Challenging the Modern

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.