Working towards the Third Reich

The epilogue contributes to efforts to map continuities in musical thought between the Weimar and Nazi eras, and deals with issues of advocacy. There was not the straightforward rise to influence that is sometimes implied. Walter Abendroth had to overcome Pfitzner’s cantankerousness and fast-fading relevance. Heuss’s work was paraded by Fritz Stege in both the Zeitschrift für Musik and Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (‘Combat League for German Culture’). The Austrian musicologist Robert Haas encountered resistance against the project that, above all, symbolized his intended mediation of the Nazi party, the Austrian National Library, and the International Bruckner Society: the ‘complete edition’ of the composer’s scores. Gustav Wyneken transformed his image of Halm from the cosmopolitan socialist and impassioned music critic of the early 1920s and emphasized Halm’s place in the national pantheon of ignored symphonic composers. Halm became the latest composer-leader in a tradition of syntheses towards which his own work on the ‘third culture’ had pointed.

‘Innerer Betrachtung gewidmet’: Alfred Heuss, the Zeitschrift für Musik, and the music journal as community

As editor of Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik during the 1920s, and thus one of Germany’s most eminent music critics, Alfred Heuss denigrated the sexualized, ‘soulless’, and decadent aspects of new German music—including that of Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss, and Paul Hindemith. He attacked composers and critics alike, with overtly anti-Semitic rejections of Schreker, Bekker, and Adolf Aber, who, he claimed, normalized these kinds of ‘un-German’ musical activities. As this chapter details, Heuss’s project was to wield his own music-critical Vermengungspolitik (‘politics of mass influence’), using his journal to oppose the decadence of the contemporary musical environment and advocating pre-nineteenth-century principles of order and propriety. Published over two years, a new regular column, ‘Dedicated to Inner Reflection’, encouraged readers to engage with works of Heuss’s Leipzig teacher, Hermann Kretzschmar, emphasizing an ‘inner’ musical essence tied to the gestural language of the eighteenth century, and a moral (profoundly ‘German’) rectitude.

Music and the idea of conservative revolution

This chapter begins by considering the numerous appearances of the term ‘conservative revolution’ in cultural writings of the 1920s and 1930s: particularly in those of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arnold Schoenberg, and Moeller van den Bruck. Into this emerging discourse, it weaves the capturing of the term for German historiography by Armin Mohler (1949) and the influence and controversy of Mohler’s usage in subsequent historical debates. Having argued that ‘conservative revolution’ may indeed serve as a revealing lens through which to view musical phenomena of the Weimar era, it proceeds—using the writings of Roger Griffin and Peter Osborne—to place its futural drive amidst the modernist thought with which it is usually contrasted, and thus offers a segue to the studies presented in Chapters 2–5.

Weimar culture and its others

This introductory chapter begins with the post-1945 concept of ‘Weimar culture’, and, through a critique of an article by Michael Kater, considers the concept’s tendency to divide the era into two rigid cultural-political factions: progressive ‘sons’ and reactionary ‘fathers’, a metaphor ultimately derived from Peter Gay’s well-known Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968). Having drawn attention to the distortions caused by such historiographical inflexibility, it proceeds to a description of the four studies (Chapters 2–5) that are to follow in the book, presenting these as distinct positions in the discourse of Weimar-era musical conservatisms and demonstrating that—for all their similarities—the subjects just as often took acute issue with one another. These were frictions, the chapter concludes, that continued beyond 1933 and the change of political regime in Germany.

‘Eine neue, edle deutsche Jugendkultur’: August Halm, Gustav Wyneken, and the question of leadership

August Halm’s 1913 notion of Bruckner as a synthesis between two musical ‘cultures’— represented by Bach and Beethoven—stands at the heart of this chapter. It argues that this idea was part of a larger project: the reorientation of the ruinous contemporary musical culture that Halm had often lamented. This project stemmed from a close collaboration with one of the most forceful evangelists of German school reform and the Jugendbewegung (‘youth movement’), Gustav Wyneken, and posited the guiding hand of an authoritarian ‘objective spirit’. As in the example of the school curriculum at Wickersdorf, this spirit would in turn be articulated by a carefully administered canon of German musical masters. Thus, the chapter argues that the nation’s youth, attuned by Halm to the dynamic process and autonomous logic of these masterworks, would serve in the transformation of music—as a symbol for wider culture—from a ‘luxury art’ to a true ‘people’s art’.

‘Der alte treue Meister Antonius’: mysticism, nation, and the Weimar ‘Bruckner cult’

Twenty-five years after Anton Bruckner’s death, groups formed in Germany to revise the composer’s biography, highlighting Bruckner as a German mystic in the medieval tradition of Meister Eckhart and his successors, and thus a figure newly divorced from the facts of his (Austrian) life. Through reference to monographs from this 1920s Bruckner renaissance—by Karl Grunsky, Oskar Lang, Erich Schwebsch, and Richard Wetz —this chapter demonstrates that, despite their ‘anti-modern’ rhetoric, these authors engaged mystic doctrine to advocate connection to a new sense of community above the individual self, expressed in terms of narrow, pro-Christian nationalistic feeling. This advocacy envisaged cultural consequences, even new symphonic performance practices. It influenced other Bruckner commentators of the decade, including those who have rarely been placed in such a context, and the chapter turns to Ernst Kurth’s Bruckner monograph (1925) and the central role that a specifically German mysticism plays within Kurth’s musical and biographical interpretations.

‘Sympathie mit dem Tode’: Thomas Mann, Hans Pfitzner, and the further reflections of a non-political man

Perhaps the most infamous of the Weimar musical ‘anti-modernists’, Hans Pfitzner is well known for his polemics against Paul Bekker and Busoni and his opera Palestrina, products of the First World War’s end. Pfitzner’s relationship with Thomas Mann has also been discussed, particularly in terms of Mann’s description, in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, of Pfitzner as the bearer of ‘sympathy with death’. As this chapter details, Mann’s early post-war work situated Pfitzner at the heart of a drive for revival, based around the ‘Hans Pfitzner Association for German Composition’, and linked to Mann’s idiosyncratic notions of cultural-political ‘synthesis’ and Humanität. This revival provoked Pfitzner’s swerve from opera towards the more direct public form of the cantata. Here, in his 1921 work Von deutscher Seele, the allegedly reclusive Pfitzner tried to strike a ‘popular’ tone and seized the moment to address his vision of the entire German nation.