Biopolitics in German Musical Culture, 1850-1910 by Jonathan
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Sound Bodies: Biopolitics in German Musical Culture, 1850-1910 By Jonathan Gentry M.A., Portland State University, 2007 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Jonathan Gentry This dissertation by Jonathan Gentry is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date____________ __________________________________ Michael P. Steinberg, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date____________ __________________________________ Dana Gooley, Reader Date____________ __________________________________ Ethan Pollock, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date____________ __________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii ACKNOWLEGEMENTS This dissertation has been written on dozens of surfaces. From attics to offices, I have called numerous desks my own. But I also made use of library carrels, the broad tables of reading rooms, and mucky table tops in coffee shops and cafes. I would like to thank the countless people that provided those surfaces: family, friends, colleagues, librarians, archivists, baristas, and servers. It has been a progressive dinner of writing, moving from place to place, finding material and shaping it. I would like to thank the institutions that allowed me to undertake this project and the specific people therein who aided its completion. I am first of all grateful to the members of the History Department at Brown University for all their guidance and the funding, including a grant from the Church Travel Fund that allowed me to conduct research at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. I am also thankful for the writing fellowship and long leash from the History Department that allowed me to begin my writing in earnest. I would like to specifically thank Joan Richards for being a wonderful Director of Graduate Studies and encouraging me to make the final push. I am also in debt to the Cogut Center of the Humanities, which welcomed me as a graduate fellow for the 2010-11 academic year. The staff of the Cogut Center – Kit Salisbury, Leslie Uhnak, and Traude Kastner – were a major help and continually made my fellowship year enjoyable and fruitful. And to all the librarians at Brown, University, Harvard University, Reed College, and Portland State University – thank you. Above all I would like to thank the people that read my research and offered feedback along the way. These include members of the Modern European Workshop at Brown University and numerous panel respondents, especially at conferences of the German Studies Association. I am similarly grateful to the community of fellows at the Cogut Center, especially Gertrud Koch, for their timely feedback and pressing me not shy away from big issues. Finally, I am immensely thankful for the close readings and suggestions from my Dissertation Committee. Michael P. Steinberg, Ethan Pollock, and Dana Gooley helped make this project a success. iv Lastly, I want to offer special thanks to my late grandmother, Rose Thompson. Without her help and encouragement I would have never been able to finish college and pursue my academic dreams. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE. Aesthetics and Biopolitics in the War of the Romantics 27 CHAPTER TWO. Musical Lawlessness: Strauss’s Don Juan, Mahler’s First Symphony, and the Critique of Musical Idealism 95 CHAPTER THREE. Discipline and Flesh: Ambiguous Modernism in the 1890s 160 CHAPTER FOUR. The Nietzschean Biopolitics of the Musical Secession 230 CHAPTER FIVE. The Musical Secession as a Mediation of Modernity 279 CHAPTER SIX. Musical Degeneration and Regeneration: The Biopolitics of New Conservatism 332 CONCLUSION: Aesthetics and Biopolitics 396 vi INTRODUCTION The Semper Opera House erupted with healthy rounds of applause and curtain calls following the world premiere of Salome in Dresden. Such rousing approval, repeated in dozens of cities, gave Richard Strauss his first operatic success and sealed his status as Germany’s most famous living composer. But the opera was also a first rate scandal, inciting sustained critical backlash and provoking a crisis about the state and future of music. The quintessential succès de scandale stemmed largely from the intertwined eroticism and violence of the story. As in Oscar Wilde’s play on which the opera was based, the character Salome dances for her father-in-law to obtain the severed head of Jochanaan, the object of her revenge and final necrophiliac love. While audiences embraced this well-executed drama, critics largely decried such staged decadence. Cologne’s chief critic at the time, Otto Neitzel, says of the main characters that “never in the operatic art have two characters wandered over the stage…which, with similar exclusivity, act out the degeneration and eccentricity of their instincts as these two, which also are so outspokenly – in one word – decadent.”1 Much like Max Nordau’s assessment of Wagner’s music dramas fifteen years prior, critics pathologized characters with the latest medical categories: perverse, neurasthenic, hysteric, obsessed, pathological, and degenerate.2 The aberrant actions in Salome were made legible through the medical lexicon of the dawning 20th Century. However, the pathology of the characters was not the overriding problem for critics. The real issue was that Strauss’s music itself was also sick. Heard as sonic illustrations of a pathological milieu, critics considered the orchestral accompaniment and vocal melodies metaphorically sick. To speak of a work of art as having afflictions in the manner of a living being is certainly a metaphor. Yet, the ease and frequency with which critics medically diagnosed 1 Otto Neitzel, “‘Salome’ von Oscar Wilde und Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 18 (1907): 391. 2 Max Nordau, Degeneration, ed. George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 1 music created slippages from metaphor to reality in phrases like “pathological instrumentation.”3 Not only the instrumental color, but Salome’s chromaticism, stylizations, and irregular rhythms were considered unmusical and pathological. Worse still, the diseased music was feared contagious, that is, threatening to infect other music and even make the audience itself ill. While such biomorphic discourse comparing compositions to biological entities, including their degree of healthiness, was by no means new in 1905 with Salome, the scandal solidified the identification of modernist music with pathology. Moreover, the opera inflamed a smoldering crisis about the health risks of music, resulting in heighten strategies for its regulation that can best be described as biopolitical. In the half-century spanning the scandals of Wagner and Strauss, bio-medical terminology became increasingly prevalent in musical discourse. Yet it also became more literal and less liberal. By the early 20th Century, critics showed great concerned with music’s effect on human populations and a willingness to quarantine sick music in the interest of national health. By identifying the biopolitical dynamics in musical culture, this dissertation examines how critics stimulated and redirected the growth of musical modernism. As aesthetic authorities, professional music critics beginning with Franz Brendel and Eduard Hanslick wielded new methods of regulation that managed compositions as quasi-biological entities with effects on human populations. This biopolitical investment of musical culture actually worked to magnify the specter of modernism by putting it on display through public dissection. Musical modernism was more than challenging innovation. To critics reared on 19th-century romanticism and idealist philosophy, new music by Strauss and others was lawless and abnormal, breaking newly minted aesthetic laws and deviating from standards of intellectual cultivation. It was “against nature,” to invoke the title of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s controvertial novel with which modernist music was often compared. Moreover, the pathological element of new music provided a frequent point of 3 Otto Hödel, “Erstaufführung des Musikdramas ‘Salome’ von Richard Strauss am 16 Mai,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 73, no. 23 (June 6, 1906): 513. 2 reference for explaining how and why it was “modern.” New music was argued to reflect or even mediate the chaos of urban modernity, also diagnosed as pathologically deviant. Since from a purely formal standpoint, stripped as far as possible of cultural referents, music cannot be described as sick, lawless, or modern, the whole categorization of “musical modernism” cannot be thought outside the lines of aesthetic discourse. In this project I expand on Peter Gay’s aphoristic statement that “Modernism was the creature of criticism.”4 Indeed, critics created modernism by first establishing the bounds of normal music and then asserting that certain innovative compositions were abnormal and sick. Furthermore, the individuating pressures of a disciplinary musical culture called forth and even encouraged such deviation by making it the object of studied and celebrated analysis. Modernism emerged as a side effect of increased regulations that only seemed to make it more prominent. The character of Beckmesser in Wagner’s Meistersinger (premiered in 1868) provides a dramatic manifestation of the new powers of the late 19th-century critic. Beckmesser is a civic authority