“Forward to Haydn!”: Schenker's Politics and the German Revival of Haydn

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-348
Author(s):  
Bryan Proksch

Abstract While Heinrich Schenker consistently espoused the superiority of the German masterworks, his biases toward Haydn's works laid the groundwork for a reversal of nearly a century of neglect toward that composer's music in German-speaking lands. The circumstances of Schenker's personal life together with his reaction to the socioeconomic and political pressures created by the harsh terms imposed on Germany and Austria by the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain led him to make the restoration of Haydn's stature as a compositional genius a crucial battle in his fight to reclaim German identity in the wake of the First World War. His mentorship of Anthony van Hoboken, who in turn underwrote Schenker's publications, created a partnership that redefined the cultural significance of Haydn's music and provided for the preservation of numerous Haydn autographs. Schenker's writings on Haydn refuted popular myths on the composer and replaced them with detailed arguments rooted in analysis in an effort to demonstrate the composer's musical significance to a nation in crisis specifically and the world at large.

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quinn Slobodian

AbstractHow we assess globalization is largely determined by how we see the world economy. This article follows a disagreement about how to see the world economy among economists in Germany and Austria in the first age of globalization from the 1870s until the First World War. Absorbing metaphors from contemporary developments in media technologies, the debate pitted historical economists, who used statistics and cartography to make visible what they called the ‘world economic organism’, against marginalist economists, including a young Joseph Schumpeter, who rejected panoramic descriptions of the world economy for a narrow focus on prices. In a forgotten chapter in the conceptual genealogy of globalization, the debates of German-speaking economists initiated a persistent divide in how to see the world economy: either in the spatially expanding networks of communication and trade or in the wandering movement of prices on the world markets.


Author(s):  
James Muldoon

The German council movements arose through mass strikes and soldier mutinies towards the end of the First World War. They brought down the German monarchy, founded several short-lived council republics, and dramatically transformed European politics. This book reconstructs how participants in the German council movements struggled for a democratic socialist society. It examines their attempts to democratize politics, the economy, and society through building powerful worker-led organizations and cultivating workers’ political agency. Drawing from the practices of the council movements and the writings of theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Karl Kautsky, this book returns to their radical vision of a self-determining society and their political programme of democratization and socialization. It presents a powerful argument for renewed attention to the political theories of this historical period and for their ongoing relevance today.


Author(s):  
Gregory A. Barton

After the death of Gabrielle Howard from cancer, Albert married her sister Louise. Louise had been pressured to leave Cambridge as a classics lecturer as a result of her pro-peace writings during the First World War. After working for Virginia Wolf, she then worked for the League of Nations in Geneva. Louise was herself an expert on labor and agriculture, and helped Albert write for a popular audience. Albert Howard toured plantations around the world advocating the Indore Method. After the publication of the Agricultural Testament (1943), Albert Howard focused on popularizing his work among gardeners and increasingly connected his composting methods to issues of human health.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Klengel

The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. An in-depth examination of all parts of this important early opus of the Brazilian Modernism shows that Mário de Andrade’s poetic images of urban coexistence simultaneously aim at a radical renewal of language and at a melancholic coming to terms with a traumatic pandemic past.


2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 463-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Fraser

On November 16, 1918, a little more than two weeks after an armistice officially ended World War I, an editorial in the Idaho Statesman offered advice about the future of the world economy. Lifting the title of its editorial directly from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or The Two Nations, the Statesman argued only the political philosophy espoused by that novel and its author could show the world a way forward. Quoting from the novel's final paragraph, the newspaper declares: “‘To be indifferent and to be young can no longer be synonymous.’ Those words were true when Disraeli penned them just 73 years ago, but they apply with striking force to the problems of today and to the problems which will be certain to develop in the years just ahead” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). The newspaper wasn't only advocating political involvement by the nation's youth, nor was Disraeli. Sybil proposes a particular kind of economic and political order, a union between a “just” aristocracy, led by the young and ambitious, and the laboring classes. It proposes that great statesmen take up the mantle of responsibility just as Thomas Carlyle, in Disraeli's day, advocated great captains of industry take up that mantle (Houghton 328). The newspaper's argument implies this seventy-year-old British novel will be critical to America's political future. But this vision of responsibility belongs in the nineteenth century – it is rooted in the conflict between republicanism and aristocratic oligarchy – and the timing of the Statesman article at first seems wildly inappropriate. As the First World War ended, the Statesman expected the world would face the kind of threats Americans had perceived before the war. The editorial warns that “mobocracy” still “holds nearly half of the area of Europe and much of northern Asia in its bloody and irresponsible grip.” If there is any doubt about who is behind this “mobocracy,” the newspaper clears that matter up, answering: “Bolshevists, Socialists and all of the disciples of unrest who may be roughly grouped as ‘The Reds’” (“Trustees of Posterity” 4). And when the Statesmen warns about “Reds,” it can easily expect its readers to remember that, only seventeen years earlier, President McKinley had been shot by just such a “Red”: Leon Czolgosz, an alleged anarchist and the child of Polish immigrants.


Author(s):  
George Gotsiridze

The work discusses the legacy of the First World War - its positive and negative sides - which played an important role in the formation of the world processes in the post-war period and still preserves its viability.The actuality of the problem is backed by the fact that the relationship of the Trans-caucasian countries with the outer world is still problematic nowadays. We witness how the world’s political and economic map is changing and technical-scientific progress is tangible. In the conditions of the accelerated global processes, a general political, economic and cultural area is being formed, and a new world order is being formed with its difficulties, social catastrophes or cataclysms, conflicts, divergence and integration. At this time, it is of utmost importance to analyze historical problems from the past and seek ways to resolve them in the political relations of the South Caucasus, as in their attitude towards the outside world, understanding that unity is a necessary guarantee of strengthening the statehood of each country and that the perception of the Transcaucasia by the rest of the world as a unified political and economic sphere will simplify the Euro - Atlantic integration. The issue is discussed from the new humanitarian perspectives, which gives us the opportunity to determine the national verticals from experience received centuries ago, around which local or regional political consciousness should be unified in order to satisfy the national interests of each country in the Transcaucasia through closer cooperation.


1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (18) ◽  
pp. 396-407

Arthur Stewart Eve, who will be remembered mainly for his pioneer work on radioactivity and his lovable character, was born at Silsoe, Bedfordshire, on 22 November 1862, son of John Richard and Frederica (Somers) Eve and, after an active and varied life spent for the most part in Canada, passed away in retirement at Puttenham, Surrey, on 24 March 1948, in his eighty-sixth year. Scholar, teacher, pioneer with Rutherford, soldier and scientific director in the first World War, Eve later was appointed Head of the Department of Physics in McGill University, Montreal, and Dean of the Graduate Faculty. The fine, well-balanced qualities of the man are well presented in the following quotations from an editorial, ‘In a Great McGill Tradition’, which appeared in the Montreal Gazette at the time of his death : ‘In the best sense, he was a university character. He was provocative but not contentious, kindly but not sentimental, critical but not cruel, humorous but not foolish, shrewd but not harsh. As he moved about the campus walks in his last years at McGill, he was a man whose life had been deepened by the vigorous use of the mind on illimitable problems, and mellowed by zest and common sense which had kept his outlook keen and reasonable.’ ‘Dean Eve’s discoveries in radioactivity and in geophysics received their due and full recognition from the highest learned societies of the world, including the Royal Society of London, on whose Council Dr Eve served in his later years. They were the recognition of the fruits of his “voyaging through strange seas of thought”. ‘But these far voyagings, valuable as they were in their discoveries, never took Dr Eve away from the warmth and colour of ordinary human experience. In the soundness of his humanity he looked for his satisfaction: ‘ “Not in Utopia—subterranean fields,— Of some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where, in the end We find our happiness, or not at all.” ’


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