Undertones of Insurrection

Music and Cultural Politics in the Modern German Narrative

Marc Weiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351300704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

A basic tenet of literary studies is that aesthetic structures are politically significant because they represent an artist's response to the political implications of cultural codes with which the recipient of the modern work is also acquainted. This tenet provides the basis for the ideological associations attending the appearance of music in the modern German narrative. With his understanding of the arts as involved in often unacknowledged ideological forces within a culture, Marc Weiner's Undertones of Insurrection bridges the gap between the "New Musicology's" rewarding infusion of modern cultural and literary theory into the study of music, politically insightful examinations of narrative structures in the modern novel, and the methodologically conservative area of musical-literary relations in Germanic Studies. In other words, the questions it raises are different from those pursued in most examinations of music and literature, because previous works of this kind concerning the literature of German-speaking Europe have often disregarded social concerns in general, and political issues in particular.Ranging from 1900 to Doctor Faustus (1947), Weiner study sets the stage by examining public debates that conflated such issues as national identity, racism, populism, the role of the sexes, and xenophobia with musical texts. In the literary analyses that follow, Weiner discusses both obvious connections between music and sociopolitical issues--Hesse's equation of jazz and insurrection in Steppenwolf--and covert ones, the suppression of music in Death in Venice and the use of politically charged musical subtexts in Werfel's Verdi and Schnitzler's Rhapsody. By uncovering the ideological agendas informing cultural practice in modernist Germany, Undertones of Insurrection calls for a reevaluation of the function of music in the modern German narrative.

chapter 1

Music in the Modern Imagination:

The Polemics of Hans Pfitzner

From 1905 to 1926 a debate appeared in the German and Austro-Hungarian press that focused on music and registered profound social crisis. Couched within a discussion of the history, technical makeup, interpretation, and future possibilities of music, a hidden agenda unfolded that concerned nothing less than the traditional values of the German-speaking world threatened by forces of change. With hindsight, it is clear that the polemic regarding music provided a vehicle for the expression of various extramusical issues: the rise of foreign technology, a feared influx into Europe of foreign races, the questioning of German hegemony and traditional moral codes, changes in sexual roles, and the desire on the part of the disadvantaged to restructure the social hierarchy in the Wilhelminian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and the postwar republics of Germany and Austria. Yet while such volatile issues appear in retrospect as a driving force within the controversy, their champions and critics, it seems, were not always aware of their presence. The images with which German-speaking Europe perceived and discussed music in the first third of the twentieth century illustrate the way the collective imagination sublimated into art the social and political pressures of the time.

At the center of the debate was the German nationalist Hans Pfitzner, a composer and theorist whose patriotism informed his notion of the superiority of German art and his definition of legitimate music. Though seldom discussed in scholarship and virtually ignored by the general public outside Germany and Austria today, Pfitzner was considered by many between 1900 and 1933 to be one of the most gifted of German composers working in the post-Wagnerian tradition. Prior to the National Socialist accession to power, his supporters included such prominent musical-literary figures as Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, Arthur Schnitzler, Paul Hindemith, and Thomas Mann. Mahler produced Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten (The rose from the garden of love) at the Vienna Opera in 1905, Walter conducted the premiere of Pfitzner’s major work for the stage, Palestrina, at the Munich Opera in 1917, Schnitzler advised the composer on the libretto to the music drama, Hindemith played the viola in the premiere of Pfitzner’s C# -Minor String Quartet in Berlin in 1925, and Mann included a panegyric essay on Palestrina in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man and acted as one of the founding members of the Hans Pfitzner Organization for German Music (Hans-Pfitzner-Verein für deutsche Tonkunst) in 1918.¹ Even Alban Berg would have studied composition under Pfitzner, and not under Arnold Schoenberg, had he not missed a train for Straßburg in a moment of confusion for which modern music may be grateful. Though Walter, Hindemith, Mann, and many others would later become disillusioned with Pfitzner following his association with the National Socialists after 1933, his prominence in Germany as a composer and critic from 1900 to the rise of fascism was second to that of only Richard Strauss.² It is symptomatic, for example, that during the First World War the propaganda department of the German Foreign Ministry subsidized performances of Palestrina in Germany and Switzerland as an example of inspirational and patriotic German art: Harry Graf Kessler, working in the ministry, was responsible for organizing tours to these performances as part of the war effort, for which the German government granted special travel permits.³ With the publication in 1926 of his Gesammelte Schriften, Pfitzner’s prominence as a cultural observer and a conservative force in the musical life of Germany was made manifest.

When discussing Pfitzner’s polemics, it is important for two reasons to bear in mind the stature he enjoyed in German-speaking Europe prior to World War II. First, his fame lent credence in the popular imagination of the time to his writings, and thus granted them an impact which seems remarkable today. Second, and more importantly, the topical nature of his arguments and of the metaphors employed within them indicates their representational character; his debates are not only significant as historical documents—as the products of an influential figure now deemed marginal—but reflect a widespread discourse which allowed Pfitzner to speak to his audience persuasively and with great force. Through Pfitzner’s polemics we can learn much about the social parameters influencing aesthetic pursuits in Germany in the early twentieth century, and especially about the images and motifs employed in the expression of conservative ideas at the time.

The cornerstone of the debates was a pamphlet by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni entitled Entwurfeiner neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music).⁴ Though the first edition of the text had appeared in 1907 (implicitly responding to a work of Pfitzner’s from 1905), it was Busoni’s revised and extended version of 1916 that triggered Pfitzner’s attacks. In this short work Busoni questioned a number of notions he believed had become entrenched in the musical imagination of Europe. Foremost among these was the interpretation of the history of music as a teleological progression that had passed a pinnacle of cultural developments and was now doomed to decay (75ff). Busoni stated that the works of Bach and Beethoven, for example, did not signify a supreme, unsurpassed turning point, but “a beginning” (80). Thus, his Sketch tacitly undermined the widespread assumption in his time that a canon of great masters should be revered as giants or cultural heroes above other, lesser men, and that the work of these giants had a legitimate claim to cultural superiority and exclusivity.⁵

Busoni’s treatise makes clear that for him a time of crisis had been reached which threatened the unfolding of music’s possibilities and the realization of its potential “freedom” (77). He was gready concerned about what he called Gesetzgeber, the “legislators” who evaluate the art solely according to its adherence to tradition and to a normative set of canonical rules (78). Busoni feared that such Gesetzgebev hampered experimentation with musical form and thereby threatened music’s development, which he described as “young” (77) and called a child (76) in order to emphasize its potential future transformations. He underscored the urgency of the problem with the statement: “Music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny” (77). Busoni never stated whom he meant by the “legislators” of music: the word suggests a Beckmesser-like pedant more interested in preserving a fetishistic control over the art and in valorizing only certain normative kinds of aesthetic expression than in entertaining a number of possibilities for musical experimentation. The term is significant, for it clearly evoked extramusical implications of an ill-defined sociopolitical nature.

An interpretive model that refused to privilege certain canonized German composers and was directed instead toward the future struck at the heart of Pfitzner’s publicly stated view of Germany’s supremacy in the development of music, and his reaction was shared by many. Pfitzner focused widespread attention on Busoni’s text through his own extensive and vituperative refutation; Futuristengefahr: bei Gelegenheit von Busonis Ästhetik (The danger of futurism: on the occasion of Busoni’s aesthetic), which appeared in 1917 in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte and was republished in 1926 in his Gesammelte Schriften. Pfitzner sensed in Busoni’s reflections on the future of music in general an attack on German art in particular, and this association of aesthetic interpretation and nationalist orientation was to accompany the intellectual exchange for the duration of the debate. Indeed, the motifs and argumentative strategies employed by Busoni, his supporters, and by Pfitzner in their aesthetic discussions are indicative of a pervasive discourse of the time spanning left- and right-wing sociopolitical positions. Many critics have made light of the national-political overtones discernible in the Busoni-Pfitzner polemic, but these overtones were a driving force in the affair.⁶ To Pfitzner, the many and related reflections in the Sketch must have appeared as a point-by-point refutation of ideas with which he had been publicly associated since the publication of his Bühnentradition (Stage tradition) of 1905–1906 and Vom musikalischen Drama: Gesammelte Aufsätze (On the musical drama: collected essays) of 1915. ⁷

Pfitzner believed that German cultural superiority was manifest in its music tradition, which, according to him, had reached its pinnacle in the works of Beethoven, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Carl Maria von Weber, Robert Schumann, and Wagner.⁸ He situated his own historical-aesthetic position at the end of this very tradition, which he felt was threatened by developments in musical composition and performance in his day. Pfitzner, like his beloved Wagner, believed that art was the most perfect expression of the “essence” of a people, as his writings repeatedly make clear:

Artistic degeneration is the symptom of national degeneration. National art is the noblest part of the organism of the body of the people. If you tell me which art thrives among the people, I will tell you how healthy the people are. All diagnosticians of the giant organism of a nation or religion have taken questions of art seriously.⁹

Thus, Pfitzner’s sensitivity to the political implications in Busoni’s rhetoric was consistent with his own understanding of aesthetics in general. When Busoni wrote of Beethoven as a “beginning,” described Schumann as a “composer of so much lower stature” (79), declared that Wagner constituted a dead end that would be useless to pursue, and defended the use of recitative and aria in modern opera (83)—a departure from Wagnerian aesthetics—Pfitzner felt attacked for his own veneration of these three figures, representatives of a specifically superior German musical tradition representing for him a superior national identity.¹⁰ In his response to Busoni in Futuristengefahr, Pfitzner expressed his patriotism in the following typical passage:

German music is not just some kind of cerebral sport, but an art we love; and when the spirit of one of our great masters is willing to appear before us, we should receive him accordingly, should call him “Prince” or “Father,” and by no means should we try to attack him; otherwise he won’t speak to us.

Berlioz and Liszt are held by Busoni—and unfortunately by a great many others—to be great composers. (1:203)

The message is clear: thoughts of German music bring with them associations of a hierarchical social system in which great (German) masters are to be revered, even worshipped. Once the identity of the prince or patriarch is underscored as German, Pfitzner’s argument immediately moves to the denigration of foreign composers.

Busoni’s criticism of the rigidity of musical traditions in Germany struck at the heart of an aesthetic program based on a conservative nationalist ideology and, given Pfitzner’s approach to musical issues, it would have been remarkable had he not been infuriated by the Sketch. Busoni’s text indeed appears to harbor anti-German sentiment; a section criticizes the ideological function of the German word musikalisch, and by implication ridicules the widespread notion that the German and Austrian peoples were unusually or innately “musical” (86–88). Busoni wrote that no equivalent for the term was to be found in French or Italian, where one spoke of being “fond of music” (87) without making it a “point of honor to be ‘musical’” (87). However, and this is a key clarification in the Sketch, he suggested that the notion of a musical person had come to mean one who had an understanding of “the rules”: “[Music] is still so young, and is eternal; the day of its freedom will come.—When it shall cease to be ‘musical’” (88). Thus, Busoni clearly associated the restrictive “legislators” with the German language, the only language that included notions of superiority in its description of those interested in music. Obviously he hoped that the art would one day no longer be influenced by the abstract theoretical rules of the Gesetzgeber he associated specifically with Germany and Austria.

When the first edition of the Sketch appeared in 1907 in Trieste, it aroused only marginal interest, but the reaction to the second, enlarged and revised edition, published in 1916 in Leipzig, was altogether different. Though the later version included some new material (consisting primarily of an expanded section on opera and sections on feeling, routine, and new “possibilities for the expansion of musical material”), it was not the nature of Busoni’s additions so much as the timing of the text’s reappearance that aroused such a vehement reaction.¹¹ When the second edition came out during the war, a number of critics, among them Hans Mersmann of the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung and Wilibald Nagel of the Neue Musik-Zeitung, openly condemned the distribution in Germany of what they perceived to be anti-German sentiment.¹² Shortly after Pfitzner’s vitriolic attack appeared, Busoni wrote a letter to the composer Hans Huber stating that he harbored no ill will against the Germans, maintaining that Pfitzner had grossly misunderstood and misrepresented his remarks.¹³ As one critic has noted, Busoni no doubt felt that Pfitzner’s reaction was unjust because the Italian had actively taken part in German cultural life since moving to Berlin in 1894, twenty-two years prior to Pfitzner’s attack.¹⁴ Nevertheless, his intentions are not the central issue here. Whether Busoni wished to deride Germany in his reflections on aesthetic matters is of less importance than the fact that he clearly was perceived to have done so by a number of critics and their readers. That statements concerning music could immediately arouse national implications was a central feature of the arts in early twentieth-century Germany.

The political overtones in the remarks Pfitzner and his contemporary critics perceived as anti-German are most explicit in the section concerning the word musikalisch and in a later passage from Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886; Beyond Good and Evil) that Busoni quoted at length in the final portion of his Sketch:

I [feel] that many precautions should be taken against German music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it—as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which [spreads out over] a sovereign existence believing in itself—well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his health anew. Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by origin but by belief, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its own even in [the] presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is [related] to the palm tree.¹⁵

Music emerges here as an overt cipher for issues that fall outside of the aesthetic sphere; Buso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Selected Works List
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chronology
• CHAPTER 1 Music in the Modern Imagination:
• CHAPTER 2 Music and Repression:
• CHAPTER 3 Mozart, Jazz, and the Dissolution of the Bourgeois Personality:
• CHAPTER 4 Democracy versus Music Drama:
• CHAPTER 5 Music and the Enlightenment Tradition:
• CHAPTER 6 “Air from Another Planet”:
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index