Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Volume 6 Number 2 Sound and Secularity Article 2

2020

Assimilating to Art-Religion: Jewish Secularity and Edgar Zilsel’s Geniereligion (1918)

Abigail Fine University of Oregon

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Recommended Citation Fine, Abigail (2020) "Assimilating to Art-Religion: Jewish Secularity and Edgar Zilsel’s Geniereligion (1918)," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1169

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Cover Page Footnote I wish to thank August Sheehy and Margarethe Adams for organizing the symposium that was the impetus for this project. This article was greatly enriched by incisive commentary from three anonymous reviewers who engaged with the work in detail. I am further indebted to Roy Chan for his thoughtful comments on a draft of this article.

This article is available in Yale Journal of Music & Religion: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol6/iss2/2 Assimilating to Art-Religion Jewish Secularity and Edgar Zilsel’s Geniereligion (1918) Abigail Fine

After fleeing the Nazis, many European From its first pages, Zilsel’s treatise set Jewish and Marxist scholars were fortunate out to destroy the Geniereligion—that is, the to find a new sense of belonging abroad, at parareligious cults of veneration that form institutions like the New School for Social around artists, scientists, pedagogues, and Research in New York City or among the other secular figures. His text reads as an émigré community in California. Others impassioned manifesto. As a committed fell through the cracks. The philosopher- Marxist, Zilsel wrote that it would be sociologist Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944), irresponsible not to speak out against a who left Vienna in 1939, could not find societal danger that allows charlatans to his footing in exile because he was never sway the masses.3 All of Zilsel’s projects quite at home to begin with. His unusual were driven by this central investment writings were pushed to the fringe of in the abilities and vulnerabilities of the Viennese academia before he left, and after working class, including his last and best- his death, his work was largely forgotten known work, On the Social Origins of until its rediscovery in the 1980s.1 One Modern Science, which traced the birth of of Zilsel’s most interdisciplinary projects— empiricism to a network of artisans rather his short book Die Geniereligion (The Cult than a roster of lone geniuses.4 Even as the of Genius), written in 1918—has much politics of interwar Red Vienna formed the to offer musicology.2 A close look at Die context of his worldview, it is tempting (if Geniereligion and its cultural environs anachronistic) to read Die Geniereligion as exposes a fresh angle on an old problem: a text that offered chilling premonitions of the formation of the Western musical canon fascism. With great clarity Zilsel identified and its secularist ethics. Zilsel’s polemic key elements of the propaganda machine reveals the canon’s central irony, which also whose blueprint had already been laid by manifests in art-religion (Kunstreligion): Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party starting proponents of the canon positioned it as in 1897, and that later made Hitler into a a secular “neutral space” for culture, but paramount “genius” alongside Napoleon, paradoxically, this neutral space was both Wagner, Goethe, and Beethoven. inflected by Catholic practice, as Zilsel Zilsel’s project was conceived amid showed, and also populated by Jewish a political minefield at the University of artists and intellectuals such as Zilsel Vienna, where a polarized Philosophy himself. Musical institutions like concert Department pushed his scholarship to the halls, journals, and festivals became sites margins. Zilsel was an active member of of assimilation where Austrian Jews Moritz Schlick’s Vienna Circle, a network of sought cosmopolitan secularity and found liberal-socialist philosophers who developed art-religion instead—alluring for some, logical and empirical methods grounded alienating for others, and downright in physics. Schlick’s group found itself dangerous for Zilsel. increasingly beleaguered by a conservative,

10 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) neo-Romantic school of philosophy nerve after the contentious clerical reforms affiliated with Christian Socialism.5 Given of Austrian public school curricula by the that the majority of intellectual leaders Christian Social Party during the Lueger of Vienna’s Social Democratic Party were era, which had been hotly contested by Jewish, it became increasingly common for Austro-Marxists who advocated for secular, outwardly “scientific” objections to Marxist humanist, and more inclusive Bildung.8 schools of thought to operate as an excuse After Zilsel stepped down, he found a space for conservative faculty to oust Jewish that was more welcoming, if less outwardly professors from their posts decades before prestigious, at the Volkshochschule, a the systematic purges of 1938. While community college that became a hotbed of Schlick insisted that his circle was apolitical, socialist intellectual freedom. Here, on the and while he himself was descended fringes of academia, his work became even from Prussian-Lutheran nobility, he was more interdisciplinary.9 nonetheless perceived as Jewish, or Jew- With the Anschluss, Zilsel’s career was adjacent. As a result, his promotion to chair the least of his worries. As both a socialist of philosophy was controversial and met and a Jew, he feared the growing climate with a pointed inquiry into his heritage. In of censorship that would impede his son’s 1936, Schlick was murdered by a deranged education. (Whether he foresaw all the former student who was paranoid about a dangers ahead, we cannot know.) With his presumed romantic entanglement with a family he fled to Manhattan in 1939 and classmate; and as Lisa Silverman has shown, then settled among the German émigrés Schlick’s perceived status as a Mussjude, a as a lecturer at Mills College in Oakland, Jew by association, led the Viennese press California. Memoirs from his son Paul to politicize the psychiatric instability as a reveal a man perpetually out of place.10 Like sensible reaction to Jewish corruption.6 Theodor W. Adorno, he began publishing It comes as no surprise that Zilsel, as sociological essays in English and even Schlick’s protégé, struggled to secure started his new book on the sociology of his footing at this university. Zilsel’s science; but he never felt quite at home book Die Geniereligion was the basis in that language, in American customs, for his Habilitation, his application for or in his role as a physics instructor at a promotion at the University of Vienna, women’s college.11 The tipping point, or so which expanded this slim manifesto into a speculated his son, was his wife’s nervous more robust, and more explicitly Marxist, breakdown and his own survivor’s guilt history of the “genius” concept. Its fraught when his sister’s letters ceased. (As the reception by the committee, traced in detail family later learned, she had been sent to by Johann Dvořák, led Zilsel to withdraw Auschwitz.) In 1944, before the war had his application and resign.7 His colleagues even ended, Zilsel committed suicide, just implied that his approach was insufficiently as Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin did philosophical because it was grounded in before him. His tragedy was not only death, economics, a veiled rebuke of his Marxism. but an ongoing struggle during his life to What’s more, his critique of celebrity find a home for his ideas, which inhabited pedagogues, combined with his apparent a space between languages, disciplines, distaste for religion, touched a sensitive and identities. Zilsel’s story was, in this

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 11 sense, a characteristically Jewish story of of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, assimilation. used the tools of liberal ideology to enact Zilsel’s treatise, in conjunction with his Jewish “civic self-improvement” (bürgerliche biography, shows us that the Western canon Verbesserung), a constellation of reforms is a critical thread in this Jewish story and vice that later came to be called assimilation.17 versa. The discipline of musicology formed The history of these reforms is complex around the monumental mountain peaks of because it operated at the intersection of German and Austrian “great men,” to borrow shifting state policies of legal emancipation, Nietzsche’s turn of phrase.12 Even today, it a new philosophical movement, and a wide perpetuates itself through tautologies, self- spectrum of individual personalities, each supporting statements that Robert Fink has seeking an identity between the cracks. dubbed the canon’s “sleight of hand.”13 The Even secularized Jews, whose cosmopolitan central legerdemain of canonic ideologies is lives were so starkly different from those their claim to universal value that remains in the shtetls, found themselves fractured opaque—that is, they mask the historical into an array of positions toward Judaism. processes that made universality desirable Some converted to Christianity with great in the first place. Recent conversations conviction, while others were baptized for about secularity, spearheaded by Talal convenience. Some defended Judaism as a Asad, may shed new light on the canon’s religion that embodied liberal humanism, opacity.14 For Asad, secular ideologies play while others cast it aside in their devotion a similar trick: they claim universal value to German Bildung. And some appeared while concealing their contingency, their to disdain their roots with “Jewish self- origins in Enlightenment thought, political hatred,” an expression of embarrassment at liberalism, and the interiority of Pietism. the poor Jewish immigrants who poured in Nor is this resemblance superficial. The from Eastern Europe, and especially Galicia. politics of canon formation mirror secularity The term itself exemplifies how slippery because canons emerged at the intersection assimilation can be: Paul Reitter has argued of sacred and secular, through a constellation that Jewish self-hatred, paradoxically, could of practices known as Kunstreligion, or art- function as a means of empowerment, religion.15 In the nineteenth century, cultural as Jews reclaimed their own stereotypes heroes like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart through self-criticism.18 became surrogate saints for the liberal Assimilation was a powerful force in elite, for whom Bildung, or educational cosmopolitan music criticism and concert self-cultivation, was integral to a sense of life. In the visual arts, Jews had a minimal belonging. Yet Bildung was grounded in an presence; in the theater and the press, they amalgam of religious practices: Catholic dominated; and in music, their numbers were sainthood, Lutheran Pietism, and Jewish noticeably strong but not pervasive, which educational ambition, all latent behind the made the pressure to assimilate more urgent smokescreen of secular self-improvement. and transparent for those whose careers Jewish secularization long predates depended on it.19 Even as the optimism of the politics of canon formation, even as nineteenth-century Bildung waned in the it later became an agent in this process.16 twentieth, its central ideologies remained Already in the eighteenth century, leaders embedded in Jewish self-perception and

12 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) ambition, and these manifested in musical revival, and a growing interest in Eastern composition and discourse, as Steven J. religions in the early nineteenth century.24 Cahn has recently shown.20 Its roots in musical thought have been traced As Bildung was subsumed by the more to early Romantic writers like Wilhelm extreme Geniereligion, Jewish composers, Heinrich Wackenroder and Friedrich musicians, and music writers found Schleiermacher, who sacralized the listening themselves alternately intoxicated and experience as a form of devotion and likened repulsed by art-religious devotion to religious feelings to a “holy music” (heilige canonical great men. They were faced Musik) that should accompany secular life.25 with the reality that the secular neutral For some, the very idea of Kunstreligion has spaces they sought were neither secular nor become emblematic of the early Romantic neutral, and some experienced a profound reaction to Enlightenment secularism, a disillusionment that fueled early Zionism. means to “overcome secularization,” in Zilsel’s response to this problem was one the words of Nicole Heinkel.26 But even among a spectrum of Jewish reactions to nuanced histories of Kunstreligion, such the realities of assimilation. If seculariza- as the writings of Helmut Loos, tend to tion is “a fugitive way for religion to reduce this concept to a simple admixture of survive,” as Judith Butler suggested sacred and secular by focusing on linguistic in her essay on Zionism, then Zilsel conflation. This approach seems to take demonstrated how it survived through the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus the medium of art-religion.21 at his word when he wrote that the early German Romantics thought art and religion The New Real Church “flow into one another” and that this “may Secularity studies has found a new vocabulary be expressed through the formula that the to articulate the complex interaction ‘sacralization’ of the profane is analogous to between sacred and secular, which are rarely the ‘secularization’ of the sacred.”27 separate. “Secular enchantment” serves as In recent years, historians have begun a counterpart to scientific rationalism, as to understand how this concept manifested articulated by Akeel Bilgrami, and recent in culture long after it was first articulated. work by Jeffers Engelhardt and Janaki Bakhle Kunstreligion was unusually complex in adopts this term for musical practices that German-speaking regions, where artistic engage with the sacred in a secular world;22 circles were divided between Protestant, similarly, religious studies scholars have Catholic, and assimilated Jewish identities. posited “re-enchantment” as a counterpart Karen Leistra-Jones has shown how art- to Weber’s “disenchantment.”23 These terms religion was confessionalized in her recent push back against the misconception that study of Hans von Bülow’s performances, the secular worldview of the Enlightenment rhetoric, and hermeneutical analyses, which was homogeneous and ubiquitous. were not only vaguely art-religious but Unlike this nuanced vocabulary, the specifically Protestant, some of numerous term Kunstreligion remains a compound cultural projects that used Kunstreligion to word in every sense. The word refers to a set unify the young German nation.28 But in the of concepts at the intersection of German same period as Bülow sermonized through Romantic philosophical idealism, Catholic analysis, the music-loving public engaged

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 13 in practices of veneration that appear cultural practice, not only a concept. In markedly Catholic, not only in Austria the Introduction to Die Geniereligion, Zilsel but also in Protestant north Germany. noted these trappings of religion in the arts When composers were treated as saints, world, calling them the “external form” of a Kunstreligion went beyond devotional deeper religious dogma: listening. My own research has shown how Outwardly already it appears that we composers’ hair-locks and walking sticks treasure the relics, autographs, hair- circulated as relics, their houses became locks, quills, and tobacco boxes of our museums that branded themselves as sites great men just as the Catholic Church of pilgrimage, and their fans experienced treasures the bones, accessories, and not only transcendent listening but clothing of saints. . . . True, we build personal fantasies of closeness with dead no chapels around the graves of our geniuses, nor do we offer burnt sacrifices celebrities, who became guardian spirits of on the altars of antique hero-temples; the music room. The lofty transcendence but we do bury some of them together of early Kunstreligion continued through in Westminster Abbey and in the Paris the nineteenth century and well into the Pantheon, or erect their busts in Walhalla. twentieth, when composers’ deathbeds . . . With holy awe, as if on pilgrimage were called “apotheoses” and their genius to Lourdes, we journey to these genius- was hailed as a divine gift. But this Romantic graves, to Weimar, to Stratford-upon- Avon, and above all to Bayreuth.32 idealism was tempered by a material fascination with composers’ daily lives, To this list of Catholic behaviors Zilsel with their ailments, clothes, belongings, added the manifestations of Geniereligion homes, and haunts.29 Material practices in popular literature and visual culture. like these reinforce the particularity, not He noted the brochures that showed the universality, of secular devotion. geniuses gathered together in heaven; We find this same interplay of the the images of a disheveled Beethoven abstract and tangible—of gazing at a that graced every music-room wall; the looming monument while cherishing a hair- biofictional operettas, like Heinrich Berté’s lock in a brooch—in Asad’s etymology of Dreimäderlhaus, that fetishized artists’ the “sacred.” He differentiates the medieval biographies; and the earliest biopic films French sacré from sainteté: the former was that made Geniereligion a product of mass institutionalized and politicized, especially culture.33 Zilsel was a cultural historian during the French Revolution, while the long before this was an established latter refers to the everyday, accessible subfield, and his interdisciplinarity gave materials of religion—the relics, shrines, him striking insight into Kunstreligion. and pilgrimages that interface with the By blending sociology and philosophy, beyond.30 For the music-loving middle he was able to trace the dogmas that class, material sainteté became a way to trade underlay these cultural products: genius in divinity: those who could not afford to as divinity, heroic individualism, and a build collections could purchase ersatz relics cult of sentimentality (Schwärmern) that like plaster masks for the music room.31 made geniuses immune to criticism. He Zilsel was among the first scholars called these dogmas because they went to treat early Romantic Kunstreligion as a unquestioned in literate society, invisible

14 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) because they substituted for (and thereby the narrator is cast down from the clouds hid behind) real religious practice. Zilsel, into a swamp that devours civilization: then, was in an ideal position to criticize “streams of mud [trickle] from Mozart’s these practices. With his own identity as grave” and merge with new floodwaters, an outsider—not just a Jewish outsider, leaves of paper fight toward the surface (that but a Marxist intellectual who worked at is, the canon), “sticky maggots” are “fattened the margins of Viennese academia—he on the dead rococo, and on national artists could observe the oddity of practices that [Heimatskünstler],” and everything succumbs had become second nature to most.34 to depths haunted by the Ouroboros, the Several years before Die Geniereligion, mythic snake that eats its own tail (or as Zilsel had already expressed skepticism Zilsel calls it, “progress that progresses about the cult of genius in Vienna’s music toward progress”).37 In this strange piece of scene. His first publication in 1912 was juvenilia, we already see Zilsel’s disdain for not a sober work of sociology, but rather canonic tautologies, for the empty promise a surreal miniature—what he termed a of timelessness, and for sublime tones that “didactic fantasy”—that debunked the idea reside perpetually out of reach. of timelessness in music culture.35 In this Zilsel’s early disillusionment reflects a evocative allegory, operagoing dilettantes deeper contradiction of art-religion in the become a carnival of zoo animals; the music world: religion shaped institutions of narrator finds himself hurled between German Bildung that purported to be secular heaven and earth, grasping at Mozart’s neutral spaces. This problem was ingrained sacred tones while dragged into the insipid in the history of Bildung itself, which had pleasures of the eighteenth century; and been torn by competing sacred and secular finally, the “spider of time” sucks the agendas since its emergence in the German narrator into its web, where all turns to Enlightenment. For Moses Mendelssohn, slime, a writhing morass of old and new. In Bildung promised to revive Platonic ideals this piece, Zilsel revealed his own flirtation by offering a moral education in virtue; and disillusionment with Geniereligion: his position on Bildung dovetailed with his appeal for Jewish self-improvement, which Thus I felt lonely, full of longing for a man, for Mozart, and I wanted to serve favored a neutral Hellenism over a Christian- him. But as I searched for him here aloft inflected moral code. But for others like and asked the tones about their creator, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Bildung was there began a roar, from all corners the an offshoot of Lutheran Pietism, which rows of tones poured in and crashed sought to transform society by cultivating against each other, separated themselves the inner self.38 again and turned into a thousand- Bildung was decidedly more secular faceted complexity and through the and political after the Congress of Vienna, universe romped the finale of theJupiter when it became a tool to manufacture a Symphony.36 Prussian bureaucracy. Outwardly, Bildung As he searches for Mozart, he finds instead was upheld as a means to distinguish the sublimity of the work, but it resides German naturalness and social reforms in a Christian heaven where he cannot from French courtliness and aristocratic remain. In a devastating final passage, backwardness; but beneath this ideology

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 15 lurked a pragmatic agenda to create did—in much greater numbers than citizens who would feed the growing those who converted to Christianity, bureaucracies of Prussia and the Austrian because the acceptance of Goethe Empire. What was thought natural in the as one’s savior did not seem to be an mid-nineteenth century became mannered apostasy and because it was much more meaningful and important than by century’s end, and this shift is crucial baptism. After the triumph of cultural for a reading of Zilsel’s Geniereligion. By nationalism and the establishment 1900, a new wave of critics dismissed the of national pantheons, Christianity Bildungsbürgertum—the educated class of was reduced to a formal survival or civil servants—as conservative philistines, reinterpreted as part of the national pedantic bureaucrats whose sole values journey. One could be a good German were loyalty, obedience, and discipline. or Hungarian without being a good Zilsel’s disdain for the deluded masses was Christian (and in an ideal liberal aimed not at the proletariat, the workers for Germany or Hungary, religion in the traditional sense would become whom he fought; his rebuke was leveled at a private matter “separate from the uncreative Bildungsbürger who served the state”), but one could not be a as arbiters of taste, enacting Geniereligion good German or Hungarian without with bureaucratic efficiency. worshiping the national canon. This Zilsel’s criticisms, then, can be read was the new real church, the one that in part as a sign of disappointment that could not be separated from the state Bildung did not fulfill the liberal aspirations lest the state lose all meaning, the one it promised. For Joseph S. Bloch, writing that was all the more powerful for in 1885, liberalism promised a “spiritual being taken for granted, the one that Jews could enter while still believing asylum” for Jews, the “port of shelter after that they were in a neutral place a thousand years of homelessness”; but worshiping Progress and Equality.40 by 1900, it became apparent that this was a false beacon.39 Yuri Slezkine, in his book Zilsel might well have agreed with The Jewish Century, has defined Jewish Slezkine’s metaphor of the “new real emancipation as “a search by individual church.” For him, Geniereligion was Jews for neutral . . . society where neutral espoused by priests, founded in dogmas, actors could share a neutral secular culture.” and housed in institutions of culture. But in order to do this, he argues, Jews had Even as Zilsel seldom discussed his to “convert to a national faith” to access Jewish background, when he criticized the inalienable rights promised by secular the Austro-German canon for its religious society. Here it is worth quoting Slezkine’s undercurrent, his critique bears a tone of argument at some length, as he postulates disappointment in a promise unfulfilled. how, for Jews in nations across Europe (here When we read Zilsel’s Geniereligion through citing Germany and Hungary as examples), Slezkine’s insights, we see how Jews needed Bildung could function paradoxically as both to assimilate not only to secularity, which a secular space and a nationalist religion: offered the protections promised by legal To enter the neutral spaces, one had to emancipation, but also to Kunstreligion, convert to a national faith. And that is which offered a sense of national belonging, precisely what many European Jews or Deutschtum.

16 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) This need for national identity was first by Judeo-Marxists in Russia, then particularly urgent in Austria after 1918. by Marxists in Western Europe, and Prior to the war, the monarchy found ways finally by the early Zionists who disagreed to unify its fractured empire by building a about whether to rebuild Jewish life at cultural center that welcomed the Jewish home (cultural Zionism) or to resettle in middle class, a paradox that historian Palestine (political Zionism). Ernest Gellner famously termed the As Enzo Traverso has shown, the Judeo- “Habsburg dilemma.”41 David Brodbeck Marxists in Western Europe who were has discussed how key figures in Vienna’s active during Zilsel’s lifetime focused on two musical life, such as Eduard Hanslick facets of Marx’s essay: whether a nation can and Karl Goldmark, sought to exchange exist without a single territory, and whether their Jewish identity for Deutschtum in Jews are partly responsible for antisemitism what he calls a “quid pro quo.”42 As such, due to their mannered otherness. By 1900, Jews became the architects of the new German-speaking Judeo-Marxists were real church, in part because, in Vienna, torn between the views of Karl Kautsky, they were 1.5 times as likely to send their who urged assimilation, and Vladimir children to the Gymnasium, which helped Medem, who sought to preserve Jewishness them rise to the ranks of cultural arbiters across borders. Where Medem held that a (to the protestation of many colleagues).43 Jewish community can be linked through But in 1918 this pluralistic empire, which Yiddishkeit, even without a national territory, considered itself a nationalities-state, was Kautsky upheld Marx’s teleological view supplanted by the Republic of Austria that that Jewish assimilation is a fated step along conceived of itself as a nation-state, and the evolutionary process that culminates that was considerably less welcoming to in socialism. Kautsky’s views were popular Jews.44 In Zilsel’s Vienna, Jews could not in part because he, along with Otto Bauer, agree on what the neutral space of culture absolved Jews of responsibility for their should look like, and built their “new real discrimination and described antisemitism church” in widely divergent ways.45 as provincial backwardness that would vanish as society advanced. But for many Spaces of Assimilation Jewish Marxists, Zilsel included, Marxism The debates over Jewish assimilation itself was an equally satisfying surrogate grew particularly heated after Karl Marx’s for national consciousness, leaving little seminal essay of 1843, “The Jewish room for a Jewish identity alongside it.47 Question.” In it, he articulated arguments Socialism promised a more equitable society that some found to be indicative of than Zion, Yiddishkeit, or assimilation to self-hatred: that Jews should abandon Deutschtum ever could. Jewishness if they hope to end their These debates on paper found echoes oppression; that emancipation would in other corners of Jewish life where help Jews shed their negative dispositions assimilation was not clear-cut. The Jewish and mannerisms; and that assimilation population of Zilsel’s Vienna was divided: would benefit society at large.46 His roughly half were acculturated Jews from thinking remained controversial well Moravia and Bohemia, a quarter were from into the twentieth century, discussed Western Hungary (a demographic that

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 17 ranged from Orthodox to assimilated), and in zones of leisure like coffeehouses, a quarter were the newest wave from Galicia, restaurants, and salons.50 who were both Orthodox and separatist. Music was another space of discourse And despite efforts during the First World where Jews could seek out an identity War to convene Jews of all stripes in a as Germans and Austrians. The more single Gemeindebund, the city’s population earnestly Jewish artists wanted or needed remained fractured into a wide spectrum to assimilate, the more they constructed of identities.48 In pamphlet wars and the “new real church.” For Arnold Rosé, coffeehouses, Jewish assimilation emerged it was the Vienna Philharmonic and the not as a linear process, but as a series of Rosé Quartet, the beating heart of Vienna’s individual paths through a patchwork of musical life; for Joseph Joachim, it was the spaces with fluctuating rules of entry. Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, which touted These rules varied most dramatically itself as a site of pilgrimage. Meanwhile, in Austria, where Jews were no longer the Jewish poet Ludwig August Frankl protected by the pluralism of an empire was known, and by many disdained, for under the umbrella of Deutschtum, of a his active role in Vienna’s artist monument German Kulturnation in which Jews might projects some decades before the non- participate equally. Building upon Marsha Jewish Nikolaus Dumba took the reins, to L. Rozenblit’s history of Jewish life before considerably more public acclaim. Frankl’s the First World War, Lisa Silverman has contribution to the so-called “monument argued that Jews who had previously fever,” or Denkmalwut, was the source found patchwork identities as Austrians of antisemitic pushback from those who before the war struggled to identify with a worried about Jewish financiers seizing new republic that defined itself by what it control of Bildung.51 And one of Europe’s was not, leading to a heightened attention most prominent cultural arbiters was to Jewish difference that complicated as assimilated as they come: Hugo von “becoming Austrian.”49 Silverman’s study, Hofmannsthal, the prolific Austrian writer together with other recent work on Jewish who disdained his Jewish grandparentage. assimilation, shows how remarkably In fin-de-siècle Vienna, being of mixed convoluted Jewish self-understanding heritage (a Mischling) was thought to could be. Some, for instance, felt a strong severely inhibit intellectual acumen, nostalgia for Catholicism as the marker of making pure-blooded Jewish intelligence an empire where they found a friendlier into a form of contamination; this is coexistence, but when they worked why Mischlinge like Hofmannsthal and too hard to efface their own difference Eduard Hanslick so vehemently distanced by participating in Catholicism, they themselves from their Jewish roots.52 But in created a new stereotype of self-conscious 1918, Hofmannsthal channeled his lack of overcompensation. Above all, Silverman belonging into a new utopia. He was among argues that spaces, more so even than the most active founders of the Salzburg people, could be coded as Jewish or non- Festival, which he positioned as the new Jewish. In cosmopolitan centers like artistic crossroads of Europe, a neutral space Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin, Jewish that he promoted with all the utopian fervor modernity was shaped most profoundly of a Zionist.53 Meanwhile, the Zionist leader

18 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) Theodor Herzl was, perhaps surprisingly, our time.”57 In conjunction with other a passionate Wagnerian. He wrote in his assimilated Jewish scholars like Otto Erich diary that Wagner’s Ring would form the Deutsch, whose work with rare historical ideal cultural center for Israel because this documents brought a new rigor to the music had the unearthly power to unify discipline, Adler’s systematic approach diasporic peoples in communal feeling.54 reflected a deep concern that was shaped Even in the musical spaces that Jews by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: that built, they could find themselves unwelcome. history, and notably the fetishization of The non-Jewish Hans Pfitzner was proud to the past that informs heritage preservation have his 1917 biofictional operaPalestrina projects, can never be a neutral science free premiered by the Jewish conductor Bruno from institutional corruption. Just as Zilsel Walter, but two years later, Pfitzner penned later articulated in his Geniereligion, Adler an antisemitic diatribe against the critic Paul worried that cultural heritage could be Bekker, whose biography of Beethoven was used or abused.58 another alleged example of the “impotence” For other Austrian Jews who found of the “international Jewish movement in themselves unwelcome, it made more art.”55 And Hermann Levi conducted the sense to accept Jewish difference and premiere of Parsifal in spite of Wagner’s respond with self-criticism and disgust. abuse; he was so strongly drawn into the Alexander Zemlinsky took the idea of Jewish space of this art that it was worth being impotence to heart with expressions of self- reminded of his Jewish difference. Those who loathing; in his opera The Dwarf (1921), saw themselves as assimilated were baffled the title character discovers his own ugliness when their Jewish difference was noted in a just as Zemlinsky did in his diaries.59 One musical space they thought neutral: David might think of Zionists as the opposite Brodbeck has shown how Eduard Hanslick extreme, but even those with proud Jewish and Karl Goldmark were incredulous when identities could assimilate to racialist critics persistently associated their works patterns of thinking. In his early writings, with a Jewish inflection.56 Max Nordau diagnosed Wagnerian art- In some cases, Jews with assimilated religion as degeneration, a subtle rebellion identities found cleverly indirect ways against antisemitism; but when it came to to critique the spaces that made them his vision of Zion, he advocated “muscular unwelcome, rather than rebuke antisemitism Judaism,” where participation in sports head-on. Kevin Karnes has shown how would strengthen the impotent Jewish Guido Adler, who founded the formal body.60 (Freud’s position was similar: discipline of musicology at the University he held that the weak bodies of Jews led of Vienna, pushed back against what he them to overcompensate with strength of saw as irrational approaches to Richard intellect.)61 And the composer Ernest Bloch Wagner by the Bayreuth circle of absorbed antisemitic language to position Wagnerites. Adler called for a level-headed his music as racially Jewish, as Klára Móricz methodology that would discuss Wagner’s has shown.62 music “calmly” and “circumspectly” rather Bloch’s thinking was also indicative of a than succumbing to “those passions that new assimilationist logic shared by writers have been so pathologically aroused in like Berthold Auerbach, Max Brod, and

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 19 Edmond Fleg. These authors maintained granted. Historian Darrin McMahon has that, as an ancient religion, Judaism holds noted how the Geniereligion Zilsel theorized the key to universal humanism. In Bloch’s was fully realized later by Hitler and Stalin, letters to his friend Fleg, which Móricz has who manipulated the psychology of the excavated from the archives, he established masses when they commissioned their Jewishness as its very own neutral space networks of influential “genius priests” (in independent from German art-religion: Zilsel’s words).64 For the cultural historian “We have to be more Jewish, not in order to Julia Barbara Köhne, who offers the most separate ourselves from the ‘others,’ but to comprehensive survey of German-language be more human. In searching for our roots discourse on genius around 1900, Zilsel we will also find those of the others for they was disturbed by the recent masculinization plunge into the same ground.”63 It is telling of the genius cult. For Köhne, Zilsel’s text that even those who resisted assimilation was a reaction to a reaction: in the wake of wanted the same liberal humanism that French and Italian arguments that linked was promised (if not delivered) by the genius with effeminate pathology and “new real church.” degeneration, some German and Austrian With this tapestry of approaches to writers remasculinized genius as virile, and assimilation, historians must read between these same authors were (not surprisingly) the lines to detect traces of Jewish identity. hostile antisemites. Throughout his book, This is certainly the case with Zilsel, whose Zilsel’s main targets are the “genius Jewishness was largely subsumed by his enthusiasts” Thomas Carlyle, Otto Marxism. But even as Zilsel did not discuss Weininger, Richard Wagner, and Houston his heritage openly, the context of his Stewart Chamberlain, who were all driving treatise, in conjunction with his rebuttal of forces in popular antisemitism. Given that prominent antisemites, encourages a new Zilsel was among the most vociferous critics reading. If the canon had not served as an of a genius cult led largely by antisemites, enticing neutral space for Jews, if Austria had his reaction might, Köhne speculates, be not made the figureheads of its Kulturnation attributed in part to his Jewish heritage.65 into deities, and if Jews did not have To acknowledge that Zilsel rebutted such a robust historical relationship with antisemites can oversimplify the matter secularism, Zilsel’s Geniereligion would seem because antisemitism was not a unified quite disconnected from Jewish concerns. ideology. In their pioneering studies of But given the growing self-consciousness Jewish Vienna, Marsha L. Rozenblit and about Jews’ place in cultural pantheons, Steven Beller articulated a useful distinction especially among Judeo-Marxists, Die between national and racial antisemitism Geniereligion emerges as a subtle expression which can allow for a more nuanced reading of Jewish alarm at art-religion gone awry. of Zilsel’s position.66 National antisemitism sees Jews as lacking deep history, as Jewish Genius: Reacting Between the Lines wandering nomads without place, language, Zilsel has a special prominence in histories or nation (the antonym, in other words, of of the genius concept because he systemati- Zionism); this ideology was a driving force cally explored the ideology and psychology for Jews who endeavored to assimilate, of practices that his contemporaries took for compensating for a perceived dearth of

20 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) cultural roots. Racial antisemitism, in was formed in the late nineteenth century, contrast, was a roadblock to assimilation. as Pamela Potter has shown, but Wagner’s When they were accused of being different essay erected a lasting opposition between in body, not only in nation—of having progressivism and conservatism, which led criminal physiognomies, muddied dialect, classic texts in music history to disparage and shuffling gait—Jews felt helpless to Mendelssohn’s backward-looking Bach assimilate without conversion (a feeling revival, and especially Meyerbeer’s perhaps best articulated by Arnold shallow cosmopolitanism, until well into Schoenberg in 1935, when he recounted the twentieth century.69 how young Jewish artists felt paralyzed Among the texts that Zilsel rebutted, by racialist accusations).67 Both racial the most brutally racialist outlook emerged and national antisemitism drew upon in Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), the stereotype of the Jew as intellectually a slim volume that was discussed with derivative, a trait that could be attributed to great fervor after the author’s ritualistic their lack of artistic heritage (national) or to suicide in Beethoven’s death-house that their inborn degeneration (racial). same year, which affirmed his adulation of Zilsel’s targets were not all antisemitic Germanic genius that promised to purge in the same way. Carlyle’s disdain for his Jewishness. While Weininger’s book the Jewish wealth of London’s West End was debated by his contemporaries, such formed the implicit counterweight to his as Wittgenstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce, adulation of great men in On Heroes, Hero- it is today best known as a favorite of the Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). Nazis, for obvious reasons: he marshaled Richard Wagner’s son-in-law Chamberlain, the disgust that fueled racial antisemitism in comparison, might be assumed to have to portray Jews as weak, effeminate, and focused on racial antisemitism given that his derivative.70 Exactly how Zilsel reacted to Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) these authors shows us which shades of is now infamous as a road map for Nazi antisemitism were the latent foundations of ideology; but a closer reading reveals this Geniereligion. book to indulge in national antisemitism Zilsel concentrated his vitriol on in equal measure, following in Wagner’s Chamberlain, whose sensationalist text footsteps. Wagner’s Jewishness in Music spread what could fairly be called alternative (1850) articulated, in inflammatory fashion, facts. Zilsel was disturbed by how what Carlyle left implicit, and his angry Chamberlain, in his Preface, acknowledged rant indulged in both racial and national his untruths but defended these as the antisemitism. Granted, Wagner’s words “living truth” (lebendiger Wahrheit) of his were not universally accepted—they met readers.71 Zilsel was astounded that these with criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike, acknowledged falsehoods could meet who derided the facile scapegoating that with “such glee and full-blooded support” mistook cosmopolitan progress for Jewish from even the most educated readers, and corruption—but his essay did leave its mark he felt this indicated “a malicious danger in musicology.68 Not only did German for our time.”72 In the appendix to Die (and even German-Jewish) musicologists Geniereligion, a short passage that debunks neglect Jewish music when the discipline Chamberlain’s mistreatment of Spinoza in

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 21 his book Immanuel Kant, Zilsel was defiant at the head of European intellect,” but at the national antisemitism that was latent whether these geniuses are “inventive” he in Chamberlain’s cult of personality. The could not say.76 passage to which Zilsel objected made This was the central paradox of “Jewish Spinoza into the stereotypically uncreative genius” traced by Sander Gilman in his Jew, the “glasses-wiper” (in Zilsel’s sardonic book Smart Jews, and I would suggest that words) who sat from birth to death in his this paradox informed, if subtly, Zilsel’s back office and recombined the work of revisionist history of scientific achievement. others into a tapestry of syllogisms.73 Zilsel Zilsel’s writings were concurrent with rebuked Chamberlain for stumbling in like texts that questioned why Jewish progress a schoolmaster, ruler in hand, ready to send was limited to less innovative spheres: the Spinoza to the back of the philosophical Viennese philosopher Theodor Gomperz, schoolroom; yet Chamberlain, as Zilsel for instance, asked why Jews have failed noted, did nothing to earn his position to excel in science, being competent only of authority because his engagement in the “reproductive arts” like music and with Spinoza’s writings was shallow and theater. Meanwhile, Zilsel’s history of inaccurate. What Zilsel found particularly science recentered intellectual achievement ironic about Chamberlain’s stance was how around a surplus of smart individuals it ran counter to Kant’s own philosophy of rather than a pantheon of geniuses. By human worth, the central preoccupation of decentralizing genius, Zilsel implicitly Chamberlain’s book. Zilsel was disturbed promoted the smart Jews (like himself ) not only by this denigration of Jewish who worked on the sidelines, innovating creativity and invention, but by the success out of the spotlight of celebrity.77 And of a book that spread the false idols of the when these smart Jews began to disappear “genius priest” to an eager reading public. in 1933, ousted from university positions Zilsel’s appendix participated in an and censored from libraries, Zilsel could ongoing Jewish reaction against Chamberlain not stand silent. In the workers’ paper that has been traced by Slezkine, and that ran Der Kampf, hiding behind a pseudonym, parallel to the response to Otto Weininger, he voiced his alarm at the new regime of whose treatise became an emblem of self- censorship. Without its smart Jews, he hatred.74 A number of Jewish authors—such wrote, German science would atrophy.78 as Berthold Auerbach (a friend-turned- Zilsel’s reactions to Chamberlain, enemy of Wagner), the folklorist Joseph Weininger, and Carlyle revolved largely Jacobs, and the author Alfred Schnitzler— around national antisemitism, which observed a special brand of “Jewish genius” cultivated the stereotype of the wandering that offered a counterpart to German great Jew: crafty, adaptable, but lacking spiritual men.75 But even Jewish authors absorbed or intellectual depth. Zilsel’s unease with the antisemitic idea that Jewish genius was racial antisemitism was more subtle, and reproductive rather than productive; smart emerges only when read in cultural context. Jews outnumbered smart Germans but This ideology became increasingly robust failed to innovate. Or as Joseph Jacobs put in music culture of the late nineteenth it, German Jews are “at the present moment century, when composers were exhumed quantitatively (not necessarily qualitatively) and reburied in Walhalla-like groves,

22 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) which allowed doctors and anthropologists spread butter on bread.83 Readers might to situate musical genius in the bones have recognized that this psychology using the outdated cranioscopic methods of revulsion lay at the core of racial of Franz Joseph Gall. The skulls of antisemitism. Wagner, for instance, began Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Bach, and his essay with a declaration of instinctive (allegedly) Mozart were endowed with repugnance, and the remainder of his features of Teutonic superiority that were rant spins out the “living truth” of that extended into dilettantish analyses of disgust. Zilsel does not openly discuss their music.79 Even Jewish composers antisemitism when he defines Abfärbung; like Mendelssohn who converted to the but perhaps it is no coincidence that Christian faith could never fully assimilate his paragraph on revulsion transitions when they faced this biological yardstick immediately to Wagner, whose leitmotives of Germanness. Despite Mendelssohn’s (Zilsel explains) have taught the public leading role in Protestant musical heritage what Abfärbung means by offering subtle in Leipzig through his Bach revival and suggestions beneath the surface of the his oratorio Paulus, his facial features were plot. Zilsel offers this example without still critiqued as prototypically Jewish with rebuking Wagner. He does, however, increasing frequency in the late nineteenth rebuke Abfärbung as a dangerous social century.80 Detractors of Mahler in Vienna problem. Meanwhile, Max Nordau and were likewise drawn to visible markers of his interlocutors were engaged in a difference, which manifested in caricatures heated debate about Wagner’s power over and music criticism.81 In this context, then, the masses, which Nordau framed as a it comes as no surprise that Zilsel argued societal pathology.84 In the context of that against the use of biology to measure concurrent discourse, Zilsel’s Abfärbung worth. He argued that it is folly to trace emerges as a hidden mechanism for social artists’ heredity and to apply biological control, and Wagner as its mouthpiece. sciences to the realm of culture. Geniuses Given that Zilsel combined philosophy are made, not born.82 with cultural history, it comes as no Zilsel offers another subtle reaction to surprise that he reacted to both shades of racialized antisemitism. The second part antisemitism. His philosophical argument, of his book revolves around Abfärbung, by decentralizing genius, made an or the “rubbing-off ” of geniuses on their intervention in the myth of the derivative devotees (or as Zilsel put it, the halo of a Jew. And his cultural argument about candle in the fog). Here, Zilsel connects Abfärbung revealed the seedy apparatus by the mechanism of the Geniereligion with which dangerous philosophies spread, in its origins in material sainteté—that is, in the same period when instinctive revulsion sacred sites, relic cults, and priests as human widened the reach of antisemitism. mediators. Most striking is how Zilsel defines Abfärbung through psychological Priests of the Geniereligion studies of disgust and fetishism, then offers Zilsel focused not only on how philosophies an example paraphrased from an aphorism spread, but also on the individuals who spread by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: that one them: the connoisseurs who disseminate feels great unease when using a razor to Geniereligion to the masses by acting as

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 23 priests in a metaphysical brotherhood. My visible writings of Heinrich Schenker, own work on pilgrimages to composers’ whose perturbing philosophy of German houses supports Zilsel’s idea.85 Museums cultural superiority seems at odds with his justified themselves with holier-than- own active participation in Vienna’s Jewish thou piety, and self-proclaimed pilgrims community. In his article on Schenker’s were keen to differentiate themselves from identity, Leon Botstein has described this tourists. Material sainteté like relics and apparent contradiction as the product of pilgrimage distinguished insiders from assimilation, “in which marginal populations outsiders, true from false devotees. that achieve some legitimacy and a foothold It was an easy jump from this culture in a culture and world after a history of of exclusion in German Bildung to related exclusion become energetic opponents expressions of racial exclusion. A regular of the very patterns of entrance they pilgrim to Beethoven’s house named themselves exploited.”87 But for Schenker, Margarete Koelman wrote a series of poems this energetic opposition did not undermine that positioned herself as a connoisseur, his participation in Jewish spaces. While he deriding other museum visitors as shallow championed German musical superiority dilettantes. Not long after she penned these as a surrogate for religion, enacting his poems, Koelman published a short story transformation from provincial Galician Jew under her pseudonym, Irene Wild, called to Viennese urbanite (as both Nicholas Cook “Dschang und Dschau,” which narrates the and Martin Eybl have shown), Schenker cultural clash of two Chinese men, one of saw a spiritual affinity between assimilated whom has been assimilated into European Jewry and German genius, which he felt society, the other of whom is a grotesque were equally threatened by a growing culture caricature fresh off the boat.86 At first it of dilettantism.88 If we read Botstein’s may seem that Koelman’s exclusionary assessment of Schenker through Zilsel’s lens, thinking in one area—positioning herself we see two types of genius priests reign over as heir apparent to Beethoven’s spirit—may the neutral space of Bildung: the proponents have extended freely to her judgments of writers like Chamberlain who stirred up a about racial others. But this picture is naïve and populist fondness for genius, and substantially complicated by the possibility whose behavior Zilsel found dangerous in that Koelman may have herself been 1918, alongside an elitist ideology like that Jewish; her maiden name, Friedländer, was of Schenker, which saw cultural insiders a common Jewish surname. If so, Koelman as protectors of the true Geniereligion, and appears to have enacted her assimilation in whose dangers have only begun to be three ways: by marrying into a family of understood in recent discourse about music Prussian bureaucrats, partaking in Catholic- theory’s white racial frame.89 inflected forms of composer devotion, and For Jews immersed in the arts, like publishing a story that derides racial others Schenker, Bildung was their bread and who fail to assimilate. butter. But when antisemitic authors Koelman’s case was emblematic of an began to note Jews’ biological differences, ambition among some Jews to become the Bildung became the razor that Jews used priests of the Geniereligion. Her forgotten as a butter knife. Their facility in the arts odes to Beethoven mirror the far more was seen as wrong, and that wrongness

24 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) elicited a passive form of disgust from a Jewish-Polish bibliophile in exile who their detractors, a mere “rubbing off ” of continued to appreciate German literature feeling with a chilling lack of individual after his narrow escape). I first discovered agency. Zilsel’s response, in the final words Die Geniereligion many years ago while of his treatise, is to do away with Abfärbung researching the material practices of art- and to concentrate on the thing itself, or religion that led composers to be venerated what he called “the ideal of the thing” (die like saints. A closer reading of Zilsel’s text Ideal der Sache), a phrase reminiscent of led me to the striking realization that my Kant’s “thing-in-itself ” (Ding an sich) that research interests—which so closely align bespeaks Zilsel’s participation in the logical with Zilsel’s interests a century ago—have positivism of Schlick’s Vienna Circle. been motivated in part by my own Jewish When Zilsel entreated his readers “not to response to the politics of secularity that has disdain, venerate, and romanticize but to continued into the twenty-first century. learn, to search for the truth and abide by In light of the fraught year 2020, it,” it is hard not to see religious reform in there are more reasons than ever to lift this last passage, an echo of sola scriptura.90 the veil. Zilsel grabbed me not only Zilsel emerges here not only as a skeptic because of my own story, but because of secularity, and not only as a Jewish Geniereligion continues to shape the story Marxist, but as the Luther of Geniereligion of Western art music. Granted, Catholic- (ironically, perhaps, given Luther’s famed inflected practices of relic-fetishism antisemitism). When Zilsel revealed how and pilgrimage have moved to the ostensibly secular institutions failed to fringe, and it is increasingly rare to hear abide by their own tenets, he sought to voices in the academy utter words as rescue Bildung and reshape the neutral extreme as Schenker’s (“of all the nations spaces of culture. His vision was one of living on the earth today, the German intellectual equity and, above all, a Marxist nation alone possesses true Genius” 91). appreciation for the collectivity of human But Eurocentric music curricula and achievement by Jews and non-Jews alike. concert programming continue to position themselves as neutral spaces of Bildung, of Epilogue liberal enrichment, that strive to elevate It is a truism that historians find traces of while masking their own structures of themselves in the past—such a powerful exclusion. To move forward, musicology truism, in fact, that our motivations for and related institutions should recognize pursuing our research tend to remain veiled. that canons were built in part through I find it important here to lift the veil in ways the politics of assimilation, and that that Zilsel did not, and to admit that there is many who seek out European musical a strong resonance between Zilsel’s project traditions have wrestled with layered and my own story of assimilation as a Jewish identities, with a dynamic and complex Germanist (and, no less, a descendant of sense of belonging.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 25 NOTES

I wish to thank my anonymous reviewers for their 6 Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews incisive feedback, Roy Chan for his comments on and Culture Between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford an early draft, and August Sheehy and Margarethe University Press, 2012), 60–65. Adams for organizing the symposium that was the 7 On the failure of Zilsel’s Habilitation, see impetus for this project. Johann Dvořák’s Introduction to Die Geniereligion, 7–40. 1 In the 1980s, Johann (Hans) Dvořák 8 On the debates between Christian Socials and spearheaded a rediscovery of Zilsel with his Edgar the liberal Freie Schule association about clericalism in Zilsel und die Einheit der Erkenntnis (Vienna: Löcker school curricula, and the spread of these controversies Verlag, 1981). Zilsel’s participation in the Vienna to Vienna’s university system, see chapter 4 of John W. Circle (Wiener Kreis) led scholars to examine how his Boyer’s Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian history of science advanced the circle’s philosophy Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago: University of empiricism. See for instance Wolfgang Krohn, of Chicago Press, 1995), 164–235. “Edgar Zilsel zur Metholodogie einer exakten 9 For a rich account of Zilsel’s Marxist activism, Geisteswissenschaft,” in Hans-Joachim Dahms, ed., both in his writings and in the reading group that he Philosophie, Wissenschaft, Aufklärung: Beiträge der led at the Volkshochschule, see chapter 4 of Janek Geschichte und Wirkung des Wiener Kreises (Berlin: Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 257–75; the section on Red City, 1918–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Zilsel in Rudolf Haller and Friedrich Stadler, eds., Press, 2014), 106–31. Der Aufstieg der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie (Vienna, 10 Paul Zilsel, “Portrait of My Father,” Shmate 1 Berlin, Prague: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1993); (1982): 12–13. and Diederick Raven, “Edgar Zilsel’s Research 11 On Zilsel’s career in the United States, Programme: Unity of Science as an Empirical possible reasons for his suicide, and his perpetual Problem,” in Friedrich Stadler, ed., The Vienna Circle life on the margins, see Diederick Raven, “Edgar and Logical Empiricism: Re-Evaluation and Future Zilsel in America,” in Gary L. Hardcastle and Alan W. Perspectives (New York: Kluwer, 2003), 225–36. Richardson, eds., Logical Empiricism in North America Recently, scholars have turned increased attention to (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Zilsel’s cultural history and genius concept, starting 129–48. with Julia Barbara Köhne and Darrin McMahon, 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil cited in notes 64 and 65 below, and continuing der Historie für das Leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003; with a recent conference at the University of Vienna, orig. 1874). “Edgar Zilsel und die Kritik der Geniereligion,” Dec. 13 Robert Fink, “Resurrection Symphony: El 5–7, 2018. Sistema as Ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles,” 2 Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion: Ein kritischer Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education 15/1 Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal mit (January 2016): 33–57. einer historischen Begründung, ed. Johann Dvořák 14 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990; orig. Vienna and Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918). In this article, University Press, 2003). all translated passages of Zilsel’s texts are my own. 15 Following in the footsteps of literary 3 Zilsel admitted that die-hard followers of scholars, musicologists have taken a substantial Geniereligion would remain immune to his criticisms, interest in the politics of canon formation since but hoped to persuade those less committed to its the 1990s. Starting with the essays in Katherine tenets; Zilsel, Geniereligion, 55. Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining 4 His last project was left unfinished upon Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), his death and was finally published in 1976: scholars such as Marcia J. Citron and William Edgar Zilsel, Die sozialen Ursprünge der neuzeitlichen Weber unearthed how canons formed and whom Wissenschaft(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976). they excluded; see Citron, Gender and the Musical 5 Friedrich Stadler, “Aspects of the Social Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Background and Position of the Vienna Circle at 1993) and Weber, The Great Transformation of the University of Vienna,” in Thomas E. Uebel, ed., Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle (London: Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Kluwer, 1991), 59–61. 2008). The discourse surrounding canon formation

26 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) remains robust, notably in the substantial volume 22 For Bilgrami, “secular enchantment” of essays edited by Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie revolves around an alternative to scientific Wald-Fuhrmann, Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie rationalism, whereas Engelhardt focuses on sacred und Geschichte. Ein Handbuch (Munich: Edition musical practices in a secular world: “right singing Text & Kritik, 2013) and the recent conference co- was lived secularity—a way of encountering, organized by Marianna Ritchey and Andrea Moore at invoking, and expressing the religious absolute in Smith College in September 2018. a ‘secular age.’” See Akeel Bilgrami, “Occidentalism, 16 On Jews as agents of secularity and the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism in Germany and Austria, see Michael Enchantment,” Critical Inquiry 32/3 (Spring 2006): P. Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical (Chicago: 381–411; and Jeffers Engelhardt,Singing the Right University of Chicago Press, 2007). Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in 17 The concept of bürgerliche Verbesserung was Estonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. first developed by Christian Wilhelm Dohm,Über die 23 Foundational literature for conversations bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin: Friedrich about “re-enchantment” includes Gordon Graham, Nicolai, 1781), as an offshoot of Enlightenment The Re-Enchantment of the World: Art Versus Religion Bildung; on the intellectual origins of this concept, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); James see Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment in Eighteenth-Century Europe, trans. Chaya Naor (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Joshua Landy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the 2010) and David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA: Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton, NJ: Stanford University Press, 2009). Princeton University Press, 2010). For a history of 24 George S. Williamson, The Longing for legal emancipation in Europe, see the classic text by Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, Chicago Press, 2004). MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); a later 25 The term “holy music” first appeared collected volume nuances Katz’s monolithic history in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Lectures on Religion by demonstrating how European states varied in from 1799, whence it was picked up by Johann their approach to emancipation; see Pierre Birnbaum Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, in Fantasies on Art for Friends of Art (1799). See the States, and Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton comprehensive two-volume collection that traces University Press, 1995). On Jewish resistance the intellectual history of art-religion: Albert Meier to emancipation, see David Vital, A People Apart: et al., Kunstreligion (Göttingen: De Gruyter, 2011). The Jews in Europe, 1789–1939 (Oxford: Oxford For the theological history of the concept, see University Press, 1999). Bernd Auerochs, Die Entstehung der Kunstreligion 18 The concept of “Jewish self-hatred” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). For stems from Theodor Lessing, notably Der Jüdische its manifestations in music discourse of the early Selbsthass (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930); on the Romantics, see Elizabeth Kramer, “The Idea of broader origins of this term in the writings of Anton Kunstreligion in German Musical Aesthetics of the Kuh and others, see Paul Reitter, On the Origins Early Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, NJ: Princeton of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2005). University Press, 2012). 26 Nicole Heinkel, Religiöse Kunst, Kunstreligion 19 For a detailed chronicle of the Jewish und die Überwindung der Säkularisierung: Frühromantik presence in nineteenth-century European musical als Sehnsucht und Suche nach der verlorenen Religion life, see David Conway, Jewry in Music: Entry to the (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004). Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner 27 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago 20 Steven J. Cahn, “A German-Jewish Tradition Press, 1978), 84–86. While Mark Evan Bonds offers of Bildung and Its Imprint on Composition and Music a more recent and comprehensive history of absolute Theory,” Musical Quarterly 101 (2019): 482–518. music than that of Dahlhaus, a close definition of 21 Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism?” in Kunstreligion and devotional listening does not factor Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., substantially into that study: Bonds, Absolute Music: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Columbia University Press, 2011), 72. Press, 2014). Helmut Loos has defined Kunstreligion

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 27 largely discursively, tracing the frequency of words 35 Edgar Zilsel, “Mozart und die Zeit: Eine like “holy” (heilig) in early Romantic music writings: didaktische Phantasie,” Der Brenner (December Loos, E-Musik: Kunstreligion der Moderne. Beethoven 1912): 268–71. und andere Götter (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017), 15–28. 36 “Da fühlte ich mich einsam, von Sehnsucht 28 Karen Leistra-Jones, “Hans von Bülow and nach einem Menschen, nach Mozart und ich wollte the Confessionalization of Kunstreligion,” Journal of ihm dienen. Doch als ich ihn hier oben suchte und Musicology 35/1 (2018): 42–75. die Töne nach ihrem Schöpfer fragte, da begann ein 29 On deathbeds as apotheoses, see Abigail Tosen, aus allen Winkeln kamen reihen von Tönen Fine, “Beethoven’s Mask and the Physiognomy of gelaufen und kletterten übereinander, trennten Late Style,” Nineteenth-Century Music 43/3 (2020): sich wieder und kehrten um zu tausendfacher 143–69. On other forms of veneration for composers Verwicklung und durch das All tollte die Schlussfuge as saints, see Fine, “Objects of Veneration: Music and aus der Jupitersymphonie.” Ibid., 269. Materiality in the Composer-Cults of Germany and 37 “Schlammströme krochen aus Mozarts Austria, 1870–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Grab und vereinigten sich zu einem Ozean von Chicago, 2017). Brei, der, verdünnt durch immer neue Regenfluten, 30 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 32. langsam anschwoll und alles unter sich begrabend 31 Fine, “Beethoven’s Mask.” nur faules Laub zum fahlen Firmament emportrug. 32 “Schon äußerlich zeigt es sich, daß Die Blätter wuchsen ins Unermeßliche und auf wir die Reliquien unserer großen Männer, ihren dem bedruckten Papiere blähten sich Kröten in Autogrammen und Locken, ihre Federkielen und schleimigem Glanz. Rabenflügelig kreiste ein Tabakdosen eine ähnliche Schätzung widerfahren Grammophon und krächzte die neueste Operette. lassen, wie die katholische Kirche den Gebeinen, In der Tauche aber wimmelte es; ein Klumpen von Geräten und Gewändern der Heiligen, wie die zappelnden Wagnerianern und anderen titanischen Hellenen den vermeintlichen Knochen des Theseus Kommis hatte sich unter dem Zeitungspapier und anderer Kultheroen. Wir erbauen um die Gräber hervorgearbeitet und das rettende Floß erklettert, da unserer Genies zwar keine Kapellen und opfern ihnen zerrten sie die anderen an den langen Haaren wieder nicht schwarze Lämmer auf den Altären antiker hinab: klebrige Maden, gemästet vom gestorbenen Heroentempel, aber wir begraben jene gemeinsam in Rokoko, und Heimatskünstler. Ganz zu unterst auf der Westminsterabtei und im Pariser Pantheon, oder dem Grund wand sich die fabelhafte Seeschlänge, wir errichten ihnen eine gemeinsame Walhalla, die die sich in den Schwanz biß: der zum Fortschritt zwar keine Gräber mehr, aber doch die Büsten der fortschreitende Fortschritt.” Ibid., 271. Verewigten, kurz, antike Kenotaphien enthält. Mit 38 My remarks in this passage represent but ähnlich heiliger Scheu wie nach Lourdes wallfahren a few key developments of a much richer history wir zu diesen Geniegräbern, ziehen wir nach Weimar, of Bildung traced by Rebekka Horlacher in The nach Stratford on Avon [sic] und vor allem nach Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung: Bayreuth.” Zilsel, Geniereligion (1918), 3–4. A Comparative Cultural History (New York, London: 33 Zilsel, Geniereligion, 52 and fn. 1. The early Routledge, 2016). biopic to which he alludes was Der Märtyrer seines 39 Joseph S. Bloch, “Das Problem des Herzens, also called Beethoven und die Frauen, a 1917 Antisemitismus,” Österreichische Wochenschrift. silent film directed by Emil Justiz. Centralorgan für die gesammten Interessen des Judentums 34 Zilsel’s approach, not coincidentally, 2/1 (Jan. 2, 1885): 1; translated and discussed by mirrors that of Marx and Engels in the premises Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews (1867–1938): A of their materialist method, which demystified Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University the idealist dogmas of their rivals: “The premises Press, 1989). from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not 40 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), can only be made in the imagination. They are 67. The passage about a search for neutral society the real individuals, their activity and the material reads in full: “‘Jewish emancipation’ was, among conditions under which they live, both those which other things, a search by individual Jews for a they find already existing and those produced neutral (or at least ‘semineutral,’ in Jacob Katz’s by their activity.” Marx and Engels, The German terms) society where neutral actors could share a Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998; neutral secular culture.” Ibid., 51. orig. 1845), 36. I am indebted to Roy Chan for 41 Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: teasing out this connection. Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg Dilemma

28 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sarah Wobick-Segev, Homes Away from Home: Jewish see also the Introduction to David Brodbeck, Defining Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Petersburg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna (Oxford: 2018); Mary Gluck, The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–23. Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Madison: 42 Brodbeck, Defining Deutschtum. Brodbeck University of Wisconsin Press, 2016).On Jewish builds upon the arguments of Pieter M. Judson in assimilation and identity in Vienna in the nineteenth “‘Not Another Square Foot!’: German Liberalism and century, see Klaus Hödl, Wiener Juden, jüdische the Rhetoric of National Ownership in 19th-Century Wiener: Identität, Gedächtnis, und Performanz im 19. Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 26 (1995): 83–97. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2006). 43 Enzo Traverso has argued against the 51 The debate was particularly heated in 1868 widespread idea of a German-Jewish symbiosis; at the start of the project to erect a Friedrich Schiller instead, he shows how Jewish intellectuals operated monument, with Frankl serving as vice president as pariahs, pushing against the continued resistance of the committee; see Herlinde Aichner, “Ludwig of German colleagues. Enzo Traverso, The Jews and August Frankl — Politiker der Erinnerung,” in Ludwig Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the August Frankl (1810–1894): Eine jüdische Biographie Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln and London: University zwischen Okzident und Orient, ed. Louise Hecht of Nebraska Press, 1995). On the Jews’ position as (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 275–89. cultural arbiters in Vienna, see Steven Beller, Vienna 52 Sander Gilman has discussed the special and the Jews. repugnance for the Mischling in Vienna: Gilman, 44 Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians; Marsha Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Superior Intelligence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (Oxford: Press, 1996), 132–43. Oxford University Press, 2001). 53 Hofmannsthal’s utopian language appears in 45 On the many shades of assimilation beyond his essays on the Salzburg Festival in Bernd Schoeller, Germany and Austria, see the collected essays in ed., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8: Reden und Aufsätze I Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth- 1979). Lisa Silverman has shown how Hofmannsthal’s Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University collaborator, Max Reinhardt, negotiated his identity Press, 1992). quite differently: he worked with Hofmannsthal on 46 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in the annual production of Jedermann at the Salzburg David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings cathedral, which couched the Salzburg Festival as (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46–63. a Catholic-Baroque endeavor, while also directing 47 Enzo Traverso, The Jewish Question: History Yiddish theater in Vienna; see chapter 4 in Lisa of a Marxist Debate, trans. Bernard Gibbons (Leiden Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 141–71. Meanwhile, and Boston: Brill, 2019). this same performance met with antisemitic protest 48 On the composition of Vienna’s Jewish during its premiere in 1920; see Michael P. Steinberg, population in Zilsel’s time, see David Rechter, Jews The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater of Vienna and the First World War (London: Littman and Ideology, 1890–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 16–18; on University Press, 1990), 169. Siegmund Kaznelson’s Congress movement, which 54 On Herzl the Wagnerite, see Leah Garrett, A explored political autonomy and Jewish unity during Knight at the Opera: Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the war, see Rechter’s chapter 4, pp. 129–60. On the the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser (West Lafayette, IN: musical manifestations of this divide between the Purdue University Press, 2011); see also Jacques recent immigrant wave and the more acculturated Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism Jew in popular broadsides, see chapter 7 of Philip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). V. Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (Oxford: 55 Paul Bekker and Hans Pfitzner had Oxford University Press, 2008), 147–80. already sparred publicly about Ferruccio Busoni, 49 Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a but the debate turned to the topic of antisemitism National Identity; Silverman, Becoming Austrians. in 1919 when Pfitzner issued his polemical essay 50 On how Jewish identity was shaped in in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte in Munich, “Neue spaces of leisure, see Shachar M. Pinsker, A Rich Ästhetik der musikalischen Impotenz” (reprinted in Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture his Gesammelte Schriften, 2nd ed., vol. 2 [Augsburg: (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Benno Filser Verlag, 1926], 99–282). The target of

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 29 Pfitzner’s multipart diatribe was Bekker’s biography 64 Darrin M. McMahon, “The Religion of Beethoven (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1912); Genius,” in Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New Bekker felt compelled to respond with his essay York: Basic Books, 2013), 189–228. “Impotenz—oder Potenz?” Frankfurter Zeitung (Jan. 65 Julia Barbara Köhne, Geniekult in 15 and 16, 1920; repr. in Anbruch 2 [1920]: 133– Geisteswissenschaften und Literaturen um 1900 und 41). In the 1926 second edition of his collected seine filmischen Adaptionen (Vienna, Cologne, and writings, Pfitzner penned a Foreword in response to Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 190–228; see Bekker that only deepened his antisemitic paranoia also Köhne’s essay “The Cult of Genius in Germany about the Jewish “war on Deutschtum” (Pfitzner, and Austria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” Gesammelte Schriften, 113). On this and similar in Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon, debates among music critics, see Karen Painter, eds., Genealogies of Genius (New York: Palgrave “Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitic Critique in the Macmillan, 2016), 115–35. Köhne was not the Austro-German Reception of Mahler, 1900–1945,” first to speculate about Zilsel’s hidden Jewish in Jeremy Barham, ed., Perspectives on Gustav Mahler reaction: see also Johann Dvořák , “Wissenschaft (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 175–94. als Gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetztung und als 56 Brodbeck, Defining Deutschtum. kollektiver Arbeitsprozess—Edgar Zilsel und sein 57 Adler wrote that “those passions that Werk,” in Haller and Stadler, eds., Der Aufstieg der have been so pathologically aroused in our time wissenschaftlichen Philosophie, 424–46. may play no role. Instead, they must be confronted 66 Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, in a candid, manly fashion and calmly discussed, 1874–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: State and all points of disagreement must be considered University of New York Press, 1983); Steven Beller, circumspectly.” Adler, Richard Wagner: Vorlesungen Vienna and the Jews. gehalten an der Universität zu Wien (Leipzig: 67 “ . . . and so we had to learn from men like Breitkopf und Härtel, 1904), 189–90; translated Chamberlain not only that there is a racial difference by Kevin Karnes in Music, Criticism, and the between Jews and Germans; not only that the Aryan Challenge of History: Shaping Musical Thought in race is a very contemplative race and is thus meant Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford to rule the world; not only that the Jewish race is an University Press, 2008), 187. inferior one and should be despised; but also that 58 See chapter 5 of Karnes, Music, Criticism, we possess no artistic capabilities. . . . One must and the Challenge of History, 133–59. understand the effect of these assertions on young 59 Sherry D. Lee, “The Other in the Mirror, or, artists.” Arnold Schoenberg, “Two Speeches on the Recognizing the Self: Wilde’s and Zemlinsky’s Dwarf,” Jewish Situation,” in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, Music & Letters 91/2 (2010): 198–223; Pao-Hsiang trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Wang, “Crisis of Identity of German Jews in fin-de- Press, 1975), 503 (my revised translation). siècle Vienna: Operas and Plays by Hofmannsthal, 68 Richard Taruskin has discussed the Schnitzler, Zemlinsky, and Schreker” (Ph.D. diss., response by the non-Jewish Eduard Bernsdorf, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999). which reveals a latent late nineteenth-century 60 On Nordau’s participation in an ideology tension between industrial progress and antimodern of muscular Judaism, see Todd Samuel Presner, Romanticism, with Jews caught in the ideological Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics crossfire; Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007) and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3: Moshe Zimmermann, “Muscle Jews Versus Nervous 228. While Jewish intellectuals such as Heinrich Jews,” in Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni, Berl, J. E. de Sinoja, and Salli Levi reviled Wagner’s eds., Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports polemics, they shared a tendency to associate Jewish in Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, music with liturgical song, which tied its sound to 2006), 13–26. the Jewish body and barred it from access to absolute 61 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, music; see Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 189–202. 1967). 69 Pamela M. Potter, “Jewish Music and 62 Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, German Science,” in Philip V. Bohlman, ed., Jewish Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music Musical Modernism, Old and New (Chicago: University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). of Chicago Press, 2009), 89–101; on the problematic 63 Bloch to Fleg, Jan. 30, 1913; translated and opposition that remained in music history texts, see cited by Móricz, Jewish Identities, 114. Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 3: 179. On

30 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) the changes in the music industry that allowed Jews 77 It should be noted that Gomperz’s essay, to thrive, and that incited Wagner’s reactionary text, written in 1904 and discussed at length by Sander see Conway, Jewry in Music, 257–66. Gilman, was both unpublished and untitled; but 70 On Weininger’s reception, see Nancy A. his sentiments, however private, were echoed by Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, eds., Jews and Gender: other Viennese thinkers of his time, notably those Responses to Otto Weininger (Philadelphia: Temple who debated Marx’s “Jewish Question.” See Gilman, University Press, 1995). Smart Jews, 107. 71 In Chamberlain’s Preface to Die Grundlagen 78 Rudolf Richter [Edgar Zilsel], “Das Dritte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, he writes that “there is Reich und die Wissenschaft,”Der Kampf 26 (1933): something higher and holier than knowledge: that 486–93. is life itself. That which I have written here has been 79 On Bach’s skull, see David Yearsley, experienced. Should some factual declarations be an “Physiognomies of Bach’s Counterpoint,” in Bach and exaggerated error, some judgments a prejudice, some the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge conclusions an error of judgment, nothing is entirely University Press, 2002), 209–38. On music-loving untrue: for isolated reason often lies, while real life doctors who fetishized composers’ remains: Abigail never does . . . a deep feeling runs beneath, beyond Fine, “Geniology as Kunstreligion: Measuring the the individual, and even as prejudice and ignorance Divine in the Composer’s Body,” paper delivered at the may distort interpretation, a kernel of living truth American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in must lie therein” (my translation). “ . . . er mußte sich Boston, November 2019. On the ritual exhumations, sagen, daß es etwas gibt, höher und heiliger als alles processions, and reburials of composers in Vienna’s Wissen: das ist das Leben selbst. Was hier geschrieben Zentralfriedhof, see Reuben Phillips, “Exhumations, steht, ist erlebt. Manche tatsächliche Angabe mag ein Honorary Graves, and the Fashioning of Vienna’s überkommener Irrtum, manches Urteil ein Vorurteil, Self-Image as the ‘City of Music,’” Musical Quarterly manche Schlußfolgerung ein Denkfehler sein, ganz 102/2–3 (2019): 303–49. unwahr ist nichts; deen die verwaiste Vernunft lügt 80 Marian Wilson Kimber, “Never Perfectly häufig, das volle Leben nie: ein bloss Gedachtes kann Beautiful: Physiognomy, Jewishness, and ein luftiges Nichts, die Irrfahrt eines losgerissenen Mendelssohn Portraiture,” in Nicole Grimes and Individuums sein, dagegen wurzelt ein tief Gefühltes Angela R. Mace, eds., Mendelssohn Perspectives in Ausser- und Überpersönlichem, und mag auch (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012; repr. Taylor & Vorurteil und Ignoranz die Deutung manchmal Francis, 2016), 9–30. festgestalten, ein Kern lebendiger Wahrheit muss 81 K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and darin liegen.” Chamberlain, Grundlagen, vol. 1, 25th the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-siècle Vienna ed. (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1940), xiii. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 72 Zilsel, Geniereligion, 192 and 234, 82 Zilsel, Geniereligion, 114. respectively. 83 Ibid., 105. Lichtenberg wrote: “How 73 The quote by Chamberlain, to which Zilsel much depends on the way things are presented in objects, reads: “In contrast, ‘dear Baruch’ sat from this world can be seen from the very fact that coffee birth until death in his little chamber and thought drunk out of wine glasses is really miserable stuff, as about work that he had read by Descartes and Bruno is meat cut at the table with a pair of scissors. Worst and recombined it (with incomparable skill) to make of all, as I once actually saw, is butter spread on a a texture of syllogisms.” Zilsel was further disturbed piece of bread with an old though very clean razor.” that this quotation was the only mention of Spinoza Lichtenberg, The Lichtenberg Reader: Selected Writings in the entire text. Zilsel, Geniereligion, 232; citing a of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, trans. and ed. Franz H. passage from Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant (Munich: Mautner and Henry Hatfield (Boston: Beacon Press, Bruckmann, 1905), 346. 1959), 99–100. 74 On reactions to Chamberlain, see Slezkine, 84 On the debate about Wagner’s degeneracy, The Jewish Century, 52–60. see Thomas Grey, “Wagner the Degenerate: Fin 75 Paul Lawrence Rose, “One of Wagner’s de Siècle Cultural ‘Pathology’ and the Anxiety Jewish Friends: Berthold Auerbach and His of Modernism,” Nineteenth Century Studies 16 Unpublished Reply to Richard Wagner’s Antisemitism (2002): 73–92; Laurence Dreyfus, “Pathologies,” (1881),” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 36/1 (January in Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: 1991): 219–28. Harvard University Press, 2010), 117–74; Isolde 76 Joseph Jacobs in a passage translated and Vetter, “Wagner in the History of Psychology,” cited by Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 53. trans. Stewart Spencer, in The Wagner Handbook, ed.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 31 Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski (Cambridge, Oxford University Press, 2007), 199–229. Martin MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 118–55; Eybl explores the tensions in Schenker’s identity, and James Kennaway, “Modern Music and Nervous which was divided among Polish, Galician, Jewish, Modernity,” in Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea Viennese, and overarching “German”: see Eybl, of Music as a Cause of Disease (Aldershot: Ashgate, “Heinrich Schenker’s Identities as a German and a 2012), 63–98. Je w,” Musicologica Austriaca (Sept. 21, 2018), http:// 85 Fine, “Objects of Veneration.” www.musau.org/parts/neue-article-page/view/54 86 For Margarete Koelman’s Beethoven poems (accessed Nov. 21, 2019). in translation, see Appendix 2.2 of Fine, “Objects of 89 Philip A. Ewell, “Music Theory and the Veneration,” 344–50. For her memoir, see “Dschang White Racial Frame,” Music Theory Online 26/2 und Dschau: Nach dem Leben von Irene Wild,” (2020). Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt (1910): 316–22. 90 Zilsel, Geniereligion, 229. 87 Leon Botstein, “Schenker the Regressive: 91 Heinrich Schenker, “The Mission of German Observations on the Historical Schenker,” Musical Genius,” in Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Quarterly 86/2 (2002): 242. Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a New Generation of 88 Cook argues that traces of Talmudic Youth, ed. William Drabkin, trans. Ian Bent, William thinking lurk between the lines of Schenker’s Drabkin, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ambition to assimilate; see Cook, “The Politics 2004), 1: 3–20. of Assimilation” in The Schenker Project (Oxford:

32 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020)