neues Wiener Journal, 10 Jan. 1933. Rudolf Ploderer, “Marx und Mahler,” 23. Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift (Jun. 1933): 13–17, quoting from Joseph Marx, “Bruno Walter als Dirigent und Solist,” Neues Wiener Journal, 11 April 1933. Correspondence from the government official Karl Kobald confirms that the material was deposited. Handschriften-, Autographen- und NachlaßSammlung, Austrian National Library. Fred Hamel, “Kraftquelle Musik,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 Jan. 1944. Joseph Heinrichs, Zeitchrift für Musik 104, no. 4 (Apr. 1937): 449. Joseph Müller-Blattau, “Zweites Internationales Musikfest in BadenBaden: Grundsätzliches als Bericht und Erörterung,” Deutsche Musikkultur 2, no. 1 (Apr./May 1937): 57–58. Else Bauer, Zeitschrift für Musik 105, no. 6 (Jun. 1938): 647. Werner Korte, “Neue Symphonie von J. N. David,” Deutsche Musikkultur 3, no. 1 (1938): 58, quoted from Brinkmann, “Distorted Sublime,” 53. Walter Abendroth, Hans Pfitzner (Munich: Albert Langen and Georg Müller, 1935), pp. 320–322. Friedrich W. Herzog, “Hans Pfitzner in unserer Zeit,” Die Musik 31, no. 8 (May 1939): 509–510. Joseph Müller-Blattau, Hans Pfitzner, Unsterbliche Tonkunst: Lebens- und Schaffensbilder großer Musiker (Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1940). Walter Abendroth, Hans Pfitzner: Sein Leben in Bildern (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1941), pp. 24, 37. Oskar Loerke, Anton Bruckner: Ein Charakterbild (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1938), p. 12. Loerke also published a book on Bach. See Hans Dieter Schäfer, Moderne im Dritten Reich: Kultur der Intimität bei Oskar Loerke, Friedo Lampe und Helmut Käutner, Abhandlungen der Klasse der Literatur (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 2003), pp. 4–6. Artur Haelßig, “Ein Beethoven-Orchester der Hitler-Jugend als Folgerung aus dem Beethovenfest der Hitler-Jugend in Bad Wildbad, Mai 1938,” Zeitschrift für Musik 105, no. 10 (Oct. 1938): 1095–1096. Richard Eichenauer, Musik und Rasse (1932), 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1937), pp. 300–301. Despite his limited musicological training, Eichenauer’s strident advocacy of nationalist causes and scorn for Jewish composers, even before the National Socialists came to power, won him

Notes to Pages 262–264

60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

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favor after 1933. Eichenauer also wrote more broadly on subjects other than musicology, for example, his 1934 book on the “determinative role” of race in history and culture. Heinrich Knappe, “Friedrich Klose: Schaffen und Schauen, Ruckblick und Ausblick,” Friedrich Klose zum 80. Geburtstag (Lugano: Bibliothek Walter Jesinghaus, 1942), pp. 91–92. Fritz Stege, Völkische Musikerziehung: Monatsschrift für das gesamte deutsche Musikerziehungswesen 3 (1936): 91, quoted from Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 247. The journal was established by the Propaganda Ministry in connection with the NS-Lehrerbund. Hitler, speech of 6 Sept. 1938, transcribed in Michael Walter, Hitler in der Oper: deutsches Musikleben, 1919–1945 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), pp. 195–197, trans. from Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock, N. Y.: Overlook Press, 2003), pp. 278–279. August Bierwirth, Nordwestdeutsche Zeitung, Bremerhaven, 21 Jun. 1937. Bierwirth himself had a long journey from Bremen to Frankfurt. Wilhelm Twittenhoff, who worked for Stumme, reported on their conversation in a letter to the composer on 26 Apr. 1937, Carl Orff Zentrum, Munich, Allgemeine Korrespondenz, paraphrased in Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 122. Wolfgang Pohl, Kattowitzer Zeitung, 6 Jun. 1942. The Kattowitzer Zeitung was among the first local newspapers to sympathize with Hitler’s Germany, as early as May 1933. W. J. Rose, “The German-Polish Pact of 1934 as a Factor in Shaping the Relations of Two Neighbour Peoples,” International Affairs 13, no. 6 (Nov. 1934): 798. Julius Lothar Schücking, “Fröhliche Sänger damals wie heute! Erstes Konzert des Musikvereins in der Oetkerhalle” unidentified review of the Bielefeld performance of Oct. 1938, Orff-Zentrum. Fritz Stege, Der Westen, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 22 Dec. 1941. Alex Ross, “In Music, Though, There Were No Victories,” The New York Times, 20 Aug. 1995. Orff apparently made this comment to Pia Gilbert (born Wertheimer), professor emeritus at the Juilliard School, as reported to the author in September 2002. Wertheimer grew up in Baden, Germany, and after the Nuremberg Laws, emigrated to the United States with her family at age sixteen, so her encounter with the composer would have occurred at a relatively young age. Westfälische Landeszeitung, 12 Feb. 1942. The reviews, many of which were marked up, presumably by Orff or his wife, are housed at the Orff-Zentrum. Orff’s undated recollection is reproduced in Carl Orff und sein Werk: Dokumentation, vol. 4, Trionfi: Carmina Burana, Catulli Carmina, Trionfo di Afrodite (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1979), p. 66. See also Guido Heldt, “Hardly Heroes: Composers as a Subject in National Socialist Cinema,” in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny,

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74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

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Notes to Pages 264–267 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), pp. 114–135. Horst Büttner, Zeitschrift für Musik 106, no. 5 (May 1939): 1133–1136. Walter Dirks, Frankfurter Zeitung, 10 Jun. 1937. Schücking, “Fröhliche Sänger damals wie heute!” Oct. 1938 review. Adalbert Heller, Fränkischer Kurier, 16 June 1937. On Handel’s reception in the Third Reich, see Pamela M. Potter, “The Politicization of Handel and his Oratorios in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Early Years of the German Democratic Republic,” Musical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2001): 311–341. Ernst Laaff, Deutsche Musik-Zeitung 38, no. 7 (15 Jun. 1937), clipping, Orff-Zentrum. Fritz Droop, Dortmunder Zeitung, 11 Jun. 1937. Signed “F. G.,” Spectator, 25 Jun. 1937. http://www.grovemusic.com.ezp1.harvard.edu/shared/views/article.html? section=music.42969.1#music.42969.1. The Orff-Zentrum website states that following Gerigk’s criticism, there was no stated production until 1940, in Dresden—without mentioning that at least five orchestras programmed “concert” versions during this period. http:www.orff-zentrum. de/carlorff_biographie_uk.asp. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 94–95. Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 267.

Index

Abendroth, Hermann, 179, 216, 242 Abendroth, Walter, 210, 222, 225, 260; on Zschorlich, 226 Achilles, Franz, 256, 339n40 Adler, Felix: on Mahler’s Symphony no. 6, 162–163; Symphony no. 7, 113 Adler, Guido, 42, 81–82, 90, 275n18; on counterpoint, 56; on Jewish identity, 141; Mahler, 27; on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 6, 97 Adorno, Theodor W., 155; on Beethoven, 245; on Mahler, 120; Symphony no. 7, 1; on Wagner, 98, 120; in the Third Reich, 143, 211–212, 323n10, 324n13, 335n143 Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein, 30–31, 46, 214 Altmann, Gustav, 39, 100 Ambrosius, Hermann, 218–219, 238 Anacker, Heinrich, 329n64, 339n38 Angriff, Der. See National Socialist Workers Party Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Musikkritiker, 223–224, 330n67

Arendt, Hannah, 211 Austrian Republic, 149; Social Democratic Arts office, 142; decade tributary concert, 170

Bach, C. P. E., 64, 287n89 Bach, David Joseph, 63, 145; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 6, 89, 134, 143 Bach, J. S.: counterpoint reception, 54, 57, 58, 187, 272n18, 283n52; influence of, 57–58; programming of, 70, 142–143, 177, 228, 249, 251; revival of, 5. See also Busoni; Halm; Kurth; Mahler; Schoenberg Bachmann, L. G., 337n15 Bahr, Hermann, 25, 66, 148 Band, Lothar, 327n41 Bartel, Hermann, 158 Bartels, Wolfgang von, 340n44 Batka, Richard, 69; on Mahler’s Jewish identity, 133; Symphony no. 5, 116, 118, 277n48, 300n135 Baudelaire, Charles, 27, 103 Bauer, Julius, 37

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Bauer-Lechner, Natalie, 45, 67; and Mahler, 277n48; on Symphony no. 1, 30, 91, 111 Beethoven, Ludwig van: commemorations, 7, 122, 165, 170–171; counterpoint, 51; politicization of, 187, 204; as touchstone, 38, 158. See also Bekker; Horenstein Beethoven, works of: Leonore Overture, 205; Piano Concerto no. 5, 96; piano sonatas, 138, 145; Kreutzer Piano Violin Sonata, op. 47, 201; Symphonies as exemplars, 27, 50, 106, 125–126, 164. Symphony no. 1, 130; Symphony no. 3 (Eroica), 3, 99; political interpretation, 137–138, 145, 166, 336n6; Symphony no. 5, 26, 92; political interpretation, 138; Symphony no. 6, 135; Symphony no. 7, 112–113; Symphony no. 8, 22; Symphony no. 9, 23, 26, 130; political interpretation, 3. See also Bruckner; and Wagner, 115; as cultural icon, 90; reception of, 204–205. See also Blessinger; Violin Concerto, programming of, 251. See also Bekker; Blessinger; Goebbels; Halm; Loos; Marx, A. B.; Morold; Schering; Schumann; Wagner Behrens, Peter, 157 Bekker, Paul, 12, 13, 119, 265–266; on aesthetics, 141; 151; on wartime art, 137; on the symphony, 121; on Beethoven and Mahler, 146, 148–149; cultural function of symphony 146; and Kurth and Bruckner, 155; on Beethoven, 76, 120, 133, 135; Beethoven and politics, 139–140, 149, 161, 181; on Richard Strauss, 83, 111, 119; on Mahler, 132, 148; his orchestration, 119–120; Symphony no. 1, 153; Symphony no. 5, 127, 152–153; Symphony no. 6, 134–135, 152, 160–161; Symphony no. 7, 153, 154

Berl, Heinrich, 192; on Wagner, 57 Berlin, 213, 228, 230, 252, 258, 263; performances in, 222; journalism, 9, 219; music criticism, 54, 100; musical life, 3, 56, 116, 126, 163, 174, 231. On music critics, See Walter Abendroth; Adorno; Bekker; Hirschberg; Hofer, Marschalk; Leopold Schmidt; Schrenk; Steinhagen; Taubert; Weißmann, Westermayer. On conductors, See Fried; Furtwängler; Kleiber. See also Blüthner Orchestra Berlin Philharmonic, 163–164, 251–252; Philharmonie, 210; and the Third Reich, 144, 215, 232, 251. See also Furtwängler; Unger; Weisbach Berlin State Opera, 219–222, 228 Berlin Symphony Orchestra, 181. See also Unger Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 234 Berliner Morgenpost, 329n63 Berliner Tageblatt, 12, 100, 234, 265, 324n16 Berlioz, Hector, 38, 42, 85; Symphonie fantastique, 129 Berrsche, Alexander, 94 Bernstein, Leonard, 3 Bie, Oskar, 27, 97, 165 Bielefeld Philharmonic Orchestra, 242 Bienenfeld, Elsa: social criticism, 43; on aesthetics, 49; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 7, 90, 92, 104, 118, 127; Mahler’s obituary, 148; and Schoenberg, 90, 121 Blankenburg, Walter, 232 Blech, Leo, 34 Blessinger, Karl, 139; on Bach, 122, 187; on Beethoven, 121–122, 172, 193, 194; on Bruckner, 172; on intensification, 152, 194; on Mahler, 29, 140; on musical life, 91, 154–155, 338n27 Blüthner Orchestra, 173 Boettcher, Hans, 335n136

Index Brahms, Johannes, 3, 9; versus New German School, 30; advice from Schumann, 51; symphonic legacy, 48, 50, 69, 92; symphonic aesthetics/ approach to convention, 79, 169; orchestration, 83; programming and recording of the symphonies, 166, 258; early symphony reception, 29; Symphony no. 1, 106, 130; Symphony no. 2, 69, 216; Symphony no. 3, 125; Symphony no. 4, 102; “Beherzigung,” op 93a, 143; influence of, 175, 176. See also Louis; Mahler; Schoenberg Brandes, Friedrich, 30, 132–133 Brasch, Alfred, 228, 229, 331n78, 332n93 Brecht, Bertolt, 218, 231 Bresgan, Cesar, 256 Bruckner, Anton: compositional aesthetics, 21, 42; Beethoven’s influence on Bruckner’s symphonies no. 8 and no. 9, 72; counterpoint, 57, 58; influence on, 144, 173–178, 315n23; memorial of, 36; orchestration, 83, 84; political use, 17, 214, 244, 245–253; programming of, 45–46, 109, 166, 179, 246; symphonic legacy, 48, 50, 164; symphonic output, 3, 141, 169–170; symphonic aesthetics, 69; 193; and socialism, 170, 187, 196–197; as touchstone, 175, 179, 204, 249. See also Decsey; Gräner; Grunsky; Halm; Hirschfeld; Jacobs; Kurth; Louis; Mahler; Morold; Nodnagel; Weißmann Bruckner’s work: Symphony no. 1, 92; Symphony no. 2, 141; Symphony no. 3, 70–71, 247; Symphony no. 4, 38, 45, 70, 189, 250–251; Symphony no. 5, 69–70; Symphony no. 6, 170, 246; Symphony no. 7, Adagio of, 172–173; political function, 170, 249, 251–252; review in Arbeiter Zeitung, 187, 196–197.

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Symphony no. 8, 70, 170; performances of, 46, 179; reception of, 72, 194, 247; Symphony no. 9, 170; as exemplary of German culture, 204; programming of, 252 Bruckner Gesellschaft, 245, 250 Bücher, Karl, 157 Busoni, Ferruccio, 9; and Bach, 132 Büttner, Horst, 264 B. Z. am Mittag, 9, 224

Chagall, Marc, 29 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 33, 43, 72, 141. See also Hirschfeld; Morold Chopin, Kate, 101, 104 Chudoba, Karl F., 245 Cologne, 117; and Goebbels, 212; music critics, 117; musical life, 54, 179. See also Hiller; Neitzel; Ohling Copland, Aaron, 6, 191, 216

Dahlhaus, Carl, 15 David, Johann Nepomuk, 177, 253 Debussy, 27, 57, 95 Decsey, Ernst, 46, 70, 171; on Bruckner, 13 Dehmel, Ida, 104 Deutsche Zeitung, 11, 46, 225 Deutscher Werkbund (and journal, Werkbund), 101, 157 Deutschlandlied, 195 Dirks, Walter, 264 Distler, Hugo, 231, 237, 334n126 Donisch, Max, 331n77 Dönitz, Karl, 251 Draeseke, Felix, 49, 52; on Strauss, 25 Dukas, Paul, 55 Dvoˆ rák, 82

Ebermayer, Erich, 327n45 Eccarius-Sieber, Arthur, 118, 126 Eckart, Dietrich, 35

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Ehlers, Paul; on Bruckner, 181, 248; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 7, 118–119; and Kampfbund, 302n165 Eichenauer, Richard, 261–262, 341n60. See also Ploder Einstein, Alfred, 143 Eisler, Hanns, 218 Erdgeist, 92

Fanck, Arnold, 158 Fin de siècle, 45, 55, 104, 140 Fishberg, Maurice, 97 Fleischer, Hugo, 28, 30, 159–160 Flesch, Hans, 331n83 Frank, César, 326, 339n22 Frankenstein, Alfred V., 340n43 Frankfurter Zeitung, 12, 132, 224, 225, 264, 265 Freud, Siegmund, 28, 105, 112, 172, 200 Fritsch, Theodor, 127, Fuchs, Robert, 54 Funk, Walter, 333–334n118 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 247; as composer, 176–177, 255; as conductor, 219–220, 251, 258; political contexts, 29, 145, 225, 226, 252–253

Gatz, Felix Maria, 275n25 George, Stefan, 12, 24, 43 Gerigk, Herbert, 265, 342n82 Germania, 335n134 Gilbert, Pia, 341n70 Gobineau, Arthur, 33 Goebbels, Joseph, 222; on aesthetics, 122, 211; arts criticism ban, 209, 225, 247, 250; press policies, 212, 214, 227–228; arts policies, 144, 252, 254; on Beethoven, 7; on Brahms, 216; on Bruckner, 248, 249; on German artistic models, 169, 213–214; politics, 150, 188, 210; propaganda, 183, 202,

212–213, 240; radio as propaganda, 210, 214. See also Hitler Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, 164, 212, 214, 220, 244 Goethe, 34, 49, 188; exemplary for music, 27, 99; reception, 158; political reception, 214; on Faustian ideal for music, 119, 160; influence on composers, 253 Goldstaub, B. F., 274n8 Goldstein, Moritz, 305n29 Grabner, Hermann, 255, 339n38 Graf, Max, 28; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 5, 48–49, 97, 99 137 Gräner, Georg, 181; on Beethoven and Bruckner, 169. See also Marschalk; Stolzenberg Greß, Richard, 174–175 Grüninger, Fritz, 314n14; on Beethoven and Mozart, 245, 336n5; on Bruckner, 171, 248 Grunsky, Karl: on counterpoint, 53; timbre, 87, 88–89, 181; on Steigerung, 53, 78, 194–195; on Bruckner, 79, 171, 178, 194, 196; on Bruckner arrangements, 89; politics and music, 244, 271n4; on Wagner, 194. See also Schenker Günther, Hans F. K., 278n60 Günther, Johannes, 330n67

Hadamovsky, Eugen, 325n28 Haelßig, Artur, 260–261 Halm, August, 72, 75–76, 181; on Beethoven, 187; on Bruckner, 13, 79, 189, 202; comparisons of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mozart, 72, 169; Von zwei Kulturen der Musik, 13, 78 Hamburg, 223, 251; musical life, 116; critics, 52, 53 Hamel, Fred, 250 Handel, Friedrich: programming of, 252; and Third Reich, 342n78; as touchstone, 112, 166, 265

Index Hanslick, Eduard, 1, 201; on “absolute” music, 30; on musical listening, 116, 125; on rhythm, 102, 104; symphony reviews, 47, 106, 125–126; on timbre, 86. See also Bücher Harlfinger, Richard, 157, 310–311n121 Harris, Roy, 216–217 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, 218 Hasse, Kurt, 323n4 Hauer, Joseph, 237 Hauer, Karl, 102 Havemann, Gustav, 226; on Hindemith, Pfitzner, and Strauss, 229 Haydn, Joseph: as classical icon, 3, 73, 115, 129; symphonic meaning, 27. See also Deutschlandlied; Kurth Haydn, Michael, 177 Hebbel, Friedrich, 33, 49 Hegel, Friedrich, 9, 64, 65, 66, 182 Hehemann, Max, 96 Heinrichs, Joseph, 175, 259 Hellmesberger, Joseph, 37 Helm, Theodor, 45; on Liszt and Bruckner, 45; on Bruckner’s Symphony no. 3, 70–71; Symphony no. 4, 38, 70; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 5, 29, 54, 88 Henze, Hans Werner, 242, 243, 335n145 Hepokoski, James, 16 Herrmann, Hugo, 217 Herwig, Hans, 249 Herzog, Friedrich, 204, 232, 234, 235; on Hindemith, 227, 229; Mathis der Maler symphony, 222–223, 225, 235, 239; Concert Music, op. 50, 232, 234; on Pfitzner’s Palestrina, 260 Hiller, Paul, 109–110 Hindemith, Paul, 143; and Hitler, 221, 226–227, 230; reception of, 121, 188; Concert Music, op. 50, 231, 232, 234. See also Havemann; Herzog; Hinkel; Schumann; Zschorlich

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Hindemith, Mathis der Maler (opera), 219, 220. Mathis der Maler Symphony, 232, 241, 242; reception of, 257. Negative reactions, see Herzog; Rasch; positive reactions, see Brasch; Joachim; Litterscheid; Marschalk; Springer; Stege; Sträußler; Stuckenschmidt. Neues vom Tage, 221; Pittsburgh Symphony, Sinfonietta in E major, and Symphonia serena, 242 Hirschberg, Walther, 127, 179, 180 Hinkel, Hans, 227, 253, 323n4 Hirschfeld, Robert, 36; and Chamberlain, 37; critical writings, 49–50, 82; symphonic ideal, 186; on Bruckner, 45, 92; on Mahler, 92, 98, 108–109, 112–113; conducting Beethoven, 37; conducting Bruckner’s Symphony no. 4, 38; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 1, 54, 96, 107, 109; Symphony no. 4, 186; on Symphony no. 5, 37; Symphony no. 6, 88; Symphony no. 7, 96; on Schubert, 92; on Strauss’s Salome, 59 Hitler, Adolf, 190, 210, 221; references to, 215, 244; on music, 245, 250–251; on Wagner, 244. See also Eckart; Jünger; Schering; Spengler Hitler Youth, 211, 261 Hofer, Heinrich, 236 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 91, 166, 294n44, 321n105 Hoffmann, Hans, 242 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 24, 47, 66, 105, 165, 192 Horenstein, Jasha, 181

Immerman, Karl, 108 Intensification Steigerung, 34; Goethe, 77; Halm, 189, 194–195, 260; in Beethoven, 161; in Bruckner, 70–72; Helm, Louis, 192, 196,

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Index

Intensification (continued) 248; Goebblels; in Mahler’s symphonies, 152, 153 Bekker; Symphony no. 3, 2, 119; Symphony no. 6, 39, 98, 162, 163, 172; Seventh, 127, 128. See also Blessinger; Grunsky Istel, Edgar, 295n51

Jacobs, Walter, 179, 194 Jean Paul, 27 Joachim, Heinz, 225, 235 Jodl, Friedrich, 284n63 Joß, Victor, 119 Joyce, James, 97 Jüdische Kulturbund, 257 Jung, Friedrich, 218 Jünger, Ernst, 139

Kalbeck, Max: on aesthetics and interpretation, 24, 29, 31, 86; on Mahler’s orchestration, 85 96, 98, 99, 108; Symphony no. 4, 100–101; Symphony no. 5, 92, 106, 108, 114–115, 117; Symphony no. 6, 61–62 Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, 226–227, 229, 302n165. See also Ehlers; Herrmann; Trapp Kandinsky, Wassily, 63, 94 Kant, Immanuel, 43, 156; reception of, 214; on aesthetics, 50, 64, 66, 200; on the sublime, 125, 193, 240 Karajan, Herbert von, 11, 178, 250, 255, 256 Kattowitzer Zeitung, 341n66 Kauders, Albert: on Mahler’s Symphony no. 5, 111; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 6, 49, 100, 133 Klee, Paul, 63 Kleiber, Erich, 219–220, 224 Klemperer, Otto, 179, 194, 260, 312n140 Klenau, Paul von, 237 Klimt, Gustav, 32, 55, 90, 92, 105, 112

Klinger, Max, 90, 92 Klose, Friedrich, 262 Knöchel, Wilhelm, 146 Kopsch, Julius, 232 Kornauth, Egon, 255 Korngold, Julius, 2, 40; and Mahler, 1, 42; Symphony no. 3, 28, 33, 49, 111–112, 119; Symphony no. 5, 49, 54–55, 114; Symphony no. 6, 55, 126–127, 133; Symphony no. 7, 1–2, 49, 55, 112; on Schoenberg, 55; on Strauss’s Salome, 59, 90 Korte, Werner, 259 Koussevitzky, Sergey, 242 Kraft durch Freude. See National Socialist German Workers Party Kraus, Karl, 35, 102 Krauss, Clemens, 163 Krenek, Ernst, 212 Kreshaw, Ian, 323n5 Kretzschmar, Hermann, 32, 42, 70–71 Krieger, Erhard, 327n40 Kulenkampff, Hans-Wilhelm, 223, 239, 329n64 Der Kunstwart, 30, 133 Kurth, Ernst, 14; and Bekker, 13, 155; on Bruckner, 13, 197–198; on unity, 186; on classical music, 202; philosophical concepts of listening, 199–202; politics, 141, 171, 172, 204, 315n17; spatial concepts, 195–196; on Wagner, 203. See also Schwebisch

Laaff, Ernst, 265 Langbehn, Julius, 12, 43, 44, 79 Laujol, Henri, 102 Laux, Karl, 247 Leonhardt, Otto, 218 Lersch, Heinrich, 254 Liebstöckl, Hans: on Mahler, 40; on Mahler and Schoenberg, 98 Linz, 230, 247, 249, 250, 280n10 Liszt, Franz: and orchestration, 82;

Index symphonic poem, 21. See also Heinrichs; Helm; Merian; Muntz Litterscheid, Richard: on Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, 229, 238, 332n98 Loerke, Oskar, 260 Loewengard, Max, 52, 53 Loos, Adolf, 47, 273n24; on Beethoven, 43, 89–90, 107 Louis, Rudolf, 12, 140, 251; on Bruckner, 13, 46, 71–72, 79, 204; on Mahler, 331n78; in Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart, 11, 24, 38–39, 41, 147; review of Symphony no. 7, 128 Löwe, Ferdinand, 45–46, 70, 170, 194 Ludwig II, 248 Lueger, Karl, 37–38, 42

Machaty, Gustav, 213 Mahler, Alma, 99 Mahler, Gustav: on aesthetics, 28; Amsterdam festival, 165, 172; antiSemitism and Jewish heritage, 38–42, 57, 140–141, 149, 164, 226; Beethoven interpretation, 37; on Blech, 34; on Brahms, 68; on Bruckner, 45, 68; compositional aesthetics, 3, 17, 67–68, 75; as conductor, 45–46, 70, 148, 178. See also Pringsheim. Conventional form, 25; 51; and Nietzsche, 127–128, 134, 140; programming, 242; and Strauss, 81, 164. Third Reich reception, 254. See also Eckart; Eichenauer; Grabner; Marx, Joseph; Perl; on Walter, 34. Wagner interpretation of, 35 Mahler’s music, 176; reception in general, 226, 265; legacy, 265; influence of Bach, 51; on polyphony, 59, 60, 243; musical meaning, 30–31, 33, 43; reception of, 27–29, 32, 35; orchestration, 82–84, 87; orchestration, views of, 56, 91, 97–98. See

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also Bauer-Lechner Songs, “Der Himmel hängt voller Geigen,” 254; Kindertotenlieder, 179; Das Lied des Verfolgten im Turm, 155; Songs of a Wayfarer, 112. Symphony interpretation, 178; cultural function of his symphonies, 113; 149, 236, 265–266. Symphony no. 1, 112, 115–116, 143; reactions to orchestration of, 153. On intepretation of, see Bauer-Lechner. On reception of, see Bekker, Hirschfeld; Marx, Joseph; Muntz. Symphony no. 2, reception of, 27, 33, 92, 109. See also Leopold Schmidt. Symphony no. 3, 60, 67, 128, 132; reception of, see Korngold. Symphony no. 4, reception of, see Hirschfeld and Kalbeck. Symphony no. 5, 85, 179, 113–114; interpretation of, 68. See also Altmann, Bekker, Dehmel, EccariusSieber, Graf, Helm; Hiller; Hirschfeld; Kalbeck; Korngold; Muntz; Neitzel, Nodnagel; Reichspost, Robert; Schrenk; Schönaich; Stefan; Taubert. Symphony no. 6, 126, 129–132, 135–136, 143, 156, 172; reception of, 48, 140. See also Adler, Felix; Altmann; Bach, D. J.; Bekker; Brandes; Frankfurter Zeitung; Hehemann; Hirschfeld; Intensification; Kalbeck, Kauders; Korngold; Liebstöckl; Marx, Joseph; Muntz; Leopold Schmidt; Vancsa; Werner. Symphony no. 7, 25, 68, 116; counterpoint in, 53; meaning of, 28, 32–33; unity in, 68. See also Bekker; Bienenfeld; Ehlers, Hirschfeld; Joß; Louis; Kalbeck; Korngold; Rychnovsky; Schmidt, Leopold; Specht; Wallaschek; Weißmann. Das Lied von der Erde, 180. Symphony no. 8, 147, 148, 180, 218; reception, 161

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Index

Mahling, Christoph-Hellmut, 15 Mann, Thomas, 102, 151; Death in Venice, 105, 113–114, 156; Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, 6; Magic Mountain, 197; Doktor Faustus, 3, 6, 268 Mannheim, Karl, 6 Marschalk, Max, 174, 224, 235, 277n49, Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 48; on Beethoven, 26, 112 Marx, Joseph, 163–164, 257–258 Marx, Karl, 6 Meisel, Edmund, 146, 213 Melos, 212 Mendelssohn, Albrecht-Bartholdy, 180 Mendelssohn, Arnold, 231 Mendelssohn, Felix, 125, 231, 242, 257, 276n39 Merian, Hans, 85 Messner, Joseph, 177, 254 Meyer, Leonard, 16 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 37 Morold, Max (Max von Millenkovich): on Bruckner, 72–73, 192–193; and Chamberlain, 72; comparison of Beethoven and Bruckner, 186 Moser, Hans Joachim, 139 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: biography, 64; exemplary of classical style, 73, 115; counterpoint, 51; criticism of, 150, 202; influence of, 104; Idomeneo, 70; Eb Symphony, K 543, 91; “Jupiter” Symphony, K 551, 104, 109, 267; reception, 245, 260; programming of, 165, 250, 276n39. See also Halm Müller-Blattau, Joseph, 259, 260 Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 11, 71 Munich Philharmonic, 249, 288n114 Muntz, Maximilian: on Bruckner, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, 109; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 1, 44, 96;

Symphony no. 2, 109; on Symphony no. 5, 88, 101, 108, 114, 117–118; Symphony no. 6, 39, 98, 110, 134 Müntzel, Herbert, 211 Die Musik, 94, 173, 211, 272– 273n19; and Rosenberg, 224 Muthesius, Hermann, 101

Napoleon, 3, 137–138, 150, 188, 215 National Socialist German Workers Party: affiliated presses, 3, 228; affiliated publications, 144, 257, 259; Angriff, Der, 225; music journals, 212; Völkischer Beobachter, 139, 226, 327n44. Bruckner endorsement, 248; NS-Kulturgemeinde, 223, 227; NS-Lehrerbund, 255; NS-Reich Symphony Orchestra, 246. Party members, sympathizers, and collaborators, 11, 219, 234, 260. See also Blessinger; Gräner, Georg; Herzog; Krauss; Morold; Sombart; Klenau; Trapp; Valentin. Ideology and propaganda, 154, 188, 191, 203, 213–214, 255, 256; Kraft durch Freude, 214. See also Nuremberg party rallies Neitzel, Otto, 65, 110, 300n141 Neue Freie Presse, 1, 55, 81, 272n17 Neues Musikblatt, 212 Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 272n17 Neumann, Claus, 231 New German School, 9 New Vienna Philharmonic. See Vienna Niemann, Walter, 12, 174; on Gräner, 174; on modern music and culture, 31, 83, 95, 97, 99, 110; on musical expression, 25; on Mahler, 41–42, 90, 110, 278–279n68; on polyphony, 57; on Strauss, 97 Nierentz, Hans-Jürgen, 217 Nietzsche, Friedrich; influence on music criticism, 41, 58, 112–113; literary influence of, 75; political

Index interpretation of, 137; on Wagner, 96–97, 103; Will to Power, 140, 156. See also Mahler; Spengler; Strauss Nisard, Désiré, 298n92 Nodnagel, Ernst Otto: on Mahler, 65–66, 107; on Mahler and Bruckner, 132 Nohl, Ludwig, 86 Nordau, Max: on “modern” music, 32, 61, 117, 119; on the symphony, 50; on modern life and art, 95, 97, 103 Nuremberg party rallies, 7, 205, 241; contemporary account, 213; music programming, 179, 245, 249. See also Triumph of the Will

Ohling, Richard, 245 Ohrmann, Fritz, 238, 329n76, 335n134 Olympics, 227, 230, 244, 263 Orff, Carl, 243; and politics, 263–264; Carmina burana. See also Büttner; Dirks; Droop; Gerigk Österreichische Rundschau, 37

Pander, Oscar von, 251–252 Pater, Walter, 190 Perl, Carl Johann, 140–141 Pepping, Ernest, 334n126 Peters, Ernst. See Heinrichs Petersen, Carl, 150 Petschnig, Emil, 177 Pfitzner, Hans: music, 255, 256; reception of, 203, 229; Palestrina, 5–6, 260; writings and speeches, 76, 169, 239 Ploder, Rudolf, 164; review of Eichenauer, 312n143 Potter, Pamela, 3 Preime, Eberhard, 334n125 Prieberg, Fred K., 212 Pringsheim, Klaus, 151

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Procházka, Rudolf von, 28 Prokofiev, Sergey, 234, 244 Propaganda Ministry. See Reich, Third Püringer, August, 112, 172–173

Raabe, Peter, 230, 248, 252, 253 Rasch, Hugo, 226, 232, 327n44, 331n77 Rathenau, Walter, 36, 167, 172, 278n60 Reger, Max, 51, 53, 57, 58, 173, 247 Reich Chamber of Culture, 230, 232 Reich Chamber of Music (Reichmusikkammer), 233; and David, 253; Furtwängler, 220; and Hindemith, 221, 226, 229, 230, 231; and Raabe, 248, 252 Reich Chamber of Theater, 221 Reich radio, 227, 249, 251; Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft, 218. See also Goebbels Propaganda Ministry Reich, Steve, 16 Reich, Third, 11, 14, 118, 139; music criticism, 188; musical life, 176–177, 215–216; press policies, 209–210 Reichskartell der Deutschen Musikerschaft, 226 Reichspost, 109 Reichsverband Deutscher Schriftsteller, 222 Reichsverband der deutschen Presse, 227–228 Reiter, Josef, 253 Richter, Hans (filmmaker), 213 Riefenstahl, Leni, 158, 213, 268 Riezler, Walter, 29, 147 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 137 Ringer, Fritz K., 183 Robert, Richard, 48, 65, 108 Rosenberg, Alfred: on aesthetics, 122, 240; on Beethoven, 7; on German artistic models, 169, 213–214; Nazi

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Index

Rosenberg, Alfred (continued) ideology, 150, 188, 226; and politics, 217, 222. See also Kampbund; NS-Kulturgemeinde Rosenfeld, Fritz, 158 Ross, Alex, 263 Rottenberg, Ludwig, 331n83 Rufer, Josef, 234–235; and Schoenberg, 223 Ruttmann, Walter, 213 Ryan, Judith, 32 Rychnovsky, Ernst, 111, 128

Saar, Ferdinand von, 101 Saarland, 245–247 Sachs, Joseph, 29, 276n28 Schenker, Heinrich, 10, 197–198; on Beethoven, 196; on counterpoint, 54; on Grunsky, 30; on übersehen, 65; on unity, 187–188. See also Wunsch Schering, Arnold, 11, 238; on Beethoven, 166, 215, 326n30, 327n41; on music criticism, 14, 22 Schiele, Egon, 105 Schiller, Friedrich, 39, 43, 134 Schillings, Max, 29, 331n77 Schlageter, Albert Leo, 216 Schlösser, Rainer, 220 Schmidt, Franz, 175 Schmidt, Leopold, 12, 50–51, 165; on Mahler, 37, 331n78; Symphony no. 2, 147, 275n17; Symphony no. 6, 28, 36, 98, 99, 100; Symphony no. 7, 126, 147 Schnebel, Dieter, 249 Schnitzler, Arthur, 24, 105; on Mahler and Strauss, 40–41 Schönaich, Gustav, 31; on Mahler’s Symphony no. 5, 36, 107 Schoenberg, Arnold, 3, 82, 143; antiSemitism, 167–168; Bach influence, 51, 62; Brahms arrangements, 256–257, 340n43; counterpoint, 51, 57, 61; as modernist icon, 7,

62–63, 111, 226; on musical aesthetics, 192; on Pfitzner, 5–6; on timbre, 56, 93–94, 119–121. See also Berl; Bienenfeld; Klenau; Korngold; Liebstöckl; Petschnig Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 87, 150, 214 Schreker, Franz, 94, 105 Schrenk, Walter, 162 Schubert, Franz, 159; and folk music, 38; 92, 164, 199; Symphony no. 8 (Unfinished), 163, 229; Symphony no. 9, 27 Schücking, Julius Lothar, 263, 264 Schüler, Johannes, 228, 229 Schultze, Norbert, 329n64 Schumann, Otto: on Hindemith, 230–231; on Wagner, 256 Schumann, Robert, 8, 27, 118; comparison of Beethoven and Mozart, 128; on Beethoven, 3, 130; on Schubert, 27, 275n15 Schütz, Heinrich, 222 Schwebsch, Erich, 171, 314n13 Secession, 49, 55, 56, 92, 282n29 Sechter, Simon, 54 Seidl, Arthur, 23, 66, 85 Segantini, Giovanni, 92 Segher, Anne, 243 Sekles, Bernhard, 231 Shaw, George Bernard, 49 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 5, 6, 191, 216, 234, 244 Sibelius, Jean, 5, Sombart, Werner, 101, 107 Sommer, K. J., 217 Sorel, Georges, 156 Specht, Richard, 43; on Mahler, 22, 25, 41, 106, 130, 148; Symphony no. 6, 156; Symphony no. 7, 156 Speer, Albert, 251, 253 Speidel, Ludwig, 275n26 Spengler, Oswald, 139, 217; on Hitler, 182–183; on Nietzsche, 158–159 Springer, Hermann, 223, 225 Stange, Hermann, 247 Stefan, Paul, 92, 106–107, 278n63

Index Stege, Fritz, 262, 263, 226n66, 333n67; on Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony, 223, 225, 234 Steigerung. See Intensification Steinhagen, Otto, 233, 234 Stolzenberg, Georg, 174 Sträußler, Wilhelm, 227 Strauss, Johann, 314n15 Strauss, Richard, 21, 35, 191; as conductor, 93, 111; criticism of, see Draeseke; Hauer; Karl. On Mahler’s Symphony no. 1, 114; and Nietzsche, 23. Orchestration of, 82–84, 243. See also Bekker, Merian. Politicized reception, see Hauer, Karl; Muntz; Niemann; Schnitzler. Polyphony, 57–58; programmatic interpretations, 29, 32; Third Reich, 226–227, 230, 232, 263. See also Havemann; Neumann Strauss’s works: Alpine Symphony, 164–165; Also sprach Zarathustra, 23, 58, 75; Aus Italien, 22; Don Juan, 16, 22, 23, 83; Ein Heldenleben, 28, 59; Elektra, 24; Friedenstag, 263; Guntram, 22; Macbeth, 22; Metamorphorsen, 24; Salome, 24, 59, 81, 221–222; reception of, 75, 112; Symphonia domestica, 23–24, 132; Tod und Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, 22, 31; Verklärung, 22, 23, 24 Strobel, Heinrich, 211–212, 238, 324n16 Stuckenschmidt, H. H., 224, 225 Stumme, Wolfgang, 263, 341n65 Stunde der Nation, 215–216 Sullivan, Louis, 89

Tandler, Adolf, 280 Taubert, Ernst Edward, 100 Tchaikovsky, 83; 242, 281n21; on Symphony no. 6, see Guido Adler Tischer, Gerhard, 82, 214, 215, 216, 228

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353

Toch, Ernst, 221 Tolney-Witt, Gisella, 292n14, 295n45 Tolstoy, Leo, 101 Trakl, Georg, 24 Trapp, Max, 259; and Kampfbund, 254–255 Trittinger, Adolf, 332n103 Triumph of the Will, 213, 268 Twittenhoff, Wilhelm, 341n65

Unger, Heinz, 179–180

Valentin, Erich, 247 Valhalla (in Regensburg), 247–248, 249, 263, 337n13 Vancsa, Max, 98 Varèse, Edgar, 16 Vauvenargues (Luc de Clapiers), 97 Verband deutscher Musikkritiker, 222 Vienna, 2, 9, 11, 249; critical traditions, 54–56, 107, 112, 117–118; cultural identity, 43, 142; musical life, 12, 37, 46. See also Lueger; Secession Vienna Court Opera, 34, 82 New Vienna Philharmonic, 46 Vienna Philharmonic, 46, 250; and Mahler, 1, 35, 38, 133 Viennese Workers Symphony Concert series, 142, 159, 166, 170; and Bruckner, 171, 314n10; and Mahler, 321n104; new music, 196, 207n65 Völkischer Beobachter. See Nazi Party von Schirach, Baldur, 211, 339n38 Vossische Zeitung, 224, 235, 306n46, 330n70

Wagner, Cosima, 22, 278n64 Wagner, Richard, 83–84, 202; antiSemitism, 35, 37–39, 84, 203–204. See also Berl; Chamberlain; Herzog

354

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Index

Wagner, Richard (continued) and architecture, 180–181; compositional aesthetics, 8; on Beethoven’s symphonic music, 3, 69, 112; on Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, 115; ideology, 241; influence of, 22, 172, 174, 176, 179; legacy of, 50; on Mozart, 150, 309n91. Political reception of, 204, 216, 268. See also Goebbels; Grunsky; Hitler; Rosenberg; Schumann, Otto. Timbre, 82–85, 95–96, 98. See also Adorno, Nietzsche. Performance of, 166, 181, 203–204, 251; scholarship on, 4. Tannhäuser, 114. Ring, 53, 59; 100; Das Rheingold, 130; Götterdämmerung, 251. Die Meistersinger, 49, 59, 112, 259, 272n19; Beckmesser, 1; Meistersinger prelude to 247, 268. Tristan und Isolde, 51, 59–60, 84; Parsifal, 84. See also Kurth, Niemann, Nietzsche Wagner, Siegfried, 175 Wallaschek, Richard, 40, 48, 99, 119 Walter, Bruno: and Mahler, 34, 126, 163, 180, 283n41, 303n4; and Third Reich, 232 Webern, Anton, 4, 242 Weigl, Karl, 218 Weill, Kurt, 158 Weimar Republic, 149, 150, 168–169, 184, 217, 224, 236 Weininger, Otto, 35 Weisbach, Hans, 249, 250 Weißmann, Adolf, 142; on Bruck-

ner, 199, 203; on Mahler, 53, 278–279n68 Werner, Theodor, 149, 162 Westermayer, Karl, 234, 235, 334n122 Wetz, Richard, 166, 176 Wickhoff, Franz, 32 Wiesengrund-Adorno, Theodor. See Adorno Wilde, Oscar, 24 Wilhelm II, 134 Williams, Peter, 273n24 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 112 Winckler, Josef, 146 Witt, Bertha, 315n24 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4 Wolf, Kuno, 50, 66, 88 Wundt, Wilhelm, 74 Wunsch, Hermann, 143–145 Würz, Anton, 275n27 Wyneken, Gustav, 75–76, 127, 289n127

Zeitschrift für Musik, 174, 175, 225, 259 Zelter, Karl Friedrich, 49 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 293n28, 312n140 Zhukov, Georgy, 213 Zilcher, Hermann, 219 Zillig, Winfried, 259 Zimmerman, Reinhold, 216, 252, 338–339n32 Zschorlich, Paul, 225–226 Zweig, Arnold, 62 Zweig, Stefan, 45, 105