Chapter 1. The First World War and Its Impact, 1914–1921

2007 ◽  
pp. 61-92
Author(s):  
Marianne Wheeldon

This chapter considers some of the general mechanisms by which artistic figures are consecrated and weighs their relative contribution to the construction of Debussy’s reputation. Drawing on Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang’s analysis of the survival of reputation in the fine arts, four areas emerge that would seem to be particularly relevant to Debussy: (1) the initiatives undertaken by the composer to establish his own legacy; (2) the posthumous reception of the corpus of works left behind; (3) the actions of heirs and family members on behalf of the deceased: and (4) the efforts of the composer’s close friends and collaborators. Yet, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, the first two were rendered less effective because of the particularities of Debussy’s case—namely, his protracted illness and his death during the First World War.


Author(s):  
Jared S. Buss

Chapter 1 pieces together Ley’s childhood in Berlin. It attributes his early fascination with science through his consumption of popular science and science fiction. By analyzing the themes and representations in his favorite books, this chapter presents Ley as an idealistic dreamer, who longed to become an explorer during the First World War and the early years of Weimar Germany.


2020 ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Luke Messac

Chapter 1 draws a link between the conscription of hundreds of thousands of Nyasaland’s Africans into the British military’s carrier service during the First World War and the first efforts to provide some measure of government health care to rural colonial subjects during the 1920s. Prewar colonial civilian medical care was poor. During the First World War, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly conscripted into the British war effort. For the most part, this experience consisted of brutal and often deadly labor. However, the experience of even threadbare medical care during the war years did lead to calls for better civilian government health facilities during the 1920s.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Attfield

This book challenges commonplace conceptions of musical conservatism during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–33). Its primary goal is to offer scrutiny of uncritical links often made by musicologists and historians between musical conservatism and cultural-political conservatism of the era, and the accompanying tendentious vocabulary of the ‘anti-modern’. It does so chiefly by means of a critical and nuanced application of the term ‘conservative revolution’, as used in the Weimar era and popularized in its historiography after 1945. The introduction introduces the time-honoured notion of ‘Weimar culture’ and its tendency to obscure parts of the contemporary cultural landscape, not least in their relation to modernity and modernism. Chapter 1 considers the problematic status of the term ‘conservative revolution’. Four contrasting studies are then presented, each focused on a particular ‘conservative’ musical figure or movement, and informed by readings of a complex discourse drawn from contemporary journals, speeches, letters, scores, and archival sources. Chapters 2 and 3 address Thomas Mann and his relationship with Hans Pfitzner in the aftermath of the First World War, and Alfred Heuss’s 1920s tenure as editor of Schumann’s Zeitschrift für Musik. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the so-called ‘Bruckner cult’ of the Weimar era and its representations of its central composer as medieval mystic, and the work of August Halm—another dedicated Brucknerian—within the German youth movement, as defined and proclaimed by the radical pedagogue Gustav Wyneken. An extended epilogue considers advocacy for these Weimar-era musical conservatisms under the Nazi regime after 1933.


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