Music Education, Social Identities and Cultural Politics in Germany and Austria, 1840-1933

Our Conservatories? Music Education, Social Identities and Cultural Politics in Germany and Austria, 1840-1933

Anthony Jay Cantor

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto

Our Conservatories? Music Education, Social Identities and Cultural Politics in Germany and Austria, 1840-1833

Anthony Jay Cantor

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of History University of Toronto

2015 Abstract This dissertation is a history of conservatories of music in Germany and Austria from the founding of the first German conservatory in 1843 to 1933. This period allows an investigation of continuities and changes in the cultural work performed by conservatories as political relationships shifted. As music was central to German cultural identity, conservatories were sites in which competing visions of Germany were contested.

Chapter 1 analyses the founding and expansion of German conservatories, focusing on local and regional identities. Music education was a way to deepen music’s local grounding while contributing to the culture of the larger fatherland. Chapter 2 explores national visions for German music education both in the absence of a nation- state and as part of the process of moulding national identity after unification.

Chapter 3 concerns North American exchanges with German and Austrian conservatories. This sheds light on the discourse of “Americanisation” in Germany and

Austria as well as on the place of central-European music in American cultural history.

This chapter explores the Austro-German music-educational establishment’s attempts

to grapple with American culture as well as Germans’ understanding of American modernity, which they found enticing, liberating and threatening. Through analysis of the debate about jazz in German music education, this chapter explores how Germans imagined American culture and the influence of African Americans and Jews on it.

Chapter 4 analyses the role of German music education in defining terms of

Jewish claims to German cultural belonging. This chapter considers the role of Bildung and music education in the construction of a distinctly German-Jewish identity; it also analyses the consequences of exclusionary racial antisemitism for conservatories.

Chapter 5 analyses the position of conservatories in battles between progressives and conservatives. Conservatories could be bulwarks against change, but they could also serve to legitimate new developments.

Recent years have seen the development of a body of scholarship devoted to the history of individual music-educational institutions. This dissertation enriches, challenges and extends that work. It does so by treating conservatories throughout

German-speaking Europe as a cultural concept, and by anchoring music education in larger scholarly conversations in German and central-European history.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the advice, support and encouragement I received while researching and writing this dissertation. My supervisor, James Retallack, offered advice, critiques and suggestions that challenged me to improve my writing and analysis. I benefitted greatly from his careful reading of many drafts, from his rigorous commentary on the arguments in and structure of this dissertation, and from his patient shepherding of this project to completion. Derek Penslar pushed me to make more careful distinctions in my treatment of German-Jewish identity and to position my work in the scholarly conversation about Jewish politics, culture and society in Germany. Alan Stanbridge shared with me his extensive knowledge of and insight into jazz, American music and

American musicians’ conflicted relationship to Europe. He also recommended theoretical works that deepened my understanding of the social and cultural work of educational institutions. My external examiner, Toby Thacker, provided comments, questions and insights that will be invaluable for the further development of the ideas in this dissertation. Kenneth R. Bartlett has been a mentor, colleague and friend during my time at the University of Toronto. From him I learned not only how to be an academic professional, but why. His passion for undergraduate teaching made me a better educator and also helped me understand why the work we do matters.

In researching this dissertation, I visited archives in Germany, Austria,

Liechtenstein and the United States. I am grateful to the archivists and librarians who took the time to respond to my questions, share their knowledge and guide me in my search for archival materials. Dietmar Schenk, the director of the Universitätsarchiv of the Universität der Künste Berlin, was especially generous with his time and energy in

talking through my ideas with me and recommending fruitful avenues of inquiry. Much of my understanding of what could be said about conservatories of music grew out of stimulating conversations with Dr. Schenk. At the same archive, Antje Kalcher provided friendly and helpful guidance. Sabine Borchert at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater

“Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy“ Leipzig graciously responded to my many requests and provided me with copies of many valuable documents. The staff at the archive of the

New England Conservatory in Boston was very enthusiastic about my research into

George Whitefield Chadwick and very accommodating during my visit. At the

Liechtensteinisches Landesarchiv, Rupert Tiefenthaler made helpful suggestions and directed me to documents related to the life and work of Josef Gabriel Rheinberger. I thank all of the archivists and librarians who assisted me in my research and pointed me to sources as well as questions for further analysis.

In researching and writing this dissertation, I benefited greatly from the generous financial support of numerous institutions. At the University of Toronto, the Department of History, the School of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences provided funding at various stages of my time as a doctoral student. An Ontario

Graduate Scholarship was also a great help. I am especially thankful for a Canada

Graduate Scholarship, awarded by the Social Science and Humanities Research

Council of Canada (SSHRC), and a ten-month research scholarship from the German

Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Conversations with friends and colleagues inspired me to think more deeply and critically about the material in this dissertation. My friends also provided invaluable encouragement as I worked to complete this project. David Stiles was a constant source

of friendship and support from my first day at the University of Toronto. I thank him for our wide-ranging conversations and also for the practical advice about writing a dissertation. Chris Landon always listened when I was experiencing difficulty. He sat across a table from me almost every day during the final stages of writing and revising this work. Meeting to write together was a great source of motivation, and our discussions about history, scholarship, politics and culture provided much inspiration.

Edward Snyder was always willing to read works in progress; I am grateful for his constant confidence. Joel Pinsker read many drafts of this dissertation, sometimes on a sentence-by-sentence basis. His intellectual energy, curiosity and genuine investment in the implications of historical scholarship made my work better. David Beffert has been a major influence on my intellectual development since 2001. He read this entire dissertation many times over, both as it was produced and in more polished forms. He paid painstaking attention to the arguments, structure and analytical categories, helping me conceptualise the issues more clearly, think more critically and express myself more precisely. I always see things differently after a conversation with Dave; this dissertation, and my approach to history, would be very different without his insights.

With apologies to Schoenberg: dieses Buch habe ich von meinen Freunden gelernt .

Finally, I thank my family. My sister, Caitlin Cantor, was always interested in my work, always asked about it and was always willing to listen to me talk about it. I have enjoyed our conversations about the process of writing and look forward to many more.

My mother, Nancy Rothkopf Cantor, was unwavering in her belief that I could and should undertake and complete this project. She genuinely cares about whatever I take an interest in and demonstrates real enthusiasm for my passions. I have spoken to her

in great detail about the ideas and arguments in this dissertation and about German history in general. It is rare to have a parent who understands what one does and why one does it, embraces it so wholeheartedly and shares in it completely. I am grateful for her support and for our relationship. I think both of my parents would see some of themselves in this work. My cousin, Brian Rothkopf, selflessly sacrificed some of his vacation time on numerous visits to Toronto so that I could work on this dissertation. His interest in my experiences researching and teaching are true signs of friendship. His advice, hard won through experience, helped me balance my responsibilities and focus on what was important. My grandfather, Hyman Rothkopf, was my biggest fan. I was touched by his desire to visit me, write to me and, once, accompany me to a conference. I know that seeing me finish my Ph.D. would have made him proud. My grandmother, Selma Rothkopf, was my favourite interlocutor, an engaged, lively and knowledgable conversation partner. She was incredibly well read, interested in discussion and debate and excited to read anything I wrote or recommended. I am grateful to have had both of them in my life for so long and regret that they were not able to read my completed dissertation.

My wife, Katrin Urschel, put up with a lot during the years in which I strove to complete this dissertation. She offered love, encouragement and advice, but also a model for how to approach the work of scholarship. I cannot match her work ethic, passion and dedication, but I have learned from them and become a better scholar and a better person through her example. She never wavered in her belief in this dissertation, and in me, and many sacrifices and accommodations so that I could finish

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this dissertation. She is a partner in all things in life and the sine qua non of any success

I have.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Teaching the “Most German of the Arts” ……………………………… 1

I: Where Music Has Always Been at Home: Local and Regional Conceptions of German Music Education …………………………………………………… 18

II: The Larger Fatherland: Austrian and German Conservatories of Music ……..... 63

III: Austro-German Conservatories, American Culture and the Anxieties of Influence ………………………………………………………………………. 113

IV: Spiritual Homelands and “Racial” Difference: Music Education and the Boundaries of Jewish Belonging …………………………………………...... 158

V: Conservatories of Music Across the “Impassable Gulf”: Conservative Values and Progressive Challenges …………………………………………. 214

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………. 268

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………... 277

Introduction

Teaching the “Most German of the Arts”

In 1895, the musicologist August Riemann published “Our Conservatories,” a scathing

indictment of German conservatories of music, as a chapter in the first volume of his

three-volume work, Präludien und Studien. 1 Riemann was a prolific polemicist and commentator on musical theory and practice. His impressions of German conservatories had been shaped by experiences as a student at the Leipzig

Conservatory and as a teacher from 1881 to 1895 at conservatories in Hamburg,

Sondershausen and Wiesbaden. 2 His essay spared no aspect of German music education.

In “Our Conservatories,” Riemann decried the lack of discipline in institutions of music education. He also critiqued the neglect of theory in favour of technical mastery of an instrument and performance. In Riemann’s interpretation, this educational programme resulted in even the finest musicians having little knowledge beyond their field of specialisation. Riemann went beyond music to identify broader social consequences of these failings. According to him, graduates of conservatories were plagued with an ignorance of history and culture; the history, theory and aesthetics of music; and even the spelling and grammar of the German language. 3 Riemann did not identify any music-educational institution by name, though he did refer to one institution,

1 Hugo Riemann, “Unsere Konservatorien,” in Präludien und Studien , vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Olms, [1895] 1967), 22-33. 2 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Translator’s Introduction” to Hugo Riemann, “‘Our Conservatories’ from Präludien und Studien (1895),” trans. E. Douglas Bomberger, The Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education XV/3 (May 1994): 221. 3 Hugo Riemann, “Unsere Konservatorien,” 23-24.

which he identified as a “musical trade school,” that enforced attendance and went beyond solely musical training to focus on the training of music teachers (which many other conservatories began doing during the twentieth century.) 4 “Our Conservatories” also criticised the proliferation of conservatories, which Riemann described unflatteringly as “shooting out of the earth like mushrooms.” 5 Riemann also voiced

concern about the demographics of conservatories’ student bodies. He expressed

concern for the future of all the young women pursuing music. He added his own

disapproval of the fact that such women, forced to leave the conservatory due to a

dearth of talent or funds, contributed to the abundance of sub-standard music teachers. 6

Riemann went on to note that German conservatories had an unsurpassed world-wide

reputation, which attracted many foreign students to Germany. He singled out the

“young daughters of Albion and the free citizens of America,” though, for making

themselves ill through too much and too energetic practice.

Riemann criticised musical aspects of the education offered by German

conservatories as well as the larger cultural implications of a system he regarded as

sub-standard. This suggests that conservatories of music were vital cultural institutions

in nineteenth-century Germany. They were invested with importance extending beyond

their practical function of training musicians. Riemann’s anxieties illuminate some of

what Germans perceived to be at stake in the professionalisation, institutionalisation

4 Riemann’s modern-day translator, E. Douglas Bomberger, suggests that this unnamed school, singled out for praise, might be the Pädagogische Musikschule in Dresden. See Riemann, “‘Our Conservatories’ from Präludien und Studien (1895),” 226n10. 5 Ibid., 226. 6 Riemann, “Unsere Konservatorien.”

and proliferation of formal music education. Conservatories of music took on cultural and political meaning as significant components of Germany’s musical landscape.

This dissertation is a cultural history of conservatories of music in Germany and

Austria from the founding of the first German conservatory in 1843 7 to the Nazi seizure

of power in 1933. It analyses conservatories as a cultural concept and in practice during

these years. In this period, conservatories of music flourished. They were objects of

public debate and contributed to the international reputation of the Austro-German

musical tradition. While calls to establish a conservatory in German territories date at

least to the Vormärz , conservatories emerged as an object of German-wide concern in the period following the 1843 founding of the Leipzig Conservatory. This is shown by the publication in the second half of the nineteenth century of books and pamphlets that appraised and assessed German conservatories. 8 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Der Klavierlehrer , a music-pedagogical newspaper with national scope, was founded. 9 Music was an art form considered central to German cultural identity.

Therefore, conservatories were sites in which competing visions of Germany were contested. Music-educational institutions participated in drawing social and cultural boundaries through wrangles over their institutional purpose and over what should be taught, who should teach it and who should be admitted for study.

7 The Leipzig Conservatory, founded in 1843, was the first such institution in Germany. In Austria, the Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde dated from 1819. 8 See Wilhelm Pranz, Über Konservatorien für Musik mit besonderer Rücksichtnahme auf das Königliche Conservatorium zu München (Munich: Franz, 1865), and Gustav Stoewe, Die Ausbildung für das musikalische Lehrfach: ein Beitrag zur Reform der Conservatorien für Musik (Leipzig: H. Matthes, 1870). 9 Der Klavierlehrer , edited by Professor Emil Breslauer, began publication in Berlin in January, 1878. It was originally published bi-monthly. In 1910 it adopted the more scientific-sounding name of Musikpädagogische Blätter . This newspaper concerned itself with all aspects of teaching music, including private (piano) instruction, theory and school-level music. It did, however, regularly publish news and announcements from conservatories as well as proposals for conservatory reform and other articles relating to conservatories.

This study is not the first to consider music education from the perspective of social, cultural and political history. I build on the existing scholarship on individual institutions or particular moments in the history of higher music education. I focus on major institutions of music education in German-speaking Europe, those in Berlin,

Munich, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Vienna. I also draw examples from other conservatories.

The conservatories selected represent centres of music education with national and international reputations. They are a mix of public institutions, institutions under royal patronage and private conservatories founded by middle-class citizen initiatives. This approach allows me to explore differences and commonalities, continuities and ruptures, and the extent to which conservatories shaped German cultural history. They were bearers of officially sanctioned directions in musical life, but also bastions of resistance against the state’s cultural agenda. They were repositories of national culture, but also allowed the persistence of sub-national cultural identities following

German unification. They offered to Jews and foreigners the promise of advancement based on talent, but could perform exclusionary and well as integrative functions. And conservatories drew lines between insiders and outsiders in another way. They were often bastions of conservatism and targets of cultural progressives. In other cultural- political climates, they were engines of progressive experimentation.

Conservatories should thus be seen alongside museums as institutions that performed cultural work. 10 Similarly, music education as a practice, in Germany, was

similar to processes of cultural education in other contexts in that it was part of a project

10 See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, theory, politics (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

of cultivation of the self and the citizen. 11 The museum emerged in the nineteenth

century as a site of instruction in rational knowledge and manners. 12 It is no coincidence that German conservatories, as well as concert halls and other fixed locales of public musical life, proliferated in the same period. Conservatories are not museums, but they are constituent elements of the “imaginary museum of musical works.” That is, conservatories performed a normative function in canon formation as well as in cementing standards of performance and aesthetic values. 13 They transmitted cultural

norms by exhibiting, performing and teaching them, both to students and the broader

public. This role was not without tension. Reformers charged that involving students in

public performances distracted from pedagogical objectives. Still, especially in smaller

cities, conservatory performances were at the forefront of concert life. 14

The cultural history of music-educational institutions in national and transnational perspectives would not be possible without the scholarship that has come before. Almost every conservatory in Germany and Austria has been the subject of a monograph or essay collection. 15 Frequently, conservatories also issue anniversary

11 See Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988). 12 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum , 1-3. For the history of museums in Germany, see James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 13 See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14 See Philine Lautenschläger, “Die Hochschule als Veranstalter im Konzertleben der Stadt,” in Zwischen bürgerlicher Kultur und Akademie. Zur Professionalisierung der Musikausbildung in Stuttgart seit 1857 , edited by Joachim Kremer and Dörte Schmidt (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2007), 344-360. 15 See Wolfram Huschke, Zukunft Musik: eine Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar (Cologne: Bühlau, 2006); Yvonne Wasserloos, Das Leipziger Konservatorium der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert: Anziehungs- und Austrahlungskraft eines musikpädagogischen Modells auf das internationale Musikleben (New York: Olms, 2004); Stephan Schmitt, ed., Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 (Tutzing: Schneider, 2005); Karl Wagner, Das Mozarteum: Geschichte und Entwicklung einer kulturellen Institution (Innsbruck: Helbling, 1993); Joachim Kremer and Dörte Schmidt, eds., Zwischen bürgerlicher Kultur und Akademie. Zur Professionalisierung

publications that contain essays on the history and development of the institution in question. 16 One goal of this dissertation is to put those works in conversation with each

other in order to explore Austro-German conservatories comparatively, as a pan-

German cultural phenomenon.

The published work on German conservatories varies widely in quality and

adherence to scholarly standards, from Dietmar Schenk’s fine work on numerous topics

related to conservatories in Berlin 17 to some of the anniversary publications of conservatories themselves, which can be merely descriptive, myopic or self- aggrandising. There is also one example of inexcusable whitewashing: Ernst Tittel’s history of the Vienna Musikhochschule . Tittel was a professor there at the time of writing. He devoted only four pages to the Nazi period, and even these are steeped in euphemism. Tittel referred to the Nazi era as a “tragic interlude” and described the

“bitter regret” of professors who had made themselves amenable to the Nazi regime as

der Musikausbildung in Stuttgart seit 1857 (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2007); and Michael Kunkel, ed., Ordnung und Chaos: die Hochschule für Musik der Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel im 100. Jahr ihres Bestehens (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2005). 16 Examples of this type of publication include Nicht Drill, sondern musikalische Erziehung: Festschrift zum 125-Jahr-Jubiläum des Franz Schubert-Konservatoriums (vormals Horak-Konservatorium und Musikschulen) (Vienna: Franz-Schubert-Konservatorium, 1992) and Edgar Hartwig, et al., eds., Festschrift der Hoschschule für Musik “Franz Liszt” Weimar zum hundertsten Jahrestag ihrer Gründung als Orchestershcule .(Weimar: VEB Kunstdruck, [1972]). Some anniverary publications contain essays of high academic quality. See Johannes Forner, ed., Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”:150 Jahre Musikhochschule, 1843-1993 (Leipzig: Verlag Kunst und Touristik, 1993). 17 Dietmar Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin: Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869-1932/33 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002); Dietmar Schenk, “Aus einer Gründerzeit: Joseph Joachim, die Berliner Hochschule für Musik und der deutsch- französische Krieg,” Die Tonkunst 1/3 (July 2007): 232-246; Dietmar Schenk, “Hindemith, die Berliner Musikhochschule und die Kunstpolitik der Weimarer Republik,” in Paul Hindemith in Berlin: Essays und Dokumente , eds. Franz Bullmann, Wolfgang Rathert and Dietmar Schenk (Berlin: Hochschule der Künste Berlin, 1997), 21-32; and Dietmar Schenk, “Das Stern’sche Konservatorium der Musik. Ein deutsch- jüdisches Privatkonservatorium der Bürgerkultur Berlins, 1850-1936” Jahrbuch des Landesarchivs Berlin (2000): 57-79.

well as the “strenuous denazification process” they “endured.” 18 Lynne Heller’s extensive work on the Vienna Musikhochschule brought the standards of historical scholarship to the history of that institution. 19

In addition to scholarship on individual conservatories, studies of individual performers, composers and others associated with music education have shed much light on the working and cultural meaning of conservatories. 20 The composer Franz Liszt

has received much attention for his role in inspiring the aesthetic and ideological

direction of the Weimar Orchesterschule .21 Similarly, scholars have analysed Richard

Wagner’s plans for a reorganisation of the music school in Munich for what they reveal

about his artistic and nationalist visions. 22 Tamara Levitz’s book on Ferruccio Busoni’s

master class in Berlin offers insight into both the connections between politics and the

agendas of cultural institutions and the manner in which a prominent composer and

18 Ernst Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule: Vom Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde zur staatlichen Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna: Verlag Elisabeth Lafite, 1967), 68. 19 Lynne Heller, “Die Reichshochschule für Musik in Wien 1938-1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, Universität Wien , 1992, 5, and Lynne Heller, “Vom Nebenfach zur Meisterschule: Klavierunterricht am Konservatorium für Musik in Wien,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 42/1-2 (April 2001): 47-64. 20 See Beate Hiltner, Salomon Jadassohn: Komponist, Musiktheoretiker, Pianist, Pädagoge : eine Dokumentation über einen vergessenen Leipziger Musiker des 19. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1995); Joachim Tschiedel, Bernhard Sekles, 1872-1934: Leben und Werk des Frankfurter Komponisten und Pädagogen (Schneverdingen: Wagner, 2005); Helga Scholz-Michelitsch, “Emil von Sauer und die Wiener Musikhochschule,” Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 46 (1998): 175-237; and Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker, 1878-1924: A Cultural Bioraphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 21 See E. Douglas Bomberger, “Charting the Future of Zukunftsmusik : Liszt and the Weimar Orchesterschule,” The Musical Quarterly 80/2 (Summer 1996): 348-361; Wolfram Huschke, “Zur Liszt- Identität der Musikhochschule in Weimar,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 42/1- 2 (2001): 197-212; and Wolfram Huschke, Zukunft Musik: eine Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar (Cologne: Bühlau, 2006). 22 Richard Wagner und die Musikhochschule München, die Philosophie, die Dramaturgie, die Bearbeitung, der Film , Schriftenreihe der Hochschule für Musik München vol. 4 (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1983) and Nils Koschwitz, Eine Musikschule als Heilsbringer für die deutsche Musik und Nation? Eine Einführung in Richard Wagners Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule und die Konservatoriumsdiskussion um 1865 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

pedagogue was able to mould an artistic style from his institutional position. 23 Similarly,

Carmen Ottner published a 2000 study of Franz Schreker’s students in Vienna, and in

2009 a volume on Schreker’s Berlin students appeared. 24

Busoni and Schreker were both brought to Berlin by Leo Kestenberg, a socialist

politician of far-reaching influence in German and, later, Israeli music education.

Scholarship on Kestenberg has boomed of late, with a new edition of his collected

writings and an essay collection that considers, for the first time, his entire career in

Berlin, Prague and Tel Aviv together. 25 Yvonne Wasserloos’s book on the Leipzig

Conservatory argued that it was the catalyst for an international music-pedagogical

model. 26 She also wrote a book-length analysis of Niels W. Gade and C. F. E.

Horneman, two Danes who taught and studied, respectively, in Leipzig. These two figures embodied the cultural transfer that linked Leipzig and Copenhagen in the nineteenth century. Wasserloos’s focus on her two subjects serves as a rich case study for the function of conservatories as institutionalisers of national traditions and facilitators of cultural diffusion. 27 E. Douglas Bomberger also offered valuable insight into international influence and teacher-student relationships in a comprehensive article on American students of the Liechtensteinian composer Josef Gabriel Rheinberger at

23 Tamara Levitz, Teaching New Classicality: Ferruccio Busoni’s master class in composition (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). 24 Carmen Ottner, Was Damals als Unglaubliche Kühnkeit Erschien: Franz Schrekers Wiener Kompositionsklasse: Studien zu Wilhelm Grosz, Felix Petyrek, und Karol Rathaus (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and Markus Böggemann and Dietmar Schenk, eds., "Wohin geht der Flug? Zur Jugend" : Franz Schreker und seine Schüler in Berlin (Hildesheim: Olds, 2009). 25 Wilfried Gruhn, ed., Leo Kestenberg - Gesammelte Schriften , 6 vols. (Freiburg: Rombach, 2009-2013) and Susanne Fontaine, et al., eds., Leo Kestenberg. Musikpädagoge und Musikpolitiker in Berlin, Prag und Tel Aviv (Freiburg: Rombach, 2008). 26 Wasserloos, Das Leipzige Konservatorium . 27 Yvonne Wasserloos, Kulturgezeiten: Niels W. Gade und C. F. E. Horneman in Leipzig und Kopenhagen (New York: Olms, 2004).

the conservatory in Munich. 28 Rheinberger educated much of the Second New England

School of composers, but his students hardly shared his conservative predilections.

Bomberger’s theme was also taken up by Josef Frommelt, who regarded Rheinberger’s

supervision of Swiss students as an aspect of Swiss-Liechtensteinian cultural

relations. 29 Biographies of non-German musicians who studied in Germany are also valuable sources insofar as they describe their subjects’ experiences in Germany and the effects of this educational period on their future careers. 30

The recent upsurge in good and serious work on individual conservatories has erected an historiographical base on which I build by bringing multiple conservatories together in thematically organised chapters. This type of linkage is in its infancy, although Georg Sowa’s study of the beginnings of institutional music education in

Germany until 1843 is an early example of scholarship that takes this broad view. Sowa surveyed the kinds of schools that existed before the founding of the Leipzig

Conservatory in that year, thus establishing the pre-history for the period covered here. 31 A few other works move beyond an individual establishment to consider conservatory-level music education as a whole. A chapter in a guide to German conservatories published by the German Association of Conservatory Directors

28 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Amerikanische Musiker als Studenten bei Josef Gabriel Rheinberger,” Jahrbuch des historischen Vereins für das Fürstentum Liechtenstein 93 (1995): 317-336. 29 Josef Frommelt, Brücke Musik: Die Beziehungen zwischen der Schweiz und Liechtenstein auf dem Gebiet der Musik (Buchs: Gesellschaft Schweiz-Liechtenstein, 2008), 49-53. 30 See William K. Kearns, Horatio Parker 1863-1919: His Life, Music, and Idea (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1990); Adelbertas Nedzelskis and Georg Domin, Der Litauische Künstler M. K. Ciurlionis in Leipzig: Der Studienauftenthalt des Meisters am Königlichen Konservatorium 1901-1902 , trans. Irene Brewing (Berlin: Bodoni, 2003); and Joachim Reisaus, “Grieg und das Leipziger Konservatorium: Untersuchungen zur Persönlichkeit des norwegischen Komponisten Edvard Grieg unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Leipziger Studienjahre,” Ph.D. diss., Universität Leipzig , 1988. 31 Georg Sowa, Anfänge institutioneller Musikerziehung in Deutschland (1800-1843): Pläne, Realisierung und zeitgenössische Kritik. Mit Darstellung der Bedingungen und Beurteilung der Auswirkungen (Regensburg: Bosse, 1973).

provides an overview of conservatories’ historical development. 32 Bomberger’s

dissertation represents an important step toward considering conservatories as

historical institutions that developed in a shared environment in that it uncovers the

German training of American musicians, who often studied at multiple conservatories.

Bomberger is also an important guide for my chapter on international connections and

influence. 33

The 2005 publication of Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914) was an important advancement in expanding the study of conservatories beyond individual schools, regions and nations. 34 This was a two-volume collection of papers presented in a series of workshops of the European Science Foundation. The goal of these volumes is to approach music education’s “compositional, institutional, and political challenges” as Europe-wide phenomena. Though one contribution considers the idea of musical cultivation throughout German-speaking Europe 35 and another analyses Riemann’s contribution to the discourse about conservatories,36 the essays overwhelmingly

concern specific institutions or regional contexts. Publishing this range of studies

together enables an appreciation of the cultural, political, social and geographical

factors that accompanied the insitutionalisation of music education in different local and

32 Christoph Richter, “Zur Geschichte der musikalischen Ausbildung und zur Entwicklung der Musikhochschulen,” in Musikhochschulführer: Studienmöglichkeiten an Musikhochschulen der Bundesrepublic Deutschland , ed. Rektorenkonferenz der Musikhochschulen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Mainz: Schott, 1993), 19-63. 33 Elam Douglas Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students, 1850-1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1991. See also Bomberger, “Amerikanische Musiker.” 34 Michael Fend and Michel Noiray, eds., Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges , 2 vols. (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005). 35 Matthias Tischer, “‘Musikalische Bildung’ - Aspekte einer Idee im deutschsprachigen Raum um 1800,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914) , eds. Fend and Noiray, 375-398. 36 Michael Fend, “Riemann’s challenge to the Conservatory and the modernists’ challenge to Riemann,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914) , eds. Fend and Noiray, 399-430.

national contexts. Additionally, a recent series of publications from the archive of the

Universität der Künste Berlin presents reproductions of primary material, such as letters and a previously unpublished autobiography, with contextualising and analytical essays that put conservatories and their staff and students squarely at the centre of the cultural history of Berlin and German-speaking Europe. 37

Studies that are not explicitly about music education have also given attention to conservatories of music. Most notably, Celia Applegate’s book on Felix Mendelssohn’s

1829 revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion devotes attention to attempts to establish a conservatory in Berlin. 38 Applegate’s contribution to the Short Oxford History of

Germany volume on Imperial Germany was an overview of the arts landscape in the

Kaiserreich . In this essay, she also pointed to the founding of conservatories throughout

Germany after 1843. 39 Alexandra Richie’s comprehensive history of Berlin also includes the Hochschule für Musik as a feature of Berlin’s cultural life. 40 A three-volume study of

twentieth-century music in Dresden included an entry on that city’s music-educational

establishments. 41 Additionally, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht’s study of the role of music

37 See Dietmar Schenk and Wolfgang Rathert, eds., Carl Flesch und Max Rostal: Aspekte der Berliner Streichertradition (Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2002); Franz Bullmann, Wolfgang Rathert and Dietmar Schenk, eds., Paul Hindemith in Berlin: Essays und Dokumente (Berlin: Hochschule der Künste, 1997); Max Rostal, Violin Schlüssel-Erlebnisse: Erinnerungen , edited by Dietmar Schenk and Antje Kalcher (Berlin: Ries und Erler, 2007); and Nancy Rudloff, Klaus Martin Kopitz and Dietmar Schenk, eds., Justus Hermann Wetzel: Komponist, Schriftsteller, Lehrer (Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2004). 38 Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 149. 39 Celia Applegate, “Culture and the Arts,” in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 , ed. James Retallack, Short Oxford History of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 116-117. 40 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 222. 41 Hans John, “Musikalische Bildungseinrichtungen in Dresden,” in Dresden und die avancierte Musik im 20. Jahrhundert 3 Vols., eds. Matthias Herrmann and Hanns-Werner Heister (Laaber: Laaber, 1999), I:141.

in transatlantic relations discusses music education as a form of exchange. 42 Similarly,

Anja Werner’s recent book on American students at German universities includes music students alongside university students. 43 More specialised studies, such as Eva

Rieger’s overview of music and patriarchy, also consider music education as a field in which women’s advancement was restricted. 44

Before providing an overview of this dissertation, some terminological clarification is in order. The two oldest institutions discussed in this dissertation, the conservatories in Vienna and Leipzig, gave themselves the name Conservatorium . The German designation Conservatorium (and, later, Konservatorium ) emphasises that these music schools were erected on the model of the Paris Conservatoire . In 1869, a new music school was created in Berlin as a Hochschule für Musik . This was, at the time, the only

German conservatory that claimed the status of a Hochschule , which staked its claim for academic rigour on a par with Germany’s renowned universities. Other institutions assumed the title Hochschule für Musik or Musikhochschule , sometimes in the context

of transition from a private institution to a public one. In Munich, the Royal

Conservatorium became the Royal Bavarian Musikschule before transforming into the

Royal Akademie der Tonkunst in 1892. Only in 1998 did it become the Hochschule für

Musik und Theater . In Weimar, the Orchesterschule became the Grand Ducal

42 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850- 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 43 Anja Werner, The Transatlantic World of Higher Education: Americans at German Universities, 1776- 1914 (New York: Berghahn, 2013). 44 Eva Rieger, Frau, Musik und Männerherrschaft: Zum Ausschluß der Frau aus der deutschen Musikpädagogik, Musikwissenschaft und Musikausübung (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1981). See also Freia Hoffmann, “Institutionelle Ausbildungsmöglichkeiten für Musikerinnen in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Von der Spielfrau zur Performance-Künstlerin: Auf der Suche nach einer Musikgeschichte der Frauen , eds. Freia Hoffmann and Eva Rieger (Kassel: Furore, 1992) and Rebecca Grotjahn, “Das Konservatorium und die weibliche Bildung,” in Zwischen bürgerlicher Kultur und Akademie , eds. Kremer and Schmidt,147-165.

Musikschule in 1902. In 1919, after the abolition of Germany’s former monarchies, it became the State Musikschule and was elevated to the status of State Hochschule in

1930.

Through the course of the nineteenth century, the terms Akademie and

Musikhochschule became associated with formal, higher education in music, with academic rigour and with professionalisation. Konservatorium was sometimes regarded as indicating an amateur or dilettantish venture. Even at the time, though, these distinctions were far from firm. The directors of Dr. Hochs Konservatorium in Frankfurt, founded in 1878, resisted having their institution taken over by the Prussian state in

1921 and the Hochschule status this would have conferred. Later that decade, the director of the Leipzig Conservatory stated that his school was at the “pinnacle of

German musical universities.” 45 Contemporary historians also use the term

Konservatorium to refer to music schools with Hochschule status. The subtitle of

Schenk’s monograph in the Berlin Musikhochschule , for example, identifies it as

“Prussia’s Konservatorium .” In this dissertation, I follow English-language convention and use “conservatory” as a generic term for music school, whether private or public, whether devoted to educating orchestral musicians, virtuosos, teachers or dilettantes.

When talking about a specific conservatory, I use the name it had at the time in question, except when doing so would create confusion.

This dissertation is divided into five thematic chapters, each of which considers an aspect of conservatories’ cultural, social and political importance from the mid-

45 Hochschularchiv, Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig (HfMTL), 2.1.6/4 (Dresden/Konkurrenz). Explanations of all other archival acronyms can be found in the bibliography.

nineteenth century to the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship. Chapter 1 analyses the founding and expansion of German conservatories through the analytical lenses provided by local and regional identities and loyalties. One of the most fruitful trends in the contemporary historiography of modern Germany is the study of the ongoing power of sub-national bonds of belonging and the resulting tension among local, regional and national identities. 46 Studying conservatories of music contributes to this budding scholarly conversation in a few ways. First, regional monarchs and nobles, especially after German unification, often attempted to retain their profile and influence by investing in culture. Conservatories were thus often yoked to the cultural-political agendas of their royal patrons or regional governments as these vied for influence with a federal state and sought distinctiveness within a larger conception of Germanness.

Second, conservatories allow an investigation of continuities and changes in the connection between cultural institutions and sub-national identities as political relationships shifted.

Commentators on music education in the nineteenth century often positioned conservatories as serving the needs of both the smaller and larger fatherland, that is, of their region and of Germany as a whole. Chapter 2 explores national visions for German music education. Given the long-standing understanding of music as a particularly

46 See David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Helmut Reichold, Bismarcks Zaunkönige. Duodez im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Studie zum Föderalismus im Bismarckreich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1977).

German art form, 47 institutions of music education were a means of institutionalising

German cultural identity both in the absence of a nation-state and as part of the process of cementing national identity after German unification. This chapter also considers conflicting conceptions of the scale of German national belonging. Music and music education were vehicles for greater-German consciousness that extended beyond

Germany into Austria and the Bohemian lands. Additionally, music education also served to shore up loyalty to the Austrian emperor and state. Austrian state patriotism existed in opposition to greater-German allegiance. Both constructions relied on culture and cultural institutions to further their claims.

One manner in which German conservatories performed a national cultural mission was by contributing to the prominence of German music and the German education system on the world stage. Chapter 3 thus concerns North American exchanges with German and Austrian conservatories of music. By 1900, over 5,000

Americans had come to Germany to study music. This cultural contact sheds light on the history of the discourse of “Americanisation” in Germany and Austria as well as on the part played by exposure to German music and music education in American cultural history. Moreover, this chapter explores attempts among German students and the

Austro-German music-educational establishment to grapple with American cultural forms they variously found enticing, liberating and threatening. Through analysis of the debate about jazz in German music education, this chapter illuminates German constructions of American culture. It also explores how Germans imagined the influence

47 See Pamela Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

of African Americans and Jews on American culture. The German discourses of race and cultural borrowing had implications for how Germans conceptualised both the needs of German culture and the role of conservatories in meeting them.

Germans did not only grapple with Jewish difference and cultural influence in the course of trans-Atlantic cultural relations. Chapter 4 analyses the role of German music education in defining the potential for and limitations of Jewish claims to German cultural belonging. Three concepts structure this chapter: the German integrationist ideal and its limitations; the role of Bildung (education) in Jewish embourgeoisement and in the construction of a distinctly German-Jewish identity; and the consequences of exclusionary racial nationalism and antisemitism for the workings of conservatories and the public conversation about music education. Jewish participation in German music education, including the assumption of leadership positions, showed on the one hand the openness of German identity. It was sometimes defined as cultural and spiritual allegiance to a set of principles and values combined with a particular aesthetic sensibility. Access to this belonging was conditional, though. Even conversion to

Christianity and contribution to the arts in Germany were not always enough; Jews had also to perform and proclaim distance from the supposed characteristics of Jewishness that were regarded, in the nationalist imagination, as opposed to Germanness. And eventually, a putatively inherent “racial” otherness made such performance impossible.

Chapter 5 broadens the focus on ideology to analyse the position of conservatories in battles between progressive and conservative forces. Conservatories could be bulwarks against change, but they could also serve to legitimate new and controversial developments in music. The concept of conservatories as having a

conserving mission was powerful, even if not as firmly grounded in cultural history and etymology as its proponents believed. Not everyone agreed about what exactly was supposed to be preserved, though. Furthermore, students, teachers and directors found ways to marry the task of curating the works of German masters with the cultural needs of the times. Conservatories also helped draw the battle lines in the defining musical dispute of the nineteenth century. Composers of the New German School, led by

Wagner and Liszt, envisioned a “music of the future” ( Zukunftsmusik ) that broke with elements of German classical tradition. These composers, musicians and advocates saw German conservatories as firmly in the hands of conservatives and traditionalists, those loyal to Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim.

Influence in music education mattered. Wagner’s demanding compositions in particular necessitated the training of competent musicians for large, professional orchestras, but conservatories focused on soloists, virtuosos and composition. This is why a new plan for German music education became central to Wagner’s work, and why Liszt was in the habit of deriding conservatories that functioned on the model of the august institution in Leipzig. Towards the end of the period covered by this dissertation, a new generation, represented by Paul Hindemith and Franz Schreker, again challenged the status quo and tried to expand the scope of what music education could be.

Recent years have seen the development of a body of scholarship devoted to the history of individual music-educational institutions. This dissertation builds on that work by treating music education in conservatories throughout German-speaking Europe as a cultural concept and as praxis, and by anchoring music education in larger scholarly conversations in German and central-European history.

Where Music Has Always Been at Home: Local and Regional Conceptions of

German Music Education

I: Introduction

When Hugo Riemann wrote his essay, “Our Conservatories,” in 1895, he did not explicitly identify the implied “we” in the formulation “our conservatories.” It is apparent that “we” meant “Germans” for three reasons: his analysis of conservatories as elements of the German education system alongside Gymnasien and Realschulen ; his

distinction between Germany and Austria when he listed the length of time that

conservatories had existed in various countries; and his sarcastic reference to “these

exalted German institutions.” In un-self-consciously using “our conservatories” to refer

to German conservatories, Riemann assumed his readers would share his assumption

and comprehend his meaning. Riemann’s assumption is not surprising, because the

unproblematic assertion of “German” as a meaningful category for discussing

conservatories follows logically from the political and cultural circumstances of

Riemann’s writing.

“Our Conservatories” appeared twenty-four years after German unification in

1871. This was the culmination of the desire of nationalists of various political stripes for

national unification in a German state, even if it was achieved under the direction of the

Prussian state, the authoritarian structure of which failed to match the vision of liberal

constitutionalists. Unification sparked the founding of educational institutions. It also

encouraged the conception of such institutions as meeting the needs of a newly united

state or, sometimes, as having an explicitly national character and mission. Even though education policy remained under the jurisdiction of the individual federal states

(Bundesstaaten) , universities were considered a national achievement and a unifying source of pride for Germans.

The history of German universities ( Universitäten and Hochschulen ) from 1866 to1918 is one of striking expansion. 1 Such universities were one of the greatest sources of German prestige in the world. 2 In 1866, there were nineteen universities in Germany.

In 1872, 1902 and 1914, universities were founded in Strassburg, Münster and

Frankfurt, respectively. From 1865 to 1890, existing polytechnical institutes were

converted into technical universities ( Technische Hochschulen ). New technical

universities were established in 1870 (Aachen), 1904 (Danzig) and 1910 (Breslau). By

1914, there were eleven technical universities in Germany. To this can be added

institutions that had avoided amalgamation into larger universities: three mining

academies; four agricultural universities; four forestry universities; and three veterinary

universities. 3

Music education was not left out of this flurry of institutional founding and

educational activity. Riemann remarked that conservatories were, at the time of his

writing, “shooting out of the earth like mushrooms.” 4 He was hyperbolic, but not wrong.

The first major institution of music education in Germany was the Leipzig Conservatory,

1 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918 , vol. 1, Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991), 569. 2 Ibid., 568. 3 Ibid., 568-569. 4 Hugo Riemann, “‘Our Conservatories’ from Präludien und Studien (1895),” translated by E. Douglas Bomberger, The Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education XV/3 (May, 1994): 226. Riemann’s essay was originally published as a chapter in Hugo Riemann, Präludien und Studien 3 vols. (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann, [1895-1901]), I: 22-33.

which was founded in 1843. The Berlin Musikhochschule was founded as the Königlich

Akademische Hochschule für ausübende Tonkunst in 1869. Germany’s first “orchestra school” ( Orchesterschule ) followed in Weimar in 1872. In Munich, the Royal

Conservatory, which had been inaugurated in 1846, became the Royal Bavarian Music

School in 1867, and was made into a Bavarian state institution in 1874. The Stuttgart

Music School was founded in 1857 and became the Stuttgart Conservatory in 1865. Dr.

Hoch’s Konservatorium , named after its late benefactor, began operations in 1878. It is

beyond doubt that German conservatories were, along with universities, a source of

renown for Germany on a global scale. This is true for the period before unification,

when music schools could buttress an idea of Germany as a cultural and geographical

category, rather than a nation state, and also for the period after 1871. For example,

over 5,000 American students studied music in Germany, mostly at conservatories, in

the second half of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, nearly all

influential American musicians had been educated in German conservatories. 5 Riemann

was hardly alone in articulating the assumed “we”—Germans—in “our conservatories.”

Works published throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that the

conservatory had emerged as a site for debates about national culture.

Yet national identity and national culture were—and are—not the only category

used to discuss and understand institutions of music education. In 1958, Max

Kaufmann, the president of the Bern Music Society, reflected on the Bern Conservatory

on its one-hundredth anniversary. He commented on what a conservatory, in general,

5 Elam Douglas Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students, 1850-1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1991, 2.

could mean for a city. Kaufmann stated that the ability of schools of art and of science to make a name for themselves internationally was well known. He added, though, that any fame that such schools achieved in the world also redounded to the reputation of the cities to which they belonged. Further, schools for the arts could determine the character of the cities in which they operated. Kaufmann focused this general principle on the relationship between Bern and its conservatory, writing that Bern, without its school of music, would be a quite different city. This was because the conservatory not only provided music education, but also contributed to the quality of life and enriched musical life in the city and canton of Bern. 6 Kaufmann’s appraisal of the Bern

conservatory’s one-hundred year history, then, focused on its international cultural

influence and its meaning for the cultural life of its city and province. Notably absent is

any mention of conservatories as bearers of national culture. Kaufmann’s writing, no

less than Riemann’s, reflects its cultural and political circumstances. Even beyond the

context of Swiss federalism, though, Kaufmann’s attention to the Bern Conservatory’s

role in local culture suggests a productive avenue to investigate institutions of music

education, one that looks beyond nation by looking within it. Kaufmann himself talked

not only about the Bern Conservatory, but about conservatories in general, and how

they could determine the tenor of their cities’ cultural lives. He was right, and his insight

applies to Germany and Austria, even if it seems less obvious in those countries.

In Germany and Austria too, conservatories were intimately connected to their

municipal and regional cultures; they shaped these cultures and structured bonds of

6 Max Kaufmann, “Zum Geleit,” in Musikschule und Konservatorium für Musik in Bern 1858-1958 by Werner Juker (Bern: Stämpfli & Cie., 1958), III.

local belonging. People involved in German conservatories and outside commentators alike understood these schools as local or regional, not just national, institutions. That is, it mattered to people that the Leipzig Conservatory was part of Leipzig ’s cultural life and that it was a royal Saxon conservatory in addition to being an important German school of music. The local or regional meaning claimed for conservatories overlapped with a sense of their national import. Conservatories could be simultaneously invoked as institutions of both the smaller and larger Fatherland, as identity was not a zero-sum game. They could be enlisted in support of arguments about the cultural predominance of German states, but also of larger abstractions such as the “northern German spirit.”

They could also be battlefields in struggles between local cultures and traditions on the one hand and national governments and agendas on the other. In shoring up a city’s status as a city of music, conservatories became focal points of rivalries between cities, both for cultural preeminence and governmental largesse.

Thus the history of music-educational institutions is connected to, and can contribute to, a recent trend among historians of German-speaking Europe. Historians have moved beyond an approach to German history that operated within the boundaries of the nation, that accepted the existence of the German people as a relatively unified category, and that focused on the role played by Prussia in forging a political expression of the nation. 7 There is now a substantial body of literature that explores multiple, overlapping but sometimes diverging paths for those living with a nation. 8 Subnational

7 James J. Sheehan, “What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 53/1 (March, 1981): 2. 8 See David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

divisions, within both the German state and the concept of the German nation, have proven fruitful ground for excavating the ambiguities and diversity of German cultures and identities. Whether large abstractions such as southern or northern Germany or former kingdoms turned federal states within the German Empire, whether cities or geographical regions, subnational categories loomed large in Germans’ understanding of their culture and their nation. 9 After German unification, cultural and educational

policy remained decentralised, which also allowed particularism to endure in Germans’

self-conception. Conservatories and other civic cultural institutions, such as

associations and choral societies, proliferated due to the persistence of numerous local

and regional ties in competition for people’s allegiance. These sub-national bonds of

attachment and belonging had long exerted strong claims on Germans’ loyalty and

affection; they persisted after the formation of a unified German state. 10 Treating

German and European history as a history of regions enables not only a more nuanced analysis of the lived experience and consciousness of historical actors, but is also important to understanding contemporary Europe, where regional identities and even political movements assert themselves. 11 Two examples of the renewed relevance of understanding Europeans at the regional level are the political-geography concept of the “region state,” which is particularly salient within the European Union, and the political success of nationalist parties, such as Plaid Cymru in Wales, that seek

9 David Blackbourn and James Retallack, “Introduction,” in Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place , eds. Blackbourn and Retallack, 8-14. 10 See Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 11 Celia Applegate, “A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times,” American Historical Review 104/4 (October, 1999): 1157-1159.

separate membership in the European Union, or regional secessionist-nationalist parties such as the Catalonian Convergence and Union.

In this chapter, I explore the founding and development of German conservatories through the analytical lenses provided by local and regional identities.

The strength and persistence of sub-national bonds of belonging can be seen in the goals and practices of conservatories as well as in the cultural conversation about music education. I analyse the connections between conservatories of music and local and regional cultural identities first by exploring the role of patronage by monarchs and governments in founding and guiding conservatories. Then, I consider conservatories in

Frankfurt and Leipzig as examples of conservatories’ role as exemplars of urban bourgeois culture and as central institutions in cities’ rivalry with state governments on the one hand and other cities on the other. Finally, I discuss the meaning of conservatories in Berlin and Vienna, two imperial and national capitals that were also focal points for northern and southern German identity with their own city cultures. I generally use the term “local” to refer to the municipal level and “regional” to discuss matters related to pre-unification German states and post-unification federal states.

“Sub-national” indicates localities and regions together.

II: Conservatories, Political Patronage, Regionalism and Localism

Emphasis on conservatories’ meaning for their communities in German-speaking

Europe was apparent from the time of their founding. The attention to sub-national meaning in discussions of German conservatories stems from the environment that

produced them: a Germany of regions, populated by a “nation of provincials.” 12 Cultural

institutions in nineteenth-century Munich, for example, were dependent on royal

patrons, who determined both the direction and funding of arts and education. Munich’s

most important cultural institutions all owed their existence to the Wittelsbach dynasty,

which paid the piper and called the tune. 13 In this example, regional rulers—the

Bavarian royal family—were the defining force in the local cultural life of their capital,

Munich. This observation applies to numerous other cities and regions. Both before and

after German unification, conservatories were founded and their existence justified with

an eye to sub-national, as well as national, needs, culture and identities. This framing

reflects the realities of patronage. But it also speaks to something deeper about how

Germans understood their homes, and how these local and regional homelands fit

together into a larger idea of nation.

The circumstances of the founding, in 1843, of the Leipzig Conservatory

exemplify the role of municipal and state-level culture and politics, both in identifying a

need for music education and in responding to that need. In his 1868 book in

commemoration of the Leipzig Conservatory’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Emil Knescke

wrote that the establishment of that institution was a product of the “glory days” of

Mendelssohn in Leipzig. While the idea came from Mendelssohn and his friend Conrad

Schleinitz, realising the plan for a conservatory required the assistance of two other

men. These were the poet, novelist and Hofrat Johann Georg Keil, and Johann Paul

von Falkenstein, the Kreisdirektor and later Minister of Education [ Minister für Kultus

12 See Applegate, A Nation of Provincials . 13 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud , vol 1, Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 26.

und öffentlichen Unterricht ]. 14 It should not escape attention that Falkenstein, who was key to transforming the conservatory from plan to reality, was a civil servant, and specifically a Saxon civil servant.

The Saxon government joined the cast of those involved in founding a conservatory due to a bequest of 20,000 thalers. Heinrich Blümner, a royal Saxon

Oberhofgerichtsrat (highly ranking civil servant), had left this sum for the purpose of

founding or supporting an “institute for art or science.” Specifically, this was to be a

“non-commercial, national [ vaterländisch ] institute.” Did “national” refer to Germany or to

Saxony? In practice, this did not matter. There was some rhetoric about national cultural needs surrounding the Leipzig Conservatory’s founding. But the king of Saxony,

Friedrich August II, held the purse strings. He, personally, could dispose of the 20,000 thalers as he saw fit. 15 Therefore, the argument for a new conservatory became an

argument for meeting the needs of Saxon culture, specifically.

Mendelssohn stressed the proposed conservatory’s nature as a Saxon institution

in a letter to Falkenstein on 8 April, 1840. First, Mendelssohn appealed to the

Kreisdirektor ’s demonstrated concern for the state and development of local cultural life.

Based on this history, Mendelssohn allowed himself to request that Blümner’s bequest

be used to establish a music school in Leipzig. How did Mendelssohn seek to convince

the Saxon government that a conservatory would be a worthwhile investment? He

argued that music had long been “especially native in this country,” that is, in Saxony. It

was not just any music that had long been at home in Saxony; it was music that was

14 Emil Kneschke, Das Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig. Seine Geschichte, seine Lehrer und Zöglinge. Festgabe zum 25jâhrigen Jubiläum am 2. April 1868 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1868), 1. 15 Ibid., 3-4.

“near and dear to any thinking and feeling art lover who has a sense for the true and the serious.” This musical orientation had always had “firm roots” in Saxony. Mendelssohn argued that anyone who truly cared about this art would want “to see its future in this country [Saxony] resting on as firm ground as possible.” A conservatory would ensure this. 16

Mendelssohn’s appeal to use the available funds to establish a conservatory presented this plan as something that grew from Saxony’s unique relationship to music.

Once established, though, the Leipzig Conservatory, while a royal institution, did not have the relationship to the state that national conservatories had in other contexts. In

1849, François-Joseph Fétis, director of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, visited

Leipzig during a trip through Germany. He published his impressions in the Gazette musicale in Paris. Signale für die Musikalische Welt , a music magazine published in

Leipzig, printed an excerpt of Fétis’s report in German translation. Fétis stated bluntly that “[t]he Saxon government does nothing at all for the conservatory” and that the city only provided a barely adequate location. Fétis asserted that a school of the arts could thrive only when the government paid its expenses and attendance was free. He held up the conservatories of France and Belgium as a model. He pointed to the

Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, which existed thanks to the patronage of friend of the arts and royal courts, and was thus destroyed by the 1848 revolutions. 17

16 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Briefe aus den Jahren 1833 bis 1847 , 4th ed., eds. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1864), 227-228. 17 This was not hyperbole. The political upheaval of 1848 ended the state subvention for the Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde . Instruction ceased in 1848 and resumed only in 1851, with support from city and national governments. See Lynn Heller, “Geschichte der mdw,”

Fétis’s justified critique of the Saxon government’s failure to provide meaningful support for the Leipzig Conservatory is all the more pointed given his understanding of northern Germany’s regional distinctiveness. Fétis believed that the arts were not merely a source of entertainment in northern Germany, as they were in in his homeland.

Rather, art was “a need of the soul, a religion” in the north of Germany. 18 Both

Mendelssohn and a prominent foreign conservatory director, then, advanced the idea that the Leipzig Conservatory was a logical outgrowth of a distinctively regional appreciation for the arts.

The case of Mendelssohn reveals how the discourse of regional culture was shaped by the reality of politics and patronage. It seems doubtful that Mendelssohn— born in Hamburg, raised in Berlin—really had much invested in the notion of Saxony’s unique musical heritage. Framing his request for financial support for a music school in

Leipzig in this manner reflected a need to appeal to the king of Saxony, to convince the monarch that he would be making an expenditure that would build on his country’s cultural inheritance and increase his prestige. Mendelssohn’s history of attempts to start a conservatory support the argument that professions of regional cultural distinctiveness could reflect pragmatic strategy rather than conviction about sub-national cultural difference. Years before approaching the Saxon government, Mendelssohn had attached his hopes for a conservatory to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. This king, a romantic, was a figure of hope to artists and intellectuals. In 1841, Mendelssohn engaged in discussions with the Prussian government about founding a conservatory in

http://www.mdw.ac.at/ID/35 . Heller is the current archivist of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. 18 “Fétis über Leipzig,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 7/53 (December, 1849): 425-428.

Berlin. Mendelssohn’s desire to realise his music-educational plans in Berlin also reflect regional identity, though. He was shaped by the musical culture of Prussia’s capital; moreover, he actively shaped it through his revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion .19

Mendelssohn may have wanted to see a proper conservatory somewhere in

Germany, but it was necessary to position art and music as regionally distinct to secure necessary support. His emphasis on the Saxon character of the conservatory, though, should not be mistaken for mere lip service. It was a major aspect of how the conservatory was perceived. The regional character of a national cultural good is demonstrated by an article in the Leipziger Zeitung from 8 Apil 1843, less than a week after the conservatory opened its doors. The newspaper reminded students of the new institution that “not only Saxony but the entire German fatherland” was looking expectantly to their school. 20 George Whitefield Chadwick, an American composer and future director of the New England Conservatory, studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1877 to 1879. In his unpublished memoirs, he struggled to reconcile his fond memories of Leipzig and its environs with Germany’s status as the enemy in World War

One. He could retain good will toward those he knew in Leipzig, because he identified them as Saxons, a “simple kindly people” who were abused by their “Prussian lords” and would have to “suffer for the enormous crimes of their rulers.” 21 So, even if

Mendelssohn’s commitment to Saxony’s status as a land of music was newfound, it

19 Dietmar Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin: Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869-1932/33 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 25. See also Applegate, Bach in Berlin . 20 Leipziger Zeitung , 8 April 1843, Beilage, quoted in Yvonne Wasserloos, Das Leipziger Konservatorium der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert: Anziehungs- und Ausstrahlungskraft eines musikpädagogischen Modells auf das internationale Musikleben (New York: Olms, 2004), 34. 21 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs 1877-1880.

contributed to a regional identity for a separate polity, as well as for a larger abstraction—central Germany—and the city of Leipzig.

Political patronage also ensured that the Weimar Orchesterschule would retain a strong regional identity from its founding in 1872. The name “orchestra school” is not coincidental. It was not self-evident that conservatories would educate orchestral musicians. The Leipzig model prioritised “higher” musical professions favoured by the bourgeoisie and thus tended to educate composers, conductors, pianists, organists and vocal soloists. Violin and cello instruction aimed at virtuosity, not competent ensemble musicians. 22 The Orchesterschule ’s mission was, then, explicitly opposed to that of

conservatories in Leipzig and Munich. It was the first conservatory in Germany

specifically dedicated to preparing orchestral musicians. 23 This goal was in keeping with

the musical agenda of the composers Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Therefore, it

was conceptualised as making an intervention into German national musical life by

meeting the needs of composers such as Wagner for better-trained orchestral players. It

is all the more striking, then, how the exigencies of patronage made this school a pillar

of Weimar’s local culture and of a regional ruler’s prestige.

The practical needs that the Weimar Orchesterschule sought to meet were linked to a regional profile. In conception and in practice, this school was intimately connected to the court and the cultural-political agenda of the local ruler, the grand duke of Saxe-

Weimar-Eisenach. It was always imagined as in the service of the court in Weimar. This

22 Edgar Hartwig et al. ( Autorenkollektiv ), “Zur Geschichte der Weimarer Musikhochschule,” in Festschrift der Hochschule für Musik “Franz Liszt” Weimar zum hundertsten Jahrestag ihrer Gründung als Orchesterschule , eds. Edgar Hartwig, et al. ( Redaktionskollektiv ), (Weimar: Hochschule für Musik “Franz Liszt”, 1972), 14-15, 20-22. 23 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Charting the Future of Zukunftsmusik : Liszt and the Weimar Orchesterschule,” The Musical Quarterly 80/2 (Summer, 1996): 348.

local embedding coexisted with the Orchesterschule ’s aspiration to add something new to music education in Germany as a whole. The Orchesterschule was the realisation of

Liszt’s vision and was founded under the direction of his student, Carl Müllerhartung.

Liszt had become the full-time conductor of the court orchestra in 1848, after six years as “Court Kapellmeister in Extraordinary.” In 1855, he proposed an orchestra school to

Grand Duke Carl Alexander to secure the future of music at court. 24 Müllerhartung proposed his own vision for such a school to the grand duke in 1864. 25 The school was finally established in 1872, under the protection of the grand duke. The latter date is significant. After almost twenty years of planning, it opened just after German unification, when rulers sought cultural prestige to compensate in part for diminished political power. 26

The Weimar Orchesterschule successfully helped maintain a level of pomp and ceremonial gravitas around the grand duke, which preserved his position as a cultural patron. He invested in regional culture to reassert himself as a cultural, rather than a political, power. Officially, supervision of the conservatory’s functional and formal approval of the director’s suggestions in matters of personnel, finance and organisation rested with the grand duke’s administration. Students at the Orchesterschule often honoured their patron in various ways, including putting on concerts to mark anniversaries of rule. The ruling family also made scholarships available for “poor

Weimarers” to attend the conservatory. It is significant that this opportunity was offered

24 Ibid., 349. 25 Ibid., 353. 26 See Helmut Reichold, Bismarcks Zaunkönige. Duodez im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Studie zum Föderalismus im Bismarckreich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1977).

to poor local residents. 27 The grand duke’s focus on the conservatory as a means to foster a connection with his subjects illustrates how the need for patronage and local political agendas made the Orchesterschule , aside from its larger cultural and practical

objectives, an institution firmly embedded in its local culture.

Weimar was not alone in its position as a residence city ( Residenzstadt ) where the royal court brought music education under its purview. In Munich as well, musicians’ and pedagogues’ larger cultural visions did not determine the direction of the conservatory alone. They contended and intersected with the needs and desires of the school’s royal patron. The Bavarian dynasty, it will be remembered, is Gay’s example of the importance of patronage, not only for court interests but for middle-class cultural aspirations. 28 Starting with its pre-history, the conservatory in Munich’s fortunes hinged

on the attitudes and actions of the royal court. As early as 1838, a court musician

named Anton Moralt petitioned King Ludwig I to fund the private music school he,

Moralt, had opened in Munich in 1836. Moralt’s petition was rejected. 29 An educational official in the Bavarian government did not think that Munich’s music-educational needs could be met by a private institution. 30 That is, the role of the king and the state was

identified as a necessity from the beginning. Moralt’s petition is significant because it led

the Bavarian ministry responsible for educational affairs to push the court to fund a

27 HfMW, HSA 511, Jahresberichte 1877-1908, Erster Bericht der Großherzoglichen Orchester- und Musik-Schule , Weimar, 1877, and Zweiter Bericht der Grossherzoglichen Orchester- und Musik-Schule in Weimar über die Schuljahre 1877-1882 . 28 Gay, Education of the Senses , 26. 29 Dale A. Jorgenson, The Life and Legacy of Franz Xaver Hauser: A Forgotten Leader in the Nineteenth- Century Bach Movement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 80. 30 Robert Münster, “Das Königliche Konservatorium für Musik 1846-1865 und seine Vorläufer,” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 14.

music school. The ministry presented a music school as a matter of necessity, given the supposed decline of Munich’s musical life. The ministry was most likely exaggerating the state of musical affairs in Munich. Its real reason for lobbying for a conservatory had to do with winning freedom for German music and musicians, casting off the yoke of

Italian ideas and performers in music and the other arts. 31 So, similar to the case of

Weimar, a national goal—the liberation of German art—was presented as an urgent need for the city of Munich and for the royal Bavarian court, due to the need to interest monarchs and secure patronage.

After an abortive attempt to transform Munich’s Central-Singschule into a professional conservatory, the Bavarian government began in 1844 to plan a new conservatory. The Royal Conservatory began operations in 1846. King Ludwig I himself expressed the wish that the conservatory should not only be meaningful for Munich, but one that would set the standard for all of Bavaria.32 The King of Bavaria saw music

education as a field in which he could enhance his own standing as a monarch as well

as contribute to the musical life of both his residence city and his entire realm. Any

national purpose, such as Wagner’s later attempt to reorganise the conservatory into a

German school of music, would have to fit alongside the Bavarian monarchy’s interests

in its political and cultural reputation. Franz Hauser was called from Vienna to be the

Royal Conservatory’s founding director. The conservatory’s Bavarian character was not

neglected in Hauser’s appointment. Hauser’s nomination for the post was apparently

31 Jorgenson, Life and Legacy , 80-81. 32 Ibid., 82, 87.

justified by the lack of a suitable Bavarian candidate. 33 Fétis, the Belgian conservatory director, also drew attention to the close association between the Royal Conservatory and its royal patron in his 1849 report by beginning his description of the Royal

Conservatory with a plain statement that it had been founded by King Ludwig I. 34

The Royal Conservatory, sometimes known as the Hauser Conservatory, lasted until 1865, though Hauser left Munich in 1864. Hauser’s dismissal had numerous reasons. There were critical ministerial reports to the king, including one, in 1853, that recommended his dismissal. Faculty attacked him and complained about his leadership, and the press was often critical. Court politics, though, were an important factor in bringing about the end of Hauser’s tenure and the shuttering of the conservatory.

Maximilian II, who ascended the throne following the 1848 revolution, supported Hauser and sustained the conservatory as relations deteriorated between director and ministry.

Beginning in1860, music of the future ( Zukunftsmusik ), promoted by Wagner and Liszt, gained favour in Munich. In 1864, Ludwig II, Wagner’s most important patron, became king, which meant that Hauser’s days were numbered. Wagner was negatively disposed toward Hauser and his circle. He also bore a grudge against Hauser dating from the latter’s lack of interest in staging a Wagner opera as regisseur in Leipzig in 1833.

Wagner regarded Hauser as an inflexible pedant. He told the new king that extant schools of art and music were failing in their mission. In September, 1864, the king told

33 Ibid., 84. 34 This part of Fétis’s report did not appear in Signale für die musikalische Welt . It is reprinted in German translation in Münster, “Das Königliche Konservatorium,” 17.

Wagner that he was open to reforming and reorganising the conservatory. In October,

Hauser was let go. 35

Wagner had the young king’s ear. And he had a plan for a new kind of conservatory. He presented his proposals in his 1865 Report to His Majesty King

Ludwig II of Bavaria about a German Music School to be Founded in Munich .” 36 The title

alone indicates the delicate balance among national, regional and local cultural

belonging. Wagner envisioned a national music school to address and correct national

problems. 37 He wanted to produce singers who were up to the task of his musical dramas, and he wanted to educate proficient orchestral musicians. Wagner saw the conservatory as a potential realisation of goals expressed in his earlier, fruitless projects. These included a "Plan for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony”; his proposal for a theater in Zurich; and his ideas for preventing the decline of the opera house in Vienna. 38 Like the Weimar

Orchesterschule , Wagner’s national agenda had to be expressed in a way that would be appealing to a state ruler. The path to realising Wagner’s proposal ran through the royal administration. As such, the value of the German music school to Bavaria had to be made clear.

Wagner’s report did not become the basis of the reorganised conservatory in

Munich, partly because the composer clashed with notables in Munich and with the

35 Jorgenson, Life and Legacy , 127, 131-134, 137-138, 140. 36 Richard Wagner, Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, [1865] 1998). 37 This dimension of his report will be discussed in Chapter 2, and the ideology of his plan will be explored in Chapter 5. 38 Wagner, Bericht , 49-50. See, for example, Richard Wagner, “Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters für das Königreich Sachsen,” in idem, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen , 10 vols. (Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1887-1911), 2:233-273.

royal court. Wagner tried to place his stamp on the city, culturally and politically. His failure to harmonise his music-educational vision, among other aspects of his programme, with local and regional interests earned him the disfavour of elites and even jeopardised Ludwig II’s hold on the throne. 39 Wagner attempted to present his conservatory as the cornerstone of an artistic agenda for Bavaria, which was to include a theatre in Munich, but his plan to create institutions that would shape Munich’s and

Bavaria’s musical life as well as serve the artistic needs of all of Germany faltered due to state-level culture and politics. He upset the king’s advisors with his political writing.

His extravagant lifestyle was fodder for caricaturists. He alienated Munich’s public through his scandalous relationship with the conductor and composer Hans von Bülow’s wife, Cosima, even as Bülow was key to what Wagner and the king were planning.

Bülow himself, brought by the king to the Bavarian court at Wagner’s urging, insulted and alienated Munich’s public, making Wagner’s circle even more unpopular, especially after war broke out between Bavaria and Bülow’s native Prussia. Wagner further angered court and citizenry by requesting an increase to his royal stipend in 1865. The

Wagner affair brought international ridicule to the Bavarian court, and even the king grew less enamoured with the composer. Wagner was asked by the royal Bavarian court to leave Munich in December 1865. 40 The rise and fall of Wagner’s fortunes in

Munich shows that a conservatory in Germany that sought to make an intervention into national culture was still dependent on sub-national culture and politics. The necessary money and favour for Wagner’s German music school could be granted or withheld by

39 Jorgenson, Life and Legacy , 144. 40 Ibid., 144, 165-168.

the Bavarian king and his court, based on their understanding of their interests, their capital’s public and their state’s cultural and educational needs.

Other suggestions for how to reorganise the closed Royal Conservatory also sought to conceptualise the reformed institution as a specific Bavarian manifestation of a matter of national cultural import. Wilhelm Pranz was an official in the Interior Ministry for Church and School Affairs [ Innenministerium für Kirchen- und

Schulangelegenheiten ]. 41 In 1865, he published his own considerations on the fate and future of Munich’s conservatory: On Conservatories of Music, With Special

Consideration of the Royal Conservatory in Munich .42 Pranz made it clear that there were national, and even universal, cultural benefits of music education. His argument proceeded from the contention that his was a time “in which all arts and sciences unite to aspire toward an illustrious goal: the refinement of man, cultivation of the people” as well as a time “in which the striving to make music, to hear music, is becoming appreciably more pronounced.” Since music “should be seen as an excellent means of cultivation” it was “the duty of any civilised state to support such striving and struggling for ennoblement and perfection.” 43 This extract demonstrates how the position of

Germany, where the nation was a cultural concept divided across separate polities,

dictated that cultural institutions had to have regional and local characteristics. Pranz

implicitly defined conservatories as a sub-national responsibility because he held that

the state had a responsibility to foster this refinement. Cultural or aesthetic refinement

41 Christa Jost, “Richard Wagners Münchner Atelier für Musik und die Königliche Musikschule (1865- 1874),” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 45. 42 Wilhelm Pranz, Ueber Conservatorien für Musik. Mit besonderer Rücksichtnahme auf das Königliche Conservatorium zu München (Munich: Georg Franz, 1865). 43 Ibid., 1.

was presented as solely attainable through the efforts of individual nationalities, whose governments were duty bound to facilitate this ennoblement. This conviction can be seen in the formulation, quoted above, that the common goal of art and science was

“the refinement of man, the cultivation of the people.” Pranz’s distinction between the universal “man” and the particular “people” only has meaning if “people” is singular: a people. The word employed is Volk , which means “people” in the sense of a national community.

Yet Pranz focused on the Bavarian state’s funding and direction of the Royal

Conservatory in Munich. His regional conception of music education, as a practical matter, was a function of the administrative reality. Pranz’s singling out of Munich’s

Royal Conservatory as the only one in Germany directly under state administration, his general discussion of the role of school teachers in Volksbildung , or education of the people, and his reference to “the conservatories,” rather than just Munich’s, show that the Volk he discussed was not coterminous with the Bavarian state. 44 This is further

demonstrated by his statement that “our German Fatherland” had no shortage of good

singers, but they lacked the opportunity for education. His remedy was to call for “every

conservatory”—clearly every conservatory in Germany, since his goal was to address

the needs of singers in “our German Fatherland”—to offer a popular course in singing to

young men who were not training to be professional singers, but seeking development

out of love for music. 45 Finally, he stated that he was driven to write this text by “the pure and noble enthusiasm for the art of music, but especially by the obligation of

44 Ibid., 26. 45 Ibid., 23.

gratitude toward the noble government of our smaller Fatherland,” that is, Bavaria, which provided him with support in his musical education. He closed with the hope that the Munich Conservatory would achieve the high level that it was called to as an artistic and state institution, and that God’s blessings would be upon this conservatory “for the blossoming of art, for the well-being of the people, and for the glory of the Fatherland .”

The differentiation between the “smaller Fatherland,” which funded Pranz’s studies, and the Fatherland that represents the Volk , is the distinction between Bavaria as a political state and Germany as a people and a nation in the absence of a territorial state. 46 When it came to institutions of music education, German political structure often meant that national concerns were viewed through regional and local lenses.

III: Conservatories and their Cities

Saxony may have been “where music has always been at home,” but the question of where, exactly, to build music education’s home within Saxony was the subject of political, cultural and even economic debate. Leipzig had a longstanding reputation as a city of music, but political and cultural leaders in Dresden also saw music education as part of their city’s cultural profile. The Leipzig Conservatory’s importance to Leipzig’s culture and identity as a city of music can be seen through the reminiscences of a former student, and through the city’s response to a proposed conservatory in Dresden, the Saxon capital. Once the Leipzig Conservatory was a functioning institution, it was often discussed as a component of Leipzig’s identity as a city of music, rather than as a

46 Ibid., 32, my emphasis.

reflection of Saxon or German culture. As such, the Leipzig Conservatory was one of numerous institutions in Leipzig, including the Gewandhaus-Orchestra, where the interplay of bourgeois culture and patronage contributed to a strong local identity. 47

One example of such discourse is Alfred Richter’s memoirs of Leipzig’s musical

life in the nineteenth century, written in 1913. The memoirs begin with a statement of

Leipzig’s long-standing reputation as a city of music. A sense of competition among

cities for cultural preeminence within greater Germany is observable in Richter’s note

that, after Vienna, Leipzig was Germany’s most distinguished musical city. 48 Richter’s discussion of the conservatory strikes a similar chord after a paragraph describing the history and founding of the school. Among the reasons that students were attracted to study at Leipzig from the beginning the first reason was “Leipzig’s reputation as a city of music.” 49 He also described the Leipzig Conservatory’s persistence as a “place of pilgrimage” for young, talented musicians even as other conservatories of equal or greater importance arose. Richter again demonstrated that the Leipzig Conservatory was seen as staking a claim for Leipzig within Germany’s cultural sphere when he discussed the founding of the Berlin Musikhochschule . This 1869 event caused a

“perceptible transformation” in the perception of Leipzig’s status. Such expressions of local pride and comparisons with other German cities colour Richter’s reflections on the conservatory.

47 See Margaret Menniger, “Art and Civic Patronage in Leipzig, 1848-1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1998. 48 Alfred Richter, Aus Leipzigs musikalischer Glanzzeit. Erinnerungen eines Musikers ed. Doris Mundus (Leipzig: Lehmstedt, 2004), 13. 49 Ibid., 125.

Competition for renown as a centre of cultivation also spurred the founding of a second conservatory in Saxony. The obvious benefits of conservatories in Leipzig and

Weimar to the musical life of their cities led the city fathers of Dresden, in the mid- nineteenth century, to bemoan the absence of a professionally directed music- educational institution there. 50 If local eminences in Dresden looked to Leipzig for inspiration in the matter of founding a conservatory in the nineteenth century, the two

Saxon cities saw each other as competitors in the early twentieth. Beginning in 1919, controversy raged in Leipzig and Dresden over a movement to establish a public conservatory, specifically a Hochschule , in Dresden. This was a dispute between two cities over material support of the Saxon state and cultural preeminence within Saxony and in the wider world.

The terms of the debate extended far beyond music into the meaning of a conservatory for the cultural, social and economic life of a city. In January 1920, Adolf

Aber, a prominent music critic for the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten , gave a speech

“against the establishment of a state conservatory in Dresden.” The presentation was delivered in a “protest gathering” at the Leipzig Conservatory and published by that school’s student union. 51 Aber began by insinuating untoward maneuvering by Dresden,

since the plan for a state conservatory there was put forward not by the Saxon

education ministry, but by private citizens in Dresden. His thesis was that a prominent

Dresdener, Paul Adolph, had lost cultural prominence due to machinations involving the

50 Michael Heinemann, “Tradition & Effizienz. Zur Geschichte der Dresdner Musikhochschule von 1856 bis 1914,” in Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden 1856-2006 , ed. Manuel Gervink (Dresden: Michel Sandstein, 2005), 11-12. 51 Adolf Aber, Gegen die Errichtung einer staatlichen Hochschule für Musik in Dresden (Leipzig: Edgar Herfurth, 1920).

state theatre. Aber charged that Adolph had schemed since then to restore his lost importance, which led Adolph to join forces with musicians and members of the musical press in Dresden, form a committee, and convince the Saxon government to support the plan for a state conservatory. 52

Aber’s presentation of the matter reveals his understanding, apparently shared

by Leipzig’s musical community, of the responsibilities of the state government vis-a-vis

local cultural establishments as well as of the proper relation of cities within a state and

their cultural institutions with each other. First, Aber asserted that the Dresden

committee took advantage of a new minister who obviously did not have the perspective

to comprehend the negative consequences of founding a state conservatory in Dresden

“for Saxony in general and especially for the Leipzig Conservatory.” The danger for

Leipzig lay in the reality that, if Dresden received a public conservatory, then anyone in

Saxony who sought certification as a music teacher would be obliged to pass an

examination in Dresden. Aber compared the situation to Prussia, where anyone who

wished to be a singing teacher at the school level had to attend the Academic Institute

for Church Music. Aber found it fitting and proper that such examinations take place at a

state institution, but he also found that introducing such a system would present obvious

disadvantages for Leipzig. 53 State control of educational policy meant that a city conservatory’s relationship with the state was of paramount importance .

In Aber’s telling, this situation arose when a naive minister had made a palace available for the planned conservatory in Dresden and set the political foundation for its

52 Ibid., 2. 53 Ibid., 6.

realisation. A member of the Leipzig Conservatory’s board of directors complained at the ministry and left with the understanding “that the government had already decided for Dresden.” 54 This suggests a detachment from the state government, or that those

active in Leipzig’s civic life treated the position of the Leipzig Conservatory, a private,

civic insitution, as secure and as their own affair. It also demonstrates, however, that

state-level administration remained an effective authority in political and cultural life. The

Saxon government’s actions had potential to undermine the privileged position that

Leipzig and its conservatory had earned as mainstays of music in Saxony and Germany

more broadly. Dresdeners’ motivation in lobbying for a state music school also arose

from their city’s changed status. As the residence of the Saxon monarchy, Dresden had

been able to attract “Germans and foreigners,” but with the abolition of monarchy, it was

in danger of being “outflanked” by other cities. 55 Here, a position within a sub-national

state gave Dresdeners prominence at the German level, which they sought to reacquire

through music education. The answer from Aber and other supporters of the Leipzig

Conservatory was that the Leipzig institution should have the advantage and be made

into a public institution.

The debate over the establishment of a state conservatory in Saxony raged in

newspapers—an open letter to Leipzig students mocked their “local patriotism,” 56 for example—but it was also a source of conflict at municipal and state levels of government. Various groups sent appeals to the Saxon Volkskammer , including the

director of the Leipzig Conservatory and the Leipzig city council. The argument of

54 Ibid., 2. 55 Ibid., 4. 56 HfMTL, 2.1.6/4 (Dresden/Konkurrenz).

Leipzig partisans, expressed in a memorandum sent to the Volkskammer by the director of the Leipzig Conservatory, Dr. Röntsch, in the name of the conservatory’s board of directors, was that the Leipzig Conservatory was an important institution due to the roster of major musicians that had taught there and the high numbers of famous

German and foreign musicians it had produced. Röntsch further argued that “the Leipzig

Conservatory is still at the pinnacle of German musical universities.” Berlin, Munich,

Stuttgart and other cities were investing large sums of state and municipal money to bring their conservatories to the highest level, but they would be unable to surpass the

Leipzig Conservatory if the latter had the funds necessary to demonstrate its superlative musical activities domestically and abroad. 57 Here, Röntsch made the case that the

Leipzig Conservatory was vital to German national cultural life and Germany’s reputation abroad. He also argued that this service to national culture could only be performed if the Leipzig Conservatory won its competition for municipal and state funding with conservatories in other German cities. In this conception, the ability for

German culture to realise its potential rested on local and regional politics and priorities.

State investment in Leipzig as a city of music was necessary for the Leipzig

Conservatory to continue to foster German culture at home and project it abroad. That conservatories were a feature of local culture with implications beyond the musical and pedagogical is illustrated by the involvement of the Leipzig Tourism Board in the dispute with Dresden. This body saw its interests at stake in either a decline in the centrality of

57 Ibid.

the Leipzig Conservatory or an increase via nationalisation [ Verstaatlichung ] by the

Saxon state. 58

The example of Leipzig and the competition with Dresden shows one way that conservatories were integral to their cities’ culture. They were part of the cultural identity of cities and self-conception of their residents. Conservatories in cities without royal courts provide good examples of the importance of conservatories as institutions of urban middle-class culture. This description applies to Leipzig. Even though the Leipzig

Conservatory sought patronage and relied on royal support, it was a bourgeois initiative and one of the ways that music shaped Leipzig’s middle class. 59 Frankfurt am Main was

also a city in which the conservatory was an outgrowth and expression of bourgeois

values. In Frankfurt, the conservatory’s local identity eventually clashed with the agenda

of a far-away Prussian government in Berlin.

Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt opened in 1878 and soon achieved its place in Germany’s musical landscape through the hiring of the composer Joachim Raff as director and of prominent teachers such as Clara Schumann. 60 Joseph Hoch, who bequeathed the money to start a foundation to establish the conservatory, was the scion of a prominent Frankfurt family. The foundation included the mayor of Frankfurt, the chairman of the Frankfurt Museum Society and other prominent Frankfurt citizens. 61 Dr.

Hoch’s Konservatorium was thus established in a spirit of civic pride; it was an institution of, not merely in, Frankfurt. A Festschrift published by the conservatory to

58 Ibid. 59 See Antje Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture: A Comparative History of Nineteenth- Century Leipzig and Birmingham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 60 Peter Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main (1878-1978) (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1979), 17-18, 22, 30. 61 Ibid., 23-24.

commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1903 stressed this local importance. Hoch was described as bequeathing the necessary money for a conservatory to “his father- city [ Vaterstadt ] Frankfurt.” His generosity was, then, an act in the service of music, but also in the service of his city and its cultural profile. Hoch was described as having been a presence in “his Vaterstadt ’s musical circles.” He found it “painful” that “his beloved

Vaterstadt ” did not have a conservatory of music. 62

In 1888, when the conservatory’s new building was dedicated, a bust of Kaiser

Frederick III was placed in the background of the stage. A bust of Hoch, however, stood in front of the stage. This arrangement exemplifies the cultural meaning of Dr. Hoch’s

Konservatorium : the bourgeois Frankfurter, Hoch, was given equal prominence with the far-away Prussian king and German kaiser. Busts of both looked on at the ceremony, but Hoch was granted slightly more prominence, as his bust stood in the foreground, showing the bourgeois, urban identity of this institution of music education. At the 1888 dedication ceremony, the chair of the conservatory’s board gave an address on the institution’s history. The chair, von Mumm, stated that, while Hoch’s first interest was to serve “the interests of art,” he also acted on “patriotic” motivations. Strikingly, “patriotic” here referred solely to Hoch’s love of and devotion to his city. He wanted his conservatory to be a monument to the pairing of public spirit [ Bürgersinn ] with love of the arts. His conservatory was supposed to fill a gap in the cultural institutions of his city. 63

62 Heinrich Hanau, Dr. Hoch’s Conservatorium zu Frankfurt am Main. Festschrift zur Feier seines fünfundzwanzigjährigen Bestehens (1878-1903) (Frankfurt: C. Adelmann, 1903), 3. 63 Ibid., 21-22.

The response to the Prussian state’s encroachment on Dr. Hoch’s

Konservatorium also demonstrates that conservatory’s status as a monument to local culture and bourgeois engagement. Frankfurt was a free city until its annexation by

Prussia in 1866. This relatively recent incorporation into Prussia fueled the resentment against what was perceived as arrogance projected from Berlin along with centralising bids for power. This attempted centralisation did not ignore music education. Leo

Kestenberg, a Social Democrat who was put in charge of musical affairs in the Prussian

Ministry of Science, Art and Education in December 1918, undertook an expansive reform of the entire Prussian system of music education, from school music to conservatories, in line with new policies pursued by Prussia’s Social Democratic state government (which only fell to Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s coup against it in 1932 ). 64

Kestenberg’s proposals involved a state takeover [ Verstaatlichung ] of Prussia’s private conservatories to meet the educational needs ushered in by new requirements for music-teacher certification. After the conservatory in Cologne was transformed into a public institution in 1925, Kestenberg set his sights on Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium. 65

Kestenberg’s attempt to convert the conservatory into an institution of the

Prussian state was received in the context of the long-standing antipathy between

Frankfurt and its state government. Kestenberg’s designs on Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium were rebuffed by what he dismissively dubbed “narrow local patriotism.” 66 Kestenberg’s

plans to reduce the size of the faculty and deny state funding for amateur education

64 Peter Cahn, “Ein unbekanntes musikpädagogisches Dokument von 1927: Hindemiths Konzeption einer Musikhochschule ,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch/Annales Hindemith VI (1977): 149. 65 Kestenberg’s interventions in the cultural politics of Berlin and Prussia are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. 66 Leo Kestenberg, Bewegte Zeiten: Musisch-musikantische Lebenserinnerungen (Zurick: Möseler, 1961), 72.

were not compatible with the statutes of the conservatory’s foundation. 67 Resistance also came from Bernhard Sekles, the director of the Conservatory from 1923 and a former student who valued the local traditions of his institution. The Sekles-Kestenberg conflict was certainly a dispute over institutional practice between the conservatory as a meaningful local institution and the larger educational aims of central authority. It was also, however, a clash between socialism and bourgeois liberalism. 68 The battle over the Prussian state’s interference with Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium is an exemplary case of the conflict between a developed local tradition and the reform politics of a central state. Lingering disaffection among Frankfurters at having been treated as a “stepchild” by the Prussian administration, especially in educational matters such as the establishment of the university, strengthened their resistance to Kestenberg’s agenda. 69

In this way, the conservatory became a site onto which anxiety over vanishing local

distinctiveness and the logic of central planning were projected and contested.

IV: Berlin and Vienna in Northern and Southern Germany

Even conservatories that seem at first glance to have functioned unambiguously as

national institutions were understood as outposts of regional culture as well. The

conservatories in Berlin and Vienna are two examples of this. The Berlin

Musikhochschule was founded in 1869. The year is not coincidental. This conservatory

was founded to advance a claim for Prussia’s cultural prestige. With German unification

67 Cahn, “Ein unbekanntes musikpädagogisches Dokument,” 149-150. 68 Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium , 245-246. 69 Ibid., 234.

two years later, the Musikhochschule proclaimed Berlin’s, Prussia’s and Germany’s claims to cultural prominence from the seat of the newly unified German Empire. In

Vienna, the conservatory emerged from a discourse of national Austrian culture, partly as a reaction against defeat at the hands of Napoleon. Calls for conservatories arose in two major cities of the Austrian Empire—Vienna and Prague—in 1808, when national cultural identity was marshalled in response to national humiliation. In that year, Ignaz

Mosel decried the lack of a national conservatory. Three years later, he published draft proposals for a music-educational institution for Vienna as the capital of the Austrian

Empire. Mosel argued that the institution should be founded and directed by the

Austrian state, as music should be regarded as an affair of state. The organisation that eventually founded Vienna’s conservatory was the Society of the Friends of Music of the

Austrian Empire [ Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des österreichischen Kaiserstaates ]. 70

The name and the motivation it arose from make it easy to conceive of the

Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde as a national Austrian institution.

When the Deutsche Musikstudentenschaft , an association of music students at

Germany’s public conservatories, published a book in 1927 to entice Americans to study music in Germany, they described the Staatliche akademische Hochschule für

Musik , as the Berlin Musikhochschule was then called, as the National Academic

School for Music. The Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende

70 Lynne Heller, “Das Konservatorium für Musik in Wien zwischen bürgerlich-adeligem Mäzenatentum und staatlicher Förderung,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges , 2 vols., eds. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 207-211.

Kunst , the successor institution to the Vienna Conservatorium , was the National School

and Academy for Music and Descriptive Art. 71

The way contemporaries described and engaged with these conservatories, though, shows that they were as much local and regional institutions as national ones.

The founding of the Berlin Musikhochschule is inseparable from the political agenda of a unifying Germany, but this unification was carried out under Prussian leadership; its agenda was also a Prussian agenda. In the eyes of Prussian officialdom and Berlin’s general public, the new capital’s cultural prestige was lacking in comparison with cities such as Leipzig. The Musikhochschule was a Prussian state institution and a cornerstone of Prussian cultural politics. 72 Its yearly reports listed students according to nationality. Tellingly in terms of the relationship between regional belonging and

Germanness, these reports distinguished between Prussia and the rest of Germany in tabulating the total number of German students. 73 (This was standard practice for most

conservatories in Germany.) The founding director, Joseph Joachim, was the only artist

won for the development of the new conservatory whose reputation extended well

beyond Berlin’s cultural scene. 74 This meant that, in practice, the conservatory provided an institutional position for local pedagogues and musicians. Through his quartet and with his colleagues and students, Joachim shaped Berlin’s musical culture and

71 Karl Kiesel and Ernst Otto Thiele, eds., The Study of Music in Germany (New York and Bremen: The University Department of the North German Lloyd in Collaboration with the Union of German Students of Music, 1927), 57. These were the only two institutions to be described, in English translation, as “national” without qualification. The conservatory in Stuttgart was called the Wurtemberg [sic] National School for Music, and the Cologne Conservatory was the National School for Music - Rhenish State School. 72 Dietmar Schenk, “Aus einer Gründerzeit: Joseph Joachim, die Berliner Hochschule für Musik und der deutsch-französische Krieg,” Die Tonkunst 1/3 (July 2007): 234 . 73 UdK, Jahresberichte. 74 Schenk, “Aus einer Gründerzeit,” 232.

established a distinctive Berlin violin tradition that endured at the conservatory. 75

Joachim also sought to organise the city’s leading orchestra through the conservatory, an aspiration modeled on the relationship between the Gewandhaus and conservatory

in Leipzig. 76

The Joachim Quartett remained closely associated with the conservatory, but

other ensembles made up of conservatory instructors helped to define Berlin’s concert

life. The conservatory’s origins in the need to create a cultural capital worthy of a

political empire shows, paradoxically, that a local culture co-existed with the abstract

notion of national culture. There was no need to diminish one to enhance the other. The

intertwining of the desire for an institutionalised, imposing national culture on the one

hand and the practical necessity of projecting this culture from a particular city on the

other, shows how local cultural embedding and overarching national ambitions were

perfectly compatible.

In 1911, the prominent critic Adolf Weismann published a book on Berlin as a city

of music. He sought to illuminate the personalities and institutions that had allowed

Berlin to achieve the rank “of a city of music par excellence ” despite some apparent

deficiencies in its population’s cultural attitudes. Weismann’s treatment of the

Musikhochschule was solely intended to assert its local, not its national, meaning.

Weissmann discussed Berlin’s musical culture in two ways that shed light on regionalism and localism within German national identity. He identified two distinct

German cultures, northern and southern, which he placed in competition with each

75 See Dietmar Schenk and Wolfgang Rathert, eds., Carl Flesch und Max Rostal. Aspekte der Berliner Streichertradition (Berlin: Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2002). 76 Schenk, Die Hochschule , 204.

other. These two regional abstractions were localised in Berlin and Vienna. He wrote that southern German influence in the German musical tradition had waned in favour of northern Germany and that the fulcrum of German music had shifted from Vienna to

Berlin. Vienna had been the “natural focal point of musical Germany. But Vienna did not remain what it was, because our music changed as well.” There was a “musical instinct” that had made Vienna into “the Italy of Germany,” but it had given way to “reflective music. Music drama, the work of a northern German [Wagner], triumphed.” 77

If Berlin had usurped Vienna’s privileged position, the Musikhochschule was one of the institutions that defined Berlin’s musical character. What Weissmann called “the spirit of the Hochschule ” extended beyond the conservatory walls to help define the city’s musical tastes. Joachim represented the conservative faction in the culture wars of the day that pitted followers of Brahms against progressive followers of Richard

Wagner and Franz Liszt. Joachim’s presence at the Musikhochschule ensured that the coming generations would not be unduly influenced by the New German School, as the progressive composers were called. 78 The conservatory itself and the concerts by its

director and faculty were linked in the mind of the musical public as the “spirit of the

Hochschule .” Joachim saw the performances of his quartet as an important measure to educate the listening public and as a beneficial model for conservatory students.

Because Joachim’s quartet served as a bridge between the conservatory and concert life, the Musikhochschule ’s classical, romantic leanings shaped Berlin’s musical life.

77 Adolf Weissmann, Berlin als Musikstadt. Geschichte der Oper und des Konzerts von 1740 bis 1911 (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1911), 7-9. 78 Ibid., 311.

Distinguished members of Berlin society attended the quartet performances of the

Joachim Quartett. 79

Even beyond the imperial period, the Berlin Musikhochschule ’s status as a major institution in the national capital continued to shape its cultural meaning. The new

Republican political structure that followed the upheavals of World War I and revolution created an opportunity for centralisation of music education in Prussia. The constitution of 1919 established the boundaries of federal and state governments in cultural affairs, to the advantage of the latter. As mentioned above, Leo Kestenberg undertook a thoroughgoing reform of the entire Prussian system of music education, from school music to conservatories. As with other culturally minded intellectuals after World War I,

Kestenberg sought to reclaim in intellectual and educational affairs what was lost in traditional power. 80 Kestenberg worked closely with Georg Schünemann, the assistant director of the Musikhochschule . The two sought to effect rapid change and convert a

conservative and, in some respects, stagnating institution into an experimentally

creative environment. Their work was rewarded. The Musikhochschule soon earned a stronger reputation than conservatories with longer traditions, such as the one in

Leipzig. 81

This reform at the level of the Prussian state was intimately associated with the culture of Berlin. The progress and setbacks of Kestenberg’s reform agenda resulted in

79 Schenk, Die Hochschule , 205-208. 80 Günther Batel, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege. Leo Kestenberg: Pianist - Klavierpädagoge - Kulturorganisator - Reformer des Musikerziehungswesens (Zurich: Möseler, 1989), 49. 81 Dietmar Schenk, “Hindemith, die Berliner Musikhochschule und die Kunstpolitik der Weimarer Republik,” in Paul Hindemith in Berlin: Essays und Dokumente , eds. Franz Bullmann, Wolfgang Rathert and Dietmar Schenk (Berlin: Hochschule der Künste Berlin, 1997), 22. See also Heike Elftmann, Georg Schünemann (1884-1945): Musiker, Pädagoge, Wissenschaftler und Organisator. Eine Situationsbeschreibung des Berliner Musiklebens (Sinzig: Studio, 2001).

a concentrated effect on the Berlin Musikhochschule and, through that conservatory, the culture of the capital city. As discussed above, Kestenberg brought the conservatory in

Cologne under state administration and tried to do the same with Dr. Hoch’s

Konservatorium in Frankfurt. After that failed, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to found a new public conservatory in Frankfurt. 82 Kestenberg’s reform agenda can be viewed as a

plan for a Prussia-wide conservatory, spread over three institutions. He envisioned a

network of conservatories operating as arms of Prussian cultural politics. The public

conservatories in Cologne, Berlin and Frankfurt were not envisioned as identical; rather,

the envisioned Frankfurt Conservatory was to be markedly progressive and incorporate

radio, film and popular music. 83 The end result would have been a regional Prussian approach to music education localised in three separate institutions. Kestenberg’s larger goal, through conservatory reform, was improving the tastes of the masses. 84

Kestenberg’s failure to realise his Prussian-wide project had ramifications for local culture in Berlin. Paul Hindemith, a dedicated progressive composer and pedagogue with attachments to Frankfurt, accepted a position at the Berlin

Musikhochschule in 1927, and most of progressive innovations planned for Frankfurt

followed him to Berlin. Thus, the Berlin Musikhochschule , in an era where its administration and political overseers were amenable to progressive change, became a key institution in establishing Berlin’s distinctive culture during the Weimar Republic. It drew teachers and students to Berlin, shaping the culture of “Red Prussia,” as this

82 Schenk, “Hindemith,” 24-25. 83 Even without Kestenberg’s influence, Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium became, in 1927, the first in Germany to incorporate jazz into its curriculum. The jazz course in Frankfurt is discussed in Chapter 3. 84 Cahn, “Ein unbekanntes musikpädagogisches Dokument,” 150-151.

progressive period has been called, and its capital. 85 Music-educational policy was a vital contributing factor to the development of a distinctive cultural moment in Berlin. 86

The conservatory in Vienna also took on local and regional roles in addition to its status as an Austrian national institution. When Robert Lach wrote his history of the

Vienna Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in 1927, his stated goal was to present this conservatory’s pedagogical mission and its importance for musical life in Vienna as well as in Austria at large. 87 Lach was a musicologist, composer, poet and committed antisemite. 88 Lach’s book on the Musikakademie should be seen in the context of his long lecture, “Vienna as a City of Music,” which was published in 1924. Both works are attempts to illustrate Vienna’s specific musical culture through the history of its musical life and musical institutions. The fact that Lach attempted to trace Vienna’s place in musical history back to 480CE, 89 even before the date of 996 that Austrian nationalists sometimes identify as the beginning of Austria’s existence, further demonstrates Lach’s interest in Vienna as the site of a distinct musical culture. 90 Lach approached his analysis of Vienna as a musical city not as a question of music history. He wrote that it was, instead, a matter “of anthropology,

85 Schenk, “Hindemith,” 22 . 86 Eberhard Preußner, “Leo Kestenberg zum 70. Geburtstag,” Musik im Unterricht 43 (1952): 317. 87 Robert Lach, Geschichte der Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (Vienna: Strache, 1927), 5. 88 Klaus Taschwer, “Antisemitische Adressen in Wien,” Der Standard 23 July 2012. http://derstandard.at/1342947379780/Antisemitische-Adressen-in-Wien 89 Robert Lach, “Wien als Musikstadt,” in Wien, sein Boden und seine Geschichte: Vorträge gehalten als ausserordentlicher volkstümlicher Universitätskurs der Universität Wien , ed. Abel Othenio (Vienna: Wolfrum, 1924), 386. 90 Lach’s enthusiasm for Nazism may also explain his elevation of Vienna as a cultural locus rather than Austria, even though Lach did not exhibit the profound disdain for the idea of Austria that other pan- German nationalists from Austria, such as Adolf Hitler, did. Lach wrote admiringly of Germany assuming a leadership position in international anti-Jewish activity. Austrian supporters of the Nazi vision of German nationalism tended to highlight Vienna’s status as a German city and downplay the distinctiveness of Austria as a separate state. See Taschwer, “Antisemitische Adressen.”

ethnography, the psychology of peoples [ Völkerpsychologie ], cultural geography and cultural history.” He described the pull that Vienna’s “musical sphere” exerted on musicians from elsewhere, such as Beethoven and Brahms, even when they were not enamoured of the Viennese Volksgeist , or national spirit. 91

Lach’s plädoyer for Vienna’s local musical distinctiveness is most forceful in its discussion of Franz Schubert. Lach took great pains to assert the fundamental and essential Viennese belonging of Schubert. Schubert was “the specifically Viennese musical genius, the Viennese musical soul made flesh and blood, the incarnation of the

Viennese musical spirit.” From the roots formed by Viennese folk music, the Viennese classical period, and Beethoven’s late-period romanticism grew Schubert, “the genius- eruption of the musical potential of Vienna.” He was the embodiment of Altwienertum .

He was a gift to the world from the “local genius of Vienna.” 92 Lach does not connect

this pure Viennese genius to the local conservatory, but Schubert sought out contact

with the Society of the Friends of Music, the society that founded the Conservatorium . In

an 1826 letter to the Society, Schubert expressed a desire to dedicate a symphony to

the Society and described himself as a “ vaterländisch ” artist. The following year,

Schubert was elected as a member of the Society’s Repräsentantenkörper .93 Lach, a

prominent advocate of Vienna as a city of music, attributed to Schubert “true, unfalsified

Viennese blood.” 94 This ur-Viennese composer, in turn, described himself as honoured

by his association with the Society of the Friends of Music, the founders of Vienna’s

91 Lach, “Wien als Musikstadt,” 384, 414-416. 92 Ibid., 428-432. 93 That is, its representative body. C. F. Pohl, Die Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des österreichischen Kaiserstaates und ihr Conservatorium (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1871), 16. 94 Lach, “Wien als Musikstadt,” 430.

conservatory. 95 Viennese music education has identified itself with Schubert as an avatar of Vienna’s musical spirit in more direct ways as well. In 1967 a future professor at the Musikakademie stressed that the conservatory’s early students had an intimate

relationship with Schubert and sang his choral works and songs. 96 In 1979, the name of

Vienna’s oldest private conservatory of music was changed to the Franz Schubert

Konservatorium für Musik .97

Lach’s devotion of an entire book to the conservatory suggests that he saw it as a principal feature of the Viennese musical culture he explored in his earlier lecture.

This work on Vienna as a city of music suggests another way in which the conservatory was seen by Lach and others as having a key role in preserving and protecting Vienna’s local musical inheritance. Lach was not pleased with musical developments in Vienna following the upheaval of World War I. The war and Austria’s collapse had enabled the rise of new segments of the Viennese population and the immigration of others. These newly prominent or newly arrived social groups brought with them a debased taste. This phenomenon added to one that had been occurring since the turn of the twentieth century: the increasing influence of new, modern, atonal music and other forms of musical iconoclasm. Lach saw music as a mirror image of politics. Just as radicals— anarchists, communists—attacked the social order, so in music did the most ignorant

“musical illiterates” engage in a rash of musical iconoclasm. As Austria experienced a

“political, social and moral collapse” following World War One, so did anarchy, lack of discipline and a decline of respect for authority spread throughout the world of art.

95 Pohl, Die Gesellschaft , 16-17. 96 Ernst Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule: Vom Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde zur staatlichen Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna: Elisabeth Lafite, 1967), 77. 97 See http://www.franzschubertkonservatorium.at/#/Startseite .

Complicated, cold atonal music was a form of “artistic chickenpox” which would have to be overcome if something “healthy” and new was to emerge. Although Lach viewed contemporary Viennese musical life with great worry, he was confident that “mother nature,” having brought forth such musical talent in Vienna, would not allow the city to rot. He closed his book with the hope that the old Viennese saying, “ der Wiener geht nicht unter ,” would prove itself true regarding “the Viennese musical spirit.” 98

What does this tirade against new developments in music have to do with music education? In his book on the Musikakademie , Lach soberly noted that Arnold

Schoenberg, the pioneer of new music, was appointed to teach a course on music theory and composition in the 1910-1911 academic year. Lach found something to celebrate in this development: he argued that it demonstrated the conservatory’s dedication to avoid “one-sidedness” and make a place for the “newer and newest” musical directions. 99 In the lecture, though, he derisively referred to “damp-eared” students of Schoenberg and Franz Schreker, who imagined that the most banal breaking of musical rules proved their own musical genius and progressiveness. 100 But

Lach saw potential for Vienna to repel this objectionable music assault from atonal and

“otherwise amusical” forces. He pronounced himself thankful for bulwarks in Viennese musical life, individuals with true talent and seriousness who would do lasting work, unbothered by the latest fads.

98 Lach, “Wien als Musikstadt,” 438, 442-445. 99 Lach, Geschichte , 85. 100 Lach, “Wien als Musikstadt,” 443.

Who were these last best hopes for music in Vienna? Joseph Marx, Franz

Schmidt and Karl Prohaska. 101 Not coincidentally, all three were, or had been,

professors at the conservatory. Prohaska taught piano from 1908-1919. Schmidt taught

music theory, composition, piano and cello from 1902-1937. He was also a director of

the Musikakademie and a rector of the Fachhochschule für Musik , which branched off

from the Musikakademie and existed from 1924-1931. Joseph Marx also held the dual

role of director and rector during part the period of the double institution. 102 Therefore, this struggle for the identity of Viennese music was a battle engaged at the conservatory. In this existential fight, Lach pointed to the “wrong side” making inroads at the conservatory and placed his faith in conservatory professors and directors to ensure the survival of true Viennese music that stemmed from Vienna’s local genius.

Forty years later, Ernst Tittel, a professor at the Vienna Musikakademie , reflected

on the history of his conservatory as a feature of Austrian, but specifically Viennese,

culture. Tittel wrote that Vienna’s conservatory became the most significant one in the

Austrian Empire after it was founded. If it was moulded by the Austrian nation’s cultural

inheritance, it was also guided by Vienna’s peerless musical atmosphere. He identified

various schools associated with Vienna and its conservatory, especially the Second

Viennese School. He connected the conservatory to the long history of Vienna’s musical

preëminence, which had resulted in an almost equally long tradition of music education

in various forms. 103

101 Ibid., 444. 102 Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule , 59-62, 84, 99-100. See also Lynne Heller’s history of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien : http://www.mdw.ac.at/index2011.php?pageid=31 . 103 Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule , 5-6.

As suggested by the examples drawn from Weissmann, there was a tendency to think of Viennese culture as the quintessence of the southern German spirit.

Accordingly, the Vienna Musikhochschule was sometimes seen as having meaning beyond the culture of its city, but as representative of a region, southern Germany, within a greater German culture, rather than as an embodiment of Austrian national culture. We see the Vienna Musikhochschule as a southern German contrast to northern German musicality through the example of a certain Professor Siemerling, a teacher of voice at the Dresden Conservatory. In 1908, Siemerling wrote to the Austrian

Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs ( k.k. 104 Ministerium für Kultus und Unterricht )

to recommend himself for a professorship at the Vienna Conservatory and propose a

master class for singing at that institution. Siemerling sought to introduce his method “to

the land of music and singing.” He thought this would be easier done in Vienna than in

Dresden. “The Austrians are born singers and musicians,” he wrote, whereas the Saxon

enjoyed hearing and performing music but could not be made into a proper singer due

to his or her non-euphonious dialect of German. On the one hand, Siemerling’s

comment about the Saxon dialect’s deleterious effects on the potential for Saxon

musicality seems to position Saxons and Austrians as two kinds of Germans with

different musical characters stemming from their versions of the German language. On

the other hand, Siemerling compared the Saxon to the Englishman, who “loves music,

but music does not love the Englishman.” Here, the internationally minded Siemerling—

104 During the period of the dual monarchy (1867-1918), the title kaiserlich-königlich ( k.k. ) was applied to state institutions in the western half of the empire (Cisleithania). The title referred to the monarch’s position as Emperor of Austria and King of Bohemia. This should not be confused with kaiserlich und königich ( k.u.k. ), which denoted institutions of the entire empire and referred to the monarch’s titles of Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.

he was also considering appointments in Naples and Saint Petersburg—seems to have operated under an understanding of national spirit, or Volksgeist , as indicative of the potential for music education, irrespective of political divisions or states. 105 The distinction made between Austrians and Saxons as one of dialect, though, indicates that some saw the conservatory in Vienna in terms of its embodiment of regional differences within greater Germany.

Such an understanding of Austrian music education as a regional aspect of a greater-German framework can also be seen in the frequency of Austrian musicians moving to Germany specifically to take up a conservatory teaching position. Such musicians include Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker and Max Rostal. Rostal illustrates how Austria and Vienna were positioned as politically and culturally distinct regions of a larger common culture. He made his way from the Austro-Hungarian hinterland to Vienna and then to Berlin, where he studied with Carl Flesch and eventually taught at the Berlin Musikhochschule . In his autobiography, Rostal described

Berlin’s overtaking of Vienna as the centre of culture:

Once again reaching back in time a bit, I would like to return to the fabulous years between 1920 and 1930 in Berlin. … What arose artistically in many areas in this decade is surely unique. In retrospect, the gathering and concentration of so many extraordinary artists seem almost unbelievable. What made Vienna a cultural centre before World War I transplanted itself to Berlin after the war. A similar situation arose shortly before, and mainly after, World War II: in every respect, Berlin was a heap

105 OeStA, Faszikel 3249, 15 C-D, 38014.

of rubble, and so London took on the cultural importance that once Vienna and later Berlin had claimed for themselves. 106

To be sure, Rostal understood his movement from Vienna to Berlin (and, later, to

London) as pursuing the centre of art and culture without regard to nationality. But he also regarded relocating to Berlin as a logical pursuit of the cultural life that he felt had moved on from Vienna.

Conservatories solidified conceptions of northern and southern German culture, with capitals in Berlin and Vienna. They also served to shore up conceptions of local and regional cultural distinctiveness. Even institutions with national and international profiles were entwined with their cities and regions and affected by the cultural politics of their state. Music education contributes to an understanding of German history that goes beyond Bismarck’s Germany to include social, cultural and political dimensions that only sometimes overlap with state boundaries. Conservatories of music also helped facilitate connections between centres of music life in German in the broadest possible sense. As such, music education also helped to establish and define national culture in

Germany and Austria as well as greater-German cultural belonging. Music education and conceptions of national culture is the subject of Chapter 2.

106 UdK, 108, Ms. 4, “Autobiographie, Vorwort und Erster Teil,” 105-107. Max Rostal’s autobiography was edited and published as Max Rostal, Violin-Schlüssel-Erlebnisse. Erinnerungen. Mit einem autobiographischen Text von Leo Rostal , ed. Dietmar Schenk and Antje Kalcher (Berlin: Ries & Erler, 2007).

The Larger Fatherland: Austrian and German Conservatories of Music

“Jedermann singt, und der größte Theil singt—schlecht. ... Die Ursache des meistentheils schlechten Gesanges der Deutschen suche man aber in nichts andern, als darinne, daß man ihn nicht genug, und nicht gehörig studiert.” 1 —Johann Adam Hiller, 1774 2

I: Music Education and German National Culture

When Hugo Riemann wrote “Our Conservatories” in 1895, he was assessing music education in Germany as a national cultural practice. 3 The local and regional

conceptions of music education analysed in Chapter 1 did not preclude national

interpretations of conservatories’ purpose. There was a dynamic interplay among

national, regional and local imperatives in structuring conservatories’ place in German

culture. Germans negotiated layers of communal belonging and mapped an ideology of

Germanness and the reality of the German state onto sub-national as well as trans-

national identities and interests. 4 Regional belonging did not negate national identity; on

the contrary, residents of the German states, and later the unified German state,

1 “Everyone sings, and the majority sings—badly. ... The cause of the Germans’ mostly bad singing is to be found in nothing else but the lack of sufficient and thorough study of it.” 2 Johann Adam Hiller, Anweisung zum musikalisch-richtigen Gesange, mit hinlänglichen Exempeln erläutert (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Junius, 1774), “Vorrede.” 3 Hugo Riemann, “Unsere Konservatorien,” in Präludien und Studien , 3 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967 [1895]), I:22-33. 4 See Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Würtemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004); and Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

balanced overlapping identities which were alternately conflicting and complementary. 5

German speakers and ethnic Germans elsewhere in central Europe experienced an

added tension between greater-German nationalism and state patriotism.

Music has long been a major component of German national identity and pride.

The German Romantics theorised a relationship between their output as artists and the

forging of German national consciousness. Cultural expression was held up as a

framework for Germans to perceive the bonds that tied them together and imbue them

with meaning. As early as the eighteenth century, a specific “music aesthetics of the

nation” emerged. That is, intellectuals and others defined Germany as a nation and a

people by pointing to the distinctiveness of German music. Performing, understanding

and experiencing German music were ways to make national feeling concrete and

uniform. This effort reached its zenith with Felix Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s St.

Matthew Passion in 1829. 6 Mendelssohn was, fourteen years later, the founder of the

Leipzig Conservatory. He had earlier negotiated with the government of Friedrich

Wilhelm IV of Prussia, a figure of hope to artists and intellectuals, 7 about founding a conservatory in Berlin. 8

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context of this process of defining the

German nation through its cultural, and specifically musical, sensibility is significant in

5 David Blackbourn and James Retallack, “Introduction,” in Landscape, Localism, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Europe, 1860-1930 , eds. David Blackbourn and James Retallack (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 6-7. 6 Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 46, 46n1. 7 Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 117. 8 Dietmar Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin: Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869-1932/33 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 18-30.

that it occurred before the founding of a unified German state. Attempts to construct a

German national consciousness inspired by the Romantics’ rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and rooted in the particularity of language, emotions, folkways and musical expression took place alongside political debates over the scope of an eventual German nation-state. This was the era of confederations and customs unions, of conflict between liberal, constitutional nationalists and ethnic nationalists over who could claim belonging in the nation, and of rivalry between Prussia and Austria over which German state would take the lead in forging a German polity.

Politically, the “small German solution” carried the day. Germany was unified at

Prussian instigation in 1866-71, to the exclusion of Austria’s German-speaking territory.

Culturally, however, the matter was not settled. Therefore, a consideration of music education through a national lens must extend beyond the borders of the German state.

This is because culture, as opposed to politics, lent itself to theorising about nationality in an expansive sense. German culture and national identity were not coterminous with the German state after 1871. In the German-speaking parts of the Austrian (and Austro-

Hungarian) Empire, as well as in the Austrian First Republic, advocates of Austrian state patriotism vied with nationalists who saw German Austria as a part of greater

Germany, culturally, and sought to realise this politically. These self-described Germans looked hopefully and expectantly to their Reichsdeutsch , or Imperial German, cousins.

And within Germany, a conception of the nation flourished that regarded the German state, especially in its truncated post-World War I borders, as far from a final resolution on the German question. This trend culminated in Hitler’s professed responsibility to

“protect” fellow Germans in the Sudetenland and in his “back into the Reich ” campaign

aimed at ethnic Germans elsewhere in Europe. Particularly in the field of music, conceptions of “German music” that unproblematically incorporated musical styles and history in Vienna and Prague were common.

Music education was a part of this project to construct a German national identity through music. The founding of major conservatories in German-speaking Europe corresponds to the periods of the Napoleonic Wars, the Vormärz and the 1860s, during which German nationalists worked to invent the nation in the absence of a nation-state. 9

A brief list of conservatory founding dates will make this clear: Prague in 1808 (though classes could not begin until 1811); Vienna in 1817 (following discussions begun in

1808); Leipzig in 1843; Munich in 1846 (as a successor to the singing school of 1830);

Berlin in 1869; and Frankfurt in 1878. It follows that an educational project associated with an art that was intimately linked to German conceptions of themselves as a national community would assume a responsibility of educating the nation.

This sense of national responsibility is discernible even though these institutions had the sub-national rootedness and loyalties discussed in Chapter 1. The Berlin

Musikhochschule , for example, was very much a creation of Prussian cultural politics. It

was also a conservatory for a capital of an empire. The early years of Prussia’s

conservatory witnessed debates over whether vocal or instrumental music was a better

means of national education or cultivation [ Nationalbildungsmittel ]. 10 The founding

9 Geoff Eley, “Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of ‘Citizenship’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890- 1930 , eds. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 17. 10 Beatrix Borchard, “‘Zur Pflege unserer unsäglich herrlichen deutschen Musik’ - Joseph Joachim und die Gründung der Berliner Musikhochschule 1869,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges, 2 vols., eds. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 2:499.

director, Joseph Joachim, was a Jew from the Austro-Hungarian hinterland who later converted to Protestantism. His connection to German spirit and culture was a factor in his appointment. 11 Additionally, the Franco-Prussian war politicised and nationalised

him. In 1870, two days before the declaration of war, Joachim wrote to his wife that it

was a blessing to have Bismarck in charge and that he felt fully German, not Austrian. 12

This chapter analyses the German national discourse and practice of music education. In the years immediately preceding German unification, and in the early years of the German Empire, a national conversation about conservatories of music emerged. This discussion variously considered music education’s role in Germany as a state and in a greater-German cultural-nationalist conception. The experience of World

War I and the humiliation of defeat lent renewed purpose to the role of music education in stoking national consciousness and facilitating national renewal. The inter-war era also saw increased concern with the position of foreigners in German conservatories and attempts to forge national networks linking conservatories, students and teachers.

In its final section, this chapter addresses the question of music education in Austria both as a component of larger German belonging and as a facilitator of state patriotism, or loyalty to the multi-national Austrian Empire, its ruling dynasty, and, later, the

Austrian Republic.

11 Ibid., 485-486. 12 Dietmar Schenk, “Aus einer Gründerzeit: Joseph Joachim, die Berliner Hochschule für Musik und der deutsch-französische Krieg,” Die Tonkunst 1/3 (July 2007): 238.

II: Music Education and National Culture in the German Empire

The years before and the decades immediately following German unification witnessed a flurry of publication on the status and the future of music education in Germany. As the German state emerged as a political reality, the fostering of musical culture took shape as a national conversation. Some of these works used one institution as a vehicle to discuss German music education in general. Wilhelm Pranz’s aforementioned consideration of conservatories, with a focus on Munich, was published in 1865. 13

Richard Wagner’s 1865 report to King Ludwig II of Bavaria concerning the establishment of a “German music school” in Munich 14 also suggests a conception of

“our conservatories.” Johann Christian Lobe’s 1869 essay collection, Consonances and

Dissonances , contained a piece on conservatories. 15 1870 saw the appearance of

Gustav Stoewe’s book-length proposal for reform of conservatories of music. 16 In 1872

the composer and music writer Ludwig Meinardus published his appraisal of the musical

infrastructure of the new German Empire in the form of twelve letters. 17 Also in 1872, in

13 Wilhelm Pranz, Ueber Conservatorien für Musik. Mit besonderer Rücksichtnahme auf das Königliche Conservatorium zu München (Munich: Georg Franz, 1865). 14 Richard Wagner, Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, [1865] 1998). 15 J[ohann] C[hristian] Lobe, “Einige Worte über musikalische Conservatorien,” in Consonanzen und Dissonanzen. Gesammelte Schriften aus älterer und neuerer Zeit (Leipzig: Baumgärtner’s Buchhandlung, 1869), 169-179. 16 Gustav Stoewe, Die Ausbildung für das musikalische Lehrfach. Ein Beitrag zur Reform der Conservatorien für Musik (Leipzig: Heinrich Mathes, 1870). 17 Ludwig Meinardus, Des einigen deutschen Reiches Musikzustände: zwölf Briefe (Oldenburg: Schulze, 1872).

the first yearly report of the Dresden Conservatory, 18 the director, Friedrich Pudor (né

Scham), 19 published an essay entitled “Significance, Structure and Duties of the

German Conservatories of Music and the Specific Organisation of the Dresden

Conservatory.” 20 Also relevant here is the launch, in 1878, of the Piano Teacher , a bi- monthly “music-pedagogical newspaper.” 21

In these publications, conservatories were seen as discrete institutions, but as sharing a national purpose. Local and regional interests were sometimes addressed, but they were not considered unrelated to the interests of the nation. On the contrary, the authors who addressed a specific conservatory or a particular German state conceptualised these as constituent parts of a national whole. Thus we see that around the time of German unification an important body of work—books, essays, articles, letters and reports—spoke to a national audience about music conservatories as a national project. In 1879, for example, the Piano Teacher printed a translation of a speech that F. A. Gavaert, the director of the Brussels Conservatory, had delivered in

1876 to the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The speech was a discussion of “our conservatories” in Belgium. 22 The accompanying editor’s note explains its translation and publication in German, three years later, because the subject had

18 The Jahresberichte , or yearly reports, began in 1872. The conservatory in Dresden had existed since 1856. 19 Michael Heinemann, “Tradition & Effizienz. Zur Geschichte der Dresdner Musikhochschule von 1856 bis 1914,” in Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden 1856-2006 , ed. Manuel Gervink (Dresden: Michel Sandstein, 2005), 20. 20 Friedrich Pudor, “Bedeutung, Einrichtung und Aufgaben der deutschen Conservatorien der Musik und specielle Organisation des Dresdner Conservatoriums" in Bericht des Dresdener Conservatoriums für Musik , ed. Director F. Pudor (Dresden: n.p., 1872), 3-28. 21 In 1911, Der Klavier-Lehrer absorbed Gesangspädagogische Blätter and continued continued publication as Musikpädagogische Blätter , or Music-Pedagogical Press . 22 F. A. Gevaert, “Ueber den öffentlichen Musikunterricht (Schluss),” trans. Dr. W. Langhans, Der Klavier- Lehrer II/19 (1 October, 1879): 218. This article appeared in three installments.

become a burning question in Germany. 23 Two related themes emerge from the unification-era public discussion of this burning question. First, composers, musicians, teachers and commentators saw music education as a means of asserting national culture and combating supposed French and Italian influence. Second, these same figures called for thoroughgoing reform of music education to meet the needs of both

Germany’s musical spirit and of a new state.

France and Italy loomed large in German music-educational discourse. These countries, their musical culture and their cultural infrastructure served both as a model for and a threat to German music education. This is most apparent in the writings by

Meinardus, Wagner and Gevaert. (Even though Gevaert’s text was prepared for a

Belgian audience, its translation and publication in a German newspaper demonstrate that his reflections were considered relevant to the German context.) Meinardus explicitly connected the mission to resist French and Italian culture to the changed circumstances represented by German unification. When his book, The Musical State of the United German Empire , was published in 1872, Meinardus was a Privatdozent at the Dresden Conservatory. 24 This book was a book-length critique of German music, in the form of twelve letters. The third letter was devoted entirely to institutions of music education, but other letters also touched on conservatories. The book was dedicated to

Baron Wilhelm von Beaulieu-Marconnay, a future National Liberal member of the

Reichstag . Meinardus began by expressing his hope that his twelve letters would revive

23 F. A. Gevaert, “Ueber den öffentlichen Musikunterricht,” trans. Dr. W. Langhans, Der Klavier-Lehrer II/17 (1 September, 1879): 193. 24 Dieter Nolden, Ludwig Meinardus (1827-1896): Komponist, Musikschriftsteller, Chorleiter: Lebensstationen, Begegnungen mit Franz Liszt, Bielefelder Zeit (Bielefeld: Bethel-Verlag, 2007), 32.

the baron’s memory of that fateful moment when “the romantic dream of our youth— kaiser and empire”—became a reality. 25

From the first page, then, Meinardus connected his appraisal of German music to

German unification, making it clear that this political transformation brought new

urgency to cultural matters. For Meinardus, the emergence of Germany as a political

power to be reckoned with and the consequent awakening of national sentiment in

Europe gave rise to the antithesis of nationalism: a cosmopolitan movement to deny

national differences. Meinardus maintained that “the political victory of the German

Empire” had inaugurated a bitter battle against forces who sought to destroy the

historical bases of national cultural life. “Fatherland-less opponents” assaulted the

“bulwark of national feeling” and its attendant benefits. Their success would mean the

replacement of everything that mattered—state, religion, science, art and culture—with

barbarism and despotism. Standing by and watching this decline would amount to high

treason against the fatherland and against humanity, as nationhood was a necessary

condition for cultural life. Further, Meinardus proclaimed that the role of music “in the

cultural life of the German people” correlated with “reawakened national

consciousness.” 26

Consequently, Meinardus saw the deterioration of the cultivation of music as auguring ill for the state of German culture. The German people were a musical people, but their respect for music’s higher purpose—moral uplift, purification of the soul—was being undermined. Specifically, it was being undermined by French influence.

25 Meinardus, Des einigen deutschen Reiches Musikzustände , 1-3. 26 Ibid., 1-3.

Meinardus scorned French culture’s supposedly negative influence, not only on German morality and faith, but also on German music, taste and ideals of beauty. The solution rested in artistic education. Meinardus called for the creation of art schools, staffed by great masters who were also gifted teachers. Their pedagogy would have to rest on an ethos rooted in national consciousness. And of all the arts, music had pride of place as a specific manifestation of German culture. Meinardus allowed that painting and architecture might not be specifically national forms of expression, but poetry and music could never be cosmopolitan. According to Meinardus, even novices could distinguish

German music from the music of Italy and France. As Meinardus saw it, the only way to restore music’s ennobling function and rehabilitate the taste of “our musical German people” was to strengthen German national consciousness in contradistinction to

French and Italian national consciousnesses—Meinardus referred to these with the pejorative adjective “ welsch ”—and “to the other romanised [ verwelschten ] germanic

nationalities.” 27

Meinardus hoped that the momentum stemming from political unification would have salutary effects on German cultural life. He thought that this political energy could be harnessed to encourage greater confidence in German culture and those features that distinguished it from other national cultures. The necessary conditions for “the rebirth of music from the spirit of the German nature and energy [ Art und Thatkraft ]” could be found only in the momentum of political unification. The German people had to learn to understand the value of German music as grounded in German particularity.

The task facing Germans was to defeat “the creeping poison of inner Frenchness.”

27 Ibid., 3, 11-14.

Meinardus wrote that Germans needed to learn to comprehend the advantages of

German music as stemming from German consciousness, and thus he turned his attention to German conservatories. Since Meinardus believed that almost every

German possessed native musical ability, he thought that all Germany needed to produce great musicians was proper music education. But this goal was hampered by a lack of national political will. Every sizable German city took measures to establish a conservatory. The problem, according to Meinardus, is that municipalities did not adequately fund these institutions. 28 Conceptualising conservatories as local institutions

was insufficient and not conducive to proper investment in music education. The result

of this was an injury to German national pride and international standing.

This is where Meinardus revealed the conflicted relationship Germany’s musical

thinkers had to France. Meinardus praised the Paris Conservatoire as a properly national school with a national spirit and mission, held aloft by “the patriotism of the

French people.” Even though German conservatories were founded on the Paris model, they were, Meinardus noted, not graced with similar state largesse. Meinardus praised the Berlin Musikhochschule , also a (Prussian) state insitution, but most of the conservatories he listed were private institutions that subsisted through the support of royal patrons and private citizens. While Meinardus regarded the investment of royal courts in culture as positive, especially in the example of Berlin, he also feared that this practice led music to sacrifice its independence and become an expression of aristocratic grandeur. He also thought that conservatories bordered too closely on businesses in their need to raise and invest capital, which damaged the conservatories’

28 Ibid., 15-16, 19-20, 29-30.

stated mission: to be places of refuge for “the free, beautiful art of music in the sense of its historical, deeply moral worth.” 29

Gevaert, the Belgian conservatory director, also saw France and Italy as countries whose conservatories had advantages that those in other countries lacked.

Where Meinardus lamented the way that the ideas of the French Revolution (and subsequent revolutions) had infiltrated German culture, Gevaert attempted to separate the ideology of the French Revolution from the resulting cultural politics. He stated that the Paris Conservatoire was the model for conservatories later opened in other

European capitals. 30 Additionally, he praised “even the bloodthirsty Jacobins” for placing

music education “under the protection of the nation.” They recognised that modern

social arrangements necessitated placing music-educational institutions under control of

the state, not the religious institutions that had directed them since the Middle Ages. 31

The language courses instituted by Italian conservatories could be a model for

conservatories in Belgium and, by extension, in Germany. 32 Even if France and Italy

could serve as examples, though, Gevaert conceived of conservatories as a national

undertaking. He thought that conservatories could be the starting points for the creation

and preservation of particular performance styles as well as creative schools reflecting

“the ideal energy of the territory from which they sprout forth.” 33

The most strident proponent of the idea that a new kind of conservatory was necessary to combat French and Italian influence in German music was Richard

29 Ibid., 31-32. 30 Gevaert, “Ueber den öffentlichen Musikunterricht,” 195. 31 F. A. Gevaert, “Ueber den öffentlichen Musikunterricht (Fortsetzung),” Der Klavier-Lehrer II/18 (15 September, 1879), 205-206. This is the second of three installments. 32 Gevaert, “Ueber den öffentlichen Musikunterricht (Schluss),” 218. 33 Ibid., 219.

Wagner. He saw banishing these foreign influences as the national mission of German conservatories. In 1865, Wagner submitted a report to the king of Bavaria outlining his plans for a “German music school” to be established in Munich. The conceptualisation of this school as a German institution was purposeful and significant. Wagner charged that the Paris Conservatoire governed the taste of every European nation, so that

German performances, especially in theatres, were imitations of French and Italian styles. He claimed that German and Italian musicians were immediately naturalised in

Paris, whereas in Germany, Italian music was imported, making Italians of German musicians. Wagner attributed this sorry state of affairs to the poor state of the arts in

Germany, despite its having produced so many masters. 34 Wagner drew a sharp distinction between foreign music education and the purpose of the music school he envisioned for Munich. Wagner’s plan saw the conservatory as a potential realisation of goals expressed in his earlier, fruitless projects, including the explicitly national “Plan for the Organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony.” 35 Wagner wanted institutional support for a distinctive German culture so that it could thrive, rather than be overpowered by French and Italian influences. The music school was, then, part of Wagner’s “national utopia,” seen in his wish for German spiritual renewal through artistic innovation and other measures to remake Germany. 36 The complicated structure

34 Wagner, Bericht , 4-5. 35 Richard Wagner, “Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters für das Königreich Sachsen,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen , 10 vols. (Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1887-1911), 2:233-273. 36 Hannu Salmi, Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 107.

of arts funding in Imperial Germany made it unlikely that such a sweeping vision would come to fruition. 37

Wagner’s belief that new educational institutions were necessary to liberate

German national culture connects his railing against French and Italian influence to the second theme that defined the discussion of music education and national culture in

Imperial Germany. This was the need for reform so that German music education could better meet the needs of German culture. Wagner envisioned music education in a way that would cast off foreign influence in order to serve a practical purpose regarding national culture. Wagner’s artistic vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk called for a unified

work of art that encompassed music, theatre, literature and visual arts. This is why he

addressed theatre specifically in his report to the Bavarian king about music education.

He thought that existing institutions did a poor job of training musicians for the challenge

of performing German canonical works. Wagner expressed the undesirability of instilling

a noble artistic taste in his proposed school, only to surrender the students to the

“exploitation” of an institution that would counteract the work of the music school by

pandering to “the deeply degraded taste in opera of our times.” 38 He continued by explaining that his conservatory would affect the state of German theatre by addressing its deficit of competent singers. He addressed the requirements of the rezitierendes

Schauspiel , or “recited play,” arguing that, during the time of Gluck’s and Mozart’s operas, the singers could learn the requisite style in Italy and Paris. There was, though, no school available to educate actors in the rhythms necessary for a performance of the

37 Celia Applegate, “Culture and the arts,” in Imperial Germany 1871-1918 , ed. James Retallack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 111. 38 Wagner, Bericht , 30.

verses in plays by exemplars of German culture such as Goethe and Schiller. 39 For this

reason, the education of singers was to be the first order of business. 40

For Wagner, the education of singers was inextricably linked with the theatre as a pressing need in German culture. As he noted, Germany produced no shortage of artistic geniuses, but lacked the artistic support available to (lesser) French or Italian authors. The first phase in the establishment of Wagner’s German music school was therefore to be a singing school. This singing school would meet uniquely national needs. No German conservatory, in Wagner’s view, successfully mastered the art of vocal instruction. Developing the “human voice, especially in Germany and under the influence of the German language” required close attention and patient practice. Further development of the music school would be dependent on the success of the singing school. The second phase was to be a theatre school, and the third phase an orchestral institute. These three phases of the music school’s development illustrate Wagner’s focus on meeting functional needs to allow German musical culture a flowering worthy of its potential. 41

Wagner made clear the link between the practical and national towards the end of his report, when he described his music school as “this important, original-German national institution.” Wagner postulated a national culture parallel to political expressions of German nationhood and fighting the same battles in another arena:

39 Ibid., 30-31. 40 Wolfgang Wagner, “Zum Geleit,” in Richard Wagner und die Musikhochschule München, die Philosophie, die Dramaturgie, die Bearbeitung, der Film , Schriftenreihe der Hochschule für Musik München Band 4 (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1983), 5. 41 Wagner, Bericht , 34-36, 38.

While the Italian and French artist is held up in triumph in the middle of his people, the noble German master resembles Frederick the Great, when he advanced, alone, to attack an entrenchment, and became aware only while looking around that his grenadiers had stayed far behind. The battle was lost; but in the same year, his small army won the battles of Rossbach and Leuthen to the amazement of all the world. 42

The idea of the music school as a weapon in the national arsenal was driven home by

Wagner’s discussion of the rootedness of German genius in German surroundings. In his view, there was a natural affinity between each German and great German artists.

Germans’ native capabilities were obvious from the facts that “Beethoven and Goethe emerged from our midst” and that Germans understood and loved their works even though they could not perform them intelligibly. 43 A conservatory, then, would be a mechanism for fashioning a German style, liberating German culture from French and

Italian performances, and facilitating the evolution of German art. Indeed, Wagner envisioned his German music school as the salvation of German culture. 44

Meinardus also took up the theme of inadequate conservatory practices.

Meinardus evaluated the conservatories on the basis of their prospectuses. These prospectuses mirrored the public perception that conservatories should offer “an encyclopedic, universal music education.” While recognising the risk of generalisation,

Meinardus argued that conservatories did not live up this lofty purpose. They hired as teachers those who had made a name for themselves in some aspect of the musical

42 Ibid., 39-40. 43 Ibid., 40. 44 See Nils Koschwitz, Eine Musikschule als Heilsbringer für die deutsche Musik und Nation? Eine Einführung in Richard Wagners Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule und die Konservatoriumsdiskussion um 1865 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

arts without regard to whether these people were capable or experienced pedagogues.

This practice allowed conservatories to aggrandise themselves before the public and to advertise themselves without ensuring that the money invested in teachers contributed to the best possible education of young musicians. Furthermore, the admission of students was not undertaken with enough care. The entrance exam, according to

Meinardus, had become nothing more than “ pro forma ” exercises; even the most hopeless students were not denied admission. Meinardus, a committed Protestant, 45 compared conservatories’ admissions process to the selling of souls. This was because conservatories sold untalented students a hopeless life of failure in exchange for tuition payments. Graduating such talentless students increased the ranks of the “artistic proletariat” and caused social distress. More rigorous admissions standards, especially regarding the awarding of scholarships, would also redound to the benefit of German national culture. The existence of genuinely talented youth who could not afford tuition was a loss “to art, to the nation and, yes, to the world.” 46

Gustav Stoewe was another figure who called for changes in music education in the era of German unification. In 1870, he published a book calling for the reform of music education. Stoewe targeted one aspect of conservatory education, the training of music teachers, and proposed reform measures for conservatories in general. Stoewe also contributed to a volume on piano pedagogy edited by Emil Breslauer, the founding

45 Nolden, Ludwig Meinardus , 40-50. These pages discuss Meinardus’s oratorio “Luther in Worms,” opus 36, which was composed in 1871-1872. Nolden comments that this piece reveals Meinardus’s desire to support the further spread of the Reformation in Germany. 46 Meinardus, Des einigen deutschen Reiches Musikzustände , 32-38.

editor of the Music Teacher .47 In addition, Stoewe published a study of piano technique as a physiological problem, complete with gymnastic exercises. 48 In his 1870 book on

conservatories, Stoewe asked whether conservatories were artistic necessities. He

concluded that they were not. According to Stoewe, conservatories could only become

indispensable if they offered a curriculum both central to music education and

achievable only through group classroom instruction. (Stoewe argued that in many

aspects of music education, one-on-one private instruction produced results equal to

group instruction.) He then observed that conservatory graduates generally gave

lessons to support themselves, but were never formally educated as teachers. Stoewe

settled on pedagogy as the missing academic subject that would cement

conservatories’ place in German culture. 49

In 1872, Friedrich Pudor, the director of the Dresden Conservatory, defended conservatories’ place in German national culture. While he implicitly rejected contemporary calls for reform, he also linked music education to reform in the German educational system more broadly. In the Dresden Conservatory’s first yearly report, issued in 1872, Pudor took the opportunity to pen an essay on the meaning, structure and duties of German conservatories, paying special attention to the organisation of his own institution. Pudor defended the utility of conservatories in a context in which

Stoewe, for example, doubted whether they were essential. He asserted that love of

47 Gustav Stoewe, “Die Muskeln in ihrer Beziehung zum Klavierspiel,” in Methodik des Klavier-Unterrichts in Einzelaufsätzen. Für Lehrer und Lernende , ed. Emil Breslauer (Berlin: N. Simrock, 1886), 118-125, and idem, “Die wichtigsten Regeln für den Pedalgebrauch,” in Methodik des Klavier-Unterrichts in Einzelaufsätzen. Für Lehrer und Lernende , ed. Emil Breslauer (Berlin: N. Simrock, 1886), 155-171. 48 Gustav Stoewe, Die Klaviertechnik dargestellt als musikalisch-physiologische Bewegungslehre nebst System gymnatischer Uebungen (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1886). 49 Stoewe, Die Ausbildung für das musikalische Lehrfach , 1-3.

music had penetrated into all social classes. It was, therefore, incumbent on conservatories of music to meet the needs of this now dominant art: theoretically educated musicians, competent musicians and teachers. Pedagogical vigilance and practical experience were necessary to elevate students to the levels necessary to contemporary musical needs. According to Pudor, this occurred in conservatories because they were sites in which eminent musicians came together and dedicated themselves to teaching as a profession. The work of music teachers was transparent and open to criticism from the entire artistic world. Pudor saw these circumstances as great benefits to music students. Furthermore, conservatories brought young musicians into contact with like-minded and similarly talented contemporaries. This created an environment of friendly competition, which pushed students toward greater achievement. Conservatories also enabled a well-rounded education in all branches of music. Finally, a conservatory diploma ( Abgangszeugniss ) opened doors for students as they embarked on the rest of their lives. The successful graduates that conservatories could point to were the best argument for their value and necessity. 50

Pudor identified these benefits of a conservatory education as a national good.

He stated that the goal of all German education, musical or otherwise, should be the provision of instruction without cost. This would allow specialised institutes of higher education to open their doors only to selected qualified students. Pudor noted that aristocratic individuals and administrations, as well as private individuals, did much to ensure music schools came close to achieving this general educational goal. These unspecified efforts allowed conservatories to fulfill their duties. Furthermore, the very

50 Pudor, “"Bedeutung, Einrichtung und Aufgaben,” 3-5, 9.

number of conservatories in Germany had positive repercussions in terms of conservatories’ success in attaining standards common to all fields of German education. The large number of German music-educational institutions created competition. This competition among music schools ensured that those that failed to meet society’s musical needs were doomed to irrelevance and decline. The conservatories that thrived in this atmosphere of competition lived up to their cultural potential; they could provide artistic youth what they needed without regard to their financial situation. Whereas Stoewe bemoaned the pedagogical failings of conservatory professors who were not trained in the craft of teaching, Pudor reasoned that competition solved this problem as well. A conservatory’s importance and characteristics stemmed from that institution’s faculty. Competition among teachers at a conservatory ensured that any teacher who did not conform to a school’s standards would no longer have a future there. Pudor also married the future of German music education to the performance of German general education. To be admitted to a

German conservatory, students had to have completed German general education

[allgemeine Schulbildung ]. Substandard general education meant that some conservatory students did not even possess adequate general knowledge. It was, then, in Pudor’s interest as a conservatory director to call for higher standards in general

German education. 51

51 Ibid., 5-6. Pudor placed German music education in the context of German musical needs and educational standards, but he did so without assigning conservatories a cultural-nationalist purpose. Pudor’s primary criterion for admission to a conservatory was a desire to engage seriously with music. As long as that condition was met, Pudor contended that a student’s personal circumstances, including gender and nationality, were irrelevant. Pudor’s separation of music education from national characters put him at odds with thinkers such as Wagner as well as with his own son. Heinrich Pudor assumed the directorship of the Dresden Conservatory in 1890, upon the death of his father. He planned a

Johann Christian Lobe, who had edited the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung from 1846 to 1848, 52 also contributed to the conversation on conservatory reform by wondering whether conservatories were necessary at all in an 1869 essay entitled

“Some Words on Musical Conservatories.” Lobe was very much a shaper of national opinion. In addition to serving as editor of a major German musical publication, he also wrote a textbook on the practice of teaching which was one of the major school texts of his time. 53 According to Lobe, parents believed that they could expect their children to

emerge from three or four years of conservatory study as a master. Lobe asked how

this notion could arise and persist, given that there were no music-educational

institutions in Germany until the end of the eighteenth century. In fact, he argued that

the relationship between the number of conservatories and the number of great artists

and composers was inversely proportional. Even before the spread of conservatories,

there were plenty of excellent musicians and composers. He noted that the greatest

nineteenth-century composers had never attended a conservatory. Among these he

numbered Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner. Furthermore, Vienna,

Salzburg and Bonn had no conservatories, yet Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven managed

fine through private lessons. In fact, all major “cities of our fatherland” had an adequate

supply of public teachers. Aside from the lack of musical benefits derived from

reorganisation of the conservatory along the lines of Wagner’s principles. Pudor fils was, in addition to being an advocate for naturalism, a völkisch nationalist and radical antisemite. Opposition to his plans from local musicians and city authorities forced the younger Pudor to sell the conservatory. See Thomas Gräfe, “Pudor, Heinrich (Pseudonyme: Heinrich Scham, Ernst Deutsch),” in Sächsische Biografie , ed. Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde e.V., bearb. Martina Schattkowsky, online at http://saebi.isgv.de/biografie/Heinrich_Pudor_(1865-1943) , and Heinrich Pudor, “Die Fortschritte der Engländer in der Musik,” Der Klavier-Lehrer XXV/9 (1 May, 1902): 143ff. 52 Rudolph Stephan, “Lobe, Johann Christian,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 14 (1985): 727, online at http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd117068098.html. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung was a highly influential musical newspaper published in Leipzig. 53 Ibid.

conservatories, Lobe also saw them as a moral danger to Germany’s national character. This was because they facilitated sexual relations between Germans and foreigners with different morals. 54

Conservatory reform was also discussed in the musical press of the Imperial period. In 1912, the Music-Pedagogical Press (successor publication to the Piano

Teacher ) published an article on reform of music-educational institutions. An editor’s

note below this article informed readers that this theme was particularly urgent, as

evidenced by the choice of “the reorganisation of music-educational institutions” as the

theme of the First International Music-Pedagogical Congress, to be held in 1913. The

editor continued by noting that the issue of music-educational reform had been taken

up, not only by professional publications, but by the general press as well. In fact, the

article in question had originally been published in the Strassburger Post . In addition to

calling for resistance to “Americanism,” the author, O. Goguel, advanced opinions

contrary to those expressed by Pudor forty years earlier. Goguel called for

conservatories to be brought under the control of the state and to limit their mission to

the education of professional musicians. 55

III: Music Education and National Renewal

After the humiliation of Germany’s surrender in World War One, the collapse of the

Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ensuing economic, social and political crises, the

54 Lobe, “Einige Worte über musikalische Conservatorien,” 171-172. 55 O. Goguel, “Musikalische Reformgedanken,” Musikpädagogische Blätter XXXV/13 (1 July, 1912): 275- 278.

focus of music-educational discourse shifted. Instead of asking how the nation could reform music education to meet national needs, observers asked how music education could reform the nation. In the new German and Austrian republics, music was held up as a way to restore national pride. Music presented a means of regaining status on the world stage lost by defeat in war. Music education was seen as essential to this project of national renewal. Conservatories could prepare musicians for their national mission as well as showcasing the superiority of the Austro-German musical tradition to the world.

On 1 April, 1915, the Music-Pedagogical Press published a front-page article entitled “Bismarck’s Relationship to Music” on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the iron chancellor’s birth. The context of “the most horrible of all wars” meant that celebrations of Bismarck’s centennial would be more muted than they would have been in peacetime. Still, the author, Olga Stieglitz, wanted to honour the artistic soul of Bismarck, “the true Übermensch of the nineteenth century.” Especially in time of war, Bismarck was owed veneration for crafting the unity that allowed Germany to face its enemies successfully. Stieglitz quoted an 1893 address by Bismarck, in which he lamented that music had not loomed large in his educational experience. She concluded by observing that Bismarck’s combination of unshakeable will and a flexible artistic soul was possible in no nation besides Germany. Bismarck was the quintessence of German national character, which combined bravery in battle with the most sensitive appreciation of thought, poetry and music. 56

56 Olga Stieglitz, “Bismarcks Beziehungen zur Musik,” Musikpädagogische Blätter XXXVIII/7 (1 April, 1915): 97-101.

This 1915 consideration of Bismarck, music and music education suggests that the experience of World War I cemented connections between music and music education on the one hand and national unity and national character on the other.

Siegmund von Hausegger, an Austrian conductor and composer who enjoyed success in various German cities, was motivated by the war to put pen to paper on the subject of national art. Hausegger is particularly relevant because he was appointed president of the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst in 1920, shortly after the war’s end. 57 In his 1914

“Christmas Thoughts on the World War,” Hausegger expressed his hope that the war would lead to an artistic rebirth. What did this mean? Fighting “overgrown foreignness” was not enough. In addition, Germans had to look into their hearts and illuminate what was truly German in them. German art was not defined by aesthetic abilities or refinement; it was rooted in the “moral elementary power” of the German people. 58

Three years later, Hausegger again hoped that the war would lead to the advancement

of national art. 59

In 1916, Hausegger gave a speech entitled “On National Art.” This address advanced a complex argument about the fundamental grounding of art in national particularity, but also addressed the manner in which great national art could nonetheless be cosmopolitan. Relevant here is Hausegger’s identification of the war as a caesura in Germans’ thinking about art. Before the war, the nations of the world seemed to pursue the same cultural goals. The war divided them into two irreconcilable

57 Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht, “Hausegger, Siegmund Conrad Friedrich von“, in Neue Deutsche Biographie 8 (1969): 112-113, online at http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd116537620.html. 58 Siegmund von Hausegger, “Weihnacht-Gedanken über den Weltkrieg,” in Betrachtungen zur Kunst. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel, 1920), 233-234. 59 Siegmund von Hausegger, “Über patriotische oder nationale Kunst,” in Betrachtungen zur Kunst. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel, 1920), 234.

groups. In a sense, Hausegger mused, the war had isolated “the German element” and put it in opposition to the rest of the world. Germans searched for something to overcome the hatred around them. They took solace in the notion that art was international and encouraged themselves with the reminder that French and English audiences enjoyed Beethoven and Wagner. In turn, Germans—again, according to

Hausegger—saw it as their duty to explore the art of their enemies. The German who read Dostoyevsky, listened to Berlioz or watched a Shakespeare performance had to acknowledge that these works were infused with Russian, French and English particularity, respectively. The certainty of art’s international character gave way to an equally firm conviction that art was, in fact, national. This realisation led Germans to ask whether they should really embrace the works of enemies “who threaten to destroy our state, our homeland, [our] way of being and culture?” Hausegger’s dense answer to this question relied on an analogy to biology and an appraisal of the relationship between the individual and the nation. 60 The fine detail of his argument is less important than his

observations about the war being a spur to grappling with art through the lens of

national distinctiveness.

Hausegger’s response to the war was hardly idiosyncratic. This association of

war and national renewal had relevance for music education. Hausegger made this the

guiding principle for his term as president of the Akademie der Tonkunst , beginning in

1920. Even during the war, though, Germans continued to discuss music education.

Conservatories were seen as sites for the institutional realisation of ideas such as

60 Siegmund von Hausegger, “Über nationale Kunst,” in Betrachtungen zur Kunst. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel, 1920), 245-265.

Hausegger’s. In March, 1917, the Music-Pedagogical Press ran the first part of an article on methodology for teaching music history. The author, Otto Wille, had written an introduction to musicology for musicians, teachers and conservatory students in 1914. 61

Wille began this article by happily observing that the subject of music history was no longer treated as a “step child” in conservatories. The teaching of music history still had room to improve, though, to the point where it formed the “backbone” of all music education. This would allow students to understand “the ideals of our masters,” which would imbue them with the strength and will to further “the ideals of musical art.” Music history would thus became a subject of instruction as important as religion. Wille’s vision for the elevation of education in music history was a nationalist one. His priority was the development of German music. Music history should teach the development of German music, with attention to “foreign music” only inasmuch as it influenced German music. 62

Writing during World War I, Wille assigned music schools a prominent role in the project

of strengthening national consciousness.

Hausegger repeatedly expressed his hope that the war would bring national

artistic renewal in its wake. In 1924, four years into Hausegger’s presidency, the

Akademie der Tonkunst celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The historical retrospective

that opened the anniversary publication focused on that conservatory’s renewal under

Hausegger’s leadership. The author of this essay, Karl Blessinger, wrote that

Hausegger’s administration energetically undertook the task of renewing the

61 Otto Wille, Grundriss der Musikwissenschaft für Tonkünstler, Musiklehrer und Konservatoristen zur Einführung in die Spezialliteratur (Leipzig: “Musik-Archiv,” 1914). 62 Otto Wille, “Zur Methodik des Musikgeschichtsunterrichts,” Musikpädagogische Blätter XXXX/5-6 (1 March, 1917): 37.

conservatory. This involved rewriting the conservatory’s statutes, tailoring the curriculum to practical needs, and establishing masterclasses. New subjects of instruction were added, including sacred music, singing in schools and seminars for choirmasters and operatic dramaturgy. The number of academic subjects was increased. Specific lectures were given for music lovers among the general public. The number of registered students and the size of the faculty increased steadily after the war. Open positions in the orchestra of the State Theatre were regularly filled by musicians educated at the

Akademie der Tonkunst .63

The Akademie der Tonkunst boasted of post-war renewal, but why was this a component of national artistic renewal? Hausegger contributed an essay to this anniversary publication that connected his thoughts about the war and national culture to music education. Hausegger chose a title that stressed the changed climate for music education following World War I: “The Duties of the Akademie der Tonkunst in Our

Time.” The conservatory’s president explained that anniversaries were occasions to

look not only to the past, but to the future as well. He asked whether the upheavals of

recent years implied new responsibilities for his school. His explication of the

conservatory’s duties in the cultural, social and political context bequeathed by the

world war came in the form of an historical consideration. 64

A theme of Hausegger’s 1924 essay was the connection among war, national culture and the conservatory. This included digressions into the story of Germanic tribes

63 Karl Blessinger, “Fünfzig Jahre Kgl. Musikschule und Akademie der Tonkunst,” in Festschrift zum 50jährigen Bestehen der Akademie der Tonkunst in München 1874-1924 (Munich: Selbstverlag der Akademie der Tonkunst, 1924), 9-10. 64 Siegmund von Hausegger, “Die Aufgaben der Akademie der Tonkunst in unserer Zeit,” in Festschrift zum 50jährigen Bestehen der Akademie der Tonkunst , 13.

invading Greco-Roman civilisation and the Thirty Years’ War’s undermining the possibility of völkisch development. Hausegger began, though, with the conversion of the Royal Bavarian Music School into the Royal Akademie der Tonkunst . He wrote that this occurred when “the victory flags of the war of 1870/71 had just flown over our lands.” 65 In Hausegger’s historical interpretation, victory in war inspired hope for new

cultural elevation. Hausegger used the Prussian victory over France to stand in for the

resulting sea change of German unification. National cultural accomplishments followed:

Wagner finally achieved his dream of a German national theatre through the Festival

Theatre in Bayreuth; Liszt, while only half German, was fully committed to German

culture and served it as an artistic and personal example to his students. After the death

of Wagner and Liszt, a new generation—Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Hans Pfitzner

and others—ensured that German music retained pride of place internationally. 66

Then came the most recent war, which changed Germany’s cultural situation completely. The upshot of the war was suffering and deprivation which “knock[ed] on all gates, including those of our institution.” Young people pursuing music education could only do so with great sacrifice. Even worse than the Akademie der Tonkunst ’s material distress was the spiritual confusion that gripped the German people. Hausegger asked whether the conservatory could remain untouched by this profound spiritual plight. At the same time, this life-and-death struggle conferred a responsibility on the Akademie

65 Hausegger was apparently referring to 1874, the year in which the conservatory became a Bavarian state institution and thus the year whose fiftieth anniversary was being commemorated. The name Akademie der Tonkunst was, in fact, officially applied only in 1892. The preceding essay in the anniversary volume made clear, though, that the true founding of the Akademie der Tonkunst occurred when the Royal Bavarian Music School was placed under the aegis of the Bavarian Ministry of Education and the direct subvention of the king was ended. See Blessinger, “Fünfzig Jahre Kgl. Musikschule und Akademie der Tonkunst,” 7. 66 Hausegger, “Die Aufgaben der Akademie der Tonkunst,” 13-15.

der Tonkunst “to contribute to the rebirth of the German people in our allotted field of activity,” that is, in music education. Hausegger was clear: an institution dedicated to the education of musicians could have a positive effect on the culture in general. Music, after all, built bridges between the nations and kept its distance from the brutal battles of the day. Would Germanness in music emerge victorious despite depression and despair? This was the question “which the fate of our people imposes on us musicians.”

The war should have strengthened national sentiment; instead, everything foreign had become more attractive. French and Italian opera again fought their way into German cultural life, and even “inferior” foreign influences were embraced, to the point that “our

German boys and girls sway with excitement to the base rhythms of Negro dances.” 67

Hausegger presented music education as part of the solution to national woe. He wrote that there could be no doubt that the Akademie der Tonkunst was particularly obligated to fulfill its responsibility as a cradle of the next musical generation. Why this particular conservatory? Munich, through its Festspiele , had supposedly long served as a stronghold of German culture in difficult times. Second, Hausegger pointed to the artists and teachers—moulders of the nation both—that his conservatory turned out.

Additionally, Wagner himself had singled out the conservatory in Munich as the school that should develop and propagate a properly German performance style. Teaching music to Germany’s youth meant teaching them “to feel the heartbeat of [their] people.”

Hausegger cautioned, though, that cultivating what was truly Germany did not mean that students at the Akademie der Tonkunst should only study German music. Indeed, the power of German culture lay in its value for all of humanity. While corrupting aspects

67 Ibid., 14, 18-29.

of foreign culture should be avoided, foreign artistic efforts that were true, meaningful and of a piece with German artistic striving were worth pursuing. 68 Wagner had

envisioned a music school in Munich as the redeemer of the German nation; sixty years

later, a director of the music school in Munich defined the responsibilities of his

institution as effecting German renewal and rebirth.

The musical press also seized on music as a way to project German culture

abroad, not only as a way to reinvigorate it at home. In August 1921, the Zeitschrift für

Musik printed an article by Georg Göhler, a conductor, composer and critic. 69 This was a few months before Alfred Heuß would assume editorship of this publication and convert it into a hotbed of agitation against everything modern and “un-German.” 70

Göhler asked how Germany could maintain its position as the land of music in the eyes

of the world. He bemoaned that those in power were ignorant of music’s economic

potential as an export commodity. Music education was vital to any plan to salvage the

importance of German music in the eyes of the world. The musical education of the

people [ musikalische Volkserziehung ] was, in Göhler’s formulation, the fundament of

German music. The “experiments of fanatics,” though, were ruining the German

educational system, including music education. 71

Göhler also set his sights on conservatories, arguing that the education of professional musicians had been a source of German pride before the war. German

68 Ibid., 20-21,23-24. 69 Ekkehart Kroher, “Göhler, Karl Georg,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 6 (1964): 513 online at http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd116701471.html. 70 See Oliver Hilmes, Der Streit ums Deutsche: Alfred Heuß und die Zeitschrift für Musik (Hamburg: von Bockel, 2003). 71 Georg Göhler, “Wie kann der deutschen Musik ihre Bedeutung für das Ausland erhalten werden,” Zeitschrift für Musik 88/16 (16 August, 1921): 401-402.

musicians staffed orchestras around the world, but this tradition was also endangered by modern conditions. Therefore, concluded Göhler, “the founding of music schools, especially orchestra schools, is absolutely not a luxury, but rather an economically necessary capital investment that will always yield a good return for the German people.” Exporting musicians would contribute to the much needed improvement of perceptions of Germany abroad. And, since German orchestra musicians were full of idealism and patriotism, they would not be in danger of losing their Germanness abroad; instead, they would continue to be a boon for Germany. Opportunities for the education of professional musicians had to be improved; German musicians had to be in demand all over the world. Göhler closed on a familiar note: to reconquer pride of place in the world, German music needed constant rebirth. 72

The discussion of conservatories’ role in national renewal also involved the question of how to accommodate foreign students in German music schools. On the one hand, bringing foreigners to Germany and Austria would help to rebuild those cultures’ international reputations. On the other, if music education was supposed to be directed at binding the nation’s wounds, foreign students would be a distraction.

Consequently, the post-World War I era in music education saw the question of foreigners in conservatories grow more heated. The nineteenth-century conversation on foreign students had been abstract, with conservatory figures and critics debating the moral and cultural repercussions of young German musicians studying with their peers from other countries. German conservatories were world renowned and hosted many foreign students. During the era of the Weimar Republic, though, this openness to

72 Ibid., 402-403.

foreign students became a subject of debate within and outside of conservatories. At stake in this debate was the purpose of German music education. There was disagreement about conservatories’ responsibility to their nation and their proper place in the world.

As the notion of strengthening the international reputation of German music and the interest in foreign opinion—both so present in the immediate post-war discourse— subsided, xenophobic public opinion penetrated music education. 73 Tensions over the appropriate steps to take to educate foreign musicians can be seen in one response to a 1928 proposal to establish a German Musical Institute for Foreigners in Berlin. This school, which opened in 1929, was to be mostly funded by private contributions. The

Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education would make space available in

Charlottenburg Palace. The stated purpose of a school devoted solely to the education of foreigners was to demonstrate to foreign countries Germany’s accomplishments as a

“land of music” again after the “pause” of World War I and the immediate post-war period. 74 Writing in the Deutsche Zeitung , Paul Zschorlich opposed the school for

foreigners. He argued that Germany already proved its musical excellence through the

work of its composers, conductors and virtuosos, and, pedagogically, through the work

of the Berlin Musikhochschule and other institutions. 75

Importantly, Zschorlich did not reject the idea that teaching foreign musicians was ultimately beneficial for Germany’s reputation. He maintained, though, that the

73 Schenk, Die Hochschule , 98. 74 Paul Zschorlich, “Eine deutsche Musikakademie für Ausländer?,” Deutsche Zeitung 24 October, 1928. UdK 1/5170, Presse-Nachrichten. 75 Ibid.

education of foreigners should not proceed without some oversight and regulation to ensure that German needs were prioritised. He was concerned about the Prussian state spending tax money on this venture. He stressed its superfluousness, since foreigners took full advantage of the benefits of German pedagogy at the Musikhochschule as well as Berlin’s other conservatories: the Stern’sches Konservatorium and the Klindworth-

Scharwenka Konservatorium . Zschorlich calculated that in the previous two years, foreigners made up one sixth to one fifth of the Musikhochschule’s student body. He also argued that the percentage of foreign students should not rise (while also not calling for a reduction), and that a quota on foreign students might be necessary, since the Musikhochschule was primarily there for German music students. 76 Germany’s status after the war had been diminished due to reparations, loss of colonies and other perceived humiliations. Zschorlich saw music education as a way to compensate for these losses, but not at the expense of adequately serving the domestic population.

A similar dynamic obtained in Vienna, where, if anything, the conservatory administration was more committed to the idea that welcoming foreign music students would serve to secure Austria’s cultural standing. In 1929, the prorector of the Vienna

Musikhochschule 77 addressed a proposal by the Vienna School Publicity Society

[Wiener Schulpropaganda-Gesellschaft ] to attract foreign students to Vienna. 78 The

76 Ibid. 77 The Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst , sometimes called the Fachhochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst , was divided from the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst in 1924 and existed until 1931. Its purpose was to offer a higher, Hochschule -level education to graduates of the Akademie . See Ernst Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule: Vom Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde zur staatlichen Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna: Elisabeth Lafite, 1967), 59-62. 78 For an example of one of the School Publicity Society’s placards from 1929, see “Studieret in Wien und Österreich,” ÖNB, Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung (POR), PLA16315378; 1929/2 (7181), online at http://www.bildarchivaustria.at/Pages/ImageDetail.aspx?p_iBildID=15873423 .

Society suggested the formation of a committee comprised of representatives of cultural-educational institutions as well as cultural and tourism organisations. The impetus for this proposal was summer courses for Americans offered by the Sorbonne in Paris. The Society also pointed to the recent establishment of the Musical Institute for

Foreigners in Berlin and similar planned institutions in Nuremberg and Munich. Since

Vienna would hold an even greater attraction for foreign students in music and the arts, similar courses for Americans in Vienna could count on success. The Society noted, though, that completion of such courses should result in the awarding of a Master’s degree; the Sorbonne awarded such a degree, and this greatly appealed to young

Americans. The official at the Vienna Musikhochschule took this to be a good idea, even if he thought that offering a degree would prove difficult, and sought the opinion of the other institutions that might participate in the committee. 79

IV: Conservatories Between Greater-German Nationalism and State Patriotism

The observation by an official of the Vienna School Publicity Society that foreign students would prefer Vienna to cities in Germany points to the balance struck by conservatories in the Austrian Empire and republic between greater-German cultural belonging and state patriotism. Nineteenth-century writing on music education in

Germany often unproblematically included conservatories in Prague and Vienna as

German institutions. A discussion of Prague’s inclusion in German music-educational

79 UMdK, Kt. 28/09-45 Rektorat 1929.

networks will be followed by a consideration of Vienna’s complicated role between greater Germany and Austrian identity.

In The Musical State of the United German Empire , Meinardus included Vienna and Prague in the list of cities with conservatories that otherwise consisted of cities within the German Empire. Lobe’s 1869 publication on conservatories began by noting the plethora of such institutions and listing the following cities: Vienna; Prague;

Dresden; Leipzig; Berlin; Munich; Stuttgart and Cologne. He did not mention any French or Italian institutions, which indicates that his intention was to present German conservatories. 80 Pudor’s 1872 essay on German conservatories also placed the

Prague Conservatory firmly in that category. Pudor began his reflections with a brief historical overview of conservatories of music. He identified Italy as the “fatherland” of conservatories. He then pointed to the establishment of the Paris Conservatoire , which

he dated to 1784. 81 Pudor further informed readers of the Dresden Conservatory’s first yearly report that German conservatories were established on the Italian and French models. He added that the first German conservatory was founded in 1811, in Prague. 82

An editor’s note accompanying the text of Gevaert’s speech in the Piano Teacher pointed out that the Prague Conservatory was the only German conservatory to offer

literary courses. 83 In 1837, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung profiled the Prague

Conservatory. This piece, signed only with the name Alfred, praised the conservatory’s instruction in instrumental music but had harsh words for its vocal education. Voice

80 Lobe, “Einige Worte über musikalische Conservatorien,” 169, 171. 81 1784 corresponds to the founding of l’École royale de chant et de déclamation , a forerunner instution to the Conservatoire . The Conservatoire was founded in 1795. 82 Pudor, “"Bedeutung, Einrichtung und Aufgaben,” 3. 83 Gevaert, “Ueber den öffentlichen Musikunterricht (Schluss),” 218.

instructors preferred Italian composers and threw “German music, so to speak, under the lectern.” Alfred argued that ignoring the finest branch of German music at a German

conservatory was completely unacceptable. 84

We see this tendency to view the Prague Conservatory as a German

conservatory in leading musical writers, musical newspapers and a conservatory

director. It is all the more revealing of German thinking about the scope of the German

nation because it did not correspond to the discourse in Prague, that is, to how the

Prague Conservatory’s own publications discussed that school’s cultural identity. The

conservatory’s founding charter was written in German by Prague aristocrats in 1808. It

refers only to music in Bohemia and does not mention Germany or German culture. 85

This reflects the political and cultural consciousness of the early nineteenth-century

Bohemian nobility, who were influential in founding numerous cultural institutions in

addition to the conservatory. These nobles communicated in German. They were “land-

patriotic” rather than nationalist. 86 This was a strong regional identity within the

Habsburg Empire, not Czech and not German in the sense implied by Meinardus, Pudor

and other German observers.

Anniversary publications stressed the Prague Conservatory’s position as a

Bohemian institution, rather than a German one. They reveal an in-betweenness at

odds with German authors’ inclusion of Prague among German conservatories. In his

84 Alfred, “Das Konservatorium der Musik zu Prag (Beschluss),” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 39/48 (29 November, 1837), 774-775, my emphasis. 85 A digital reproduction of the 1808 charter appears on the website of the Prague Conservatory. The conservatory renders Böhmen as “the Czech lands” rather than “Bohemia.” See “History of the school,” http://www.prgcons.cz/history . 86 Michaela Freemanová, “The Prague Conservatory in the context of nineteenth-century Bohemia,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914) , eds. Fend and Noiray, 2:519-520.

1858 book commemorating the conservatory’s fiftieth anniversary, August Wilhelm

Ambros proudly proclaimed the Prague Conservatory’s status among the premier music-educational institutions in Europe. Ambros also asserted that Bohemia was known far and wide as a “musical land,” and that the reputation of Bohemian musicians extended all the way to America. 87 Ambros described the second half of the seventeenth century as the classical period of the “specifically Bohemian school of music.” 88 Eduard Hanslick, the Bohemian-German music critic, also commented in 1858 that the Prague Conservatory had become central to Bohemian musical life; he wrote that its anniversary celebrations should warm the heart of all who combined appreciation of music with patriotism. 89

The Prague Conservatory’s middle position and Hanslick’s patriotic pride in it are revealed by a closer look at what Ambros meant when he talked about Bohemia as the fatherland served by the Prague Conservatory. In his historical consideration of

Bohemian music in the eighteenth century, Ambros reflected on the fortuitous location of Bohemia between Vienna, where Italian music was favoured at court, and northern

Germany, where the most profound German art was created by Bach in Leipzig.

Ambros argued that this position in the middle led to Bohemian culture emerging as an appealing third way, which was audible in the works of Bohemian composers. Ambros’s book was written in German, but the 1911 publication on the occasion of the conservatory’s one-hundredth anniversary appeared in Czech before being translated

87 August Wilhelm Ambros, Das Conservatorium in Prag. Eine Denkschrift bei Gelegenheit der fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier der Gründung (Prague: Verein zur Beförderung der Tonkunst in Böhmen, 1858), 1-2. 88 Ibid., 8. 89 Eduard Hanslick, “Das Prager Conservatorium,” in Sämtliche Schriften , 7 vols., vol. I/4, Aufsätze und Rezensionen 1857-1858 , ed. Dietmar Strauß (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 329.

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into German. 90 The first director of the conservatory, Friedrich Dionys Weber (or Bed řich

Diviš Weber), wrote music-theory textbooks in German and gave his compositions

German-language titles such as “ Böhmens Errettung ,” or “Bohemia’s Salvation.”

Antonin Dvo řák, the Czech nationalist composer, became a professor of composition in

1891. After three years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York,

Dvo řák again took up his teaching duties in Prague from 1895 until his death in 1904.

He was appointed director of the conservatory in 1901. 91

These details suggest that the German inclusion of the Prague Conservatory among German institutions was at odds with how the conservatory was understood in

Prague, both in the early nineteenth century and in the decades after German unification. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung ’s 1837 critique of the Prague

Conservatory’s failing as a German conservatory sits uneasily alongside Ambros’s 1858 description of Bohemian culture as an alternative to the music of Italy and Germany.

Indeed, the nineteenth century was a period of German and Czech interplay and rivalry in Prague’s cultural life and musical institutions. Until the 1870s, this coexistence was marked by cooperation; in the following decades, nationalism led to competition between Germans and Czechs in the culture of Prague. 92 The period that witnessed

Pudor’s and Meinardus’s writings, the 1870s, was the time in which the Prague

90 Johann Branberger, Das Konservatorium für Musik in Prag. Zur 100-Jahrfeier der Gründung im Auftrage des Vereines zur Beförderung der Tonkunst in Böhmen , trans. Emil Bezecny (Prague: Verlag des Vereins zur Beförderung der Tonkunst in Böhmen, 1911). The discrepancy between a fiftieth- anniversary publication appearing in 1858 and a hundredth-anniversary publication in 1911 is explained by the fact that the conservatory’s founding charter appeared in 1808, but classes did not begin until 1811 due to the interruption of the Napoleonic Wars. 91 Ibid., 197, 204, 207, 213, 221. 92 Michaela Freemanová, “Prague’s Society of Musicians (1803–1903/1930) and its rôle in the music and social life of the city,” Hudební v ěda XL/1 (2003): 17.

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Conservatory was on its way to becoming a Czech national institution. Josef Krej čí, the

director of the conservatory from 1866 to 1881, 93 was criticised by the Czech press for a

perceived lack of support for Czech nationalism, party due to his reluctance to

countenance the performance of pieces by Czech composers. This despite the fact that

Krej čí advocated unsuccessfully for musicians to be educated in the Czech language.

Krej čí’s focus on German works was considered inappropriate to a cultural moment in which debates about music in Prague centred on whether Czechs should foster national music or develop in a worldly, cosmopolitan direction. In the late 1880s, Czech became the language of instruction in some classes, though German-language music-theory textbooks were still in use. The centenary celebration in 1911 reflected the transformation of the conservatory into an institution of Czech culture. 94

There was, then, a disparity between the pan-German sensibilities of some

German commentators on music education and the actual situation in Prague. The examples of music-educational discourse that include the Prague Conservatory show the idea of music as a source of national cultural cohesion both predating the German state and transcending its borders. Prague retained its place in German cultural consciousness even after it became the capital of Czechoslovakia, a successor state of

Austria-Hungary. In 1926, German music students founded the Union of German

Students of Music 95 (Deutsche Musikstudentenschaft , DMSt). 96 The DMSt connected

93 “Krej čí, Joseph (1821-1881), Komponist, ” in Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950 , vol. 4, (Lfg. 18, 1968), 248. Online at http://www.biographien.ac.at . 94 Freemanová, “The Prague Conservatory,” 532-536. 95 This is how the Deutsche Musikstudentenschaft translated its name into English. 96 Arno Schellenberg of the student union at the Berlin Musikhochschule wrote to the Musikhochschule ’s administration in January 1926 to announce the formation of the DMSt; he included a copy of the DMSt’s

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students at public conservatories—those with the status of Hochschule , including the

Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich—throughout Germany. This organisation also included the German Music Academy in Prague, which had been founded to accommodate the city’s German community, 97 as an associate member.

As the DMSt was an attempt to create a national network of German music

students, it is significant that the organisation not only included a music school in

Prague but also overtures to the students at the Vienna Musikhochschule . A May 1929

letter from Georg Blumensaat, the chair of the DMSt, referred to years’ worth of

unanswered letters about the possibility of the Vienna institution joining the DMSt.

Blumensaat explained that the DMSt was an artistic and economic union of all students

at German Musikhochschulen . Blumensaat also noted that a string quartet by a

Viennese student had been performed at the DMSt’s last annual conference, and that

this student had taken part in the conference. He then noted that the Vienna

Musikhochschule was much closer to the DMSt—presumably more in keeping with the

DMSt’s goal to unite German public institutions of music education—than the

conservatory in Prague, which already belonged to the DMSt. Blumensaat then invited

the Viennese conservatory to sent representatives to the DMSt’s 1929 conference, to

be held later that month in Munich. Blumensaat’s persistence earned him a reply from

the conservatory’s administration. The administration had no objection to students at the

Vienna Musikhochschule joining the DMSt; unfortunately, this was not possible, as there

provisional statutes, which had been agreed to earlier that month. In 1933, Schünemann wrote that the DMSt had been founded in 1924. It is most likely that Schünemann misremembered the founding date. 97 Bruno Nettl, Becoming an Ethnomusicologist: A Miscellany of Influences (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2013), 3.

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currently was no student union at the Vienna Musikhochschule that could officially affiliate with the DMSt. The administration was willing to encourage closer cooperation between music students in Vienna and their counterparts in Germany. 98

The DMSt’s outreach to Vienna in the 1920s and the positive Austrian response is one example of a longstanding relationship between German and Austrian music education. It is undoubtedly true that the idea of a larger German nation was a major force in the identity of German-speaking Austrians. The strength of Georg von

Schönerer’s German National Movement and All-German Union in the Austrian Empire, and of the Greater German People’s Party in the First Republic, testify to the strength of dreams of expanded German unification in Austrian political culture. Not for nothing did

Austrians initially choose the name German-Austria ( Deutschösterreich ) for their rump

state—in Clemenceau’s dismissive phrase, “ ce qui reste ”99 —that emerged from the

Habsburg Empire in 1918.

And yet there was also an Austrian state idea, a patriotism formed by belief in a multinational state, loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty and, sometimes, the unifying force of Catholicism. 100 German Nationals and All-Germans such as Schönerer and Franz

Stein regarded the Austrian state as an abomination; their devotion was to the German

Volk , not an empire that sought to balance German interests with those of Slavic and other non-German peoples, and certainly not to a universal church. 101 But there were

also Austrians who were, as the novelist Joseph Roth poignantly put it, “homesick for

98 UMdK, Kt. 28/09-45 Rektorat 1929. 99 Jan Erk, Explaining Federalism: State, Society and Congruence in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany and Switzerland (New York: Routledge, 2008), 18. 100 See Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848-1916 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005). 101 Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich: Piper, 2010), 337-393 passim .

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the Kaiser.” 102 Austrian patriots constructed an identity around state belonging and the emperor; they resisted calls for unification with Germany. Karl Lueger, for example, was the Christian Social mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. He and Schönerer were intractably opposed to each other. Lueger preached anti-liberalism and Catholicism. He grasped and exploited the potential of antisemitism as the keystone of a mass movement. Lueger also defended Vienna’s German character and undertook a

“Germanisation” campaign for the imperial capital. 103 But, Lueger was unflinchingly loyal

to the Austrian emperor; he wielded his patriotism as a cudgel against his political

rivals. 104

The best description of Austrian state patriotism comes from František Palacký, a prominent Czech nationalist who published Austria’s State Idea , a collection of his articles, in the fateful year of 1866. Palacký promulgated a “state idea” of a multi- national federal state with some autonomy for each constituent nationality. 105 This kind of multi-national state idea was precisely what made the Habsburg Empire a hurdle for völkisch dreams of a German-dominated central Europe. Germans in Austria struggled

to reconcile overlapping but contradictory German and Austrian claims on their

allegiance. 106

Music education had a position in the distinctly Austrian consciousness that existed alongside larger German cultural identity. Invoking musical genius became a rhetorical strategy to negotiate overlapping German and Austrian identities. Austrian

102 Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarsch (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009 [1932]), 338. 103 Hamann, Hitlers Wien , 407-431. 104 Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics , 9. 105 Franz [František] Palacký, Oesterreichs Staatsidee (Prague: J. L Kober, 1866). 106 Edward Timms, “National Memory and the ‘Austrian Idea’ from Metternich to Waldheim,” Modern Language Review 86/4 (Oct., 1991): 900-901, 903.

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composers could be held up as both mirrors of Austrian peoplehood and connections to larger German belonging. 107 There were times when it became politically or culturally imperative to stress Austrian national distinctiveness, and music was enlisted to perform that cultural work. 108 This state patriotism acknowledged shared German nationality but viewed the Austrian state as growing out of particularly Austrian identity and ideals. This patriotism had survived the collapse of the empire to give meaning to belonging in the

First Republic. Austrian music was a meaningful component of enduring Austrian patriotism. In her introduction to My Austria by Kurt [von] Schuschnigg, the

Austrofascist 109 chancellor of Austria, Dorothy Thompson wrote that Austria’s “greatest geniuses ... came there from other soils. And it is typical of Austria that she was the homeland of all those who spoke the world’s most universal language: Music.” The

107 Erin Regina Hochman, “Staging the Nation, Staging Democracy: The Politics of Commemoration in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933/34,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010, 230-232. 108 For an example, consider Kurt [von] Schuschnigg, the chancellor of Austria from 1934 to 1938. Schuschnigg opposed the Anschluss with Hitler’s Germany and thus needed to justify Austria’s claim to nationhood. He acknowledged the “essential Germanness” of Austria but cautioned that this belonging should not be abused; recent developments had pushed German and Austrian consciousnesses apart. The hatred that penetrated all aspects of life had “as little in common with the Austrian character as it [had] with the cultivation of the healthy national spirit which has always been at home in our country.” Austrians were part of “the whole German people,” but they “call[ed] Austria their Fatherland.” Austrians were the inheritors of the vanished Austrian Empire, which “was not a state like other states; it had its own notions ... [and] its own way of life.” Austrians approached their problems in the spirit “of the former tolerant, moderate old Austria.” The mission of Austria was to stand “on the bridge which connects differing cultures.” Schuschnigg quoted Hofmannsthal, Schiller and Grillparzer to buttress this idea of Austria as a fatherland with its own values. Schuschnigg’s requiem for “his Austria” was an affirmation, albeit a self-serving one, of Austrian state patriotism. See Kurt Schuschnigg, My Austria , trans. John Segrue (New York: Knopf, 1938), 290-293, 302-307. 109 The choice of either Ständestaat or Austrofascism to describe the Dollfuß and Schuschnigg regimes has signaled a position on the relative perfidy of these governments since the 1930s. Such terminological debates are still evident in the political culture of commemoration as well as the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Austria. In January 2012, the Austrian historian and Green Party Member of Parliament Harald Walser welcomed the official rehabilitation of victims of Austrofascist justice but rightly criticised the rehabilitation law for avoiding the word “Austrofascism.” See Alexander Lassner and Günter Bischof, “Introduction,” in The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment , eds. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka and Alexander Lassner (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003), 1-3 and Harald Walser, “Ein historischer Schritt,” Der Standard , 16 January, 2012, online at http://derstandard.at/1326502903452/Austro-Faschismus-Ein-historischer-Schritt .

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Austrian idea was “supra-national, integrating, all-inclusive, Christian, and humane. ...

The Austrian idea is the western idea.” 110

If it is largely true that, as a cultural-national identity, Austrianness is often best defined as a regional German identity, 111 it is also true that justifications and celebrations of the Austrian state and Austrian culture almost always hinge on music. In

1939, one year after the Anschluss , the eminent scholar of nationalism Hans Kohn posited a supranational, non-German “heirdom and mission” for Austria, whose future lay “not with Germany but with the other peoples with whom the Austrians have lived together for so many centuries.” Kohn discussed the idea of a dynastic Austrian state, which “found ... its most sublime spiritualization in the Austrian music.” Austria might

have been German, but it needed not embrace pan-Germanism; the national character

of “the Homo Austriacus ” was shaped by heterogenous national and intellectual influences. 112

These reflections on music and the idea of Austria indicate that state patriotism, as distinct from national identity, could be a powerful source of loyalty and collective belonging. Music education helps us see how belonging can be shaped by an institutional structure within the frameworks of an independent state: German culture and the Austro-German canon, but Austrian music education. The history of the conservatory in Vienna is intertwined with Austrian patriotism and the state. In 1811, the composer Ignaz Mosel published an “Outline of a Music-Educational Institution for the

110 Dorothy Thompson, Introduction to My Austria , xxiv-xxv. 111 Hochman, “Staging the Nation,” 29, 225. 112 Hans Kohn, “AEIOU: Some Reflections on the Meaning and Mission of Austria,” Journal of Modern History 11/4 (Dec., 1939): 519, 526-527, my emphasis.

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Capital and Residence City of the Austrian Imperial State.” Mosel lamented that music was not seen as an affair of state. He called for the establishment of a public conservatory directed by the state. 113 The movement to establish conservatories in the

Austrian Empire grew from the patriotic fervour following national humiliation at the hands of Napoleon. This attempt to strengthen Austria’s status as the homeland of music was part of the Austrian response to military defeats in 1866 and 1918 as well. 114

In August 1866, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung printed a piece of

correspondence from Vienna. The anonymous writer reported the mood of the city: the

Viennese did not want to concede north-German superiority in matters of music

education, even if they were forced to acknowledge Prussian military supremacy. One

the one hand, this report placed Vienna firmly in the German cultural nation by quoting,

critically, the popular Viennese opinion that their city was the home of German art. On

the other, this article suggested Austrian distinctiveness by quoting a Viennese

newspaper’s comment that Viennese violins and pianos would play the role of the

needle gun, so decisive in the Prussian victory at the Battle of Königgrätz, in

competition with Berlin, Leipzig, Munich and Paris. Here, Vienna’s musical culture was

not only positioned as a superior culture within Germany, but as superior to the culture

of German and French musical centres. 115

113 [Ignaz Mosel], “Skizze einer musikalischen Bildungsanstalt für die Haupt- und Residenzstadt des österreichischen Kaiserstaats,” Vaterländische Blätter für den österreichischen Kaiserstaat 4/10 (2 February, 1811): 57. Lynne Heller identifies Mosel as the author of this article. See Lynne Heller, “Das Konservatorium für Musik in Wien zwischen bürgerlich-adeligem Mäzenatentum und staatlicher Förderung,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914) , eds. Fend and Noiray, 2:210n15. 114 Heller, “Das Konservatorium,” 208-209. 115 “Nachrichten,” Leipziger Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung I/34 (22 August, 1866): 275-276. See also Heller, “Das Konservatorium,” 208-209.

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In 1871, Carl Ferdinand Pohl published The Society of the Friends of Music of the Austrian Imperial State and its Conservatory .116 The Society had undergone an administrative restructuring and introduced new statutes in 1869, which included a new curriculum for the conservatory. These developments gave Pohl, the Society’s archivist and librarian, the opportunity to gather files and documents to produce a history of the

Society. 117 Pohl’s book has nothing to do with his institution’s counterparts in Germany,

or with conservatory education as such. Instead, it is an institutional history of one

private society and its conservatory. Still, there are suggestions in Pohl’s argument and

terminology that reveal assumptions about this organisation’s relationship to the state

and to the idea of national culture.

Pohl chronicled the Society’s various bureaucratic dealings with the imperial

state. He also reproduced selected primary sources in appendices. These reveal a

connection between the musical culture fostered by the Society, along with its

conservatory, and the cultural heritage of Austria. One of these appendices was a list of

conservatory students who were awarded medals for excellence. In 1830, the medals

featured portraits of Mozart and Beethoven, a native and an adopted Austrian,

respectively. 118 Pohl also reproduced correspondence between the Society and

Beethoven, 119 and he referred to a letter from Schubert, a composer who had always

116 C[arl] F[erdinand] Pohl, Die Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des österreichischen Kaiserstaates und ihr Conservatorium (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1871). The Society of the Friends of Music, a private organisation dedicated to the promotion of all aspects of music, founded its conservatory in 1817. The conservatory became a state institution in 1909 and was re-named the k.k. Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst . 117 Ibid., III, 53. 118 Ibid., 140. 119 Ibid., 57-59.

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lived in Austria.120 Pohl also mentioned a civil servant’s failed attempt to construct a new

music hall for the Society and erect in it a monument to the composers Gluck, Haydn

and Mozart. (Gluck was a German who was Kapellmeister in Vienna. Haydn and Mozart

were Austrian.) Pohl highlighted the Society’s work restoring the graves of Beethoven

and Schubert. 121 Still, in 1849, Eduard Hanslick criticised the lack of direct state involvement in the conservatory in the form of funding. He was scandalised by the fact that, in Vienna of all places, it had fallen to a private society to found a conservatory of music. 122 Both Pohl’s focus on Austrian culture and Hanslick’s call for greater state involvement show again the connections among music education in Austria, Austrian cultural distinctiveness and the Austrian state.

Pohl did not present these activities as carried out to further the reputation of

Austrian music as such, but the focus on Austrian masters suggests that the Society and its conservatory saw themselves as cultural institutions of the Austrian state and in the service of the Austrian emperor. The Conservatory of the Society of the Friends of

Music was intertwined with the Austrian state and monarchy both explicitly and implicitly. The protectorship of the Emperor and the designation “of the Austrian imperial state” embedded the Society’s general mission of musical advocacy and philanthropy within territorial borders. This connection to the Austrian state influenced the Society’s pedagogy in specific ways. Beginning in 1863, the Society’s conservatory organised a committee to administer state examinations for potential public-school music teachers and award state teaching certifications. A member of the Society’s board of directors

120 Ibid., 16. 121 Ibid., 13, 32. 122 Eduard Hanslick, “Das Musik-Conservatorium,” in Sämtliche Schriften , 7 vols., vol. 2, Aufsätze und Rezensionen 1849-1854 , ed. Dietmar Strauß (Vienna: Böhlau, 1994), 50-51.

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remarked on the value that such a decision by the government would have for the position of the conservatory, and on the consequences for “the entire musical state of affairs of the [Habsburg] monarchy.” Austria’s first teacher-education courses were introduced at the conservatory in 1896. The Society considered this a positive development, not only because it would improve the profession of music education, but also for its potential to foster closer relations between the conservatory and state authority. After the nationalisation of the conservatory in 1909, the newly titled

Akademie claimed for itself an advisory role in the affairs of all Austrian music schools, whether they were state funded or not. 123 As the conservatory took on responsibilities in

an area of state administrative responsibility—school-level education—both the role and

notion of the conservatory as an Austrian patriotic institution were strengthened. This

focus on serving the population of Austria is evident in Pohl’s 1871 retrospective as

well. He wrote that the Society established its conservatory to provide music education

to pupils from all lands of the Habsburg monarchy. 124

In Pohl’s writing, Germany and German conservatories are conspicuous by their absence. Later Austrian writing on the Conservatory of the Society of the Friends of

Music and its successor institutions followed this pattern. Robert Lach was a musicologist, a graduate of Vienna’s conservatory and, from 1924 to 1945, a professor of music history at the Akademie . In a 1927 book, Lach sought to trace the developmental history of his institution in order to grasp its “artistic and pedagogical

123 Lynne Heller, “Vorläufer der Abteilung Musikpädagogik 1896-1947,” in Zur Geschichte der Abteilung Musikpädagogik 1947-1997; 50 Jahre Musikpädagogik Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien , ed. Ewald Breunlich (Vienna: Abteilung Musikpädagogik an der Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst, 1997), 3, 4-6. 124 Pohl, Die Gesellschaft , 5.

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mission” as well as its “meaning for the musical life of Vienna and Austria.” 125 And in

1967, another Akademie professor penned another history of the school. Ernst Tittel

portrayed the Akademie as “one of the most significant and largest music-educational

institutions of Europe and one of the oldest music schools where German is spoken .” 126

This formulation hints at German cultural belonging while pointedly not identifying an

Austrian conservatory as German. In his next paragraph, though, Tittel related the

conservatory more closely to Austria. He described it as “shaped by the rich cultural

heritage of the Austrian people [ Volk ], guided by the primal musical atmosphere of the

city of Vienna, [and] borne by a grand artistic tradition.” 127

This chapter has explored the role of conservatories of music in sustaining a national cultural conversation. At key moments in the development of German national identity, music education was enlisted both to define national culture and to create the conditions for it to blossom. Music education was invoked to meet the needs of the

German and Austrian states, but it also enabled cultural definitions of the German nation that extended beyond state boundaries. The understanding of music education as a national cultural good discussed in this chapter comes into sharper relief through consideration of international encounters. The cultural relationship between Germany and the United States was one marked by competition and suspicion as well as admiration and collaboration. Ideas of national culture, but also tensions of modernity, were apparent in the German-American music-educational exchange. We turn to the story of Germans and Americans thinking about and interacting with each other through

125 Robert Lach, Geschichte der Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (Vienna: Ed. Strache, 1927), 7. 126 Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule , 5 (my emphasis). 127 Ibid., 5.

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music education in Chapter 3. Then, Chapter 4 discusses the potential for and limitations of Jewish belonging in German culture through music education, a topic that also develops the themes of national culture explored in this chapter.

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III

Austro-German Conservatories, American Culture and the Anxieties of Influence

I: Introduction

The history of Germany and America has been intertwined since “German” and

“American” denoted geographical abstractions rather than national identities. In 1813, the nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt famously defined the German’s fatherland, not as a collection of states ruled by princes, but as existing wherever “the German accent rings/And hymns to God in heaven sings.” 1 Those German hymns in the German tongue rang out in Pennsylvania a century before Arndt’s birth and continue to do so in the twenty-first century. Refugees from and survivors of slave labour and death camps made immeasurable contributions to the United States’ cultural and intellectual life, and the music of a people formerly enslaved in the United States became a weapon in the

Cold War battle between East and West Germany. From emigration in the seventeenth century to occupation in the twentieth; from Bismarck, North Dakota, to the Onkel Toms

Hütte housing development in Berlin; from General von Steuben to General Marshall—

Germans and Americans have influenced the course of each other’s social, political and cultural development. 2 For inhabitants of German-speaking Europe, the American

1 Ernst Moritz Arndt, “The German Fatherland,” in The Poets and Poetry of Europe , with introductions and biographical notes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 322-33, online at German History in Documents and Images, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=237 . 2 See Frank Trommler, ed., Amerika und die Deutschen: Bestandsaufnahme einer 300jährigen Geschichte (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986); Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds.,

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colonies and the United States have represented the promise of a new beginning and the threat of cultural colonisation, 3 hope for humanity and all-purpose bogeyman. 4 For

Germans, the United States became a symbol of progress, equality, optimism and social mobility, 5 but also of cultural and racial degeneracy. 6 Americans saw Germany as the cradle of serious art and as a force of cultural oppression. Germans and Americans have welcomed each other as partners, regarded each other with suspicion, competed with each other as rivals, fought each other as bitter enemies and faced common threats as committed allies. And jazz, a major American art form, was a weapon of the

Cold War in divided Berlin. 7

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music was central to this trans-

Atlantic exchange. 8 Music education, in particular, facilitated cultural contact. In 1935, approximately fifty American teachers and students embarked on “a field course in music education” through Columbia University’s Teachers College. 9 This “novel

traveling classroom” was led by Professor Peter W. Dykema, 10 a pioneer in American

America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History , 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); and Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, eds., The German- American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures 1800-2000 (New York: Berghahn, 2001); 3 Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonisation und Kalter Krieg: die Kulturmission der USA in Österreich nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1991); Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka, eds., The Americanization/Westernization of Austria (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004). 4 Dan Diner, Feindbild Amerika. Über die Beständigkeit eines Ressentiments (Munich: Propyläen, 2002), 13-17. 5 Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 93-104 , 163-170 . 6 James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 19-42 passim , 87-88. 7 Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 8 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850- 1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 9 “50 to Tour Europe for Music Studies,” New York Times , 19 May, 1935, N4. 10 Ibid.

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music education and music appreciation. 11 The goal of the course was “to provide

American teachers with the opportunity of direct contact with the musical resources of

Europe in schools, colleges and special music centres.” To that end, the party visited concert halls, museums, galleries, theatres and cathedrals, as well as folk schools, in

England, Germany, Austria and France. Stops in Germany and Austria included Berlin,

Dresden, Nuremberg, Munich and Salzburg. 12

Dykema’s “traveling classroom” appears at first glance to be of a piece with a

longstanding New World practice of casting eyes to the Old for cultural tutelage. I argue

in this chapter that cultural exchange in the field of music education is more complex

and less unilateral than that. I do this by exploring three aspects of German-American

exchange in music education. First, I analyse the ambivalence with which American

musicians regarded German influence. American music students did not uniformly

welcome European influence, yet even students who wanted the United States to

transcend European culture often saw the need for German music education. Second, I

argue that American culture structured the experiences of Americans at German

conservatories. Finally, I analyse German conservatories’ conflicted approaches to

American culture. Administrators, teachers and students variously saw American culture

as a source of hope and as a threat to standards and values.

Before exploring the tensions revealed by German-American music-educational

exchange, some definitions are in order. First, I continue to employ a “greater-German”

conception of Germany in this chapter, that is, one that includes the German-speaking

11 See Michael L. Mark and Charles L. Gary, A History of American Music Education (Lanham, MD: R&L Education, 1999). 12 12 “50 to Tour Europe for Music Studies,” N4.

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parts of the Austrian Empire and, later, the Austrian Republic. I do this for a number of reasons. Nineteenth-century Americans understood the German world, and German culture, as extending beyond the boundaries of the German state of 1871. For them,

Austria, particularly Vienna, was solidly German. 13 Conversely, Germans and Austrians exhibited similar impressions of American society and its modernity. Scholars have analysed the German and Austrian perception and reception of American culture together, not only for the pre-unification period, but also for the period since 1945. 14

The second term requiring definition is “modernity,” notoriously difficult to define but discursively ubiquitous. Modernity was the framework employed by Germans and

Americans to understand each other and assess the promise, as well as the danger, of each other’s culture. 15 We see tensions over modernity not only in music-educational exchange, but in virtually all trans-Atlantic interactions. For Canadian tourists in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, modernity was the defining factor in structuring their experiences and senses of self. 16 Pre-World War I

German discourse surrounding America was inextricably bound up with attempts to

13 Michael Saffle, “‘Do You Ever Dream of Vienna?’ America’s Glorification of Musical Central Europe, 1865-1965,” in Identität, Kultur, Raum: Kulturelle Praktiken und die Ausbildung von Imagined Communities in Nordamerika und Zentraleuropa , eds. Susan Ingram et al. (Vienna: Turia and Kant, 2001), 62. 14 Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). For a specific study, see Ruth A. Starkman, “American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music (1965) fails in Germany and Austria,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20/1 (2000): 63-78. 15 See Mary Nolan, “America in the German Imagination,” in Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan , eds. Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger (New York: Berghan, 2000), 3-25. 16 Cecilia Morgan, ‘A Happy Holiday’: English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 17.

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grapple with modernity. 17 There are several related meanings of modernity that capture its relevance for this discussion of German-American connections in music education. In the arts, the term “modern” signified a break with tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Social transformations, such as behaviours contrary to traditional gender roles, were also understood as symptoms of modernity. In addition, modernity connoted a state of technological advancement and economic or industrial efficiency.

The United States loomed large in European understandings of modernity, even before 1945. Many Europeans equated, however problematically, the transformations of modernity with Americanisation. These transformations ranged from models of industrial production to the techniques of advertising and mass consumption to challenges to sexual propriety and the familial order. American economic modernity was understood to go hand in hand with modern forms of social organisation and cultural transformations. 18 Discussing the projection and reception of American culture abroad

with attention to the discourse of modernity also enables a discussion of consumer

culture, urbanisation, democratisation and economic models in the encounter between

Americans and Europeans. 19 America was held culpable for any consequences of modernity deemed undesirable. It was a scapegoat for any perceived decline of traditional values. While Europeans acknowledged other modes of modernity, American modernity was seen as the “most modern” and thus the most destabilising. 20 The

17 Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne , 33-34. See also Viktor Otto, Deutsche Amerika-Bilder: Zu den Intellektuellen-Diskursen um die Moderne 1900-1950 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006). 18 Nolan, “America in the German Imagination,” 4. 19 Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger, “Introduction: Americanization Reconsidered,” in Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan , eds. Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger (New York: Berghan, 2000), xiv-xv, xx-xxi. 20 Diner, Feindbild , 9, 16-17.

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analytical category of modernity serves to situate German-American exchanges in music education in the context of the anxieties and enthusiasms associated with challenges to tradition in various aspects of life. A focus on modernity allows an appreciation of the extent to which the German-American exchange was exactly that: an exchange, an international conversation, not a one-way process of cultural transmission. Americans associated the prospect of German music-educational experiences with the threats posed by modernity. Germans, in turn, understood

American influence as an influx of the modern, for better or worse.

II: German Music Education in the American Imagination

In 1827, Goethe addressed the United States’ cultural potential in his poem, “Den

Vereinigten Staaten.” Famously, he wrote, “America, you have it better/than our continent, the old one.” America’s advantages were its lack of crumbling castles and freedom from the burden of “useless remembrance/and futile strife.” Goethe saw this freedom from history, this youth and modernity, as conducive to American art. He enjoined Americans to capitalise on the present, thus bidding them to embrace their modernity. Significantly, though, Goethe envisioned this art as being created not by the

Americans of 1827, but by their children. In their efforts to write poetry, the latter would,

Goethe hoped, be protected from tales of knights, bandits and ghosts. 21 In other words,

Goethe viewed with favour the prospect of an American culture free to rejoice in its

21 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke , ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1948-1960 [1972]), 1:333.

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modernity without the weight of European traditions and superstitions. It would be his audience’s children who would bring forth this American culture. This section is about those children and the generations to follow. Some took Goethe’s advice; others were more amenable to the influence of “old Europe.” For both groups, though, music education in Germany was the sine qua non .

In the early 1850s, a small number of American music students set off for study

in German institutions of higher music education. By 1900, over 5,000 Americans had

gone to Germany to study music. 22 These numbers made German music education a cultural concept in the American consciousness, the subject of newspaper reports and even popular anxiety. The negotiation of tradition and modernity also hovered over this cross-cultural endeavour. The small group of the 1850s were pioneers. 23 The fictional

American narrator of a tale of misfortune in German music education described himself on the ship to Europe as feeling “like a modern Columbus in search of new musical lands.” 24 Thousands of Americans who followed these early explorers did so secure in the belief that America’s musical future rested on their shoulders. 25

The image of the Old World as a wilderness for Americans to tame and the notion of Europe as the source of America’s future capture a conflict in Americans’ understanding of their culture’s relationship to tradition and modernity. There was a widespread belief that the United States did not possess the necessary infrastructure to

22 Elam Douglas Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students, 1850-1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1991, 1-2. 23 Ibid., 1-2. 24 Leonard Liebling, “Shattered Idols. Selected Extracts from Sylvanus Urban’s Diary,” Musical Courier 4 July, 1898, 1. This article is held in UdK 1/7, Personalakte H. Barth. The nature of the character Sylvanus Urban is discussed later in this chapter. 25 Bomberger, “The German Musical Training,” 2.

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foster American music. Therefore, decamping for Europe was seen not only as a return to a traditional source of culture, but also as a step toward something new and modern:

“forging new trails” 26 rather than returning to a culture and world they had left behind.

This paradox—that forging new trails for America required re-treading well-worn

European paths—resulted in ambivalent feelings about European music education.

German music education was regarded as necessary, and in some ways superior to the

United States in terms of culture and values, but it was also resented.

George Whitefield Chadwick expressed this sense of needing Europe in order to reject Europe. Chadwick was an important figure in the Second New England School, a group of American composers who played a large role in the development of American classical music. Chadwick influenced many other musicians to study in Germany.

Chadwick studied at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1877 to 1879. During the first semester of the 1879-1880 academic year, he studied composition and organ with

Josef Gabriel Rheinberger at the Royal Bavarian Music School in Munich. 27 This short tenure as Rheinberger’s student was enough to impress Chadwick, whose recommendations and encouragement were directly responsible for the increased number of Americans enrolling at the conservatory in Munich after 1882. Chadwick sent letters to Rheinberger in support of potential American students and gave students letters of recommendation to present to Rheinberger. 28 He also strongly suggested that potential students study with Rheinberger first, before he would take them on as pupils.

26 Ibid., 1-2. 27 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Amerikansiche Musiker als Studenten bei Josef Gabriel Rheinberger,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins für das Fürstentum Liechtenstein 93 (1995): 320-322, 331. 28 Ibid., 322.

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Sidney Homer, who achieved fame as a composer of songs, recalled that he began studying with Chadwick at age nineteen. He wrote that Chadwick “wanted me to enter

Rheinberger’s class at the Royal Music School at Munich the following September, and planned my studies accordingly.” This involved teaching Homer the organ, as an instrument was required to matriculate in Munich, even though Homer planned to study music theory. 29

Chadwick’s enthusiasm for the benefits of European training makes all the more revealing his description of the uneasy necessity of German education for American musicians. Chadwick reflected on the timing of his birth in 1854 and asked himself whether he was born too early or too late. He mused that he may have arrived too late, since Boston in the early 1860s witnessed “tremendous interest in organ playing and choral singing” but the leading musicians were “men of mediocre talent and half baked education.” This dearth of talent in an earlier period meant that Chadwick “might have won an honourable position without being obliged to struggle and fight quite so hard for it.” His reason for speculating that he might have been born too soon, though, was his conviction that “the time is coming ... when it will no longer be the style to speak patronizingly of American composers who have the courage to write themselves down, and have acquired the requisite technique to do it.” 30 Chadwick allowed himself to imagine that, in the near future, American conductors would “perhaps even be preferred to heavy Teutons (Toot-ons) 31 who think their mission is to evangelize the country.” He

29 Sidney Homer, My Wife and I: The Story of Louise and Sidney Homer (New York: MacMillan, 1939), 33. See also Bomberger, “Amerikanische Musiker,” 322n7. 30 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1854-1877, original emphasis. 31 This joke plays on the alleged relentlessness or aggressiveness of German musicians, who “toot on” indefatigably.

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hoped that “orchestral players born and raised in this country will have the positions now occupied by imported Viennese Jews.” 32 Chadwick’s pronouncement about the prevalence of Germans in American musical life was not hyperbole. Orchestral and symphonic music blossomed in the United States with the large-scale immigration of

Germans, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when Germans were conspicuously over-represented in almost all American orchestras.33

If Chadwick believed that German music was strangling American music in its cradle, this line of thought was common to all the arts in nineteenth-century America.

The question of nationality loomed large in discussions of not only music, but also literature, the visual arts and architecture. This debate pitted those who followed Goethe in celebrating America’s freedom from the constraints of European heritage against those who doubted whether American national distinctiveness would emerge from artistic experimentation. 34 The example of Chadwick shows that even those composers who hoped that American music would come into its own saw German music education as necessary. Students went to Germany for the institutional and practical benefits of

German conservatories. They brought with them a range of ideas about how that training could and should bear fruit.

32 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1854-1877. There is no reason to infer anti-Semitism on Chadwick’s part from this statement. While he acknowledged the disproportionate presence of Austrian Jews among European musicians making a living in America, any animosity is directed towards them as Europeans, not as Jews qua Jews. In other parts of the memoirs, Chadwick took eloquent stands against anti-Semitism. 33 Michael Broyles, “Bourgeois Appropriation of Music: Challenging Ethnicity, Class, and Gender,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century , eds. Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 236. 34 Betty E. Chmaj, “Fry versus Dwight: American Music's Debate over Nationality,” American Music 3/1 (Spring, 1985): 63-64.

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The case of Arthur Farwell, one of Chadwick’s students, 35 illustrates the place of

German music education in the process of developing an American national music. In

1897, Farwell travelled to Berlin. There he studied with Engelbert Humperdinck and

Hans Pfitzner. 36 In May 1899, Farwell returned to the United States and began

considering how to use the music and folklore of his country’s indigenous peoples,

Native Americans, to create an American music grounded in American history and

culture. 37 Farwell rejected the notion that European forms should guide the development

of American music. Still, his turn away from European music hardly rendered his

German music-educational experiences irrelevant. Farwell’s embrace of folk traditions

native to America may be attributable to the influence of his teacher, Edward

MacDowell, who had studied at the Paris Conservatoire as well as at Dr Hoch’s

Konservatorium in Frankfurt. MacDowell studied Native American dances and songs in

order to compose his Indian Suite for orchestra in 1892. 38 Another possibility is that

Farwell was inspired more directly by his experiences in Germany. Farwell saw in

Bayreuth what Wagner had wrought from Germanic legends and folk music. He enthused at the prospect of American folk music serving as similar raw material for

American composers. 39 Finally, Farwell felt that American composers were in an

untenable position due to the German dominance of American music education. He

35 Evelyn Davis Culbertson, “Arthur Farwell’s Early Efforts on Behalf of American Music, 1899-1921,” American Music 5/2 (Summer, 1987): 156-157. 36 Humperdinck and Pfitzner had positions in various conservatories throughout their careers. Farwell, however, took private lessons with both pedagogues. 37 Culbertson, “Arthur Farwell’s Early Efforts,” 158. 38 Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: Norton, 2001), 385. 39 Culbertson, “Arthur Farwell’s Early Efforts,” 159.

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lamented that the outsized role of German music education resulted in Americans

“s[eeing] everything through German glasses.” 40

Chadwick’s and Farwell’s conflicted appraisal of German music education as

both necessary but deleterious to the development of an American idiom were echoed

in popular advice given to Americans for choosing a European conservatory. In July

1886, S. Austen Pearce, a music critic 41 and editor of instructional material for piano, 42

published an appraisal of European conservatories in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly.

Pearce began his reflections on contemporary schools of music by rejecting a

conception of music as a pure art, expressing universal emotion through an objective

aesthetic standard. Rather, Pearce introduced the issue of music schools as one firmly

grounded in music’s non-universality, in the effect of national cultures on music-

educational institutions. Pearce wrote:

The selection of a music-school sometimes leads to considerable perplexity. Music is frequently termed “the universal art,” and is supposed to affect equally persons of widely differing nationalities — rich and poor, learned and illiterate; it therefore seems necessary to point out that music is not found uniform in character in various times and climes. Every great nation of antiquity had its own peculiar form of the art, and in modern times it has passed through many phases in different countries.

40 Ibid., 159. 41 “The Late S. Austen Pearce,” New York Times 14 April, 1900, BR8. 42 See, for example, Gustav Damm, Piano School , ed. S. Austen Pearce (New York: Schirmer, 1888). The title page of this book states that it was “[c]ritically revised corrected and edited [sic] by S. Austen Pearce.”

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The platitude, “Human nature is the same in all ages,” is often heard; yet music reveals strongly marked differences, even among individuals. 43

Pearce saw every conservatory as anchored in particular national traditions. This rejection of music’s universality identifies Pearce as remarkably ahead of his time, as the idea of universalism in music can be found in the work of even some twenty-first- century musicologists. 44 He advised American students to “study vocalization in Italy,

Symphonic music in Germany, opera styles and violin playing in France, and church music in the English cathedrals.” Tellingly, this advice was followed by thoughts on how to translate this education into a career in American music:

Yet, some attention must be given to the music of all countries, to prevent onesidedness or contracted views; especially if the profession is to be exercised in America. For this is neutral ground. The people are by no means unanimous respecting the merits of the various European schools; and there is a certain sectarianism noticeable in several coteries, which the teacher, performer, composer or critic, must take into consideration. 45

Pearce’s advice suggests two things. First, America’s musical distinctiveness

arose from its status as “neutral ground” and its corresponding ability to avoid

“onesidedness” in absorbing European trends. Second, Pearce’s admonishment to his

readers that they should learn from Europe but not be overly influenced in a particular

direction exemplifies the perceived need for European music study regardless of one’s

43 S. Austen Pearce, “Modern Music-Schools,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly XXII/1 (July, 1886): 23. 44 See Alan Stanbridge, “The Tradition of All the Dead Generations: Music and Cultural Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 13/3 (2007): 256-260. 45 Pearce, “Modern Music-Schools,” 23.

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ultimate position regarding European influence. Since music education involved actually going to German conservatories, rather than just accepting or rejecting European artistic forms, it enabled a relationship with Europe that offered a third way: valuing education in European traditions but channeling these toward the development of something new and American.

Pearce’s conviction that American students should study in Europe but apply what they learned in distinctively American ways mirrored the attitude of American musicians who recognised the need for German instruction but were wary of importing

German culture into the United States. Chadwick, for example, decided to study in

Germany after hearing a friend who had studied in Dresden relate his experiences of

German musical life with great enthusiasm. Chadwick knew that he had to go to

Germany in order to become a musician. 46 He wrote that “[American] conservatories of those days were not directed by orchestral composers or equipped with full orchestras so we had to blunder through in the dark.” 47 Nevertheless, this practical need for

European training never overshadowed Chadwick’s primary goal: to foster American

music on American soil. That technique, though, was best acquired in the homeland of

the “Toot-ons” who were so conspicuous in American musical life.

Chadwick’s advice to his student, Sidney Homer, echoed this point. Chadwick

convinced Homer that music did not have to be “an exotic art born of the passions of

foreign lands,” but that “prosaic, repressed New England” had a poetry that could be

46 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1869-1876, original emphasis. 47 Ibid. The first American music schools were founded toward the end of the 1860s but only achieved excellence comparable to their European counterparts around the turn of the twentieth century. See Bomberger, “Amerikanische Musiker,” 319.

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expressed musically. 48 But Chadwick also taught Homer that the way to realise this

distinct, native potential was to learn and hone his craft in Germany. Homer had already

gone to Leipzig twice in a failed effort to become a conservatory student before studying

with Rheinberger in Munich at Chadwick’s suggestion. 49 Homer’s disappointing

attempts to become a music student in Leipzig further demonstrates the complex mix of

motives that characterised Chadwick’s thinking about the relationship between German

institutions and American culture. Homer had been put off by German condescension,

as illustrated in his sarcastic remark that Germans “were always right” and “knew all

about music.” 50 He had failed to secure a place in Leipzig and was acutely aware of what an outsider he was, as an American, in the home of such musical greatness. Even so, when he was inspired by Chadwick to dream that New England could be a fount of distinctive musical expression, he readily accepted his teacher’s advice that German instruction was indispensable for a potentially American music. Even after a series of experiences ranging from disappointing to unpleasant, he echoed Chadwick’s sense that German experience was essential if something authentically American were to emerge.

Horatio Parker was another New England composer who studied with Chadwick before becoming a student of Rheinberger’s in Munich. 51 Parker’s path to Germany also stemmed from the idea that being a composer in the European “art music” tradition was foreign to American culture. Parker’s daughter wrote the following as an introduction to her father’s period as a student in Germany:

48 Homer, My Wife and I , 32-33. 49 Ibid., 16, 19. 50 Ibid., 31. 51 Bomberger, “Amerikanische Musiker,” 333.

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It was Mr. Chadwick who first felt, and pointed out to the family, that he was dealing with real “talent.” In these circumstances, it was agreed, America did not have enough to offer. As with all gifted students of any of the arts, Europe was thought of as the only place in which to complete an artist’s education. It was not only a question of teaching, but of atmosphere or background. Only in surroundings of an older culture—mellower than America in 1880—could a young talent properly mature. So art students from all the world drifted naturally to Paris (it was the period later celebrated so nostalgically in the novel “Trilby”), and music students, equally naturally, to the Conservatories of France and Germany. 52

Parker’s memoirs betray no bitterness at the outsized influence of Germany or German

treatment of American musicians. He joined his contemporaries, though, in assuming

that becoming an American composer necessitated the benefits of German institutions

and pedagogy.

Considering why America was deemed infertile ground for the development of American music reveals the powerful role of modernity in American artists’ understanding of their culture. Americans such as Chadwick turned to German music schools not only because theirs was a young nation and had not yet developed the institutions boasted by longer-established cultures. They also looked to Germany out of disappointment about what kind of culture the United States produced. The image of American deficiency in cultural matters was bound up with the dominant image of

American modernity; it was not incidental to or separable from the way in which this

52 Isabel Parker Semler, Horatio Parker: A Memoir for his Grandchildren compiled from Letters and Papers (New York: Da Capo, 1973), xx, 44.

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modernity was envisioned by these Americans and also in German-speaking Europe.

Homer, for example, blamed America’s musical failures on the pride of place granted to business in American culture. In this conception, commercial and economic modernity were a detriment to the fostering of Kunst und Kultur . As Homer wrote:

Are we cowards in our approach to artistic life? Are we so oppressed by the banality we see around us that we lose all power of perception and must ever remain blind to the ineffable spark of talent or genius which glows fitfully in our midst, glows only to be crushed out? .... Or are we so soaked in barter that we can see nothing until we see the dollar beyond it? Does genius look like fantastic abnormality, freakish, abortive, until we discover its relation to some market? Good business. Is that the only eye we have? Is that the overdeveloped sense which deadens all others? If so, let us wake up. The world is full of things that in their conception, creation, and fulfilment have no relation to barter and business—things too precious to be priced. No currency has been devised to measure them. If such surpassing things be, we cannot afford to lose the chance of finding them in our midst. They may be there, they must be there. Let us search diligently, hope, foster, encourage, develop that sixth sense of discovery—discovery of genius. 53

Homer also tailored his advocacy for music-education funding to what he perceived as

American priorities, calling art a great “investment” and stressing that the “outlay” required would yield great “return.” 54 Chadwick offered a similar diagnosis of American culture, noting that his business-oriented father did not believe that musicians were

53 Homer, My Wife and I , 17. 54 Ibid., viii-ix, my emphases.

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respectable. 55 The elder Chadwick thought that the young composer was foolish to

reject a career in business. He believed that “[m]usicians were all bummers ... and

musical composition didn’t amount to nothin’ even if I had talent for it which he thought I

had not, at least not enough.” 56

The second half of the nineteenth century was an era in which the United States had emerged to rival the United Kingdom as the epitome of industrial development.

Consequently, German and Austrian observers shared these Americans’ view that the triumph of mechanized mass production, dynamism and efficiency in America had rendered the rising power a land devoid of high culture. 57 Additionally, a belief in

European cultural superiority served as compensation, if often subconsciously, for the comparatively advanced state of American technology. Educated middle-class German authors stressed the contrast between American “civilisation” and the cultures of antiquity and of Europe. 58 This tension between the image of America, shared by

Germans and American artists, as a land of commerce and the potential for Americans to produce great music also informed German receptions of American musicians and

Americans’ experience in German conservatories of music.

III: The American Experience of German Music Education

55 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1877-1880. 56 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1854-1877. 57 Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne , 163. See also Helmut Lackner, “Travel Accounts from the United States and their Influence on Taylorism, Fordism and Productivity in Austria,” in The Americanization/Westernization of Austria , eds. Bischof and Pelinka, 38. For an example of this German discourse, see Wilhelm von Polenz, Das Land der Zukunft oder Was können Deutschland u. Amerika voneinander lernen? vol. 10 of Gesammelte Werke von Wilhelm von Polenz (Berlin: F. Fontane & Co., [1917]). In this book, revealingly entitled The Land of the Future , Polenz argued that Americans had themselves been mechanised by their practical orientation, which left them unable to appreciate “that cannot be weighed or measured, the inner beauty and harmony of people and things” (68). 58 Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne , 167.

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In June, 1888, the New York Times reported on “American Boys in Berlin,” noting that there had probably never been as many Americans studying in Berlin as during the semester that had recently concluded. The article described the opportunities available to American students, as well as the difficulties they faced. Music students were singled out at the start for special attention. The Times speculated that “if one were to judge from the audiences at the popular concerts which have been given this season at the

Philharmonic, it would seem almost safe to say that half the young people studying in the numerous Berlin conservatories are from the land of dollars.” 59 The Times ’s choice

of this nickname for the United States illustrates the penetration of a perception of the

cultural relationship between that country and Germany that located America in the

realm of business and “dollars” and Germany as the home of philharmonics and

conservatories. Even as American musicians went to Germany to find conditions more

hospitable to their art than those in the “land of dollars,” American culture shaped their

experiences in German conservatories. Both the kind of German music they expected

to encounter and their impressions of the German educational system were conditioned

by the norms of American culture.

Americans stood out in German conservatories for their devotion to Wagner.

Chadwick, for example, arrived in Germany already a committed disciple of Wagner’s. 60

He was not an anomaly among American students. Émile Rupp, a church and synagogue organist in Strasbourg who had studied with Rheinberger, recalled the

59 “American Boys in Berlin,” New York Times , 10 June, 1888, 13. 60 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1869-1876.

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master’s English and American students “who were in the habit of putting on airs on the main esplanades of Athens on the Isar [Munich] with heavy orchestral scores of Richard

Wagner’s music dramas under their arms.” According to Rupp, who contributed his memories of his student days in Munich to a publication marking the hundredth anniversary of Rheinberger’s birth, these Americans harassed the conservative

Rheinberger during his free time with their enthusiasm for Wagner. This led

Rheinberger to declare himself “an utterly unmusical person” outside of his teaching hours. 61 Chadwick described Rheinberger as “conservative, almost to the verge of pedantry.” 62 He described how Rheinberger “would make a wry face” at “any hint of

abrupt modulation or modern dissonances.” Further, Rheinberger “never mentioned

Wagner, Berlioz, or Lizt [sic] and if he had, it probably would have been with

contempt.” 63

The German conservatory establishment’s antipathy toward Wagner is discussed in Chapter 5. Germane here are the ways in which American students’ widespread and persistent enthusiasm for Wagner reflected the American culture that had shaped them.

Wagner was associated with modernism and experimentation in music, but also with other aspects of political and social modernity. One eminent historian has linked

Wagner with Darwin and Marx as progenitors of “mechanical materialism,” 64 which was a concept central to European understandings of the industrial modernity they

61 RhAV Da 16, Manuskripte zur Publikation: “Joseph Rheinberger: Gedenkschrift zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 17. März 1939 / von seinen Schülern und Verehrern” zusammengestellt und übergeben von Walter Kaufmann. 62 George W. Chadwick, Horatio Parker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 9. 63 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1877-1880. 64 Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), 7.

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associated with America. Wagner’s musical vision was closely linked with modernity in the mind of the concert-going public. He “encapsulated the widespread diagnosis of modernity as a heartless juggernaut and represented the means of transforming it into the motor of an advancing civilization.” 65

Wagner himself linked his warm reception in the United States to that society’s economic modernity, arguing that the achievement of material prosperity enabled “a greatness of spirit” conducive to the appreciation of his art. 66 Americans returned the appreciation by elevating Wagner into an icon of democracy. In 1876, Wagner was commissioned to compose music for a centennial celebration of American independence held in Philadelphia. This festival associated Wagner with progressive modernity. 67 Although late-nineteenth-century American reality differed from the United

States’ founding ideals, the image of America as the cornerstone of democracy was

prominent among Europeans. Many Germans criticised the corruption of the Gilded

Age, but an “influential minority” linked the United States’ democratic political system

with its wealth and modernity. 68 In 1888, Walt Whitman wondered whether Wagner was

a democratising force, or whether he produced art for the elite. 69 In the 1890s, American

Wagnerians chose the first of Whitman’s options. They presented Wagner as a devotee

of democratic values. 70 In reality, Wagner revered genius, not democracy, but his

65 Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 107. 66 Burton W. Peretti, “Democratic Leitmotivs in the American Reception of Wagner,” 19th-Century Music 13/1 (Summer, 1989): 29. 67 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture , 107. 68 Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne, 109. 69 Peretti, “Democratic Leitmotivs,” 30. 70 Ibid., 33.

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involvement in the 1849 May Uprising in Dresden and subsequent exile from Germany allowed a narrative of Wagner as democratic revolutionary to emerge.

In Franz Liszt, Americans had a rare opportunity to study with a composer and virtuoso who was sympathetic to Wagner, as both were representatives of the New

German School. The Weimar Orchesterschule was the only German school of music in the nineteenth century to give a warm welcome to the progressive movement. While

Liszt did not teach at the Orchesterschule , the school was indebted to his ideas regarding structure and pedagogy. He also taught master classes in Weimar from 1869 until he died in 1886. 71

Liszt celebrated his American disciples. Carl Lachmund, an American who studied with Liszt from 1882 to 1884, recorded that Liszt was especially enthusiastic about his American students, specifically because of their American culture. In 1883,

Liszt’s students held an “American dinner” for the master. Liszt used the occasion to voice his gratitude toward America. Americans’ willingness to appreciate his work when it was scorned in Europe—except for Russia—was one inspiration among many for

Liszt to declare his undying respect for Americans.72 Liszt was not just flattering his

hosts. As Lachmund recalled:

Now came my ordeal: the task of “saying something appropriate” had fallen to me, the very antipode of a speech-maker; of course it ended with a “Hoch” for the subject of the toast, and all went to clink their wine glasses with him. Liszt, amused, was the first to rise when I had finished. After clinking glasses with him,

71 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Charting the Future of Zukunftsmusik : Liszt and the Weimar Orchesterschule,” The Musical Quarterly 80/2 (Summer, 1996): 348-349. 72 Carl Lachmund, Living with Liszt: from the diary of Carl Lachmund, an American pupil of Liszt, 1882- 1884 , ed. Alan Walker (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1995), 259, 261.

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we waited for him to take his seat, but he remained standing; looking reflectively at our [American] flag, he raised his hand, indicating that he wished to speak. We were puzzled; we knew that Liszt never spoke, and I had seen him refuse to do so at the great Wagner banquet at Bayreuth. It was evident that he intended to honor the Americans in this special way. “You all know that I am not in the habit of speaking,” he began, “but this is really such a charming occasion that I wish to say just a few words.” Pointing at the flag he extolled its beauty, saying that it was an emblem that brought to one’s mind many great things America had accomplished in its short history. 73

Liszt’s admiration for his American students was not echoed by conservatory instructors

throughout Germany. In 1872, the American pianist Amy Fay described her teacher,

Theodore Kullak, as profoundly prejudiced against Americans. Though Kullak’s most

talented students were Americans, he often remarked, when faced with substandard

musicianship: “Why, Fräulein, you play as if you came from America.” 74

Americans often made a distinction between German music education as such and the German conservatory as an educational institution. The German masters were superlative; their attention to the administration of a well-run school was not.

Widespread American disappointment in the German educational system reflects the fact that the American school system was seen, by Germans and Americans alike, as a triumph of American culture. Germans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to regard America as a cultural wasteland, but the ideal of universal access to education, however, was an important aspect of the debate over American modernity. 75

In his 1906 book, American Impressions , the playwright and poet Ludwig Fulda stated

73 Ibid., 261-262. 74 Fay, Music-Study in Germany , 170. 75 Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne , 217.

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that America thoroughly embraced the idea that education should be available to all who seek it rather than the purview of the elite. He wrote that the American educational system had amazed him more than anything else he saw in his travels. 76 Germans

tended to view American schools as bastions of pragmatism and modernity. 77 The practical focus of American schools struck Germans as of a piece with the pragmatic mindset that marked American modernity. 78

Disappointment with how German educational institutions functioned marked

American commentary on studying in Germany as well as American musicians’

impressions of their experiences. The 1888 New York Times article about American students in Berlin captured the dynamic in which German learning was praised but

German schools were criticised. The Times acknowledged that German professors had

much knowledge to impart, even to professors at America’s most august universities.

The Times noted with dismay, though, that these serious scholars were joined in

Berlin’s lecture halls by unqualified students. One of these was “a youth who stated that his purpose in entering the university was to ‘see the fellers.’” Another was an archeology student who imagined that Cologne was on the way from Berlin to Rome.

The Times drew from the examples of these incompetents a lesson for American proponents of importing the German university system. “Just fancy the products that would be turned loose upon an unsuspecting public from an institution in New-York or

Chicago which should require no more preparation or regularity than the University of

Berlin does from foreigners!” The Times noted that it was possible to obtain the

76 Ludwig Fulda, Amerikanische Eindrücke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1906), 105, 123. 77 Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne , 221. 78 Ibid., 225-226.

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signatures required to prove completion of a course without ever actually attending a lecture. 79 This combination of reverence for German culture and learning combined with

skepticism of the German educational system is apparent in the reflections of

Americans who studied at German conservatories.

Chadwick’s experiences demonstrate disappointment with the practice of

conservatories alongside an appreciation of the opportunity they provided to study with

masters. Shortly after he entered the Leipzig Conservatory, Chadwick received a

schedule that required him to attend a total of ten hours of lessons with six different

teachers even though he had intended to study only with two instructors. He appealed

to one of his professors, who laughed and treated it as self-evident that students did not

have to attend the lessons to which they were assigned. 80 Chadwick’s critique of the

Leipzig Conservatory as an educational institution found echoes in his appraisal of the

conservatory in Munich. He remarked on the inflexibility of a system that obliged him to

pass an entrance examination despite what he had already accomplished in Leipzig. He

also found the method of public examination, in which he had to complete compositional

exercises on a blackboard in front of the entire faculty, to be unduly harsh. 81 Rigidity and a lack of accommodating spirit characterise German conservatories in Chadwick’s descriptions.

Henry Holden Huss was another American music student who valued his

German instructors but did not have the same respect for the schools in which they taught. Huss, who studied with Rheinberger as well as Josef Giehrl in Munich from 1882

79 “American Boys in Berlin,” New York Times , 10 June, 1888, 13. 80 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1877-1880. 81 Ibid.

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to1885, remarked on the lack of attention to academic standards: “it was optional whether one did any contrapuntal work at home (except at examination time) or not.” 82

In May 1883, Huss wrote to his family to inform them of his success in examinations in piano and fugue. After describing the exercises and performances that comprised his examinations, he remarked: “That was the extent of my ‘Clavier Prüfung’!!” 83 The two exclamation points convey astonishment; we can infer that the examination was not as rigorous as Huss had anticipated. Yet Huss had nothing but effusive praise for

Rheinberger as a teacher.

In the American understanding, European art had no equal in American culture, but German educational practice was a travesty. In July 1898, the Musical Courier , a

preeminent American music magazine, published a scathing critique of the Berlin

Musikhochschule . This came in the form of an article by Leonard Liebling, in which he

purported to publish excerpts from the diary of Sylvanus Urban, a young American who

had studied at the Berlin Musikhochschule . Both Urban and his diary were fictitious.

Liebling felt compelled to publish this “manuscript” because a discussion of music

education in Germany was timely. Sylvanus Urban’s fictitious experiences demonstrate

the tension between the high regard for the quality of German music teaching and the

disappointment with conservatories as schools. Through his invented character, Urban,

Liebling portrayed the German conservatory system as outrageously exploitative. 84

82 Henry Holden Huss, “Rheinberger as a Teacher,” The Musical Courier 4 July, 1888, 18. 83 Quoted in Gary Allen Greene, “The Life and Music of Henry Holden Huss,” 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1987, 1:29. 84 Liebling, “Shattered Idols, 1. The Musical Courier articles discussed here are held in UdK 1/7.

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Urban was depicted as having a naive (and stereotypically American) faith in meritocracy. He believed in the “glorious tradition” and “august authority” of the

Musikhochschule , whose professors were “famous the world over as examples of integrity and honor and sincerity.” Urban was thus scandalised by allegations that admission to the Musikhochschule could be obtained through bribery and that professors would secure admission for their private pupils regardless of talent. Urban rejected all chicanery in favour of assiduous practise, certain that the esteemed conservatory would prove worthy of his faith in it. It did not. He was forced to acknowledge the truth of another American student’s verdict: “Tradition and all that rot sounds very well, but those men all have their eye on the pocketbook.” 85

The sorrows of the young Urban add a new element to the American disappointment with the functioning of German conservatories: the notion that these institutions had been corrupted by the modern values, including commercialism, that

American musicians went to Europe to escape. Urban remarked repeatedly that such corrupt practices might obtain at an American conservatory but should never take place in Germany. Liebling’s story asserted that talk of tradition was so much empty rhetoric masking the Musikhochschule ’s true priority: money. This applies the standard critique of American modernity’s effects on culture to Germany instead. Even in Germany, supposedly free of the corrosive modern subjugation of all human endeavours to commerce, art and genius were only important as commodities to be bought and sold.

A rebuttal to this Musical Courier article affirmed that German music education was superior precisely because it was not tainted by financial considerations. Sigismund

85 Ibid., 2.

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Nosmirg, who identified himself as an American living in Berlin, published a letter in a subsequent issue. Nosmirg took issue with Liebling’s depiction and criticised the ego and unrealistic expectations of American students. Tellingly, he reminded American readers that the teachers and environment of Berlin offered more opportunities for artistic growth “than is possible if the embryo artist is at home, immersed and surrounded by business considerations .” He also noted that the Musikhochschule was a public institution whose priority was the education of Germans. Nosmirg argued that private lessons were not a self-serving ploy by the teachers. Rather they were an obvious way to develop the skills necessary for admission. Nosmirg was aware that

Americans criticised the system of education, not the quality of the education. He found this misguided. He emphasised that Liebling’s story gave “a very wrong impression of

Berlin teaching, or rather system of teaching , for about the teaching itself there can be

no two minds.” 86

Americans were often frustrated by their experiences in German institutions of music education. Young Americans who sought to escape their country’s commercial mindset for a society more amenable to their artistic aspirations found that their

American culture structured their expectations and experiences in German conservatories. They were distressed that their idealised vision of Germany’s differences from the United States was not always accurate. And their reception by professors and fellow students was coloured by German perceptions of American culture.

86 Sigismund Nosmirg, “Reply to Leonard Liebling,” Musical Courier 24 August, 1898, 21-22, my emphases. UdK 1/7.

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IV: German Conservatories and American Culture

While American musicians debated the effects of German influence on their culture,

Germans discussed whether—and how—to incorporate aspects of American culture into German conservatories. Germans did not uniformly regard the United States as a land devoid of Kunst und Kultur . Some sought to incorporate American cultural innovations into German music-educational curricula. Enthusiasm for American musical forms led German music students to their own disappointing experiences in American conservatories. The proper place of jazz in German music education was a major source of controversy in the 1920s and 1930s, sparking heated debates about race, national culture and the role of popular music in academic institutions. In that same era,

German conservatory students made overtures to their American counterparts with mixed reactions from conservatory administrators and government officials.

Germans and Austrians sometimes sought out American music education, though not in as large numbers as the flow in the opposite direction. In the 1920s, this came as a surprise to Austrian officialdom. Whereas some Viennese officials welcomed the possibility of exchange with the United States, the very idea that American institutions would have anything to offer budding Austrian musicians struck others as simply ridiculous. In December 1927, the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New

York wrote to Dr. Frederick Fischerauer, Austria’s local consul general. The Institute’s assistant director, Archie M. Palmer, began by informing the Austrian diplomat of his institution’s work in providing fellowships for French, German, Czechoslovakian,

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Hungarian and Swiss students to study in the United States. The IIE also sent

Americans abroad in an effort to foster goodwill. Palmer noted that he was gratified to learn of overtures Fischerauer had made to Austrian authorities about establishing an exchange between the United States and Austria. Fischerauer forwarded the IIE’s material to the Austrian Chancellory later that month. He requested that the information be passed on to any interested parties, especially the Austro-American Institute of

Education (AAIE) and the University of Vienna. 87

Both Palmer’s letter and Fischerauer’s report to his government found their way to the Fachhochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst , which existed from 1924-1931 as an initiative of the Vienna Akademie . The Fachhochschule was created to ensconce the conservatory in the ranks of domestic universities and foreign music schools, which frequently held the status of Hochschule .88 Both the American consulate in Vienna and the AAIE had a history of encouraging American enrollment at Vienna’s music- educational institutions. In 1926, the AAIE’s director, the prominent Austrian pedagogue

Dr. Paul L. Dengler, 89 wrote to Joseph Marx, the rector of the Fachhochschule , to press for the establishment of special music courses, in English, for Americans. Dengler explained that his institute sought increased contact between the United States and

87 UMdK, Kt. 27/09-45 Rektorat 1928. 88 See the history of the current Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst by Dr. Lynne Heller at http://www.mdw.ac.at/?pageid=31 . Robert Lach’s 1927 history described the Fachhochschule as having been created as a branch of the Akademie , as opposed to created as a separate institution, in order to lend the institution the character of a Hochschule . The Fachhochschule formed, then, “the conclusion and the crowning achievement of the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst .” See Robert Lach, Geschichte der Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (Vienna: Strache, 1927), 121-122. 89 See “History,” Austro-American Institute of Education, online at http://www.aaie.at/j/index.php?Itemid=64 .

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Austria, to be achieved by bringing Americans to Vienna. He was convinced that an awareness campaign would help realise this goal. 90

Why Vienna? Dengler explained that Austria and particularly Vienna had a range of impressive cultural institutions that had good reputations abroad but were attended by Americans in relatively low numbers, due to the lack of organisations to arrange

American participation. He thought that the conservatory was the “natural setting” for such special courses, as it was also famous abroad. A few days later, the rector responded that he approved of Dengler’s initiative, but could not offer courses in English due to his faculty’s insufficient command of the language. 91 The American consul, John

P. Hurley, was also concerned with the conservatory. In 1926, Hurley was tasked by the

United States Department of State with gathering information about the structure and policies of Austrian institutions of higher education, including the conservatory, due to the high esteem in which they were held. 92

When an educational exchange was suggested, it followed as a matter of course that the Austrian minister of education sent the documents by Palmer and Fischerauer to the rector of the Fachhochschule . Marx’s response reveals an official understanding of American music education that is completely in line with the views of Amy Fay,

Chadwick and others who fled America’s insufficient music-educational infrastructure.

Marx considered student exchanges between Austria and the United States to be a good thing. Regarding the Fachhochschule , though, such a scheme was out of the question. Because of “the undeniable fact that no American music school comes close

90 UMdK, Kt. 26/09-45 Rektorat 1924-27. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid.

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to the artistic-pedagogical status of the Vienna Musikhochschule , there is hardly any incentive for the music students here to complete part of their musical studies in the

United States.” He then made the point more directly: whereas many Americans preferred to study music in Vienna, there was not a single known case of an Austrian going to the United States to do so. 93

Three years later, in 1931, German music students challenged Marx’s certainty.

The DMSt, the union of German music students described in Chapter 2, discussed exchanges between German and American music students at its 1931 annual conference. Shortly after the Vienna Fachhochschule ’s rector had scoffed at the notion of his students visiting an American conservatory, a German-wide organisation in which

Viennese students were also involved discussed American music study for Germans.

The topic was raised at the 1931 conference by Georg Blumensaat, the DMSt’s chair.

Blumensaat reported on the DMSt’s partnership with an organisation known as the

Terramare Office, which worked to foster exchanges between German and American students. 94

The day after Blumensaat discussed the cooperation between the DMSt and the

Terramare Office, a certain Dr. Mönnig of the Terramare Office addressed the conference. He reported on his office’s efforts to coordinate reciprocal exchanges, whereby American scholarships were provided for German students, and vice versa.

93 UMdK, Kt. 27/09-45 Rektorat 1928. 94 UdK, 1/3289, Hochschulverband Deutscher Musikstudenten. The Terramare Office was a propaganda organisation that distributed information about Germany abroad. Before 1933, the Terramare Office published such works as Oberammergau: God's Alpine Wonderland and Art in Germany . Under Nazi rule, it turned to topics such as National Socialist architecture, the life of Adolf Hitler and racial curriculum in German schools. Publications of the Terramare Office from 1934-1937 are held by the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. See http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt3870312k;query=;style=oac4;doc.view=entire_text

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The first such exchange had occurred during the academic year from 1930 to 1931.

Two students of the Berlin Musikhochschule studied for ten months at the “Julia School” in New York—presumably the Juilliard School—and two Americans enrolled in the

Musikhochschule ’s opera school. One of the Americans was able to secure an

appointment as a lyrical tenor at the State Opera Unter den Linden . The exchange was

viewed as a success. Mönnig announced that it would be continued in the following

year; a pianist from the Chicago Musical College had already been chosen to

participate. 95

One of the Germans who had studied at the Juilliard School was a violist named

Wichmann. Following Mönnig’s address, Wichmann reported on his impressions of and experiences in New York. He commented on the difficulties facing a foreigner who intended to remain and earn money in the United States. He praised the “pleasantly collegial and mutual spirit of the students” at Juilliard. Then, he remarked: “Modern music is generally unknown; the most popular music is still Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, that is, German classics.” Wichmann also noted that American music schools had no brass classes, only strings and piano, which may also have been a comment on the absence of modern music (such as jazz) in the curriculum. This German had embarked excitedly on music education in the United States. He returned mildly disappointed to find pride of place there given to German music rather than the modern American music he had anticipated encountering. 96

95 UdK, 1/3289. 96 Ibid.

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The DMSt’s enthusiasm for American exchange was met with resistance by

German conservatory officials. In Vienna, Marx did not see the value of such an exchange. Georg Schünemann, the assistant director of the Berlin Musikhochschule , told the DMSt in 1929 that he was concerned that Germany must work harder to retain its leading position in the world of music. This was because the United States increasingly focused on developing its own musical culture and dissuaded students from studying music in Germany. 97 This hardly suggests a willingness to surrender his own students to American influence. While the students were clearly eager—Wichmann fielded numerous questions after his presentation on his time in New York—government officials responsible for music education found that this enthusiasm among the students, especially for attracting Americans to German conservatories, went too far.

Governmental officials also disagreed with students about the desirability of American experience.

The divergence of opinions between students and officialdom is illustrated through the story of the 1927 publication of The Study of Music in Germany . This book introduced German conservatories, including the Vienna Akademie and Hochschule , to

prospective American students. Both Schünemann and Franz Schreker, the director of

the Berlin Musikhochschule , authored contributions to this volume. 98 Schünemann feared that German conservatories were losing their status among Americans, so it was in his interests to advertise German music education to Americans. The Study of Music

97 Ibid. 98 “Information,” in The Study of Music in Germany , eds. Karl Kiesel and Ernst Otto Thiele (New York and Bremen: The University Department of the North German Lloyd in Collaboration with the Union of German Students of Music, 1927), 57.

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in Germany was an initiative of the DMSt. The music students were specifically

motivated to reach out to Americans after positive encounters with American music

students. Prussian officials, however, were reluctant to support such an endeavour. The

publication of this “propaganda book,” as the students dubbed it, shows that students in

inter-war Germany and Austria were intrigued by and wanted greater contact with

Americans. Administrators such as Schünemann and Schreker welcomed such contact

too, to enhance the international standing of German musical institutions.

Those with political responsibility for music education in Germany were not

convinced of the value of reaching out to the United States. The “propaganda book” was

first proposed in 1926. Schünemann requested a subvention for such a project from the

Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education. 99 In October 1927, Arno

Schellenberg—who later had a successful career as a baritone—wrote to the education

minister in his role as chairman of the DMSt. Schellenberg informed him that the DMSt’s

upcoming “music week” and conference was a spur for the music students’ union to

renew contacts with its counterparts in neighbouring countries and to advertise

Germany’s music schools. He referred to a “foreign office” of the DMSt that had been

serving that purpose for a year, mainly by managing connections with Americans. 100

After highlighting the DMSt’s particular interest in American music students,

Schellenberg pointed to the recently published guide for Americans to German music

schools as the beginning of the DMSt’s successful publicity campaign. He invoked this

project to convince the minister to provide funding for the “music week,” which would

99 Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung . 100 UdK, 1/3289.

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continue the work of forging contacts with foreigners. 101 The requested support was not forthcoming. Wilhelm Nentwig, the conservative director of the Ministry’s arts section, 102 wrote that the requested financial support was out of the question due to a lack of available funds. He added that “the student union’s dealings with foreign countries” struck him as already “too extensive.” 103

The students’ interest in America occurred at a time when one American art form in particular, jazz, was making inroads in German culture and specifically in German music education. Germans and Austrians exhibited enthusiasm for jazz in the inter-war period, though to a lesser degree than their contemporaries in Britain and France. 104

There were overlaps between some features of jazz and music of the 1920s composed

in a manner closer to the European tradition, including the freer employment of

percussion and the elevation of brass over strings.105 The word “jazz” has been used to

describe wildly different forms of music in different time periods and national contexts.

The jazz played by German musicians was markedly different from the music

understood as jazz in the United States, which in turn differed from the numerous ways

that twenty-first-century musicians and listeners understand jazz. In the 1920s,

Germans developed their understanding of jazz from imported charts, rumours and text

books such as Alfred Baresel’s Das Jazzbuch from 1925. 106

101 Ibid. 102 Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier, Kunst für die Republik: die Kunstpolitik des preussischen Kultusministeriums 1918 bis 1932 (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), 15, 51. 103 UdK, 1/3289. 104 Daniel Ramseier, “‘Harlemer Nachtlied.’ Wilhelm Grosz und sein Zyklus Afrika-Songs op. 29,” in “Wohin geht der Flug? Zur Jugend.” Franz Schreker und seine Schüler in Berlin, eds. Markus Böggemann and Dietmar Schenk (New York: Olms, 2009), 131. 105 Ibid., 133. 106 Ibid., 131. See Alfred Baresel, Das Jazz-Buch (Leipzig: Zimmermann, 1926).

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Importantly, though, the German discourse of jazz connected it both to specific aspects of American culture, including America’s racial diversity and its cultural modernity. These connections among jazz, African-Americans and modernity in the

European imagination are demonstrated by Ernst Krenek’s jazz-opera Jonny spielt auf , composed from 1925 to 1926. 107 The piece told the story of an African-American jazz musician. Krenek explained its themes as the divide between the “historically overburdened and brooding” central-European spirit, on the one hand, and the new, life- affirming mentality represented by America. Krenek used the train, a symbol of industrial modernity, to symbolise freedom. The Alpine glacier, by contrast, stood for stultifying European intellecutalism. Jonny spielt auf , with its music closer to jazz as understood in Europe than in America, nonetheless illustrates the way Europeans’ approach to jazz were wrapped up with their understanding of American culture. 108

Conservatories took a leading role in shaping the German cultural reception of jazz. Krenek wrote his jazz opera—a term he rejected for Jonny spielt auf 109 —after studying at the Vienna Akademie and the Berlin Musikhochschule . In 1925, as Krenek began working on Jonny spielt auf , Franz Schreker—the director of the

Musikhochschule and Krenek’s teacher— also began an experimental Zeitoper , or topical opera, entitled Christophorus . The music captured the sounds and atmosphere

of Berlin of the 1920s, including jazz as it was performed in that city. The second

version of the much-revised libretto, from 1926, contained two acts set in America,

107 Krenek rejected the term “jazz-opera.” 108 Kurt Drexel, “American Jazz in Ernst Krenek’s Opera Jonny spielt auf,” in The Americanization/Westernization of Austria , eds. Bischof and Pelinka, 102-103, 105. 109 Jonathan O. Wipplinger, “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf ,” in Blackness in Opera , eds. Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan and Eric Saylor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 243.

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which allowed Schreker to include more jazz and other evocations of American culture. 110

Curricular choices also thrust music education to the forefront of the German debate about jazz. Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt was another battlefield on which American culture was conscripted into the conflict over whether conservatories should institutionalise modern music. In 1927, the conservatory’s director, Bernhard

Sekles, announced the first jazz course in a European music school. He did so in a notice sent to major musical publications. The resulting uproar perfectly captures conservatories’ position as facilitators of American culture—as Germans understood it— in the Weimar era. The debate over this Jazzklasse reached all the way to the Prussian

Landtag . Traditionalists’ fears gave weight to accusations that jazz was colonising

German music, since this American art form now had a berth at a German institution of

music education. 111 As the New York Times put it, this was more worrisome than jazz attaining popularity among the public; in assuming a place at a German conservatory, jazz had penetrated “the sacred precincts of art.” 112 This rhetoric inverts Chadwick’s

formulation of Germans evangelising American music. For Chadwick, proper training in

a German conservatory was vital to ward off the invading “Toot-ons.” In the case of jazz

instruction in Frankfurt decades later, the German conservatory was a bridgehead for

the American musical invasion.

110 Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker, 1878-1934: A cultural biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 245-246, 359n28. 111 Jonathan Otto Wipplinger, “The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2006, 255-258. 112 “Jazz Bitterly Opposed in Germany,” New York Times , 11 March 1928, 114.

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The cultural discussion about the jazz course also had a racial dimension. It was as much about the threat or promise of African-American culture as it was about

American culture more broadly. Sekles attempted to depict the introduction of a jazz course as a practical matter. He wanted to provide training for the “majority of [German] musicians” who found “themselves permanently or temporarily compelled to play in jazz ensembles.” 113 Reasoning rooted in cultural ideologies followed close behind, though.

Sekles thought that “only a transfusion of unspent Negro blood” could counteract the

“increasingly abstract-speculative” nature of European art. Furthermore, jazz instruction

would correct Germans’ “conspicuously little joy in the rhythmic , despite the fact that it is

generally recognized that rhythm is to be seen as the pulse of all music.” 114

The prominent music critic Karl Holl struck the same two notes in defense of

Sekles. Holl approvingly repeated Sekles’s practical justifications for instruction in jazz.

He added that introducing jazz to a reputable conservatory would provoke wider engagement with the question of the relationship between popular music and art music.

He then addressed opponents of the jazz course, who rejected the introduction of jazz as “suicide” for European music. Holl charged these critics with ignoring the danger of

“degeneration through inbreeding.” The “adoption of foreign substances,” he claimed, had always been necessary for meaningful cultural achievement. 115

Of the conservatory directors who weighed in publicly on Sekles’s venture,

Schreker was the least disparaging. To him, the introduction of a jazz class was a

113 “Ibid., 114. 114 Wipplinger, “The Jazz Republic,” 274-275. This is Wipplinger’s translation of Sekles’s announcement of the jazz course. See “Kreuz und Quer. Jazzklasse an Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium,” Zeitschrift für Musik 94 (1927): 706. 115 Karl Holl, “Jazz im Konservatorium,” Melos 7 (1928): 30-32.

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measure taken prematurely and not something he would consider for the Berlin

Musikhochschule . Other conservatory directors adopted their own line of attack.

Sigmund von Hausegger of the Munich Akademie concentrated on Sekles’s disregard

for the distinction between high and low culture by suggesting that a dance hall be

added to the conservatory to complement the jazz course. Joseph Marx, who had

already scoffed at the idea that his Austrian students could have anything to learn from

America, expressed opposition to Sekles in explicitly racial terms. This “negro music”

had amused Marx for “fifteen minutes” before boring him. Furthermore, “German music

is far from needing a blood transfusion of this kind.” 116

German critics of jazz regarded it as simultaneously primitive and modern. The

jazz class’s opponents asked whether the “intellectual rhythm” of European and

specifically German music did not have an effectiveness far beyond “the vital—still vital

despite all the civilisation and industrialisation—rhythm of jazz.” 117 This understanding of jazz corresponds to the common German association of Africa (and the African diaspora) with primitiveness. 118 The critics argued that jazz had retained its core

elements despite modernity. German conservatives associated jazz with “primitive

sexuality.” 119 On the other hand, the emergence of jazz from the heart of modernity, the locus of “civilisation and industrialisation,” positions it firmly as an African-American, as opposed to an African, phenomenon. Indeed, a putatively primitive “other” was a founding ingredient of modernism. While “primitive” was discursively employed as the

116 “Jazz Bitterly Opposed in Germany,” 114. 117 Holl, “Jazz im Konservatorium,” 31-32. 118 Uta G. Poiger, “American Jazz in the German Cold War,” in Music and German National Identity , eds. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 218. 119 Ibid., 19.

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opposite of “civilised,” jazz as a supposedly primitive music was held by German critics to be firmly rooted in the conditions of modernity.120

The two aspects of America that Germans were most impressed by—positively and negatively— were Henry Ford and jazz. Ford stood for progress and economic modernity. Some Germans associated the rhythms of jazz with the prosperity of industrial mass production. 121 But critics of jazz and other forms of popular music equated such music with the putatively negative aspects of the assembly-line model. No less a theorist than Theodor W. Adorno, writing in 1941, criticised the standardisation of popular music. He linked the promotion and distribution of popular music to industrial mass production. (As for the production of popular music, he saw the composer as still practicing a handicraft that had not yet fully submitted to the logic of mass production; instead, composers feigned industrialisation “in order to look more up-to-date.”) He reserved his harshest criticism for jazz as the quintessential example of standardisation in popular music. According to Adorno, improvisation only appeared as an expression of artistic freedom; in reality, it was so constrained by norms and frameworks that it was actually “pseudo-individualization.” 122 Jazz, then, appeared in the German imagination

as a feature of “primitivist modernism,” seen as both reflecting defining features of

120 Vitality, the primitivist myth and the relationship between jazz and modernity were important strands in early European critical and scholarly appraisal of jazz. See Ted Gioia, “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth,” Musical Quarterly 73/1 (1989): 130-143 and Tom Perchard, “Tradition, Modernity and the Supernatural Swing: Re-Reading ‘Primitivism’ in Hugues Panassié’s Writing on Jazz,” Popular Music 30/1 (2011): 25- 45. 121 Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4-9. 122 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music [With the assistance of George Simpson],” in Essays on Music , ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 443-445. Lemke has questioned whether this connection between jazz and factory mechanisation can withstand scrutiny. She argues that such analysis overlooked the contradictions between “the syncopated improvisation of jazz and the mechanized routine of the assembly line.” See Lemke, Primitivist Modernism , 6.

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modern life and stemming from an African diaspora culture regarded as “primitive.” 123

Cultural conservatives of the 1920s also associated jazz with rootless moderns

par excellence : Jews. They derided jazz as music invented by black people and marketed by Jews. 124 This conception of jazz persisted in the nationalist and anti- modernist imagination. After the Vienna premiere of Jonny spielt auf , Krenek’s jazz- opera, a conspiracy theory circulated alleging that the opera was part of a Jewish plot to undermine German culture. The racist and antisemitic reaction to Jonny spielt auf was at the same time an anti-American and anti-modern reaction. 125 A Nazi caricature of

Jonny spielt auf for the 1938 Entartete Musik (“Degenerate Music”) exhibit shows a simian saxophonist with an earring in his ear and a Star of David on his lapel. 126 Thus,

jazz was connected not only to Africanness but also to effeminacy and, through

association with Jews, to Americanness through the crucible of American syncretism.

Not incidentally, Sekles, the originator of the jazz class in Frankfurt, was Jewish. His

opponents made his Jewishness central to their condemnation of his efforts to bring

jazz into the conservatory. 127

123 Lemke, Primitivist Modernism , 9. 124 Poiger, “American Jazz,” 218. 125 Christian Rogowski, “Staging the African American Conquest of Old Europe: Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf ,” in From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African America and Germany , eds. Maria I. Diedrich and Jürgen Heinrichs (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 110. 126 Drexel, “American Jazz,” 107. The “Degenerate Music” exhibit was staged alongside of the first Reich Music Days in Düsseldorf. It occurred one year after the exhibition of “Degenerate Art” in Munich. See Pamela M. Potter, “Music in the Third Reich: The Complex Task of ‘Germanization,’” in The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change , eds. Jonathan Huener and Francis R. Nicosia (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 92-93; Albrecht Dümling, “The Target of Racial Purity: The ‘Degenerate Music’ Exhibition in Düsseldorf, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich , ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 43-72; and Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 78, 125. 127 See Joachim Tschiedel, “Der "jüdische Scheindirektor" Bernhard Sekles und die Gründung der ersten europäischen Jazz-Klasse 1928,” mr-Mitteilungen 20 (September 1996): 10-17 and idem, Bernhard Sekles, 1872-1934: Leben und Werk des Frankfurter Komponisten und Pädagogen (Schneverdingen: Wagner, 2005).

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Music education was at the centre of a complicated discourse of America, Jews, black culture, jazz and transnational influence. The example of the Comedian

Harmonists, a German vocal ensemble, shows how German conservatories were yoked to German debates over American culture. The Comedian Harmonists offered the musical public of the late 1920s and early 1930s American jazz and ragtime music through a German filter. The sextet’s founder, Harry Frommermann, was inspired by the

Revelers, an American group. He sought to create a German equivalent to bring, in the words of a 1929 announcement, “vocal art in the most modern form” to German audiences. 128

To prove their legitimacy as representatives of this modern, American art form,

the Comedian Harmonists capitalised on widespread assumptions about the music-

educational establishment. Three of the six Comedian Harmonists—Frommermann,

Erich A. Collin and the pianist Erwin Bootz—had studied at the Berlin Musikhochschule .

(Frommermann spent a semester at the Staatliche Schauspielschule , or State Drama

School, a branch of the Musikhochschule that existed from 1925-1931.) 129 In

programmes and advertisements, the Comedian Harmonists proudly declared the

transgressions of official culture in the name of jazz that led them away from more

respectable cultural and professional pursuits and to the sextet. This included the claim

that Bootz had been “thrown out” of the Musikhochschule by Schreker for “his

disrespectful jazzing up of classical operas.” This was not true. Schünemann threatened

128 Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik , 237. 129 Ibid., 187, 236.

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Bootz with legal action unless he desisted from spreading this story. 130 The Comedian

Harmonists’ claims about the Musikhochschule amounted to clever self-promotion, as

the Musikhochschule was anything but hidebound in the years of the Weimar Republic.

The Comedian Harmonists, with their three Jewish members, gave their final

performance in 1935 before being banned by the Nazi regime. 131 The question of the

position of Jews in German music education will be taken up in the following chapter.

This chapter has argued that the musical relationship between the United States,

on the one hand, and Germany and Austria, on the other, was marked by anxieties

about cultural influence. A mixture of fascination and trepidation defined German-

American cultural exchange. Music was an important aspect of transatlantic relations. 132

The history of music education expands our understanding of the ambiguities of this

relationship. American musicians recognised German accomplishments in music

education and regarded German conservatories as valuable sources of education that

was unavailable in their homeland. They sought to use their German training to create a

distinctly American form of music, though, and were wary of the outsized role of

German music in American culture. They also often did not find that their artistic

preferences were valued by the German music-educational establishment. Germans

were similarly both attracted to and disdainful of American cultural influence. German

music students sought to attract more Americans to German conservatories and were

disappointed to discover the heroes of their own canon at the United States’ premier

130 Ibid., 236-237. 131 Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39. 132 See Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy .

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conservatory. The question of jazz in German music education inspired a heated debate. Some saw in American culture the potential to add vitality to a culture they considered frustratingly stale and intellectualised. Others thought that conservatories should be bulwarks against Americanisation and connected jazz to their racial and antisemitic anxieties. In both directions, music-educational exchange reveals ambivalence: the perceived necessity of cross-cultural fertilisation coupled with disdain; the appreciation of foreign traditions coupled with an undertone of resentment; participation coupled with rejection.

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Spiritual Homelands and “Racial” Difference: Music Education and the

Boundaries of Jewish Belonging

I: Introduction

In 1825, the name Heinrich Ernst appeared in a programme for a concert featuring

students of the recently founded Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in

Vienna. This was the first time that Ernst, who went on to be one of his generation’s leading violinists, was listed in a programme for a concert at the Conservatorium . In

1828, Ernst was dismissed from the Conservatorium for violating school policy.

Specifically, he had returned to his hometown of Brünn—now Brno in the Czech

Republic—to tend to his sick father. Ernst remained in Moravia longer than his

authorised leave from the Conservatorium and found himself expelled. Upon returning

to Vienna, Ernst requested reinstatement as a student, but he also asked to be

exempted from lessons at the Conservatorium . Ernst was already supporting himself by

giving violin lessons. Why, then, did he bother asking for the restoration of his student

status? As a Jew, he feared that permission to reside in Vienna might be denied him if

he were not formally registered as a music student. Ernst’s appeal was successful and

he was reinstated as a conservatory student. In his 1871 history of the Gesellschaft der

Musikfreunde and its conservatory, C. F. Pohl recounted Ernst’s story and quoted a

letter from the Conservatorium to Archduke Rudolph, the royal protector of the

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Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde ,1 in which the conservatory directors were clear that this

exemplary student should be readmitted solely so that he might be allowed to stay in

the imperial capital. 2 The committee wrote to the Archduke in a neutral tone, but the

letter’s frank acknowledgement of the practical benefits for Ernst, as a Jew, of having

student status suggests a hint of pride at the conservatory’s ability to facilitate belonging

for a musician who would otherwise be denied opportunity due to his background.

Contrast the Conservatorium ’s response to Ernst’s predicament with the

experience, just over a century later, of another Jew who sought a berth in Vienna

through music education. Franz Schreker was born in Monaco. His father was a

Bohemian Jew. After studying and then teaching at the Vienna Akademie für Musik und

darstellende Kunst , as the Conservatorium was known after 1909, Schreker became

director of the Berlin Musikhochschule in 1920. 3 If not Jewish himself, Schreker’s Jewish ancestry made him “Jewish enough” for discrimination in the minds of racial antisemites.

Seeing his position at the Berlin Musikhochschule threatened due to his Jewish heritage, Schreker wrote to Joseph Marx, director of the Vienna Akademie , in 1933 to inquire about the prospects for securing a position there. Schreker was not alone.

Numerous Austrian Jews working in Germany imagined that their native land would welcome them back as the situation in Germany grew increasingly precarious. Marx replied to Schreker that he had nothing to offer him. Further, Marx wrote that he sympathised with the Germans and that the Jews had brought persecution upon

1 Alexander W. Thayer, “Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainer, Archduke of Austria,” A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (A.D. 1450-1883) , ed. George Grove, 4 vols. (London: MacMillan, 1883), III: 200-201. 2 C[arl] F[erdinand] Pohl, Die Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des österreichischen Kaiserstaates und ihr Conservatorium (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1871): 43-44. 3 Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker, 1878-1934: A Cultural Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9-10, 115.

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themselves through their supposedly outsized and nefarious influence in German culture. 4

The cases of Ernst and Schreker, separated by one hundred years, illuminate the themes of this chapter. In the earlier case, music education was a vehicle for Jewish belonging. Both Ernst, a Jewish student, and the administration of the Vienna

Conservatory saw it as desirable that affiliation with a conservatory be used to secure a

Jewish musician’s ability to teach and earn a living in Vienna. In Schreker’s case, a persecuted Jew thought that his value to music education might rescue him from an oppressive environment and allow him to practise his craft in Vienna, free from the barriers that had been erected around Jews in Germany. The political, ideological and cultural atmosphere in 1930s Austria meant that Schreker’s hopes were cruelly dashed.

The transformations that account for these drastically different encounters between

Jews and Austro-German music education mirror the difficult trajectory of German-

Jewish emancipation, assimilation and persecution. Music was identified in Austro-

German cultural discourse as an art form that found its fullest expression in German- speaking Europe. Music education, then, presented a particularly fraught space for contesting, establishing and denying the terms of German-Jewish cultural belonging.

Educational institutions legitimate and cement official knowledge; they also contribute to the process of constructing identities in line with dominant discourses and definitions. The knowledge and identity imparted through music education concern not only music but the social power relations within which it is produced, consumed and understood. Conservatories of music performed—and perform—cultural work in the way

4 Ibid., 289-290.

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they sanction conceptions of high culture and national culture, through whom they grant or deny access, and in which forms of cultural expression they deem worthy of study and present to the public. As Jews saw unprecedented opportunities and achieved hard-won success in nineteenth-century German society, the question of their involvement in quintessentially German fields of cultural endeavour grew ever more urgent. Parallel to the arc of German-Jewish history, conservatories of music were sites to proclaim and demonstrate belonging; they were also a source of anxiety about

Jewish difference and its possible repercussions. These two roles for conservatories in

German- and Austrian-Jewish history are exemplified by the Vienna conservatory’s efforts to secure a place in Vienna for a talented Jewish musician in 1828 and that same institution’s decision to keep an internationally recognised Jewish artist at bay in 1933.

The story extends beyond Vienna, though. Examples from major conservatories in

Germany and Austria will reveal how the negotiation of difference—by majorities and minorities, non-Jews and Jews alike—took on particular urgency in conservatories of music.

Conservatories combined two important paths to belonging and embourgeoisement: music and education. After legal emancipation, Jews in Germany and Austria sought opportunity and social advancement through education. Relative to their presence in the population, Jews were overrepresented in Austrian and Prussian universities in the late nineteenth century. Their remarkable rise to visibility and prominence in social and cultural life provided grist for the mills of antisemitic politicians

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after the 1880s. 5 Antisemites did not focus solely on Jews’ religious difference, and in

fact campaigned more harshly against assimilated Jews. 6 Such overheated reactions did not change the fact that in the nineteenth century, German Jews held fast to the bourgeois ideal of education. Educational achievement was central to Jewish emancipation, and thus to Jewish embourgeoisement, at the individual and collective levels. 7

As well as being overrepresented in German institutions of higher learning, Jews were also prominent in the field of musical performance. This phenomenon did not occur in a vacuum, but rather was part of the surprising and controversial Jewish rise to prominence and success in nineteenth-century Germany. 8 In Austria as well, Jews were disproportionately prominent in fin-de-siècle Viennese high culture, especially music.

We should not regard this music as somehow particularly or essentially Jewish. The task, rather, is to understand the sociological, political and cultural conditions that resulted in members of an historically marginalised minority, or people defined as such through heritage, achieving such a marked presence among the artistic elite. 9

Connections between the opportunities of Jewish emancipation and careers in music

5 Gary B. Cohen, Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 154-155, 161-162. 6 Alf Lüdtke, “Lebenswelten und Alltagswissen,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte , ed. Christa Berg, vol. 4, 1870-1918. Von der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des ersten Weltkrieges (Munich: Beck, 1991), 61. 7 Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 216, 242. 8 Fritz Stern, Gold und Eisen: Bismarck und sein Bankier Bleichröder , trans. Otto Weith (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999), 9. 9 Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14, 24-26, 32.

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can be shown by considering the attraction of an art form coded as universal to a population seeking mainstream acceptance. 10

Jewish involvement in German music and musical institutions, conversely, helps us better understand German culture. “Universalism” was and is not universal; there is a long tradition of obscuring the Germanness of German music by discursively constructing it as “universal.” 11 Universality is one component of the ideology that “art

music”—commonly called “classical music”—is the most worthy and important music. 12

Claims to universality have historically served to support claims for the superiority of

German music over other supposedly particularist, national musical styles. 13 Music was

also the most highly valued art form among non-Jewish Germans, which made it

attractive to Jews seeking acculturation, embourgeoisement and full emancipation. And,

there were more opportunities for musicians to make a living than for other kinds of

artists. 14 Jews’ striving for admission to a field of endeavour that was allegedly defined and adjudicated according to universal criteria and simultaneously regarded as a particularly German art form was part of a process of carving out a place in the German cultural mainstream.

This chapter explores the intersections among music education, German-Jewish identity and Jews’ cultural position in Austria and Germany. First, I analyse the role of

10 Ruth Katz, “Why Music? Jews and the Commitment to Modernity,” in Deutsche Juden und die Moderne , ed. Shulamit Volkov (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 31. 11 Celia Applegate, “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 21/3 (Spring 1998): 275-276. 12 Lucy Green, “Why ‘Ideology’ is still relevant for critical thinking in music education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 2/2 (December 2003): 16-17. 13 Applegate, “How German Is It?”, 275. 14 Ezra Mendelsohn, “On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life,” in Modern Jews and their Musical Agendas: Studies in Contemporary Jewry an Annual, Volume IX , ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10.

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music-educational discourse, practice and policy in setting the terms for Jewish assimilation. Conservatories of music were one avenue for Jews to take up the promise of belonging offered to them by the majority and predicated on cultural assimilation.

Participation in music education, though, also demonstrates the extent to which the liberal promise of full belonging in exchange for assimilation was, in fact, a “liberal fantasy.” Furthermore, the history of Jewish involvement in conservatories illustrates what Sander Gilman has evocatively called the “conservative curse,” whereby the offer of acceptance became a dream indefinitely deferred. Gilman articulates the

“conservative curse” this way: “The more you are like me, the more I know the true value of my power, which you wish to share, and the more I am aware that you are but a shoddy counterfeit, an outsider.” 15

Some Jews advocated a full erasure of Jewish identity and difference. More

commonly, though, Jews attempted to adapt their Jewish inheritance and reconcile it

with German modernity. Success in musical life and music education helped define the

contours of a German-Jewish and bourgeois identity, one that sought not to obscure all

elements of Jewishness but articulated specific Jewish contributions to German culture.

In the second section of this chapter, I discuss opposition to and limitations of the

possibility of German-Jewish belonging. Third and lastly, I analyse the perceived

connections among Jews, femininity and virtuosity; these connections became a

discourse of exclusion from full cultural belonging as well as a potent criticism of

conservatories of music.

15 Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 2.

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II: Music Education, the Promise of Cultural Belonging and German-Jewish

Bourgeois Identity

In 1911, the German-Jewish music critic and essayist Adolf Weissmann published

Berlin as a City of Music , an overview of the capital city’s musical culture. Weissmann had begun his career with a marked ambivalence to the idea of Jewish music. Over the course of his life—before his untimely death in Palestine, during a trip to explore Jewish music at its source—Weissmann developed into a passionate advocate for the development of Jewish music as such. 16 In a 1924 essay for a Jewish monthly, for example, Weissmann pondered the potential effects of “racial,” cultural and historical factors in Jews’ musical abilities and affinities. He remarked on the difficulty of

“synthesis” between characteristics of the Jewish “race” and German culture. 17

In his 1911 book, Weissmann considered whether Felix Mendelssohn should be considered a Berliner. The composer had been born in Hamburg, not in Berlin.

Weissmann concluded, though, that the activities of Mendelssohn’s prominent grandfather and father in Berlin meant that his cultural belonging in the imperial capital should not be questioned on the basis of his city of birth. Of greater relevance was the fact that Mendelssohn’s “ancestry was not pure in the Berlin sense.” This was a reference to Mendelssohn’s Jewish heritage. Weissmann followed this observation with the facts that Mendelssohn was baptised as a Christian and raised in the Christian faith.

16 Rudolf Réti, “Adolf Weissmann ist gestorben,” Menorah 7/5-6 (May-June 1929): 320-321. 17 Adolf Weissmann, “Der Jude und die Musik,” Menorah 2/1 (January 1924): 13-14.

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The real question, according to Weissmann, was not one of birth or background. It was whether Berliners recognised genius in Mendelssohn, and whether they were prepared to accept his genius. 18 In other words, Mendelssohn’s status as a pillar of Berlin and

German culture depended on his artistic ability and aesthetic affinity for German culture, not on his Jewish heritage.

Weissmann grounded his claim for Mendelssohn’s belonging as a Berliner and a

German in the composer’s brilliance and his conversion to Christianity. Mendelssohn’s conservative compositional style, which set the tone for the Leipzig Conservatory under his direction, is partially attributable to his sincere devotion to his adopted faith and to traditional German values. 19 Weissmann’s comments about Mendelssohn’s ability to transcend his heritage through his active shedding of religious difference and through his aesthetic commitments suggest the terms faced by Jews who sought acceptance as cultural Germans without distinction, at least as understood by an assimilated Jew.

There was a nineteenth-century discourse of German culture as a universal, and universalising, force. In this ideal, which did not find its perfect echo in practice, people of disparate backgrounds could be united through internalisation of and spiritual commitment to German culture, its standards, values and principles. As Weissmann’s focus on both Mendelssohn’s Christianity and his compositional style suggests, Jews could become exemplars of a German culture that was understood as unitary and

18 Adolf Weissmann, Berlin als Musikstadt: Geschichte der Oper und des Konzerts von 1740 bis 1911 (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1911), 176. 19 Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 3.

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having sprung from a supposedly timeless German spirit, but only with certain conditions and limitations.

A belief in a single German high culture that was simultaneously the expression of German genius and the embodiment of universal values and standards is often observable in nineteenth-century cultural thought. Paradoxically, the belief in the power of German culture as an integrating force was inseparable from the belief in the superiority of German culture, specifically German music. The very superiority of

German musical expression made it the purest reflection of supposedly universal aesthetics. German histories of music historically presented the development of music as a German story; music’s true history was explained as a progression of German composers, with token acknowledgement of some foreigners. 20 In short, there is a long genealogy of the idea of Germans as the “people of music.” 21

An entry in an 1873 musical encyclopedia demonstrates the intertwining of universalist claims for German music with national chauvinism. August Reissmann, a biographer of Schubert and Mendelssohn, penned an entry entitled, simply, “Germany.”

Reissmann explained the relationship between German music and universality thus:

The sonata, the symphony and the overture, etc., are German in the truest sense of the word. Yet it cannot be ignored in this regard that music won its magnificent artistic cultivation among Germans only because it was not one- sidedly attached to national needs, as in Italy and France. This highest

20 Albrecht Riethmüller, “‘Is That Not Something for Simplicissimus ?!’ The Belief in Musical Superiority,” in Music and German National Identity , eds. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 291. 21 See Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,” in Music and German National Identity , eds. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1-35.

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perfection wins out only because our German masters see and practice art as an end in itself, and do not one-sidedly subjugate it to the national needs of the masses. ... In contrast [to Italian and French composers], our great German masters gave form, in their artistic works, to the highest and most holy ideas without regard to whether, in so doing, they also satisfied a need of life. [German masters] achieved, thereby, the only correct artistic viewpoint. This, mainly, is the characteristic feature of German music, that it portrays its ideals in eternally exemplary forms, by which we mean not an effusive fantasy’s subjective creation, but rather the sum total of those ideas which are, together, the central and crucial ideas of life. Our masters have always practiced German music as an art form only in this manner, and that is why [German music] has not degenerated to national constraints ... but rather has become universal in the best sense of the word. 22

German music was commonly defined as existing outside of and above petty national concerns. The encyclopedia entry quoted above was not idiosyncratic; it expressed the widespread view of nineteenth-century German musicologists that

German music was universal and thus superior because it eschewed parochialism. 23

Musical criticism inside and outside of Germany conflated the putative universalism of

German music with its superiority, and thus prized the German people as uniquely

capable of producing music that transmitted universal messages and fulfilled universal

needs. 24 In 1876, a German theologian smoothed over any tensions between the national and the universal in German music by explaining that Wagner’s nationalism

22 August Reissmann, “Deutschland,” in Musikalisches Conversations-Lexicon. Eine Encyklopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften , ed. Hermann Mendel, vol. 3 (Berlin: Oppenheim, 1873), 139. 23 Applegate, “How German Is It?”, 277. 24 Celia Applegate, “What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation,” German Studies Review 15 (Winter, 1992): 21-22.

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was “of a universal sort, since universality is one characteristic of German national feeling.” 25

What does this conception of universality as a primary marker of German music have to do with Jews in German musical life and music education? The answer lies in the implications of the conviction that Germans had a genius that enabled the composition of music that was free from all forms of particularism. If Germans defined themselves as the “people of music,” could it follow that they also defined any “people of music” as Germans? In other words, did German pride in the superior quality of German music, and the depth of its spirituality, open a door for Jews in German society to stake a claim for German belonging? The answer is yes, and conservatories of music served to anchor Jews’ aspiration to belonging through cultural assimilation just as they anchored music as a German cultural priority. The Jews who were granted access to this form of assimilationist German belonging were often, like Mendelssohn, among the minority of German Jews who converted to Christianity.

The story of the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim shows the power and limitations of the notion that Jews could secure full German cultural belonging through conversion and internalisation of German musical values. Joachim was a Jew from the Austro-

Hungarian hinterland. He was the son of German-speaking Jews in Hungary and had been baptised as a Protestant in 1853. 26 Joachim was appointed as the founding

25 Lorenz Kraussold, Die Musik in ihrer kulturhistorischen Entwicklung und Bedeutung, von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf Richard Wagner: drei Vorträge (Bayreuth: Verlag der Grau'schen Buchhandlung, 1876), 102, quoted in Ibid., 28. 26 Dietmar Schenk, “Aus einer Gründerzeit: Joseph Joachim, die Berliner Hochschule für Musik und der deutsch-französische Krieg,” Die Tonkunst 1/3 (July 2007): 234.

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director of the Berlin Musikhochschule in 1869. He remained the dominant influence on

Prussia’s conservatory until his death in 1907.

In appointing Joachim to his post in 1869, the Prussian authorities endorsed the potential of Jews to become German through cultural allegiance. This statement is all the more striking when one considers that the Berlin Musikhochschule was envisioned as a cornerstone of Prussian cultural politics. 27 The fact that the proposed director was

Austro-Hungarian and of Jewish heritage was not ignored in the ministerial discussion preceding Joachim’s appointment by King Wilhelm I of Prussia on 10 May, 1869. Two days earlier, Heinrich von Mühler, the Prussian Minister of Religious and Educational

Affairs, had written to the King about the suitability of this composer and violin virtuoso for such an important Prussian post. Mühler informed the King that the Hungarian-born

Joachim had been raised and educated, or cultivated, as a German. Further, the

Minister remarked that Joachim had declined the directorship of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels “out of love for his spiritual and artistic homeland,” that is, “for Germany.” 28

Joachim’s rejection of a position at a foreign conservatory was held up as evidence of

his devotion to German culture. Joachim shared this perception that cultural belonging

was a matter of affinity and commitment, rather than something innate; he turned down

a position at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, in part because he did not want his

children to become Slavs. 29

27 Ibid., 234. 28 Quoted in Beatrix Borchard, “‘Zur Pflege unserer unsäglich herrlichen deutschen Musik’ - Joseph Joachim und die Gründung der Berliner Musikhochschule 1869,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770- 1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges, 2 vols., eds. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 2:479-480, 483-485. 29 Johannes Joachim and Andreas Moser, eds., Briefe von und an Joseph Joachim , vol. 2 (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1913), 422.

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Ignaz Moscheles was another convert who linked his claim to German belonging with a position at a renowned German institution of higher music education. Moscheles was one of the preeminent pianists and music educators of his day. Like so many Jews who became prominent in German music, he was from the Austro-Hungarian

Vielvölkerreich —Prague, in this case. His musical career led him to Vienna. It was an invitation by Mendelssohn to join the faculty of the Leipzig Conservatory that brought

Moscheles to Germany in 1846. 30 He died in Leipzig in 1870. 31 Moscheles was from an

educated bourgeois family. 32 In 1832, he and his wife converted to Christianity. Still, he

never distanced himself from his Jewish roots. He visited his Jewish relatives in Prague

and cultivated friendly relations with Jewish musicians. 33 Moscheles was one of the

Jewish “new Christians” who surrounded Mendelsohn. 34 He very much considered himself to be German and enjoyed being seen as German while living in England. 35

Music education—Moscheles’s formal position as a conservatory professor as an arbiter

of German musical judgement—helped cement his attachment to his chosen homeland.

In a January 1845 letter to his wife, Moscheles made a telling statement about his

pending appointment in Leipzig. He wrote, “I have the prospect of once more becoming

a German artist.” 36 For Moscheles, teaching at a German conservatory made it possible

for him to be not only a musician in Germany, but a German musician.

30 Elaine Brody and Jan Larue, “Trois Nouvelles Etudes,” Musical Quarterly 72/1 (January 1986): 4-5. 31 Charlotte Moscheles, ed., Recent Music and Musicians As Described in the Diaries and Correspondence of Ignatz [sic] Moscheles , trans. A. D. Coleridge (New York: Henry Holt, 1873), 420. 32 Brody and Larue, “Trois Nouvelles Etudes,” 4. 33 David Conway, Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 106. 34 Ezra Mendelsohn, “Should We Take Notice of Berthe Weill? Reflections on the Domain of Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies 1/1 (Autumn 1994): 24. 35 Conway, Jewry in Music , 106. 36 Moscheles, Recent Music and Musicians , 309-310.

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A third convert from Judaism who became a leading figure in German music education was Sigmund Lebert. Born as Seligmann Levi, Lebert joined the German

Catholics ( Deutschkatholiken ), a dissident reform movement, in 1846. 37 He founded the

Stuttgart Musikschule in 1857. (The school took the name Konservatorium in 1865 and

became a Royal Conservatory in 1896). Lebert undertook the founding of the

Conservatory due to the lack of institutional opportunity for music education of the rising

bourgeoisie in Stuttgart. The Conservatory illustrated how the development of bourgeois

musical life in Stuttgart was shaped by Jewish musicians. To meet various needs of the

city’s population, Lebert divided the school into divisions for artists and amateurs. 38

The number of leading music-educational figures who were converted Jews is

striking. Conversion to Christianity was a path taken by some German and Austrian

Jews to express and seek to prove their belonging in their respective societies;

conversion was also seen by some as the sole path to advancement. 39 But, conversion was not a common phenomenon. Only approximately 22,000 German Jews converted to Christianity in the entire nineteenth century. These were “mainly Jews seeking advancement in an official or academic career, for which a baptismal certificate was virtually required,” 40 which helps explain the overrepresentation of converts among

37 For the Deutschkatholiken and other religious dissenters, see Todd H. Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 38 Daniel Jütte and Matthias Pasdzierny, “Jüdische Musiker in Stuttgart. Zwei Fallstudien,” in Zwischen bürgerlicher Kultur und Akademie. Zur Professionalisierung der Musikausbildung in Stuttgart seit 1857 , eds. Joachim Kremer and Dörte Schmidt (Schliengen: Argus, 2007), 115, 118, 121, 124. Some sources give Levi’s original first name as Samuel. 39 George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success 1880s-1980s (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1988), 54-55. 40 David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 218. Shulamit Volkov notes, pointedly, that the historian Harry Bresslau taught at the University of Berlin “not as an Ordinarius (a full professor) but as an Extraordinarius (an adjunct

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conservatory founders and teachers. Most Jews, even the most assimilated ones, preferred to mould Jewish identity so that it fit modern German culture, rather than abandoning all vestiges of their heritage. 41

Music and education were two constituent elements of a distinctive German-

Jewish identity, one that did not seek to erase Jewish culture for complete assimilation,

but rather one that constructed a particularly Jewish mode of German belonging.

German Jews carved out a subculture that was both self-consciously German and

recognisably Jewish. Assimilation did not generally entail a repudiation of Jewish roots

or even Jewish identity. 42 As one Jewish youth publication wrote, “Not despite, but

because we are Jews, we are faithful and upright Germans.” 43 The carefully chosen name of the main organisation of German Jews, the Central Association of German

Citizens of Jewish Faith, which was founded in 1893, 44 neatly encapsulated this duality. 45 It emphasised a liberal conception of Germanness, defined by citizenship, and posited that this Germanness had room for various communities of citizens. Kurt

Tucholsky’s mocking inversion of the Association’s name as the “Central Association of

Jewish Citizens of German Faith” pointed to the Association’s zealotry in arguing that

professor).” See Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 23. 41 Blackbourn, History of Germany , 218. 42 George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 2. 43 Quoted in Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 59. This is Kaplan’s translation of a passage from an 1898 issue of the Israelitischer Jugendfreund . 44 Avraham Barkai, “Wehr Dich!”: Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 1893- 1938 (Munich: Beck, 2002), 13. 45 Similarly, the name of the contemporary umbrella council of Jewish organisations in Germany, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, implies a changed post-Holocaust understanding of the relationship between Jews and German belonging.

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Jews could be both Jewish and fully German. 46 The Association’s general rejection of any form of Zionism that undermined German national feeling among Jews is another example of the widespread conviction among German Jews that they were German rather than a national “other.” Even as the Association came, over time, to acknowledge descent, common inheritance or “tribe,” which meant that Jewishness was more than the religion of Judaism, its leadership stressed the compatibility of Jewishness and

Germanness. 47 The Association represented many Jews caught between German and

Jewish nationalisms. 48 It represented the majority of Jews who sought to be both

German Jews and Jewish Germans. 49

It is not surprising that this grappling with Jewish identity and the possibilities of

German-Jewish synthesis overlapped with the fitful process of Jewish emancipation and

entry into the middle class. The values of the Association were those of the liberal

Jewish middle class, which linked education and acculturation with social advancement

and took the liberal educated middle class ( Bildungsbürgertum ) as its model. 50 In fact,

Jewish thinkers dating back to the eighteenth-century Jewish enlightenment saw

Bildung as the cornerstone of arguments for emancipation. 51 Bildung is best defined as

a combination of education, refinement, appreciation for culture, self-cultivation,

46 Bjoern Weigel, “Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart , ed. Wolfgang Benz, vol. 5, Organisationen, Institutionen, Bewegungen (Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), 93. 47 Jehuda Reinharz, “ Deutschtum and Judentum in the Ideology of the Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens 1893-1914,” Jewish Social Studies 36/1 (January 1974): 37-39. For the replacement of religious identity with ethno-cultural identity among some members of the Centralverein , see Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites , 203-204. 48 Reinharz, “ Deutschtum and Judentum ,” 38-39. 49 Barkai, “Wehr Dich!” , 14-15. 50 Ibid., 14. 51 David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 72-73.

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aesthetic sophistication and moral maturation. 52 Bildung stressed reason and the

development of an individual’s spirituality and creativity. 53 Jews internalised German

markers of Bildung , which included the pursuit of education and cultural sophistication. 54

Bildung became an article of faith for German Jews. Most of them were poor during the

period of legal emancipation; when the doors to the middle class were opened, many

Jews embraced that class’s values and the implicit promises of shared belonging in a

common humanity. Jews clung to the ideal of acculturation through Bildung and the

accompanying faith that Bildung would guarantee respectability among the non-Jewish

middle class. They did so long after the concept of Bildung had been redefined in a

more exclusionary, nationalist way by the wider German society. The ideal of Bildung as

a process of self-improvement that could transcend differences remained an integral

part of German Jews’ definition of their Jewishness. 55

Music was an important component of developing and demonstrating Bildung among the majority of Jews who aspired to a German-Jewish synthesis without conversion. Music lessons were an integral part of the education of a middle-class child.

As women of the German bourgeoisie were expected to be proficient piano players,

German-Jewish women embraced the piano wholeheartedly. Pianos were ubiquitous in urban and rural Jewish households, and Jews took music appreciation seriously, comprising a disproportionate number of concert attendees. 56 Jews were also present in

conservatories of music, not only as prominent professors and directors, but also as

52 Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class , 8. 53 Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites , 248. 54 Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class , 8. 55 Mosse, German Jews , 4, 7, 14 and Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class , 8. For a fuller and more up-to-date assessment of this issue, see Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum . 56 Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class , 58, 121, 133.

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students. The Stern’sches Konservatorium , a private venture in Berlin owned and directed by Jews, epitomised the values and cultural position of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie. Julius Stern, one of the founders, was a Jewish self-made man. 57 Gustav

Hollaender, the Stern’sches Konservatorium ’s director from 1894-1915, was a violinist

and the son of a Jewish doctor. The Stern’sches Konservatorium was an institution of

the German-Jewish culture that loomed large in the culture of Berlin’s bourgeoisie. In

the 1920s, as the Berlin Musikhochschule grew more amenable to socialist music

politics and the avant-garde , the Stern’sches Konservatorium was a bastion of

bourgeois musical culture. 58 When music-educational opportunities became more accessible to women, Jewish women entered conservatories in appreciable numbers. 59

The example of Salomon Jadassohn demonstrates the connections among

Jewish entry to the German middle class, cultural integration and opportunities in the

field of music education. Jadassohn was born to a Jewish family in 1831 in Breslau

(Wrocław). After musical instruction there, Jadassohn arrived, aged sixteen, in Leipzig

in the fateful year of 1848 to study at the Conservatory, where he was one of

Moscheles’s piano students in addition to studying theory and composition. Following

the 1848-1849 academic year, Jadassohn moved on to Weimar to study with Liszt. He

remained in Weimar until 1852 and demonstrated enthusiasm for the musical agenda

pursued by Liszt and Wagner, even though Liszt was not particularly impressed by his

student’s artistry. In the early 1850s—the exact date is unknown—Jadassohn returned

57 Dietmar Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin: Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869-1932/33 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 30. 58 Dietmar Schenk, “Das Stern’sche Konservatorium der Musik: Ein deutsch-jüdisches Privatkonservatorium der Bürgerkultur Berlins 1850-1936,” in Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Jahrbuch des Landesarchivs Berlin , ed. Jürgen Wetzel (Berlin: Mann, 2000), 58-59, 68, 71. 59 Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class , 133.

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to Leipzig. He studied composition privately with the conservatory professor Moritz

Hauptmann. Jadassohn remained in Leipzig as a composer and private composition teacher. Beginning with the 1871-1872 semester, Jadassohn taught composition and theory of harmony at the Leipzig Conservatory. 60

Jadassohn did not convert to Christianity or otherwise abandon Judaism as religion and identity. In fact, the first public mention of Jadassohn as a composer came when he composed a quartet to mark the dedication of the Leipzig Synagogue in 1855.

In 1865, Jadassohn became the conductor of the synagogue choir. He was the driving force in the synagogue’s musical life for thirty years, and fulfilled these duties without pay. 61 Jadassohn strove for acceptance within Leipzig’s bourgeoisie, but he faced barriers. As a Jew, even with (almost) full civic equality, certain segments of the bourgeoisie remained out of reach. The traditional urban establishment was largely closed to Jews, most of whom were relatively new arrivals. Integration in the economic bourgeoisie required financial wherewithal that these striving recent arrivals did not yet possess. The Bildungsbürgertum offered the only avenue for middle-class respectability for Jadassohn. 62 His life story shows, then, the relationship between music education

and Jewish embourgeoisement. Jadassohn also shows the limitations of the paths that

music-educational institutions offered Jews. His American student George Whitefield

Chadwick recalled that Germans, “those paragons of cleanliness,” frequently derided

“dirty Jews.” This antisemitic abuse prodded Chadwick to reflect that almost everyone

who had treated him kindly in Germany had been Jewish. He singled out Jadassohn

60 Beate Hiltner, Salamon Jadassohn: Komponist - Musiktheoretiker - Pianist - Pädagoge (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1995), 21-26, 33-34, 39-40, 99. 61 Ibid., 16, 55. 62 Ibid., 16.

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specifically, writing that he “was like a father to me and I am glad I came to do him honor.” 63

Cultured Jews such as Jadassohn stood out as Jews. That is, outsized cultural presence became a marker of this tiny minority. Writing home to the United States from

Germany, where she was a music student, in 1870, Amy Fay remarked that it was difficult to secure good seats at the opera in Berlin because “rich Jews” snapped them up. 64 It is also telling that Chadwick, in lamenting the German colonisation of American musical ensembles, specifically invoked the presence of Viennese Jews, as opposed to just Austrians or Germans, in American orchestras. 65 Joseph Joachim, the director of the Berlin Musikhochschule whose position was secured due to his commitment to his

“spiritual homeland,” was, despite his conversion to Protestantism, regarded as a Jew

by critics and the public throughout his career. 66 Jewish enrollment in conservatories of

music should thus be seen as part of the larger phenomenon of Jews’ emergence as

not only a minority with a distinct identity in German cultural life, but also as the bearers

of bourgeois culture in Germany. 67

III: The Limits of the Cultural Belonging

63 NEC, RG 1.2: George Whitefield Chadwick Collection, Memoirs, 1877-1880. 64 Amy Fay, Music-Study in Germany: From the Home Correspondence of Amy Fay , ed. M. Fay Peirce (London: MacMillan, 1908), 33. 65 NEC, RG 1.2: Chadwick Diaries 1854-1877, Vol 1. 66 Beatrix Borchard, “Von Joseph Joachim zurück zu Moses Mendelssohn. Instrumentalmusik als Zukunftsreligion?” in Musikwelten - Lebenswelten: Jüdische Identitätssuche in der deutschen Musikkultur , eds. Beatrix Borchard and Heidy Zimmermann (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 45. 67 See Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Burg, 1989).

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Jews’ rise to social and cultural prominence in Germany was constantly contested and controversial. Neither a full-throated embrace of German culture nor arriving at the zenith of German cultural life insulated Jews from doubts about their belonging as

Germans. Both confessing and converted Jews were faced with demands to prove this commitment over and over again. Varying political and ideological currents structured both the conditions of Jewish belonging as well as the assumptions and arguments employed to deny it. Cultural policing and “racial” exclusion marked the experience of

Jews in music education. This field was particularly fraught for Jews, as imparting the values and practices of an art form so central to German identity stoked anxieties about

Jewish participation in German high culture.

A major nineteenth-century impetus for the rejection of Jewish involvement in

German music education, and in German culture more broadly, came from Richard

Wagner. As we have seen, Wagner was ideologically opposed to the practice of most

German conservatories. Among their other aims and goals, conservatories endeavoured to influence the culture of their city, region, nation, or the wider musical world. Felix Mendelssohn was spurred to found the Leipzig Conservatory, for example, partly to counterbalance the influence of German Romantic nationalism as well as

French trends on German music. Mendelssohn brought like-minded pedagogues to the conservatory, thus ensuring that its students—those who upon graduation would contribute to the formation of middle-class tastes—were immune from such forces. 68

Taking sides in such cultural battles, though, also meant taking sides on the question of

how and whether Jews could be counted within the bounds of German culture. Jews

68 Conway, Jewry in Music , 193-194.

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and Jewishness were invoked as symbols and yoked to larger cultural-political questions, such as whether German music would take a conservative path or embrace radical aspects of Romantic nationalism. The former camp was associated with

Mendelssohn and Brahms, while the latter camp was associated with Wagner and Liszt.

With the exception of Liszt’s classes in Weimar, formal music education came down on

the conservative side of this debate within German musical circles. 69

Wagner’s antipathy toward the German conservatory system and his

antisemitism should be treated together. In 1850, Wagner first published his antisemitic

essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik , in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik under the nom de

plume K. Freigedank (Freethought). Wagner added his own name nineteen years later,

in 1869. Wagner’s stated purpose in this tract was to explain “the unconscious

perception that asserts itself within the Volk as a most deeply felt aversion to Jewish nature.” 70 One way he did this was to reject explicitly the possibility of Jewish

assimilation and acculturation. Instead, he conceptualised Jews in terms of immutable

characteristics that were unavoidably apparent in musical expression:

The Jew, who is inherently incapable of making himself known to us artistically either through his outward appearance or through his speech, but least of all through singing, has nevertheless been able to attain the mastery of public taste in the most popular modern art form, music. 71

69 This divide is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. 70 Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869), 9. 71 Ibid., 17. For this essay and Wagner’s antisemitism more broadly, see K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 53-58; Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and Jacob Katz, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1986). See also Leon Botstein’s response to Katz’s downplaying of both Wagner’s

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Wagner asserted that Jews could not “make [themselves] known to us artistically,” yet they were doing exactly that as composers, performers and teachers. One important avenue for “attain[ing] the mastery of public taste” in music was by teaching it in conservatories.

Wagner focused on emancipated Jews and made no accommodation for conversion. He presented Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer as examples for his argument that emancipated Jews were deracinated exemplars of urban capitalism. As such, genuine creativity eluded them. In Wagner’s view, Jews were imitators, technically proficient but not possessed of genius. They supposedly degraded art by treating it as a business and pandering to debased popular tastes. 72 Wagner’s essay was, then, an attack on the philosophical basis of Jewish participation in German music, including music education.

The original 1850 publication of Wagner’s essay did not arouse much outrage.

Among the few who voiced protest, however, were professors at the Leipzig

Conservatory. The editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , Franz Brendel, taught at the

Leipzig Conservatory. Eleven of Brendel’s irate colleagues wrote to him and demanded his resignation. Their condemnation of Wagner’s screed did not mention Jews—the ostensible subjects of Wagner’s enmity—or antisemitism. Still, among the signatories were Ignaz Moscheles and Joseph Joachim, two musicians who epitomised the cultured

antisemitism and its influence on modern racial antisemitism: Leon Botstein, “Wagner and Our Century,” review of Pro and Contra Wagner by Thomas Mann and The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism by Jacob Katz, 19th-Century Music 11/1 (Summer 1987): 92-104. 72 Leon Botstein, “Introduction: The Tragedy and Irony of Success: Locating Jews in the Musical Life of Vienna,” in Vienna: Jews and the City of Music 1870-1938 , eds. Leon Botstein and Werner Hank (Annandale-on-Hudson: Bard College; [Hofheim]: Wolke, 2004), 19.

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men of Jewish descent whom Wagner was attacking. 73 In a letter to his son, Moscheles transcribed a letter that the composition teacher Julius Rietz had proposed sending to the conservatory’s directors:

It cannot have escaped the notice of the honorable Directors of the Conservatoire that the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik has aimed for some time past at depreciating the state of music and the musical performances at Leipzig, and this in a tone which oversteps the limits of fair criticism. Men are attacked whose merits are recognized throughout the whole musical world, and whose works are precious to every unprejudiced artist and connoisseur. We, the undersigned, would completely ignore these matters if the editor of that journal, Dr. Brendel, was not one of our colleagues at the Conservatoire. As his views are in direct opposition to ours, and we believe they may exercise a bad influence over the pupils of the Conservatoire, we now call on the honorable Directors at once to dismiss Dr. Brendel from his post. Signed: Becker, Böhme, David, Hauptmann, Hermann, Joachim, Klengel, Moscheles, Plaidy, Rietz, Wenzel. 74

As it happened, the directors merely reprimanded Brendel. 75

The focus in this letter was not on defending Jews against Wagner’s slurs. Nor did Rietz and his colleagues explicitly refute the alleged incompatibility of German art and Jewish “nature.” Instead, they pointed to the international stature of the musicians criticised by Wagner for their supposedly inescapable Jewish characteristics and argued that such criticism had a negative influence on German music. This again illuminates the connection nineteenth-century Germans drew between universal standards and legitimate German cultural belonging: allegedly immutable Jewish particularity was

73 Conway, Jewry in Music , 303n33. 74 Moscheles, Recent Music and Musicians , 361-362. 75 Ibid., 362.

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refuted with reference to the fact that the world recognised the musicians in question as artistic masters.

Yet one aspect of the conservatory teachers’ protest focused on music education. They felt that Brendel, having published Wagner’s views, would corrupt his conservatory students. Thus the debate over how Jewish difference was properly understood was also a debate over what kind of music and musical values conservatories should inculcate. The letter quoted above illustrates Wagner’s use and abuse of Jews as one part of his comprehensive cultural-political crusade. As Eduard

Hanslick, a contemporary who also fell victim to Wagner’s poisoned pen, noted,

“Wagner could not stand any Jew; therefore he liked to consider anyone whom he could not stand to be a Jew.” 76 Wagner also “could not stand” conservatories. Wagner’s conflation of Jewishness with his cultural opponents is apparent in this instance, as the conservatory instructors knew that Wagner’s screed against “Judaism in music” was simultaneously a rejection of their vision for German music. They structured their response accordingly, with special attention to the deleterious effects of having an apparent supporter of Wagner’s views on their faculty. Hanslick also noted that antisemitism became “one of the ten commandments” for Wagner’s followers after the publication of Das Judenthum in der Musik .77 Establishing an image of the Jew was

central to a construction of German values in which Germanness was defined in

opposition to its supposed antithesis: Jewishness. This is because antisemitism had

come to signify more in German cultural discourse than antipathy toward Jews.

76 Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben , ed. Peter Wapnewski (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), 220. 77 Ibid., 357.

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Attitudes about Jews—both positive and negative—were codes that signalled adherence to a wider set of cultural, political and social beliefs. 78

Cultural life in Vienna was similarly defined by the battle lines forming between

Wagner and his opponents. Wagner’s cultural philosophy contributed to particularly aggressive manifestations of antisemitism in Viennese musical thought and institutions. 79 Vienna’s conservatory was one institution that defined the terms and conditions of cultural belonging. As in Leipzig, Viennese attacks on supposed Jewish influence were simultaneously statements about what philosophy of music should be regarded as normative, about what should be taught and by whom. Jews had been an exception at the Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in the 1870s, but by the end of the nineteenth century, there were growing numbers of Jewish students and professors. As in Germany, antisemitism heightened the political and aesthetic division in music and music education between the Brahmsian school and Wagner’s acolytes, led in Austria by Anton Bruckner. 80 That is, the divide between traditional

values in music and new challenges to them was also a divide between Jews and their

supporters, on the one hand, and their opponents on the other. Brahms not only

represented the conservative school, he was also derided as a philo-Semite, not least

because of his friendship with Joseph Joachim. As a (converted) Jew who had studied

78 Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites , 117-118. See also 119-144. 79 Leon Botstein, “Einführung: Tragödie und Ironie des Erfolgs: Juden im Wiener Musikleben,” in quasi una fantasia: Juden und die Musikstadt Wien , eds. Leon Bostein and Werner Hanak (Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke, 2003), 17. 80 Ibid., 17.

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in Vienna, Joachim contributed to antisemites’ sense that outsiders were undermining properly native music. 81

This association of Jews with culturally conservative forces is unlikely and surprising. Contradictions abound. This strange discursive connection can be partially explained through the striving of some Jews to make good on the conservative establishment’s implicit—and often broken—promise of acceptance. 82 Jews were representatives of the conservative conservatory establishment that Wagner saw as a roadblock in the way of his cultural agenda. Jews also, however, appeared as outsiders undermining local traditions. Another counter-intuitive feature of the debate over Jewish participation in musical life is that Wagner had Jews in his inner circle and admired some Jewish musicians, as did Liszt. For example, Wagner enjoyed a close association with the conductor Hermann Levi. 83 Some Jews cultivated enthusiasm for Wagner as a

way of demonstrating their German belonging. 84 Wagner at once blamed Jews such as

Mendelssohn for propagating a conservative style that held undue sway over German public taste and for undermining German ideals with the values of capitalist modernity.

Both forms of condemnation derived from Wagner’s belief that Jews were not creative and thus could only master the technical aspects of music, not innovate. In reality, there were only scattered Jewish conservatives in nineteenth-century Germany. Much more frequently, Jews had an affinity for liberalism. 85

81 Ibid., 17. 82 Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred , 2. In Gilman’s phrasing, “the liberal promise and the conservative curse exist on both sides of the abyss that divides the outsider from the world of privilege.” 83 Milton E. Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006), 228. 84 Mosse, German Jews , 23. 85 Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany , 3.

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This seeming contradiction can be partially explained by drawing a distinction between social and political conservatism on the one hand and cultural or artistic conservatism on the other. Thus Brahms was simultaneously strongly identified with the conservative musical establishment and, in Vienna, as a northern German liberal with values in line with those of the educated middle class. This resulted in Brahms sometimes being misidentified as a Jew. 86 Viennese Jews tended to admire German

liberalism in the nineteenth century, 87 which explains their affinity with Brahms’s political

liberalism as well as his cultural conservatism. This phenomenon helps explain how

Jews who had arrived in the cultural establishment became regarded as a conservative

force, even as liberalism was a cornerstone of German-Jewish identity (and socialism

increasingly provided a political home for German Jews.) 88 Joachim’s prominence in the

Brahms circle, along with others, helped establish a perception of Jews as a conservative force in music. In a sense, this linkage of Jews with cultural conservatism points to the success of the German integrationist ideal—that is, the belief that German culture was universal and would integrate anyone who internalised its values—as well as the fervour with which Jews had adopted the values of the bourgeoisie to which they sought entry. As a music critic put it in the course of criticising Vienna’s conservative concert offerings in 1890, “Strange! In the realm of politics Jewry is liberal; in that of music, conservative.” 89

86 See Margaret Notley, “Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” 19th-Century Music 17/2 (Autumn, 1993):107-123. 87 Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews , 50. 88 Mosse, German Jews , 2, 4, 11, 55-71. 89 This quotation by Josef Stolzing from the Ostdeutsche Rundschau is translated and quoted in Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34.

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Joachim’s contested status as an exemplar of German music, tasked with leading a prominent conservatory, demonstrates that the boundaries of Jewish belonging were policed not only by Jewish music teachers’ enemies and opponents, but also by their friends and colleagues. These boundaries applied to converts as well as to confessing Jews. Joachim, as a baptised Austro-Hungarian Jew, saw his claim to

German identity during his conservatory career defined by the interplay between seemingly contradictory answers to the question of whether Jews could be full-fledged participants in German culture: the integrationist ideal and immutable difference, usually defined in national or racial terms. Joachim’s appointment as founding director of the

Berlin Musikhochschule occurred in 1869, the same year in which Wagner reissued Das

Judenthum in der Musik under his own name. After some enthusiasm for Liszt early in his career, Joachim emerged as an indefatigable opponent of the New German School associated with Liszt and Wagner. 90 His long tenure in Berlin shows that Jews’ ability to define themselves culturally and religiously was not solely a matter of self-identification.

The position assigned to Jews in German cultural politics was also a defining factor.

Joachim’s Jewish heritage was considered by Prussian authorities when they appointed him as the founding director of the Berlin Musikhochschule ; the violinist’s

devotion to German ideals, however, counted for more than his background. This

governmental endorsement of its conservatory as the institutional affirmation of the

unifying power of German culture hardly put the issue of Joachim’s Jewishness to rest.

Wagner’s brand of antisemitism denied the possibility of the integrationist ideal by

90 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music , vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 418.

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asserting that uniquely Jewish aesthetics were immanent in even the most acculturated

Jew. Joachim also contended with attitudes toward his Jewish background that did not intrinsically rule out allegiance to German culture, but predicated it on behaviours and demonstrations of commitment. That is, Joachim repeatedly had to “perform” his

German belonging in the face of definitions that severely constrained the integrationist ideal. Such performance required greater distance from Judaism and Jewish culture than even baptism could provide. In 1879, for example, Joachim planned to perform music by Beethoven in a synagogue as part of a benefit concert. 91 The reaction of Ernst

Rudorff, a close friend of Joachim’s as well as an antisemite, 92 illustrates that Joachim’s

position as director of a prestigious institution of music education required ongoing

negotiation of his Jewish background and the artistic effects of “tribal” belonging. A

mere declaration of allegiance to German culture did not suffice. Joachim’s assumption

of a prominent music-educational position due to his having been cultivated as a

German is a realisation of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s notion that the German nation was

an educational undertaking and music could bring the average person into this

collectivity. 93 Dissenting from this notion, Rudorff’s views allowed only limited access to

Germanness based on a firm line between Jewish and German culture.

Rudorff explained his position in a letter of December 1879, in which he advised

Joachim not to appear in a synagogue. He asked him, “for the sake of [his] position, as a man and as an artist,” to stay away. Rudorff listed three reasons for his strong stance.

91 Beatrix Borchard, Stimme und Geige: Amalie und Joseph Joachim: Biographie und Interpretationsgeschichte (Vienna: Böhlau 2005), 558. 92 Ibid., 558. 93 Celia Applegate, “How German Is It?”, 295.

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First, he found the programme—Beethoven and Schumann—inappropriate for a house of God. Second, Rudorff was repulsed by the idea of performing, “in a Jewish temple,” an aria that described the stoning of Saint Stephen “by anti-Christian Jews.” Finally,

Rudorff felt that the whole concert was intended to make a point about Jewish belonging in German culture. If such a public demonstration had to be made, then, according to

Rudorff, Joachim belonged on the other side. By the “other side,” Rudorff meant that

Joachim stood alongside Mendelssohn as a member of the “Israelite tribe” who had become “so very German,” and whom Germany could claim and be proud of as one of its own. Therefore, Joachim had to keep his distance from a “coterie of Jews” who wanted only to use him to demonstrate the “ majorem gloriam ” [sic] of their “clan.” 94 In other words, Rudorff defined Joachim’s belonging in his “spiritual and artistic” homeland as conditional. In order to retain credibility and authority as an embodiment and teacher of German music, Joachim had to tread carefully on the line dividing German and Jew, and he had to do so in ways that would not have been required of a non-Jewish musician invited to a benefit concert at a synagogue.

This example shows that public acknowledgement of the possibility of choosing one’s homeland through cultural and spiritual loyalty coexisted with a soft, or non- absolute, ethnic determinism that allowed exceptions to otherwise firm categories only when rigorous criteria were met. That is, the promise of full cultural belonging existed only under the terms allowed by the majority. These terms could be amended by representatives of the majority or enforced selectively. Importantly, the terms of acculturation shifted along with the cultural-political climate. Joachim and Rudorff

94 Joachim and Moser, eds., Briefe von und an Joseph Joachim , 3:217-219.

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negotiated the terms of Jewish belonging in the late nineteenth century. As the ideologies of the twentieth century coalesced, and as their exponents garnered social and political power, a national, ethnic or racial definition of Jewishness became dominant. Even amidst the emergent rigid racial categories in music education of the pre-Nazi 1930s, though, limited space for cultural—as opposed to racial—conceptions of Jewish difference persisted.

A close reading of an exchange between two teachers of violin at the Berlin

Musikhochschule reveals this continued interplay between the assertion of cultural belonging by Jews and those of Jewish ancestry on the one hand, and antisemites’ rejection of this possibility on grounds of “race” on the other. In 1931, Carl Flesch and

Gustav Havemann conducted a debate about the nature of Jewish contributions to

German music education and German culture through a series of open letters in the

Allgemeine Musikzeitung . Flesch was a Jew from Moson (German: Wieselburg),

Hungary. Havemann, a self-described “Aryan” German, had joined the NSDAP as early as 1928 95 and later became a leading figure in the Reich Music Association. 96 The

Havemann-Flesch dispute stemmed from a passing observation that Flesch made in his

1931 publication about tone in violin playing. Flesch had described Polish and Russian

Jews as having a particular sense of tone [ Klangsinn ], which was the product of their

living experience in ghettos. 97 Flesch was interested in this observation from the

95 Katinka Rebling, “Schicksale, Bekenntnisse, Um-Wege,” in Carl Flesch und Max Rostal. Aspekte der Berliner Streichertradition , eds. Dietmar Schenk and Wolfgang Rathert (Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2002), 26. 96 Herbert F. Peyser, “Hindemith Center of Nazi Music Row,” New York Times 3 December 1934, 15. 97 Carl Flesch, Das Klangproblem im Geigenspiel (Berlin: Ries & Erler, 1931), 5. Flesch was presumably using the term “ghetto” loosely to refer to the towns and shtetls of the Russian Pale of Settlement, since there were no ghettos in Russia.

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perspective of folklore, but it was incidental to his larger point that there was “neither a

‘Jewish’ nor an ‘Aryan‘ tone ideal, but only a musical tone ideal.” 98 Havemann reacted

against Flesch’s supposed privileging of “Jewish racial advantages.” He was unwilling,

“as an Aryan German in Germany,” to let these claims go un-refuted. Furthermore, he

accused Flesch of wanting to impose on Germans the Jewish sense of tone, “which our

race rejects” as too delicate and sensual. He closed his open letter by warning Flesch

that Germans intended to maintain their own “character traits and spiritual life.”

The fact that Flesch and Havemann were conservatory professors added

urgency to their debate. The implications for music education were clear. The question

was not merely whether Flesch privileged a distinctly Jewish aesthetic, but whether this

supposedly Jewish tonal sense would be imparted to future generations over one that

reflected German “character traits and spiritual life.” The participation in this debate by

two music educators rendered the notion of a Jewish sense of tone not a matter of

personal preference, not an idiosyncrasy of an individual performer and not a “fact”

about a minority of musicians in Germany. Notions of distinct Jewish musicality were

instead made into an issue that could determine the future of German music.

The debate had further ramifications. Havemann had seized the opportunity

provided by Flesch’s hypothesis of eastern European Jewish particularity to perform

what twentieth- and twenty-first-century observers refer to as the perpetrator-victim

reversal ( Täter-Opfer-Umkehr ), a tactic much beloved by nationalists, Nazis and neo-

98 Gustav Havemann and Carl Flesch, “Die Diskussion über das Klangideal. Belebte Fortsetzung und friedsames Ende,” Allgemeine Musikzeitung 18 December 1931, 851, Carl Flesch, “Antwort an Prof. Gustav Havemann,” Allgemeine Musikzeitung 11 December 1931, 840 .

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Nazis. 99 That is, Havemann claimed that he and his fellow “Aryan German[s] in

Germany” merely wanted to have musical standards drawn from their own culture and

history to be the standard in their own country, which Flesch supposedly tried to

undermine by forcing a Jewish “sense of tone” on Germans. He also scolded Flesch for

publishing his views, given that they lived in a time of “racial incitement.” 100 The administration of the Musikhochschule followed the debate and forced a public reconciliation in which both professors declared their dedication to the service of

“German art” and “ German youth.” 101

Flesch’s position reveals his embrace of the promise of integration and belonging

offered by German society to assimilated and converted Jews. Flesch was by no means

thinking in racial categories in the way that Havemann was. As stated above, Flesch’s

ethnographic observation had nothing to do with innate racial characteristics. As a good

German music teacher, he thought in terms of universal standards. In fact, Flesch was

explicitly describing the experiential effects of Jewish ghetto life on musical production,

not, pace Havemann, “Jewish racial advantages.” According to Flesch:

The primary activity of the average ghetto Jew over many centuries consisted of serving his God by means of extensive prayer exercises. Jewish prayers are mostly accompanied by a sung litany, notated by specific marks, which has developed over time, here and there, into an independent tonal form of outstanding and peculiar beauty; it is no wonder that this regular, primitive-

99 The Täter-Opfer-Umkehr has been much remarked on by scholars and journalists. For an example in the context of recent far-right provocations in Austria, see Hans Rauscher, “Der ‘neue Jude’ Strache,” Der Standard 1 January 2012, online at http://derstandard.at/1326504134733/Einserkastl-RAU-Der-neue- Jude-Strache . 100 Havemann, “Offener Brief,” 824-825. 101 Havemann and Flesch, “Die Diskussion über das Klangideal,” 851, my emphasis.

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musical activity of an entire race, which felt the need to bemoan its fate through song, awoke, maintained and developed in [this race] over time a sense for the sound endowed with a soul, as the result of which the many outstanding violinists who are descended from this milieu can be regarded. 102

Flesch’s use of the racial parlance of his time points to the instability of this discourse

and the way it intersected with ideas of culture and religion. He was clearly describing

lasting effects of cultural practice and thus employing “race” differently than racial

antisemites did. Flesch assumed the existence of race, acknowledged the Jews as a

race, but attributed any observable musical commonalities among Jews to culture and

experience. Such commonalities stemmed from specific practices of specific Jews:

“ghetto Jews” from Poland and Russia, not, say, the Rothschild inhabitants of the

Château de Ferrières . This focus on the constructive power of lived experience is in

keeping with the elevation of environmental over inherited characteristics in German-

Jewish racial thought. Jews tended to privilege experience and environment as

determinants of cultural and even physical attributes. 103

Even though Flesch was among the minority of German Jews who converted to

Christianity, 104 his own background bears the hallmarks of assimilated, bourgeois

German-Jewish subculture. These were its profound respect for Bildung and belief in

102 Flesch, Das Klangproblem , 5. 103 See John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in fin-de-siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 104 According to Kathinka Rebling, Flesch converted to Protestantism along with his wife and children sometime before World War I. Flesch was, however, buried in his family plot in the Jewish cemetery in Moson, now Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary. See Rebling, “Schicksale, Bekenntnisse, Um-Wege,” 19. See also Kathinka Rebling, “Carl Flesch - Personendaten,” Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit , online at http://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00001449 .

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the Enlightenment idea that education shaped character. 105 In his memoirs, for

example, Flesch described his parents’ decision to move to Vienna when he was nine

years old. Vienna was chosen as the site for the young Flesch’s music education partly

because the Flesch family had always understood itself to be German above all else.

With his relocation to Vienna, Flesch recalled in his memoirs that he was able to “take

part in central European musical life.” 106 He thus cemented the connection between music education and becoming fully German.

Building on this faith in the constructive power of education and belief that people were shaped by environment, not “race,” Flesch believed that conservatories could play a foundational part in the establishment of national musical styles, or national schools of musical performance. As opposed to performing an integrative function—creating criteria for cultural belonging for Jews and others—Flesch assigned conservatories a constructive function. They did not enable Jewish belonging in national cultures; instead, their actual practice defined those cultures. This is clear in Flesch’s discussion of Russian and German examples. Flesch identified a Russian school of violin playing with the students of Leopold Auer at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. In so doing,

Flesch was not simply saying that different conservatories fostered identifiable modes of playing. He went further, defining the aesthetic values propagated by major conservatories in various countries as ipso facto national traditions.

Flesch’s analysis of national schools combined argumentation about the effects of cultural environments on musical talent with the specific physical approaches to

105 See Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry , 24-25, 173-178. 106 Carl Flesch, Erinnerungen eines Geigers (Zurich: Atlantis, 1961), 23.

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musicianship taught in conservatories. Flesch wrote that Auer had an excellent pool of students from which to draw in the Russian ghetto. He also traced the development of a

Russian school to the particular way of holding the bow taught by Auer and employed by all of his students. 107 In dubbing Auer-students the “Russian school,” Flesch remarked that the French and Russian schools had surpassed the German school in international reputation. Moreover, Flesch thought that the Berlin Musikhochschule had

the potential to create a national school in Germany on a par with competing national

styles. 108

Flesch’s understanding of Jewish difference and its consequences for the kind of cultural boundaries conservatories could draw was thus different from Havemann’s mischaracterisation. Flesch’s argument for national schools was free of ethnic determinism. In fact, Flesch thought that both the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and the Berlin Musikhochschule should draw on the talent developed by Jews from “ghettos” in order to develop a Russian or German national tradition, respectively. For Flesch,

Jews could help to define national styles, as conservatory instructors and students, without conflating national styles with a Jewish aesthetics. This is why, in his response to Havemann, Flesch stressed universal musical criteria over Jewish or “Aryan” particularity. 109 A glance at Flesch’s students confirms just how misleading Flesch’s use

107 Bert Greiner, Violintraditionen am Moskauer Konservatorium zwischen 1866 und 1966 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 14-15. Flesch’s observations were echoed by the historian James Loeffler, who described Auer’s long line of Jewish students from the Pale of Settlement as “synonymous with the Russian violin school as a whole and arguably the single most important phenomenon in the modern history of the classical violin.” See James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Cutlure in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 98. Loeffler’s study provides important analysis of Russian-Jewish musical culture with specific attention to the experience of Jews at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. 108 Ibid., 15, my emphasis. 109 Flesch, “Antwort an Prof. Gustav Havemann,” 840.

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of the parlance of his time on race and nation could be. Jo Juda, a Dutch Jew who studied in Berlin from 1930-1932, 110 reported that he felt particularly at home in Flesch’s violin class because of the exceptional national diversity. In Flesch’s class alone, at least eight of the ten or eleven students were foreigners: Russians, Poles, an

Argentinian, a Hungarian and Juda himself. 111 In Flesch’s mind, this was the assemblage that, through the Berlin Musikhochschule , had the potential to create a

German national school of violin playing.

Flesch’s devotion to his chosen culture and the connection between this

belonging and the responsibility of music education is also apparent in his advice to his

former student and fellow teacher at the Musikhochschule , Max Rostal. Rostal was a

Jew from Austria-Hungary (Cieszyn/Teschen) who formally renounced his membership

in the Jewish religious community in 1930 112 but did not convert to Christianity. In 1928

he became Flesch’s assistant at the Musikhochschule . In 1931 he became a member of

the faculty in his own right. 113 In 1933, Rostal corresponded with his mentor, Flesch,

about the feasibility of emigration due to the increasingly difficult situation for “non-

Aryans” in Germany. Flesch downplayed the dangers German Jews presently faced. He

observed that it was difficult for Jewish musicians abroad too, because foreign countries

were “inundated” with them, and that many Jews who had fled Germany had come to

regret it. He added that an “Aryan” would not seek out another teacher “due to the fact

110 Rebling, “Schicksale, Bekenntnisse, Um-Wege,” 23. 111 Jo Juda, Voor de duisternis viel (Nieuwkoop: Heuff, 1977), 11. This passage was translated into German by Kathinka Rebling and quoted in Rebling, “Schicksale, Bekenntnisse, Um-Wege,” 23. 112 Antje Kalcher, “Max Rostal - Personendaten,” Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS- Zeit , online at http://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00002648 . 113 Antje Kalcher, “Einleitung” to “Quellen,” ed. Antje Kalcher, in Carl Flesch und Max Rostal. Aspekte der Berliner Streichertradition, eds. Dietmar Schenk and Wolfgang Rathert (Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2002), 33-34.

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that you [Rostal] are circumcised.” (Flesch was writing from his summer home in Baden-

Baden and did not grasp how dire the situation in Berlin was.) 114 Flesch believed that

Rostal should wait out this “short-lived horror.” As he put it, some needed to stay behind

“to maintain the old rights” after the “end of the reign of terror.” 115

When Rostal reported that the “Aryan Paragraph,” which banned “non-Aryans”

from public service, was being applied to teachers who offered private music lessons,

Flesch responded that, if this were not merely a rumour, he would intervene with the

Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur and with Havemann. Later the same month, Flesch told

Rostal that he doubted the latter would lose the right to give private lessons. Flesch

referred to his regular communication with Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor of the

Berlin Philharmonic, who was apparently using his influence to mitigate the harshness

of Nazi laws. 116 Flesch’s notion that he could appeal to Havemann, a committed Nazi

who had previously attacked him, testifies to his strong sense that belonging to the

German music-educational establishment conferred membership in the cultural and

national community.

Obviously, Havemann did not share this conviction that one could become

German through music education. Nor did he agree that conservatories created, rather

than reflected and policed, national culture. His comments about Rostal further reveal

the implication of music education in ideologies and discourses of national belonging.

They show the tension between competing claims for the kind of belonging

114 Ibid., 35. 115 Max Rostal, Violin - Schlüssel - Erlebnisse: Erinnerungen. Mit einem autobriografischen Text von Leo Rostal , ed. Dietmar Schenk and Antje Kalcher (Berlin: Ries & Erler, 2007), 61. 116 Letters between Flesch and Rostal are reprinted in Schenk and Rathert, eds., Carl Flesch und Max Rostal .

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conservatories should legitimate. In July, 1932, Havemann wrote to Flesch about

Rostal’s appointment. He noted that he had purposely left Rostal out of his earlier political argument with Flesch, because he did not wish to “give an even greater target” to the “radical elements” that were “abundant” in German society. Continuing, he described how he felt about Rostal:

[I]t is self-evident that a teacher must be good, but I demand that a professor at a German institution of higher education be completely rooted in and entwined with [ verwachsen ] German culture. In lessons, such questions are, along with the instrument, of greatest importance, especially in the interpretation of great works. I hardly know Rostal at all and told Schünemann 117 that if he is convinced of [Rostal’s immersion in German culture], then for God’s sake he should extend his appointment. 118

Havemann’s letter shows again that competing definitions of Jewish belonging and

difference were less rigid than they might appear at first glance. His hint at the limited

possibility of a Jew being sufficiently rooted in German culture to teach at a German

conservatory may have been disingenuous, but it was not the only time he made

overtures to the possibility of acculturation.

Havemann was willing to admit Joseph Joachim, for example, to the pantheon of

German artists. He did so when pressed by Flesch about the contradictions in

117 Georg Schünemann was the assistant director of the Berlin Musikhochschule until June, 1932, at which time he replaced the dismissed Franz Schreker as director. It is not clear which position Schünemann held at the time of the conversation referred to by Havemann. 118 Letter of 2 July 1932, Carl Flesch Archive, London, cited in Rebling, “Schicksale, Bekenntnisse, Um- Wege,” 28, original emphasis.

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Havemann’s theories of “race” and culture. In his response to Havemann in the

Allgemeine Musikzeitung , Flesch dismissed Havemann’s “distinction between a Jewish and an Aryan tone ideal” as “an artificial construction.” He reminded Havemann that the latter’s teacher, Joachim, who “is so endlessly revered by all of us,” was a “full-blooded

Jew.” Flesch then continued:

You will not, however, be able to deny that [Joachim] still constitutes for all of us the unparalleled ideal of a deeply personal form of expression, for which the element of tone hardly enters the question. When one contrasts him with [August] Wilhelmy, whose tone is so rapturous despite his pure Aryan heritage, then, proceeding from your standpoint, one would have to switch [Joachim’s and Wilhelmy’s] racial belonging. ... There, I do not see how you can justify your assertion that the Jewish artist’s quality of tone has a more delicate character than that of his Aryan colleague. This fusion of artistry and race seems to be altogether misleading .119

Havemann, for his part, acknowledged Joachim’s German belonging on similar

terms as the Prussian government had sixty years earlier. Havemann described

Joachim as a baptised Jew who lived alongside “us Germans,” who had a very close

friendship with “great German composers,” and who had immersed himself “in German

spiritual life.” This master, though born a Jew, had found “the sound that left us deeply

awestruck.” He “bound himself completely with us and was, for us, a priest of German

art.” Havemann contrasted Joachim with Flesch. He addressed Flesch as a “baptised

Jew and nationalised German” who nevertheless made the mistake of treating the

119 Carl Flesch, “Antwort an Prof. Gustav Havemann,” 840, my emphasis.

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“Jewish sense of tone” as the standard. 120 Havemann thus tried to incorporate the idea

of cultural assimilation into a framework where culture was largely defined by race.

The inclusion of Joachim in this 1931 argument about race, music and education

is instructive. Understandings of Jews’ place in German culture were varied and

contradictory. Exploring these ideas in the context of music education brings the

interplay of various categories of belonging into relief. Joachim was vested with the

responsibility to direct Germany’s only musical Hochschule because he had committed himself to German ideals. This did not mean that his inescapable belonging to the

“Israelite tribe” ceased to define and constrict his place in the culture. Similarly,

Havemann’s later invocation of seemingly exclusive racial categories left room for someone such as Joachim, who had performed Germanness to a degree that rendered his “racial” otherness of secondary importance.

Thus Jews, German authorities and members of the non-Jewish German majority tended to define Jewishness and its meaning vis-à-vis German culture in misleadingly unambiguous terms that masked a fluidity. As this section has argued, that fluidity is revealed through the history of Jewish participation in music education. The responsibility to educate young Germans in an art form identified as their unique inheritance and their gift to the world brought to the fore anxieties about Jewish otherness. Those anxieties were found among Jews and non-Jews alike. And,

Havemann was neither the first nor the last antisemite to reserve for himself the right to decide who was a Jew. This tradition includes such figures as Karl Lueger and

Hermann Göring.

120 Havemann, “Offener Brief,” 825.

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IV: Virtuosity, Jews and Conservatories as Factories

Another way that Jewish difference was defined in German discussions of music education built on Richard Wagner’s charge that Jews could achieve technical mastery of their instruments but not creative artistry. The image of the Jewish virtuoso informed criticisms of conservatory practice. Theories about Jewish virtuosity also intersected with the questions of physicality and sensuality of tone debated by Flesch and

Havemann. The argument over virtuosity—whether this was something to be fostered or discouraged by conservatories—enables us to appreciate how conservatories of music were implicated in the question of Jewish cultural belonging. While figures such as

Joachim secured their conservatory position on the basis of full acculturation into the

German artistic world, others began to see conservatories as outposts for a dangerous colonisation of German music by a Jewish aesthetic. The question of whether conservatories should prioritise the training of virtuosos was also tied up with questions about the social purpose of music and music education. These connections are illustrated by challenges, levelled by Wagner and Franz Liszt, against the kind of conservatory instruction embraced by the Leipzig Conservatory and the institutions modelled on its example.

The Leipzig Conservatory and institutions organised in its image focused on solo performance. In fact, the orchestra department of the Leipzig Conservatory did not boast a full faculty until 1881. Students were educated as soloists in piano and violin, rather than being trained with an eye to gainful employment in musical ensembles. Such

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conservatories became known as “virtuoso factories.” 121 Liszt and Wagner both believed that technically proficient orchestral and ensemble players, not virtuosos, were necessary to meet the demands of their work. This is why Liszt advocated a new kind of music school in Weimar, an Orchesterschule , or orchestra school. In his 1864 proposal for such a school, Carl Müllerhartung, who became the Orchesterschule ’s founding director in 1872, stressed that his school did “not wish to train students as composers, conductors, or virtuosos .” Rather, the goal was to train musicians who would be

“capable orchestra members” and who would be “conscious members of a higher organism working for general understanding as well as for personal gratification.” 122

Similar language appeared in Wagner’s 1865 report to King Ludwig II of Bavaria,

in which he outlined his proposal for a “German music school” in Munich. 123 With regard

to piano instruction at the reorganised conservatory in Munich, Wagner stressed that

the “education of pure virtuosity, in special cases of outstanding talent,” would be left to

private instruction. Wagner favoured focusing on the proper performance of classical

works and on training teachers because the piano was a fixture in countless bourgeois

living rooms. It had already become the primary means through which the general

public appreciated music. Educating good teachers, therefore, would positively affect

the taste of dilettantes, amateurs and the wider public. Piano instruction would also

render aspiring conductors capable of “proper judgement of the content and form of our

121 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Charting the Future of Zukunftsmusik : Liszt and the Weimar Orchesterschule,” Musical Quarterly 80/2 (Summer, 1996): 352-353. 122 Quoted in Ibid., 353, my emphasis. 123 This report is discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 5.

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classical masters.” 124 The purpose of a music school in Wagner’s conception, then, was

decidedly not the education of virtuosic solo performers. Rather, conservatories had a

social purpose: to gain the broadest possible influence over the musical taste of a wider

public.

None of this should be taken to mean that Wagner’s views were completely

shared by Liszt. Liszt did not oppose virtuosity as such and was, as a performer, a

major influence in propagating virtuosity. 125 Liszt’s and Müllerhartung’s opposition to virtuosity in conservatories grew from their desire to bring conservatory instruction in line with their perception of Germany’s musical needs. Wagner had more antipathy toward virtuosity and its effects on music life. Even he, though, praised the appointment of Joachim as director of the Berlin Musikhochschule , though he acknowledged that his doing so was sure to “annoy” Joachim. Of Joachim, Wagner wrote that “this virtuoso knows and exactly carries out the mode of rendering I demand for our great music …

He consequently serves me as the only musician, apart from Liszt and his school, to whom I can point as proof and example of my previous assertions.” 126 Yet Wagner

opposed the focus on virtuosos in conservatories, in Berlin or elsewhere. He added:

How the [ Musikhochschule ] is to be conducted from nothing but the high stool of the first fiddler, is beyond my comprehension. Socrates, at least, was not of the

124 Richard Wagner, Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule (Munich: Christian-Kaiser, 1865), 26-27. 125 Daniel Jütte, “Juden als Virtuosen. Eine Studie zur Sozialgeschichte der Musik sowie zur Wirkmächtigkeit einer Denkfigur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 66/2 (2009): 137. 126 Richard Wagner, “About Conducting,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works , vol. IV, Art and Politics, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1912), 362-363. Of course, this praise was qualified by “ifs” and “buts,” as discussed in Chapter 5.

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opinion that Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles were qualified to lead the State to paths of pleasantness by their eminence as generals and orators. 127

What does the criticism of producing virtuosos instead of ensemble musicians

have to do with Jews? How does it reveal music education’s role in shoring up ideas

about the conditions of cultural belonging and in reinforcing them through practice?

Virtuosity was associated with Jews in the nineteenth-century German imagination.

First, a positive valuation of virtuosity had emerged among the German-Jewish

bourgeoisie in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some Reform rabbis, for example,

praised virtuosity and saw it as analogous it to other aspects of middle-class striving for

self-improvement. Jewish virtuosos loomed large in German musical culture. Second,

though, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a shift among Jewish

musicians from an embrace of virtuosity to a rejection of it, as the concept became

loaded with negative and antisemitic connotations. 128

These antisemitic connotations concern us here, as they relate both to the

practice of music education and to the perception of it. A negative conception of

virtuosity enabled the fusion of criticism of conservatories with antisemitic agitation. The

rhetoric employed to criticise virtuosity mirrored antisemitic rejection of Jewish artistry

almost exactly. Wagner and others 129 dismissed Jews’ attempts at artistic creation as

127 Ibid., 363. 128 Jütte, “Juden als Virtuosen,” 127-130, 134-135. 129 Liszt expressed similar views about the limitations of Jewish creativity in the 1881 edition of a book originally published in 1859. See F. Liszt, Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie, nouvelle edition (Leipzig: Breitkopf et Haertel, 1881), 31-95. See also Mendelsohn, “On the Jewish Presence,” 4. The antisemitic material in the chapter entitled “ Les Israélites ” has been attributed to Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who worked on the proofs for the 1881 edition. See David Cooper, “Béla Bartók and the Question of Race Purity in Music,” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and

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passionless mimicry; the virtuoso was also seen as a kind of machine. Virtuosity and

Jewishness both were decried as producing cold, derivative art devoid of true creative genius.

Clara Schumann, for example, decried “mechanical virtuosity.” It is significant that such terms taken from industrial capitalism were employed to characterise a virtuosity increasingly associated with Jews. The virtuoso, and especially the Jewish virtuoso, came to represent the commercialisation of music. There are numerous examples of virtuosos being associated with mechanical production rather than art: in

1841, Gustav Schilling spoke of an “oligarchy ... that had sacrificed music to virtuosity;”

Hanslick defined virtuosity as a “branch of business;” Hans von Bülow described a

Jewish virtuoso as a “machine become man.” All of this is in line with Wagner’s railing against “artistic industrialists,” a category that primarily included virtuosos, especially the

Jewish ones. 130 The range of antisemitic rhetoric linking Jews, virtuosity and business

was grounded on this association between musical virtuosity and modern industrial

economic life.

Such rhetoric was integrated into negative appraisals of the cultural work

performed by conservatories. For example, Wagner pointed to Mendelssohn—the

director of the Leipzig Conservatory—as his primary example of a second association

with virtuosity that functioned alongside the mechanical conception: the virtuoso, and

particularly the Jewish virtuoso, was held to possess a distinctive body type and to

Ideology of European Musical Cutlure 1800-1945 , eds. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 20-21, 30n29. As Alan Walker memorably wrote, Princess Carolyne “inserted gaseous paragraphs full of hegelian prose, parts of which are incomprehensible. The early section on the Israelites, which was already a simmering cauldron, was now worked up into a poisonous brew.” See Alan Walker, Franz Liszt , vol. 2, The Weimar Years, 1848-1861 (New York: Knopf, 1989), 388-390. 130 Jütte, “Juden als Virtuosen,” 127, 136-139, 141-142.

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exude sensuality. 131 This even though Mendelssohn himself fretted over the potential harmful effects of shallow virtuosity. 132 As stated above, Mendelssohn was in fact

moved to found a conservatory to combat the flashiness of virtuosity. 133 Still, he was associated with an institution that critics targeted for insufficient emphasis on orchestral instruments and careers. Remember, too, that Havemann rejected putatively Jewish characteristics in music as overly delicate and sensual. The apparent contradiction between these two constructions of the Jewish virtuoso—representative of both mechanical capitalism and superficial sensualism—was a feature of Nazi antisemitism as well. 134

The refrain that Jewishness and virtuosity in music were both marked by an unbecoming sensuality reveals an important discursive manoeuvre through which

Jewish involvement in German music and music education was deligitimised. Virtuosity was often negatively associated with sensuality and particular bodily manifestations.

Beatrix Borchard, for example, has analysed the virtuoso as a “feminine” type. 135

Furthermore, virtuosity and Jewishness were associated with each other, and both were

gendered as feminine. An example of the linkage between virtuosity and femininity

comes from Hugo Riemann’s 1895 critique of German conservatories. Riemann

described conservatory students at the outset of their training as primarily impressed

with “technical proficiency.” This led them “to devote themselves with all energy to

131 Ibid., 127, 136-139, 141-142. 132 Peter Mercer-Taylor, The Life of Mendelssohn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105. 133 Conway, Jewry in Music , 193-194. 134 Jütte, “Juden als Virtuosen,” 142. 135 Beatrix Borchard, “Der Virtuose – ein ‘weiblicher’ Künstlertypus?” in Musikalische Virtuosität. Perspektiven musikalischer Theorie und Praxis , eds. Heinz von Loesch, Ulrich Mahlert and Peter Rummenhöller (Mainz: Schott 2004), 63-76.

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practicing.” This was not a good thing. Riemann joined other critics in lamenting conservatories’ failure to require attendance in courses on music history, music theory and in “ensemble classes (even for those not performing).” Such a system would make

“excessively sustained playing (six, eight, ten, even more hours per day)” impossible. 136

In case it was not clear that Riemann was echoing earlier critiques of

conservatories for turning out virtuosos, shaped by hours of practice, rather than

complete artists, he closed his essay by using mechanical imagery to deride

conservatories: “For the time being we are too spoiled by the musical high-speed press.

Stick a farm boy with straight fingers and healthy ears in one end, and after a year the

finished composer or virtuoso comes out at the other.” 137 The antisemitic philosopher

Bruno Bauer went a step further in bringing the capitalism of the factory and the

problem of (Jewish) virtuosity together in 1862: the aesthetic of Jewish virtuosos, he

wrote, could only find an audience among a public that had already experienced

capitalist corruption. 138 The Jewish critic Adolf Weissmann also identified Jews as born

virtuosos and virtuosity as something foreign on German soil. 139

Riemann did not single out Jews as responsible for the factory production of

virtuosos or as particularly disposed to it. He did not have anything to say about Jews at

all. Instead, he identified women—specifically, two groups of foreign women—as

particularly susceptible to the dangers of acquiring technical competence to the

exclusion of music history and aesthetics: “In particular the young daughters of Albion

136 Hugo Riemann, “‘Our Conservatories’ from Präludien und Studien (1895),” trans. E. Douglas Bomberger, Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education 15/3 (May, 1994): 229-230. 137 Ibid., 235. 138 Jütte, “Juden als Virtuosen,” 140, 146-147. 139 Weissmann, “Der Jude und die Musik,” 13.

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and the free citizens of America soon carry [practicing] to such excess that after a few weeks they are sick. Playing must be completely forbidden to them for a long time.” 140

This was a stereotype applied to students of both genders from English-speaking

countries, 141 but Riemann’s concern was for “young daughters” in particular. This

mirrors earlier fears, which peaked during the German reading debate of the 1790s, that

women, young people and other supposedly at-risk groups could be morally

compromised through Lesesucht (addiction to reading) or Lesewut (craze for reading). 142

It is telling that Riemann saw women as most prone to the tendency to elevate the technical skills associated with virtuosity over aspects of music education thought to be more conducive to artistic development precisely because of the culture discourse that also linked virtuosity with Jewishness. This conflation suggests that artistic tendencies identified as Jewish were also coded as feminine. But Jews were not only held to be practitioners of a feminine art; Jews were also identified in the cultural and racial discourses of the long nineteenth-century as feminine, to the point that Jewish men were often seen as women masquerading as men. 143 The racial theories that gained currency in the latter half of the nineteenth century furthered the linkage between

Jews and femininity by defining Jews as a “feminine race.” Even some prominent

140 Riemann, “‘Our Conservatories,’” 230. 141 See the explanatory footnote provided by Bomberger in Riemann, “‘Our Conservatories,’” 230n11.. 142 See Matt Erlin, “Useless Subjects: Reading and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” The German Quarterly 80/2 (Spring 2007): 145-164; Stephan K. Schindler, “The Critic as Pornographer: Male Fantasies of Female Reading in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Eighteenth-Century Life 20/3 (1996): 66-80; and Martha Woodmansee, “Toward a Genealogy of the Aesthetic: The German Reading Debate of the 1790s,” Cultural Critique 11 (Winter 1988-1989): 203-221. 143 Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 20-23.

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Jewish leaders advanced the construction of Judaism as feminine and thus more ethical. 144

Most famously, Sex and Character , an antisemitic text published in 1903 by Otto

Weininger, a Jew who had converted to Christianity the year before, sparked much

debate about the supposedly female nature of Jews. Weininger conceived of the Jew as

feminine and therefore lacking in individuality. Weininger’s fulminations against modern

culture as suffering under a sexuality forced onto it by women were complementary to

constructions of the Jew as predisposed toward virtuosity. For example, Weininger

linked masculinity with intellect and creativity; he contrasted these qualities with

childbirth, which he identified as a purely physical act and thus representative of

femininity. 145 This is markedly similar to the notion that Jewish virtuosos exhibited mechanical mimicry and unbecoming sensuality rather than artistic genius.

This widespread portrayal of Jews and the supposedly Jewish practice of virtuosity as feminine occurred in a context in which women were defined as “naturally” lacking qualities necessary for artistic creativity. Feminist scholarship in musicology has illuminated the ways in which constructions of gender and gender anxieties have

144 Till van Rahden, “Jews and the Ambivalences of Civil Society in Germany, 1800–1933: Assessment and Reassessment,” Journal of Modern History 77/4 (December 2005): 1045. See also Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 150-153; Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Benjamin Maria Baader, “Jewish Difference and the Feminine Spirit of Judaism in Mid- Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History , eds. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman and Paul Lerner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 50-71. 145 Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charackter: eine prinzipielle Untersuchung , 10th ed. (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1908). The chapter on Jews is on pages 409-452. Ritchie Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew,” in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ , eds. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 23-27; and Jean Radford, “The Woman and the Jew: Sex and Modernity,” in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ , eds. Cheyette and Marcus, 91-95.

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informed the production, performance and reception of Western art music. 146 Virtuosity

was taken as evidence of Jews’ insufficient masculinity and, suggestively, “musical

impotence.” 147 This cultural construction positioned both Jews and women as outsiders through attribution of a common set of characteristics. It is thus fitting that the plan to found an orchestra school in Weimar, explicitly to meet the musical needs neglected by

“virtuoso factories” on the Leipzig model, barred women from admission. Women were, in any event, excluded from professional orchestras at that time. 148 Gender ideologies

concerning women’s abilities meant that the conservatories that did admit them limited

them to certain instruments and subjects, such as singing, piano and pedagogy. 149

A concrete example from Stuttgart will demonstrate how the associations

between Jewish physicality and virtuosity intersected with the identification of the

conservatory as a site of Jewish aesthetics to mark Jews as outsiders to German

culture. Sigmund Lebert, who founded the conservatory in 1857, did not escape the

attention of Hans von Bülow, Wagner and the “Bayreuth circle” through his conversion

to an unorthodox Christian movement. In an antisemitic attack on Lebert, stemming

from the false reports that Lebert had criticised his edition of Beethoven’s works, Bülow

called Lebert an “ignorant, unctuous Jew.” Bülow also noted that Lebert’s real surname

was Levi. The statements associating Lebert’s Jewishness with a bodily quality—

greasiness—and referring to him by his more obviously Jewish birth name show

sympathy with Wagner’s definition of Jewish difference as intrinsic and apparent

146 See Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 147 Jütte, “Juden als Virtuosen,” 142-143. 148 Bomberger, “Charting the Future,” 353. 149 See Eva Rieger, Frau, Musik und Männerherrschaft : zum Ausschluss der Frau aus der deutschen Musikpädagogik, Musikwissenschaft und Musikausübung (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1981).

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through the body, language and a fundamental alienation from European culture. Soon,

Lebert’s work at the Stuttgart Conservatory became instrumentalised as supposed proof of Wagner’s depiction of Jews. Lebert’s tendency to value technicality was taken as confirmation of Wagner’s argument that Jews had a superficial and materialistic approach to music. Furthermore, Lebert’s own method of piano instruction was condemned by critics as the epitome of “spiritless finger drill.” In 1880, Wagner turned his attention to the Stuttgart Conservatory and took specific aim at its supposed factory- like character by mocking the idea of churning out hundreds of female music teachers. 150

V: Conclusion

Through the abuse suffered by Lebert in his role at the Stuttgart Conservatory, we see how conservatories were made part of an argument about Jewish cultural belonging that included references to gender and physicality. Here, the spectre of Jews corrupting

German music with crass capitalism joined with the image of the Jew as virtuoso. The conservatory was central to this culture war: it had enabled Jewish entry into the musical middle class, and it was seen as a perch from which Jewish pedagogues could impart their “foreign” sensibility to future generations. (This is the charge Havemann would level against Flesch decades after Bülow and Wagner targeted Lebert.) Opposing the work of conservatories meant opposing “virtuoso factories.” This, in turn, meant opposing a purportedly Jewish artistic sensibility which sprang not from the drive to

150 Jütte and Pasdzierny, “Jüdische Musiker,” 125-127.

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create but from the spirit of capitalism. Conservatories cried out for reform, because as currently constituted they were part of what Wagner dubbed “this invasion of the

German nature by an utterly alien element.” If it was the Jew’s “duty” to exploit sources of profit ignored by European nations, then German art and music allowed the Jew to take “German intellectual labour into his own hands; and thus we see an odious travesty of the German spirit upheld to-day before the German Folk, as its imputed likeness.” 151

One way Wagner sought to subvert the heights Jews had reached in German music

was to call for the restructuring of music education. Conservatories’ apparent neglect of

the New German School’s practical needs, and these institutions’ reputation for

churning out virtuosos, made music education a significant source of anxiety for those

Germans who pondered the cultural ramifications of Jewish emancipation,

embourgeoisement and acculturation.

This chapter has shown that conservatories of music were sites of competing

definitions of the role of Jews in German cultural life. The debate over whether Jews

had a claim to cultural belonging in Germany played out in conservatories of music,

through words and actions. The work of music education, and the arguments about it,

created knowledge about different kinds of cultural belonging—full or partial. Studying

conservatories thus illuminates nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought about

Jews, Germanness and difference. It brings to light the specific anxieties that

accompanied Jewish involvement in institutions tasked with shoring up and transmitting

a central aspect of German culture. Analysing the terms of Jewish participation in music

151 Richard Wagner, “What is German?” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works , vol. IV, Art and Politics, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1912), 158-159.

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education, and the reactions to Jewish involvement, shows how German cultural belonging was defined and fought over by individuals and social groups. It also, however, indicates the flexibility of such definitions. Ultimately, music education is a powerful example of what the sociologist Nicolaus Sombart has identified as the “offer of alliance”—an offer extended by Jews to Germans and rejected with tragic consequences. 152 Music education also demonstrates another cultural domain where

the German promise of belonging in exchange for assimilation was not fully fulfilled.

Meanwhile, Jews were swept up in larger political, cultural and ideological wrangles that

raged in German and Austrian music education. It is to the politics of music education

that we turn in Chapter 5.

152 Nicolaus Sombart, “Der Beitrag der Juden zur deutschen Kultur,” in Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland , ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Stuttgart: Burg, 1989), 17-40.

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Conservatories of Music Across the “Impassable Gulf”: Conservative Values and

Progressive Challenges

I: Introduction

In her 1951 memoir, Berta Geissmar, the Jewish secretary and concert manager of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, had this to say in describing her surprise at the Nazis’ rise to power:

I had never read Mein Kampf , never taken the case of Hitler seriously. Our work had nothing to do with propaganda and politics; its substance was the fostering of music, nothing else. What could be more in the interest of the true Germany than our work in the service of art? 1

This quotation exemplifies the views of those who failed to grasp that serving “the true

Germany” was a political act, and defining “the true Germany” was a matter of cultural politics.

Geissmar’s surprise at the intrusion of politics into the supposedly apolitical realm of music was not uncommon in her time. Nor is it in ours, when music’s beautiful remove from politics and ideology is an article of faith for many. As this dissertation argues, though, music, ideology and politics were and are intimately intertwined.

1 Berta Geissmar, Musik im Schatten der Politik (Zurich: Atlantis, 1951), 64.

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Conservatories’ part in shaping local cultures and class structures; music education as part of visions of national cultural and political belonging; the role of modernity in

American students’ enrollment in German and Austrian conservatories, as well as their expectations and disappointments; and the potential of music education to facilitate

Jewish belonging in German culture or aid in the construction of a Jewish sense of nationality: each of these subjects is political. Conservatories of music were and are sites where cultural politics could be debated and tested in practice. As educational institutions that trained the German and international musical youth, conservatories conferred a kind of official imprimatur on some musical ideas while branding others as unfit for German musical life.

This chapter examines the struggle over which directions in musical thought should be taught to young musicians. First, I examine the relevance for music education of the defining divide in nineteenth-century German musical life, between conservatives

(associated with Johannes Brahms, Joseph Joachim and the critic Eduard Hanslick) 2

and progressives (led by Wagner and Liszt). 3 Conservatories were targeted as bastions of conservatism. Composers and musicians affiliated with the Brahms school believed in absolute music. That is, they valued music as an autonomous, non-signifying art form. Wagner, Liszt and their followers, sometimes also identified as the New German

School, advocated for programme music, or music that explicitly conveyed some kind of narrative or message. They believed that music should impart philosophy and they

2 For a reevaluation of Hanslick that finds nuance in his thought beyond the received image of him as a stock conservative character at war with the forces represented by Wagner and Liszt, see Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx, eds., Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013). 3 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Charting the Future of ‘Zukunftsmusik’: Liszt and the Weimar Orchesterschule, Musical Quarterly 80/2 (Summer 1996): 348.

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turned to new forms such as the tone poem and Gesamtkunstwerk to do so. Whereas the faction associated with Brahms wanted to preserve classical compositional principles, enthusiasts of Zukunftsmusik advocated something very different: they revelled in innovation. 4

The second section of this chapter examines the way conservatory directors understood the ideal of preservation in German and Austrian music education. The third section explores Wagner’s and Liszt’s plans for music education as well as the broader relationship between German conservatories and the New German School. Following that, the fourth section examines the reform of the Berlin Musikhochschule in the 1920s as part of an era of socialist challenge to the status quo in politics, culture and music education. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the tension between tradition and modernity defined the cultural conversation around music education and the experiences of those who taught or studied in conservatories of music in German- speaking Europe.

II: Conservatory Directors and Conservatism

In 1878, Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt opened its doors. The first director was the Swiss-born composer and pedagogue Joachim Raff. At the opening celebration on

25 September, 1878, Raff gave a speech in which he presented his vision for the new

4 Erik Levi, “Music in modern German culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture , eds. Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 233-234.

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institution. During this address, he reflected on the history and purpose of conservatories of music:

The name “conservatory” comes from “to conserve”: to preserve [ erhalten ]. In institutions with this name, something directly related to music must, therefore, be preserved. What is to be preserved cannot be musical production itself .... The goal can only be the preservation of that which technically determines the production of the musical work of art and for the preservation of those elements that secure a good reproduction of it. The former is the necessary theoretical knowledge for creating as well as for understanding what has been created. The latter are the vocal and instrumental means of performance. We can conceive of both under the name “technique.” The musical work of art is, as every other artwork, personally, geographically and chronologically contingent. The sum of these conditions we call “style.” And this constitutes the second objective of conservatories. Preservation of technique and style is, therefore, the purpose of conservatories of music. The term “conservatory” is, despite its Latin origin, modern; the thing that it describes, however, is already very old, as I will now demonstrate briefly. 5

Raff went on to narrate the history and development of music from its primitive origins, over the centuries “to the moment where the richness and perfection of the extant music compelled the foundation of dedicated musical schools.” 6

Raff’s reflections on the origin of the word “conservatory” were correct in point of fact but misleading in terms of the meaning he drew from that etymology. The German word Konservatorium does in fact stem from konservieren , or “to conserve.” This name

5 Helene Raff, Joachim Raff: Ein Lebensbild (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1925), 218. 6 Ibid., 218.

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did not, however, imply anything about the teaching of music. Musical technique and style were not what was to be conserved, preserved or maintained. The first conservatories were erected in sixteenth-century Naples, not as music schools but as orphanages. Children from indigent families received instruction in literacy and religion in conservatories. They also could learn a trade. These early social-welfare institutions did not teach music. Musical instruction in conservatories stemmed from the imperative to increase income in order to cover operating costs and the costs of welfare provision.

Musical instruction also helped meet demand for music by other city institutions. By the mid-seventeenth century, teaching music had become the primary business of conservatories. It was also their primary source of income. The Neapolitan conservatories became full-fledged musical enterprises during the eighteenth century. 7

Raff’s exercise in faux-etymology effectively repurposed the history of music

instruction in conservatories. Raff’s history lesson tried to transform the practical

innovation of teaching music in orphanages into a mission statement for that teaching:

the preservation of musical technique and style. The fact that Raff’s conclusion informed

his mission statement as director of the new conservatory in Frankfurt shows that

music-educational thought was intertwined with cultural politics. Raff held that

conservatories existed to conserve. The statement is anodyne, though, unless there

were forces against which traditions had to be defended. If there was opposition to

Raff’s notion that music education should preserve a cultural inheritance, then Raff’s

7 Rosa Cafiero, “Conservatories and the Neapolitan School: a European model at the end of the eighteenth century?” in Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914): Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges , vol. 1, eds. Michael Fend and Michel Noiray (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 15-18.

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conception of conservatories was not merely historical, not solely aesthetic, but also ideological.

Raff’s inaugural address thus consciously positioned his conservatory in the context of the conflict between conservative and progressive musical forces outlined above. He elaborated on why conservative music-educational efforts were urgent by pronouncing contemporary art to be broader than it was deep. He perceived a responsibility to impress substantive art, art of character, on students and to shield them from “the superficial and the trivial.” What signal was Raff sending with this statement?

What might instructors at a German conservatory in the late nineteenth century consider trivial? What contemporary music would they regard as lacking in depth, and as their mission to combat? The answer is clear from the reservations that one of Raff’s faculty members harboured against Raff himself.

The world-renowned pianist Clara Schumann taught piano at Dr. Hoch’s

Konservatorium . Schumann mistrusted Raff. The source of her suspicion was Raff’s former allegiance to the New German School. He had been a follower of Liszt, and thus in opposition to conservatives. By criticising contemporary music as lacking depth and emphasising the duty to preserve, Raff may have been sending a message to those who worried about his leadership due to his earlier musical affiliation. Raff’s guiding principle as conservatory director was, according to his daughter, “to convey to the pupils a great artistic tradition.” 8 Raff thus presented himself as fully committed to the

conservative mission of the conservatory as a bulwark against unworthy contemporary

developments in the arts.

8 Raff, Joachim Raff , 219.

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Raff’s ideas, and the practice of his directorship, though, reveal that he was not as conservative as his 1878 speech implies. He allowed cracks in the conservative fundament through which progressive rays could penetrate. First, in that same 1878 address, Raff said that the work of outstanding teachers could not only look backward.

Instead, such work should be ahead of its time. Yes, the primary purpose of a conservatory was to teach style and taste alongside technical skills and knowledge of form. Even so, the few students who were capable of “creating a rule for themselves and following it” should always be able to follow their own path. 9

This overture toward innovation was not mere rhetoric. According to Raff’s

daughter, local Frankfurt personages were unhappy with the manner in which Raff

assembled a faculty for his conservatory precisely because he did not prioritise hiring

only like-minded instructors. When the piano teacher Josef Rubenstein, a devoted

follower of Wagner, left the conservatory in 1878, Raff replaced him with Carl Heymann,

whom the press had described as the new Liszt. 10 Raff’s decisions regarding

appointments were informed by his belief that modern piano playing should flourish

alongside the classical school represented by Clara Schumann.

Despite Raff’s belief that conservatories should conserve, he was navigating

ideologically charged waters to shape an institution that would neither reject the legacy

of the past nor become hidebound through slavish reverence for it. Raff attempted to

put his balanced understanding of music education into practice, but he could not

always keep the peace between warring musical factions. Rubinstein, the devotee of

9 Peter Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium 1878-1978 (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1979), 49. 10 Ibid., 49.

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Wagner, left the conservatory in 1878 after only two months of service, supposedly for health reasons. In an 1879 article exchange with Rubinstein about Robert Schumann, though, Julius Kniese referred to the former’s “dismissal” from Dr. Hoch’s

Konservatorium . In 1880, Rubinstein wrote an article in the Bayreuther Blätter critical of both Brahms and Raff. In short, Raff’s attempt to stake out middle ground as a conservatory director was not sustainable. He was too modern for Clara Schumann and too conservative for Rubinstein. Raff’s vision of a conservatory that did justice to both camps proved difficult to realise.

The notion that conservatories’ purpose was to be conservative was not confined to the conservatory and musical public in Frankfurt. The Leipzig Conservatory, founded by Felix Mendelssohn in 1843, revealed its conservative character at its very opening.

Mendelssohn had earned great fame, but also a degree of assimilation into Prussian

Christian culture, through his revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion .11 Mendelssohn’s educational philosophy emphasised reverence for the old masters. The new conservatory projected an artistic image that elevated the classics and rejected not only the New German School but even late Beethoven and early Brahms. 12 In 1843, the

same year that the conservatory opened, a monument to Bach was unveiled in Leipzig.

Mendelssohn had been instrumental in raising money for this, further illustrating the

conservative classicism that guided him. 13 Moritz Hauptmann, a prominent composer in

11 R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 198. See also Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 12 Johannes Forner, “Leipziger Konservatorium und ‘Leipziger Schule’: Ein Beitrag zur Klassizismus- Diskussion,” Die Musikforschung 50/1 (January-March 1997): 33. 13 Peter Mercer-Taylor, The Life of Mendelssohn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179- 180.

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the nineteenth century and instructor of harmony and composition at the Leipzig

Conservatory, explicitly rejected Wagner’s music with some very dismissive comments about its staying power. Liszt came to regard Mendelssohn’s music as the defining component of the conservatism of the Leipzig Conservatory and of the city in general.

He was known to use “Leipzigism” as an epithet. 14 The Königliches Conservatorium in

Munich, too, was founded by one of the leading figures in the nineteenth-century Bach

movement in Germany, Franz Xaver Hauser. 15 In Berlin, the Musikhochschule was founded in 1869 under the leadership of Brahms’s friend Joseph Joachim. From 1850 to

1884, the Cologne Conservatory was led by Ferdinand Hiller, an outspoken opponent of

Liszt and Wagner. 16 Taken together, these conservatories and their directors

demonstrate that musical iconoclasts were not wrong to regard institutions of formal

music education with suspicion.

In Vienna, thirty years after Raff opened Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt,

a conservatory director also tried to negotiate between a perceived imperative to

conserve and challenges to conservatism in music and music education. On 1 January,

1909, the Conservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was nationalised and

reconstituted as the k.k. Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien

(Musikakademie ). In the Musikakademie ’s first yearly report, the director, Wilhelm Bopp,

reflected on the historical and contemporary purpose of music-educational institutions. 17

14 Wm. A. Little, “Mendelssohn and Liszt,” in Mendelssohn Studies , ed. R. Larry Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 123-124. 15 See Dale A. Jorgenson, The Life and Legacy of Franz Xaver Hauser: A Forgotten Leader in the Nineteenth-Century Bach Movement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). 16 Bomberger, “Charting the Future,” 351. 17 Lynne Heller, “Das Konservatorium für Musik in Wien zwischen bürgerlich-adeligem Mäzenatentum und staatlicher Förderung,” in Musical Education in Europe , Vol. 1, eds. Fend and Noiray, 225-226.

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He described transformations in conservatories’ mission since the flurry of conservatory founding in the nineteenth century. In those days—according to Bopp—conservatories taught an elite of truly talented students. This talented minority learned by listening to lectures delivered by masters. Bopp saw, though, that music education had been democratised at the time of his writing. The small classrooms that sufficed for earlier generations had given way to large buildings and lecture halls, packed with talented and driven students. The educational goals had also changed since the early days, becoming more diverse and more ambitious. 18

Bopp recognised these changes and attributed them to conservatories’ need to keep pace with the modern demand for education that was both broad and deep.

Otherwise, they would become antiquated. Conservatories thus found themselves performing a dual function, similar to that undertaken by Gymnasien and universities: to meet the needs of the masses clamouring for musical schooling ( Erziehung ) as well as to train those aspiring to a career in music. In recognising this double purpose, Bopp made a statement that shows the persistence of the tension seen in Raff’s address over thirty years earlier:

If the original purpose of conservatories was to maintain the classical properties of the art of music in their beauty and purity, to preserve them, to cultivate style of rendering for them and to bring this to the height of perfection, then the field of activity of contemporary institutions of music education is not restricted to this terrain .... Certainly the responsible leaders of the musical youth should not march, with “long legs of progress,” at the forefront of every up-to-the-minute

18 Jahresbericht der k.k. Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst über das Schuljahr 1908/09 , quoted in Ibid., 227.

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movement that targets musical virgin territory; certainly all problematic attempts to find new idioms for the basic language of our art, to dissolve harmonic constructions, the laws of tonality and the commandments of a formal composition that is even recognisable in the most audacious undertaking-- certainly this musical iconoclasm may not find open gates at those places consecrated to music education. But neither may fossilised conservatism and the obdurate arrogance of reaction wave their flag over the lecture halls of musical institutions of higher education .19

Both Raff and Bopp, then, accepted that their conservatories were bound to honour a conservative tradition, but also that conservatories had to grow, to change, in order to accommodate the needs of the times. Bopp’s reasoning also hinted at the connections between conservatism and progressivism in music education and in politics and society more broadly. Bopp’s openness to new directions in music was intimately connected to maintaining relevance in the face of social-political transformations. An earlier mode of music education had been suitable for an aristocratic elite. In an age of increased access to education, something quite different was needed for the masses.

Bopp’s deft balance of conservatism and progressivism can be seen in his approach to Arnold Schoenberg. More than any other composer, Schoenberg has come to stand for the break with tonality, and with tradition, in favour of atonality and the radically modern. Schoenberg was the leader of the Second Viennese School, a group of composers that flourished in the early twentieth century. The Second Viennese

School included Schoenberg’s students whose compositions evolved from romanticism to chromaticism without a tonal centre and finally to serialism and the twelve-tone

19 Ibid., 227, my emphasis.

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technique pioneered by Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s compositions were cerebral and grounded explicitly in a dense set of underlying ideas. He valued Brahms for his structural and formal foundations and took inspiration from Wagner for how to elide and transcend boundaries. Rather than join the fray between these two musical camps,

Schoenberg simply pronounced that the “impassable gulf” had been rendered moot and was no longer an issue. 20

Schoenberg’s career was punctuated by periods spent teaching at

conservatories. The relationship between this challenging composer who nonetheless

revered tradition and the music-educational establishment reveals much about the

ideological tensions that defined the era. Schoenberg’s first teaching appointment was

at the Stern’sches Konservatorium in Berlin in 1902. 21 In 1909, Schoenberg began

campaigning for a position at the Vienna Musikakademie as a teacher of composition. 22

In 1910-1911, Schoenberg taught a private music-theory course at the conservatory. 23

Bopp, the director, felt that appointing Schoenberg would revitalise, through new approaches, composition classes that had become staid. 24 Writing in 1927, Robert Lach

presented the appointment of Schoenberg the same way. For Lach, the existence of

Schoenberg’s course demonstrated that the very latest in musical practice was not

being given short shrift at the newly public Musikakademie . The presence of

20 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), 347-348. 21 Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 43. 22 Bryan R. Simms, review of Music Theory and Analysis in the Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (1874- 1951) by Norton Dudeque, Music and Letters 88/4 (November 2007): 693. 23 Ernst Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule: Vom Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde zur staatlichen Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna: Elisabeth Lafite, 1967), 102. 24 Simms, review of Music Theory and Analysis , 693.

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Schoenberg showed that the conservatory took pains “to avoid all one-sidedness and also allow the most varied trends in music to have their say.” 25

Schoenberg knew that he could not present himself to the Musikakademie as an

enemy of the conserving mission and hope to gain an appointment. Conservatories

struggled to respond to the Second Viennese School, as they had to the New German

School. Schoenberg strove to disabuse his potential employers of the notion that he

would upset the apple cart. In 1911, Schoenberg published his Harmonielehre , an influential work of music theory on which he had begun work in 1910. He wrote it with the possibility of a teaching position in Vienna in mind. The book establishes

Schoenberg as an expert in traditional classical music and music theory. The forward- thinking composer stressed his fealty to traditional methods of teaching and composing.

He also acknowledged the need for fresh approaches to music theory, which Bopp thought the Musikakademie ’s composition faculty was lacking. 26 This was not disingenuous of Schoenberg, who has been dubbed a “conservative reactionary.” 27

Bopp recognised that Schoenberg’s appointment would ruffle fewer feathers at the conservatory if it were presented as a conservative decision. In 1912, one year after

Schoenberg’s course had ended, Bopp proposed appointing Schoenberg and Franz

Schreker to fill vacancies left by the retirement of Robert Fuchs and Hermann

Graedener. Bopp still saw the need for new directions in theory and composition. As he explained to a meeting of the Musikakademie ’s board in June 1912, the two retiring

25 Robert Lach, Geschichte der Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (Vienna: Strache, 1927), 85. 26 Simms, review of Music Theory and Analysis , 693. 27 Willi Reich, Arnold Schönberg, oder der konservative Revolutionär (Vienna: Molden, 1968).

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teachers had shown no interest for music after the era of Schumann and Mendelssohn, an outlook that had hindered composition students. Bopp was careful to ward off conservative opposition to his suggestion of Schoenberg and Schreker. He noted that they had intimate knowledge of the great works of the past and could inculcate in students “understanding and love” for both “classical and more recent masterpieces.”

He also stressed that, in recommending Schoenberg and Schreker as teachers, he was not endorsing them as composers, since they often went further than he was willing to go. Bopp referred his colleagues to the success of Schoenberg’s course in 1910-1911.

Despite only lasting a year, the course had produced concrete results; students had done better in examinations than ever before. Bopp reassured his colleagues that any fears they entertained about Schoenberg coercing his students into adopting his compositional methods were baseless: Schoenberg always gave his students examples from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. As evidence that Schoenberg did not intend to proselytise among students of the Musikakademie , Bopp pointed to the Harmonielehre , which was highly regarded throughout the musical profession. 28

Bopp was tactically savvy to stress Schoenberg’s conservative credentials.

Another board member, the bank director Alexander Spitzmüller, spoke from experience that gradual change was preferable to radical transformation. He asked if it were possible to appoint teachers who were not as “passive” as the retiring professors, but without “making such a large leap into the future.” The president of the Musikakademie ,

Karl von Wiener, responded that hiring Schoenberg and Schreker would not represent

“a radical turnaround in leading positions of the Akademie ,” because the positions

28 UMdK, Musikakademie, Präsidium 1912.

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envisioned for the two composers would not be “decisive for the entire direction of the institution.” By way of reassurance, Wiener added that the faculty would still have a conservative representative, Richard Heuberger. Wiener also appealed to his colleagues’ nationalism. If they opposed Schoenberg and Schreker on cultural-political grounds, then they would have to settle for “second-rate men from abroad.” 29

These examples illustrate how conservatory leadership positioned institutions of music education in the cultural-political debates of the day. Conservatories were directed by men whose allegiances largely rested with the conservative side of the musical divide. Still, conservatory directors did not always deem it appropriate to freeze out new developments in music completely. Both in their own statements of principle and in their hiring decisions, even conservatory directors who embraced a “conserving” mission made room for measured, gradual innovation. The apostles of progressivism, though, took direct aim at the conservatory system. The New German School’s engagement with music education is the subject of the following section.

III: Wagner and Liszt’s Challenges to Conservatism

The New German School’s rejection of the values of the conservative music-educational establishment, and that establishment’s repudiation of the prophets of Zukunftsmusik , involved more than musical style. The conflict was particularly heated because it was centred on music as an expression of political and social values. The long nineteenth century was a period of flux in which forces of change took on the established order in

29 Ibid.

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politics, society and the arts. These fields of endeavour were inter-connected. It is not an exaggeration to call Wagner a revolutionary in the political and sexual spheres as well as in music. Just as the principle of democracy threatened entrenched hierarchies in politics and music, so did Wagner challenge both musical and political orthodoxies: he participated in the 1849 uprising in Dresden and he experimented with dissonance at the expense of the rules and structure of tonality. Wagner took aim at limiting conventions and institutions in politics and at those in the arts that were associated with the political order. This fusion of the political and the musical is shown in Tristan und

Isolde , in which Wagner used chromatics and freer rhythms to represent Eros’s attack on the state, its politics and morality, which were in turn expressed through more traditional harmony and metre. 30 From his Swiss exile after 1849, Wagner plotted revolutionary directions for German music in a series of essays. 31

In opposing the German conservatory establishment, then, Wagner and his followers were also opposing a larger conservative social vision. Franz Brendel was one who embraced Wagner and the New German School as a politically liberal challenge to the old regime, which he associated with Mendelssohn’s work. Brendel had become the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1845 and he published Wagner’s antisemitic essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik , in 1850. In an 1845 essay, Brendel decried

Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann as unsuited to contemporary needs, partly due to

Mendelssohn’s adherence to forms of the past. This critique was articulated in a context

30 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna , 347. 31 Todd, Mendelssohn , xxiii.

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of escalating revolutionary fervour; the musical and political visions informed each other. 32

The German conservatory as an institution was seen as a weapon in this larger struggle, one that put the New German School on the defensive, particularly because of its power to inculcate values in the young generation of musicians. Progressive musicians who surveyed the German music-educational landscape in the 1870s and

1880s saw a network of conservative institutions, linked by an educational philosophy that venerated the past as well as by personal connections among directors and teachers who revered Mendelssohn. Progressives feared that these institutions had produced a generation of conservative musicians who were hostile to the musical experimentation of Wagner and Liszt. 33

There were, though, some conservatory students who attempted to bring the

New German School into the walls of the conservatory. The conservative character of the Berlin Musikhochschule under the direction of Joachim and his successors persisted until the era of the Weimar Republic. An excerpt from the memoirs of Siegfried Ochs illustrates the practical effects of the Musikhochschule ’s perception of Wagner as a threat. Ochs entered the Musikhochschule in 1878. He would go on to found the

Philharmonic Choral Society of Berlin in 1882. Writing in 1922, Ochs recalled the time that his professor, Ernst Rudorff, discovered the score to the prelude to Lohengrin in his music folder. “That was it for me,” wrote Ochs. When Ochs was expelled from the conservatory for various offenses, Rudorff wrote to Ochs’s parents that their son’s

32 Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 3 , The Final Years, 1861-1886 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 200. 33 Ibid., 200.

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opinions about music were so confused that Ochs had actually expressed himself willing to “sacrifice all of Mendelssohn’s piano music for the overture to Wagner’s

Meistersinger .” According to Rudorff, “that says it all.” 34 There was no need to add

another word about Ochs’s future prospects.

That said it all at other conservatories as well. In his 1898 book, Experiences with

Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and many other Contemporaries , Wendelin Weißheimer recalled his time as a student at the Leipzig Conservatory, which he entered in 1856.

Weißheimer described Julius Rietz, Mendelssohn’s successor as composition instructor, as a “staunch opponent of the Wagnerian line” who “even brought the war into” his classes. When Rietz determined that Weißheimer was “one of those,” he did not expel the eighteen year old, but he recommended that he depart of his own accord:

I must tell you that [your] composition completely displeases me. Take it to Weimar; you will hear pretty words there! 35 You seem to be a disciple of Wagner, and that is your undoing! Look at these walls, within which I have been teaching for ten years; many have never heard anything but warnings upon warnings —and you are the worst of all [students] whom I have warned! 36

Musical Leipzig, according to Weißheimer, “sailed uniformly in Mendelssohn’s wake.”

Weißheimer also described an occasion in which he was invited to Ignaz

Moscheles’s apartment. The piano professor introduced him to another guest and

34 Siegfried Ochs, Geschehens, Gesehenes (Leipzig: Grethlein, 1922), 81-82, 96. 35 As a conductor and teacher in Weimar, Liszt created a pro-Wagner climate in that city. 36 Wendelin Weißheimer, Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt und vielen anderen Zeitgenossen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1898), 9.

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revealed his student to be a “passionate proponent” of the new musical directions, which resulted in a heated debate in front of Moscheles. In 1858, Weißheimer ended his studies at the conservatory. In 1859, the self-proclaimed “Weimarian” made his way to

Weimar for composition study with Liszt. 37 Since Liszt habitually criticised students for sounding as though they belonged in Leipzig, studying with Liszt was the right choice for Weißheimer, as Weißheimer had been, in the words of the Musical Times , a

“marked man” at the Leipzig Conservatory. 38

In Munich, Josef Rheinberger put his personal conservative stamp on the

conservatory from 1859 until his death in 1901. 39 He contended with Americans who

paraded around with Wagner scores under their arms and fruitlessly tried to engage him

on the subject of their hero. 40 The Musical Quarterly , the major American journal of

musical scholarship, remembered Rheinberger in 1932 as “ultra-conservative.” 41

Rheinberger had, in fact, expressed some understanding of Wagner, showing that appreciation for musical greatness could extend across the ideological divide. Even so, he was an adversary of the New Germans, 42 as his American students discovered to

their chagrin. When requested to contribute to a 1939 publication commemorating the

one-hundredth anniversary of Rheinberger’s birth, one of his former students at the

37 Weißheimer, Erlebnisse , 20-22, 39. 38 H. T., “A Wagnerian Boswell,” review of Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, und vielen anderen Zeitgenossen, nebst deren Briefen by Wendelin Weissheimer, The Musical Times 40/674 (1 April, 1899): 233. 39 Bernd Edelmann, “Königliche Musikschule und Akademie der Tonkunst in München 1874-1914,” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 175. 40 See Chapter 3. 41 Edgar Istel and W. Oliver Strunk, “Ludwig Thuille (November 30, 1861—February 5, 1907),” Musical Quarterly 18/3 (July 1932): 465. 42 Harald Wanger, Josef Gabriel Rheinberger und die Kammermusik , Schriftenreihe der Gesellschaft Schweiz-Liechtenstein vol. 3 (St. Gallen: Zollikofer, 1978), 15.

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Munich Akademie der Tonkunst praised the Liechtensteiner for taking the wind out of the sails of his eager students from the United States, who were infatuated with

Wagner. This former student, Émile Rupp, went on to remark that “that epoch’s stubbornly one-sided Wagnerism” must have been “agony” for the conservative

Rheinberger, whom Rupp dubbed “a saviour of absolute music.” 43 Rupp’s reminiscences also demonstrate that German conservatories could be successful bulwarks against the influence of the New German School. Rupp did not arrive for study with Rheinberger at the Munich Akademie as a conservative. He had been an enthusiast of modernism and of Wagner. Under Rheinberger’s tutelage, Rupp came to appreciate his mentor’s conservatism: he rejected the charge, levelled by supporters of

Wagner, that Rheinberger’s music was characterised by backwardness. Rupp wrote that he owed his own esteem among French composers to the realisation, impressed upon him by Rheinberger, of the “timelessness of absolute music.” 44

Students in Leipzig also mocked those whom they regarded as in thrall to

Wagner. To commemorate a 1914 summer excursion to Leisnig (Saxony), students at the Leipzig Conservatory created a satirical postcard. The card depicts a woman walking next to a line of trees and surrounded by frolicking rabbits. The text reads: “The solitary [female] artist: nature, nature and only nature.” The woman is carrying a thick edition of Wagner’s Parsifal under her arm. 45 Making the figure of scorn a woman evokes Nietzsche’s accusation that Wagner’s popularity was evidence of effeminacy in

43 RhAV Da 16, Manuskripte zur Publikation: “Joseph Rheinberger: Gedenkschrift zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 17. März 1939 / von seinen Schülern und Verehrern” zusammengestellt und übergeben von Walter Kaufmann. 44 Ibid. 45 HMT, 2.1.4/1, 2.1.4/2, Sommerausflüge.

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culture. According to Nietzsche, Wagner had been corrupted by the adulation of women and represented cultural decline. 46 In invoking this powerful rejection of Wagner’s claim

to legitimacy, the Leipzig music students policed their classmates’ ideological affinities

and marginalised transgressors.

Faced with this institutional culture at Germany’s conservatories and the way it

worked on Germany’s musical youth, it is not surprising that proponents of

Zukunftsmusik sought to found new music schools or remake extant ones in their

image. In 1849, Wagner proposed subsuming the Leipzig Conservatory into his own

planned German National Theatre in Dresden. 47 His best chance to influence music education, though, came in Munich. After various petitions to expand the music- educational offerings in Munich and Bavaria, specifically the Central-Singschule that had been founded in 1830, King Ludwig I of Bavaria and his interior ministry began to plan for a new conservatory on the model of the conservatory in Milan in 1844. 48 This new institution, the Königliches Conservatorium für Musik , opened under the directorship of Franz Xaver Hauser, a friend of Mendelssohn’s, in 1846. 49 The

Königliches Conservatorium was subject to criticism from the public and the press

throughout the 1850s. These critiques centred on lack of discipline and oversight, but

also on the lack of a clear curriculum and the poor relations between Hauser and the

46 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 51. 47 Leon Botstein, “The Aesthetics of Assimilation and Affirmation: Reconstructing the Career of Felix Mendelssohn,” in Mendelssohn and his World , ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 12. 48 Robert Münster, “Das Königliche Konservatorium für Musik 1846-1865 und seine Vorläufer,” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 13-17, 20-29. 49 Christa Jost, “Hans von Bülow als Pädagoge in München,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 42/1-2, Franz Liszt and Advanced Musical Education in Europe: International Conference (2001): 78.

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faculty. A royal commission of 1853 called for a fixed, comprehensive plan of instruction as well as other changes in personnel and practice. Another decade of complaints against Hauser led to his unwilling retirement in 1864. 50

This change in direction provided the opportunity for Wagner to involve himself in a conservatory and in the public discussion of music education. 51 King Ludwig II, who

had ascended the throne in 1864 upon the death of Maximilian II, requested a report on

the reorganisation of the Königliches Conservatorium from Franz Lachner, a royal

Kapellmeister who had directed the Central-Singschule from 1842-1843, as well as a

memorandum on the topic from Wagner. The latter was presented to the king in March

1865 and published in May. As a result, Ludwig formed a commission to discuss the

issue, which included Lachner, Bülow, Wagner and others. 52 In his report, Wagner

outlined his own vision of the purpose of a conservatory. This began with his own

interpretation of the implication that a conservatory was supposed to conserve

something. Wagner stated that calling a school a “conservatory” revealed the

expectations of such a school: “it should preserve [ erhalten ], ‘conserve’ [‘ conserviren ’], the classical style of a mature stage in the development of art.” How? By transmitting the “mode of rendering” ( Vortragsweise ) that enabled the blossoming of the classical .53

Here already Wagner defined what is to be conserved in a conservatory in a way that

suited his purposes. In describing the method of performance as that which

50 Münster, “Das Königliche Konservatorium für Musik,” 13-17, 20-29. 51 Christa Jost, “Richard Wagners Münchner Atelier für Musik und die Königliche Musikschule (1865- 1874),” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 35. 52 Münster, “Das Königliche Konservatorium,” 29-30. 53 Richard Wagner, Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule (Munich: Christian-Kaiser, 1865), 4.

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conservatories had to preserve, and then describing the classical era enabled by such performance as over, Wagner was allowing a more expansive scope for the music that could be heard and taught within conservatories’ walls than fealty to the idea of conserving might suggest.

Wagner did not stop there. He used the supposed roots of conservatory in “to conserve” to explain the pointlessness of German conservatories as they were then constituted. (Wagner’s plan for reorganising the conservatory in Munich was meant to restore relevance to an institution that he believed had lost it.) According to Wagner, there was no German national artistic institution of comparable importance to the theatres in Italy and France. A classical style could not be preserved or fostered in

German conservatories because such a style was either unknown or unrepresented in

German public artistic institutions. Wagner allowed that Germany had produced musical masters, but not “the media needed for their art.” He charged that Germans were in a dependent position when it came to institutions for the practice of music. They had not

“taken the first step towards cultivating a style that conforms to the German spirit.” The proposed German music school was to be a Stilbildungsanstalt , an institution for the cultivation of a style. It would give students the tools to produce new works and influence the development of art. 54 That the music school would be one component of a

larger turn away from tradition and conservatism is suggested by Wagner’s plan,

described in his report, to launch a periodical to report on the doings of the school while

also introducing a wider public to contemporary music. 55

54 Ibid., 5, 30, 39. 55 Jost, “Richard Wagners Münchner Atelier,” 41.

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At first, it appeared that Munich might become the city in which Wagner’s ideas took hold in music education. The shuttered conservatory was reopened as the

Königliche Musikschule in 1867, under Hans von Bülow’s direction. Bülow’s pedagogical concept was, unsurprisingly, thoroughly Wagnerian. In an 1867 letter, he wrote that Wagner’s report to the king would be the starting point for the organisation and method of the Musikschule .56 Specifically, it would become “a kind of musical

workshop,” in which the focus would be on teaching proper performance through

examples, exercises and concerts. 57 Bülow was thus realising one of Wagner’s

priorities, namely the development of institutions that could foster a style suitable to the

performance of Germany’s great works. This methodology is especially apparent in

Bülow’s piano curriculum, which focused on the late work of Beethoven. In 1864, Bülow

had described such work as the keystone for building something new in musical life.

Hence the school did not offer a uniformly Wagnerian education. Bülow was recognised

for creating a collegial environment among teachers of different artistic inclinations, in

contrast to his forerunner, Hauser. Rheinberger’s wife, Fanny, for example, lamented

Bülow’s resignation because he had done so much to make the school an outstanding

one. 58 From 1867, then, the reconstituted Musikschule was run by a director who was

sympathetic to Wagner’s music-educational ideals. Wagner and his coterie had

influence at court, and in this way too they could spread their wings over Munich’s

musical life.

56 Ibid., 80. 57 Hans von Bülow, Briefe und Schriften , ed. Marie von Bülow, vol. V, (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1895-1908), 60ff, cited in Jost, “Richard Wagners Münchner Atelier,” 80. 58 Jost, “Richard Wagners Münchner Atelier,” 84, 86.

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The Wagner circle’s influence was not, however, hegemonic. Resistance arose from the musical profession and the public. Bülow found that the musical public lagged far behind that of Berlin in its appreciation of newer music. He lamented having to educate the concert-going public in Munich after having spent nine years expanding the horizons of the public in Berlin. Recitals by Bülow in 1865 featuring works by Anton

Rubinstein and Liszt were too daring for conservative Munich, even though they were performed alongside Beethoven, Bach, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Symptomatically, when Bülow departed for a concert tour, a newspaper pronounced: “Peace reigns again in Munich.” Royal plans for a new “Wagner theatre,” announced as the conservatory discussions were underway, also provoked public outcry from governmental ministers and members of the public. They were upset at Wagner’s influence at the royal court and the costs of funding his ventures. Bülow, as an ally of Wagner’s, was also attacked by the press as part of a campaign against Wagner and all that he represented. 59 The

establishment of a music school that operated on Wagnerian principles in no way meant

that that city was prepared to let Wagner define its culture.

Indeed, Bülow’s term as director was short. He took office when the Musikschule

opened in 1867 and resigned in 1869. Whereas some scholars have argued that

Wagner’s opponents drove Bülow out of Munich, 60 the reality seems to be that the personal issues involving the affair between Wagner and Bülow’s wife, Cosima, made it impossible for Bülow to remain in Munich. 61 In his farewell letter of August 1869,

59 Birkin, Hans von Bülow , 155-156. 60 See William Ashton Ellis, Translator’s note to “A Music-School for Munich” by Richard Wagner, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works , vol. IV, “Art and Politics,” trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1912), 172. 61 Jost, “Richard Wagners Münchner Atelier,” 85.

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addressed to teachers and students of the Musikschule , Bülow instructed the

Musikschule ’s students to honour and acknowledge Wagner as the greatest living composer to whom they owed both the initiative to found the Musikschule and the plan for its organisation. 62 After Bülow’s departure, the influence of Wagner’s ideas declined

and the Musikschule became a conservatory in the mould of most others in German-

speaking Europe. The 1874 death of the composer and teacher Peter Cornelius, who

had come to Munich with Wagner in 1865, meant that the conservative direction

represented by Rheinberger defined the conservatory for the following twenty-five

years. 63

Liszt also sought to create opportunities for music education sympathetic to

Zukunftsmusik . Liszt regarded German conservatories, especially the Leipzig

Conservatory, as the institutional embodiments of the musical ideas he rejected. Liszt

also clearly perceived how a conservatory that embraced the ideas of the New German

School could be beneficial to the development of progressive music. Liszt, like Wagner,

saw contemporary German music education as sorely lacking in its failure to educate

orchestral musicians up to the task of performing new nineteenth-century music. Liszt

taught master classes in Weimar, where he also conducted the court orchestra. In 1855,

Liszt proposed a music school to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and

expressed his desire to include Wagner in the faculty, but his proposal was rejected. He

continued to teach his master classes in Weimar until his death in 1886. These classes

were, in their structure and content, diametrically opposed to the style of instruction at a

62 This letter appears in full in Josef Gabriel Rheinberger: Briefe und Dokumente seines Lebens , vol. III, eds. Harald Wanger and Hans-Josef Irmen (Vaduz: Prisca, 1983), 88-91. 63 Edelmann, “Königliche Musikschule,” 115.

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German conservatory. Liszt even treated his students to parodies of prominent conservatory instructors such as Clara Schumann and openly mocked conservatory education. 64

The Weimar Orchesterschule was founded in 1872, not by Liszt but by his

Weimar colleague Carl Müllerhartung. 65 Liszt’s ideas, though, were influential at the new

institution which, in 1956, was renamed in his honour. More than a conservatory, the

Weimar institution was conceived as a “progressive school of music” ( Fortschrittschule

der Musik ). 66 The name Orchesterschule advertised its difference from the dominant

German conservatory model. The goal was the training of orchestral musicians up to

the task of performing increasingly complex and demanding Zukunftsmusik , not on

producing conductors, composers or soloists. Liszt and Wagner needed larger and

better orchestras to perform their difficult compositions. This focus on technical ability

stood in marked contrast to the reality at other German conservatories, which focused

on theoretical grounding in the works of past masters and became known as “virtuoso

factories” due to their privileging of soloists over ensemble players. 67 In 1885, an opera programme was introduced at the Orchesterschule on the model of Wagner’s earlier

proposals for Munich. The Orchesterschule also made it a priority to perform

contemporary music. The school eventually took on the trappings of other German

conservatories, such as composition classes as well as piano and vocal instruction. Its

focus on meeting the needs of composers such as Wagner and Liszt for highly

64 Bomberger, “Charting the Future,” 348-350. 65 Ibid., 352, 354. 66 Wolfram Huschke, “Zur Liszt-Identität der Musikhochschule in Weimar,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 42/1-2 (2001): 197. 67 The Leipzig Conservatory initially did not teach orchestral instruments except for strings. Only in 1881 was its orchestral department complete.

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accomplished orchestral musicians, though, was unique in Germany and brought it the approbation and material support of Liszt, Bülow and others associated with the New

German School. The Weimar Orchesterschule was the only school of music in Germany that was firmly in the progressive camp. 68

In Berlin, too, progressive forces tried to carve out a music-educational niche for themselves. Arthur Rubinstein described the Berlin of the 1880s as a “ Konservatopolis .”

This was due to the large number of (often short-lived) private music schools, but also because of the conservatism of Berlin’s musical public. The conservatism was not ubiquitous, though; Wagnerian conservatory students were a recognisable type in the

1890s. 69 The Musikhochschule was in the hands of Joseph Joachim, who made it clear that he stood for the classical tradition and offered Brahms, not Wagner, as a “messiah” to those who needed one. 70

Another conservatory, though, was positioned as a counterweight to the

Musikhochschule in the ideological fight for Berlin’s cultural profile. The Stern’sches

Konservatorium (Stern Conservatory) was a private institution founded in 1850, making it Berlin’s first conservatory. It was not just one component of the “ Konservatopolis ,” but

a foundational influence on Berlin’s musical culture. In a Festschrift commemorating the

conservatory’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1925, two faculty members asserted that

Berlin only achieved the character of a true, modern musical city through the 1850

68 Bomberger, “Charting the Future,” 352-357. 69 Schenk, Die Hochschule , 59. 70 Adolf Weissmann, Berlin als Musikstadt: Geschichte der Oper und des Konzerts von 1740 bis 1911 (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1911), 300.

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founding of the Stern Conservatory. 71 The Stern Conservatory asserted itself as a counterpoint to Berlin’s official, conservative culture as represented by the

Musikhochschule , Prussia’s state conservatory. It was owned and directed by two

Jewish families, the Sterns and the Hollaenders. 72 The Stern Conservatory’s origins in

Berlin’s Jewish bourgeoisie are a clear contrast to the Musikhochschule , which represented Berlin’s officialdom and the cultural agenda of the Prussian court and state.

After Julius Stern’s death in 1883 and a period of ownership by a group of heirs, Jenny

Meyer emerged as the sole owner of the conservatory. While we should not exaggerate the significance of a woman becoming owner and director of a conservatory, a woman assuming such a position at a conservatory was certainly unusual in the 1880s. Meyer’s career is an example of emancipation. 73 As such her assumption of the Stern

Conservatory’s directorship signalled a progressive attitude when compared to the more

traditional Musikhochschule .

The Stern Conservatory’s anniversary publication also sheds light on its role as

an institutional home for progressive musical forces in Berlin. Wilhelm Klatte and Ludwig

Misch, looking back at their conservatory’s seventy-five years of existence, pointed

proudly to Bülow’s 1855-1863 tenure as a piano teacher. This is how they presented the

conservatory’s co-founder and co-director—from 1857 sole director—Julius Stern:

71 Wilhelm Klatte and Ludwig Misch, Das Sternsche Konservatorium der Musik zu Berlin 1850-1925: Festschrift zum 75jährigen Jubiläum (N.p.: n.p., n.d. [1925]), 5, 9-10. Early nineteenth-century Berlin had had two public institutions of music education, though neither of which was a conservatory per se: the Institut für Kirchenmusik (founded in 1822) and the composition school of the Prussian Academy of Arts (founded 1833). 72 Dietmar Schenk, “Das Stern’sche Konservatorium der Musik. Ein Privatkonservatorium in Berlin, 1850- 1915,” in Musical Education in Europe , Vol. 1, eds. Fend and Noiray, 275, 286-288. 73 Ibid., 277-278.

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The artistic farsightedness and liberal-mindedness of this man, who brought about the first performance of the “Missa solemnis” in Berlin, who served as a pioneer with equal understanding for the works of Bach and Handel and the Zukunftsmusik of Wagner and Liszt, also ensured “freedom of artistic opinion” within the conservatory .... If the work of the recognised, that is the older, masters naturally formed the basis of music education, still entry was not barred to the new [masters], the controversial [masters] as the case may be. Compositions by Liszt and Raff, for example, had only just appeared when they were added to the teaching material. 74

We should also consider how one of the Stern Conservatory’s co-founders

interpreted the meaning of “to conserve” for conservatory practice. In 1855, Adolph

Bernhard Marx published his pedagogical work, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts und

Ihre Pflege , which engaged with the implications of the word “conservatory.”

Since [this term] has already been established, let them be called “conservatories!” They must set themselves a higher goal than narrow “preservation.” In these times, which have no shortage of catchwords, conservative is what one calls the inclination to hold on to “the existing order.” However, the status quo is ... not always the good or the best. It is in fact never the best. Humanity is dependent on life, that is, on movement and progress; only what is dead “persists”—until it decomposes. ... Let progress be our motto! That is art’s motto. Nourished and enlightened by the acts of those spirits that have passed on, we wish to consecrate our life and work across the span of time to the present day, to the future and to

74 Klatte and Misch, Das Sternsche Konservatorium , 16-18.

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eternity, that we, within the confines of personal existence, may delight in the advance enjoyment of and participation in the times that will come after us. 75

Marx’s cri de cœur in favour of progress as a watchword for music and music education,

despite the putative implications of the word “conservatory,” reveals the progressive

climate that reigned at the conservatory that he helped found five years before writing

these lines.

As with other conservatories discussed here, the passage of time complicates

any easy binary distinction between progressivism and conservatism. Marx left the

Stern Conservatory in 1856. After Stern’s death in 1883, the Stern Conservatory

became less open to new musical influences. By the 1880s, it had become difficult to

discern aesthetic differences between the private institution and the Musikhochschule ,

as committed opponents of Wagner and supporters of Brahms assumed teaching

positions at the Stern Conservatory in the era of Meyer’s direction. 76 The conductor

Bruno Walter, who entered the Stern Conservatory at the young age of eight 77 and earned himself the nickname “the little Mozart,” 78 remembered the Stern Conservatory

as a redoubt of reaction. He described the community he grew up in and the

conservatory he attended as anti-Wagnerian environments in which Brahms was held

up as the antithesis of the threatening music of the future. Walter described the Stern

75 A. B. Marx, Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre Pflege. Methode der Musik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1855), 565-566. 76 Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 7. 77 This was presumably in 1884, as Walter was born in September 1876. In his memoirs, Walter stated that he could not recall any other student his age and that he remembered himself as a child among young adults. 78 Ryding and Pechefsky, Bruno Walter , 3.

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Conservatory in this regard as similar to the conservatories in Leipzig and Cologne as well as to the Berlin Musikhochschule under Joachim. He used powerful imagery to do so: “Anti-Wagnerianism had retreated into the conservatories as into a fortress and closed the gates.” Walter observed that the Stern Conservatory competed with the

Musikhochschule not only in the quality of education but also in the vehemence of the rejection of Wagner, whose name was simply not uttered within the Stern

Conservatory’s walls. 79

Progressive forces targeted conservatories of music as institutional embodiments of the conservatism and tradition they sought to overturn. The conservatory establishment generally proved resilient, though Wagner—a towering cultural force— was able to take advantage of cultural and political opportunities in Munich to partially achieve his goal of a music school that served his needs and aligned with his values. In

Weimar, a conservatory was founded explicitly to meet the needs of the New German

School and in Berlin a private conservatory offered a cultural agenda that contrasted to that of the Musikhochschule . Still, progressive teachers and students penetrated and affected even the most staunchly traditional conservatories, and the more progressive institutions had periods in which conservatism was ascendant. In Berlin, the

Musikhochschule experienced a sustained progressive period in line with changed

Prussian cultural politics after World War I. The next section tells that story.

IV: Reform of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in the Twentieth Century

79 Bruno Walter, Thema und Variationen: Erinnerungen und Gedanken (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1947), 46-48.

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Political and cultural transformations after the upheaval of World War I created opportunities to reform and restructure music education. These were most pronounced in Berlin. A climate conducive to change was facilitated by a new administration of the

Musikhochschule and the long period of Social-Democratic government in Prussia from

1920-1932, when Otto Braun, the “Red Czar of Prussia,” was minister-president (apart from two short interruptions). 80 To be sure, the Berlin Musikhochschule was not the only

conservatory to adapt to inter-war cultural trends. In 1928, Bernhard Sekles introduced

Europe’s first jazz class at Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt. 81 At the Munich

Akademie , the Wagnerian Siegmund von Hausegger became director in 1920 and then president in 1922, an office he held until 1934. The Akademie remained generally hostile to atonal music and other modern trends, but students were sometimes able to create opportunities to learn and perform contemporary music, including Schoenberg but also jazz and music inspired by dadaism. 82 Berlin, however, is the most striking example of the opportunities for reform because of the confluence of musicians, politicians and opportunities concentrated there.

The Berlin Musikhochschule ’s new identity began with the appointment of Franz

Schreker as director in 1920, when twelve years of Social-Democratic government also

80 Siegfried Heimann, Der Preußische Landtag 1899-1947: eine politische Geschichte (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2011), 135-136. 81 See Joachim Tschiedel, “Der ‘jüdische Scheindirektor’ Bernhard Sekles und die Gründung der ersten europäischen Jazz-Klasse 1928,” mr-Mitteilungen 20 (September, 1996): 10-17. While Frankfurt was also under Prussian administration, Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium was private and strongly resisted intervention by the Prussian state. 82 Klaus J. Seidel, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufbruch und Gleichschaltung: München und die Akademie der Tonkunst 1914 bis 1933,” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 242, 303-311.

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began. Schreker, an Austrian opera composer, had been named by Bopp along with

Schoenberg as a potential source of new inspiration for composition courses at the

Vienna Musikakademie . On 13 May, 1920, Schreker published a manifesto in the

Berliner Tageblatt ; it was reprinted in the Austrian Musikblätter des Anbruch in

September. His manifesto was entitled simply “ Musikhochschule ,” indicating both that it contained his plans for Berlin’s conservatory and also his ambition for the Berlin

Musikhochschule to be the conservatory in German-speaking Europe, a model for the practice of music education.

In his article, Schreker counseled the younger generation to be patient. In his view, learning and reinterpreting the technique and form of expression of those who came before was necessary to produce something new and meaningful. He thought students were perhaps too quick to pronounce as antiquated the old volumes, in which rules were presented according to the old masters. He wrote that students should be given new editions of these old works and told that “he who created this was once a young and eager person like you. He was in full command of his technique, but this was not the most important thing to him. He knew all the rules of the art of his day, but only in order to transgress them.” Therefore, the conservatory should be open to everything that was valuable in new music.

Schreker continued in the same vein when he began to speak of individual composers. He cautioned that one must not stop with Brahms and “cross oneself” when confronted with Richard Strauss, Mahler or even Wagner. (This, in the same conservatory that had reprimanded Ochs for preferring Wagner to Mendelssohn.)

Schreker also criticised the use of methods of instruction in harmony that were out of

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date one hundred years earlier; he identified the acceptance of new methods as itself in keeping with tradition, since “Bach’s outrageous harmonic temerity” still exerted influence on the work of composition. Lastly, Schreker stated that Schoenberg should be incorporated into the conservatory’s curriculum. In stating this, he drew attention directly to Schoenberg’s radicalism. He wrote: “Consider: the young person is born as a

‘contemporary.’ What seemed foreign to us twenty years ago—this is self-evident for him.” 83 And thus, what seemed foreign to Schreker’s generation in 1920 should nevertheless be taught; it would be self-evident to future generations.

Schreker did not effect this transformation of music education on his own, however—he did not even seek to. In fact, the violin professor Carl Flesch remembered him as something of an absentee director. 84 Much of the day-to-day running of the

Musikhochschule fell to the assistant director, Georg Schünemann. Schünemann in turn worked closely on the reform project of Leo Kestenberg, the socialist music educator and politician who was appointed to the new Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and

Public Education ( Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung , formerly the

Prussian Kultusministerium ) in 1918. 85 Until his dismissal in 1932, Kestenberg exerted a major influence over Prussian cultural politics, specifically in the area of music education from kindergarten to the Musikhochschule . It was Kestenberg who brought

Schreker and other progressive figures, such as Paul Hindemith, to the

83 Franz Schreker, “Musikhochschule,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 2/14 (September 1920): 490-492. 84 Carl Flesch, The Memoirs of Carl Flesch (New York: Da Capo, 1979), 315. 85 Heike Elftmann, Georg Schünemann (1884-1945): Musiker, Pädagoge, Wissenschaftler und Organisator: eine Situationsbeschreibung des Berliner Musiklebens (Sinzig: Studio, 2001), 11, 104-105.

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Musikhochschule .86 He also won Schoenberg and Ferruccio Busoni, another future-

oriented composer, for master classes at the Prussian Academy of Arts. 87

Kestenberg’s role as a politician in music-educational reform speaks to the new

political climate after World War I. Social Democrats and their coalition partners sought

to foster a new and confident identity through culture and education in the wake of

defeat and upheaval. 88 This political sense of purpose was intertwined with the cultural

climate created by the war’s destabilising legacy. A 1952 celebration of Kestenberg

captures this cultural moment, the cultural-political opportunities it provided and

Kestenberg’s leading position within it. In honour of Kestenberg’s seventieth birthday,

Eberhard Preußner published a panegyric to Kestenberg, who was then living in Israel,

in Musik im Unterricht . Preußner wrote that “to write about Leo Kestenberg means to

write about Berlin in the 1920s.” He described the former Prussian cultural politician as

“one of the strongest and most successful exponents of this unique time period in a

unique city ... in which Einstein, Spengler, Spranger alongside many others defined

intellectual life, in which Käthe Kollwitz created, in which Schönberg, Schreker,

Hindemith, even Busoni, Klemperer, Furtwängler and Kleiber themselves” were the

principal musical figures. 89 Identifying Kestenberg as the most prominent representative

of this boundary-breaking period shows the importance of the political climate to music

86 Wilfried Gruhn, “Vorwort,” in Leo Kestenberg: Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 1, Die Hauptschriften , ed. Wilfried Gruhn (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2009), 11. 87 Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 255. 88 Gruhn, “Vorwort,” 16. 89 Eberhard Preußner, “Leo Kestenberg zum 70. Geburtstag,” Musik im Unterricht 43 (1952): 317, quoted in Wilfried Gruhn, “Leo Kestenberg 1882-1962. Kosmopolit und Visionär,” in Leo Kestenberg: Musikpädagoge und Musikpolitiker in Berlin, Prag und Tel Aviv , eds. Susanne Fontaine et al. (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2008), 11.

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education. More important still, if Kestenberg, a politician associated with reform of music education, is numbered among “the strongest and most successful” figures of this cultural moment, this also suggests the centrality of music education to the larger progressive and experimental cultural-political climate of 1920s Berlin and “Red

Prussia” more generally.

There was a consensus in the years immediately following the war’s end that music was a particularly German art and should thus be cultivated. Further, this consensus held that the state was responsible to provide much needed education and comfort by fostering musical life. Even in the face of the Prussian state’s calamitous economic situation following the war, the belief in the restorative potential of music for

Germany was shared across the political spectrum. Military defeat and economic collapse were not incidental to this consensus; it was precisely in the face of these hardships that music emerged as the field of endeavour in which Germany’s historical greatness could not be denied. Konrad Haenisch, Prussia’s minister of education and cultural affairs [ Kultusminister ], articulated the social-democratic interpretation of music’s political importance in December 1919, when he told the Prussian

Constitutional State Assembly: 90

One can be national, one should be national; we should be proud of the great cultural past of our people, of the immortal treasures of our culture, of our literature, of our classical period [ Klassik ], they should be made accessible to our entire people. Right now, in adversity, in the humiliation of our people, we

90 Verfassunggebende Preußische Landesversammlung , the precursor to the Landtag, or state diet.

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should hold our head high and proudly acknowledge our Germanness [Deutschtum ]. This is more necessary today than ever before.

Haenisch went on to contrast national pride as he envisioned it with the kind of

“nationalist arrogance” that he blamed for Germany’s miserable condition. 91 The

creation of a music division in the Ministry, and specifically the music-educational plans

of the Independent Social Democrat (USPD) Kestenberg, was welcomed by both the

SPD and the Zentrum , if for different reasons. This cross-party support made

Kestenberg’s work possible. In 1919, even a representative of the German National

People’s Party (DNVP) praised the creation of the music division and the idea of state

control of music education. 92 Decades later, in Israel, Kestenberg recalled with justified satisfaction that the extreme Right did not repudiate his reforms: “Hitler wanted to obliterate and erase everything connected with my name, but all of the edicts that were proposed and implemented by me remained in effect under the National Socialist regime due to their grounding in facts and the good sense of the leading music teachers of that time.” 93

Kestenberg’s reforms were ambitious and thoroughgoing. They served a progressive agenda that followed from the aforementioned consensus that music education was a political project. In 1921, as Head of Musical Affairs ( Referent für musikalische Angelegenheiten ) in the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und

Volksbildung , Kestenberg published his plans for reform of music education at all levels

91 Susanne Fontaine, “Leo Kestenberg als Musikpolitiker,” in Musikkultur in der Weimarer Republik , eds. Wolfgang Rathert and Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott, 2001), 82-84. 92 Ibid., 86. 93 Leo Kestenberg, Bewegte Zeiten: Musisch-musikantische Lebenserinnerungen (Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1961), 42-43.

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together in a manifesto entitled Musikerziehung und Musikpflege .94 The justification for

this kind of overarching restructuring of music education rested on the conviction that

musical matters intersect with culture and human history, that is, that music was

intimately connected to larger visions of society. As Kestenberg explained fifteen years

later in a letter to his daughter, “art and music should not be regarded as a source of

enjoyment or sensual stimulus, but rather should be classified and applied as means of

‘formation and change.’” 95 This idea of formation and change, or Gestaltung und

Veränderung , was central to Kestenberg’s conception of art as an object of pedagogy.

Kestenberg saw in music education the collaboration between artistic creation and the technical aspect of music, the craftsmanship. This combination lent music education its

“Bildungswert ,” its value for the larger process of education and cultivation. 96

Accordingly, Kestenberg divided his Denkschrift into sections addressing kindergarten; primary school; higher education and adult education; university;

Volkshochschule ; private music school; musical Gymnasium ; Hochschule für Musik ;

and an envisioned music-pedagogical academy. 97 These topics reveal the essentials of

Kestenberg’s work: “the clear distinction between [those] who perceive music as a

general language of emotion, that is, the music-lover, the dilettante and [those] who

make music their profession out of an inner need and gift, whether as productive or

94 Leo Kestenberg, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1921), reprinted in Leo Kestenberg: Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 1, Die Hauptschriften , ed. Wilfried Gruhn (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2009), 23-130.The International Leo Kestenberg Society translates the title of this work as Music Education and the Fostering of Music . See “Music Education: Basic principles,” International Leo Kestenberg Society, http://www.leo-kestenberg.com/music- educator/info_musikpadagogik_grundprinzipien_206_ang.cfm . 95 Quoted in Wilfried Gruhn, “Leo Kestenberg 1882-1962. Kosmopolit und Visionär,” 19. 96 Ibid., 19-20. 97 Kestenberg, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege , 24. This list of sections is not exhaustive.

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reproductive artist, or as music educator.” 98 Why start with kindergarten? Because

“influencing the small child seemed and still [in 1961] seems tremendously important to me.” Kestenberg saw great responsibility for kindergarten teachers. He called for emphasising “the meaning and the value of music for the education of the small child” as well as “sufficient musical education for the teaching staff” in “ear training, rhythmic gymnastics, children’s songs, roundelay, children’s games and improvisation” and the introduction of musical games and dances in kindergartens, founded on methodologically sound primers. Kestenberg’s attention to music taught in kindergartens demonstrates the comprehensiveness of his vision.

As for conservatories—“Hochschule für Musik and Orchesterschule ”—their task was “the final, highest education.” 99 Here, Kestenberg waded into a debate that long

preceded his tenure as Musikreferent . He was adamant that conservatories should

privilege “musicality in general, that which is humanistic and full of life, above virtuosity

and one-sidedness.” 100 Further, in the matter of conservatories, “much, if not everything,

depends, here as everywhere, on understanding music as having agency, as part of our

humanity.” Given the improvements Kestenberg envisioned in primary and secondary

98 Kestenberg, Bewegte Zeiten , 43. 99 Kestenberg, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege , 79. Kestenberg referred to Konservatorium as a variety of private music school; in keeping with English convention, and the usage employed throughout this dissertation, I use it for institutions of higher musical education, whether Konservatorium , as in Leipzig or Vienna, or Hochschule , as in Berlin or Vienna, or Akademie as in Munich or, again, Vienna. Schenk refers to the Berlin Musikhochschule as Preußens Konservatorium , or Prussia’s conservatory, in the subtitle of his book. Kestenberg also called for greater clarity in how terms such as Musikschule, Konservatorium and Hochschule were employed, which speaks to a definitional imprecision in terms of what kinds of institutions adopted which names. Kestenberg sought to clear up this imprecision as part of his attempt to streamline music education. 100 Ibid., 79. This elegant translation of “ das Allgemein-Musikalische, das Menschlich-Lebensvolle über Virtuosentum und Einseitigkeit ” is not my own, but comes from the International Leo Kestenberg Society, http://www.leo-kestenberg.com/music- educator/info_ang.cfm?cfgSection=musikpadagogik&cfgSousSection=grundprinzipien&noPageSiteIntern et=206 .

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music education, new conservatories would have to be founded through transforming existing conservatories, which taught both amateurs and those on a professional path, into proper Hochschulen , recognised by the state as schools for educating future professional musicians. A revision of the tenure system was also necessary. Lifetime appointments should be exceptions, because changes in artistic and educational philosophies necessitated “constant renewal” of faculty. 101

Kestenberg was, then, in fundamental agreement with Schreker’s progressive,

future- and youth-oriented philosophy of music education. He was convinced that

conservatories should keep pace with developments in music and education, rather

than protect and conserve supposedly timeless standards. But what was actually

socialist about any of this? Kestenberg’s socialist grounding was more obvious in his

other projects, such as the Kroll Opera. The Kroll Opera performed non-traditional

pieces for the working class at prices appropriate to a labourer’s income. Theory and

reality did not always converge. Kestenberg’s discussion of “the people” often lacked a

clear sense of who “the people” were and what forms of art they desired. Additionally,

the Right deplored these experimental stagings, and Kestenberg was not always deft

about placating his opponents. 102 But socialism and a progressive agenda were present

in Kestenberg’s conservatory plans as well. Finding them requires reading beneath the

surface of some of Kestenberg’s more romantic language involving human development

101 Kestenberg, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege , 80. 102 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007) 197.

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and “spiritually mastered practice.” 103 Such a reading can be undertaken in more than

one way.

First, Kestenberg’s project of centralisation and professionalisation placed a

priority on efficiency and modernisation over the maintenance of tradition. This is seen

most clearly in Kestenberg’s advocacy of standardised training and certification of music

teachers. Requiring testing for orchestral musicians who wished to teach the next

generation of orchestra members would “forestall [both] the danger of superficiality and

‘dabblerism.’” Second, one perceived benefit of Kestenberg’s reforms would be the

reduction of the “music-proletariat,” which resulted from too many musicians being

trained for too few professional positions. 104 Third, the International Leo Kestenberg

Society explains how socialist ideals underpinned Kestenberg’s entire agenda, which was “holistically organized, socialistically oriented, and inspired by the reform pedagogical approaches of the Youth Movement ( Jugendbewegung ).” Further,

Kestenberg “embraced the nurturing of both traditional and popular music .... The

concept behind this was on one hand based on Kestenberg's socialist convictions: all

human beings, whatever their origins, should be able to take part in (the practice of)

music.” As Kestenberg himself put it: "As important as all artistic-aesthetic interests

were to me, I was equally attached to all the ideological-socialist ideals." 105

103 “Music Education: Basic principles,” International Leo Kestenberg Society, http://www.leo- kestenberg.com/music-educator/info_musikpadagogik_grundprinzipien_206_ang.cfm . 104 Kestenberg, Musikerziehung und Musikpflege , 78, 78n58, 84-85. 105 “Music Education: Basic principles,” International Leo Kestenberg Society, http://www.leo- kestenberg.com/music-educator/info_musikpadagogik_grundprinzipien_206_ang.cfm . This translation of Kestenberg’s comments in Bewegte Zeiten comes again from the Society. For its description of Kestenberg’s goals, the Society refers to Wilfried Gruhn, Geschichte der Musikerziehung. Eine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte schulischer Musikerziehung vom Gesangunterricht der Aufklärungspädagogik zu ästhetisch kultureller Bildung (Hofheim: Wolke, [1993], 2003).

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Some of Kestenberg’s theorising may appear abstruse to contemporary readers.

We must ask, therefore, whether his concept of “education toward humanity with and through music” 106 meant anything for the practice and experience of music education at the conservatory level. The answer is a resounding yes. The image of Kestenberg attempting “to clear away the cobwebs of elitist culture and promote the creation of ‘art for the people’” found its way into a history of music in the twentieth century by Alex

Ross of the New Yorker .107 The Kestenberg Reform made Berlin into a centre of

progressive music-educational praxis. Kestenberg’s policies resonated beyond Prussia

and beyond the 1920s. Kestenberg strengthened Berlin’s receptiveness to new music

by appointing progressives to two music-educational institutions: the Prussian academy

of Arts and the Musikhochschule .108

In particular, the career of the composer Paul Hindemith shows clearly that the

Berlin Musikhochschule during the Kestenberg era became known as a progressive contrast to other institutions, and as such became a magnet for frustrated progressive pedagogues. The story of Hindemith’s arrival and success in Berlin demonstrates the progressive change in music education that took place during the period of “red

Prussia.” Hindemith’s move to Berlin is one aspect of the story of Kestenberg’s 1925 attempt to transform Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt into a state Hochschule .

Kestenberg had already transformed the conservatory in Cologne into a publicly funded

Hochschule and sought, in Frankfurt, to create a third Prussian Musikhochschule . Even

106 Gruhn, “Vorwort,” 15. 107 Ross, The Rest is Noise , 197. 108 As noted above, Busoni was brought to the Prussian Academy of Arts, to be followed by Schoenberg, and Schreker was called to the Musikhochschule. See Ibid., 197.

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though the foundation for the august Frankfurt institution had lost much of its capital through inflation and currency collapse, Kestenberg’s plans were rebuffed. 109

Kestenberg attributed this failure to “narrow local patriotism.” 110 But the politics of local patriotism were not the only ones at play. The Frankfurt institution’s resistance also bespoke a sense of bourgeois confidence and self-sufficiency, one that was, in actuality, increasingly in decline and vanishing. 111 In other words, the Prussian state’s centralising, socialist agenda was also a source of friction.

The plan was not only to create a state Hochschule out of the conservatory in

Frankfurt, but to create a progressive one, subject to Kestenberg’s agenda. This gives us a glimpse into what progressive conservatory reform meant in practice: a conservatory devoted not to the production of virtuosos, but to Volksbildung , that is, not just to public education, but to popular and accessible education in modern music, including film music and popular music. The state takeover [ Verstaatlichung ] of

Prussia’s conservatories, after all, was seen as necessary due to new demands

imposed by Kestenberg’s reforms, specifically the educational needs ushered in by new

requirements for music-teacher certification. 112 Even after the failure of the plan to

transform the extant conservatory in Frankfurt, Kestenberg tried to found a new

Musikhochschule there, as such a music school seemed more feasible on Prussia’s

109 Dietmar Schenk, “Hindemith, die Berliner Musikhochschule und die Kunstpolitik der Weimarer Republik,” in Paul Hindemith in Berlin: Essays und Dokumente , eds. Franz Bullmann, Wolfgang Rathert and Dietmar Schenk (Berlin: Hochschule der Künste, 1997), 24. 110 Kestenberg, Bewegte Zeiten , 72. 111 Schenk, “Hindemith,” 24. 112 Peter Cahn, “Ein unbekanntes musikpädagogisches Dokument von 1927: Hindemiths Konzeption einer Musikhochschule,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch/Annales Hindemith VI (1977): 149-150.

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fringes, in Frankfurt, than in Berlin. 113 Moreover, this never-realised conservatory was

not intended to mirror the schools in Berlin and Cologne. Rather, it was to be an

exceptionally progressive institution due to the introduction of the fields of study listed

above, the goal of which was to raise the taste of the masses. It would train teachers in

accordance with Kestenberg’s ministerial directives and was to be opened in 1928 at

the latest. 114

Hindemith, a former student at Dr. Hochs Konservatorium , which he attended with a full scholarship, 115 supported Kestenberg’s agenda. 116 It is easy to see why, from an ideological standpoint. Hindemith was from a working-class family. His musical ideology fit well with Kestenberg’s on two counts. First, Hindemith was an advocate for the work of contemporary composers. Second, Hindemith became associated with

Gebrauchsmusik , music for use. “If, say, a bassoonist and a double-bass player were looking for something to play, then Hindemith would dash off a Duet for Bassoon and

Double Bass and not worry what posterity might make of it. He worked fast and to order.” 117 This is certainly an anti-elitist practice. Gebrauchsmusik also rests on an understanding of music as a skilled craft and learned profession; writing music based on practical needs keeps musicians working and prevents the expansion of a “musical proletariat.” Gebrauchsmusik was also promoted by Carl Orff, who pioneered instruction

music for school children. Kestenberg considered Orff a suitable candidate to oversee

113 Schenk, “Hindemith,” 24-25. 114 Cahn, “Ein unbekanntes musikpädagogisches Dokument,” 151. 115 Ross, The Rest is Noise , 198. 116 Schenk, “Hindemith,” 24-25. 117 Ross, The Rest is Noise , 199.

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all German music education. 118 Hindemith and Kestenberg, then, were certainly compatible in their ideas and aims. It is no surprise that Hindemith was eventually won for the Berlin Musikhochschule . How he got there shows the connections between music education and the project of fostering a progressive musical culture as part of a larger socialist social agenda.

The primary opponent of Kestenberg’s Frankfurt plans was Heinrich Langer.

Langer was not only a member of the board of trustees of Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium , but also a member of city council and, from 1925, head of the newly created music department of the city government. Kestenberg dubbed him a “reactionary,” which indicates that Kestenberg understood that resistance to his attempted take-over of Dr.

Hoch’s Konservatorium was ideological as much as it was an expression of local

patriotism. Langer was opposed to Kestenberg’s plan to found a conservatory separate

from the established Frankfurt institution. He also drafted a statute for the new

conservatory, which reached the Prussian ministry in February 1927. One month

earlier, Kestenberg had enlisted Hindemith’s aid in negotiating with Langer. Hindemith’s

meeting with Langer was acrimonious and resulted in the composer ending his

relationship with Langer. This is why, when Hindemith issued a written commentary on

the organisation of the new Musikhochschule , he did so not over his own name, but

over that of his colleague Licco Amar. Hindemith also informed Langer that he had

accepted a position in Berlin, that he did not wish to wait for the opening of the new

118 Ross, The Rest is Noise , 198-200.

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Musikhochschule in Frankfurt, and that he would not teach at Dr. Hoch’s

Konservatorium , which was hardly the equal of the Berlin Musikhochschule .119

Despite this early acceptance of a position in Berlin, Hindemith offered commentary on the mooted statutes for the proposed Musikhochschule in Frankfurt in

June 1927, possibly in an attempt to secure his colleague Amar a position. Hindemith- as-Amar charged that Langer’s proposals offered nothing different from extant music schools, nothing that indicated a conservatory with “new goals.” In keeping with that critique, Hindemith regarded as doubtful the necessity of the proposed department of sacred music, as numerous other institutions already met the needs of church music.

Hindemith then expressed ideas about music education in keeping with socialist ideals of accessibility and usefulness. He found the inclusion of a department of conducting in the conservatory plan inappropriate and called instead for conductors to be educated alongside other musicians, followed by a few specialised courses. This was an argument for using music schools to produce musicians skilled in a range of practical applications rather than to produce an elite. Hindemith also argued that theory should not be treated as distinct from practice. Indeed, “the separate handling of theoretical instruction is really the greatest detriment that our current education system exhibits.”

The separation between theory and practice and the antagonism that sometimes raged between theoretical and practical teachers was, in Hindemith’s view, “catastrophic for our entire conception of music.” He thought that instrumental education should be

“rationally redesigned” and theory instruction should be brought into harmony with “the way of thinking of our age.” Progressive statements followed upon progressive

119 Cahn, “Ein unbekanntes musikpädagogisches Dokument,” 151-153.

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statements. A new curriculum, appropriate to new times, was called for. “That which came before has become useless for us.” New exercises would be produced by teachers working alongside students. Hindemith thought that these exercises would form the study materials of the distant future. 120

Progress, the future, practicality, usefulness. The kernel of Hindemith’s argument was that over-specialised music education should give way to “the work of a musical workshop [ Werkstattarbeit ], in which everyone took part in everything.” 121 This

statement alerts us to important historical continuities in progressive visions of music

education. Over sixty years earlier, Wagner had railed against conservatism in favour of

music education attuned to practical needs and functioning as a musical atelier, or

workshop. (A difference between Hindemith and Wagner is that the latter argued for

separating opera and theatre education from conservatories of music.) The Frankfurt

project was finally abandoned in 1929 due to Frankfurt’s growing debt and the larger

financial crisis. 122 As far as the progressive politics of music education, though, it hardly mattered by that point. Hindemith accepted an appointment in Berlin in December 1926, and began his duties at the Berlin Musikhochschule in the summer of 1927. The progressive innovations planned for Frankfurt, such as the Broadcasting Laboratory

(Rundfunkversuchsstelle ) and the incorporation of film music, followed Hindemith to

Berlin instead. Indeed, Hindemith’s five years in Berlin, from 1927-1933, comprise an identifiable sub-period with the larger avant-garde phase of the Musikhochschule .

Hindemith loomed large at the Musikhochschule . His presence was decisive for the

120 Ibid., 161-167. 121 Ibid., 167. 122 Ibid., 170.

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flowering of progressive pedagogy. Schünemann, for example, directed the

Broadcasting Laboratory, but Hindemith played a key role. He advised Friedrich

Trautwein on the development of the trautonium, a new electronic instrument.

Hindemith also taught a course on film music. 123

We can go beyond the Broadcasting Laboratory to see what was progressive about the Berlin Musikhochschule during the ascendancy of “Red Prussia.” The conservatory’s yearly reports, or Jahresberichte , are illuminating in this respect. The

Jahresbericht for 1928-1929 included an essay entitled “Talkies [ Tonfilm ] and Radio

[Rundfunk ] in Music Teaching” by Schünemann, the assistant director. This piece illustrates what progressive music education meant in practice: experimenting with new technology, putting aside the notion of elite culture and training students in the practical needs of culture accessible to the masses. The first sentence reinforces the points made above. It proclaimed that talking pictures and radio presented music education with new duties and goals. The second sentence was a clear statement that music education should be attuned to the realities of mass culture, should experiment with the newest technology and should look to practical needs for its priorities. As Schünemann wrote, “Every musician nowadays should get to know the basic conditions of mechanical transmission of music, as they must be able to play or sing in front of a microphone; they must know how to adjust tone and technique to the particular nature of electronic recording and playback.” 124

123 Schenk, “Hindemith,” 25-29. 124 Georg Schünemann, “Tonfilm und Rundfunk im Musikunterricht,” 50. Jahresbericht der Staatl. Adak. Hochschule für Musik vom 1. Oktober 1928 bis 30. September 1929 (1929): 7-12. The Jahresberichte are held in the archive of the Universität der Künste Berlin .

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Schünemann also presented film as a useful teaching tool. He wrote that students could study filmed examples of technique, movement and use of muscles while playing instruments. The possibilities of film had brought musical pedagogy to a transition point. “We can derive important knowledge for science, teaching and art from picture and sound; everywhere, we can show recordings of great musicians and educators.” Schünemann affirmed that such filmed recordings had already paid dividends in music instruction. Knowledge of the technical side of musical transmission would also be valuable for composition students. At the Musikhochschule , budding composers had already performed successful experiments which lay the groundwork

“for a new radio music.” This led the Broadcasting Laboratory to introduce courses of study in radio speech and radio music, which included: education for speaking in broadcast media; speech and gesture for films; transcription; pedagogical broadcasting for schools; and electroacoustics. 125

The Jahresbericht from the following year, 1929-1930, similarly featured reflections on aspects of the conservatory’s work that were not only new and innovative, but also in keeping with a socialist conception of the responsibilities of music education to the people. Curt Sachs wrote about the Musikhochschule ’s slide and photograph collection, as well as his own use of slides and a slide projector in his lectures there.

The forward-thinking incorporation of technology into music education, begun by the

Broadcast Laboratory, 126 is apparent here. Sachs noted that two projectors were available at the Musikhochschule for lectures or private study. A more general elevation

125 Ibid., 7-12. 126 Schenk, Die Hochschule , 261.

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of the popular to the stuff of formal study can also be read in Sachs’s article. By bringing pictures and illustrations into formal, academic music education, music teachers were following the example of popular and folk histories of music, which used images to increase their audience. 127

This Jahresbericht also contained a piece by Friedrich Trautwein entitled “The

Meaning and Nature of Electric Music.” For Trautwein, enriching the art of music meant making new forms of expression available. Trautwein had invented the trautonium, an electronic musical instrument and forerunner of the synthesiser. He hailed the trautonium as an advance compared to earlier attempts to relieve the performing artist of unnecessary burdens through the use of electronics. The trautonium rested on the most modern scientific principles and new knowledge of physics, which revised earlier understandings of tone and timbre. The trautonium, in short, was “completely equal to traditional musical instruments and, beyond that, [made] new musical effects possible.”

It was developed at the Musikhochschule and improved upon there by Hindemith. 128 We have, then, an example of a progressive conservatory, a conservatory that saw its mission as blazing a path to the new, not conserving or maintaining the old.

This embrace of progress should not, however, be construed as an outright rejection of tradition. Juxtaposed with the aforementioned articles extolling the connections among new technology, new social needs and new, mass-centred goals was a series of articles by Schünemann exploring the Musikhochschule ’s proud history.

127 Curt Sachs, “Das Lichtbildarchiv der Hochschule,” 51. Jahresbericht der Staatl. akad. Hochschule für Musik vom 1. Oktober 1929 bis 30. September 1930 (1930): 27-30. 128 Friedrich Trautwein, “Bedeutung und Wesen der elektrischen Musik,” 51. Jahresbericht der Staatl. akad. Hochschule für Musik vom 1. Oktober 1929 bis 30. September 1930 (1930): 30-34.

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The 1929-1930 Jahresbericht commemorated Joseph Joachim’s hundredth birthday with an article on the founding of the Musikhochschule in 1869. The implication was that whatever status the Musikhochschule enjoyed in the 1920s—having been reorganised under Kestenberg, Schreker and Schünemann—was inseparable from Joachim’s much earlier efforts “to raise the Hochschule to the centre of Berlin’s musical life and to the premiere educational institution in Germany and beyond.” Tellingly, given the ideological context in which Schünemann wrote, he began his retrospective on the

Musikhochschule not with its founding, but with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s 1809 idea of music as an aspect of the “education to humanity” that could bind a nation’s higher and lower orders together. 129 Humboldt’s “ Menschenerziehung ” is a revealing starting point

for a story that ended, at least at the time of writing, with Kestenberg’s “ Erziehung zur

Menschlichkeit .”

The 1931-1932 Jahresbericht saw Schünemann taking up the historical theme

yet again. He composed an essay on Joachim’s papers, which his son had given to the

Musikhochschule ’s archive the previous year. It will be remembered that Joachim was

considered a conservative in his day, and that he was a virtuoso. Schünemann

stressed—not incorrectly, but pointedly—that Joachim’s plan was for a school that did

not only train soloists, but strove for general musical education. 130 In honouring the early

history of his institution, Schünemann married the progressive spirit of his day to an

appreciation for institutional, cultural and political history. His engagement with his

129 Georg Schünemann, “Die Gründung der Hochschule für Musik. Zur Erinnerung an den 100. Geburtstag von Joseph Joachim am 28. Juni 1931,” 51. Jahresbericht der Staatl. akad. Hochschule für Musik vom 1. Oktober 1929 bis 30. September 1930 (1930): 9-15. 130 Georg Schünemann, “Aus Joachims Nachlaß,” 53. Jahresbericht der Staatlichen akad. Hochschule für Musik vom 1 Oktober 1931 bis 30. September 1932 (1932): 5-8.

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conservatory’s history alongside reflections on the role of broadcasting and radio music in music education positioned the traditions of the Musikhochschule as foundational to its contemporary innovation. For Schünemann at least, progressive reform did not entail rejecting what had come before. He was thus fully in accord with Schreker’s aforementioned suggestion that the cycle of the young generation pushing against the strictures enforced by the generation before is itself a valuable tradition in music education and thus musical culture. Schünemann honouring Joachim in the

Jahresberichte that also extolled progressive innovation shows that the new was able to acknowledge the importance of the old.

For Berta Geissmar—in the example that opened this chapter—the rise of Hitler and the Nazi regime put “music in the shadow of politics.” 131 It is true that Nazism

brought rigid ideology and tight control to music education. 132 This chapter has argued,

though, that founding, administering and attending a school of music always intersected

with cultural ideologies. Conservatories were also one battlefield in various nineteenth-

and twentieth-century wars between tradition and modernity. Even among these

institutions, which generally were closely associated with the conservative camp, there

were moments of progressive challenge and even ascendancy. This chapter has

131 Geissmar, Musik im Schatten der Politik , 64-65. 132 See Albrecht Dümling, “On the Road to the ‘Peoples’ Community’ [ Volksgemeinschaft ]: The Forced Conformity of the Berlin Academy of Music Under Fascism,” Musical Quarterly 77/3 (January 1993): 459- 483; Lynne Heller, “Die Reichshochschule für Musik in Wien 1938-1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univeristy of Vienna, 1992; Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller, eds., Music and Nazism: Art Under Tyranny, 1933-1945 (Laaber: Laaber, 2003); Michael Meyer, The Politics of Music in the Third Reich (New York: Lang, 1991); Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Chistian Wolf, Musikerziehung unterm Hakenkreuz: die Rolle der Musik am Beispiel der Oberschulen im Gau Tirol-Vorarlberg (Anif/Salzburg: Müller-Speiser, 1998); Stephan Schmitt, “Die Staatliche Hochschule für Musik - Akademie der Tonkunst in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” in Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis 1945 , ed. Stephan Schmitt (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 313-390.

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argued that these two sets of interactions and tensions—pedagogy and ideology on the one hand, tradition and progressivism on the other—had a perenially reciprocal effect on each other. Thus, ideological, political and generational tensions over tradition and progress drove change in the theory and practice of German and Austrian music education.

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Conclusion

The image of conservatories of music in Germany and Austria that emerges from this

dissertation reveals the intimate connection between formal music education and a

range of pressing social, cultural and political issues. Conservatories of music were a

site in which ideology and politics were contested. This is not only because music is a

signifying art, but also because of the potent intersection between music, so central to

German identity, and the mission of education to convey standards to future

generations. Who sought to found music education, and why? Who should direct

conservatories of music, and to what ends? What should be taught and who should

teach it? Who should be admitted for study, and what should that course of study

entail? What is the very purpose of music education? All of these questions confronted

governments, administrators, professors, students, critics and the wider public. Each

question reveals how music education is intimately entwined with identity, with cultural

belonging, with tensions between the particular and the universal, and with progressive

or conservative visions for society.

Chapters 1 and 2 examined the role of conservatories of music in shoring up

various layers of identity. In Chapter 1, the fruitful historical discussion about sub-

national bonds of belonging in Germany 1 was brought to bear on music education. The

history of conservatories of music illuminates much about the coexistence and

complementarity of local, regional and national identities. Music was fundamental to the

1 See David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

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construction of Germany as a cultural nation. Across the boundaries of the kingdoms, grand duchies, duchies, principalities and free cities of the German lands, music contributed to a sense of shared culture and peoplehood. At the same time, the nineteenth-century impetus to found conservatories was very much wrapped up with the cultural politics of sub-national states, regions and even localities. The first conservatory in Germany—apart from two in the Austrian Empire, in Prague and Vienna—was founded in Leipzig in 1843 under the direction of Felix Mendelssohn and with funding allotted by the King of Saxony. In appealing to the ruler, Mendelssohn invoked the

Saxon people’s particular affinity for music. 2 This was, however, after earlier

negotiations with the Prussian government to establish a conservatory in Berlin had

failed. 3

Appeals to sub-national cultural identities were sometimes practical matters given administrative and political structures. But regional and local cultures, marked by dialect, sensibility, religion and history, also represented deeply felt collectivities.

Nineteenth-century Germans were, famously, a “nation of provincials,” and any observer of contemporary Germany will note the continued defining power of the idea of

Heimat .4 The “narrow local patriotism” that so frustrated Leo Kestenberg was a powerful phenomenon. 5 Cities, for example, had particular cultures and listening publics that

corresponded to urban politics and class composition. Conservatories of music both

2 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Briefe aus den Jahren 1833 bis 1847 , 4th ed., eds. Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1864), 227-228. 3 Dietmar Schenk, Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin: Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869-1932/33 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 25. 4 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 5 Leo Kestenberg, Bewegte Zeiten: Musisch-musikantische Lebenserinnerungen (Zurick: Möseler, 1961), 72.

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reflected and constructed cities’ cultural self-perceptions. The Leipzig Conservatory was very much an institution of Leipzig’s bourgeoisie, and the directions taken by the conservatory in Munich were responsive to the cultural agenda of the royal court in a monarchical capital city. Both Leipzig and Berlin bore the sobriquet “city of music,” and conservatories of music were central to this local pride. The Berlin Musikhochschule was also a cornerstone of Prussian cultural politics. 6 It met the needs of an imperial

capital whose cultural prestige lagged behind that of other German cities; it established

an identifiable Berlin traditional of violin playing; 7 and it defined Berlin’s concert life.

The Berlin Musikhochschule was not only an institution of Berlin’s cultural life, not only an arm of Prussian cultural politics, but also the only conservatory of music in

Germany to have the status of a Hochschule . As such, it was also a national institution, a bearer of national culture to which the musical world looked for direction in Germany and beyond. This dual function of conservatories—at once pillars of local and regional cultures and also participants in national discourses—is taken up in Chapter 2. There is a long genealogy of Germans’ identity as the “people of music.” 8 Music education was a

part of the project of constructing a German national identity through music, in the

absence of political unification and in periods when nationalists laboured to instill

6 Dietmar Schenk, “Aus einer Gründerzeit: Joseph Joachim, die Berliner Hochschule für Musik und der deutsch-französische Krieg,” Die Tonkunst 1/3 (July 2007): 234 . 7 See Dietmar Schenk and Wolfgang Rathert, eds., Carl Flesch und Max Rostal. Aspekte der Berliner Streichertradition (Berlin: Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2002). 8 See Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity,” in Music and German National Identity , eds. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1-35. See also Celia Applegate, “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 21/3 (Spring 1998): 274-296.

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national consciousness across German states on the basis of culture. 9 Chapter 2

establishes that layers of identity were neither mutually exclusive nor necessarily at

odds with each other. Music education became a national conversation, and

conservatories of music were yoked into the service of the smaller and larger

fatherlands simultaneously. Commentators on German music education, such as Hugo

Riemann, appraised individual conservatories across Germany as part of a national

system that met (or failed to meet) national needs.10 Richard Wagner saw the state of

German conservatories of music as a hindrance to the emergence of truly German

national music commensurate with Germans’ supposed innate musical genius. 11 In times of national crisis and defeat, observers looked to music as a source of German pride and success. Conservatories of music were thus sites of national renewal.

Chapter 2 also grappled with the tension between greater-German conceptions of nationality and state patriotism in Austria. This was a defining issue for Austrian cultural thinkers, practitioners and politicians. Conservatories of music in the Austrian

Empire and, later, the Austrian Republic facilitated loyalty to state and kaiser; they also staked Austria’s—especially Vienna’s—claim to be not only part of the German cultural nation but the very locus of German musical spirit. In nineteenth-century musical and music-educational discourse, conservatories in Vienna and Prague were seen as self-

9 See Geoff Eley, “Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of ‘Citizenship’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890- 1930 , eds. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 17. 10 Hugo Riemann, “Unsere Konservatorien,” in Präludien und Studien , 3 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967 [1895]), I:22-33. 11 See Nils Koschwitz, Eine Musikschule als Heilsbringer für die deutsche Musik und Nation? Eine Einführung in Richard Wagners Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule und die Konservatoriumsdiskussion um 1865 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

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evidently German institutions, even as the Prague Conservatory’s own publications positioned it as a manifestation of the unique culture produced by Bohemia’s fortunate location between Vienna and northern Germany. 12 This chapter also considered the

1926 formation of the Union of German Students of Music and its outreach to the

Vienna Musikhochschule as a potential member institution.

Whereas Chapter 1 considered conceptions of Austria as a region within the

German cultural nation, Chaper 2 closed with an analysis of music education’s

contributions to Austrian state patriotism and the Austrian state idea. The history of the

conservatory in Vienna is one in which a definition of Vienna as a centre of German

music was intertwined with Austrian patriotism, as the institutional framework of the

Austrian state channeled larger cultural affinities toward Austrian belonging. Following

Austrian military defeats at the hands of France in the early nineteenth century, of

Prussia in 1866 and of the Allies in 1918, music education was invoked to demonstrate

Austria’s status as the true homeland of music. At its start, the Conservatorium was an

arm of the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna. The Society and its conservatory

foregrounded Austria’s cultural heritage, understood themselves as cultural institutions

in the service of the Austrian emperor and forged concrete connections with the state

and sovereign, including teaching and certifying music teachers. When the

Conservatorium was nationalised in 1909, the newly constituted Musikakademie took on

an advisory role in the affairs of all music schools in Austria. Two members of the

Musikakademie ’s faculty in the twentieth century wrote books on the conservatory that

12 August Wilhelm Ambros, Das Conservatorium in Prag. Eine Denkschrift bei Gelegenheit der fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier der Gründung (Prague: Verein zur Beförderung der Tonkunst in Böhmen, 1858), 1-2.

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situated it in the musical life of Vienna and Austria, and in the musical heritage of the

Austrian Volk .13

Chapter 3 extended this focus on the connections between music education and national culture by examining an important transatlantic encounter: American-German cultural exchange through music education. The image and experience of German music education were vital to American cultural history. Americans began to seek out music study in Germany in the 1850s. By 1900, over 5,000 Americans had gone to

Germany to study music. 14 Numerous American musicians reflected on the need to learn their craft in Germany. Their considerations of this practical reality led both

American musicians and observers of this phenomenon to draw conflicted conclusions about how the values of tradition and modernity contributed to a given culture’s attitude toward the arts. Influential American musicians, such as the composer George

Whitefield Chadwick, recognised Germany’s superior music-educational offerings but also resented the extent to which German musical standards dominated musical life in the United States. These Americans felt that they needed Germany in order to reject

Germany: benefitting from the German music-educational infrastructure was the only way to acquire the skills necessary to foster a distinctly American music. For their part,

German musicians regarded America with a combination of fascination and disgust.

America and its musical forms represented liberation from stultifying traditions; the

13 Robert Lach, Geschichte der Staatsakademie und Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (Vienna: Ed. Strache, 1927) and Ernst Tittel, Die Wiener Musikhochschule. Vom Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde zur staatlichen Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna: Elisabeth Lafite, 1967). 14 Elam Douglas Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students, 1850-1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1991, 1-2.

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encounter with American modernity, though, brought to the fore German anxieties about race, purity and status on the world stage.

Chapter 4 moved on to another cultural encounter that provoked much anxiety, this one between Germans and the Jewish minority. A mixed picture of the potential for

Jews to attain cultural acceptance and to cement their devotion to German culture through music education emerged in this chapter. Music, as an art form deeply associated with German national feeling, offered a powerful means for Jews to perform their German identity. Both music and education were important vehicles for Jewish embourgeoisement . Jews were prominent in both fields, and conservatories of music

were a site for Jews to accept the German promise of cultural acceptance in exchange

for cultural assimilation. Music education also exposes the limits of the German

integrationist ideal. Real or imagined Jewish difference—alternately perceived as

religious, cultural, “tribal” or “racial”—defined the conservatory careers of confessing

Jews, assimilated Jews and Jews who had converted to Christianity. As late-nineteenth-

century racial theories gained currency, the question of what cultural work Jewish music

teachers performed became more urgent. Richard Wagner famously pronounced that

Jews were capable only of mechanical imitation, not creative genius; his crusade

against the conservatory system intersected with his antisemitism as he blamed Jews

for the commercialisation of music and derided conservatories as conservative redoubts

as well as virtuoso factories. 15 The image of the Jewish virtuoso brought together fears about gender, physicality and sensuality, including the charge that the renowned violin

15 See Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869) and idem, Bericht an Seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule (Munich: Christian-Kaiser, 1865).

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teacher Carl Flesch sought to impose a Jewish sense of tone on Germany’s musical youth. 16

Lastly, Chapter 5 crystallised the political and ideological background of the issues discussed in every previous chapter. The great musical divide in the nineteenth century was between conservatives and progressives, typified by, but hardly restricted to, the disagreements between followers of Brahms and enthusiasts of Zukunftsmusik .17

Conservatories were hardly sidelined in this cultural and ideological dispute. On the contrary: as institutions tasked with conveying musical values, principles and standards to coming generations, conservatories were the front lines of the battle. They could legitimate musical ideas but also brand musical directions as unacceptable. Even as

Wagner and others railed against conservatories and the figures who determined their artistic directions, conservatories negotiated between tradition and innovation in terms of their appointments, their treatment of iconoclastic students and their senses of purpose. The Weimar Orchesterschule was the only nineteenth-century conservatory in

Germany that was fundamentally aligned with the prescriptions for music education offered by Wagner and Franz Liszt. In the twentieth century, though, the Berlin

Musikhochschule underwent reform under the leadership of the socialist politician Leo

Kestenberg and the future-oriented composer Franz Schreker. Teachers such as Paul

Hindemith and innovations such as the Broadcasting Laboratory made the

Musikhochschule very much an institution of “Red Prussia.”

16 Gustav Havemann, “Offener Brief an Professor Carl Flesch,” Allgemeine Musikzeitung 4 December 1931, 824-825. 17 E. Douglas Bomberger, “Charting the Future of ‘Zukunftsmusik’: Liszt and the Weimar Orchesterschule, Musical Quarterly 80/2 (Summer 1996): 348.

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This dissertation proceeded from the observation that every major conservatory of music in Germany and Austria 18 has, individually, been the subject of excellent, critical scholarship in recent years. Cultural historians, political scientists, sociologists and others have turned their attention to these institutions of music education in revealing and productive ways. In this dissertation, I built on that fine work by treating conservatories of music across Germany and Austria together, both as a cultural concept in the minds of critics, politicians and observers, and also by looking at conservatories’ practice in the context of music education as a project undertaken by a network of institutions in concert with each other. With this new scholarly perspective, it makes sense to put conservatories of music in conversation with each other because they were in conversation with each other. As individual components of a shared musical, cultural and institutional landscape, conservatories of music reveal a great deal about the defining questions and productive tensions in German cultural history

18 And, one might add, most minor ones as well.

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