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 27

CHAPTER TWO. Musical Lawlessness: Strauss’s , Mahler’s First , 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 House erupted with healthy rounds of applause and curtain calls following the world premiere of in . Such rousing approval, repeated in dozens of cities, gave his first operatic success and sealed his status as ’s most famous living . 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,” -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 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 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 who judges Walther von Stolzing’s musical innovations as socially and aesthetically abnormal. While Wagner created Beckmesser, a less than transparent satirization of Hanslick, in order to lambast him as a narrow-minded traditionalist, the story cannot help but betray anxieties about the growing powers of the critic. Beckmesser bridges the public official and aesthetic judge, showing criticism to be an extra-aesthetic affair concerned with social well-being.

Looking back on of the early 20th Century, Viennese critic Max Graf writes that in

Germany, “critics were almost a species of town councilor, members of the magistracy, public officials of municipal life. Indeed, they were often policemen, tracking down evil doers.”5 These

Beckmesser-like critics illustrate the ascendency of disciplinary techniques in musical life with

4 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford: , 1978), 119.

5 Max Graf, Composer and Critic: Two Hundred Years of Musical Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1946): 270.

3

their ever-present ears, judgment rods, examinations, and pastoral advice-giving. As with

Beckmesser’s treatment of Walther, professional critics fanned the flame of modernism by making much ado about often small musical innovations. Only through the noise of regulation and critical discourse did new music attain its fully deviant stature. Yet it was a deviance perceived to not only threaten the state of music, but the very biological well-being of society.

The dissemination of new institutions and techniques of musical criticism are not only useful for understanding the origins of musical modernism, but also its social significance.

Critical discourse creates a third coordinate in calculating the relationship between works of music and their social context. Critics provide a conduit of two way exchange between compositions and culture, interpreting music’s meaning for its public and offering a sample of public response to a composition. As critics made clear, the new music of Strauss, Gustav

Mahler, and associated with their “secessionist” school, stirred anxieties and hopes about processes of modernization and its effect on the health of the human body and species.

This dissertation argues, then, that the broader significance of musical modernism lies in its intersection with a contemporaneous biologization and medicalization of mass culture and politics. This included not merely new forms of ethnic and political racism, such as anti-

Semitism, but also the ascendance of public health paradigms and public investment in the maintenance of biological life, both of the individual and the nation. As with other dangerous populations that emerged with Central European mass politics – such as political parties, ethnic groups, and diseased persons – the progeny of innovative composers were categorized as a pathological and circumscribed “population.” Not only was musical modernism compared to these groups, but it became subject to the same biopolitical pressures and controls, ultimately quarantine.

In examining the origins and political significance of modernist music in , this dissertation privileges a series of compositions that span the two decades around 1900. These works – primarily symphonic and operatic pieces by Strauss and Mahler – represent a distinct

4

phase of early musical modernism that I call secessionist. In excavating the origins of musical modernism, not only does this dissertation draw attention to the role of music critics, but also the secessionist movement in breaking from 19th-century compositional norms. While less well- known than other compositional schools, my research demonstrates that for at least a decade the secessionist school was a coherent circle of musical innovators, whose works first introduced the parameters of modernism to musical culture. I emphasize the historical role of the secessionists in the origins of modernism precisely because it was their compositions that mobilized music critics into articulating the concept and dangers of modernism in music. Although the music of the secession was subject to and even shaped by the unrelenting disciplinary and biopolitical pressures of musical authorities, its deviance also articulated its own vision of health. Within a musical culture that routinely created parallels between music and bodies, secessionists constructed sound bodies that affirmed – as a musical metaphor – an anarchic and communal vitality not subject to the strictures of law, musical or political. They voiced an alternative biopower to counter the dominant biopolitics of entrenched authorities.

Biopolitics: History and Theory

Biopolitics refers to the potentially broad segment of governance preoccupied with the protection and management of biological life. In this dissertation I will be concerned with two distinct lines of thought emanating from the unruly thematic of biopolitics. The first relates to

Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, which focuses on the regulatory power of medical discourses and public health initiatives.6 He juxtaposes this force for the maximization of life with the negative, life-taking modes of sovereign power and law. The second notion of biopolitics I will be using asserts that modern sovereign power has a vested interest in regulating

6 Foucault most thoroughly explores the theme of biopolitics in his lectures. See Society Must be Defended Lectures at the Collège de 1975-76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010).

5

biological life, an interest that historical precedes and schematically stands aside from Foucault’s politicized medicine. This second iteration is essentially a Nietzschean concept of biopolitics, which has been productively utilized by thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze and

Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito, who all note in the judicial operations of states from absolutism to neoliberalism the prerogative to protect (and eventually modify) biological life.7

Tying together the strands of Foucauldian and Nietzschean biopolitics is the mechanism of law. Foucault’s biopolitics, ultimately rooted in medico-scientific discourse, points to the power of natural scientific law when wielded by interest groups on both sides of the civic/civil divide. According to this definition biopolitics initially derives its authority from medicine and the science of population, but is often adopted by the agents and legal apparatus of the state.

Conversely, Nietzschean biopolitics highlights the hidden and often insidious operations of state law itself in variously protecting, damaging, and sequestering the vital capacity of state subjects.

If Foucauldian biopolitics assumes a separation of between medical power and sovereign power, at least until late 19th-century public health policies, Nietzschean biopolitics asserts an inherent biological operation at work in sovereign law.8 The centrality of law to biopolitics becomes most relevant to my project in the context of the musical laws that aesthetic authorities used to govern musical life and to judge compositions.

A second theme which unites these two threads of biopolitics is a historical narrative. In both its Foucauldian and Nietzschean iterations biopolitics is identified with modernity – variously defined and periodized – modern politics being the history of biopolitics’s gradual

7 In particular I draw from the following body of works: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari. Anti-Oedipus :Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 280; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 308; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Robert Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Roberto Esposito, The Third Person, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 8 See Esposito’s chapter on Nietzsche “Biopower and Biopotentiality,” in Bíos, 78-109.

6

expansion, even its colonization of other segments of the political sphere. While scholars each point to different moments as the genesis of biopolitics – social contract theories, liberal governmentality, etc. – all focus on its escalation up to the 20th Century and Nazism, wherein politics became applied biology. The sweeping historical narratives employed in major expositions on biopolitics often fail to make references to specific decades. Nevertheless, the late

19th Century seems to have a privileged, though underarticulated, position. For Agamben, one can detect in Alexis de Tocqueville the beginning, but by no means height, of democracy’s inability to manage the “bare life” it set out to vindicate.9 Similarly, for Hannah Arendt, the protracted entry of laboring classes into politics was indicative of a general politicization of life production. Yet, by linking the emancipation of the working classes with the emancipation of women – part of a general disclosure of material concerns and collapse of public/private distinctions – Arendt points to a historical moment much closer to 1900 than 1800.10 Foucault, who never fully articulated his view of late 19th-century biopolitics, suggests that it was a period during which medical power over the general population (biopolitics) intersected with both the disciplining of individuals and the legal framework of sovereignty itself.11 For all Foucault’s careful delineation of different political modalities, they seem to coalesce in a form of “new racism” just before the dawn of the superpolitical 20th Century. Similarly, Esposito reads that period – through the voice of Nietzsche – as a moment of transition from one type of biopolitics to another. If states from the early modern era on sought to protect the lives of citizens, in the late

19th Century biological protection became proactive and preventative.12 The removal of dangers to a population became a means to improve public health, another variant on the conventional historical theme of a crisis of liberalism. If the Foucauldian thread focuses on biopolitics as initially a non-punitive force and the Nietzschean thread on biopolitics as a legal maneuver, both

9 Agamben, 9. 10 Arendt, Human Condition, 73. 11 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 258-60. 12 Esposito, Bíos, 95-99.

7

sides can agree that the politics of biological life circa 1900 merged state law and biological improvement via the logic of scientific law.

The Foucauldian strand of biopolitics stands apart from the others, because it emerges from his work on discursive production, discipline, and the attempt to conceive of power beyond the juridical framework of repression and emancipation. In Discipline and Punish he juxtaposes the negative power to take life with the “humane,” molding influence of disciplinary institutions like prisons, schools, militaries, and hospitals which train and rehabilitate deviant individuals.13

Over the course of his next book, The History of Sexuality, Foucault moves from discipline to biopolitics, from the regulation of individual bodies (a diverging incarnation from the use of

“souls” in Discipline and Punish) to populations.14 Yet, not only are discipline and biopolitics equally juxtaposed with sovereignty and part of a distinctly Foucauldian view of dispersed power, but the words he uses to describe the modes of both discipline and biopolitics are nearly identical: management, regulation, maximization, etc. Foucault’s biopolitics flows according to the same mechanisms of discipline, but applied more specifically to the biological status of a given human population, rather than the subject status of an individual. It should be noted that much of

Foucault’s intellectual trajectory in the 1970s displays the influence of his colleague Deleuze.

This is the move from archeology to genealogy, structuralism to post-structuralism, power to

(micro)politics, subjectivity to bodies. In a way Foucault’s recourse to biopolitics is his rethinking of medical discourse (particularly in The Birth of the Clinic) through the vitalist and politicized lens of Anti-Oedipus. Yet, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics (and thought more generally) remains distinct, because it grows out of his earlier works, which emphasize the extra- legal, extra-punitive powers of medical and scientific authority and expertise. Because the

Foucauldian strain of biopolitics bears the residue of his work on the formative powers of

13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977). 14 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978).

8

discourse, it is the notion of biopolitics my project primarily invokes when demonstrating the productive powers of musical authorities in creating modernism.

Despite a categorical awkwardness in lumping together various thinkers as the

“Nietzschean thread” of biopolitics, all share a preoccupation with law and its seemingly hidden effects on the biology of its subjects. As this body of thought demonstrates, it is not only medical authorities that delineate different spheres and types of life, but also legal standing. In very different ways Agamben (zoë, bios), Arendt (public, private, social), and Esposito (social contract, personhood) highlight the law’s historical role in parsing and regulating the political subject as living being. The works of Nietzsche and his 20th-century followers Deleuze and Guattari focus less on modern politics per se, but their concepts (degeneration, the Dionysian, micro-fascism, molecularization) philosophize social organization in an ahistorical manner that is broadly biopolitical, interrogating the relationship between expanding life and contracting law. If

Foucault focuses on biopolitics as a separate modality or stratum of politics, for those in the

Nietzschean train of thought biopolitics is rather a distinct way of looking at the whole of politics.

This is quite simply politics considered from the perspective of its effect on biology and might be more properly considered vitalism. Even Arendt, far from condoning any form of vitalism, takes something of a vitalist perspective in her delineation of labor, work, and action in The Human

Condition. Nonetheless, I shall call both strands biopolitics, not least because these vitalist paradigms are invoked less for their general philosophy and more for their specific approach to social organization. For my project it is this Nietzschean concept of the biopolitics of law that best explains the contemporaneous, especially political, significance of musical modernism.

Given the frequency with which fin de siècle modernism ran up against and often counter to the

“laws” of late 19th-century aesthetics, these compositions ended up illuminating the role of aesthetic law in parsing different forms of aesthetic beings. While compositions are not living beings, critics often treated them as if they were, forging links between the regulation of human populations and that of musical schools.

9

The relationship between a work of music (or aesthetics generally) and biopolitics has three levels: representative, metaphorical, and literal. Representative refers to the literary mention of biopolitical themes. This is less strictly musical, but in programs, lyrics, and one can find representations of biopolitics. An example from Salome would be the way that the king is appalled that Narraboth died without being ordered to. Metaphorical comes into play when considering the fictive parallels between a composition(s) and a human body(ies).

Metaphorical biopolitics involves thinking about the production, regulation, or health of aesthetic form and condition in the manner one would analyze the management of biological form and condition. This is something critics often did (and I do in my historical criticisms) and is a major element of the biopolitics of musical modernism. An example from Salome would be the earlier description by critics of its instrumentation as “pathological.” Finally, musical biopolitics can be literal when considering the relationship of art to the health of the listener. When art is regulated as an impediment or aid to the biological vitality of the listener or population group, then this is nothing other than standard biopolitics entering the aesthetic sphere. I will be dealing with all three, trying to keep them separate, but the slippages are frequent. For instance, critics often conflate the metaphorical sickness of musical form with its ability to affect the bodily conditions of audiences. Similarly, the pathologization of literary components of a composition – such as the diagnosis of characters in Salome – frequently led to parallels in the metaphorical musical analysis, which were not doubt influenced by the extra-musical texts.

I am not writing a history of biopolitics, but of musical culture. It just so happens that aesthetic politics at the turn of the 20th Century shared the biopolitical dynamic of its time. This is not to say that musical culture always participated so readily in contemporaneous politics or biopolitics. If anything 19th-century German musical culture actively resisted direct politicization, only grasping biopolitical topics and mechanisms well after their general social entrenchment. But at the close of the 19th Century, after a period of rapid transformations in and intensifications of biopolitics through state racism, public health initiatives, eugenics, and social

10

welfare programs – the biologization of politics – musical culture itself became biopoliticized.

One can detect the same mechanisms used to control human populations at work in regulating musical populations. The same dynamics that shaped how humans as biological creatures participated in the political sphere also shaped how music functioned in the public sphere. The terms of access to the polis, the center of politics and culture, was policed by biological, if not always racist, prerequisites. Understanding this historical development helps unravel enigmas that have plagued musical historiography. There is a lingering ambiguity surrounding the chronology and social significance of musical modernism. When did art music cease to be romantic and become modern? Was musical modernism a progressive or regressive force with respect to democratization? In addressing both questions, my project posits biologization or biopoliticization as a thematic winnowing fork to straighten out persistent vagaries.

Much of the scholarship on fin de siècle modernism is fraught with the problem of apparent ambiguity with respect the art’s status as modernism. This early iteration of modernism appears ambiguous aesthetically in relation to romantic traditions and philosophically in relation to the anti-tradition of modernity itself. The indeterminate categorization of this music has generated a host of in-between terms: “transitional,” “ambiguous modernism,” “nostalgic modernism.”15 In particular scholars like Richard Taruskin and Walter Frisch juxtapose the at least somewhat modern means with the ostensive romantic cultural ends.16 This is essentially the problem of Wagner, with whom Strauss and Mahler continue to be lumped as unmodern modernists. Considering the biopolitical elements of German musical culture helps clarify the alleged ambiguities, demonstrating how and when new music became modernism. The biopolitical musical discourse in which Strauss and Mahler were situated demonstrates how their

15 See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York: Norton, 1991); Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 16 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3-4; Frisch, 9.

11

music was made to function as post-romantic. That discourse created the possibility and categories of musical deviance, such that their music was less the “maximalization” of traditions, but rather branded as a difference of kind. Regardless of the veiled intentions of the composers, their music was received as sympathetic for the condition of urban modernity. It is not simply that their romantic works were mistaken as modern, but even their formal innovations – in dialogue with aesthetic discourse – broke from 19th-century expectations and principles. The vantage point of biopolitics focuses on alternative notions of power and agency that gives critical discourse as much a role in the genesis of modernism as composers.

Thinking musical modernism alongside the history of biopolitics helps remove some of the mental roadblocks encountered by scholars when analyzing the movement’s socio-political significance. While my research confirms previous conclusions about the liberal/nationalist tension present in late 19th-century musical aesthetics, the relevance of that political dynamic quickly dissipates when one turns to the 1890s. Despite attempts by scholars to place modernist composers and critics into the liberal/nationalist dichotomy, the labeling is often forced and far from the perspective of their own contemporaries. Indeed the biopolitics at work in German musical discourse placed secessionist modernism outside the established political positions of liberal and nationalist. Their music was heard to express various anti-liberal and anti-nationalist political sensibilities, which correspond to more democratic intersections between biological well-being and life. The political rubrics of biopolitical thinkers offer supra-partisan interpretations of political dynamics, providing new vocabulary by which to traverse the shifting terrain of progressive and conservative during the turn of the 20th Century. It is precisely the varying modes of social biologization that can provide a political map on which to locate musical modernism, both the vitalism of Strauss and Mahler, as well as the regulative strategies of critics.

The political significance of German musical modernism cannot be located on a spectrum of political parties, but within the discourses and deployments of biopolitics.

12

Just as scholars of earlier periods of music history have asserted the role of musical discourse in creating 19th-century German art music, I show how new discourses unraveled that tradition.17 The notion of musical discourse draws from the work of Foucault and inherits his attempt to challenge the hegemony and autonomy of the author. One who participates in a discourse – such as Hanslick’s – invokes a whole series of associations and rules not necessarily intended by the author. By this perspective the originality of authorial intent is hemmed in by unintended codes and what the discourse allows to be said and not to be said.18 Foucauldian discourse analysis gives scholars a tool for investigating the significance and operation of linguistic texts outside the lens of authorial intent. It seems fair to say that scholars who tout musical discourse are similarly trying to undermine the authority of the composer. Perhaps in no other discipline is authorial intent still as ardently pursued as musicology. The ardent quest to know “what Mahler really meant” shows an inclination for intention and even hermeneutics. The very idea of musical discourse suggests that musical meaning does not wholly stem from the composer, but from a linguistic discourse about music. For example, the composer does not inject rationality into a musical piece by composing in sonata form, but rather sonata form is embedded in a discourse of rationality.

One of the biggest criticisms of Foucault is that he leaves no room for, or completely evades, the issues of agency and historical causation. While this may be true of early Foucault, the structuralist, during the mid to late 1970s he shed some of his skepticism about separating oppression and resistance. Compared to his analysis of the emerging natural sciences in The

Order of Things, scientific discourses in Discipline and Punish are wielded by groups.

Discourses are not simply arbiters of arbitrary orders – creating new truth regimes – but they are

17 See Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 18 At the level of musical form, Adorno’s notion of musical materials partially parallels Foucault’s linguistic notion of discourse, in that, both structures limit what can be “said” and determine the significance of what is said.

13

deployed by groups with vested interests. Following the influence of Deleuze, one can see in

Foucault’s writings an explosion of the militaristic word “deployment,” invoking both politics and agency. However, the parameters of resistance nonetheless remain murky. Rarely, does he suggest a kind of counter discursive deployment.19 Nor is the marginalization by discourse to be embraced as a method of resistance as this only reinforces the discourse. In other words, abnormality on its own terms is not source of power. If anything, Foucault, if only during the late

1970s, seems to suggest that resistance lies outside of discourse, outside of speaking, in the mute biological refrain.

In incorporating discourse analysis into music history too heavy-handedly, I fear that the head of the author/composer may be cut off, only to be replaced by discourse as the single determinant of musical meaning and change. In this dissertation I will be considering the significance of specific musical compositions as well as musical discourses associated with them.

I do not want to suggest that either the texts or their discursive contexts have more agency than the other. They are hopelessly intertwined. Moreover they should not be considered on separate planes, art on one side and criticism on another. The question of the essential meaning of a composition is fruitless. Rather a composition and its criticism constantly did and do things, both to each other and their audiences. They are both machines in a long assembly of production, in this case, the production of modernist musical culture.

Historiography

Scholarship on the origins and social significance of German musical modernism must first grapple with the theoretically-charged work of Theodor Adorno. His incomparable and unavoidable analysis centers on the heroic musical narrative of the , but places it in social context. Per Schoenberg’s determinist self-burden of having to emancipate dissonance, Adorno views modernism as the culmination of a 19th-century historical process of

19 One possibility of a counter discourse is the notion of writing counter-history discussed in Society Must be Defended, 66-76.

14

both subjective expression and a rationalization of means leading to objectification.20 The result of this dialectical process was an erosion of available musical materials to express authentically, leading to a need to innovate. Accordingly, Schoenberg’s atonality registers a recognition of the total corruption and commodification of traditional methods (tonality and even rhythms), such that emancipated music retained its subjectivity, if only as an expression of the alienated state of the modern individual under capitalism. For Adorno, this dialectic, culminating in Schoenberg’s ability to channel the truth of his era, are the origins of modernism. Consequently, Adorno insists that post-romantic, “new music” really begins with Schoenberg. Even in his later re-estimations of Strauss and especially Mahler, he considers their music nostalgic, tradition-bound, and unemancipated.21 For Adorno, the origins of modernism are purely formal, but form caught in the same dialectic of modernity discussed with Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.22 As to the broader significance of musical modernism, Adorno emphasizes its struggle with society- wide commodification and objectification. For Adorno, the music of Schoenberg and Mahler resists, though in different ways, while that of Strauss and others capitulates.

Beyond Adorno and his limited imitators, there are three, not mutually exclusive, schools of thought within scholarship on the origins and politics of German musical modernism: formalist, Dahlhaus, Schorske. While rejecting Adorno’s attempt to read the social significance of music, 20th-century formalist musicologists shared Adorno’s investment in Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance as the mile marker and defining feature of musical modernism. If not as a result of a historical dialectic or bearing witness to capitalism, the formalist origins of modernism are the need for greater self-expression, while that accomplishment represents the assertion of the sovereignty of the artist amid the flood of mass culture kitsch. The formalist

20 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 21 Theodor W Adorno, Mahler : A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Theodor Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1964,” trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Perspectives of New Music 1 (1965): 14-32 and 2 (1966): 113-29. 22 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1988).

15

interpretation of modernism does not really constitute a strict school, but a habit among largely

20th-century musicologists in distinguishing between late romanticism and modernism. This view can be seen in books on 20th-century music from Gerald Abraham to Robert Morgan and Richard

Taruskin more recently.23 While Morgan and Taruskin are more apt than their predecessors to acknowledge fin de siècle innovation as proto or early modernist – as well as to place music in cultural contexts – both mark it as something transitional that has more to do with romanticism than modernism. Taruskin in particular goes to lengths to emphasize the music of Strauss and

Mahler as extensions of 19th-century romantic styles.24 If there is a fin de siècle modernism at all for Taruskin, it is only as a “maximalization” of past trends to a point of saturation. In making a distinction between means and ends, he finds the means to be a maximalization of romantic style to ends that are partially modern, defined as an affinity for the future, the metropolis, and extremes. While Taruskin is generally keen to critique the formalist taboo on cultural context and significance, he manages to say little about modernism in this regard.25

The work of Carl Dahlhaus did much to expand the concept of musical modernism and has been fruitfully expanded on. He argues that the concept of late romanticism attached to the fin de siècle is not only a serious misnomer, but a spurious attempt by 20th-century modernists to denigrate certain forms of composition as regressive.26 He argues that the period from about

1890-1910 – the primary era analyzed in this project – should be understood as a time of open ended modernism, in which post-romantic experimentation had not yet solidified into distinct programs. Dahlhaus argues for specific formal divergences in the music of this period, while also acknowledging in the music an ambiguous spirit of break-away from the past. Dahlhaus’s

23 Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (London: Duckworth, 1974); Morgan, Taruskin. 24 Specifically Taruskin shows how Mahler modulates with 2nds rather than 5ths, which had been previously done by Schubert, Wagner, and Bruckner, though not as frequently. Taruskin, Oxford History: Volume 5, 16 25 Taruskin vaguely links Strauss to thinly-defined decadence and places Schoenberg’s music within the context of art as inner transcendence. 26 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 334.

16

chronology and terminology has been echoed by recent works on German musical modernism by

Walter Frisch and Karen Painter.27 This dissertation largely confirms Dahlhaus’s sweeping perspective, but highlights the musical schisms and rapid changes in the years around 1900. In an attempt to avoid “imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age,” Dahlhaus refers to that period as one of “open ended modernism.” Nevertheless, he and his followers still treat it as a singular age of exploratory and multifarious early modernisms.28 Much of Strauss’s and Mahler’s music in this era did function as modernist, but it was against a backdrop of plentiful persistent romanticism. Both Dahlhaus and Frisch tend to speak of the post-Wagnerians together in one breath, without distinguishing the varied proximity of each to Wagner. As with the formalist scholars, the failure to recognize the sharp departures of the secessionists from Wagner and the

New Germans has muddled understanding of this period.

In carving out this period of open-ended modernism from about 1889-1907, Dahlhaus sought to give the era its own due, treating it neither as transitional, nor as a prologue, nor as an epilogue to something else. However, by homogenizing two decades under epochal singularity, the Dahlhaus school of thought frequently ignores the rapid changes in German musical culture during that time. That the secessionist school came and went within a decade has hardly been acknowledged. Additionally, the influence of this period on what came after has been understated. Dahlhaus and others rightly recognize a major shift in musical culture in the years after 1907, but have mistakenly linked it to the fallout from Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance. Rather, those years saw conservative shifts in the biopolitics both in and outside the musical world that aimed to improve music by actively removing dangers such as the secessionists, rather than rehabilitating them. If anything Schoenberg’s formal innovations should be read as an initially private reaction to a surge of cultural repression. The 1907

27 Frisch; Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 28 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 334.

17

threshold should be understood as primarily a shift in cultural policy and discourse, not a revolutionary compositional shift. Regardless of when one dates the origins of musical modernism – with Don Juan in 1889 or Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in 1907 or something else – its very definition remains vague and problematic, especially when expanded beyond the litmus test of atonality. By reformulating the whole definition of modernism according to musical discourse – especially its bio-medical rhetoric – my project avoids making borders out of specific formal developments. Rather music slowly became modernist as it is made by critics to function as a lawless, deviant mediation of urban modernity. Against the compositional mile markers of Adorno, the formalists, and Dahlhaus, my dissertations showcases the agency of politics and cultural authorities in creating modernism.

Less well known than Dahlhaus’s re-periodizations of romanticism and modernism were his Adorno-like attempts to exceed formalist prohibitions and read socio-cultural significance in music. Like Adorno he hears expressions of vitalist philosophy in Strauss and Mahler.29 No doubt the cultural connections between and even “convergence” of early modernism and other artistic and intellectual developments were plentiful. Frisch’s German Modernism: Music and the

Arts masterfully articulates these cultural connections, which form the basis of his analysis of the broader significance of early modernism. For Frisch these are musical invocations of naturalism, symbolism, historicism, and inter-textual parody, equally present in German literature and painting. However, neither Dahlhaus nor Frisch can get a handle on the relationship between musical modernism and the dominant political developments of the Central Europe around 1900, which Dahlhaus identifies as imperialism and mass democracy. He calls them “extremely

29 Theodor Adorno, “Richard Strauss at Sixty,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 407; Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 133; Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 331.

18

obscure,” particularly any parallel with growth of the labor movement, and does not see politics at this time as having much influence on a relatively isolated musical culture.30

It is at this crucial juncture that the biopolitical paradigm forges the missing link.

Imperialism, democratic politics, and musical modernism were all marked and motivated by a new pursuit of biological well-being and the hierarchical delineation of life forms. While modernism can still hardly be said to have sympathized with the growing socialist movement, both had a vested interest in empowering and validating previously excluded forms, one musical, one human. In either sphere the exclusion of illegitimate music or illegitimate life operated according to the same biopolitical logic that defined legitimacy through sound, tamed bodies.

The links between mass politics and modernism are most obvious, finally, when one considers that they were subject to the same forces of discipline, health management, and quarantine. The political significance of musical modernism lies then in being caught up in the biopolitical struggles of mass politics.

Probably the most influential voice in recent interpretations of the social significance of modernism, musical or otherwise, has not come from historically-oriented musicologists, but from a historian, Carl Schorske.31 In Fin de Siècle Vienna: Culture and Politics, Schorske articulates a compelling narrative for the political significance of Viennese modernism, as well as its origins in those politics. Although not solely about music, Schorske’s interpretation has been echoed by scholars of mostly Viennese musical modernism, such as Leon Botstein, Nicholas

Cook, Sandra McColl, Margaret Notley and David Brodbeck.32 According to the Schorskean

30 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 330. 31 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980); Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 32 Leon Botstein, “Music and its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914,” Harvard University Dissertation, 1985. However, his most recent and sustained treatments of the political contexts of modernism have been his chapters in the Bard Music Festival Book Series. Those include: “Schoenberg and the Audience: Modernism, Music, and Politics in the Twentieth Century,” in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 19-54; and “Whose ? Reception, Interpretation, and History,” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Cook; Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in

19

narrative, modernism originated as a retreat into self from a political sphere fraught with anti-

Semitism. While Schorske’s work itself emphasizes the apolitical of modernism, his emulators, most notably Botstein, suggest that the modernism of Mahler and Schoenberg functioned as a liberal resistance to racist Viennese politics.33 While the turbulent mass politics of the fin de siècle no doubt left their mark on musical development, my project demonstrates that anti-Semitism hardly played a role in the development of musical modernism.

Perhaps because of the compelling research of Schorske and Botstein the Viennese component of German musical culture circa 1900 has received the bulk of scholarly attention. As assimilated Jews, Mahler and Schoenberg have been heard to write music with a politically liberal sensibility. While this may be partially true for Schoenberg, the view of Mahler’s as voicing liberalism – repeatedly argued by Botstein – was not at all how they were received or functioned prior to Mahler’s death in 1911. In fact Mahler’s music was heard to be decided anti-liberal. Additionally, while historians have viewed Strauss in an unpoliticized light as the cynical opportunist, no music of the era was considered more politically charged. His and repeatedly instigated political debates and were often considered apologies for anarchism.

Like Schorske, I want to emphasize the relevance of political developments to aesthetic modernism. However, my project demonstrates that the Schorskean paradigm of liberalism vs. nationalist racism/anti-Semitism does not reflect the musical culture of fin de siècle modernism.

With noted exceptions the secessionist compositions were not considered sympathetic to liberalism and it is only around 1910 that anti-Semitism surfaced in aesthetic debates about

Vienna, 1896-1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Brodbeck, “Dvořák’s Reception in Liberal Vienna: Language Ordinances, National Property, and the Rhetoric of Deutschtum,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, no. 1 (2007): 71-131. 33 Botstein’s interpretation of Mahler’s politics has been further echoed by Karen Painter and Carl Niekerk. See Painter, Symphonic Aspirations; and Carl Niekerk, Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010).

20

modernism. Rather, it is the politics of public health that provided a social context for the opportunities and dangers of musical modernism. Such attempts at biological regulation of populations had their foot in musical culture, kicking open the possibility of a modernist music.

In fact the tension between liberals and nationalists, frequently mentioned by cultural historians, was hardly present as both groups were united in their opposition to modernism as a public threat.

By ignoring cohabitation between liberalism and nationalist racism, historians of musical culture have run into interpretive quagmires trying to make sense of liberal critics like Robert Hirschfeld,

Max Kalbeck, and Heinrich Schenker, whose rejections of modernism shared elements of racism.34 By importing Schorske’s political narrative wholesale, historical specificities have appeared strange scholars of musical culture, specifically why liberal formalists would harshly criticize the supposedly liberal Mahler and why nationalist Wagnerians would turn against

Strauss, assumed to be imitating Wagner.

Perhaps more than either Dahlhaus or Schorske, the historian William McGrath directly interrogates the simultaneity of rising mass politics and modernism in Central Europe.35 In the case of Vienna, he is able to forge a link between “Dionysian art” and “populist politics” by identifying the common clubs and milieu from which the leaders of each emerged. However, despite their common biographical origins, McGrath concludes, like Schorske, that the two developments represented opposed aims: an aesthetic retreat to the self vs. a political betterment of society. In the case of musical culture, my dissertation problematizes the anti-social characterization of musical modernism, showing it to be a development befitting the later

Schoenberg School, but not the early musical secessionists. While the zones of Dionysian music

34 While Schorske’s analysis of Viennese politics has been challenged by political historians, cultural historians and especially historical musicologists continue to invoke it. The exclusionary practices of Viennese liberalism has been productively analyzed by Pieter Judson in Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996). 35 William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

21

and populist politics should not be collapsed, the thematic of biopolitics offers a means of conceptualizing the shared dynamics of these developments. After all the Dionysian refers to a frenzied, even dangerous conception of communal life and death, while populist implies the whole population, an essentially biological concept. It was precisely such shared attempts to conceptualize and regulate the vitality of populations that brought music and politics into such close proximity.

Chapter Breakdown

Chapter one, “Aesthetics and Biopolitics in the War of the Romantics,” establishes the dynamics of German musical culture in the late 19th Century. By looking at the writings of Franz

Brendel and Eduard Hanslick, I outline the development of the two major late romantic camps, the and the formalists. Both critics pioneered new institutions and aesthetics for German music, Brendel based on Hegelian nationalism and Hanslick based on neo-

Kantian liberalism. Brendel founded the New German School as an interest group to promote new music that expressed definite ideas. He introduced a metaphorical biopolitics through aesthetic laws aimed to maximize the national population of music. Brendel also built a network of critics who served as disseminators of ideas and formed a centralized body of cultural surveillance. Hanslick localized such surveillance by making the daily newspaper the site of concert and musical analysis. In terms of biopolitics, Hanslick’s major innovation was to introduce a bio-medical perspective to musical aesthetics. Hanslickian formalism established different laws than the New Germans for judging musical beauty and aimed to promote music devoid of non-musical ideas. He judged music according to a rubric of normality (vs. quality) and noted in his reviews the health of a composition. He made the biopolitics of musical culture both more explicit and even literal by considering the health effect of concerts on the audience.

The aesthetics of both camps introduced biomorphic splits between the body and legitimating spirit of a composition. According to this discourse the alignment of body and spirit meant that a composition was metaphorically bios, qualified life, while works in which the body was out of

22

control were zoe, bare and unprotected life. It is this War of the Romantics that introduced biopolitics to music and provided the immediate and necessary context for the emergence of musical modernism.

Chapter two, “Musical Lawlessness: Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony,” analyzes the discourse around two breakthrough compositions. In their own ways Strauss’s Don

Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony violated the competing musical codes of late romanticism.

They were deemed aberrant compositions – unmusical and dangerous – by both the New

Germans and the formalists. Indeed I argue that the eight most frequent infractions of these two compositions could be read in sum as an emancipation of musical elements, expanding on

Dahlhaus’s own argument about their emancipation of color. Both Strauss’s Don Juan and

Mahler’s First Symphony drew attention to the sonic building blocks of orchestral music and freed their music from the constraints of the romantic-idealist necessity to transcend the raw materiality of music through fidelity to (rational) ideas and musical concepts. Borrowing from the lexicon of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that this emancipation molecularized music, breaking down the “molar” constructs of late romanticism and enabling future composition to become new constellations. These works were not only critiqued by both camps of idealism, but themselves critiqued the idealist tendency to split music between its superficial means and spiritual ends.

While there are formal musical divergences in the music of Strauss and Mahler, it was above all the insistence by critics that the music was lawless that make it function as extra-legal and abnormal. This nascent musical modernism first emerged as the unexpected byproduct of the heightened aesthetic regulation. Within the context of a musical culture which aimed to dissect and categorize compositions, these works of Strauss and Mahler were made by the biopolitical discourse into something new, a dangerous aesthetic species that was increasingly called modernist over the course of the 1890s.

Chapter three, “Discipline and Flesh: Ambiguous Modernism in the 1890s,” explores two competing vectors in musical culture. After the audacious works discussed in chapter two, the

23

music of Strauss and Mahler was pulled in two directions, simultaneously closer to romantic norms and further away from them. I demonstrate the formative powers of discipline in musical culture, including the partially successful attempts to modify compositions and their perception.

At moments during the 1890s the music of Strauss and Mahler was made more docile and normative. However, more often the multiplication of musical criticism and its monitoring prerogative served to reinforce the perceived unmusicality of works like ,

Don Quixote, and Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies. More so than their previous compositions, these were considered dangerous to the state of music and to the health of audiences. Both the metaphorical and literal biopolitics of German musical culture expanded with the growth its critical apparatus. While critical discourse tended to deprecate such bare superficial sound as illegitimate – the musical equivalent of zoe – I read the discourse against its own intent to suggest that such symphonic corporeality did not capitulate to an animal/rational dichotomy – or even privilege the animal – but gave voice to a singular stratum of musical flesh.

In the thematic of open ended and universal flesh, as articulated by Roberto Esposito, I expand on the emancipatory and even communal affirmations of early musical modernism. Finally, this chapter concludes by showing how Strauss and Mahler began to be perceived as leaders of a new secessionist movement, a development which broke down the War of the Romantics by pitting both New Germans and formalists against the secession.

Chapter four, “The Nietzschean Biopolitics of the Musical Secession,” examines in depth

Strauss’s opera Feuersnot and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, both premiered in November, 1901.

With these two works the composers became intertwined as leaders of a distinct musical movement, most aptly designated the musical secession. Feuersnot was Strauss’s manifesto on modernity and aesthetic modernism. He uses this opera to articulate his break from 19th-century musical tradition and embrace of the Nietzscheanism and vulgarity of modern cities. With various layers of allegory, Strauss’s opera articulates a vision of history – musical and societal – in which modernity is defined by new powers of biological production. I read the opera along

24

side Roberto Esposito’s work on the immunizing function of the social contract, as well as the way biopower and especially musical modernism disrupted this function. Similarly, Mahler’s

Fourth Symphony affirms the power of life to reverse the exclusionary processes of social immunization, particularly through its parallels with the novel in its carnivalesque and grotesque forms. In terms of the parallels between Mahler’s music and the function of novels, I draw upon

Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on form to modify the novelesque interpretations of Mahler by Adorno and Botstein. Musically, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony affirms the power of bodily needs to unite people. In their lyrical component both compositions feature a Dionysian festival of children that reinforce the music’s jubilation and enactment of emancipated flesh.

Chapter five, “The Musical Secession as a Mediation of Modernity,” looks at the growth and apogee of the musical secession from 1901 to 1905. During these years, new German art music had more performance opportunities than any time before or since, not least because

Strauss was the president of the Allgemeine deutsche Musikverein. The secession and its many minor modernists were strongly tied to Nietzschean vitalism by their program choices and by critical discourse. Building off discussions of Nietzsche, health terminology became common currency in musical criticism of this era, not just to pathologize compositions, but also to praise them. A second major theme in the musical discourse of this era was the rapid increase in cultural criticism, including the insistence that musical forms reflected contemporary social developments. Specifically, Mahler’s Third Symphony was heard to collapse traditional bifurcations between biology and culture, while Sinfonia Domestica was criticized for mediating a social obsession with technology and urban stimulation. Whereas earlier works by Strauss and

Mahler had ushered in concerns about the state of music, with the growth of the secession and changes in discourse in the early 20th Century, musical modernism raised concerns about the health of society at large. Vitalism, neurasthenia, urban stimulation, and technophilia seemed to critics and cultural theorists to threaten the biological stability of society. In sum these

25

developments were seen as part of the move toward mass democracy, linking the aesthetic threat of the secession with the political threat of democracy.

Chapter six, “Musical Degeneration and Regeneration: The Biopolitics of New

Conservatism,” looks at the development of a virulent reaction to the musical secession and the subsequent transformation of German musical modernism. Following the most radical of secessionist premieres, most notably Strauss’s Salome, Musical culture was in crisis about its health and future. Heated debate was initiated in by Felix Draeseke, who called for an end to the toleration of the secessionists. The aesthetic strategy of Draeseke as his sympathizers represented a new form of musical conservatism that attempted to actively stop performances of new, dangerous music and revive compositional principles from previous centuries. Like new forms of political conservatism in the early 20th Century, new musical conservatism railed against the permissiveness and consequent degeneration of a liberal (musical) culture. By contrast a return to the classics would offer “healing” to the “condition” of society. This post-Salome wave of conservatism corresponded to new models of public health based on contagionism and signaled a palpably negative shift in biopolitics. The improvement of populations – musical and human – was to be accomplished by a removal and quarantine of threats. While the pressures of new conservatism by no means eradicated musical modernism, it significantly altered new music.

Following Max Reger’s defense of modernism against Draeseke, new music became more futurist, expressionist, and neo-classical, three mutually inexclusive trends. In the new works by

Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg between 1909 and 1912 one can hear previously absent urges for avant-gardism, subjectivity, and traditional forms. While certainly modernist, these works no longer intoned the fleshiness of the musical secession and its Nietzschean politics. If these works

– particularly Schoenberg’s atonality – signal the beginning of high musical modernism, they should be understood as a reaction to the biopolitics of new conservatism.

26

CHAPTER ONE Aesthetics and Biopolitics in the War of the Romantics

It is therefore not the task to argue from the standpoint of pure form about the admissibility or inadmissibility of progressive innovation, or to polemicize against the new from a completely old standpoint, but to understand the new form from the content and from the perspective of historical conditions, such as is the case with Liszt's works. For this reason it cannot still be immediately said that every singularity is just as subjective and classically random as all others. One must distinguish between that which follows from the new ideal by necessity – and cannot be separated from it – and that which the artistic subject achieves only through chance.36 – Franz Brendel

The main prerequisite is that music be based on its own laws and remain specifically musical, thus making, even without program, a clear, independent impression. The main objection to be raised against Liszt is that he imposes a much bigger – and abusive – mission on the subject of his symphonies: namely, either to fill the gap left by the absence of musical content or to justify the atrociousness of such content as there is.37 – Eduard Hanslick

During the 19th Century the city of was the publishing center of Germany’s music industry and also home to one of its most revered concert halls, the Gewandhaus. Bearing the inscription “True joy is a serious matter,” the hall stood for the tradition of German art music as a source of contemplation and personal elevation. At the famed Gewandhaus conducted his compositions Les préludes and Mazeppa on February 26, 1857. As two of the first

“” these works challenged the autonomy and traditions of instrumental music by publishing a literary program alongside the music. Not only did the abandon the four-movement symphonic standard, but made listening a process of translating sound into story. For decades German musical culture lay divided over whether such was an extension of or regression from the serious mission of the Gewandhaus.

In the above quotes, one can see two very different reactions to Liszt’s concert. In the first Franz Brendel defends Liszt’s symphonic poems as historical progress, while in the second

Eduard Hanslick lambasts such program music as unmusical. This disagreement about the legitimacy of program music forms the crux of the so-called War of the Romantics. Brendel

36 Franz Brendel, “Franz Liszt in Leipzig,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 46, no. 10 (March 6, 1857): 102. 37 Eduard Hanslick, Hanslick's Music Criticisms, trans. and ed. by Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover Publications, 1988): 54.

27

asserts that “historical preconditions” and “necessity” have given rise to Liszt’s new forms and aesthetic ideals. In other words the historical need for greater expressivity led Liszt to use music to express extra-musical content, through the aid of written words. By contrast Hanslick accuses

Liszt’s symphonic poems of possessing “atrocious,” if any, musical “content.” Liszt’s grandiose

“mission,” which Brendel continually defends according to the parameters of historical progress, remains for Hanslick “abusive” to music and its independence. For Hanslick, musical programs deface the musicality of music, making it something else.

Yet, for all their well-documented differences, Brendel and Hanslick share a commitment to objective analysis and aesthetic regulations. Both critics agree that good music is rooted in decisive “content” – rather than superficial flourishes – though each define content differently.

Moreover, Brendel and Hanslick both emphasize the necessity of principles for composing proper musical forms. In these quotes, Hanslick speaks of “musical laws,” while Brendel urges that musical expression should avoid a purely subjective and random basis.

Just three years before Liszt’s Leipzig concert both Brendel and Hanslick published their main aesthetic treatises in which they articulate the principles of their two musical camps. Those two publications were Brendel’s History of Music in , Germany, and France and Hanslick’s

On the Musically Beautiful. Like their reviews of Liszt, the titles of their opuses highlight core differences: history vs. beauty. Building their systems of musical aesthetics on differing foundations of German philosophy, Brendel’s and Hanslick’s books established the principles for the two sides in the War of the Romantics: New Germans and formalists. Brendel’s aesthetics formed the basis for his network of critics and composers that he later titled the New German

School. Hanslick’s book laid a foundation for a formalism based on pure musical relationships, a view that disregards extra-musical associations, whether insinuated by the composer or the listener.38 As the quote above suggests, Hanslick and the formalists were especially alarmed by

38 Throughout his career Hanslick alternately expanded and retracted some of the most positivistic analysis from “On the Musically Beautiful” and his aesthetics more generally. While Kevin Karnes argues that

28

the program music of the New German School, which they found to be, not merely bad, but a threat to the very condition of music. Liszt’s symphonic poems were “abusive” to music, a danger that needed to be neutralized in the interest of music’s well-being. By contrast, Brendel and the New Germans found to be expressively arbitrary and dismissive of music’s inner evolution. These entrenched positions gave birth to an aesthetic war in the late 19th

Century between competing critics and composers over the condition and future of music, each trying to regulate and improve musical culture in the interest of culture at large.

The two sides in the War of the Romantics faced off on numerous fronts. If the New

German School championed compositions with extra-musical programs, the formalists supported purely instrumental music. In both their formal acknowledgements and philosophical undertones,

Brendel was influenced by Hegel and Hanslick by Kant. The New Germans considered music legitimate when it expressed literary ideas and kept pace with historical dialectics, while the

Hanslickian formalists emphasized the eternal norms of beauty and legitimated music according to its development of musical concepts. These aesthetic battle lines were also separated by political and institutional networks. If Brendel and the New Germans used their aesthetic politics to promote German nationalism, Hanslick and the formalists reinforced liberal institutions and ideas. Such elective affinities between New German critics and nationalism, on the one side, and formalist critics and liberalism, on the other, were only reinforced by the organs that published their writings. Nationalist newspapers carried correspondence from New German critics, while liberal newspapers employed formalist critics, such as Hanslick writing for the Neue Freie

Presse.

Hanslick’s most positivistic statements were youthful, insincere attempts to get a post at the University of Vienna, concert reviews throughout his career retain a commitment to musical law and its authority, though perhaps not to the project of developing a distinct science of music. See Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

29

Yet, for all their differences, the similarities and shared aspirations of the New Germans and formalists are just as striking. Both positioned themselves as supplanting the romantic aesthetics of the early 19th Century through new objective analysis and principles. Both grew out of ’s 1830’s call for rigorous and vigilant musical criticism designed to improve the general state of music. Both moved away from networks of alike connoisseurs toward musical knowledge as consumed by masses from experts. Both created methods by which to legitimate a composition according to the logic of lawful necessity. Perhaps most importantly, both sides remained invested in the basic presuppositions of German idealism, namely the split between surface and depth. For both New Germans and formalists a composition could be divided between its ideal and elemental components, its transcendent core and the phenomenal expression of that inner spirit. As I will argue, the methods of analysis and the philosophical dualism amounted to an objectification of musical expression by both sides.

With differing specializations of power, both camps in the War of the Romantics effectively biopoliticized musical culture. The aesthetics and institutional innovations of the New

German School employed multiple facets of discipline (expertise, observation, and perpetual examination) and placed musical regulation within the paradigm of population management.

However, the biopolitics of Brendel and company were only metaphorical, in that, the methods they used to define and regulate the state of music paralleled Hegelian regulations of living species. With Hanslick and the formalists the biopolitics of musical culture became much more explicit and literal. Hanslick added bio-medical concepts to aesthetics, including a concern for the literal health of audiences. Formalists also distinctly judged compositions according to a measure of the norm, which created new categories and dangers of deviant music. The aesthetic battles of the late 19th Century attempted to regulate and redefine musical culture through competing versions of scientific expertise and aesthetic law. The War of the Romantics was aesthetic politics by other means. Unlike previous eras, the late 19th Century called into question

30

the very concept of music, while simultaneously invoking innovative pressures to improve compositional output.

This chapter begins with a short overview of German musical culture in the early 19th

Century. It is important to establish the traditions of that culture, including its investment in philosophical idealism, as many of those assumptions governed German musical life into modernist era. Additionally, one can only understand the innovations of Brendel and Hanslick by comparing them with traditions they modified. Next, I examine Brendel’s aesthetics and institutional founding of the New German School. The second half of this chapter is dedicated to the aesthetics, network innovations, and spreading influence of Hanslick. In each section from romanticism, to New Germans, to formalists I demonstrate the gradual biopoliticization of

German musical culture. My research confirms the conclusions of previous scholars about the general political gulf that separated the aspirations of the New Germans and formalists.39 Just as the New German endeavors were intertwined with projects of German nationalism, the formalists attempted to cultivate liberal ideas using music. However, not only does my chapter flesh out the linkages between the aesthetic and political spheres, but also the similarities across aesthetic party lines. A biopolitical tenor cuts across both positions. By considering the biopolitics of the War of the Romantics, I clarify the history of musical culture’s gradual politicization, as well as the role of biological regulation in nationalism, liberalism, and musical culture.

German Musical Culture in the Early 19th Century: Idealism and Romanticism

In the last three decades, following new historicism in the humanities and the cultural turn in history, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to musical criticism and musical culture. The impetus for musicologists has been the exploration of musical significance beyond both the borders of a score and the biography of a composer. For historians the cultural turn

39 On the War of the Romantics as a cipher for liberalism vs. nationalism, see Manfred Wagner, Geschichte der österreichischen Musikkritik in Beispielen (Tutzing: Schneider, 1979); Brodbeck; McColl; Cook; Notley.

31

offered license to research music history using their own methods, to date, largely quantitative and causal ones. For both it has been a matter of contextualizing in various ways our understanding of the canonic figures of music history. This has been done through studies on reception, listening, concert behavior, amateur music making, instrument production, and, above all, musical criticism. Research on musical discourse – the various writings about music in a given era – has become a major resource for understanding the conceptual and human networks that gave and continue to give meaning to music. In this chapter I look at the discourses of the

War of the Romantics, as both a reaction to the aesthetics of early romanticism and a necessary precondition for the emergence of modernism.

In the scholarly endeavor of contextualization, “musical discourse” in the early 19th

Century has received significant attention, particularly from David Gramit and Mark Evan

Bonds.40 Gramit suggests that “talk about music invokes and constructs social categories,” not to mention musical categories, and argues that all the new 19th-century phenomena of musical listening depended on a change in discourse that validated music’s expression of higher, indefinite feelings, often associated with the voice of the composer.41 As these scholars demonstrate, the new discourse was one of musical idealism, referring to both the influence of

German idealist philosophy and the sense of art music as an agent of Bildung, that is, the educational cultivation of personal subjectivity as a necessary component of public and bourgeois life in German Europe. The discourse of musical idealism separated “popular” and “art” music, making concerts of the latter a serious endeavor of solemnity and sublimity.

In assessing the foundation of this new musical discourse, Mark Evan Bonds in particular points to the application of the German philosophical tradition of idealism to music between 1790

40 David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 41 Gramit, 3. These phenomena included rapt, silent listening and the privileging of instrumental music and complete compositions.

32

and 1810. German idealism can be characterized by a mission to overcome the limitations that prevent the thing in itself from being perceived, as well as the reconciliation of subject and object, self and world. Both of these endeavors are animated by the aspiration to transcend one’s immediate material sensations. Bonds argues that German philosophers, particularly Ludwig

Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, began to focus on music as an avenue to transcendence and absolute truth. Music’s indefinite representational qualities – the reason it was considered an inferior artistic medium in the 18th Century – became in the 19th Century its greatest asset. German idealists suggested that music did not vaguely represent (or re-present) images like birds or feelings like anger, but rather musical communication exceeded the limited capacities of language. Symphonic composing and listening in particular became a kind of philosophizing about the sublime and vehicle for the individual to be subsumed (aufgehoben).

Bonds considers E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in

1810 evidence that philosophical idealism had become firmly entrenched in musical discourse. In

Hoffmann’s review one can clearly see the convergence of idealist philosophy and aesthetic romanticism. Hoffman considers instrumental music “the most romantic of all arts,” for its range and depth of expression, particularly the enactment of “that infinite longing that is the essence of romanticism.”42 Yet, Hoffmann is careful to distance the expressive power of instrumental music from both “plastic depiction” and the “outer sensual world.”43 Beethoven’s music rather expresses and transports the listener to a different “realm,” designated by Hoffmann as infinite, unknown, gigantic, unfathomable, unspeakable, and sublime. This transcendental sphere accessed by instrumental music cannot be named with words, yet Hoffmann’s criticism directs readers on how to listen for it. Evoking the rough contours of idealist philosophy, Hoffmann bears romantic

42 E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 238. 43 Hoffmann, 236.

33

instrumental music (including Haydn and Mozart to a degree) as forging a path beyond the material realm into otherwise inaccessible inner essences, not unlike the thing-in-itself.

Hoffmann’s review appeared on the pages of Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (hereafter

AMZ), which highlights the role of new music journals in cultivating the new idealist musical discourse. The Leipzig-based AMZ, founded in 1798 by Friedrich Rochlitz, was the first periodical to offer a steady supply of serious musical journalism to connoisseurs, and by the late

1820s, Vienna, , , and had their local correlates. Recent scholarship particularly emphasizes the work of these journals in staking claim to serious art music for

Germanness and the German bourgeoisie, both its aspirations for Bildung and nation building.44

A. B. Marx, who edited the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung from 1825-30, crucially championed Beethoven, not just as the music of German nationalism, but as the proper music of the bourgeoisie.45 Marx juxtaposed the aristocratic, entertaining operas of Rossini with the intellectually deep symphonies of Beethoven.46 Marx solidified the dichotomy between the

“spiritual” aptitude of the Beethoven symphonic traditional and the “sensuous” ignobility of vain and virtuosic styles.47 Although initially framed by Marx in the context of morality rather than health, here was born the links between the philosophical symphony, harmonically driven music, the sophisticated enculturation of the bourgeoisie, and the process of nation building. This

44 See Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Sanna Pederson, “Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800-1850,” University of Pennsylvania Dissertation, 1995. 45 See Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method, ed., and trans., Scott Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Marx’s Hegelianism also marks a subtle turn against the subject orientation of romantic aesthetics toward a notion of music expressing concrete thoughts and actions rather than the indefinite feelings of Hoffmann. 46 Prior to this Beethoven’s core audience had been connoisseur aristocrats, while Rossini (even in Vienna and Berlin) had been more popular with bourgeois audiences. See Tia Denora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Sanna Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity,” in 19th-Century Music 18 (1994): 871-907. 47 See A. B. Marx, “The Old School of Music in Conflict with our Times,” in Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method, ed., and trans., Scott Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18.

34

constellation remained unabated in German culture into the 20th Century and informs much of the rejection of modernism for its return to sensuousness and banality.

The 1830s mark a significant moment of rupture in German musical culture and genesis of a subtle biopolitical imperative. It was a highly self-reflective moment for an aesthetic culture that deemed itself – not for the last time – in a state of serious decline following the deaths and slump in the popularity of Beethoven and Schubert. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed an expansion of musical writing for a connoisseur audience, that is, esteemed figures in musical culture addressing each other. It was an era of famous critic-composers including Berlioz,

Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt. Looking back at this period from the 1850s and the clear party lines of the War of the Romantics, Franz Brendel called it a period of confusion and chaotic debate.48

In 1834 Robert Schumann and his circle founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

(hereafter NZfM), the aims of which best exemplify the 1830s shifts and robust public sphere in musical culture. For Schumann, the AMZ, and criticism generally, was too polite and unreflective, while at the same time unsupportive of newer, serious music looking to build on

Beethoven. Schumann’s well-known crusade represents the first in a long series of conflicts between moderns and traditionalists.49 In addition to consciously promoting contemporary composers, Schumann’s NZfM had as its mission to improve the “state of music.”50 Such a reduction of the whole of musical culture to a singular state signals a regulatory inception that can be usefully compared to biopolitics. Though still wholly metaphorical, such reorientation towards a homogenized whole represents an essentialization of music in a manner similar to the concept of a biological population. Like human individuals, singular compositions were made to speak for the evolving condition of the whole. Such a change in perspective colored the task of

48 Franz Brendel, “Zur Anbahnung einer Verständigung,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 50, no. 24 (1859): 266. 49 That conflict is not however, enough to constitute his music or aesthetic as “modernist.” 50 Leon Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967): 24.

35

criticism. If the concert reviews – though not necessarily the articles – of the AMZ were journalistic reports, the NZfM encouraged analysis and judgment of compositions in the interest of improving the “state of music” as a singular entity.

For all its interests in improving music, the NZfM under Schumann remained far more a clearing house for aesthetic ideas than a pressure group attempting to promote a specific kind of music. This can be seen in Schumann’s own articles which largely take a faux-epistelatory form as a way of staging aesthetic dialogue, rather than making direct propagandistic assertions.51 The

NZfM initially functioned as a musical public sphere – a think tank for musical connoisseurs – rather than pronouncements of a professional critic, assuming authority over a lay audience. The journal actually published far fewer concert reviews than the AMZ and was aimed at an even more specialist audience. Schumann lacked the specific mechanisms of biopolitics present in the

War of the Romantics like natural law, surveillance, medicine, concern for audience health, but had the broad form of regulation through improvement and concern about the whole. The War of the Romantics grew out of Schumann’s urge to improve criticism and the state of music, though divided that inheritance into two distinct camps, the New Germans and the formalists.

Franz Brendel and the New German School

Franz Brendel was arguably the first professional music critic, who’s aesthetic and institutional innovations set in motion the dynamics of 19th-century German musical culture.

After studying philosophy in Berlin and Leipzig, he received his Ph.D. in Freiburg in 1840. He lectured for several years, primarily on musical history and aesthetics, before assuming the

51 This is especially true of his Davidbündler exchanges between a group of fictional young romantics, who, like Schumann and his circle, wished to fight back against Goliath and the aesthetic Philistines. Ultimately, Schumann’s style of criticism extends the style of Hoffmann with its romantic and highly creative assertions about music’s unique, mystical capacities. In a review of ’s Études, Opus 15 in the NZfM, Schumann writes from the first person, “Music is the orphan whose father and mother no one can determine. And it may well be that precisely in this mystery lies the source of its beauty. The publishers of these pages have been charged with favouring the poetical aspects of music to the detriment of the scientific…We confess, however, that for us the highest form of criticism is that which reflects most closely the impression made by the stimulating original itself.” In Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings, trans. and ed. by Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1965), 36.

36

editorship of the NZfM from an ailing Schumann. Like Schumann before him, Brendel bemoaned the state of music and criticism, vowing to improve the former through more rigorous forms of the latter. However, Brendel gradually used the journal to provoke an aesthetic “war” between supporters and detractors of program music: the War of the Romantics.52 While Schuman’s NZfM

– even in the dialogical style of his criticisms – still gave voice to multiple perspectives, Brendel used the journal to argue for the expressive superiority and progressiveness of composers like

Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner whose music aimed to express specific images and ideas through the aid of literary programs and colorful . While debates about the validity of program music had raged for years, Brendel made the debate into a schism.

In the 1850s the schism became a full blown war, with Brendel at the center of each crucial escalation. In the first 1852 volume of the NZfM Brendel came out publically announcing that the journal would henceforth be dedicated to the cause of Wagner and like-minded composers.53 During a speech in 1859 at the first annual musicians congress – which he had organized with Liszt – Brendel minted the label “New German School” to apply to these composers and the critics who vouched for them.54 This meeting led to the foundation of the

Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein (hereafter ADMV), of which Brendel was president until his death in 1868. The organization supported New German School music through scholarships and an annual festival held each summer in a different German city. As a self-proclaimed musical

“party,” Brendel’s New German School championed the triumvirate of Wagner-Liszt-Berlioz and distinguished itself from the party of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and increasingly Brahms, who

52 Although the historiography on Brendel and the war of the romantics is not as developed as earlier and later periods of musical discourse, see See “Chapter 8, Midcentury” in Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); On Brendel and Hegel also see Golan Gur, “Music and ‘Weltanschauung’: Franz Brendel and the Claims of Universal History,” Music and Letters 93, no. 3 (August 2012): 350-373. On The ADMV see Walker, Alan: Franz Liszt, The Years (1848–1861) (Cornell University Press 1989) and Altenburg, Detlef (ed.): Liszt und die Neudeutsche Schule, Weimarer Liszt-Studien, im Auftrag der Franz-Liszt-Gesellschaft e. V. Weimar herausgegeben von Detlef Altenburg, Band 3, Laaber-Verlag, Laaber 2006. 53 Franz Brendel, “Zum neuen Jahr,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 36 (1852): 1-4. 54 Franz Brendel, “Zur Anbahnung einer Verständigung,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 50, no. 24 (1859): 265- 273.

37

along with wrote a manifesto in 1860 condemning the principles and partisanship of Brendel and the NZfM. By this time, the various mid-century aesthetic tensions had largely coalesced into two embattled and embittered camps.

Franz Brendel has been a vastly underappreciated figure in the history of German music.

Taruskin, who acknowledges Brendel’s neglect, rightly points to the critic as the originator of historicism in musical culture.55 Historicism, in short the compositional burden of incessant innovation, is so commonplace in musical thought that it is difficult to recognize the severity of this departure. Like the whole New German School, Brendel’s role in musical culture has lived in the eclipse and shadow of Wagner. Indeed, while the early aesthetic writings of Wagner have received plentiful scholarly attention, many of Wagner’s arguments were mere echoes of

Brendel’s own publications.56 Furthermore, while “Wagnerian” has become widely diffused label for late 19th-century followers of program music, the New German School of Brendel is a more historically accurate designation. Bayreuth-oriented Wagnerism was a radical and limited splinter of the more widespread New Germans, who did not unreservedly praise Wagner. Recent scholarship on Brendel has begun to remedy his neglect, especially emphasizing the Hegelian features of his thought. Similarly, I contextualize Brendel as a Young Hegelian, but also highlight the new power dynamics he embeded into musical culture through his thought and institutional reforms.

Brendel established the aesthetic principles of the New German School, which held together into the early 20th Century. In his opening address to the 1859 ADMV conference, he summarizes those principles as:

…rationalism versus the previous naturalism; self-consciousness versus instinct; the spiritual side versus the sensual; the characteristic versus the beauty of the merely formal. In our age the foremost thing is to cultivate a thinking appreciation of art. This does not altogether exclude the instinctive side; the

55 See “Chapter 8, Midcentury” in Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 56 Wagner’s takes on Beethoven, Meyerbeer, German musical institutions, and music as a factor in national unification all borrow from Brendel.

38

unconscious aspect is the abiding foundation of all artistic production. But a theoretical, aesthetic consciousness should now accompany it, purifying and clarifying it; artistic production should maintain an equilibrium between both sides.57

Under the privileged headings of “rationalism” and “naturalism” a series of dichotomies unfold in

Brendel’s aesthetic. In the above quote the highly biological stratum of “naturalism” refers to the instinctual, unconscious, and sensual, but elsewhere also used to denote styles that are subjective,

Latin, and concerned with psychological experience.58 For Brendel naturalism implies the exuberant, even “Schwärmerei” according to Brendel, styles of composers as diverse as Mozart,

Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer, all considered to be undisciplined in their expressive enthusiasm.59 By contrast, “rationalism” refers to objective, mindful, deep, technical,

Nordic, and law-abiding music. However, not only did the New German School oppose the excesses of romanticism, but increasingly also “the beauty of the merely formal” and the penchant for conventional forms and composers that characterized the formalist school.

Brendel was not looking for rationalism to supplant naturalism, but rather an aesthetic synthesis, forged by the leading role of the rational. For Brendel and the New Germans the key to a synthesis of subjectivity (naturalism) and objectivity (rationalism) was the musical expression of “ideas.” What Brendel calls in the above quote “the characteristic,” he elsewhere designates the “poetic content” or “poetic idea,” which precedes and determines the musical form.60 In the model composition, subjective expression of the idea lawfully materializes in objective form.

57 Quoted in “Franz Brendel’s Reconciliation Address,” trans. James Deaville and Mary A. Cicora, in Thomas S. Grey, ed., and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 324. 58 See Franz Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 22, no. 1-2 (1 January, 1845): 3. His comparison of the criticisms of Rochlitz with the music of Mozart and the writings of Goethe are particularly illuminating. 59 On his descriptions of Schumann’s music as “Schwärmerei” and his criticisms as “arbitrary” see Franz Brendel, “Zur Anbahnung einer Verständigung: Vortrag zur Eröffnung der Tonkünstler-Versammlung,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 50, no. 24 (10 June 1859): 266; Franz Brendel, Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Heinrich Matthes, 1867), 638. 60 Brendel, Geschichte der Musik, 631, 634.

39

Defining musical rationality as expressive specificity leads Brendel to endorse the programmatic music of Wagner and Liszt, which aimed to express literary ideas.

However, even before his discovery of these composers, his same aesthetic called for a revision of musical criticism based on the same synthesis of rationalism and naturalism. Just as had become too subjective, Brendel viewed musical critics like Rochlitz,

Hoffmann, and even Schumann as writing arbitrary musical analysis. In fact, Brendel chastises musical critics as the ones who, in their “subjectivity” and “vacillation,” precipitated the decline of by not offering proper critiques and guidance.61 Consequently, Brendel argues that it will be critics infused with a new objectivity who will be able to resuscitate musical life. While critics or composers may take the lead in a specific era, Brendel always situates art and thought as united in a Zeitgeist, such as when he compares the music of Mozart, the criticism of Rochlitz, and the writings of Goethe as expressing the same basic ideas.62

Historically, one should situate Brendel as a musical Hegelian, even Young Hegelian by comparison with the more classicist taste of A. B. Marx.63 At every turn, Brendel’s thought employs the tools of Hegelian philosophy, no surprise given he studied philosophy in Germany – including Berlin briefly – during the 1840s.64 For Brendel, everything revolves around the

Hegelian “idea,” that guarantor of historical synchronic unity and diachronic progress. Not only does his thought assume a “spirit of the age” uniting art and society, as well as music and criticism, but his aesthetics only speak in the vernacular of historical overview and development,

61 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 4. 62 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 2-3. 63 Other scholars call Brendel a Young Hegelian because of his nationalism and using Hegel against himself. See Taruskin, Oxford History, vol. 3, 417. John Williamson calls Brendel a Young Hegelian for viewing the growth of criticism as progress. See his “Progress, Modernity and the Concept of an Avant- Garde,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music , ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2001), 300. On A. B. Marx see Scott Burnham. "Aesthetics, Theory, and History in the Works of ." Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1988. 64 On Hegel and the Young Hegelians see John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

40

always dialectical.65 Roughly speaking, the objective “Old German School” of Bach and Händel necessarily begot the subjective antithesis of Classicism/Romanticism (largely undifferentiated for Brendel), which demanded to be raised up to a new synthesis: The New German School.

Moreover, Brendel conceives of musical-historical progress as a grand narrative of the concretization of abstraction, a move from unconsciousness to consciousness. With materialization and consciousness defined as decisive expression of what previously lay beneath articulation, the New German School placed a premium on expressive means and the evolution of form, making them the party of the most experimental music. The historicist burden of progress demanded that new compositions and forms gave voice to specific intellectual concepts and not merely remained ephemeral experiences or technical abstractions. Music was the serious

Hegelian project of making ideas conscious and raising general consciousness.

In Wagner and Liszt, Brendel found composers whose works and writings fulfilled his aesthetic principles. It would be unfair to say that either Brendel converted to the composers or that they converted to his cause, but rather they formed mutually beneficial relationships.

According to Brendel’s own account, Wagner, particularly the Weimar performances of his operas

Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, gave the circle the courage to stand behind its own principles, while the circle provided Wagner with a ready-made group of apologists and an outlet for his own publications.66 Whereas Wagner provided an improvement of “opera,” Berlioz and especially

Liszt offered Brendel a model for the development of instrumental music, primarily through the genre of the symphonic poem.67

65 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 1: “Criticism is always, at least in the first stages of its development, the reflex of the art; with the art she is forced to emerge and therefore goes through the same stages and Standpoints. 66 On the influence of Wagner and Tannhäuser specifically on Brendel, see Franz Brendel, “Zum neuen Jahr,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 36, no. 1 (1 January 1852): 2; Brendel, Geschichte der Musik, 623-24. 67 While supportive of Wagner’s urge toward drama within music, most New Germans never adopted his wholesale abandonment of the genre of opera.

41

In later editions of Brendel’s opus, “The History of Music in Italy, Germany and France,” first published in 1854, he provides a thorough defense of Liszt’s symphonic poems:

Liszt was so happy to find a new form and to offer a solution; he had the boldness to really draw out the implications from preceding developments, i.e. to grant the poetic content an equal share in the shaping of the piece of music, but on the other side to simultaneously maintain its inalienable right through the logical coherence of the thematic work of the instrumental music. So there can be no doubt for that which follows about the legitimacy of this innovation.68

If in the previous stage, particularly however with Beethoven, conscious thought itself… is the foundation of the whole creation. This conscious side has therefore presently a fundamental importance. In Liszt’s works we see every earlier process concluded, the pinnacle of thought, towards which all push, is grasped with certainty, and thus the predominance of the idea is raised up [erhoben] to the main principle. An unbroken stream of development toward the conscious side goes forward from Beethoven through to the modern era, so that the present even gives rise to these peaks. As equal, co-productive power, thought follows from the musical art of the soul. It is the development from the soul to the mind [Geist], from a music of the soul to an art of the mind.69

Brendel considers Beethoven the first, and until Wagner and Liszt, only “New German” composer in reconciling subjective expression and objective unity through the “poetic concept.” In the latter quote, one can see how the “poetic idea” grounds music in mindful consciousness, versus music of pure subjectivity, that is, the soul. The first quote shows how expression of a non-musical idea provides objectivity, in terms of having an external measurement for musical expression, but as the first quote makes clear, musical legitimacy is nonetheless determined by logical coherence.

Whatever the formalists’ critique of New German music, the party saw its music as determined by rigorous logic and musical law. Musical forms must adhere to their poetic concept and not exceed the bounds of necessity. As with all Brendel’s writings, his Hegelianism bleeds through in his vision of history as a grand narrative of the materialization of the idea. With Liszt, poetic content is raised up – Hegel’s key dialectical term – from peripheral consideration to the basis of music. Moreover this is about music as a vehicle for consciousness of the world and its ideas.

For Brendel, Liszt is a hero, an unresisting conduit for historical change.

68 Brendel, Geschichte der Musik, 631-32. 69 Brendel, Geschichte der Musik, 634.

42

Another Hegelian element of Brendel’s aesthetic is the emphasis on law as a force for emancipation. In constant contrast to the “random” aesthetic judgments of his forbearer

Schumann, Brendel posits “firmer principles of universal development rules,” based on

“objective scientific knowledge.”70 Beginning from the precept that music must be timely, he concludes that the time had come for the sensual expression of music to reveal concrete ideas.

Consequently, a composition’s ability to coherently express ideas (even subjective ideas) provided music critics with an objective rubric by which to measure musical success. In view of the guiding idea(s), what Brendel calls the “first principle,” expression must proceed with unity and by necessity. Such an aesthetic point of reference seems to be the basis for Brendel’s and the

New German School’s confidence in asserting its position. If a work is law abiding, it is useful, progressive, and intellectual, rather than ephemeral. Indeed the lawful expression of concrete ideas marks a faculty of self-consciousness in the music, which Brendel attributes to Liszt above.

For Brendel “unconscious” music remains musical, but immature and bound to its subjective, naturalistic means of expression. By bringing philosophical principles into musical aesthetics,

Brendel has a measure of lawfulness by which to measure musical compositions and the state of music. Such an invocation of natural law marks an intensification of biopolitics in music, in that new forms of scientific authority were brought to bear on the regulation of musical form. While the forthright use of biological metaphor is subtle in Brendel, it is present nonetheless in his ranting against unchecked naturalism. Indeed, what seems to hold back the biopolitical vector of

Brendel’s thought is the lack of danger with regard to unruly musical expression. Bad music is sadly infantile with regard to historical development rather than monstrously abnormal, as it would become under the gaze of the formalists.

The biopolitics of Brendel’s aesthetic borrows directly from Hegel’s own biopolitical analysis, most evident in his analysis of personhood. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes,

70 Brendel, Zur Anbahnung, 264.

43

“Any living thing at all is a subject, while person is a subject which has its subjectivity as an object.”71 Firstly, such a broad, naturalist concept of subjectivity in Hegel clearly informs

Brendel’s wide category of subjective music as instinctual. Yet, personhood, which is a necessary distinction for self-consciousness, freedom, and legal right, can only be obtained through property-like possession of one’s living being, the untamed will and appetite. Hegel makes an idealist separation between the willing of personality and the living of biological organisms, writing that the individual “is alive in a particular bodily organism,” but only the person possesses their body, insofar as it expresses their will.72 Hegel engages a surface/depth hierarchy between the mind and body, as well as the Aristotelian concept of human (or perhaps person) as the thinking animal, who has objectified their animality.73 Hegel continues to engage this duality, suggesting that the living body must be “vitalized” and “possessed” by the spirit, leading to the ultimate conclusion that “In his direct life, before it is idealized by self-consciousness, man is merely a natural being, standing outside of his true conception.”74 Only by making this natural substrate of living subjectivity into an owned object can one become a person or in fact “man” in his developmental fullness, and stands prior to that categorically outside of humanity.

Returning to Brendel’s aesthetic, the same dynamic of objectification and ownership is at work in music’s ascension to fullness and personality. For Brendel music must be a willful expression of the idea, as if that is the mindful spirit of the composition itself. The body of the music – which in Brendel is really its entire sonic realm, the acoustic phenomena itself – is not adequate as musical personality in itself. It must be controlled, possessed, and willed as an object by an agency that is separate, but deemed internal – the poetic content. Only then can the composition possess legitimacy as a bearer and follower of law. Or following up Hegel’s assessment of the true conception of humanity, only music that has become self-conscious

71 G. F. W. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (New York: Prometheus, 1996): 45. 72 Hegel, 53. 73 In fact, not willing their life, Hegel argues that animals have no right to their life. 74 Hegel, 54, 61.

44

through its poetic idea actually qualifies as music rather than natural sound. Music possesses personality when its expressive capacity – what Brendel calls its subjectivity – is objectified as an externally manipulated and owned extension of the inner idea. Such an objectification of music has a metaphorically biopolitical slant, in that musical forms are judged according the same criteria as life forms with regard to their biological being. This parallel is stitched together with the distinct Hegelian concept of subjectivity as the unconscious appetite of the living being. For

Brendel romantic music is analogous to Hegel’s animal as untrammeled subjectivity, lacking the right to life of personhood, musical or otherwise. As I will discuss further on in the context of

Hanslick, such a distinction between the mind and body of music leads the categories of mindful and mindless music as musical bodies with and without the right to existence.

Brendel and the New Germans also encouraged music to express the personality and nationality of the composer. For Brendel, nationality was not an ethnically fixed concept, but highly cultural and malleable. He considered musical traditions the expression of national qualities, even if they are mixed internationalist expressions or expressed by those born into different nations. For example, Mozart is considered a blend of German and Italian spirit, while

Berlioz and Liszt wrote “German” music, defined by “unadorned inwardness and tough compact force.”75 Tied up with Brendel’s push for more partisan musical criticism and a Hegelian manifestation of ideas was the prerogative of using musical culture to advance the national cause, that is, consciousness of one’s nationality. In his 1845 essay on music criticism Brendel argues that music is the “sensation of the nation,” but it is the task of critics to make it the “thinking consciousness of the nation.”76 Brendel dismisses the value of Italian musical influence, not only because Italian music lacks thought and disregards the importance of lyrics, but also because the

Italian nation was viewed as politically bankrupt and decrepit, not useful to the aspiring German

75 Brendel, “Zur Anbahnung,” 271. 76 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 11.

45

nation.77 Here musical composition is assumed to express the condition of national politics.

While there is an element of biopolitics in Brendel’s attempt to view the whole national population, his Hegelianism lacks the measuring rods of normality, health, and even the biological inference of “nation” (his nationalism is more cultural than biological). Brendel’s

German nation is neither sick nor degenerate, but it exists just fine in the realm of spirit, awaiting its inevitable coming to consciousness and materialization. If the nation is not conscious it is simply an immaturity to be worked out by the march of time.

Brendel’s New German School not only introduced new aesthetic laws and politics into

German musical culture, but also new organizational forms. As editor of the NZfM, Brendel took a much different approach than Schumann in organizing the paper and relating to readership.

Brendel made the NZfM the organ of a distinct musical party, which attained further organizational coherence through the ADMV. As a self-proclaimed “party” – invoking all the associations of the developing mid-century political parties – Brendel took care to eliminate divisiveness and diversity from the New Germans.78 He was openly opposed to the confusion generated by Schumann’s more “liberal” use of editorial powers, that is, allowing the paper to publish divergent aesthetics perspectives.79 Brendel could not be clearer about this when he wrote in 1852 that the new principle of the paper was “decisive partisanship.”80 He urged critics to cease their timidity in regard to the task of music and stand up against bad music and arbitrary aesthetic pronouncements.81 As the leader of an aesthetic party, Brendel sought out a network of like-minded correspondents. By the 1850s, the NZfM had established critics in most German cities of note (as well as in other regions), who served as both disseminators of party principles

77 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 6. 78 He speaks of the emergence of two distinct parties in 1852 in “Zum neuen Jahr,” 2; In 1859 he says that the NZfM had to take a party position against its will: “Zur Abahnnung,” 264. 79 Schumann’s liberal position as editor initially stimulated discussion, but lead to usurpations: “Zur Abahnung,” 269. 80 Brendel, “Zum neuen Jahr,” 2. 81 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 11.

46

and agents to report back to the paper. Such a proliferation of concert criticism and knowledge about musical culture allowed the NZfM and its readers to keep tabs on the state of musical life to an unprecedented degree. The AMZ and NZfM under Schumann had focused on articles, not a continual stream of reviews from dedicated correspondents.

Brendel’s transformation of the NZfM and its affiliates from a debate society into an interest group, aiming to promote a specific platform paralleled the contemporaneous development political parties and interest groups in Central Europe. Similarly, the new terms of public engagement epitomizes Jürgen Habermas’s distinction between the bourgeois public sphere and the consumer sphere of the late 19th Century.82 Brendel’s network of critics formed a vanguard of loyal party members to promote the New German aesthetic through partisan publications designed to change listening habits and repertoire decisions. This network included a large number of composers and critics, whose names and locations began to be printed in the

1850s on front of each edition, like a signed manifesto.83 Yet, this aesthetic politicking reverberated with the broader political project of nation building as they considered music part of the nation’s “political and general education.”84 In an era that initially lacked a German nation- state, and in accordance with the holistic Hegelian unity of art and politics, New German music had the concrete political significance of making manifest the abstract notion of nationhood.

In terms of its relationship with society, the NZfM and New German School functioned like an interest group or a pressure group, publishing suggested reforms for musical culture and

82 On interest groups, media, and mass politics see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 83 Beyond Wagner, Liszt, and Brendel, some of the more well-known members included Peter Cornelius, Felix Draeseke, Hans von Bülow, Alexander Ritter, August Ambros, Heinrich Porges, and . After Brendel’s death in 1868, the NZfM became more moderate within the War of the Romantics. Consequently, Wilhelm Tappert formed the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung in 1874, later taken over by Otto Lessmann, as the most doctrinaire New German journal. 84 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 6.

47

even the German states in respect to their governance of musical organizations.85 Like other civil organizations, the New Germans invoked the authority of expertise for suggested reforms, but also for making judgments on compositions. Drawing on the academic authority of Hegelian philosophy, Brendel approached musical criticism as a professional expert relaying information to a lay audience. This is perhaps the biggest shift in criticism wrought by Brendel: the birth of the professional critic. The critic was professional both by making music writing one’s primary occupation (previous critics had been academics, composers, authors, conservatory instructors, etc.) and by the authoritative position claimed. In his constant assessments of musical criticism,

Brendel created a divide between writer and lay public. He urges the New German critics to “win the opinion of the public” and educate the “layman.”86 Also, when Brendel speaks of correcting wayward opinion, he does so from the angle of recent developments in academic aesthetics having discovered the objective truth. These advancements allowed critics to assess the objective form of the composition and not simply the subjective impression given to the listener.

The politics of the New German School were not simply its nationalism, but also new techniques of musical discipline. In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault states that disciplinary power stems from “hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and their combination that is specific to it, the examination.”87 Such methods are most aptly observed in institutions like militaries, prisons, schools and hospitals. While it is outside the scope of this project, it should be noted that Brendel and the New German School urged the German states to form schools of musical training.88 Yet, even the growing system of public concerts and professional reviews functioned like a semi-institutional structure of hierarchical observation and examination. The aesthetic principles laid out by Brendel provided the measure for aesthetic normality, though it

85 On the state institutional reforms see Franz Brendel, Die Organisation des Musikwesens durch den Staat (Leipzig, 1865). 86 Brendel, “Zur Einleitung,” 12. 87 Foucault, Discipline, 170. 88 Brendel, Die Organisation.

48

was less a medical concept of the normal than a historical concept of proper evolution. If music was not serving its historical mission, it was not so much abnormal as an impediment.

The power of Brendel’s network of critics as a kind of surveillance should not be underestimated. For the first time composers were aware that concerts were likely an informal examination process. Their music would be judged for a national audience in the NZfM. If the articles in earlier journals were limited affairs that only referenced a small number of dispersed concerts, in the late 19th Century journal reviews were almost guaranteed for a philharmonic concert in a major city. The pressures of such potentially omnipresent observation gave composers anxiety, and perhaps even subtle disciplinary guidance in writing their music and having it performed. Many late 19th-century composers – mostly notably Bruckner and Mahler – privately expressed deep concern about the potentially harsh reviews of critics, especially in

Vienna.89 This process of infinite analysis and judgment served to individualize the composition as something identifiable. Brendel’s rigorous criticism ensured that compositional form would be scrutinized, categorized, and made into something distinct. Moreover, composers themselves were individuated as having a specific compositional style that their music must embody. Music composed by Wagner was deemed Wagnerian and an extension of Wagner’s own person. For

Wagner to write un-Wagnerian music would be considered inauthentic expression. The analysis and categorization by musical authorities gradually limited the acceptable compositional bounds for each composer.

Foucault argues that such voluminous examinations processes generated both the individual and the population as a distribution of individuals.90 Near the end of Discipline and

Punish, Foucault makes clear that discipline is a type of power, not necessarily tied to

89 See letters by Bruckner in Crawford Howie, : A Documentary Bibliography: From Ansfelden to Vienna (New York: Edwin Mellon, 2002), 479. See letters by Mahler in Max Graf, Composer and Critic: Two Hundred Years of Musical Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1946): 29. 90 Foucault, Discipline, 190.

49

institutions.91 Indeed the whole system of professional musical criticism employed this same disciplinary power to mold the reception and composition of future musical works. To Foucault’s list of “judges of normality” one could add aesthetic judge.92 At the first ADMV festival – another site of discipline and observation – Brendel declared in 1859 to be living in a new age of criticism.93 It was the age of Beckmesser, a new age of musical discipline. Late 19th-century

German musical culture was becoming suffused with new forms of critical power, both disciplinary individuation and a biopolitical-like management of the state of music, though one relatively mute with regard to medicine and biology.

Following Brendel’s death in 1868 the NZfM and the ADMV became less doctrinally New

German and more open to formalist music. However, the New German School was by no means in decline as its members found new expressive outlets. The Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung (AM-Z) was founded in 1874 by Wilhelm Tappert, author of the Wagner-Lexikon and became the most rabidly New German journal. In 1885 the journal was taken over by Otto Lessmann. Given his strong hand in editing and writing many reviews and articles, the journal functioned almost as his personal organ. The journal’s subtitle – Weekly for the Reform of Music Life of the Present – suggests its New German bent in the spirit of Schumann’s circle and the original impetus behind the NZfM. And even its interest in “musical life,” rather than simply music, suggests a heightened biopolitical orientation. Beginning in the 1880s, New German and Wagnerian critics began to assume posts for nationalist newspapers as well. Just as the affinity between liberal papers and aesthetic formalists was entrenched, so also the reverse was true. New German critics wrote for new nationalist papers with a populist tone. Examples include Theodor Helm at the Deutsche

Zeitung, E. E. Taubert at the Post, and Paul Moos at the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten. While the socialist papers did not employ art music criticism to the degree of liberal or nationalist papers,

91 Foucault, Discipline, 215. 92 Foucault, Discipline, 304. 93 Quoted in “Franz Brendel’s Reconciliation Address,” trans. James Deaville and Mary A. Cicora, in Richard Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas Grey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 318.

50

there was at least initially some report between the New Germans and socialists. Joseph Scheu, who wrote for the Arbeiter Zeitung in Vienna, had a Brendelian leaning, but the Berlin equivalent

– Vorwärts – never had a similarly dominant critic and did not really publish much music criticism until the late 1890s. While the ADMV festivals also performed works by Brahms and other formalists, it remained a platform for program music. It was at the 1889 and 1890 festivals, in Wiesbaden and Eisenach respectively, that Strauss’s early tone poems and Tod und

Verklärung established him as a promising composer. By the 1890s, the ADMV was still a significant resource for young, innovative composers like Strauss and Mahler who had difficulty getting their works performed by local institutions.

Eduard Hanslick and Formalism

In the mid-1850s Eduard Hanslick had an impressive string of successes. In 1854 he published his aesthetic treatise, On the Musically Beautiful, the influence of which can be gauged by the nine editions it went through over the rest of Hanslick’s career.94 In 1855 he became chief music critic for Die Presse, Vienna’s first affordable daily newspaper. In 1856 Hanslick began a long relationship with the University of Vienna, first as a lecturer, then as the world’s first professor of musical aesthetics. In 1857 he published damning and influential reviews of Franz

Liszt and Richard Wagner in Die Presse, criticizing the leading composers of the New German

School for not writing “musical music” as outlined in On the Musically Beautiful. Not only did this establish Hanslick as a leading defender of absolute music in the War of the Romantics, but each of these mid-1850s accomplishments exemplify and furthered monumental shifts in German

94 On the influence of Hanslick, Paul Moos – a nationalist New German critic – wrote in his 1902 Moderne Musikästhetik in Deutschland:“Eduard Hanslick is the most successful and influential aesthetitcian of music of our time. His famous Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was first published in 1854, and in 1897 was in its nineth edition. It has had widespread influence among both specialists and laymen. Opinion is more or less evenly divided between those who are in agreement with it and those who are in disagreement. The book has survived all challenges, and today it is read as much, with as much enjoyment, as it was forty years ago.” Quoted in the editor’s introduction to Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., ed. and trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986): xi.

51

musical culture. While not as overtly political as Brendel – both in regards to aesthetic and state politics – Hanslick did far more to subtly biopoliticize musical culture.

Hanslick got his big break as a critic after publishing an extended, glowing review of

Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1845. He went on to write reviews for the Weiner Musik-Zeitung and

Die Presse, eventually settling in for the duration of his long career at the Neue Freie Presse

(hereafter NFP), Vienna’s leading liberal daily and a splinter paper from Die Presse. In transitioning from a music-specific periodical to a daily newspaper, he brought the perspective of a specialist to a general audience.95 Yet, despite his desire to be a professional musical critic, because the profession did not exist, he had to legitimate and financially support himself through other means. He managed this balance by lecturing on aesthetics at the University of Vienna and holding a post at the Austrian Ministry of Culture. In 1870, based on the strength of On the

Musically Beautiful, he became professor of the history and aesthetics of music at the University of Vienna. Despite the fact that he was primarily considered a music critic, even by his university colleges, his university connections allowed him to bring the authority and objectivity of an aesthetic expert to a mass audience.96 He was part of the first wave of serious musical criticism published in mass newspapers, bringing together his aesthetic innovations with a new means of public intercourse.

Whereas Brendel is often ignored in musical histories, Hanslick remains well known. If

Wagner overshadowed Brendel, it was precisely Hanslick’s battles with Wagner for which he is best remembered. As the model for Beckmesser in Meistersinger, Hanslick has been rightly enshrined as the most famous 19th-century music critic. Despite a tacit familiarity, or perhaps

95 As Dana Gooley notes, Hanslick wrestled with a challenging, almost paradoxical desire, to balance rationally guiding the Viennese public as an equal in the public sphere with his authoritative understanding as a professional. See Dana Gooley, “Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism,” The Journal of Musicology 28, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 289-324. 96 On Hanslick’s relationship with the University of Vienna, see Kevin Karnes, Music, Criticism, and History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

52

because of it, Hanslick has not until quite recently become the focus of much scholarship.97 In fact much of the research on other critics like Robert Hirschfeld and Heinrich Schenker has been conducted in the name of expanding understandings beyond Hanslick.98 Yet, for all the supposed scholarly understanding of Hanslick, he has been wrongly pigeon-holed as a conservative, fighting against the progressive school of the New Germans. Such a view was promulgated early by Max Graf, a Viennese critic of a younger generation, who argues that, for all the venerable critic’s wit, Hanslick attempted to stop the flow of history and represented a gulf between composers and critics.99 Recent scholarship has begun to document his politically liberal sympathies and undo views of Hanslick as an aesthetic reactionary.100 In the same spirit I aim to demonstrate Hanslick’s role as an innovator, ushering in aesthetic changes no less than his adversaries in the War of the Romantics. Moreover, for all the supposed familiarity with

Hanslick, his introduction of bio-medical concepts into aesthetics has been vastly underappreciated. In the context of an aesthetic war, Hanslick’s innovations activated biopolitical forces of normalization and public health regulation.

Hanslick shared with Brendel an impetus to make musical aesthetics more objective and in line with the latest academic trends, though he took the natural sciences rather than philosophy as his model. When he first published On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick was conscious of living in an era when the methods of the natural sciences were highly valued and spreading to new fields of inquiry. He writes in the opening: “The tendency in science to study as far as possible the objective aspect of things could not but affect researches into the nature of beauty.”101

97 See Gooley; Karnes; Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, Wolfgang Marx, ed., Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013); Mark Burford, “Hanslick’s Idealist Materialism,” 19th-Century Music 30, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 166-181. 98 See Botstein, “Music and its Public;” and Cook. 99 About his elder colleague Hanslick, Graf writes, “Thus he widened the gap between creative composers, critics and the public, turning away from the living springs of his time and trying to stop their flow, using his wit as a plug.” Graf, Composer and Critic, 251. 100 Karnes; Brodbeck; Notley; Grimes, et al. 101 Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Aesthetics, 7th ed., trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 7.

53

But whereas most researchers were interested in exploring a science of acoustics or a mathematics of tone relations, Hanslick pushed an agenda for researching the law-abiding properties of the composition itself: “Hence, instead of enlarging on the vague and secondary effects of musical phenomena, we ought to endeavor to penetrate deeply into the spirit of the works themselves and to explain their effects by the laws of their inherent nature.”102 This emphasis on law – specifically the natural laws of music – is key to understanding Hanslick’s revolution and its disciplinary rhetoric.103 For Hanslick, European art music abides by laws, specifically, “the primordial law of ‘harmonic progression’ which…contains the germ of development in its main forms.”104 If music only expresses musical ideas (one of Hanslick’s oft- repeated dictums), if its only content is form, then its beauty lies in the logic and lawfulness of those formal (though he argues, not mathematical) relations.105 If a composition does not follow these “elementary laws of nature” or “the natural order of things,” it is not music.106 “Musical music” and “unmusical music” are common phrases of Hanslick, which indicate whether or not a composition is, in a way, doing what it was born to do, and point to his ahistorical, universalizing aesthetic. Diligently sustaining the musicality of all music means adhering to the normal functioning of the universe. Whereas Brendel’s formulation of musical principles drew

102 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 13. 103 On the formalist invocation of law, see Graf, Composers and Critics, 252: “…in every town in Germany – even the smallest – some little Hanslick was sharpening his pen and spluttering ink in the name of the classics against the musical revolutionary from Leipzig. The practice of invoking so-called laws of musical beauty against their violation by Wagner became general.” 104 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 51. 105 On Hanslick’s insistence that musical beauty is not based on the mathematical relationships of tone, overtones, etc., see Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 23. Hanslick objection to Bruckner was precisely that his music did not follow the logic and laws of harmonic progression. In a review of Bruckner’s Eight Symphony he writes: “Thus, tossed about between intoxication and desolation, we arrive at no definite impression and enjoy no artistic pleasure. Everything flows, without clarity and without order, willy-nilly into dismal long windedness.” Hanslick, Hanslick's Music Criticisms, 289. 106 See Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 51, 104. Hanslick emphasizes the importance of laws in musical analysis, but actually makes reference to few specific laws or suggestions for laws. In On the Musically Beautiful he primarily refers to harmonic progression (and perhaps organicism) as an aesthetic law: “The subject of a composition cannot, therefore, be understood as an object derived from an external source, but as something intrinsically musical; in other words, as the concrete group of sounds in a piece of music. Now, as a composition must comply with the formal laws of beauty, it cannot run on arbitrarily and at random, but must develop gradually with intelligible and organic definiteness, as buds develop into rich blossoms.” Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 124.

54

inspiration from philosophy and history, nature and the natural sciences are the ultimate horizon for Hanslick’s musical laws. If the main principle of New German aesthetics was logical coherence to the idea, Hanslickian formalism posits the central musical law of logical development of themes.

By musical development Hanslick primarily means the elaboration upon a central melody. While at times he pays lip service to the idea that harmony and rhythm are co-equals in determining the foundation of a composition, in practice On the Musically Beautiful gives the central and leading role to melody. Hanslick describes composing as follows:

The starting point of all creative activity of the composer is not the intention to portray a specific feeling but the devising of a particular melody. Through this deep-seated, mysterious power, into the workings of which the human eye will never penetrate, there resounds in the mind of the composer a theme, a motive. We cannot trace this first seed back to its origins; we have to accept it simply as given. Once it has occurred in the composer’s imagination, his activity begins, which starting from this principle theme or motive and always in relationship to it, pursues the goal of presenting it in all its relationships. The beauty of a self- subsistent, simple theme makes itself known in aesthetical awareness with an immediacy which permits no other explanation than the inner appropriateness of the phenomenon, the harmony of its parts, without reference to any external third factor.107

From the inspired discovery of a melody (or theme or motif) a composer builds a structure of tones that is only beautiful if it is harmonious in its relationships and developments. The building blocks of these musical structures are the musical concepts, that is, melodies: “The independent, aesthetically not further reducible unit of musical thought in every composition is the theme. The ultimate determinations which one ascribes to music as such must always be manifest in the theme, the musical microcosm.”108 For Hanslick the core of music is melody and its development.

Proper music does this logically and lawfully. Furthermore, the “ideal content” of music, that which gives it legitimacy and independence is “found only in the tone-structure itself, however,

107 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 32. Emphasis added. 108 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 80.

55

and not in any other aspect of the work.”109 In essence, every other part of music is extraneous to this tone structure.

If Schumann and Brendel wanted to make musical criticism more rigorous, Hanslick wanted to make it academic. Building from On the Musically Beautiful musicology developed as a scientific discipline that provides the laws and norms of music, as well as the authority to conform musical culture to them. Musicology is necessary to make music musical. If financially speaking, Hanslick needed the aesthetic treatise in order to support his desire to write criticism (it provided an entry into university teaching), he also needed it conceptually to provide the scientific point of reference for judging and disciplining musical culture. On the Musically

Beautiful provided Hanslick and all like-minded critics the authoritative weight of science and university research. Authority was bestowed on Hanslick as a “professional” critic – one who knew better than others – but I would argue that he achieved the status of professional through the legitimacy of science, much like a professional medical practitioner. While not all professional critics thereafter used or could use scientific authority, it was present at the founding of musical criticism as a profession. As his university colleagues noted, Hanslick was no scientific scholar, but rather laid the groundwork for a science of musical aesthetics to uncover the lawful properties of music.110

If Brendel’s marriage of music and extra-musical ideas bore the marks of Hegel,

Hanslick’s annulment was thoroughly Kantian.111 Given Hanslick’s various appointments at the

University of Vienna, the first in 1856, it is not surprising that he stayed in step with the latest academic developments, including Neo-Kantianism in philosophy. In early editions of On the

109 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 31. 110 On the attitude of the University of Vienna toward Hanslick’s scholarship see Kevin Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 23-24. 111 In the same way that Brendel may be described as a Young Hegelian, Hanslick is something of a Neo- Kantian in using Kant’s ideas against him, as well as selectively borrowing. Hanslick like other Neo- Kantians tends to downplay Kant’s notion of intuition and other avenues to the noumena.

56

Musically Beautiful Hanslick even named Neo-Kantian Johann Friedrich Herbart as a forerunner in formalist aesthetics, but one who like so many of the giants of German philosophy, said little or little positive about music.112 Hanslick’s aesthetics activated many facets of Kant’s philosophy, including, among others, strict compartmentalization, the role of “imagination”

[Einbildung(skraft)] in aesthetic contemplation, and the relation of music to concepts.113

According to Hanslick’s delineation of spheres of inquiry and life, music required its own aesthetic principles and aesthetics need not relate to ethics and politics. Brendel’s Hegelian urge to reconcile subjective and objective aesthetics, as well as the overt fusion of politics and aesthetics, was foreign to Hanslick’s Neo-Kantian quest for purely objective, positive knowledge of compositional beauty. Like Kant, Hanslick explored in depth the process of perception and emphasized the role of “imagination” in mediating sensations and rationality, making art into an opportunity for the audience to cultivate rationality. Proper listening for Hanslick actively perceives and follows musical form out of the raw sensations, that is, imagination – form/image making. Whereas Kant had considered music a lesser, irrational art because it lacked linguistic concepts (the basis of rationality), Hanslick found rationality in music through its purely “musical concepts,” while still buttressing Kant’s view that music has no relationship with non-musical concepts.

As an integral part of his Neo-Kantian science of musical aesthetics, Hanslick objectified music to an even greater degree than Brendel. This does not simply mean an attempted detachment or neutrality in the analysis of beauty, but writing about a composition as if it were a static object. 114 Not unlike in the writings of Brendel, the juxtaposition of objective and

112 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th edition,16. 113 See Donald Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory. (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1974); Herman Parret, “Kant on Music and the Hierarchy of the Arts,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer, 1998): 251-264. 114 While Hanslick’s criticisms are not particularly objective, in the sense of being detached, in On the Musically Beautiful he encourages the listening to be objective with regard to musical feelings. His criticisms uphold this careful parsing of music, particularly withholding emotive and extra-musical associations he made personally with the music. He does not deny that such associations occur, just the relevance of these associations to aesthetics.

57

subjective analysis runs throughout On the Musically Beautiful. For Hanslick, subjective analysis examines how a musical performance makes the listener feel, remember, and associate emotively or otherwise. For Hanslick music does all these things, but that is not its source of beauty or its distinct enactment of purpose. The musical composition has an objective existence apart from these ephemeral effects. Although Hanslick writes plenty about music needing to be performed or music as sounding forms, ultimately, in objectifying music, he reduces it to notes on a staff.115

For Hanslick subjectivity lies with the composer, but does not get passed on to the composition, which must be discussed as pure form in motion, like a changing landscape.

In his criticisms, Hanslick not only writes about music as an object, but specifically as an objectified biological body. In On the Musically Beautiful he argues that since music expresses nothing but form, useful criticism would be to make analogies to other kinds of forms or “poetic fictions” that incorporate movement, strength, and ratio – categories relevant to form.116 He specifically lists the human body, along with architecture and landscape, as good analogies for a composition.117 This should be seen as a slight departure from older traditions of organicism in musical analysis. Hanslick certainly supports, even as one of his laws, musical organicism, which is the idea that a composition should develop like a living organism, progressing through life stages and united by its own internal self-generation, i.e. a musical theme should not seem to come from outside but from within previously heard themes.118 Where Hanslick’s embodied discourse differs from musical organicism is in treating a composition as a form frozen in time.

Traditional organicism looks at a composition as a living entity moving through time; Hanslick takes the whole composition and likens it to a single plastic, albeit living, form. For example, he

115 Hanslick argues that the musical concept does not change if it is transposed to other instruments or keys. The musical concept exists a series of notes, not necessarily in the sound they make. See Hanslick, On The Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 81. 116 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 23. 117 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 49. 118 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 124. He writes: “Now, as a composition must comply with the formal laws of beauty, it cannot run on arbitrarily and at random, but must develop gradually with intelligible and organic definiteness, as buds develop into rich blossoms.”

58

writes about the physiology of Verdi’s Requiem (the relationship between flesh and spirit), the physiognomy of Wagner’s leitmotifs, and the “Mozartian blood” that flows in the veins of

Brahms Second Symphony.119 However, where the bodily analogies are most common are in reference to the health or illness of the music. It is through this incessant embodied language that musical compositions become metaphors of biological entities for Hanslickian formalists. The step to a metaphorical biopolitics is not far from here.

Hanslick was certainly not the first person to make an occasional reference to health or the body in his musical criticism, but raised the practice beyond incidental metaphor to consistent and purposeful practice. His early writings display a materialist concern, but the decidedly medical component of his reviews seems to pick up significantly in the 1870s. Even when he appears to use a medical word in his early writings – like “pathological” listening – he does not engage the medical side of its meaning. In this context he is merely trying to provide an antipode to logical.120 Patho-logical means following the logic of pathos - feeling and emotion.121 Perhaps not incidentally, this 1870s medical turn coincides with Hanslick’s’ becoming a professor of aesthetics at the University of Vienna, a global mecca for scientific medicine.122 While embodied discourse could be littered throughout a review, during this period he also developed the stylistic habit of saving the bulk of his health pronouncements for the end of the review, as if they were the most important part, or somehow summed it all up.

119 Hanslick, Music Criticisms, 7th ed., 166, 199, 157. 120 The lack of real medical implication in his use of “pathological” in early writings is communicated clearly in sentences like: “An exclusive activity of the intellect, resulting from the contemplation of the beautiful involves not an aesthetic but a logical relation, while a predominant action of the feelings brings us onto still more slippery ground, implying, as it does, a pathological relation.” Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 12. 121 For Hanslick feeling precedes emotion. Emotion is the specific emotive association attached, either consciously or not, to sensations or feelings. It is not less a function of the mind, with its own kind of process, if not logic, hence pathological. In fact, what is negative in Lohengrin is precisely the instability of the sensations, and consequent inability to translate them into definite emotions. See Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 10; Hanslick, Music Criticisms, 66. 122 See Deborah Cy oen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007).

59

Comparing earlier and later reviews of Liszt and Wagner provides good examples of this bio-medical intensification in the 1870s. In Hanslick’s 1857 review of Lohengrin, his first negative concert review of Wagner, he critiques the music’s sensory effects, and the indeterminacy of those sensations, but there is nothing specifically about health, illness, or medicine.123 Conversely, in reviewing a symphonic concert of Wagner in 1872, he describes the composer’s tempo and style as posing an infectious threat to both performers and audiences:

“Temp rubato, that musical sea-sickness which so afflicts the performances of many singers and instrumentalists would soon infect our orchestras, and that would be the end of the last healthy element of our musical life.”124 Further reviews of Wagner (Meistersinger, Tristan, Parsifal) reiterate the composer’s threat to the health of musical life. A similar difference in style can be seen in the treatment of Liszt. In his preface to the 7th edition (1885) of On the Musically

Beautiful he describes Liszt symphonic poems from the mid-1850s as having “dosed the listener with a sort of vision-promoting medicine.”125 However, in his 1857 review of the same compositions, Hanslick only derides the “popular response” to the Liszt’s “sensual effect.”

Certainly, Hanslick’s early writings convey a materialist concern for sensation, sensuality, musical effects on audience, and even biology, but they lack the conceptual precision and prescriptive powers afforded by the medical lexicon.

That such a terminological shift also implies biopolitical management of compositions and audiences can be seen in a focus on “musical life.” In Hanslick’s description of performers as the “last healthy element of musical life,” musical culture attains the status of a living entity or a population of living entities in need of protection and cultivation. In treating the various

123 Hanslick, Music Criticisms, 66: “One is never at ease, never secure in one’s sensations; it is rather like being exposed to the deluge of an ever-turning mill wheel. Attracted by many a lively detail, I cannot recall a single larger musical episode of which I could say that it gripped the listener with an immediate force or struck him in his emotional vitals. Wagner’s music affects the soul less than the nerves; it is not moving so much as eternally exciting, painfully concentrated, sensually and poetically exquisite…Wagner makes the impression less of a volcanic nature bursting its bonds than of a shrewd contriver who, secretly aware of his essential sobriety, continually forces himself into a state of exaltation.” 124 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 7th ed., 106. 125 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 6.

60

components of musical life as living populations to be managed – some metaphorical, some literal – Hanslick’s style becomes specifically biopolitical, rather than merely bio-medical. There are several populations to supervise, but all fall under the general species of musical life. These populations include audiences, conductors, and performers. While composers seem to secure a level of individuality apart from populations, composition in general was perhaps the most important and managed of all populations.126 The state of composition so heralded by Schumann and Brendel, became with Hanslick a distinctly medical state with various symptoms and requiring various treatments, and clearly engages the rhetoric of an extra-individual living population or a body of works. At a premiere, the individual composition spoke for its species.

The Neo-Kantian threads of Hanslick’s thought do not merely move aesthetic discourse toward the natural sciences – away from the giants of idealist philosophy – but also toward concerns with music’s effect on listeners and judgments based on norms. An aesthetic politics based on ensuring the equilibrium of musical life follows a different path of criticism than conservative judgment or nationalist manifestation. Judgments based on a scale of normalization are both more and less severe than those that are not. As Foucault makes clear, the median of the norm provides a new measuring mechanism proximate to disciplinary and biopolitical power, by the first identifying the state of the individual and then locating that individual in relation to the whole.127 Normalizing judgments are more austere than those of value in that they essentialize the errant subject as deviant, as inhabiting a different state or racial categorization than the normal subject. In Hanslick, this is the logic that allows him to speak of some compositions as music and others as unmusical, not to mention specifically abnormal, invoking the identical medical category. In this regard, Hanslick is harsher than his New German adversaries, whom he pathologizes and places outside the domain of music.

126 This does not mean that the health of composers was ignored. On the contrary composers, especially New German and modernists were often described as ill. 127 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 253: “The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize.”

61

While Brendel and the New Germans could accept some formalist music as music, they were also less apt to try to improve certain forms of composition. In this regard, Hanslick’s criticism was less severe, in that it did not give up on bad composers as lost causes in the way the

New Germans disregarded their opponents. This is the leniency of discipline that Foucault discusses. Hanslick and other formalist critics always seem to hope for the best, that a composer will heed their advice and improve in the future. Hanslick’s reviews of Wagner and Strauss, even their most “unmusical works” always leave open a door for them to return to real music. In fact,

Hanslick shows them the way and encourages them to be normal. True to the logic of discipline,

Hanslick aims to maximize the usefulness of composers and music, tactfully using his criticisms for greatest efficiency of effect, never criticizing with a will to harm. As a form of delinquency,

Hanslick’s category of “abnormal music” is that fallen from a state of proper socialization, but nevertheless remaining the object of rehabilitation.128

Hanslick’s aesthetic politics merge discipline and biopolitics, a confluence perhaps best understood through parallels with the institutions of public health. Hanslick acts as an agent of public health, extending the reach of those institutions into the musical sphere. The policing surveillance, examination, diagnosis, and prescriptions have as their united aim the maximization of the health of the musical populations, a health defined and defended by medico-scientific authority. Hanslick wears the hat of the public health official most clearly in the pathologization of aesthetic enemies and encouragement of healthy musical behavior – negative and positive reinforcements.

Tasked with the protection of society’s health, Hanslick assumes an authoritative role toward the public. Hanslick does not shy away from attending concerts he knows are probably unhealthy, but like a public health official inspecting reports of unhygienic school conditions, he goes in, does his research, and publishes his findings (and warnings) for the public. As Dana

128 On delinquency as a dispositif linking essentialized exclusion and inclusion through discipline: Foucault, Discipline, 256.

62

Gooley notes, Hanslick tasked himself with the rather unprecedented responsibility of guiding his public, though with the gentleness of an overseer and not the didactic manner of a despot.129

Hanslick even went as far as to study each reviewed composition on the , inspecting it for musical or unmusical qualities. The musical public needs to know if they have been exposed to health dangers, or if they themselves are sick. They also need to know what are the appropriate treatments and preventative practices. Still more, the public needs to know what to look for and who to report.

Conversely, Hanslick spends considerable energy defining and stimulating what is healthy in musical life. This includes making sure that music promotes healthy feelings and sensations. Hanslick’s aesthetic opposes not simply those who locate musical beauty in feelings represented or experienced, but also musical idealists who underrate the sensuous element in music.130 Indeed, a healthy experience should stem from healthy, natural organization. In On the

Musically Beautiful, he writes: “The logic in music, which produces in us a feeling of satisfaction, rests on certain elementary laws of nature which govern both the human organism and the phenomena of sound.” In other words, the biological human organism responds with satisfaction

(by the 1870s he would say health) to law-abiding musical form. Hanslick likens the effect of proper music to the disciplinary trifecta of education, law, and medicine: “the soothing effect of music on the human passions is always affirmed with such emphasis that we are often in doubt whether music is a police regulation, an educational rule, or a medical prescription.”131 Whereas elsewhere Hanslick raises concerns about the pathological effect of bad music on the passions, here music has the potential to repress and rehabilitate the wayward tendency of the passions.

Indeed, while music as education is hardly an unusual trope, Hanslick’s suggestion that lawful

129 Gooley, 296. 130 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 49. In future prefaces to On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick had to continually defend the treatise against overly formalist readings that argued the critic had no concern for feelings. In fact the marriage of science and sensuality in Hanslick significantly distinguishes him from the German critics and may say something about Austrian culture, and Austrian liberalism more broadly. 131 Musically Beautiful., 7th ed., 12.

63

music has a power that can be likened to police and medicine demonstrates the disciplinary and cohersive power of aesthetics. At least for the individual listener, music has the ability to manage their health. This provides a biological justification for the formalist aesthetic, a biopolitics of the aesthetic realm that bleeds into literal biopolitics when considering the effect of such medical policing on real life listeners.

In his actual criticisms, Hanslick makes the effort to establish when lawful music has its enhancing medical effect. Hanslick’s discerning ear, praising moments of bio-medical improvement, reinforces his public health discourse. Despite some reservations, Hanslick praises the healthiness of Brahms Second and Third symphonies, as well as Verdi’s Requiem. Since the medical and sensual emphases of Hanslick increased over his career, those qualities can best be seen in later reviews. In reviewing a Rubinstein piano concert from 1884, he writes: “To hear

Rubinstein play is pleasure in the finest sense of the word, a pleasure in which the sensual element plays an important part. His healthy, robust sensuality floods upon the listener with refreshing candor. His virtues are rooted in his unsapped natural strength and elemental freshness.” Rubinstein has a “robust sensuality and love of life.” Hanslick considers this rare in modern world, which with Hans von Bülow as representative is brooding, “dominated by the intellect, by education, by refined and more or less profound reflection.”132 In 1893 he describes the audience’s experience of the first chords of a Schumann as “a heavenly balm,” by comparison with the preceding Tod und Verklärung of Strauss.

However, Hanslick’s enactment of public health strategies is not simply general, but specifically liberal, specifically the policy of a figure like Max Pettenkofer. Considered the father of German hygiene, the Bavarian Pettenkofer was Germany’s first professor of hygiene at the

University of Munich. Following a cholera epidemic in 1866, Pettenkofer organized a conference on public health the following year, which sparked the formation of numerous public health

132 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 229.

64

interest groups between 1867 and 1873.133 It should be noted that it is exactly during this time that the medical component of Hanslick’s reviews increase. Pettenkofer and his colleagues attributed disease etiology to environmental factors, making sanitation initiatives their primary policy. Additionally, as political liberals like Hanslick, cleaning up cities for sanitationists was an infrastructural project that allowed natural processes to run more smoothly without directly violating the autonomy of citizens or intervening in their freedom of choice. Hanslick burdens himself with this same balance of liberal governmentality, that is, creating spheres of life that need to be politically managed (like population), but then limiting as far as possible direct intervention into those spheres, in the name of their maximization. As Foucault notes in The

Birth of Biopolitics liberals tend to weigh their actions within the framework of natural processes

– specifically classical political economy – often concluding that the best way to govern is not to interfere with these processes.134 At the very least, the cost of intervention was weighed against the benefits reaped. This is why liberal public health policy in the 19th Century adopted such structural policies of sanitation, which would allow the social and natural worlds to function most efficiently and productively, while not directly intervening in the private lives of citizens.135

The liberal calculation of Hanslick’s musical health policy can best be seen in his treatment of Richard Strauss. For Hanslick, Strauss was the logical culmination of the New

German musical poetics that Hanslick had campaigned against throughout his career. However, despite his insistence on the sickness and ugliness of such music, Hanslick never intimates a desire for actively quarantine or eradication.136 He listens to the music and tries to manage it, even when expressed in Strauss’s hyperbolic form. In his review of Don Juan he writes:

133 E. P. Hennock, “The Urban Sanitary Movement in England and Germany, 1838-1914: A Comparison,” Continuity and Change 15, no. 2 (September 2000), 280. 134 Additionally, most decisions guided by liberal governmentality adopted the efficiency rubric of political economy, and even aimed to specifically promote economic growth. See Foucault, Biopolitics: 239-60. 135 Of course this is in addition to the desire to preserve public/private splits and the ideology of hygiene. Though one might argue that hygiene was simply the logical medical paradigm of liberal governmentality. 136 With Wagner, Hanslick is simply happy that such poetic music is not the norm. However even as poetical music became more prevalent in Strauss’s era, Hanslick still maintains his non-interventionary liberal governmentality.

65

We could almost wish that many more such tone paintings might be composed, simply to provide the ne plus ultra of false licentiousness and precipitate a reaction, a return to healthy, musical music…We are not so sanguine as to expect the reaction against this emancipated naturalism in instrumental music to come immediately – but come it must.137

This quote is full of the biopolitical elements of Hanslick: healthy music defined as “musical music” and in opposition to “false licentiousness,” or unhealthy sensuality. However, what I want to emphasize here is his non-intervention stance and recourse to (as well as faith in) natural processes. Nature and its living organisms, notably humans, will not allow this diseased music to spread unchecked. He seems to suggest that as unhealthy music spreads to a breaking point, the musical community will naturally turn away from it in their own health interest.

Hanslick’s trust in natural processes is repeated with even greater clarity in his review of

Strauss’s next work. He writes: “Tod und Verklärung also strengthens our previously expressed opinion that, in view of the quick and rapturous acceptance of this composer, the unhealthy tendency will not soon be overcome, although it will eventually provoke a healthy reaction.”138

He confesses his conviction that tone poems and paintings would not go away easily or any time soon, but according to cause and effect, the body will react to its attack. Later on in his review he expands upon this idea by quoting contemporary author and critic Paul Heyse, who shares

Hanslick’s liberal public health paradigm within the sphere of art:

I observe in the new radical tendency [Heyse himself is referring to literature] to slight the beautiful in favor of the sheer dramatic no more than a growing pain in our time. A wise aesthetic pathology would no more attempt to suppress such phenomena than would rational physical hygiene attempt to obstruct the cleansing processes of the human body, even when they break out conspicuously upon the skin. It is probable that our schoolbook aesthetics would have become downright dry without this violent reaction.139

Like Hanslick, Heyse is convinced that the natural course of art and society will remedy the diseased aesthetic condition of the present like the “cleansing processes of the human body.”

137 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 292. 138 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 294. 139 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 294.

66

Mirroring Nietzsche’s ennoblement through degeneration, Heyse even accepts this diseased turn in art as evolution, noting that health can be aided by such violence to the body. In this quote,

Hanslick appropriates the voice of Heyse to give more precision to his aesthetic of public health.

Specifically, the phrase “wise aesthetic [school of] pathology” overtly links the practices of musical criticism and public health. Moreover, this wise discernment is identified as “rational physical hygiene,” replete with its insistence that management requires a laissez faire attitude, but also seems to link disease etiology with hygiene – the key medical paradigm of Pettenkofer and liberal public health policy. There is no fear of contagions here, but an insistence that the autonomy of the sick be maintained, and that aesthetic pathology be rational and resist the desire to act on the “conspicuous”-looking skin. From the perspective of managing aesthetic life,

Hanslick generally takes this same permissive position of Heyse, which for all the danger and

“violence” of new music, deduces that its prohibition is not the most efficient management of musical culture’s healthy evolution, as the phrase “growing pain” suggests. This is a major distinction between aesthetic liberals of the late 19th Century and those of the early 20th Century, who, as I will show in later chapters, deemed the danger far too great to let fester.

The liberal reluctance to interfere runs throughout Hanslick’s aesthetic. Despite a desire to improve musical life, he does not want to overly dictate what composer’s compose and audience’s listen to. Moreover, maintaining the rational autonomy of music itself and nurturing it in listeners seem to be at the heart of his formalism. In the opening quote he describes Liszt’s symphonic poems as “abusive” to music, while the prohibition on ascribing specific emotional expression to music is couched as speaking for music, not letting it speak for itself. Hanslick writes, “The most indispensable requirement if we are to hear music aesthetically is, however, that we hear the piece for its own sake, whichever it be and with whatever comprehension we hear it.”140 To attribute specific ideas or emotions to music would be a violation of the

140 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 66.

67

composition’s autonomy as rationally unfolding form with an intrinsic beauty and personality of its own. Similarly, when hearing a work of music, Hanslick’s ideal audience member actively listens to it, rather than being passively affected by it, which would be a violation of the listener’s autonomy. Any real aesthetic pleasure the listener experiences is, for Hanslick, the result of determined contemplation by the listener’s own rational capacity.141 Pleasure does not belong to the music, but to the autonomous listener engaged with autonomous music.

As with the liberal Kant, Hanslick focuses heavily on perception, articulating diagrams of the science of listening. In terms of dissecting the individual, he makes a hard and consistent distinction between feelings and imagination, as when he writes:

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination…Our imagination, it is true, does not merely contemplate the beautiful, but contemplates it with intelligence – the object being, as it were, mentally inspected and criticized.142

The transcendental category of beauty can only be deduced by imagination, which for Hanslick is an active rationality.143 That this beautiful musical object is distinct from any physical sensations or means for production/communication is made clear in Hanslick’s rubric of composition. The beauty of art begins in the inspired imagination of the composer and is designed (composed) to be communicated to the imagination of the listener.144 Hanslick considers the pure elemental aspect of music, its sensuous impression, to be a conduit between the “psyche” of the composer and that of the listener, but this elemental substratum is not the object of listening or analysis.145

Additionally, a composer can write music that lacks the formal integrity to be contemplated by autonomous powers of the listening subject’s imagination. Such is the case with Wagner’s

Lohengrin, which “affects the soul less than the nerves; it is not moving so much as eternally

141 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 64. 142 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 11. 143 However, Hanslick is very much about creating “images” of music through metaphorical structures. 144 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 11. 145 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 45.

68

exciting, painfully concentrated, sensually and poetically exquisite.”146 Hanslick distinguishes between the “pathological” and “aesthetic” (i.e. logical) properties of music as well as faculties of listening.

Hanslick’s philosophy of the human subject is pervaded by body and mind dualities. One of the ways Hanslick situates this split is in the language of elemental vs. ideal. Frequently in On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick refers to the “elemental” component of music as its sonorous and sensation-producing power, such as when he writes, “When people surrender themselves so completely to the elemental in an art that they are not in control of themselves, then it seems to us that this is not to the credit of that art and is still less to the credit of those people.”147 Not only does submission to the baseness of sound constitute an evacuation of self-determination, but it is a mode of listening that fails to grasp the ideal content of music. As mentioned above the ideal content for Hanslick is the melody, the tone structure. In terms of modes of listening he writes that “naïve audience takes pleasure in the merely sensuous aspect, while the ideal content is perceived only by the cultivated understanding.”148 While the “material substratum” (i.e. sound) of a composition impacts the nerves of the listening subject – their own material substratum if you will – the ideal content can only be grasped by the subject’s focused imagination, in which the base sensations are held in check.149 Indeed contemplation is the listener’s only guard against the elemental powers of both the music and oneself.

Hanslick does not deny the role of biology in the human subject, but, like Hegel, marks it as animalistic and ranks it below the intellect. Hanslick actually makes bodily health a prerequisite for proper listening, noting that an unhealthy nervous system or “psychological abnormality,” may corrupt one’s ability to contemplate the ideal.150 As sensation is for Hanslick

146 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 66. 147 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 61. 148 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 60. 149 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 52. 150 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 50.

69

the singular interchange that leads in one direction to feelings and the other toward contemplation, it must function normally.151 And yet that biological foundation must be buried in the quest for musical beauty and rational cultivation. Hanslick writes, “In pure contemplation the hearer takes in nothing but the piece of music being played; every material interest must be set aside.”152 The primary reason for this is that both the listener and the musical form listened to lose their thoughts and sovereign independence in the flood of invasive sensations.153 As I will discuss further on, it is imperative for Hanslick that the ideal not be crushed by the elemental, in the interest of musical, individual, and social enrichment. He does not posit the elemental and imaginative as inversely proportional, but rather the imaginative as perpetually threatened by elemental. The elemental can be productively immense, but as a mere means, must be tamed to serve the imaginative.154

Just as there is a dualism in the perceiving individual between imagination and nerves, so also Hanslick’s aesthetic splits music itself between image and elements. At times Hanslick speaks about music abstractly as sensually moving forms, but in practice he is not interested in music as sensation, but in the music of music. He is interested in its spiritual core, and not its secondary phenomena, as if they spring from the noumena: “Hence, instead of enlarging on the vague and secondary effects of musical phenomena, we ought to endeavor to penetrate deeply into the spirit of the works themselves and to explain their effects by the laws of their inherent nature.”155 Hanslick insists even in On the Musically Beautiful that the “musical organism” is divided between its body and its beautiful, but not yet visible, energy: “Thoughts and feelings run

151 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 51. He describes the nerves as the “imperceptible telegraph service between body and soul.” Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 4: “Imagination, moreover, is by no means an isolated domain; it draws its vital impulse from our sensation and rapidly transmits our sensations to intellect and feeling. But, for the real comprehension of beauty, these are peripheral considerations.” 152 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 4-5. 153 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 62: “Where such “moral effects” of music still on the agenda, it is unlikely that anybody would rise indignantly to speak for or against the bewitching power which, in sovereign extraterritoriality, conquers and befuddles the human spirit with no regard for its thoughts and decisions.” 154 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 57. 155 Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 13.

70

like blood in the arteries of the harmonious body of beautiful sounds. They are not that body; they are not perceivable, but they animate it.”156 In this quote, not only are the biomorphic tendencies and objectification of Hanslick’s musical discourse on full display, but the split between the mind and body of a human subject is transferred to the composition itself. In this case the inner thought of the composition (the abstract melody) has a biological component as blood, but it is separate from the visible body of music, that is, its elemental sound.

While Hanslick is certainly post-Hegelian and aesthetically innovative in suggesting that the form and content of music are inseparable and that its ideal content is only its form, he nonetheless introduces new dualisms into the composition as organism. For all the notion of sounding forms, Hanslick first separates sound and form. He insists that “music begins where those isolated effects leave off,” and that the tonal structure is “the real content of music, is the music itself.”157 Essentially, this makes the musical score the “music itself” and its “material substratum,” the sound and its impression, are not the music, only a kind of vessel for music. For

Hanslick the form-content fusion has other subtle dualities in it, besides the general one of score/sound. Specifically, Hanslick distinguishes between the melody and the orchestration, as well as between principle melody and development. While his juxtaposition of theme and orchestration is more evident in his reviews – as are most of his aesthetic specifics – even in On the Musically Beautiful he suggests that a melody transposed from piano to would have a similar content, despite sounding different.158 Such a split further nullifies the specificity of sound, and reinforces musicality as an objectified, iconographic entity that exists on a staff.

As to the privileged, transcendent position of melody, Hanslick writes, “This bud is the principle theme, the actual material and content (in the sense of subject matter) of the whole tonal structure. Everything in the structure is a spontaneous continuation and consequence of the

156 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 82. 157 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 52, 60. 158 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 80.

71

theme, conditioned and shaped by it, controlled and fulfilled by it.”159 Hanslick is quite explicit that the main melody is the actual content of the whole, a kind of unifying mind that shapes and controls the rest of the melodic body. In a way this is not so different from Brendel’s split between idea and form, except that Hanslick places some actual music – though only the principle melody – on the side of the inner, spiritual core of the entire composition.

The earlier versions of On the Musically Beautiful make more evident the rooting of

Hanslick’s dualisms in theology and German idealism. For example, whereas the later, edited versions said that the thoughts and feelings of a composition were its blood and animation, at first

Hanslick called this inner core a “vital energy” and the composition’s “breath of life.” 160 This penchant for the transcendental and intuitive can perhaps be best seen in his treatment of the compositional act. He describes core themes as originating in a flash of genius, something like revelation, in which a beautiful melodic core appears in the composer’s imagination.161 What distinguishes good and bad music is both the depth of the initial inspiration and the degree to which the compositional elaboration stays true to the inspiration. Another doubling of the composition comes across in his review of Verdi’s Requiem, one with a more explicitly theological bent:

Despite them [some ugly passages], this Requiem remains a genuine and beautiful example of Italian art. In the physiology of this art, and in the character of its Catholicism, there is a certain overload of the sensuous and of ardent southern emotionalism. It is sufficient that in Verdi’s Requiem the spirit is not suffocated in the flesh, as has happened in so many Italian sacred compositions, including some highly celebrated ones.162

159 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 8th ed., 81. 160 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 125: “Thoughts and feelings pervade with vital energy the musical organism, the embodiment of beauty and symmetry, and though they are not identical with the organism itself nor yet visible, they are, as it were, its breath of life.” 161 See Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 52. 162 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 166.

72

The genuine and beautiful spring from the spirit, while the sensuous and emotive are of the flesh.

Moreover, the musical flesh, while tolerated as a vessel or vehicle of the musical spirit, also contains the threat of suffocation, of not letting the spirit out to breathe.

Whatever the potential cultivating properties of musical music, Hanslick continually stokes fear about the subversive potential of this “most powerful of all arts,” a threat directed at the plane of the listener’s corporeality.163 In the constant parallel between music forms and life forms, both have an elemental body in Hanslick’s philosophy. The danger of the musical body is properly Dionysian, in that he links subversive musical power with wine, imbibing, and intoxication: “We may drink in a melody, but not a picture, a church, or a drama. For this reason no other art can be turned to such subservient uses. 164 Similarly:

Music loosens the feet or the heart just as wine loosens the tongue. But such victories only testify to the weakness of the vanquished. To be the slave of unreasoning, undirected, and purposeless feelings, ignited by a power which is out of all relation to our will and intellect, is not worthy of the human mind.165

For Hanslick, music in a state of nature is dangerous and enslaving. Protection requires not merely a dualism between “will and intellect” and “feet or the heart,” but the critical assertion that they be in proper “relation.” The seat of rationality must reign over the body, no matter its powerful inclinations. The mind of the composition and the listener must dominate and connect, as a bulwark against the Dionysian potency of the musical body.

But what is musical corporeality? It seems to be unformed sound, before it becomes elevated to the status of musical music. In practice, fleshy musical is pseudo music – detached from the mind and fragmentary – the only effects of which are sensory. Hanslick’s formalism asserts that music that lacks musical ideas is without content, without spirit – animalistic musical bodies. This can be seen as early as his 1857 critique of Liszt’s symphonic poems. According to

Hanslick’s aesthetic, Liszt’s music claims poetic content and therefore is actually without musical

163 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 78. He says that the material element in art is greatest in music. 164 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 91. 165 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 93.

73

content. He writes that Liszt “knows too well that such a purely sensual effect never fails of poplar response, and his ‘good friends’ take proper care that the brassy noise is interpreted as profundity.”166 The musical body is the brassy noise and has a “purely sensual effect.” To give such musical corporeality content or meaning requires a false elevation to profundity, the result of a general disingenuousness which Hanslick often suspects of the New German School.167

Similarly, Hanslick juxtaposes the supposed aims of Wagner with his actual corporeal effect. In the case of the Ring he likens the music to the steam machines used at the premiere to visually evoke the Rhine: “These utterly material effects are in direct contradiction to the pure idealism which Wagner claims for his works. He strives everywhere for the strongest sensual impression, and with every available means.”168 Without content, without a cultivating purpose, Hanslick’s discourse turns the concept-driven music of Liszt and Wagner into elemental sound without the transcendent purchase of idealism.

If the musical body is, generally speaking, sound as sensorial effects and without organizing content, it takes on a more specific meaning in the case of Strauss and Mahler. For

Hanslick and many other critics, Strauss’s musical corporeality can be located in his use of timbre, that is, instrumentation, and the sound quality or color of the chosen instrumental palette.

Take, for example, his reviews of Don Juan and Also Sprach Zarathustra:

In the one-sided study of these three orchestral geniuses, the younger generation has developed a virtuosity in the creation of sound effects beyond which it is hardly possible to go. Color is everything, musical thought is nothing.169

The composition, uncommonly weak and tortured as a musical invention, is actually just a refined orchestral piece, a resounding intoxication with color. Certainly the piece is interesting and entertaining as a brilliant combination of new and original, but also adventurous and offensive sound effects. But this

166 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 56. 167 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 66. He says that Wagner in Lohengrin makes the impression less of a volcanic nature bursting its bonds than of a shrewd contriver who, secretly aware of his essential sobriety, continually forces himself into a state of exaltation. 168 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 153. 169 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 291.

74

fabulous orchestral technique was, I feel, less a means for the composer than an end and chief purpose.170

The phrase “sound effects” is an even more damning critique of the musicality of Strauss than the

“sensual effects” of Liszt and Wagner. Again, musical thought is juxtaposed with color, and in the Zarathustra review, Hanslick makes clearly states that color should be means for musical ideas, which Strauss inverts and makes the ends. While Liszt and Wagner simply lacked proper thought behind their means, Strauss makes means his thought. In a way the thoroughness of this inversion makes musical elementality more evident, a potent theme in the early reviews of

Strauss and Mahler.

Hanslick’s consistent dualism between the spirit and body of music has clear biopolitical implications. In terms of debates about legitimate music, Hanslick’s laws of logical development provide a means of validation, but as a result, divide a composition into its legitimating and extraneous components. As I have shown, these divides are frequently couched in metaphors based on a human biological subject. These include spirit/flesh, logical/pathological; ideal/elemental, blood/body, imagination/nerves. Just like Brendel’s Hegelian model of expression, Hanslick relies on coherence between the two halves of a composition. As in Verdi’s

Requiem, the flesh must conform to the bounds dictated by the spirit. Should the flesh overflow and “suffocate” the spirit, then the composition becomes an abnormal deviant, unable in its incoherence to contribute to the greater self-determination of autonomous listeners. Similarly, should the music lack spirit, as Hanslick suggests of Liszt’s symphonic poems, then the composition is likewise dangerous and monstrous. In either case – surplus of flesh or deficit of spirit – the music is unmusical. Ultimately, the problem is that the legitimating transcendence of musical spirit is not in control of – or does not possess as an object – its sonic body.

Given Hanslick’s investment in biological language, it is useful to speak of worthy and unworthy music in the language of worthy and unworthy life. According to the classical Greek

170 Eduard Hanslick, “Concerte,” Neue Freie Presse, no. 11704 (March 23, 1897): 2.

75

distinction, bios is qualified life, while zoe is bare, unprotected, unqualified life. Bios is status of citizens that live in the polis and live the good life of politics, art, and philosophy. In the context of 19th-century German musical culture, the Bildung ethos of cultivation and self-betterment is an example of a bios mode of living, a worthy and legitimated existence. Returning to musical forms, music with a bios status would be that which has transcended its “animal” baseness and is fit for enculturation. On the other side the excessively corporeal, illegitimate music functioned as a kind of musical zoe, bare sound. Musical bios possesses a right to existence, while zoe can be excluded, though Hanslick in his disciplinary leniency does not. The aesthetic laws of both the

New Germans and formalists produced these mirror categories of musical life. These biological distinctions have definite political implications, in terms of access to citizenship, protection, and civic participation. That such political theory infiltrated aesthetics comes across in the assessment that if a composition violated musical logic and law it ceased to be “musical music”

(Hanslick) or possess “its inalienable right” (Brendel).171 Lawless music that lacked the unifying stamp of inner content remained a kind of musical zoe.

As Hanslick’s embodied aesthetic discourse often slips from metaphor to literalness, his regulation of sound bodies is tied to that of human bodies. Hanslick’s demographics of pathological listening share the traditional associations of zoe and reiterate the importance of active listening to citizenship and bios. Those people who are only interested in the elemental body of music and its effect on their physiology have no access to the potential bios of a composition, relegating the composition and themselves to a state of worthless zoe. First off,

Hanslick genders the bios/zoe split, accusing women of being “highly emotional beings” and therefore base listeners.172 In his review of Wagner’s Ring, he says, “It is through its sensually

171 Hanslick specifically mentions this phrase in his review of Strauss’s Don Juan, while Brendel speaks of musical rights in the context of Liszt’s symphonic poems. See Hanslick, Criticisms, 292; Brendel, Geschichte der Musik, 632. 172 Hanslick’s also attributes the dominance of male composers to the “emotionality” of women. Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 72.

76

fascinating magic that this music, as a direct nervous stimulant, works so powerfully upon the audience and upon the female audience particularly.”173 Weak listenership, while not demographically limited to women, is gendered as a female quality, unable to resist or transcend the intrusion of music “directly” into the bodily element. He also uses this characterization of women to explain why so few have composed music of “worth.”174

In terms of class, it is not clear what Hanslick intends by the phrase “uncultured masses,” but he accuses them of only taking “naïve delight” in the “material aspect” of art.175 By contrast, he says that the ideal aspect of a composition is only evident to the trained few, making education a selective prerequisite for true musical, rather than sonic, listening. In the chapter on

“Pathological Listening” in On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick moves quickly from women and masses to animals, early civilizations, and “savages,” the latter of which fall squarely in the zoe category. He writes: “It is well known that the action of music is most powerful of all in the case of savages.”176 They lack the ennoblement of bios that raises them beyond bare life and prevents them from being killed without consequences. While Hanslick’s parallel dismissal of savages

(the 19th-century term for indigenous peoples) and elemental music might seem innocuous and abstract in 1854, by 1907, as I discuss in the final chapter, German imperial subjects in Southwest

Africa and modernist music were being repressed by the same logic.

In each case Hanslick’s base listeners miss the higher qualities of music because they are only fascinated in and moved by the material effect of its element: “In the indolent and apathetic attitude of some and the hysterical rapture of others, the active principle is the same – delight in the elementary property of music.”177 While explored in the realm of music, the social parallel to

173 Hanslick, Musical Criticisms, 154. 174 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 72. 175 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 92. “…the naïve delight which the uncultured masses take in the material aspect of the various arts, which its ideal aspect is manifest only to the trained understanding of the few.” Statements like these substantiate Botstein’s writings on the concern about declining musical literacy. 176 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 94-95. He further makes a parallel between evolutionary stages of culture and subjection to musical persuasion. The more highly evolved, the least subjection. 177 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 91. Italics in original.

77

Hanslick’s aesthetic is clear: Only the sovereign subject has the full protection of citizenship and access to the polis, not women, workers, animals, non-Europeans, slaves, or other iterations of bare life. While Hanslick was not an explicit monger of evolutionary decline, his model of Euro- centric, social Darwinist, biological hierarchy implicitly opens up the possibility of degeneration, should those of a bios social strata act like lower forms of life.

Despite Hanslick’s Neo-Kantian claims about the autonomy of music, his aesthetics clearly supported broader political and philosophical interests. As opposed to earlier musical formalism, such as a the vintage touted by Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab, which was motivated by a conservative nostalgia for tradition, Hanslick’s formalism was intertwined with liberal ideals.

At the most obvious level, Hanslick and other similarly-minded formalists wrote for newspapers directly affiliated with liberal ideals and political parties. More abstractly, his aesthetics advocate for individual autonomy, rationality, and freedom, both for the composition and the listener. For

Hanslick, the imputation of extra-musical ideas to music is a direct affront to the composition’s deserved objective independence. Similarly, the search for extra-musical associations takes the listener down a dangerous, perhaps unhealthy indulgence in emotion and sensuality. Such delight in the materiality of art, Hanslick associates with “the uncultured masses,” a source of social anxiety for liberals from Mill to Ortega y Gasset.178 Despite the threat of sensual listening posed by program music, Hanslick asserts that active repression of the unhealthy was unnecessary as the educated should be able to resist.179 If proper music and listening for Brendel is supposed to engender a heightening of national consciousness, for Hanslick, “musical music” and disciplinary

178 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed.,, 92. I am thinking of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1869) and Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930). 179 For all his disdain for “unhealthy” music, Hanslick maintains a rather permissive attitude towards its performance, assured that proper musical education and the natural course of “aesthetic pathology” will lead to its eventual demise. See especially his review of Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung: Hanslick, Criticisms, 294.

78

musical criticism cultivated individual rationality and responsibility. This is part of the well- documented political split in the War of the Romantics between nationalism and liberalism.180

Musical Criticism at the End of the 19th Century

Hanslick was not only the foremost articulator of formalist aesthetics, but he also influenced the structures of musical culture and criticism, though more through the power of imitation than Brendelian institutional reforms. If Brendel defined the partisan role of music journals in the late 19th Century, Hanslick became the model for the daily newspaper critic.

Whereas Brendel attempted to “win the public” through music-specific journals, Hanslick was able to reach the public more directly through its primary media resource. Both networks were still self-selecting – the aesthetic parties of the journals and the political affiliations of the daily newspapers – but writing for liberal public of newspapers like the Neue Freie Presse Hanslick was able to assume an even greater level of authority viz. his audience. Even though Hanslick had to largely support his career as a critic through other endeavors, he was still the consummate professional guiding his consumers through the world of musical culture. Such an air of expertise further informed the disciplinary powers of the music-judge.

Arguably, the first, cheap, mass-circulated newspaper was La Presse, founded in Paris in

1836. The paper’s affordability stemmed from the innovative printing of advertising along with articles. Additionally, La Presse emphasized the genre of the feuilleton, that is, a separate section

(in La Presse, literally a separate sheet) devoted to cultural or social issues such as music.

Stylistically, feuilletons were characterized by a blend of literary flare and journalism, squeezed into a short column, but were most often printed at the bottom of the newspaper with a line that separated it from the more serious matters above. The general format of La Presse, including its cultural component, spread to cities around the world, including Vienna, where Die Presse was founded in 1848 as a virtual replica of the Paris newspaper. So when Hanslick began writing for

180 See Brodbeck; Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Musical Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

79

Die Presse in 1855, he was really at the head of the curve in terms of writing about music for a mass audience in Central Europe. By 1900 Vienna had 23 daily newspapers and Berlin 45, almost all of which carried musical feuilletons.181

It is not a stretch to say that these feuilleton music critics modeled themselves on

Hanslick. In his history of music criticism Max Graf – a noted Viennese critic himself – states that every daily newspaper wanted a Hanslick and every critic wanted to write like him.182 He was widely read and respected for his thoughtful, yet witty style. Graf positions the explosion of

Hanslick-like critics as a reaction to Wagner, leaving litle doubt about the Hanslick-like formalist orientation of most daily newspapers critics. Graf himself notes how they continually invoked timeless laws of music against Wagner, a deployment of the natural sciences clearly based on

Hanslick’s aesthetic innovations.183 That liberal daily newspapers were the first to devote considerable place to music criticism only reinforced the link between aesthetic formalism and political liberalism.

The expansion of music criticism fueled by Brendel and Hanslick became exponential by the end of the 19th Century. Early musicologist Hugo Riemann noted that with the expansion of the number of concerts, newspapers had to double and triple their number of correspondents.184 It was a golden era of musical criticism. Music had to be known and analyzed, a disciplinary process that only further individuated forms of music. If Brendel’s NZfM and its imitators created a national surveillance of musical culture, the Hanslick-like critic reinforced the level of local musical observation and judgment. In Hanslick’s Vienna, the critics were ever-present at concerts and ever-feared by composers. New German composer Alexander Ritter apparently told Richard

Strauss that the formalist critics, including Hanslick, turned the public against Liszt in Dresden.

181 Graf, Composer and Critic, 267. 182 Graf, Composer and Critic, 252. 183 Graf, Composer and Critic, 252. 184 Hugo Riemann, “Degeneration and Regeneration,” in Select Writings of Max Reger, ed. Christopher Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2006): 36-37.

80

While they had applauded at the first concert, after the scathing reviews from critics, the public became ashamed and refused to admit their initial enthusiasm.185

While certain aspects of Hanslick’s style and influence are well-known, I aim to emphasize the biopolitical slant of his aesthetic and network innovations. He famously raised concert reviews to the level of art itself, providing a successful merger of serious aesthetic commentary with a witty, florid, and entertaining prose. No less influential and ground-breaking, however, was his shepherding quality. By shepherding I mean that his writings did more than make aesthetic judgments, but actively aimed to shape and discipline how composers composed and audiences listened. Indeed his mounting incorporation of the language of medicine, health, and the body had the effect of reinforcing his authority and providing specificity to his shepherding prerogative.

The spread of the Hanslick’s influence was gradual and piecemeal. The main components of the Hanslick Revolution – the daily newspaper as the primary terrain of musical discourse, the biomedical terminology, and emphasis on normativity – can first be seen in Vienna in the 1880s. In German cities, by contrast, the Hanslick model does not really take hold until close to 1900, not only after Vienna, but after Paris, London, and Boston. It was in Vienna that the War of the Romantics first spilled over into the newspapers, a conflict that mobilized militaristic metaphors. Max Graf speaks of Robert Hirschfeld “crossing swords” with Hanslick, while Anton Bruckner refers to and Gustav Dömpke – two critics opposed to him – as Hanslick’s “two lieutenants.”186 The formalist critics had to contend not only with Hirschfeld, but most directly Theodor Helm, Vienna’s most notable New German critic at the end of the 19th

Century, as well as his imitators.

185 Richard Strauss, “Is There an Avant Garde in Music?” Recollections and Reflections, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. L. J. Lawrence (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1974), 14. 186 Graf, Composer and Critic, 271; Howie, Anton Bruckner, 402.

81

Kalbeck, best known as a biographer and proponent of Brahms, was the most important and influential of Hanslick’s first imitators. He moved to Vienna at the invitation of Hanslick in

1880 and wrote for a number of papers, including first the Weiner Allgemeine Zeitung and Die

Presse before being installed as the chief critic of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt in 1886. Kalbeck especially reinforces the animal/rational dimensions of Hanslick’s aesthetics, which can first be seen in his critiques of Bruckner’s base musical life. First he describes a partial performance of

Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in 1883 as “a wild jumble of stamping, storming, roaring and neighing as if there had been a meeting together of the Wolf’s Glen and Walpurgis Night.”187

Three years later, the full performance of the symphony in Vienna marked Bruckner’s ascension in popularity. Hanslick declared Bruckner the new idol of the Wagnerians, who also four months later received the “Order of Franz Joseph” from the emperor. In response Kalbeck began his

1886 review of the full symphony by mocking the public’s enthusiasm and noting how lucky they were to have a “poet by the grace of God, an original genius, an elemental spirit, an unconsciously creative artist, a free spirit, an ascender of understanding, a man of revelation, an

Ururur phenomenon.”188 He then goes on to describe Bruckner’s musical ideas as a “simmering broth-like mass of orchestral sound, but these ideas are the dead and mutilated remains of an old world doomed to destruction, not the fruitful seeds of a new world struggling to come into being.

Nevertheless, something could be done with even these ideas if they were manipulated by a master who had control over the over-all structure.”189 As with Hanslick, musical music is here defined by the cogency of musical ideas. For Kalbeck, Bruckner compositional style does not assemble the primordial elements of sound into unified musical world or life form protected from destruction. Rather he suggests that Bruckner composes as a comic and chaotic improviser. Like

Hanslick, Kalbeck has a faith in natural process and progress, that chaos will not overtake the

187 Max Kalbeck, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung (Februrary 13, 1883): 1. (trans. Crawford Howie). 188 Max Kalbeck, “Dichter und Symphoniker,” Die Presse (April 3, 1886): 1. 189 Max Kalbeck, “Dichter und Symphoniker,” Die Presse (April 3, 1886): 1.

82

laws of the universe: “We believe as little in the future of the Bruckner symphony as we believe in the victory of chaos over the cosmos.”190 Whatever his belief that the New German School would ebb from history, Kalbeck still enacted the rhetoric of public danger in his review of

Bruckner’s F Major Quartet:

To be sure, Bruckner is by far the most dangerous of today’s composers, his ideas cannot be fathomed, and that which cannot be construed possesses a magical, seductive power which causes greater damage than the refined and laboriously entangled sophistries of others. What he provides is music of pure revelation, as he has received it from above or below, without any profane addition of worldly logic, art and good sense.191

If it was easy to discount the musical rationality of Wagner and Liszt given their programs, the expressive ethos of Bruckner’s absolute music presented a more difficult, even more irrational threat. Lacking the educational communicability of organicism – both the unfathomable musical ideas and worldly logic of development – Bruckner can only seduce.

Writing for the left-liberal Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Dömpke’s review of Bruckner’s

Seventh Symphony sounds even more like it could have been written by Hanslick:

His imagination is so incurably diseased and fractured – and we know what tutor and ‘healer’ was responsible – that it does not recognize anything which resembles the necessity for regularity in chord sequence and periodic structure…Perhaps we should give up the attempt once and for all to seek an explanation for the abnormalities of a 60-year-old which a 20-year-old could not eliminate quickly enough. Bruckner composes like a drunkard…At the end of the first section the composer mixes tubas and horns and has them play the most gruesome and chromatically divergent passages possible. We truly tremble at the musty smells that assault our noses from the discords of this decay- addicted counterpoint.192

This review bears the mark of Hanslick’s style in every clause. Dömpke suspects the health and sobriety of the composer’s imagination, that realm of genuine inspiration and creativity. The review continuously criticizes Bruckner for lacking structure, reason, harmonic necessity, purpose, and conciseness, all the laws of Hanslick’s scientific aesthetics. There is a Hanslick-like

190 Max Kalbeck, “Dichter und Symphoniker,” Die Presse (April 3, 1886): 1. 191 Quoted in Howie, Anton Bruckner, 433. 192 Gustav Dömpke, Weiner Allgemeine Zeitung 2186 (March 30, 1886).

83

physicality in the olfactory analogy. But there is also a disciplinary impetus. Bruckner’s style is so abnormal, that were he twenty years old, such divergence would be educated out. Finally, the counterpoint is not described as decayed, but decay-addicted, essentialized within a condition.

Besides Kalbeck and Dömpke other notable formalists, all of whom wrote for the Neue Freie

Presse in the 1880s, included Richard Heuberger, Ludwig Speidel, and Max Nordau

Perhaps the most famous pathologizer of modern art, Max Nordau, was related to

Viennese musical culture, but only tangentially. Despite being from Vienna, sharing Hanslick’s embodied discourse, and being a correspondent for the NFP in Paris, he was far more linked with

Parisian cultural life. It seems likely that Nordau’s style had less to do with Hanslick and more with the mileau of Morel, Charcot, Zola, Huysmans, etc. This is not to say he lacked renown or influence, but he is seldom mentioned by writers within German musical culture. And if he was mentioned, it was not necessarily for his 1892 book Degeneration. For example when Nietzsche published The Case of Wagner in 1888, the high ranking New German critic Richard Pohl thought that Nietzsche’s style owed something to Nordau. Pohl says that Nietzsche translated

Nordau’s critique of modernity in The Conventional Lies of Civilization into a Wagnerian context, an interesting presentiment of Nordau’s own later work.193 Yet, Nordau did not have the influence in Central Europe currently accorded to him by historians, who often make him emblematic of fin de siècle anxieties of decline. The liberal Nordau shares the biopolitical rhetoric of Hanslick, but Nordau lacks the specifically musical angle of the musical formalists, and hence stands outside those discussions.

If the primary voice of liberalism and anti-Wagnerism was Hanslick, Theodor Helm was the key proponent of ethnically nationalist Wagnerism. According to Manfred Wagner’s documentary survey of Austrian musical criticism, the 1880s aesthetic debates turned political

193 Richard Pohl, “Der Fall Nietzsche: Ein psychologischen Problem,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 19, no. 44 (October 25, 1888): 518.

84

with Helm at the center of this shift.194 Recently, David Brodbeck has demonstrated this political difference in the reception of Dvorak. For Hanslick, Dvorak’s music could “speak German” and therefore should be part of the German repertoire. However, for Helm, in the context of conflicts about Czech language ordinances in Bohemia which would exclude Germans from political power, Dvorak’s music represented the threat of Czech nationalism. While Max Graf claims that

Hirschfeld was the first to cross swords with Hanslick, more recent study shows that that honor rightfully belongs to Helm.195

As a critic with New German and Wagnerian sympathies, the real significance of Helm is that he brought these aesthetic and political sensibilities to a daily newspaper audience.

Furthermore, he not only imitated Hanslick’s style of public shepherding, but also his public health terminology. Helm began writing musical criticisms for the Musikalisches Wochenblatt and the Pester Lloyd, but is well-known for beating out forty applicants in 1884 to become the chief critic for the Deutsche Zeitung, Vienna’s leading nationalist paper founded in 1871 in the wake of the Pan-German student movement.196 While at first glance Helm is the exact opposite of

Hanslick, he shared the liberal critic’s prerogative for protecting and disciplining musical populations. As Brodbeck argues, Helm’s aesthetic possesses an ethnically nationalist component, evidenced by frequent assertions that Germans can only appreciate music written by

German composers. Helm even went as far as to suggest that Hanslick likes Dvorak because the critic was born in .197 For Helm, repertoire intrusion by non-Germans constituted a threat to the populations both of Germans and German music. In his review of Dvorak’s Hussite

Overture, Helm writes: “Dvorak’s Hussites obviously want to threaten the lives of us Germans, if

194 Manfred Wagner, Geschichte der österreichischen Musikkritik in Beispielen (Tutzing: Schneider, 1979). 195 Graf, Composer and Critic, 271. 196 McColl, 21. 197 Brodbeck, 115.

85

only musically for the time being.”198 Whereas Hanslick danced around political questions, Helm made reference to specific political issues and persons.199

As a part of his ethnic nationalism, Helm also introduced anti-Semitism to Viennese musical discourse.200 However, Helm’s anti-Semitism was never as explicit as the younger

Camillo Horn, Max Muntz, and a notorious critic who went by the pseudonym Hagen, the three of which became the most outspoken musical voices for Wagnerian Pan-Germanism in the 1890s.

Horn and Hagen even attacked Brahms, who by the 1890s was nearly “above reproach.”201 Horn wrote for the Deutsches Volksblatt, perhaps “the most important German national anti-Semitic organ in Austria.”202 Hagen wrote for the Ostdeutsche Rundschau a tabloid to which the rabidly racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain also contributed. In their work on the radical aesthetics and politics of late 19th-century Vienna, both Carl Schorske and William McGrath note the similarities between the Wagnerism of Jung Wien and anti-Semitic politics (both Pan-German and Christian

Socialist), but do not map their intersection onto specific persons in the 1890s. Helm, Horn,

Muntz, and Hagan provide examples of such persons.

Robert Hirschfeld stood as something as an outlier or mediator in the War of the

Romantics, championing both Brahms and Wagner equally. Hirschfeld avoided the extremes of this aesthetic schism, by blending aspects of both. He largely engaged in formalist analysis, but was not put off by program music, nor bought into Hanslick’s view that beauty only stems from musical concepts. However, even more than with Helm, Hirschfeld’s style of criticism resembles that of Hanslick, despite such differing aesthetic positions. In his dissertation, Leon Botstein writes extensively about Hirschfeld, who he asserts, was more representative of the Viennese public than Hanslick. I think that Botstein is quite right to highlight the importance of Hirschfeld,

198 Brodbeck, 118. 199 However, Hanslick does call Dvorak’s music the “politics of reconciliation.” 200 Sandra McColl suggests that Helm’s anti-Semitic concepts were written to appease his audience at the Deutsche Zeitung. See McColl, 21. 201 McColl, 153. 202 McColl, 22.

86

but it should be noted that he does not become in any way representative of critics until after

1900. And this is not necessarily because Hirschfeld was so personally magnetic or influential, but rather because by then the majority of critics shared his merger of formalism and the canonization of Wagner. Aesthetically, Hirschfeld was actually an early iteration of what I will call in later chapters “new conservatism.” He celebrated all forms of classicism and romanticism and was adamantly opposed to early modernism, particularly condemning it as a threat to public health and musical life. Much like Hanslick, he considered himself a steward of the city, and was probably at least as widely heeded as Hanslick in their days.

Hirschfeld actually studied musicology under Hanslick at the University of Vienna and became a teacher of music aesthetics at a Viennese conservatory in 1883. He wrote reviews for multiple newspapers, though primarily the Weiner Abendpost, and from 1893 to 1913 wrote programs notes for the Vienna Philharmonic. According to Botstein, Hirschfield’s Wagnerism was at odds with the Wagnerism of Friedrich Hausegger, one of the chief idealist aestheticians of

Wagnerism.203 Whereas Hausegger celebrated music as an inner subjective experience and the expression of the composer’s identity, Hirschfeld looked for music to promote universal norms and unity.204 Like Hanslick, Hirschfeld measures music according to the norms of the cannon, and considers serious music a source of education that would cultivate both the individual and society through its universality:

In our muddleheaded time, where conflict and quarrel envelop life and art, and calm, concentrated work vanishes in the general vain chase for momentary success – in an age, in which men are concerned and create only for a barren egoism for its own sake, and for self interest – how one yearns for the unifying sense of quiet work, for those small circles of men or art, who work for health and light, to build and educate others; selflessly, modestly, free from the madness of vanity and self exaggeration, which is the great disease of our age.205

203 Botstein, “Music and its Public,” 1042. 204 At the same time, Hirschfeld critiqued modernists like Strauss and Mahler for lacking originality and their own expressive voice. 205 Quoted in Botstein, “Music and its Public,” 1027.

87

Like Hanslick, Hirschfeld tries to avoid overt politicization in his writings, but nonetheless considers a healthy music life necessary for a “well-ordered political and civic organism.”206

Where Hanslick’s influence is perhaps best seen in Hirschfeld’s is the repeated invocations of health in relation to musical culture. Botstein even notes the prevalence of health in Hirschfeld’s musical discourse, but does not analyze its significance or relationship to other styles.207

Where Hirschfeld differs from Hanslick is in his more populist and nationalist strains.

Hirschfeld wanted large public audiences to be exposed to the cannon. Even his program notes, with their blow by blow explanation of compositions, appealed to the musically uneducated, but attempted to integrate (ennoble) them through education, albeit a comparatively easy education.

Politically speaking, if Hanslick was the arch liberal and Helm the chief nationalist, Hirschfeld created a synthesis, much like his aesthetic merger of formalism and Wagnerism. He simultaneously emphasized the need for broad public education and critiqued excessive individualism. However, the underappreciated significance of Hirschfeld lies in his status as a forerunner of a new breed of conservative musical criticism in Vienna and Germany in the early

20th Century. Like Hirschfeld these aesthetic new conservatives of the early 20th Century reached across the aisle in a coaltition of formalists and New Germans. Even the politics of the early 20th

Century followed Hirschfeld’s model in uniting liberals and conservatives against threats from dangerous population groups. In the final chapter I discuss how the Bülow Bloc of 1907 is emblematic of this merger.

The aesthetic schism between the New Germans and the formalists had multiple political realities. It was an aesthetic power struggle between two musical interest groups. The platforms of these two groups, while ostensibly about music, had clear resonation with the political ideologies of nationalism and liberalism. By the end of the 19th Century, as if to make the aesthetic and political parallels brutally obvious, formalists were writing for liberal newspapers

206 Botstein, “Music and its Public,” 1090. 207 Botstein, “Music and its Public,” 1030.

88

and New Germans for nationalist newspapers. Right up to the 20th Century, this highly segmented framework organized musical culture and provided the immediate backdrop for modernist innovations. Until then, progressive musical culture remained divided between supporters of program and absolute music, which also functioned as a philosophical split between

Hegel (idea and consciousness) and Kant (concept and rationality), as well as a political split between nationalism and liberalism.

Conclusions

In this chapter I have outlined the aesthetics and growth of the War of the Romantics by looking at its two most influential figures: Brendel and Hanslick. At numerous levels the positions of the New Germans and formalists stand opposed to each other. They either supported program music or absolute music. They were either influenced by Hegel or Kant. They legitimated music either by expression of ideas or development of melodic concepts. They emphasized either historical development or eternal norms of beauty. Their aesthetics and affiliations were politically more sympathetic to either nationalism or liberalism. They primarily voiced their criticisms through either music journals or daily newspapers.

Despite its polemics, the War of the Romantics abounds in the irony of shared aspirations. It was ultimately a civil war of musical idealists. First of all, both sides constructed their aesthetic in opposition to earlier romanticism. It was a war between Hegelians and

Kantians, which, for all their differences, share a common transcendental split between phenomena and noumena, a trademark of German idealism inherited by musical aesthetics.208

Brendel and Hanslick employ the ideas of their chosen philosopher in an effort to create musical laws by which to judge a composition’s legitimacy. Both sides could agree on the need for a composition to proceed by necessity and logic, but differed on the organizing principle. For New

208 Although he does not paint it specifically as Hegel vs. Kant, Mark Evan Bonds similarly argues that there was an idealist common ground to both side in the War of the Romantics, but they failed to realize it within the polemics. See Bonds, 110.

89

Germans it was the extra-musical idea, for the formalists the primary musical melody. In either case – idea or melody – each provided a noumenal core for the composition. The musical expression of the composition must develop from this inner, transcendental content. In both cases there is a doubling with the composition between its noumenal core and phenomenal representation. For the New Germans this was between idea and form, for the formalists between melody and development. In both cases musical elements such as instrumentation and timbre

(color) were considered secondary and subservient to the primary content. Both sides were concerned with managing the population or state of music through the proliferation of observation, judgment, and analysis according aesthetic laws and the authority invoked as experts in that law. Both objectified music in manners similar to political philosophies of human life, creating separate categories of musical bios and musical zoe. Together, both sides in the War of the Romantics created a musical culture immersed in ever-present analysis, judgment, and the vivisecting mechanism of law.

Carl Dahlhaus has usefully characterized the music of the late 19th Century as untimely, a lingering romantic art in an unromantic age of “positivism.”209 This is only partly true. His assessment holds that cultural context changed more than musical form across the revolutionary threshold of 1848. Musical expression remained vaguely romantic in Hoffmann’s sense of emotional range and depth, using the dynamics and chromatic modulations of Beethoven,

Schubert, Weber, and Schumann. Yet, his assessment of the cultural context as “positivist” is not only vague, but the notion that late 19th-century music was detached from the intellectual currents of its time is also misleading.210 As I have demonstrated, the musical aesthetics of the late 19th

209 Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 14. 210 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 193: “Apart from a few connections extending as far afield as the world of anthropology, there was simply no such thing as a musical positivism serving as the style of the period…No small part of the music of this positivistically inclined age was considered at the time to be “neoromantic.” This fact, and the fact that neoromanticism of distinction could exist at all, seems perplexing at first, since we are at a loss to find even a single tangible parallel in this extreme case of the ‘noncontemporaneity of the contemporaneous.’” Elsewhere Dahlahus does speak of limited enclaves of musical realism in the late 19th Century, especially in , but does not see in such musical mimesis a

90

Century differed vastly from earlier in the century, but were not out of synch with academic and political trends. It might be more accurate to say that musical aesthetics during the War of the

Romantics were idealist in a scientific age, but that was not a contradiction in the German academic landscape of the mandarins.211 “Positivist” implies a rigorously inductive method of only making “positive” statements void of any trace of speculation or metaphysics. Even

Germany’s most esteemed natural scientist – Hermann von Helmholtz – could concede that aesthetic judgment lay outside the principles of physics.212 Additionally, to the degree that the age was positivist, as Dahlhaus claims, the emphases on objectivity and law in the musical aesthetics of the late 19th Century were not entirely opposed to ethos of making merely empirical, positive judgments.

Simultaneously, though, an anti-positivist, transcendental ethos of musical idealism persisted into the late 19th Century, even if altered from its earlier inspirations and forms. The

Hegelianism of the New Germans and Neo-Kantianism of the formalists differed from

Hoffmann’s invocation of Tieck and Wackenroder, but were equally idealist in its investment in surface/depth models of expression. In the case of the New Germans the expression of transcendental ideas primarily differed in terms of seeking to express the concrete rather than the

“unspeakable.” Hanslickian formalism was closer to the “positivism” of the late 19th century, which was also rooted in Neo-Kantian philosophy. Yet, whereas the Neo-Kantians like the

Marburg circle attempted to eradicate the transcendent elements of Kantian philosophy like

connection to the scientific positivism of the day. See Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 264-65. In his later writings, Dahlhaus provides a broader birth for the existence of realism in music, but this does not contradict his earlier arguments that especially German music of the late 19th Century was romantically out of step with the times. Furthermore, the fact that Strauss and Mahler figure prominently in discussions of German musical realism, suggests how they broke from the norms of neoromanticism. See Carl Dahlhaus, Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 211 On German academic culture in the late 19th Century see Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). 212 On Helmholtz’s aesthetics see Gary Hatfield, “Helmholtz and Classicism: The Science of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley: University of California Press): 522-58. On the limits of scientific methods with regard to art see especially 541-43.

91

intuition, a residue remained in Hanslick’s aesthetic philosophy. For Hanslick the melodic core of a good composition was produced by the composer’s flash of genius, and, indeed, proper musical listening, which attempted to discern that core melody and follow its development was akin to an experience of “pure” rather than “practical” reason, with transcendental implications shunned by the most rigorous Neo-Kantians.213 Logical musical listening for the formalists allowed entry into a more perfect sphere inhabited by the ingenious composer. While Hanslick would not, like

Hoffmann, name that sphere as the unnamable, his aesthetic continued like the early 19th-century aestheticians in privileging music as an unequaled avenue to transcend the earthly and sensual.

Having established the terrain of the War of the Romantics, Hanslick with Brendel should be understood to have biopoliticized musical culture, opening a huge gulf between the beginning and end of the 19th Century. Musical criticism was a form of regulating the whole of musical life, with an eye to the management of well-being – even health – of the public. Brendel and more so

Hanslick allowed art music to address the whole population structurally through daily newspapers and stylistically through the mode of cultural criticism. The individual participants in art music were largely urban elites, but the proliferation of a mass reading sphere allowed everyone to have accesses to developments and debates in high culture. By the end of the 19th Century, every people group, from artisan to aristocrat, peasant to proletariat, had their own newspaper, with feuilletons on the latest important concerts. Even the socialist newspapers, which targeted an audience that by and large did not attend major art music concerts, provided detailed reviews for their readers.214 It is not a matter of whether everyone actually read them, but that structurally, everyone could read them and that they were addressed to the whole population. Critics had the whole population in mind when gauging musical significance. Consequently, the diagnosis of the

213 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 32: “Through this deep-seated, mysterious power, into the workings of which the human eye will never penetrate, there resounds in the mind of the composer a theme, a motive. We cannot trace this first seed back to its origins; we have to accept it simply as given.” 214 Vorwärts, the leading daily for the social democrats in Germany, started carrying more feuilletons in the spring of 1895. In Vienna, the Arbeiter Zeitung carried reviews by notable critics such as Joseph Scheu and David Jospeh Bach, the later a major proponent of cultural education for the working class.

92

health of musical life, especially in Hanslick, was simultaneously a diagnosis of the life of the human population.

But the biopoliticization of music is not just a concern with musical populations as preexisting entities to be analyzed, it is the creation of populations and aim to direct and enhance their biological well-being. Musical criticism in general is productive, producing meanings for music. With this revolution in musical criticism the significance attributed to a single composition or concert tended to place it within an entire horizon of musical life, producing significance for the whole as well. A review often functioned as a medical checkup for the whole of musical culture, including the various groups of individuals present (composers, conductors, performers, audiences, and subgroups within the audiences) and the state of composition.215 And the professional, physician-like gaze of the critic dissected these life-like entities, measured them against a created norm, produced their medical diagnosis or subjectivity, and offered directives from supposed experts for betterment of their health. This infusion of discipline into the biopolitical horizon further entails a level of surveillance. The ever presence of critics and their voluminous publications ensured that the subjects of musical life were under constant and sometimes anonymous scrutiny. Knowing that they could be being watched, composers, conductors, performers, and audiences were encouraged to internalize the norms of musical culture.

Through the discursive powers of aesthetic law and health, critics in the war of the romantics were able to create classify types of musical life. Both New Germans and formalists articulated ideal musical compositions using parallels with the human subject. In both cases a successful composition held the unruly potential of musical expression and subjectivity – the raw musical elements – in check through its law-abiding, rational inner core. The quasi-naturalist component of music was discursively cleaved off from the mind of the composition, only to be

215 Even if it was an older piece performed, rather than a new one, the older piece could still serve as something with which to measure present accomplishment.

93

reintegrated under its control. Should the doubled components of music not be brought back together through the same law that separated them, the music was judged immature or worse unmusical, a form of musical zoe, unworthy of life. If for Brendel, lawless music was merely ahistorical, for Hanslick it was abnormal and a dangerous threat to the state of music. If for

Brendel the rational component of music functioned as an evolutionary addition, for Hanslick the logic of musical concepts functioned as a bulwark against an ever-present danger of the throbbing sensuality of music. Hanslickian musical concepts were a standing security force. With

Hanslick’s embodied musical discourse and the constant invocation of health, his conception of the dangers of musical deviance function as a major biopoliticization of musical culture.

Furthermore, it was just such a paradigm of normalization that made possible the species of musical modernism. Under the constant surveillance of a managing musical culture, musical qualities – even its lawless deviance – became multiplied and made known. Only under the pressures of such a musical discourse with clear laws could musical forms attain the distinction of heresy. Indeed, while New German music was not modernist within its own musical discourse and even within the context of established romantic forms, it was often made to function as modernist under the gaze of formalist analysis. In this way, for all his lack of modernism,

Wagner’s music itself could function as modernist in certain circles. However, the truth is that his music was lawful within the right musical jurisdiction. Additionally, it remained idealist, wedding Hoffmann’s conception of romanticism with Brendel’s historicist .

Yet, as the War of the Romantics spread, especially Hanslick’s normalizing, medicalized aesthetic discourse, the possibility of modernism also spread. Indeed modernism emerged as a byproduct of stricter aesthetic regulation and management.

CHAPTER TWO Musical Lawlessness:

94

Strauss’s Don Juan, Mahler’s First Symphony, and the Critique of Musical Idealism

When concert-goers entered the Musikverein for the Viennese premiere of Gustav

Mahler’s First Symphony they experienced a pair of surprises. First, ushers handed out the concert program for free, rather than charging the traditional 30 Heller. However, the real surprise lay inside the program – a notice that Mahler had forbidden Robert Hirschfeld to publish his usual “technical analysis” for the philharmonic public.216 Scandalously denied a guide to melodic development, critics found themselves unable to make sense of the composition. In their harsh reviews critics declared that the work was neither a proper symphony nor a symphonic poem. By this time, 1900, Mahler had already ceased to supply a literary program for performances of this work. Without either “program” – a score overview or a poetic narrative –

Mahler’s First Symphony was considered unintelligible and unmusical. It lacked the de facto legal documents that might verify the innovative composition’s legitimacy in the opinion of supporters of program and absolute music alike. Mahler’s stubborn disavowal of concert norms was indicative of modernism’s challenge to the aesthetic principles of the War of the Romantics, a challenge initiated a decade early with the premieres of Strauss’s Don Juan.

In the 1890s Strauss and Mahler established themselves as the leading musical iconoclasts, a “secession” from tradition in the vein of other fin de siècle modernisms in Central

Europe.217 Despite palpable differences between Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First

Symphony, the similarities are striking. Both compositions vaulted their composers to notoriety through performances at Weimar (1889 and 1894). Both vacillate between the genres of

216 See Josef Scheu, “Feuilleton: Musik” Arbeiter Zeitung no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1-2; h-m, “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung (20 November 1900): 12-13. 217 Musicologists and historians alike have noted the parallels between Mahler, Strauss, and secessionist artistic movements. See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Leon Botstein, Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914 (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1985); Carl E. Schorske, Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1998).

95

symphony and symphonic poem, an important indicator of their lawlessness. Both compositions received similar critiques from initial reviewers. They were considered thematically composite, scored with unnecessary timbre, unreconciling in their finales, excessively affective, plagiaristic, banal, and wrought with caricature. Each of these qualities was viewed as a violation of musical logic and therefore law. Critics who had previously disagreed on the lawfulness of compositions by Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner – at base an argument over the terms of musical law – were of one opinion in condemning the lawlessness of Strauss and Mahler.

In defiance of late 19th-century aesthetics, which objectified musical expression as the tamed possession of a composition’s inner logic, the lawlessness of Strauss’s Don Juan and

Mahler’s First Symphony also functioned as an emancipation of musical elements. Borrowing the term “musical elements” from Hanslick, I refer to the separate building blocks of a composition – melodies, orchestration, modulation, etc. – before they have been formed into a coherent composition wherein these elements represent something beyond their sonic immediacy.

In these compositions, by Strauss and Mahler music does not represent anything but itself, a goal explicitly pursued by Mahler in Vienna when he controversially disallowed any guidebook. That music had become extra-sonic through idealist discourse is made evident by the programs adored by Viennese audiences. Yet these works only appeared lawless, abnormal, and elemental within the established discourse. Without the aesthetic principles of warring late Romantics, the rhetoric of lawless, abnormal music is not possible. The fault-finding methods and rhetoric of critics served to create modernism as the unforeseen byproduct of such regulation.

I begin this chapter by demonstrating the coherency of critical reactions to Strauss’s Don

Juan across party lines. Even the most supportive critics heard the composition to violate the competing parameters of musical logic. In the next two sections I examine the discourse around

Mahler’s First Symphony, first as Titan in Weimar and then as a symphony in several major cities.

I show how the view of Mahler’s work as violating eight specific aesthetic principles remained consistent and I particularly emphasize the role of a Hanslickian critic, Ernst Otto Nodnagel, in

96

establishing the discourse about Mahler’s music as abnormal. In the fourth and final section, I argue that the lawlessness of these compositions enacted an emancipation of musical elements from the confines of late romantic aesthetics. Historically speaking this emancipation made possible future modernist innovations. In this regard I dialogue with the notions of

“molecularization” and “becoming” employed by Deleuze and Guattari in both musical and extra- musical contexts. In sum, Strauss and Mahler not only critiqued the aesthetics of the war of the romantics, but also the political values of each camp, namely liberalism and nationalism.

Strauss’s Don Juan

Don Juan premiered in Weimar on November 11, 1889 in the second subscription concert of Strauss’s first season as the court conductor. By all accounts the performance was a “great and deserved success,” and firmly established Strauss’s reputation as an “eminent talent.”218 As a subscription concert in provincial Weimar, it did not get reviewed by major metropolitan critics or dailies, rather only by anonymous correspondents for music periodicals. The journal reviews of

Don Juan’s premiere in Weimar were largely glowing and without the discipline, biopolitics, or polemics of the War of the Romantics. Unlike later reviewers in Dresden, Berlin, and Vienna, the

Weimar correspondents showered the composition with clichés and approval. After performances of compositions by Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow at the first subscription concert, Strauss’s

Don Juan was tacitly accepted in Weimar as a welcomed extension of the New German tradition.

As an example of the unspectacular, report-like reviews of Don Juan’s premiere in

Weimar, an anonymous critic for the Musikalische Wochenblatt writes,

Inspired by Nicolaus Lenau’s poem, the latter work [Don Juan] notably aroused keen interest and gave the composer a triple curtain call, which was even quite an earful, as the work puts very unusual requirements, not only on the orchestra, but also on the comprehension of the listener. The themes are almost always charming, original and especially of great rhythmic conciseness. The triumphant theme of the hero, which is repeatedly opposed by a diversely contrasting female character, rises more and more in bright orchestral color with wonderful energy, which then follows at the conclusion a collapse in fatal exhaustion. The

218 Anonymous, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 16 (1889): 490; Anonymous, Neue Musik-Zeitung 10, no. 23 (1889): 289.

97

enormous difficulties of the performance were overcome by the successful orchestra under Strauss’s spirited in the most brilliant manner, so that the effect was just brilliant.219

The review concluded by naming the more notable soloists and performers, which only reinforces the matter-of-fact quality the review, still common in much German musical criticism circa 1889.

This review states what was performed, the composition’s value qualities, who conducted, who played, and the audience’s general reaction without really dissecting the work. While this account does provide foreshadowing of the major issues with Strauss – technical difficulty, orchestral color, taxing listening requirements – it does not engange with the aesthetic politics of the day. In terms of analyzing the composition itself, the review simply notes the juxtaposition of themes, dubbed male and female, and the collapse of this tension. The archetypal quality of this thematic narrative seems acceptable for program and absolute music lovers alike, hardly even engaging the War of the Romantics. The unique acceptance by the Weimar critics highlights my assertion that it took critics in the mold of Brendel and Hanslick to make music modernist. In

Weimar Don Juan was safely New German; in major cities it was dangerously modern. It was not until performances in Dresden, Berlin and Vienna that the discourse developed, portraying

Strauss’s Don Juan as superficial and unmusical.

In early 1890, Don Juan was performed in Dresden and Berlin, though it took another two years – January 10, 1892 – before it came to Vienna. During the fin de siècle it was not atypical for the Viennese to hear radical music well after other major Central European cities.

The city’s notoriously traditional musical taste and watchdog critics dissuaded composers from having new works performed in Vienna too soon. No major work of new music was premiered in

Vienna until Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in 1912, after Mahler was safely dead.220 By comparison,

Strauss was far more successful than Mahler in getting his works performed in Vienna, which

219 Anonymous, “Weimar,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 20, no. 48 (21 November 1889): 577. 220 One might call Schoenberg’s chamber pieces “major,” but prior to 1910 he was hardly known outside Vienna. These premieres were not major events in the broader musical landscape.

98

only first heard a Mahler symphony in 1899, well after other major cities and only after he had become director of the Vienna Hofoper. Strauss also had little reservation about offending the

Viennese audience. As Theodor Helm pointed out in his review, Strauss could have placated the

Viennese audience with his Symphony or even Aus Italien, but rather decided to make his big

Viennese entrance with Don Juan.221 In each of these cities – Dresden, Berlin, Vienna – Don Juan was similarly heard as ornamental, immoral, and unmusical.

In Dresden an anonymous reviewer for the Dresdener Journal wrote what was perhaps the first major indictment of Strauss. The reviewer begins by criticizing Strauss for deviating from the “simple, natural means” of classical and romantic expression by using “complicated means,” “a whole storm of sound effects,” and “very cumbersomely conceived and clever tone combinations.”222 As a proper Hanslickian, the reviewer for the Dresdener Journal gives no legitimate ground to program music, describing it as “long rejected as inartistic” and “foreign to the essence of instrumental music.”223 Even though the critic did not listen to the music as an expression of the story of Don Juan, he nonetheless, like other formalists, expressed relief that the protagonist is ennobled by the realization that his philandering has “natural” limits. Primarily, the reviewer attempts to analyse the composition formally:

If we disregard the descriptive addition of words – the view provided by the composition as a tone painting – within its formless frame a number of sometimes witty, sometimes contrived and banal instrumental ideas line up together in just the fiery Allegro, a Bacchanal and in the coda (if we may apply this terminology, associated with musical logic, over-flowing in structure of the work itself). In terms of originality, the eminent skill of the author is in instrumentation, which is to some extent very melodiously worked out, but as a whole can be considered as not possessing strong purpose and clear creative ability. It demands both the idealist critique and the principle requirements of the specifics of aesthetic beauty, harmony in form and content.224

Despite some back-handed compliments about skill and wit, this critic finds Strauss’s balance of

221 Theodor Helm, “Concerte,” Deutsche Zeitung (12 January 1892): 1. 222 Anonymous, “Feuilleton,” Dresdner Journal, evening edition (11 January 1890), 1. 223 Anonymous, “Feuilleton,” Dresdner Journal, evening edition (11 January 1890), 1. 224 Anonymous, “Feuilleton,” Dresdner Journal, evening edition (11 January 1890), 1.

99

form and content – surface and depth – vastly disproportionate according to the ideals of aesthetic law. He even uses a food metaphor, calling it a “tantalizing, tasty shell of dyed glaze” around a

“small kernel of modest content.” The instrumental “ideas,” that is the edifying content, are found

“banal,” disingenuous, and assembled. The critic is even quite explicit that Strauss disregards the idealist principles of beauty, an invocation of the philosophy and lawfulness that bolstered late romantic aesthetics.

After Don Juan’s next premiere in Berlin, only the most culture-focused of the daily papers published feuilletons of the concert: the liberal Berliner Börsen Zeitung and Berliner

Tageblatt (hereafter BBZ and BT). Although these Berlin reviews were not as polemic as those in

Vienna, they were far more professional and modern than the German journal reviews. Oscar

Eichberg writes in the BBZ:

The Straussian orchestral work is not without dramatic marrow and not without charming melodic individual traits. It interests further through its externally clever, indeed sometimes even refined, roaming instrumentation, but it lacks the actual escalation and unity of character. It is mosaic work and basically as drowned in color [zerfarben] as Lenau's poem itself...In the aftermath the novelty remains well appreciated for its many externally dazzling details, not without effect on the public, which indeed afterwards seemed a far more unmixed pleasure compared to the easily-loved E major Symphony (no. 3) of old Papa Haydn.225

Eichberg’s own aesthetics were probably closer to Hirschfeld than Hanslick, but like Hirschfeld, he displays in his criticism the discourse of the most virulent formalists. The primary fault, indeed the essentialized “defect” Eichberg attributes to Don Juan is its mosaic quality, a series of departures, broken phrases, poor transitions, and disunities. He writes about a lack of “proper melodic flow, and right in the middle of the whole thing we find a series of broken phrases and incomprehensible apostrophes from which no new idea even wants to develop.”226 Furthermore,

Eichberg suspects that, lacking formal content that could be the foci of interest, Strauss substitutes superficialities – externally clever instrumentation and an overdose of color

225 Ch. Berliner Börsen Zeitung, no. 53, II. Evening supplement (1 February 1890): 1. 226 Ch. Berliner Börsen Zeitung, no. 53, II. Evening supplement (1 February 1890): 1.

100

[zerfarben]. This critique of overcompensation – the old Hanslickian critique of Wagner – recurs over and over again in reviews of Strauss and Mahler.227 Eichberg even ends his review with a very Hanslickian concern for the audience, apparently disturbed by their partial pleasure in

Strauss, but assured that the accompanying performance of Haydn – proper canonized music – reminded listeners of real pleasure.

The review in the BT by leading Berlin critic Heinrich Ehrlich is more even-handed, but very much echoes Eichberg’s assessment.228 Ehrlich begins his review by asserting that he is not going to address the question of program music – in other words engage the War of the

Romantics – but in an underhanded way he does this anyway by concluding with his own definition of program music. In his review of Don Juan, here is how Ehrlich describes the music:

It starts with a very pithy theme, from which follows a small characteristic phrase of the basses and then a dramatic chromatic passage of winds with a counter movement of the strings. Then the movement moves into an Andante, featuring beautiful tone colors. A contrapuntal melodic movement of the horns accompanies beautifully, only stretched out too far and overloaded. It requires the most attentive, trained ears in order to rightly find oneself between the excess of instrumentation. Another place begins very beautifully in which the oboes lead the melody. Then further comes a contrapuntally worked interlude, finally a very interesting conclusion.229

After this very journalistic description of the composition, in which he criticizes instrumental excess for confounding the average listener, he advises Strauss to write “true program music.”

Ehrlich argues that all music can be program music, in that it conjures up associative representations for listeners, but it must first be properly organized in order to do this successfully. Ehrlich encourages Strauss to abandon lyrical programs, write with tighter organization, and score with more “economy” of instrumentation. Ehrlich’s sense of instrumental economy aims for a maximization of musical content through a minimum of sound: instrumentation should be at the behest of the content, and not “overload it.” Such a discourse

227 Max Muntz even mentions that this critique is a cliché. See Max Muntz, “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 2. 228 On Ehrlich see Graf, Composer and Critic, 262. 229 H. E., “Untitled,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 59, first supplement (2 February 1890): 2.

101

borrow from Hanslick’s fear about the beastly body of music hindering its rational mind.

At the Viennese premiere of Don Juan, Strauss did not have the Lenau stanzas printed in the program, perhaps deferring to the Hanslickian antipathy for program music. Yet, critics like

Hanslick, because of their affinity for studying scores and invoking academic authority, saw through the ruse. Hanslick begins his review in the NFP by noting the Lenau stanzas quoted in the score and bemoaning the popularity of tone painting and poetry among young composers.

Generally speaking, Hanslick echoes the conclusions of his fellow German liberals and formalists about Strauss’s Don Juan: superficial instrumentation, morally vulgar poetic content, intoxicating intent that is “repulsive” to the musically educated. In short, “Color is everything, musical thought nothing.”230 Hanslick notes that with Strauss the urge for “virtuosic orchestration” is historically heightened and even more of a “vampiric” drain on creative power. He concludes that “this is no ‘tone painting’ but rather a tumult of brilliant daubs, a faltering tonal orgy, half bacchanal, half witches’ sabbath,” and that “Strauss, moreover, translate[s] badly, unintelligibly, tastelessly, with exaggeration.”231 As with most critics, Hanslick resolutely asserts that Don Juan fails to translate program into music and is therefore not even good program music. Hanslick goes on to criticize the composition’s “false licentiousness,” a dig at both the immoral eroticism of the narrative and Strauss’s own mode of sensual musical presentation. As with his reviews of the New German School, Hanslick expresses anxiety about audience intoxication, but using more pointed metaphors, famously calling Strauss “a routined chemist who well understands how to mix all the elements of a musical-sensual stimulation to produce a stupefying ‘pleasure gas’.”

Here Hanslick establishes the now well-worn perspective of Strauss as the cynical and unhealthy craftsman who titillates and manipulates his audience.

The formalist journal, the NMZ, published several critiques of Don Juan. The first was a diplomatic review of the Dresden concert, the second an essay, the genre most germane to

230 Hanslick, Criticisms, 291. For the original see Ed. H., Neue Freie Presse (12 January 1892): 1-2. 231 Hanslick, Criticisms, 292.

102

journals.232 Bernhard Vogel’s article “German Composers of the Present: Richard Strauss” best sums up the formalist critique of Strauss’s Don Juan. Like much of the early discourse about

Strauss, it addressed his already notorious shifts in compositional styles from early chamber and absolute music to orchestral tone poems. While recognizing and even satirizing the innovative aesthetic aims of Don Juan, he dismisses the result as ultimately superficial. He writes:

“Coloring is the Alpha and Omega of his artistic thoughts and feelings; to contend with [Hans]

Makart, who as a painter composed symphonies of color, and to devise only sound combinations, which in intoxicating splendor feature exuberant color on the outside, is his main ambition.”233

Hans Makart, one of the many painters with whom Strauss would be compared, was a Viennese painter and architect whose style of lavish ornamentation became synonymous with the

Ringstrasse in the 1870s. Vogel suspected that Strauss’s primary aim was to create intoxicating sound effects, with any ideas relegated to “side issues.” In Germany, Strauss was Viennese. Not only did Vogel chastises Strauss for focusing on the surface, but also for lacking compositional self-control, evident in the apparent integration of random musical ideas, without care for how they mesh, and then failing to adequately or clearly develop the ideas. However, it is noteworthy that Vogel does not, like later critics, overtly link Strauss’s superficiality, sensuality, disunity, and boldness with larger social developments. Like most 19th-century liberals, Vogel maintained a separation of spheres and the autonomy of music.

Given Don Juan’s New German generic heritage, it is not surprising that liberal and formalist critics rejected Strauss as many of them had Liszt, Wagner, and Bruckner. The historical rupture with Don Juan comes in the specificity of the formalist critique and its similarity to the New German critique of the same composition. The accusations of superficiality in Wagner were lodged quite generally at his zest for bombastic orchestral effects and sensual

232 J. J., “Berlin,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 11 (1890): 123. 233 Bernhard Vogel, “Deutsche Komponisten der Gegenwart: Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 12 (1891): 78.

103

affect. In the criticisms of Don Juan, and even more so Strauss’s later works, the music’s superficiality is specifically linked to impersonal melodies and saturation of color – unnecessary instrumentation and timbre. The liberal and formalist press might have been quick to lump Don

Juan in with the New Germans, but, as I will demonstrate, the New German critics had similar problems with the work’s balance of form and content. In actuality, neither school in the War of the Romantics found the composition to be properly musical, because it lacked the legitimating unity of either logical development or logical expression of a poetic idea. For perhaps the first time, but hardly the last, Strauss’s artwork brought together the two sides of the War of the

Romantics to combat the common enemy of unmusical music.

Otto Lessmann, editor of the AM-Z, was initially a Strauss supporter. However, his defense of Strauss was always highly qualified and based more on a principled support of innovation than on the actual music of Strauss. In a review of the Berlin premiere of Don Juan,

Lessmann inverts many of the formalist conclusions about the aesthetic trajectory of Strauss’s young career. In Lessmann’s view, it is a praiseworthy quality that Strauss,

this hot head runs against the narrow bounds of traditional forms, which he in his ‘Don Juan’ has also skipped over to set forth around himself his own ‘rules’ of poetic criticism…In order to reproduce the poetic content of Lenau’s poem, Strauss had to create his own form, which with regard to the idea is itself not less logically developed than a symphonic movement.234

In a textbook Brendelian defense of New German music, Lessmann actually asserts that Don

Juan’s form is both “logical” and legitimate according to its expression of “the idea.” He praises

Strauss’s expressive capabilities, and explicitly his ability to “translate” Lenau’s poem into a

“tonal language.” Lessmann’s view of Strauss as a successful translator stands apart from other interpretations. Perhaps this is because Lessmann says little about the composition itself, but rather uses the concert review as an opportunity to defend program music, with Don Juan serving as an example. In fact, the only thing of substance he says about the music is partially critical:

234 Otto Lessmann, Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 17 (1890): 68-69.

104

... in the second half of [Don Juan] the imagination of the composer appears to go a bit wide. That by my own sense of orchestration some overly noisy timbre also could have been scored a little more mildly, I do not want to conceal; nevertheless, I take the healthy and unique creative force, which energized the work, as it is and rejoice in it with every high degree of admiration, which genius may require for itself.235

For all his general praise, Lessmann detects excess in the second half and in the orchestration.

Lessmann’s support of Strauss here and elsewhere was always diluted by concerns and remained founded on his own aesthetic tenants rather than on Strauss’s actual music. Notably, Lessmann juxtaposes the unruly surface of Don Juan with its “healthy” and “creative” inner force, a depth of legitimation which redeems the work, but does not justify its less than perfect externalities.

Lessmann’s own analysis of Strauss’s timbre and color as overflowing the necessity of the poetic content would increasingly be invoked by New German critics, first of all in Vienna two years later.

Perhaps the most striking fact of Don Juan’s Viennese premiere, was the way prominent

Viennese Wagnerians – both moderate and radical – rejected the composition. Hirschfeld, as a correspondent for the Neue Musik Zeitung, is comparatively mild in his criticism:

The symphonic poem "Don Juan" by Richard Strauss experienced in the 5th Philharmonic concert a wonderful performance, but found at the very least a cold reception. Generally the coloring of the composition was admired, but the design of the thematic content itself could not be warmed [erwärmen]. Whether Strauss along with his unprecedented orchestral technique possesses innate talent, innate sensation, cannot be said from this piece. He speaks in a foreign language. Each little piece of melody is borrowed from the treasuries of R. Wagner and Liszt. Straussian is nowhere to be found.236

In short, he found Don Juan communicatively unclear and derivative. Perhaps, in saying that

“thematic content could not be warmed” he means the lack of expressive clarity could not bring the ideas of the program to life musically. While one might think that Hirschfeld would be delighted to have new Wagnerian music in Vienna, he is not, because for him, as mentioned in chapter one, music must be an extension of the composer’s personality. He championed art music

235 Lessmann, AMZ 17 (1890): 68-69. 236 R. H., “Wien,” Neue Musik Zeitung 13, no. 3 (1892): 31.

105

as the cultivation of the self and preservation of individual autonomy. In fact, Hirschfeld would never become as supporter of Strauss, who he viewed as lacking a genuine style of his own, manipulating musical material as a detached craftsman. Indeed it is not until Rosenkavalier in

1911 that critics generally considered Strauss to have found his own voice.

Theodor Helm – the proponent of German nationalism, Wagner, and Bruckner – was even more damning in his critique of Don Juan. Like Vogel, he begins with a lengthy account of

Strauss’s life that focuses on the conversion to program music. However, rather than emplotting it with tragedy or hope of new things to come, he largely seems to revel in the irony. Given that

Strauss:

…had been brought up in the fundamental hatred of that artistic triumvirate [Berlioz-Liszt-Wagner]...It was all the more surprising, when suddenly reported, Richard Strauss swore off his old gods and had gone over with the whole kit and caboodle to the camp of the program musicians.237

Yet, this defection is not a cause for celebration as Helm is even more critical of Don Juan than

Hirschfeld. Helm similarly assesses Strauss’s musical expression as unoriginal and disingenuous, especially compared to the “unbridled sensuality” of Wagner and the “bacchanal love of life” in

Berlioz. The only thing that Helm can find “worthy of admiration” are the color combinations, boldness, and confidence, leftover compliments than even Hanslick could muster. In fact, the reviews of Hirschfeld and Helm not only contradict the claims of Lessmann and his AM-Z correspondent, but are far more similar to the formalists Vogel and Hanslick. Like Vogel, Helm compares Strauss to : “Strauss' ‘Don Juan’ is a coloristic masterpiece, a musical

Makart of first rank, but no more.”238 Like Hanslick, Helm even compares Strauss to Jean Paul

Nicodé’s tone poem, The Sea, in their failure to illustrate: “Even after the so far necessary rehearsals, we could discover in neither the one nor the other of the both excellent musical colorists the capacity for independent melodic invention, for really unique tonal language.”239

237 Helm, “Concerte,” DZ (12 January 1892): 1. 238 Helm, “Concerte,” DZ (12 January 1892): 1. 239 Helm, “Concerte,” DZ (12 January 1892): 1.

106

Strauss’s Don Juan was considered by all serious critics to be, at best, ornamental sound effects that lacked the logic of either poetic translation or melodic development. At worst it was disingenuous and unhealthy noise.

Strauss’s Don Juan, especially its Viennese premiere, foreshadowed the end of the War of the Romantics by bringing together both romantic camps against new music. The fact that

Strauss’s compositional career emerged from within the institutions, aesthetic forms, and expressive ethos of the New German School should not obscure the fact that Don Juan broke the mold. A faction of the New German School did fully support Strauss and his deviations, but a wholesale acceptance of Strauss by the leading Wagnerians did not occur. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency by scholars to portray Strauss as a logical extension of Liszt and Wagner. For instance Sandra McColl expresses surprise that some Viennese Wagnerian’s disapproved of

Strauss’s Zarathustra in 1897, despite the fact that they had heaped even worse scorn on Don

Juan five years earlier.240 According to the critics of his day, Strauss’s Don Juan deviated from the expectations and musical regulations of both aesthetic camps.

A foundational reason for the widespread opposition to Don Juan was its ambiguity with regard to genre. Although the first reviewers of Don Juan took it for a New German tone poem, all except for Lessmann claimed it lacked form, even for a tone poem. However, within a decade, critics sympathetic to new music such as Gustav Brecher, Richard Specht, and Ernst Otto

Nodnagel argued that Don Juan could be read as having traditional form, though they disagreed on whether it was in sonata or rondo form, a debate which has not abated.241 So which is it? Tone poem? Sonata? Rondo? It seems prudent to argue that Don Juan integrates aspects all three. To echo the perspective of James Hepokoski, Don Juan is in dialogue with forms, a dialogue I argue

240 McColl, 136-142. 241 The formal categorization of Don Juan has continued to be unclear with musicologists Norman Del Mar and Michael Kennedy further arguing for sonata form, a position further challenged by recent scholars. See James Hepokowski, “Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and his Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992): 135-175.

107

that initially puzzled critics. Furthermore, in obfuscating the aesthetic and genre divide of the

War of the Romantics between symphony and symphonic poem, Don Juan begins to deterritorialize the musical landscape. Just as the musical idealists critiqued the experience of listening to Don Juan, Don Juan’s form critiqued musical idealism.

Structurally Don Juan appears divided into four sections, bracketed by a definitive introduction and coda. Given the programmatic setting, these sections could easily be episodes in

Lenau’s poem, and lend themselves superficially to an interpretation of the composition as a tone poem. In terms of mere musical form, such an interpretation also favors the rondo reading, as each section contains the main themes of the introduction, along with its own distinct themes.

However, since the final “episode” does not really introduce any new themes, this could also be read as the recapitulation of a sonata form, with episodes two and three functioning as a long development section. Yet, there are also problems with this view, given the failure of many of the themes of section three to be integrated in the end, which also miserably fails to reconcile the remaining melodies. One could say that Strauss winks at traditional forms, offering a neatly organized composition, but pulls of short of abiding by any specific form. Don Juan demonstrates an awareness of music laws, but not a willingness to obey them.

What remains less clear is how the music relates to the Lenau stanzas, especially because there are four musical sections and three poetic stanzas. From the perspective of program music, the first two sections of Strauss’s Don Juan seem to be blatant narratives of the protagonist’s amorous conquests. In a very abstract sense they could correspond to the first two Lenau stanzas, which describe the adventures and character of Don Juan, though do not offer a specific two episode narrative. Nonetheless, the semblance of adherence to or “translation” of the program provides some evidence that it is a symphonic or tone poem. The real incongruities begin, then, in the second half of the composition. One possible solution is to combine sections two and three

– the development sections according to the “sonata” interpretation – as representing the longer middle stanza of the program. Even then, the last section of Strauss’s Don Juan hardly

108

corresponds to Lenau’s last stanza. In fact they are at odds.

Aside from the coda, the last half of Don Juan in no way represents the last stanza of

Lenau, in which a dying, disillusioned Don Juan repents for mocking “higher” things and dies in an aura of nihilism. In fact, musically Don Juan’s mood seems rather the opposite, more content than ever in his base life style until the coda. In the midst of the raging, the “masculine” brass descends against the backdrop of “feminine,” amorous strings and then breaks off in stark silence to be followed by a few bars of barely audible, muted brass. As was the opinion of the Berlin correspondent242 for the NMZ this coda does seem to relate to Lenau’s final stanza:

It was a beautiful storm that drove me, It raged, and remained silent. Seemingly dead are all wishes, all hopes; Perhaps a bolt from the heights, which I despised, Has mortally struck my power of love, And suddenly the world was for me desolate, deranged; Maybe not; - the fuel is consumed, And cold and dark was the stove.

After a climactic, frolicking “tangent” that seems to comprise half the piece, Strauss’s music gets back to the poetic content at hand. The sonic explosion of the second half seems to occur between stanzas two and three and has little to do with the poetic program. Even when the music finally returns to Lenau at the end, it is rushed and unconvincing. He quickly kills off Don Juan – presumably through a duel with Diego, son of the patrician – but spares him Lenau’s death-bed soliloquy. Musically, the few measures of muted brass hardly seem to be a despondent philosophizing about the emptiness of Don Juan’s pursuits. Until the very end the music pursues renewed expansion and expression. Strauss rather gags Don Juan. Musically Strauss does not make a dying Don Juan recite the repentant and nihilistic platitudes of Lenau as Strauss would do in his next two works. He makes the convalescent in Tod und Verklärung proclaim Wagnerian redemption and reconciliation, and the mouthpiece of Schopenhauerian resignation.

However, here, without ceremony, he kills Don Juan, only to have similar rogue-like music and

242 J. J., NMZ 11 (1890): 123.

109

characters reincarnate a few years later as Till Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, , the Hero, and Kunrad, in a new stylistic turn. While Strauss seems to have initially chosen the work to dramatically highlight the death of Don Juan – after seeing a stage play of the narrative – as it stands the composition seems to enact his life and barely dramatizes his death. In short, the music does not directly express its literary program.

It is in the second half of Don Juan that the composition departs from New German aesthetics. It does this first by creating a dialogue between literary text and musical forms, rather than resigning music to the assisting task of expressing a poetic idea. Additionally, it is in the second half that the musical motifs become most fragmented, the timbre most abrasive, and the idioms most diverse. With a horn call that divides the piece in half, not unlike the opening of

Mahler’s Third Symphony, Don Juan moves into new territory. The tone poem abandons the cycle of polite courtship, melodramatic union, and dissatisfied disintegration and enters new phases with more humor, crude instrumentation, and resolve that lack the earlier dominance of

Tristan-like strings and unresolving undulation. There is not even the appearance of redemption through love. The staggering difference is first evident with the so-called “carnival scene” of the third section, which seems to affirm Don Juan’s love of life and broadened it beyond the transcendence of the eternal feminine. Don Juan leaves behind his role as mere seducer, as

Strauss’s music leaves behind the seduction of romanticism. The ever-striving of Don Juan wants to find something new, something beyond Wagnerism. That the music should seem to take off just as it departs from the literary text is a fitting condemnation of the strictures of New German aesthetics.

This divergence between the two halves was not lost on critics. Eichberg seems to be hinting at it when he writes:

After an outwardly lively, similarly strongly sensual introduction, which in its instrumentation, as in its total musical character, is reminiscent of the Venusberg scene in Tannhäuser, the composer departs immediately from the subject matter, no longer coming to a proper melodic flow, and right in the middle of the whole thing we find a series of broken phrases and incomprehensible apostrophes from

110

which also no new idea wants to develop.243

It is after the Wagner-esque loves scenes that music abandons its subject and splits into

“incomprehensible apostrophes” and numerous tributaries. Similarly Lessmann, an early supporter of Strauss, says that the instrumentation goes too far in the second half.244 Perhaps even the conflicting opinions between Eichberg and Helm as to whether or not it was reminiscent of Wagner’s Venusburg scene stems from the two halves of Don Juan. The first half and the first two episodes are very Wagnerian, even to the point of quoting . But when

Helm writes about the unbridled sensuality as un-Wagnerian, perhaps that is because Strauss does not really pull out all the stops until the second half. What is unbridled in Don Juan is not the sexuality, but the second half, the introduction of new themes, and a swelling that gobbles up available musical elements, without necessarily tying up all the loose ends. Hanslick describes it as “a faltering tonal orgy, half bacchanal, half witches’ sabbath.”245 It has a sexual element, but is also just plain deviant in mixing together humor and hallowed ground, crude brassy timbres with the symphonic grandeur of form and size. Helm finds the strangest part to be the quite audible glockenspiel paired with the highest violin notes, which he assumes is a reference to a humorous incident in which a clock chimes in a monastery, a scene not in Strauss’s “official” three Lenau stanzas. Although there is no reason to believe that Strauss intended such an allusion, the fact that the music created such an association for Helm suggests how Strauss’s Don Juan desacralizes and revels in humor in a manner different than both Lenau’s poem and New German aesthetics.

As the composition’s program, the libertine character of Don Juan is a fitting choice for a work that musically breaks free from established aesthetic constraints. Don Juan is a rogue who violates both moral codes and legal statues. From the perspective of the late 19th Century his desires are not only immoral, but abnormal, whose sexuality is deviant and even perverse. The

243 Ch, BBZ (1 February 1890): 1. 244 Otto Lessmann, Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 17 (1890): 69. 245 Hanslick, Criticisms, 292.

111

formalist reviewers of Don Juan betray their liberal sensibilities and anxieties in consistently emphasizing Don Juan’s unnatural character, which must, according to nature, lead to dissolution and death. But Strauss’s Don Juan is as much a musical story as an expression of Lenau’s poem, especially considering its inconsistent and inaccurate translation as feigned program music.

Indeed, one could just as easily say that the Don Juan saga is an imperfect literary interpretation of a musical phenomenon. As a fictional character of unmediated, unbounded desire, Don Juan approximates music’s ability in Strauss’s Don Juan to follow its expressive desires, regardless of established aesthetic boundaries.

Strauss’s Don Juan has been frequently cited as a beginning of musical modernism, or at least an early phase. Dahlhaus, in his cursory analysis of Don Juan, suggests that a vague spirit of secession inhabits the composition, especially the vitalism of the opening theme, a supposed expression of Don Juan’s insatiable desire.246 However, such a metonymic pronouncement misses the circumscription of this initial eroticism within New German strictures, which are only exploded in the composition’s colorful second half. It also remains unclear what Strauss is breaking away from in Dahlhaus’s analysis. Building on Dahlhaus, James Hepokowski argues that the modernism of early Strauss, including Don Juan, lies in its play with form, an analysis which better explains its post-Romanticism.247 Beyond simply genre choice, though, Don Juan breaks from a litany of aesthetic rules, especially the idealist conception of form and content, which critics repeatedly harped on. Neither Dahlhaus nor Hepokowski really consider the discursive context of Strauss’s Don Juan as a source of its lawlessness and modernism. In dialogue with – and alongside of – its formal musical deviations, one must consider the virtually unanimous declaration by metropolitan critics that the composition was unmusical. Whatever

Strauss’s intent, his Don Juan was made to circulate as a new, dangerous species of sound, one

246 Dahlhaus, 19th-Century Music, 331. 247 See Hepokowski, “Fiery-Pulsed Libertine.” Hepokowski even suggests that Strauss’s Burlesque may be a better early period marker for the beginning of Dahlhaus’s open ended modernism, given that this is Strauss’s first work that caricatures established musical forms.

112

that lives outside the safe confines of musicality.

The reviews of Strauss’s Don Juan already articulate the major tenants of what would become the critique of musical modernism.248 Even though the work ruffled far fewer feathers than later compositions by Strauss and other modernists, it nonetheless violated the general categories of late-romantic aesthetic law. The accusations of rule breaking in Strauss and others can be broken down into eight basic and consistent categories. The fact that they each apply equally, though not in the exact same manner, to both New German and formalist aesthetics further demonstrates the similarities of each camp and their shared role as co-producers of late romanticism. Those eight critiques are: 1) excessive color, timbre, instrumentation; 2) fragmented, patchwork thematic construction; 3) vulgar poetic content and/or musical idioms; 4) unfulfilling or unreconciled finales; 5) ambiguity of genre; 6) plagiaristic; 7) violent; and 8) satired or caricatured poetic content and/or musical idioms. Notably absent from this list is extended chromaticism or dissonance as a significant or offensive quality of new music. While future compositions by Strauss and especially Mahler were called out for their excessive dissonances, it was hardly a major concern of a musical public that had come to accept the Tristan chord. In fact, future claims of harsh dissonance usually occurred within the eight categories such as violence or lack of reconciliation, both of which could also occur without excessive dissonance. Only in retrospect have scholars, following the self-aggrandizing musical-historical narrative set down by the Second Viennese School, fetishized extended chromaticism, dissonance, and atonality as the primary driving force of musical modernism and the public’s aversion to it.

248 Each of these eight factors was present in the critiques of Strauss and Mahler, though not evenly distributed. The first three were heavily present in almost every review of Don Juan, though the other five cropped up in a minority of reviews. For instance, only Hanslick was really worried about the violence of Don Juan, while only the Wagnerians were concerned about plagiarism – a theme that continued throughout this period. The eight category of caricature – which became paramount in Mahler and later Strauss – was only tacitly present in the first reviews of Don Juan in questioning the seriousness of the composer’s intentions, but emerged in 1896 in descriptions of the music after being performed at the ADMV. Bernhard Vogel, “Die Leipziger Tonkünstlerversammlung des ‘Allg. Deutschen Musikvereins,’” 92, no. 24 (10 June 1896): 290.

113

Rather, the scandal of modernism revolved around these eight factors and the emancipation, not of dissonance, but of musical elements. Following the lead of Dahlhaus, scholars have pointed to an emancipation of color in the compositions of this period.249 Certainly, this was the case, but it was part of a much larger emancipation of musical elements from the polished veneer in which romantic music had been packaged. For many critics new music was considered unmusical because it remained unrefined, perhaps in some cases close to becoming music, but with all the scaffolding still attached. While critics often misread the intention of

Strauss and Mahler (for example, interpreting intertexuality as plagiarism) critical discourse reinforced the music’s no doubt purposeful illumination of its own elements and the production side of music in arranging those elements.

According to late romantic aesthetics, the total compositional form or idea is preeminent, while the specific tones and timbres, in all their various constellations, are made secondary.

Indeed, the musical elements of a composition are made inaudible through their need to serve the totality. Strauss and the early modernists reverse this. Each of the eight violations mentioned above draws attention to the raw ingredients of music. Furthermore, they highlight the composition as something composed, the sum of an artisanal production using sound effects. The excessive coloring makes evident the selection of instruments and the singularity of each melody.

Similarly, the mosaic approach breaks down phrases to make its separate parts evident. Musical citations and everyday sounds take the listener out of the seamless expression of art music and make evident the interchangeability of musical elements shared across the world’s soundscape.

Ambiguous reconciliations and genre choices make musical building blocks stand out by making them not fit together into a coherent whole. Musical parodies allow the listener to hear old idioms freshly and make their constituent parts evident as something malleable. Finally, violent or overly affective musical idioms make musical production evident as something emanating

249 Dahlhaus, 19th-Century Music, 243; Painter, Symphonic Aspirations, 86-101.

114

from an “other” and not simply inhabiting the mind of the listener. Musical elements are indeed artistically chosen sound effects that exist prior to form and idea. While the eight violations of modernism were framed by critics as evidence of musical abnormality or illegitimacy, they can also be reconfigured as evidence of emancipation from romantic aesthetic law. The music exists for itself. It is immanent to its elements and does not exist for a larger transcendental cause.

Like the modernists works that followed it, Strauss’s Don Juan was critiqued by musical idealists and itself critiqued musical idealism. As I have demonstrated, both sides in the War of the Romantics found the composition lacking sufficient musical logic. Even Strauss’s most vocal

New German supporters praised Don Juan in theory, not in its musical details. For formalists, the unmusicality of Strauss surpassed that of his predecessors as a composer of pure sound effects, not music. Against both camps in the War of the Romantics, the iconoclasm of Strauss’s Don

Juan unfurled musical form that lacked traditional logical development or coherence to an idea.

Indeed the explosion of sound in the second half of the work served to underscore the inadequacy of literary programs to musical expression. Specifically, sentimentalized and ennobling

Wagnerian Eros is parodied and then cast aside in further musical expression, putting New

German music in a new light where it appears constrained and formulaic, contrite expression.

Strauss critiques the representative aesthetic of late romanticism that would make musical expression the objectified other of the main idea or musical theme. As a cipher of human subjectivity, reinforced by the pulsing figure of Don Juan himself, Strauss’s musical organization enacts an organism that lacks division between its legitimizing intellect and dangerous corporeality. The music stands only for itself as a unitary form and content of pure desire.

Mahler’s Titan in Weimar

For all the innovations of Strauss’s Don Juan, it made a far smaller splash than Mahler’s

First Symphony. Under the initial title of Titan, Mahler’s First Symphony marked the genesis of a sustained modernist movement. Nearly every performance of this work created controversy, especially after its Weimar premiere in 1894. While, of the eight categorical violations of

115

modernism made by Strauss’s Don Juan, some were subtle, each was pronounced in the virulent reviews of Mahler’s work. When he modified Titan into his First Symphony, Mahler was made into a true iconoclast as the work’s emancipation of musical elements was even more obvious.

Lacking the blending adhesives of musical tradition, Mahler’s Titan/First Symphony illuminates its musical elements

Titan was performed on June 3, 1894 as part of the ADMV festival, held that year in

Weimar. It was the highlight of the evening, a highly anticipated, yet scarcely-heard, piece by the highly-regarded conductor in , where Mahler held the post of chief conductor from 1891 to 1897.250 Unlike the context of Don Juan’s premiere – a local subscription concert – this performance of Titan, as part of a national festival, attracted significant critics and reviews. Even larger daily newspapers carried festival updates from correspondents. Versions of Titan had been performed in Budapest (1889) and Hamburg (1893), but, as those concerts were only reviewed by local critics, it was the ADMV concert in Weimar– which Strauss’s had helped engineer – that propelled Mahler the composer into the musical spotlight. And whatever the specificities of

Mahler’s Titan viz. the rest of his oeuvre or the supposedly bad execution of Titan in Weimar, the largely negative reactions to this performance established the discourse on Mahler’s symphonies, which would remain virtually unchanged until his departure for New York. Even more than with

Strauss both sides in the War of the Romantics contributed to the discourse of Mahler as unmusical.

I suspect that one critic – Max Hasse – was the author of three different reviews of this concert, two in journals (NZfM and MW) and one for Berlin’s semi-official Vossische Zeitung

(VZ).251 I make this speculation given the relative similarity of form and content in the three reviews, but regardless, Hasse’s perspective represents something like the mean, the least

250 Mahler had conducted Titan in Budapest in 1889 and Hamburg in 1893, but as these were not major musical centers, the concerts did not attract the attention of the larger musical public. 251 The author of the review in the MW is definitely Max Hasse. The reviews in the NZfM and the VZ were signed as “h.” and anonymous respectively, but read like Hasse’s analysis.

116

polemical and perhaps most read opinion. These detail-oriented reviews give much attention to describing the complicated and piecemeal program of Titan. The entire composition was then called Titan after Jean Paul’s novel of the same title, but clearly the original five movements – or even the final four of the published version – were in no way an attempt to translate the narrative of the novel into music. The piece was then divided into two halves, the first “From the Days of

Youth: youth, fruit, and thorn pieces” and the second “commedia humana,” an allusion to Dante’s epic poem. Both halves were further divided into movements (hence the symphonic form) with programmatic titles. “From the Days of Youth” was at the time comprised of three movements:

“Spring and no end. This introduction describes the awakening of nature at the earliest dawn,”

“Flowerine Chapter (andante)”, and “Set with full sails (Scherzo).” The “commedia humana” contains two movements: “Stranded. A funeral march in the manner of Callot” and “Dall'inferno al Paradiso [From the Inferno to Paradise], as the sudden expression of a deeply wounded heart.”

In the MW, Hasse also mentions an additional programmatic reference for the funeral march:

the author received the external motivation for this piece of music through that parodist picture well-known in southern Germany to all children: “the hunter’s funeral procession” from an old children’s story book: (in) which animals of the forest escort the corpse of the dead hunter to the grave; rabbits carry the procession, in front a band of bohemian musicians lead, accompanied by music- making cats, toads, crows etc. and stags, deer, foxes and other four-legged creatures and feathered animals of the forest in cute positions escort the procession.”252

According to other reviewers, Mahler himself explained this programmatic reference in a preconcert talk.253 So while the official program “Stranded. A funeral march in the manner of

Callot” seems to make reference to 17th-century drawings of Jacques Callot by way of E. T. A.

Hoffmann’s collection of short stories from 1814, these seem to have been disregarded by the composer and the critics in favor of the fairy tale woodcut interpretation.

252 Max Hasse, “Die 30. Tonkünstlerversammlung des Allgemeinen deutschen Musikvereins,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 25, no. 26 (21 June 1894): 312-13. 253 See H. N., “Die Musikalische Woche,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 141 (17 March 1896): 1; It seems that Mahler might have originally thought that the woodcut was by Jacques Callot.

117

If the generic ambiguity of Strauss’s Don Juan was subtle, with Mahler’s Titan it was upfront and the springboard for critique. For Hasse and Lessmann this motley stew of programmatic allusions made for a confounding lack of cohesion. The conglomerate nature of the composition begins in the subtitle: “A tone poem in symphonic form.” Mahler’s Titan and, as

I will show, its further evolution as his First Symphony obfuscates traditional genres and the established territories of the formalists (symphony) and New Germans (tone poem). One of the many continuities between Hasse’s review in the MW and the reviews in the NZfM and VZ, and a reason to think he also authored those, is the argument that Mahler’s Titan might more accurately be called a programmatic suite. In the MW he states categorically that it is a suite and “not a symphony,” without real explanation.254 The VZ review argues that because the symphony is a historically evolved genre, meaning, I assume, that there is no precedent for such a symphony,

Titan is no symphony. In his reviews Hasse provides little evidence as to his position within the

War of the Romantics, which provides no reason to believe he had any special need to defend absolute music and the symphonic form. Nevertheless, he is quite clear that Mahler’s Titan, whatever its flirtation with symphonic form, is not a symphony.

However, Mahler’s Titan does not seem to be a proper, New German tone poem either, because it is broken up into movements, and, more importantly, because it was not clear what the music was supposed to be illustrating. As outlined above the programmatic content is quite convoluted, making the music’s supposed expression of that program largely unclear. In the

NZfM Hasse writes that the program is:

without discernable psychological cohesion! The program sounds almost like the heading above one of the “Jubilee periods” [Jean Paul’s chapters] in Jean Paul’s ‘Titan’. Has the work an overall relationship with that named similarly by this poet? It would be so beautiful to discover (flower bedecked crown of spring). This depends then however on a purely external coexistence, as in an intellectual parallelism.255

254 Hasse, MW 25, no. 26 (21 June 1894): 312-13. 255 H., Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 61, no. 24 (1894): 278-79.

118

By “intellectual parallelism,” I assume he means that there is no direct parallel between the titles of the symphonic movements and the narrative of Jean Paul’s Titan. Clearly, the sections of

Mahler’s Titan do not narrate Jean Paul’s novel, but makes the allusion for more abstract or

“intellectual” reasons. In the VZ he mentions that he even tried to find a guide to lead him through the maze of the “rambling program,” but the attempt was in vain.256 Similarly,

Lessmann, who able to digest Strauss’s Don Juan as a genuine poetic expression of Lenau, was mystified and disappointed by Mahler’s Titan, which in no way seemed like a musical translation of Jean Paul. Lessmann even tries to simplify the process by reading Jean Paul’s Titan as an allegory of a “self-destructive, ingenious nature,” but finds it “impossible to find a poetic connection between poem and music.”257 As a Wagnerian who viewed music as a superior translation of an idea, Lessmann could by no means condone Mahler’s glaring refusal to stick to his ostensive subject

As with Strauss’s Don Juan, it is the second half of Titan – the human comedy – where

Mahler most egregiously breaks with tradition. If most critics could accept the first half as satisfactory, even pleasant, despite seeming derivative, it was the second half of Titan that ruffled everyone’s feathers. For example, in terms of the capacity to express the program musically,

Hasse finds the first half to adequately depict, “not without success,” the spirit of the individual movements, though still not the spirit of Jean Paul. He characterizes the music as pastoral, invoking old fashioned melodies, the movement of the natural world, and animal sounds. In both the NZfM and the MW Hasse likens each section to a similar cannon of composers. He finds the first movement’s awakening of spring to be reminiscent of Haydn, or even Beethoven, though adding “modern” harmony to classical melody, by which me meant its extremely polyphonic scoring. Additionally, the Scherzo sounds like Weber, the funeral march “New French” music,

256 Anonymous, Vossische Zeitung no. 260 (7 June 1894): 5. 257 Otto Lessmann, “Der XXX. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins: Weimar 31. Mai – 6. Juni,” Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 21, no. 55 (22 June 1894): 348.

119

specifically Bizet, and the finale New German.258 Hasse largely pardons the funeral march and saves his criticism for the finale, which he says “spoils everything.”259 Expecting some kind

“elevation” or “intensification” in the accent to paradise, he found none.260 Rather, he writes that the early motifs “echo out from the first part of the composition in mere endless succession in the previous aggregate state. From here the work sinks down slowly, but definitely down to Hades

[Orkus].”261 And in the VZ, “I hardly remember to have ever heard something similarly without unity as this journey from hell to paradise. It sounds more often as if the individual instruments were wandering helplessly and searching for intervals they cannot find.” This lack of unity and edification illuminates why Hasse felt compelled to distance Mahler’s Titan from the symphonic realm. It is not simply nitpicking classification, but the preservation of the hallowed status of the symphony, the most important, serious, edifying, and nationalized genre in German musical culture. Titan in no way seemed to match those modifiers of German idealism. There is no reconciliation or transcendence. The motifs of the earlier movements remain unintegrated and paradise sounds less like spring and more like hell in its endless struggle. The resolution is unsatisfying. Such a view is not far from that of Adorno, later arguing that Mahler’s music makes a precept out of denial, by lamenting “it shall not be.”262 However, for Adorno, this is no compositional misstep on the part of Mahler, but a melancholic protest against the “world’s course,” played out musically as a dissatisfaction over the impossibility of further tonal innovation.263

The single most in depth review of the performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at the

Weimar ADMV festival was by Ernst Otto Nodnagel. Nodnagel is a hugely important figure in the history of Mahler reception, primarily known as one of his first big supporters. However,

258 Hasse, MW 25, no. 26 (21 June 1894): 312-13; and H., NZfM 61, no. 24 (1894): 278-79. 259 VZ no. 260 (7 June 1894): 5. 260 H., NZfM 61, no. 24 (1894): 278-79; and Hasse, MW 25, no. 26 (21 June 1894): 312-13. 261 H., NZfM 61, no. 24 (1894): 278-79. 262 Adorno, Mahler, 5. 263 Adorno, Mahler, 7.

120

before Nodnagel flip-flopped, he was one of Mahler’s most vocal opponents. Both as opponent and supporter, Nodnagel did much to establish various perspectives on Mahler, first as dangerous deviant, and then as the next great hope of German music. Both of these judgments by Nodnagel are made within a disciplinary process, first assessing the ingrained deficiencies of Mahler’s music and then encouraging its later rehabilitation. Mahler’s music is never simply good or bad for Nodnagel (as it is for someone like Hasse), but classified as a type and measured against a norm.

Nodnagel was born in 1870 and after studying law and music worked mostly as an independent writer. Although he never secured a permanent post as a critic for a major paper, he published technical analyses of works in several major journals and became a conservatory teacher in Königsberg in 1899. He published formal analyses of five of Mahler’s first six symphonies, but ceased writing in 1906 and died in 1909.264 His writings display a strict support for formalism and methods highly reminiscent of Hanslick. Nevertheless, Nodnagel did not share

Hanslick’s Neo-Kantian disregard for subjective musical associations, but displayed a traditionally idealist support for listening as a mode of personal, spiritual transcendence and composition as having the historicist burden of progress. Nodnagel’s aesthetic was perhaps reminiscent of A. B. Marx, but with a sympathy for new music.

His review of Mahler’s Titan appeared in the BT, signed with his full name printed in bold, and established the liberal/formalist critique of Mahler, which would be reiterated for decades. In Nodnagel’s critique of Mahler’s Titan a modern critic ushers in Mahler as a modern composer. The reviews of Hasse and Lessmann, while negative, were largely submerged in a stew of confusion. They did not go to lengths to categorize the danger and abnormality of

Mahler’s First Symphony, but simply considered it a failed calculation of programmatic coherence and expression. With Nodnagel, Mahler’s music moves from merely lawless to

264 On Nodnagel’s biography see Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 300-1.

121

abnormal. In his later reviews of Mahler, Lessmann would also pour on the rancor, but after only one hearing he gave the composer some benefit of the doubt.

The style of Nodnagel’s review bears the influence of Hanslick at nearly every turn.265

The feuilleton is not simply a review of Mahler’s Titan but a literary piece that makes its own arguments in the process of critique. Nodnagel organizes the introduction and conclusion to his review around a comparison of Mahler’s symphony to a contemporaneous painting by Thomas

Theodor Heine. A visual artist known for his caricatures, Heine became an illustrator for

Munich’s notoriously satirical journal Simplicissimus in 1896. If the first reviewers of Strauss chose to compare him with an ornamental painter, the first painterly parallel to Mahler’s music was a caricaturist. Nodnagel makes extensive allusion to Heine in his review in order to reinforce his view of Mahler’s music as overblown baroque comedy and a danger to one’s health, important components of the discourse about modernism.

Nodnagel references Heine’s 1892 piece “The Execution,” which features a man walking into a vulva-shaped castle followed by a woman with a sword. Much as with the Salome vogue, this painting showcases a fin de siècle fascination with the femme fatal and the intermingling of sexual pleasure and death. Nodnagel does not at all make a parallel between this image and the program of Mahler’s First Symphony, but rather defines both as “bizarre studio pieces,” mocked by audiences and effecting disturbing sensorial impressions. In closing his review, he actually states that such grotesquery is permissible in painting, but not music:

In painting one can indeed accept the acquisition when one finds included sometimes a baroque joke in the exhibition; whoever does not want to see it, can certainly inspect the remaining pictures or turn away his eyes, and no person is damaged. Musically however, the matter lies differently. For the sake of an abstruse joke, Mahler expected of an orchestra unheard of stresses in a time when they were already more than overburdened, and then he quite unnecessarily for a whole number of people spoiled a wonderful festival through headaches. And that was decidedly not cute of him.266

265 Notably, Nodnagel was writing for the Berliner Tageblatt, one of Germany’s most important liberal newspapers, something akin to Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse, the publisher of Hanslick’s reviews. 266 Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Von der Tonkünstler-Versammlung in Weimar,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 284, evening edition (7 June 1894): 4.

122

This loaded quote bears all marks of Hanslick’s style, including the biopolitical imperative.

Like Hanslick, Nodnagel saves this meta-statement about the bio-medical effect and danger of music for the end of the review. Like Hanslick, Nodnagel argues that music is more invasive than other artistic mediums and, consequently, possesses a heightened threat of causing physical or psychological “damage” to the audience. While other critics found Titan obnoxious, Nodnagel is the first to credit it with causing headaches, an effect he actually mentions twice in the review and projects on persons beyond himself. For Nodnagel, Mahler’s tom foolery is careless towards harming the audience. And given the potentially negative health effects to the indefensible audience, a composer must use his power more carefully and take his craft more seriously. Such were the stakes of music from this biopolitical viewpoint.

The framing device of the Heine painting is not only used to demonstrate the danger of

Mahler’s music, but Nodnagel’s primary assessment: that it was a joke. Hasse suspected humor and roguery, but Nodnagel has no doubt and proclaims it boldly and throughout the review. In analyzing the finale, he says,

The most amazing is actually the closing movement ‘Dall’ inferno all paradiso.’ The Allegro furioso appears consistently comic, and the desolate spectacle – with various grotesque instrumental jokes in places where one should expect a picture of paradise – permits no other view after acting in no way other than as a bloody satire, a somewhat very baroque “Atelierscherz”, an unheard of mystification.267

Nodnagel then goes on to question, and subtlety deride, the tastefulness of this joke. Throughout the review a constellation of somewhat undelineated terms creep up repeatedly. In this quote alone: comic, spectacle, grotesque, joke, satire, and baroque. To this list could be added quirks, banalities, fun, absurd and perhaps irony. Citing the Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold

Lessing, Nodnagel suggests that idiocy and irony should not be confused. 268 Perhaps the

267 Nodnagel, “Weimar,” BT no. 284, evening edition (7 June 1894): 3. 268 Some of the other reviewers mentioned these, but not in the same level. The reviewer for the VZ, probably Hasse, speaks of bizarre details and infuriating oddities. In the MW, Hasse calls the march an ironic joke, and the NZfM it a satire. For Lessmann Mahler’s music is artistry, shenanigans, half- humorous. The terms “grotesque” and “baroque” are new to Nodnagel.

123

category that most usefully ties together these various adjectives and artistic methods is caricature, as it simultaneously incorporates the humor, attenuated forms, and slander insinuated by Nodnagel’s vocabulary. This view of Mahler as a musical caricaturist became a mainstay of early Mahler reception and had great significance for the critical capacity of his music, as will be considered further on.

Lessmann did not consider the music caricature per se, but rather bad comedy. He writes,

“I find that the composer loses himself in artistry and shenanigans, which in the end elicit the feeling of unease.” And in conclusion, “The total impression of the work was as well in the end half humorous, half aggravating.”269 These comments offer a somewhat different perspective than

Hasse, and one more in line with later Mahler commenters. Lessmann does not take Mahler seriously, because he assumes that Mahler does not take composing seriously. As Mahler’s Titan evades traditional forms and styles that might provide a rubric for assessing the piece, reviewers like Lessmann retreat to accusations of humor and heresy as explanations for their frustration and confusion. Such assessments of Mahler as jokester reinforced a discourse of new music as disingenuous and laden with secret malice, as was Hanslick’s handling of the New Germans.

If Nodnagel’s review, far more than the others, accentuated the satirical quality of Titan, it also clarified the object satirized. Nodnagel reads the symphony as a critique of the excess of program music. In the beginning of the review he suspects that Mahler’s music is absolute music trying to be program music. Later he simply states: “He wants however now to turn against the excesses of program music, so he toots first of all some great superfluousness, then corrects this himself.”270 In what Nodnagel calls his backward manner, Mahler wants to move composition forward by “ridiculing” an “absurd principle,” by which he means the pictorial aims of program music. The confusing maze of the program is here thought to be purposefully incoherent, as if to mock the intricate narratives and images “translated” into music by the New German School.

269 Lessmann, AMZ 21, no. 15 (7 June 1894): 349. 270 Nodnagel, BT no. 284, evening edition (7 June 1894): 3-4.

124

While it may be a stretch to assert with Nodnagel that Mahler was attempting to “ridicule” program music, the post-programmatic program music of Titan manages to critique the process of translating literary ideas into music. Mahler does this by reconfiguring the relationship of music to texts that is not identification, but dialogue. The music proceeds by its own path, and while it may intersect with the labyrinth of programmatic references in highly abstract manner, the music and text do not lead to a clearly shared destination.

Not only do Nodnagel and Hasse read Mahler’s music as a caricature of the expressive, translating aims of program music, but as a caricature of art music more generally. Nodnagel’s reference to the “incessant, grotesque deployment of muted trumpets and horns,” as well as

Hasse’s critique of “bizarre details,” provide a sense of what caricature means at the formal musical level.271 For critics, Mahler’s music distorts and attenuates the expression of instruments so that the “traditional” melodies are no longer perceived as traditional. Such a notion of caricaturing musical themes seems more at the heart of Mahler’s project than a broad dismissal of program music, as suggested by Nodnagel. While critics heard the music as irreverent towards familiar idioms, such grotesquery actually renews the expressivity of traditional themes

(Adorno’s argument) and illuminates the elemental properties of even the supposedly familiar.

So even with this first significant Mahler concert, much of the discourse about Mahler’s music was already established. Mahler undermined the aspirations and musical forms privileged by both sides in the War of the Romantics. Titan was neither a proper symphony, nor tone poem

(critique #5). It was perceived as a conglomeration that brought together musical elements which did not belong together (critique #2). Mahler was suspected of being a musical caricaturist and a sneering rogue composer (critique #8). And for Nodnagel at least, Mahler’s music was something dangerous to the health of musical audiences (critique #7). The initial critiques of Titan figure as

271 Nodnagel, BT no. 284, evening edition (7 June 1894): 3-4; VZ no. 260 (7 June 1894): 5; Hasse, MW 25, no. 26 (21 June 1894): 312-13. In one place Hasse suspects that the whole thing might be a satire of the classics, in the MW he straight forwardly states: “The concluding movement sounds like a parody of the New Germans.”

125

intensified, but parallel, versions of the critiques leveled at Strauss’s Don Juan. Similarly, both compositions critiqued existing musical forms. Both began in familiar musical territory, only to diverge from and disrupt it (critique #4), to the consternation of even the mildly supportive. Both glory in trivialities and unelevated matters (critique #6), musical and programmatic.

Mahler’s First Symphony

In the years that followed Mahler’s arrival on the national stage in Weimar, he conducted his First Symphony in Berlin (1896), Frankfurt (1898), Prague (1899), and Vienna (1900).272

After the Weimar debacle, Mahler trimmed down the composition by removing the title, programmatic references, and one movement, officially transforming Titan into his First

Symphony. Despite attempts at clarification and formally foregoing generic ambiguity, the critical reception of the symphony remained categorically unchanged from the Weimar performance. See for example a review in the NZfM by Berlin critic Eugenio Pirani:

The specialties of this composer, with which he often manages to baffle the audience, are unique, if not always beautiful mixtures of orchestral color, surprising sound effects, large, powerful to the point of ear bursting FF crescendo intensifications, barely audible tremolo in the strings, shrill, cutting dissonances, rapid fire drum and timpani effects and more of the same. These are but basically only externals and the serious musician finds the middle of this magnificent apparatus very little that is inventive and manages in the end little imaginative core. Throughout this chaotic tangle of tones an actually successful musical thought is rarely achieved, which would be recognized by the healthy, genteel musician. It scatters lots of sand in the eyes, but offers little that satisfies and delights the heart and the mind. 273

In general, Pirani finds Mahler’s symphony to be a misplaced exercise in attempted originality that only amounts to noise. He criticizes its idiosyncratic orchestration as mere sound effects. He finds it to actually lack genuine originality in terms of melodic concepts. He especially criticizes its unhealthiness and violence to the listener, comparing the sound to dynamite or a military. He calls the Scherzo particularly grotesque, a supreme example of musical caricature. This quote

272 During this period Mahler also premiered his Second Symphony in several cities, but that will be discussed in chapter three. 273 Eugenio Pirani, “Berlin,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 36 (1896): 399.

126

alone contains half of the eight critiques of modernism.

Like Pirani, the other critics who reviewed Mahler’s First Symphony, whether formalist or New German, found it problematic and unmusical. Program or not, the composition generated a similar, though not identical, discourse. There were some differences, but they were situational, not categorical. For example, whereas New German critics were particularly critical of Titan as a tone poem, under the later guise of symphony, it was the formalist reviewers who criticized the work’s ambiguity of genre. In other cases, removing the program actually made the music sound more vulgar. For example, the first two movements, which had previously been heard to acceptably depict animals, were considered too pedestrian as pure music for a symphony. In the rest of this section I will demonstrate the unchanged and solidifying discourse around Mahler by focusing on how critics heard each of the eight deviances of Mahler’s First Symphony.

Excessive Coloration: If Don Juan was critiqued for having unnecessarily lavish instrumentation, Mahler’s First Symphony displayed an eccentric timbre that was equally thick as

Strauss, but dynamically quirky rather than ornamentally layered. In the quote above, Pirani calls the magnificent orchestral apparatus of Mahler his specialty, from the barrage of timpani to frequent use of tremolo, but finds the “beautiful blend of orchestral color” ultimately superficial.

For Pirani, as for other formalists, such color stirs the uneducated audience, but is a façade hiding a lack of musical merit. Even Ludwig Bussler, one of the most sympathetic of early Mahler reviewers, concludes that “the core of his capability lies in coloring.”274 Like Strauss’s works, instrumentation in Mahler was an immediately recognized strength and distinction of new music.

But compared to melodic innovation, such a complement was often a patronizing attempt to salvage worth in worthless music. It is noteworthy, that whereas Strauss was compared to

Makart, Mahler’s early comparison was Heine. This helps illustrate the difference is perceived excessive coloration. Makart’s was a bejeweled style with Heine using a more symbolist play of

274 L. B., National Zeitung no. 188 (17 March 1896): 3.

127

parody and contrast between bold uniform colors and flat lines. Strauss overloads with ornament,

Mahler revels in contrasting simplicities.

Patchwork construction: For the formalists the coarse rather than smooth integration of disparate melodies no doubt signaled a dearth of musical logic. However, for the New Germans this hybridization signaled a false or fractured expression of personal and national identity.

Hirschfeld critiques Mahler for not speaking Mahlerian, but attempting to write music foreign to himself.275 Lessmann, who praises Mahler’s at times Wagnerian sound, says that the depth of musical thought – one might read idea – “fades away under foreign influence.”276 With its folk references, both musical and programmatic, Mahler’s “pastoral” First Symphony sounds vaguely like nationalist music – but which nation? Sure, Jean Paul, Weberian lyricism, Wunderhorn poems, and Wagnerian harmonies at first suggest a “German” orientation, but those are set beside other music, traditionally coded as non-German. Critics described its melodies as variously

French, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and Slavic. In writing “non-German” music Mahler neither exoticizes these melodies, nor polishes and elevates them in their incorporation into the

“German” symphony. While other “German” composers could write “non-German” music, such as Liszt’s or Brahms’s Hungarian pieces, these were either deliberately written as “other” music, separated from the German style, separated from the “Germanic” symphony, or properly stylized by making them approximate traditional “German” melodies. Mahler integrates melodies traditionally associated with various nationalities, without claiming that one has melodic domination over the other and without indicating in the title, program, or musical organization that the music speaks for any particular nation. In fact, it is decidedly anti-nationalist.

Generic Ambiguity: Despite all attempts by Mahler to transform his first major work into a legitimate four-movement symphony, reviewers did not consider it symphonic. However, it

275 R. H., Neue Musik-Zeitung 22, no. 1 (1900): 9. 276 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 23, no. 12 (20 March 1896): 166- 67.

128

should be noted that the Berlin critics were less confused with the form and took it seriously as a symphony. Even Lessmann, simply notes that it used to have a program, but does not restate it or let that color his analysis of the work as a symphony. However, H. N. at the BT was an exception.

Despite the fact that everyone at Weimar thought the program a hindrance, he asserts that the understanding of Mahler’s symphony was based on a program and that the Berlin audience’s understanding of the work was hindered by the removal of the program.277 Mahler could not escape the ambiguity of his creation. With a program most critics insisted that the work was not program music, without a program they insisted that it was.

Critics outside of Berlin reiterated H. N.’s view that Mahler’s First Symphony was really program music, though not all of them seem to have known, or taken time to reiterate the Weimar program. Both H. P. in Frankfurt and Josef Scheu in Vienna were sure that a program existed, but found one only really necessary for interpreting the incoherence of the second half.278 The two most prominent and senior reviewers, Hanslick and Helm, were informed enough to know that it had a much-derided program at Weimar, though only Helm, the Wagnerian with ties to the

ADMV, elaborates on it, publishing verbatim the specifics of the Titan program. However, despite knowing that the original program was a source of confusion, both Helm and Hanslick, as well as Scheu and H. P., beg for it.

In fact, the Viennese critics display proudly their reliance on “programs,” both in the sense of lyrical programs and melodic analysis. As mentioned in the introduction, the Viennese concert was especially intriguing because Mahler forbade Robert Hirschfeld to write his traditional guide pamphlet about the symphony for his philharmonic audience. Consequently,

Hirschfeld had printed and handed out freely a slip saying precisely that Mahler had forbidden

277 H. N., Berliner Tageblatt no. 141 (17 March 1896): 1. 278 Joseph Scheu, “Feuilleton: Konzerte,” Arbeiter Zeitung no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1-2; H. P. “Kleines Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung no. 68 (9 March 1899): 1. In fact H.P. gives hints that he knows the original program, but does not say so or outline it.

129

analysis of the symphony.279 Mahler’s refusal of any kind of educational guide for his symphony was perceived as quite audacious, warranting two exclamation marks from Helm and paragraph description of the intrigue by Josef Scheu, chief critic for the Arbeiter Zeitung (AZ), the primary organ for the social democrats in Austria. Leon Botstein has written considerably about

Hirschfeld’s guide books as evidence of a declining, cheapening, and less intimate musical education among the philharmonic public, but here the Viennese critics themselves display a remarkable analytical helplessness, which they blame on the lack of lyrical program, but also seems to result from lacking Hirschfeld’s formal analysis. Given the lack of program and an upfront dismissal of Mahler’s symphony as a symphony, the Viennese critics largely threw up their hands, professed confusion and did not try to analyze it in any depth. Critics in every other city had more willingness to interpret than in cultivated Vienna. Whatever the reasons for

Mahler’s refusal of Hirschfeld’s guidebook, it served to critique the musical culture of Vienna, its faux educational dependence and inability to engage with music in an unmediated way.

It seems that a primary reason that the Viennese critics wanted a guide – either Mahler’s or Hirschfeld’s program – was to lead them to the promised land of compositional intent. In the course of complaining about not having Hirschfeld’s guide, Scheu states that music is more pleasurable if the composer’s intentions are known. Certainly, Scheu means that it is intellectually pleasurable to be able to clearly follow a piece of music rather than listening in a state of confusion, but he also implies more. The primacy of compositional intent also refers to the sovereignty of the artist and the process of creation, such that critics do not even desire to make an interpretation of their own. Scheu is put off that Mahler seems to “let us guess what he means.”280 For musical idealists listening is rather about attaining a pleasurable intimacy with the composer and the inspirational – almost revelatory moment – of creation. As I noted in chapter one Hirschfeld’s aesthetic position places considerable value on the sovereignty of the artist and

279 On the program controversy see, Scheu, AZ no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1. 280 Scheu, AZ no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1.

130

their art as an expression of their person and personality. Scheu wants to know what the composer was thinking at moment of creation in order “through tone images to awaken in us the same moods, sensations and expectations, which in the creation of his work filled and guided him.”281 It is not just about knowing what the images are and judging if the music adequately depicts them, but participating in the composer’s ineffable experiences. Even Hanslick, the great nemesis of program music, has a similar response: “we were not indifferent, to experience, what a brilliant man as Mahler pictured with each of these movements and how he would have explained to us its enigmatic cohesion.”282 While at first this seems like a matter of simply knowing what one is listening for, Hanslick goes on to say that musical listening is about entry into the “heaven” of the composer, with programmatic music being a cheap and unsatisfying method of entering that promised land. Hanslick’s review, while disapproving, is surprisingly short and indiscriminating, essentially abandoning the critical task as if, because the symphony lacked its program, Hanslick did not actually have an opportunity to hear the real composition. He ends on the rather enigmatic note: “For the time being I do not have the full appreciation of what sometimes even leaves the most brilliant composer in stiches: ‘The grace of god.’”283 Hanslick seems to be saying two things. First that, because he does not understand the composition, he is unable to tap into the divine spark of composition which animated Mahler in composition; and second, that sometimes this process of creation goes awry and inspiration leaves the composer somewhat marred, and perhaps the composition somewhat damaged or less than ideal. So this

Viennese privilege of compositional intent is not just a matter of wanting to hermeneutically know what an artwork is about, but wanting to experience the composer’s genius or imagination.

Even Hanslick in On the Musically Beautiful speaks gushingly of the “mysterious power” of inspiration, pointing to the “spontaneous activity of the imagination, the spiritual energy and

281 Scheu, AZ no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1. 282 e. h., “Zweites Philharmonisches Concert,” NFP (20 November 1900): 8. 283 e. h., NFP (20 November 1900): 8.

131

distinctiveness of each composer’s imagination [that] make their mark upon the product as character.”284 Elsewhere Hanslick is clear that something of the mind of the composer is impressed onto the composition, making the work mindful, and the listening the exploration of rational intelligence.285

Caricature: In the transposition from Titan to First Symphony, Mahler’s work remained heard as sonic caricature, especially in Vienna. Scheu calls the first movement “intentionally raw and ugly.” Helm calls the “Bruder Martin” allusion “vulgar,” and sums up the whole symphony as

“grotesque cacophony of explosions” at least worth a good laugh. The correspondent for the

NMZ echoes Nodnagel’s sentiments from the Weimar concert, calling it a “grizzly joke with his public, it intentionally hoaxed, teased, bantered (as one says in Vienna), in order to gloat over its perplexity.”286 And like Nodnagel and Lessmann, this reviewer found such a joke far too long and involved for good taste. In fact the NMZ, a largely anti-New German journal, emphasized the uncanny and grotesque quality of the piece more than any reviewers since Berlin: “Bizarre at any cost.”287 The NMZ correspondent is particularly critical of the instrumentation, calling the music a “wild surge of weird, strange, never before heard sound mixtures and infernal noises,” in which

“every instrument is endured, what it can least accomplish.”288 This is actually an astute observation of Mahler’s tendency to score melodies on instruments, such that it pushes each to the border of its range. The reviewer even says, “No single instrument sounds like it should sound really.” Even a reviewer for the arch-conservative Kreuz Zeitung (KZ) notes the burlesque quality of the funeral march and Mahler’s instrumental penchant for gimmickry in his supposed incessant imitation.289

Unreconciled Conclusions: Like the Weimar concert, the reviewers continued to hear the

284 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 31. 285 Hanslick, Musically Beautiful, 31-32. 286 h-m, Deutsche Zeitung (20 November 1900): 12-13. 287 R. H., NMZ 22, no. 1 (1900): 9. 288 R. H., NMZ 22, no. 1 (1900): 9. 289 ok., “Theater und Musik,” Neue Preussische Zeitung no. 131 (18 March 1896): 5

132

finale as a miserable failure, though for a wider array of reasons. Dr. v. B.’s comparatively positive review of the Prague concert faulted Mahler’s conclusion not for excess, boredom, parody, and lack of cohesion, but as “rushed” and a “reigning in” of the composer’s imagination.290 Similarly, the even-handed treatment in the National Zeitung (NZ), a left-liberal

Berlin daily found the symphony’s steady development aborted in the finale. H. P.’s review of the

Frankfurt concert described the finale as “cheap sentimentality, not resolving satisfactorily.”291

Hanslick and Helm, true to their modern review style, do not give a movement by movement overview, so end up saying nothing specific about the finale. Both of them do mention a lack of formal cohesion, with Helm specifically citing incongruity between the first and last two movements. Helm even informs his readers that at the Weimar concert the finale was heard as an insulting parody of the New German School.292 He does not voice this view himself, but also says nothing to indicate he disagrees with it. Even without the confusing Titan program, reviewers could not find within their romantic aesthetics a logical thread musically connecting each movement of Mahler’s First Symphony.

Plagiarism: Perhaps without a program to contend with critics were more perceptive of the music itself and consequently found more in it to criticize including its supposed plagiarism.

Notably, it was critics writing for German nationalist and conservative papers that most insisted on Mahler’s lack of originality. While the formalists Hasse and Nodnagel had previously noted possible plagiarisms in Titan, Lessmann, Helm, and a critic for the KZ were less diplomatic.

Lessmann considers Mahler’s musical syntax, specifically orchestral layering, to be a “copycat” of Wagner, though “out of control and attenuated.”293 Helm calls Mahler’s First Symphony a

“treasure trove of Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Weber, and so on.”294 It was not

290 Dr. v. B., “Theater,” Prager Tageblatt no. 63 (4 March 1898): 7. 291 H. P., FZ no. 68 (9 March 1899): 1. 292 h-m, DZ (20 November 1900): 12-13. 293 Lessmann, AMZ 3, no. 12 (20 March 1896): 167. 294 h-m, DZ (20 November 1900): 12-13.

133

simply that the symphony sounded like these canonic authors, but Helm, in a typical Viennese emphasis on score analysis and technical scholarship, says that he and others discovered these citations listening to the four hand piano version before the concert. Helm even says that he hopes to dig up the specifics of Mahler’s plagiarism at a later date. If the KZ politically stands out from other papers so far considered, its interpretation of Mahler’s First was especially unique and univocal. The review spends almost its entire lengthy text condemning the symphony for plagiarism and is unequivocal in suggesting that perhaps not a bar of the score is completely original. However the thrust of this analysis is not so much its lack of originality, but rather its composite character: “Wagner, Weber, Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorak, Moszkewski, Humperdinck and many other composers [trustingly agree to assemble] in the symphony of Herr Mahler and peel off often so quickly that one believes to hear a potpourri.”295 Although it seems plausible that this critique was motivated by anti-Semitic jabs at the purity of Mahler’s music, the connections between the politics of the German Conservative Party and the aesthetics of the KZ seem slim by comparison with other papers. Conservative aestheticians tended to praise the cannon and fidelity to the cannon rather than value originality. Nevertheless, Wagner had translated anti-Semitism into musical aesthetics by suggesting that Jews could not write original music. Whatever the intent of the KZ reviewer his argument was far from the overt anti-Semitism of DZ in Vienna or later interpretations of Mahler circa 1910.

Violence: Probably the most noteworthy difference in the post-Weimar reviews of

Mahler’s First Symphony is the prevalent insistence that the music did damage to their person and to the state of music itself. This critique was especially true in Berlin, where reviewers seem to have taken a page from Nodnagel’s foundational appraisal. H. N. begins by saying with the first third of his short review:

The symphony, after which one part of the public positively cheered the composer, gave me a headache. My ear is apparently not yet modern enough for this disharmony. It seems that all tones of the scale are played together. I can

295 ok., “Theater und Musik,” Neue Preussische Zeitung no. 131 (18 March 1896): 5.

134

imagine, that the composer, which with the dissonance already imagined their resolution, does not so feel their hardship, but for whoever does not know what follows, it unpleasantly gets on their nerves. And similarly from the beginning I felt direct physical pain from the endlessly long, sustained high harmonics of the violins, under which all possible chords arrange themselves next to each other.296

The insistence that the performance have him a headache seems like plagiarism of Nodnagel.

Apparently, that was the official line of the BT. But H. N. goes even further, saying that the music affected his nerves, a phrase that seems physiologically literal, given his insistence that listening to Mahler caused pain. The source of this hardship is clear: yet to be resolved dissonance. If either concert should have been heard as dissonant, it was the Weimar, which was supposedly sloppy. Yet, those critics did not find the chromaticism particularly dissonant.

Perhaps this is because they were too busy trying to unravel the program to listen closely to the music.

The anonymous review in the MW concludes its description of the sound as an “onslaught of fanfares, trumpet blares, percussion blows, trombone passages, timpani, drum thunder,” to which the listener could only “passively capitulate.”297 This notion of overwhelming the will of the listener, goes back to liberal criticisms of Wagner, but remained a current in the specific critique of post-Wagnerian music as a violation of individual sovereignty. However, the writer does concede that vocal-like themes and “opera-like longing” in the finale “momentarily eases, nonetheless, the tortured auditory nerve.”298 Unlike Hasse, the correspondent for the MW at

Weimar, this writer finds Mahler’s First Symphony physically violating.

Formalists Pirani and Eichberg relate similar experiences. Pirani deploys numerous military metaphors to explain Mahler’s noise, which he deems unhealthy for the performers and

“sand in the eyes” of the audience.299 In some of biographies of Mahler, Eichberg is described as

296 H. N., BT no. 141 (17 March 1896): 1. 297 Anonymous, “Musikbriefe,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 27, no. 14 (26 March 1896): 180-81 298 MW 27, no. 14 (26 March 1896): 180-81. 299 Eugenio Pirani, “Berlin,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 36 (1896): 399.

135

an enthusiastic supporter of Mahler, based on letters written by Mahler.300 However, a close reading of Eichberg’s reviews suggest otherwise. The final paragraph of his review reads:

Completely as a promethean Titan however Mahler exhibits in the final grimace, which begins with a wild outcry, a cymbal strike, which strikes the ear as a scourging. In form and melody it is no monologue. The orchestra, which the composer handles by the way with virtuosic mastery, modulates out of one key into another, the most remote severely jammed together, from one ear-bursting dissonance to a second still more ghastly and so forth without grace in infinitum. Briefly this finale claims the nerves of the listeners not less than strong drink…Ambiguity of form and thought and all kinds of acts of violence permit no joy to erupt despite many interesting single lines.301

The rather generic review in the VZ, written by “n.” similarly criticizes the cymbal gong at the beginning of the final movement, calling it “ear-bursting.”302 Like H. N., Eichberg finds the modulation and chromaticism dissonant and painful. Like the MW reviewer, he suggests that the finale at times claimed the will of the listeners – even making a parallel with alcohol.303 So even when Mahler’s music is not causing pain, it is still overly and negatively affective in intoxicating the audience.

While the New German critics were less concerned with the music’s ability to overwhelm, they no had no less a problem than the formalists with Mahler’s capacity to violently cajole the listener. Lessmann, perhaps the only critic to review both the Weimar and Berlin concerts, emphasizes its violence in the second review. In the first review he briefly described the work as “half humorous, half aggravating,” but in Berlin the aggravation is exacerbated:

It teams with violences, which grow to ear-blasting cacophony, and also the instrumentation, which in part is handled with great virtuosity, often wanders off enough in flat shenanigans with sound effects, sometimes however it degenerates also into pure bluster and nerve-rattling noise.304

300 It is common in biographies to rely more on letters than reviews. For example see Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler: Vienna, Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 127. 301 i., BBZ no. 131, I. Supplement (18 March 1896): 1. 302 n., VZ no. 130, evening (17 March 1896): 5. 303 Eichberg also initiates, to my knowledge, a discourse of Mahler’s conducting style as unhealthy and wild. For later examples of this discourse see K. M. Knittel, “‘Ein hypermoderner Dirigent’: Mahler and Anti-Semitism in ‘Fin-de-siècle’ Vienna,” 19th-Century Music 18, no. 3 (Spring, 1995): 267. 304 Lessmann, AMZ 3, no. 12 (20 March 1896): 167.

136

Once again the reference to nerves should be taken literally as a distinction of violent and noisy music. Lessmann even ends his review saying that the music, which he listened to with great sympathy, “disturbed him” and that his head would likely still be “buzzing” by the time his reviewers read his journal. Given that his paper was a weekly, this was a pretty severe statement, that the music would have adverse physical effects for days. For Berlin musical life, Mahler’s symphonies (his Second Symphony had premiered the previous year) mark a real upswing in the perceived danger of new music.

The most sustained Viennese meditation on the violence of Mahler’s First Symphony came not from the formalists, but from Scheu, the Wagnerian. He writes:

Today I do not know, should the alternating between a quiet, beautiful melodies and tremendous sounding noise be the storming of the Bastille or would a stronger musical association be with old Jericho, which as is well known succumbed to the trombones of Joshua so outrageously. It was not musically beautiful and Mahler does not reveal what he intended to picture therein.305

As with his Viennese colleagues he largely excuses himself from analysis because of the lack of program, but manages to paint some intriguing pictures of the finale: Bastille and Jericho. Each story is loaded with both violence and a politically revolutionary agenda. As a traditional

Wagnerian, Scheu would not have a problem with loud, large orchestras, but finds Mahler’s

“noise” ugly and seeking to destroy some edifice of power, either the highly symbolic armory of the Ancient Regime or the usurpist walls of decadent Jericho. In the case of Jericho, Scheu reminds the reader that it was music itself, specifically Joshua’s trombones that razed the walls and did physical damage. Given the specific criticism of the volume and timbre of brass instruments in Mahler, Scheu’s allusion seems fitting for the affective force of Mahler’s First

Symphony. As with other categories of criticism, the view of Mahler’s First Symphony as violent was equally shared by formalists (Eichberg and H.N.) as well as New Germans (Lessmann,

Scheu).

305 Scheu, AZ no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1.

137

Vulgarity: The final major quality imputed to Mahler’s First Symphony was vulgarity, not merely of poetic content, but specifically a musical vulgarity. This critique was especially germane to Berlin, where critics frequently deployed the adjective derb in their descriptions of

Mahler’s music. The word derb, which can be translated as rough, earthy, crude, or stout, is primarily translated here as “gruff,” bringing together the offensive friction of rough and the dirtiness of earthy. While some descriptions of the pastoral quality of Mahler’s First Symphony are by no means negative, derb the modifier or Derbheit the noun suggest something uncouth and improper for the symphonic realm. The slippage from an elevated, romantic characterization of the natural world to one overly mired in vulgarity can be measured by slippage from the cute animal world to a less than pretty human sphere. For the reviewers of the Weimar concert, the pastoral associations with Mahler’s First Symphony were primarily birds, mammals, and the forest – a picturesque landscape. However, the Berlin critics found the pastoral equally rural, that is, giving voice to less cultivated human life. It seems that the initial program of Titan, in calling the first half “youth, fruit, and thorn pieces,” created associations of landscape, but not Leute. By taking away the program, Mahler actually expanded the possible meanings or interpretive lines of flight for this composition. Indeed without the program, the scherzo took on a decidedly human visage for these reviewers.

While the critics from the MW and VZ located the symphony’s Derbheit in the scherzo,

Eichberg mentions the word specifically in analyzing the finale, but nonetheless uses similar words to characterize the first two movements. He writes comparing the work to Mahler’s already performed Second Symphony:

[Mahler’s First Symphony] is, at least in both of the first movements, written very much more naturally and comprehensible and is reminiscent actually only in its last movement, an Allegro furioso, of desolate formlessness and the Cyclops- like gruffness, which speaks forth in that C-minor symphony [Mahler’s Second Symphony]. With both of the first movements Mahler seems to have intended a musical illustration of rural life; his themes are here from a certainly robust charm, it moves us along us out of a found desire, a zesty forest air, if it also feels not entirely to empty places, in which the composer permits his leanings for Faustian brooding to quite snap the reigns. The second movement is very

138

pleasing, a scherzo in slow ¾ time, by which one can imagine quite well a rural festival with peasant dancing and so on.306

The view of the scherzo as pre-modern life and celebration is similar in the VZ and MW, however laced with less charm: “The Scherzo lends itself as a gruff pastoral dance,” and “The second movement is a scherzo, which only confirmed previously voiced opinion that Mahler has a very agreeable talent for cheerfulness and dance numbers. It is a very gruff, peasant-like stomping, at times bordering on triviality, a roaming piece, which in the trio accompanies a dainty and sweet

Waltz.”307 Prior to the precious Waltz – a symbol of gay and cultured Vienna – the critics picture for the reader a festival and derb stomping, simply the opposite of the waltz. Furthermore, the overall piece is called trivial, as if it did not aspire to musical importance. The derb quality of

Mahler adds to the naturalistic quality of his music in the spirit of Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart

Hauptmann with its focus on everyday language, lower class struggles, and the grimier side of modernity. The musical vulgarity of Mahler’s First Symphony was heard as an aural approximation of the uncultured and unenfranchised. Just as the music invoked associations of zoe forms of life, so also the vulgarity of symphony, as well as its other violations, marked it as musical zoe.

While there was some variance in opinion, the reception of Mahler’s First Symphony, with and without the Titan program, remained within a certain narrow spectrum. It is hard to say what caused such continuity. Was it the established discourse itself or a similar operation of the relatively similar work of art itself? I cannot begin to separate them, but merely assert their co- presence and interdependence. Musical meaning does not erupt in a vacuum, but from associations, including, at the time, general discourses of musical idealism, as well as the specific discourses that accrued in connection with Mahler and his individual works. To phrase the problem differently, does a critic call it vulgar because it really is, or because it is vulgar in the

306 i., BBZ no. 131, I. Supplement (18 March 1896): 1. 307 n., VZ no. 130, evening (17 March 1896): 5; MW 27, no. 14 (26 March 1896): 180-81.

139

context of 19th-century symphony aesthetics, or because someone else first said it was vulgar? By answering “all of the above,” I am not trying to simply obfuscate the scholarly task of analysis, but emphasize the underappreciated roles of discourses. Whatever the effect of the music itself – perhaps physiologically or psychologically – they were inseparable from the contextual associations and discourses. They too must be accounted for.

Modernism as an Emancipation of Musical Elements

The discourse around Mahler’s First Symphony emphasized the same eight qualities as

Strauss’s Don Juan. For critics these eight deviations suggested that the music was something unmusical and wild, potentially dangerous. Their idealist musical discourse characterized this new music as lawless and abnormal, in some cases dangerous and pathological. Through the aesthetic appropriation of legal and medical terminology and power (the intersection of which is the stuff of biopolitics), the discourse of musical idealism aimed to ostracize Strauss’s and

Mahler’s works as musical zoe. This confluence of medicine and law, signals the biopolitical force in musical culture and the source of its formative forces. In making the works of Strauss and Mahler into cases and patterns of delinquency, biopolitical aesthetics cannot help but create a niche for them as new specimens of deviant art. In its origins, modernism was not simply new, bad music. Rather, it was categorically monstrous, outside the protection of aesthetic law and outside the blessing of fruitful normality. Furthermore, without the aesthetic principles of warring late Romantics, the rhetoric of lawless, abnormal music is not possible. This discourse creates modernism, initially as the negative byproduct of late Romantic aesthetic regulations. By actively defining and cultivating the properly musical, these regulations create the potential of unmusicality and the compulsion to spotlight such detected deviations. It is this discourse which gives musical modernism its deviant, pathological, and “heretical” valence.

As I have demonstrated through the voices of contemporaneous critics, Strauss’s Don

Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony violated the competing meta musical laws of logical coherence to the idea and logical development of musical concepts, which governed late 19th-

140

century music. Among the eight specific infractions of these works, half directly and clearly refer to such measures of narrowly defined logical necessity. The effusion of instrumental color could not be purely justified by the supposed inner necessity of the poetic idea or melody. Similarly, the apparent composite construction of motifs and unreconciling departures in the wild second halves defied the logic of musical organicism. Above all, I argue, it was the generic ambiguity of

Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony that foreclosed their legitimacy as music rather than noise under idealist musical law. Both compositions share formal links with the symphony and with the symphonic poem, but neither submits to the disciplining of genre. Even when

Mahler attempted to symphonize his work, critics did not buy it. The orchestra dialogues with the programs of Lenau and Jean Paul, but does not translate them in the New German sense. While there is no doubt a logic and intellectual intent behind the coherence and development of these compositions, it was not the logic that led to the proper, unambiguous, idealist experiences.

The remaining four modernist qualities of Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First

Symphony – excessive affect, caricature, plagiarism, and vulgarity – more clearly illuminate how these compositions violated the idealist goals of these aesthetic laws. Whether Hegelian consciousness raising or Kantian pure contemplation, the aspirations of the New Germans and formalists shared an idealist penchant for intellectual edification, a suspicion of the senses, and a separation between surface and depth. Idealist musical listening aimed to transcend or penetrate to the essence of sensory musical phenomena. The music of Mahler and Strauss was considered far too affective, inculcating audiences with doses of pleasure and/or pain far too excessive to permit edifying transcendence.308 The apparent sonic satire was also too unnerving and jocular for the realm of serious art music. Plagiarism or even citation was a threat to the New German mission in particular because it depersonalized a composition, cancelling out the work’s function of making manifest abstract identity. Finally, the programmatic and idiomatic banalities of

308 Generally speaking New Germans were more comfortable with musical affect, so long as the experience is in accordance with the idea.

141

Strauss and Mahler blasphemed the revered symphonic realm, a direct assault on the elevated aspirations of idealism, musical or otherwise. Within the context of aesthetic discourse, the first performances of Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony repudiated the educational prerogative of New Germans and formalists by reveling in neglected superficialities.

However, to focus on this music as abnormal, misses what it accomplishes. The eight violations of modernism can actually be reread as affirmative gestures. Indeed categorizing the music as merely deviant reinforces the norm as such, that is, strengthens the cornerstone that ultimately determines and creates deviance as a byproduct. As Foucault notes, this is the very reason why abnormality in itself cannot be celebrated as a means towards emancipation, as it needs the excluding pressure of the norm to exist, a vector deviance can never escape.309 Even

Adorno’s celebration of Mahler’s critical voice is likewise stuck within a negative space from which it cannot detach. For Adorno, Mahler’s mannerist and feigned inauthenticity protest against the frustrated norm of expressive innovation, which in Mahler’s time had reached an insurmountable wall foreclosing progress within tonality.310 It is not that Mahler is protesting against tonality per se, but against a cul-de-sac of historical development. Mahler is the

“unhappy consciousness of that age,” the spokesman for a “historical hour [that] no longer allows it to see human destiny as reconcilable in the existing conditions.”311 Because Adorno is so wed to this historicist model of expressive innovation, Mahler’s innovations can only be heard as lament. Furthermore, those Mahler deviances only reinforce the teleological norm of dialectics the same way that abnormality in Foucault only further entrenches the norm. Neither Foucault nor Adorno leave space for emancipation, for a space outside of established power.

I am to demonstrate, then, the affirmative gestures in not only Mahler but also Strauss, particularly with regard to musical history and development. Although the eight critiques of

309 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 131, 157. 310 Adorno, Mahler, 22, 30. 311 Adorno, Mahler, 16.

142

modernism were initially framed by reviewers as abnormalities, they point to formal musical emancipations accomplished by Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony. The critique went both ways. In other words, while the idealists critiqued the modernists, while work of modernism critiqued idealist aesthetics. At the formal level these works critique the aesthetics of the War of the Romantics by freeing musical elements from dualisms and transcendental obligations. The music is lawless, because it considers the musical laws unjust to music itself.

I aim to build on Dahlhaus’s concept of the “emancipation of timbre,” to explain the affirmations of modernism and how it breaks from late-Romantic aesthetics.312 In his cursory comments on the subject Dahlhaus writes that “fin de siècle modernism…freed tone color from its subservient function of merely clarifying the melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint of a piece, and gave it an aesthetic raison d’etre and significance of its own.”313 As I have demonstrated, giving musical elements such as timbre their own “raison d’etre” was a palpable divergence from the laws of idealist aesthetics, in which all aspects of a composition have a

“subservient function” to follow the composition’s inner necessity and express its poetic or thematic content. Indeed, given the specific language of Strauss’s and Mahler’s detractors, I want to suggest that one can speak of their music emancipating, not merely timbre, but musical elements more broadly.314 This is a reversal of Hanslick’s aesthetics, which in On the Musically

312 Dahlhaus sees the emancipation of color as gradually beginning with Berlioz and Liszt, essentially within the New German School. Additionally, Dahlhaus and Frisch, while diverging over the relation of music to other arts, insist on a periodic unity, such that all fin de siècle music must be of a kind. Consequently, they unnecessarily lump Strauss and Mahler together with late New German composers. 313 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 243. 314 I purposely avoid using the phrase “musical materials,” because of Adorno’s distinct monopoly on its meaning. For Adorno, musical materials are the inherited forms and techniques that contain socio- historical meanings beyond the intention of composers and aesthetic discourse. It is paradoxical to speak in any way of an emancipation of musical materials, while musical elements could be freed from a style or discourse in which they were made highly subservient and regulated. Adorno’s notion of musical materials invokes a purely formal analysis, while my use of “musical elements” insists on the separate but integrated spheres of aesthetic discourse and forms. Max Paddison makes this distinction clear when he says, “it is not what ‘musical sounds’ are in themselves – their natural, physical qualities – that is significant, but rather what they have become in any particular instance.” See Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetic of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 65. For Adorno on musical materials, see Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

143

Beautiful, continually reference the “elemental” properties of music that need to be made subservient to the ideal content, that is, the central motifs.315 Mahler’s refusal to provide a central poetic idea or melodic theme for his Viennese audience was indicative of new music’s break from idealist aesthetics, including the emancipation of musical elements from the duty to symbolize or represent a transcendental unity and core. While merely concert conventions, the literary programs and melodic guides of the late 19th Century had become expedited guarantees that a composition possessed and was dutiful to its immaterial worth. Their absence signaled the presence of extra-legal, sensory music that marched to the beat of its own desire.

Rather than expressing the being of music, in their formal structures Strauss and Mahler demonstrate music in the process of becoming. Rather than composing works that appear to have a total essence, their modernist works showcase the production of disparate sounds as music.

Each of their eight violations draws attention to the composed quality of the compositions and the experiential quality of their produced musical experiences.316 Generally the works of Strauss and

Mahler do not congeal as expressing a single idea or emanating from a single concept, those being idealist pursuits that ultimately direct attention away from the musical elements and their production, both that by the composer and by concert performers. Whether their thick instrumentation, musical citations, banal idioms, strange transitions, or unnerving affect, the finished music celebrates its back history on the composer’s workbench and its effect upon listeners. By not splitting music between its raw elements and the transcendental/educational needs of idea/content, music remains immanent without needing to stand for something else or split itself between its surface and core, its phenomena and noumena. Such unraveling of the bifurcating tendencies of idealism has much in common with Nietzsche’s own reaction, not merely against Wagner, but against idealism more generally, Hegel and Kant included. Written

315 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 7th ed., 91. 316 In their own ways, Strauss and Mahler reverse the phantasmagoria of Wagner’s music according to Adorno’s analysis.

144

the same year as Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony, Nietzsche’s Twilight of the

Idols (1888) asserts in a basic vernacular, “The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”317 In the musical realm Strauss and Mahler likewise abolish both the phenomenal and the noumenal, asserting an agnosticism about such duality. These elective affinities no doubt led Strauss and Mahler to directly take up Nietzsche’s philosophy in their later works.

Dahlhaus was right to point to Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony as path breaking works in the emancipation of color, a major component of the broader emancipation of elements.

In terms of instrumentation – scoring, timbre, color, sound quality – these two compositions overflowed the boundaries of imposed musical icons such as idea or Melos. In the 1890s reviewers criticized Strauss more than Mahler for incongruous instrumentation, and this excessive color struck hardest at the formalist idolatry or fetish for motivic development. Nevertheless, these compositions exposed the noumenal worship prevelant throughout late romanticism. As mentioned earlier, Don Juan’s extravagant musical color was perhaps the most noted component of the composition, which was to some impressive, to most excessive. Oskar Eichberg called

Don Juan “drowned in color,” while Vogel wrote, “Coloring is the Alpha and Omega of his artistic thoughts and feelings; to contend with [Hans] Makart, who as a painter composed symphonies of color, and to devise only sound combinations, which in intoxicating splendor feature exuberant color on the outside, is his main ambition.”318 Vogel’s quote here suggests what color stood in contrast to: melody, the inside. The actual tone fabric, the quality of sound, the instruments making those sounds are considered by Vogel and other formalists as external and extrinsic to the “actual” music, that is, its iconic objectification in the melodic score. Mahler’s

317 , The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 486. 318 Ch., BBZ no. 53, II. Evening supplement (1 February 1890): 1; Vogel, NMZ 12 (1891): 78.

145

instrumentation was similarly noted by critics.319 The frequent characterization of Mahler’s First

Symphony as baroque was certainly also a reference to thick musical ornamentation and excessive coloring. Bussler, Mahler’s most positive Berlin reviewer, even wrote, “The core of his capability lies in coloring.”320 Though, more often Mahler’s instrumentation was raised in the context of its strange and grotesque nature. Nodnagel even makes the clear connection between grotesquery and muted brass, as if the act of muting distorts or attenuates the sound as an analogy to caricature in the visual arts.321 Scheu also seems to be driving at Mahler’s instrumentation when he says that his music is “intentionally raw and ugly.”322 Or in the succinct words of

Hirschfeld: “No single instrument sounds like it should sound really.”323 In drawing attention to instrumentation and color through perceived excess, Strauss and Mahler drew attention to the means and practice of musical production, to sound itself.

If 19th-century musical culture from the glorification of the composer-genius to Wagner’s sunken orchestra pit tended to hide the means of musical production – creating in Adorno’s words its phantasmagoria – Strauss’s and Mahler’s colorful orchestra’s broadcasted these means.324

Parallels with painting might aid the argument here, as critics often likened Strauss and Mahler to open air painters and impressionists.325 This parallel seems to suggest that just as painters fractured traditional representations by using coarsely grouped artistic material and unusual colors, so also the “sound effects” of Strauss and Mahler fractured the direct “re-presentation” of

319 Ok. KZ no. 131 (18 March 1896): 5: “The instrumentation is on the whole not inept, in detail however many trivial gimmicks find themselves.” 320 L. B., NZ no. 188 (17 March 1896): 3. 321 Nodnagel, BT no. 284, evening edition (7 June 1894): 3-4.: “However, what are these incessant, grotesque deployment of muted trumpets and horns?” The muted bass sounds emphasize the act of muting, that is, the production and labor that goes into creating music. 322 Scheu, AZ no. 321 (22 November 1900): 1-2. 323 NMZ 22, no. 1 (1900): 9. 324 See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2005), especially chapter six. 325 While numerous examples of this categorization exist in reviews of Strauss and Mahler, perhaps the most famous designation of their music as “impressionist” was by Walter Niemann in his music history from 1913: Walter Niemann, Die Musik der Gegenwart und der letzten Vergangenheit bis zu den Romatikern, Klassizisten und Neudeutschen (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1913).

146

the musical iconography, either the melodic score or the idea. Hanslick makes this parallel explicit in referring to Don Juan’s “brilliant daubs” and “globs.” It is precisely the daubs and globs that I want to key in on. The prominent, undisguised brush strokes in Impressionism and

Postimpressionism draw attention to the fact that the painting is a work of art, making evident the act of producing it, rather than repressing labor in favor of the image produced. Similarly, Don

Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony do not attempt to hide color and Klangkörper, or submit them to the higher cause of pitch and melody, but showcase the labor inherent to the composition and performance of music. One might even say, metaphorically speaking, that such noticeable color in composition emphasizes the materiality of music, at least insofar as it performed on specific instruments, travels through matter, and effects the bodies of listeners. Just as the three dimensional daubs and globs protrude from the canvass in a thick caking of paint, so also

“impressionist” music – a label often attached to Strauss and Mahler – extends into the world and disrupts the autonomy of art implicit in musical idealism. This particalization of music showcases the elements of music without always presuming that the sum of these elements converge into a synergistic unity – a molar organization held together by a transcendental core – that gives a composition its elevated status. Because “no instrument sounds like it should,” as

Hirschfeld says of Mahler’s First Symphony, musical sound is liberated from the confines of being and being for a transcendental cause, that is, being for what it “should” according to

Hirschfeld.326

Strauss and Mahler achieved as similar illumination of the elemental in music through their melodic mosaics of disparate themes – the patchwork of “incomprehensible apostrophes” and “tiny sundries.”327 By juxtaposing melodies without asserting a unifying development between them, their idiosyncrasies stand out more. This is especially pronounced in Mahler’s

326 R. H., NMZ 22, no. 1 (1900): 9. Hirschfeld further notes that “every instrument is endured, what it can least accomplish.” 327 i., BBZ no. 131, I. Supplement (18 March 1896): 1; n. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung no. 130, evening (17 March 1896): 5.

147

First Symphony, which incorporates styles of such distant association. According to Hasse’s very pointed analysis, “already the program – in which crops up a chaos of real and transcendental concepts without discernable psychological cohesion!”328 And this is what confounded the critics: the side by side appearance of humorous, raw sounds with melodies reminiscent of the German romantic cannon. And yet, the vulgar only really appears as such against the backdrop of the elevated, and vice versa. The grandiose music of the finale in

Mahler’s First Symphony only sounds pompous and satirical set alongside peasant dance idioms.

In this process of patchwork music’s stylization stands out, detached from expectations and extra- sonic experiences. There is even something of Walter Benjamin’s “profane illumination” at work in Mahler. Benjamin uses this phrase to describe the Surrealists’ investment in estrangement through uncanny encounters with outmoded everyday objects.329 The “Bruder Martin” funeral march in Mahler’s First Symphony injects a children’s song into a symphony rupturing one’s understanding of both the song and the symphony. And yet the accumulated experience of this hallowed profanity and profaned holiness is to make the melodic themes comprehendible again as constructions of sound.

In addition to coarse coloration and patchwork construction, the other six qualities of modernism stage an emancipation of musical elements. The vulgar context and unreconciled finales decontextualize through fragmentation, much like melodic mosaics. Similarly generic ambiguity, “plagiarism,” and caricature all play with expectations. Expecting either the role- playing of genre or the airs of originality, when a piece lacks a clear role or suddenly sounds like an imitation, the listener is ripped from experience and made to confront the music itself as purposeless or feigned. Caricature is even more illuminating of elements than plagiarism, because familiarity is mixed with attenuation and desacralization of melody. Stretched to be

328 H., NZfM 61, no. 24 (1894): 278-79. 329 See Walter Benjamin, “: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978): 177- 192, especially 179-181.

148

grotesque the caricatured music stands out and reflects back on what it parodies, casting its specificity in a new light. Finally, the physical affect and violence of musical modernism draws attention to music sound quite directly. Music is heard as sound effects that have a jarring affect on the listener on par with other sounds like animals or explosions.

What I am calling the emancipation of musical elements, might also be deemed a becoming molecular of music, to invoke the coinage of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They juxtapose the molecular with the molar as two conceptions of groupings: assemblages of multiplicities vs. unitary mass.330 In their first introduction of these concepts in Anti-Oedipus,

Deleuze and Guattari make clear that molar and molecular cannot be mapped onto a distinction between the collective and the individual. In fact both molar and molecular involve collectives of individualities, but differentiated by a will toward either “aggregates” or “singularities.” In their words,

In both cases the investment is collective, it is an investment of a collective field; even a lone particle has an associated wave as a flow that defines the coexisting space of its presences. Every investment is collective, every fantasy is a group fantasy and in this sense a position of reality. But the two kinds of investments are radically different, according as the one bears upon the molar structures that subordinate the molecules, and the other on the contrary bears upon the molecular multiplicities that subordinate the structured crowd phenomena. One is a subjugated group investment, as much in its sovereign form as in its colonial formations of the gregarious aggregate, which socially and psychically represses the desire of persons; the other, a subject-group investment in the transverse multiplicities that convey desire as a molecular phenomenon, that is, as partial objects and flows, as opposed to aggregates and persons.331

Bracketing the dialogue here with psychoanalysis, becoming molecular is an emancipatory procedure that allows desire to assume new constellations and connections, however fragmentary.

Molecularization aims to undo the repression of multiple forms of sovereignty: aggregate groupings and persons. Additionally, molar and molecular seem to correspond with their more

330 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus :Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 280. 331 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guitar. Anti-Oedipus :Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 280.

149

familiar concepts of territory and deterritorialization.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari expand on becoming molecular within their general excursus on “becoming” as a simulation of particle flows. With the possible exception of becoming animal, they argue that becoming is neither a “real” transmutation nor an identification, but a proximity of elemental flows: “Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a particular zone of proximity.”332

Because of this elemental notion of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “all becomings are already molecular,” that molecularization is a precondition for other forms of becoming.333

To inject the music of Strauss and Mahler into the Deleuzian discourse of becoming is not at all an intrusion. In fact, music plays an important role in their chapters on becoming. They specifically cite Ravel and Debussy as upsetting the “transcendent, organizational plane of

Western music based on sounds forms and their development.”334 These French post-Wagnerians and contemporaries of Strauss and Mahler are heard to “retain just enough form to shatter it, affect it, modify it through speeds and slowness. Bolero is the classic example, nearly a caricature, of a machinic assemblage that preserves a minimum of form in order to take it the bursting point.”335 Elsewhere they attribute to Debussy various becomings that are “inseparable from a molecularization of the motif, a veritable “chemistry” achieved through orchestration.”336

As opposed to the molar constructions or musical “territories” of the War of the Romantics – territories inscribed by law – Strauss and Mahler create new musical landscapes by breaking down and reassembling musical elements. Their molecularization of German symphonic music is emancipatory in freeing musical elements to follow new becomings, new sonic flows and proximities, but it is also emancipatory with regards to music as immanent sound. In their

332 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 273. 333 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 272. 334 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 270. 335 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 270-71. 336 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 308.

150

explanation of the plane of immanence – in the same chapter on becoming – Deleuze and Guattari write, “The same applies to music. The developmental or organizational principle does not appear in itself, in a direct relation with that which develops or is organized: There is a transcendent compositional principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not “audible” by itself or for itself.”337 The modernist emancipation of musical elements dethrones the

“transcendent compositional principle” and allows music to be “for itself.” As I have previously demonstrated the forms and principles of the War of the Romantics functioned as transcendent unifiers of music, separate from sound itself. Strauss and Mahler’s molecularization allow music future becomings, including becoming modern, but they also introduce an immanence to art music. The music of Strauss and Mahler is for itself.

The emancipation of musical elements in Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First

Symphony allows music to become a subject-group, rather than a subjected group, according to the Deleuzian distinction. In other words molecularization allows for modernist music to express itself as something more than an object in the aesthetics of late romanticism. As noted in chapter one, the competing principles in the War of the Romantics equally objectify musical expression as the possession of extra-sonic intellect or personality. In a kind of aesthetic idolatry, a musical performance is not music then, and does not exist for itself, but is for the formalists the expression of the score, the icon. The New Germans have no less an essentialist icon for music: the idea. Melody, harmony, instrumentation, and rhythm serve the expression of the idea, which is the spiritual core of music. According to the parallels with living organisms, a metaphor ardently affirmed by contemporaneous discourse, these elements of music are its body, its dangerous, animalistic vessel in need of mastery. Molecularization shatters these icons and their biopolitical dualism between musical worth and sound effects.

In subverting the hierarchies of musical law, Strauss and Mahler challenged the

337 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 266.

151

experiential and enculturating objectives of late Romanticism. In terms of experience, formalists explicitly engineered musical culture to maximize Bildung, the educational and moral cultivation of the individual. According to critics, Strauss’s and Mahler’s music lacked the logical organization and development necessary, especially in Hanslickian or formalist aesthetics, for the cultivation of rationality and evolutionary progress. For Bernhard Vogel, the “random” musical progression of Don Juan stands in opposition to the “artist’s task,” which is to exhibit “self- control” and “not casually integrate a good idea immediately into the whole.”338 Similarly,

Mahler’s music is described as “haphazard and shapeless” by H. N. of the BT and by the MW correspondent in Berlin as having “deficiency of a large, cohesive melody.”339 Universally,

Mahler’s music was derided for its lack of consistency and cohesion, particularly between the first and last movements. In the words of the VZ reviewer, “To find cohesion between the finale and the first movements of the symphony was quite impossible.”340 It is not simply that their music was incomprehensible because it seemed to evade maps of intelligibility, such as logical development, but in being incomprehensible, listeners did not get that edifying experience for which they came to the concert hall. Additionally, the emphasis on instrumentation, color, quirks, sound effects, and so on, was perceived as distracting from rational engagement, or making up for lacking it.

The mode of listener engagement engendered by Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony not only defused the formalist experience, but undermined its educational prerogative. There are no real prerequisites for listening to Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony, but in a populist

338 Vogel, NMZ 12 (1891): 78. Vogel, as a formalist, also states that he cannot enjoy Don Juan because of its lack of logical development: “the material ideas are a side issue in a sometimes too abrupt, aphoristic, and unclear manner of presentation and development, which hinders the unmediated enjoyment.” Oskar Eichberg has a similar position on Don Juan as a “series of broken phrases and incomprehensible apostrophes from which also no new idea wants to develop, a defect, for which the composer vainly seeks to compensate us through ingenious tone painting.” See Ch. BBZ no. 53, II. Evening supplement (1 February 1890): 1. 339 H. N., “Die Musikalische Woche,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 141 (17 March 1896): 1; Anonymous, “Musikbriefe,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 27, no. 14 (26 March 1896): 180-81. 340 n. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung no. 130, evening (17 March 1896): 5.

152

manner can be, at least partially, understood and sufficiently experienced by all. Mahler’s refusal to allow a guide book for his First Symphony suggests that at least the composer considered the work transparent and self explanatory. Don Juan, though certainly possessing a semblance of traditional forms, does not claim to or ask audiences to listen for them. While there are plenty of references and inside jokes for those immersed in musicology and the cannon, Don Juan and

Mahler’s First Symphony allow for understanding apart from them. These compositions do not required audience members to study before hand or know much about music. It is notable that the support for Mahler in Vienna was often said to be coming from those in the philharmonic standing room, who remained marginal to the moneyed, educated bourgeois public. With its layered intertexuality, the music of Strauss and Mahler is far from anti-intellectual, but rather simply opposed to the educational models of easy and marketable formalism, that is, the guide book dependence of the Hirschfeld’s Viennese audience. While Don Juan and Mahler’s First

Symphony are certainly complex and highly intellectual, they undermined the prided education and discipline usually requited to participate correctly in 19th-century German art music.

On the other hand, the experiences cultivated by Strauss and Mahler also subverted New

German traditions of music. These traditions include an expansion of the romantic fascination with the sublime, great music as an extra-conscious experience and connection with a transcendental sphere, and music as an expression and cultivation of national identity. Opponents of the New German School, and especially of Wagner, critiqued such ecstatic music as an opiate.

Yet, for all the populist, anti-educationalism of Strauss and Mahler, to which many New Germans could relate, their music resisted intoxication and nationalism. Certainly Strauss and Mahler – in these early works and throughout their careers – could write intoxicating music. However, the music often seems to barricade one’s lapsing out of consciousness. Both Don Juan and Mahler’s

First Symphony contain enough quirks and surprises to pinch the listener, resist kitsch, create uneasiness, and make the listener focus on the music rather than the experience of the music. Part of this is accomplished through its intertextual intellectuality that runs counter to the doubling

153

expectations in music drama and symphonic poems. The music does not express the lyrical content, creating a clear sonic mirror, but operates in independent dialogue with the program, forcing the audiences to actively explore their connection. This lack of parallelism also informs the anti-nationalism of Strauss and Mahler. Just as their music is not a linguistic expression more essential than language itself – as it is in Wagnerian aesthetics – it cannot then be an expression of nationality. While certainly versed in the grammar of the German musical cannon, neither

Strauss nor Mahler feels themselves confined to it. Although the programmatic references of

Titan – Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, fairy tale images, Wunderhorn poems – are far more

German than Don Juan, musically Mahler employs melodies variously described by critics as

French, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, and Slavic. Yet these “non-German” melodies are neither exoticized, nor held up as expressions of any single nationality.

In historiography there has been a tendency to lump Strauss and Mahler in with the late romantics of the New German School. Such a demarcation largely stems from the tyranny of tonality in lines of thought as diverse as Adorno and Taruskin, for both of whom Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance marks the only real break with 19th century traditions.341 While

Adorno attributes to the music of Strauss and Mahler a different function than that of Wagner – exposing rather than veiling commodification – ultimately he views them as sharing the common fate of expanding and exhausting romantic tonality.342 In Taruskin’s analysis of Strauss and

341 Even in his positive assessment of Mahler, Adorno primarily measures Mahler through the matrix of tonality, though he recognizes that the accomplishments of the “unemancipated” Mahler are nonetheless post-Romantic. See Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 20: “He charges tonality with an expression that it is no longer constituted to bear. Overstretched, its voice cracks…Mahler heats it up from within, from an expressive need, to the point that it again becomes incandescent, speaks, as if it were immediate. Exploding, it accomplishes what was later taken over by the emancipated dissonance of Expressionism.” On the other hand, Taruskin goes to length to demonstrate through formal analysis how Mahler’s Second Symphony uses similar techniques as earlier romantics. See Taruskin, Oxford History, vol. 4. 342 See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981), especially chapter 6, “Phantasmagoria;” Adorno, Mahler, 30: “Mahler’s music stresses its inauthenticity;” Theodor Adorno, “Richard Strauss: born June 11, 1864,” trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Perspectives of New Music (Fall-Winter 1965): 14-32, 113-29. For all Adorno’s praise of Mahler and scorn for Strauss, in certain respects his take on the truth content of each is not so different.

154

Mahler, he interprets what Adorno calls exposure as merely intensification:

Within the period 1890-1914, and especially in the German-speaking lands, modernism chiefly manifested itself…as a radical intensification of means [specifically intoxication] toward accepted or traditional ends (or at least toward ends that could be so described). That is why modernism of this early vintage is perhaps best characterized as maximalism.343

As this chapter evinces, the early music of Mahler and Strauss did not merely rehash “accepted or traditional ends” and was more than “inflated rhetoric” without “new things to say.”344 Rather the critical reactions to Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony reinforce Dahlhaus’s periodization, which considers these works a historical caesura. In terms of characterizing this departure, Dahlhaus is somewhat vague, though he does cite irregular syntax, post-functionalist harmony, and of course an emancipation of color as “one of the crucial features of fin-de-siècle modernism.”345 As the eight anti-idealist categories of these compositions suggests, Strauss and

Mahler did more than free instrumentation from fidelity to ideas and concepts, but stimulated an even broader reassessment of musical building blocks that made possible other modernist innovations.

In departing from the aesthetics principles of the War of the Romantics, Strauss’s Don

Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony also break with the ingrained political implications of late romantic music. The modernist critique of idealist aesthetics was also a critique of the politics of both liberalism and nationalism. While early Strauss has generally been interpreted as apolitical

– a notion I will challenge in the following chapters – this chapter challenges the interpretation of

Mahler’s music as voicing political liberalism. Leon Botstein and others, following the interpretive trajectory initiated by Leonard Bernstein, have read Mahler’s music as a liberal critique of norms, especially nationalism. In a very insightful essay on Mahler reception,

Botstein characterizes Mahler’s music, much like a novel, as demanding a mode of listening that

343 Taruskin, Western History, vol. 4, 5. 344 Taruskin, Western History, vol. 4, 5. 345 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 338, 243.

155

is inclusive, participatory, self-reflective, and critique-generating. In Botstein’s words:

Listeners to Mahler’s symphonies, much like readers of the late nineteenth- century generation of realist prose, are forced to come to terms with the instability and incompleteness of the imagination and any construction of meaning or the assignment of truth. This extends beyond the artificial temporal space of an artwork such as the novel or the symphony. It applies to the constructs of external reality we call politics and culture. The accumulated meaning experienced through the act of listening and reading can illuminate that which lies beneath the surface of our experience of the passage of real time. The Mahler symphony becomes like the world. It does not contain it, but it forces the listener by its expanse and detail to be self-aware about the inadequacy of the fixed norms and forced coherences and resolutions with which we judge the world. The experience of listening to Mahler is intended to be unsettling because it defies more than the expectations of what listening to symphonic music ought to have been about; it seeks to defy the logic by which daily experience is justified. In this sense, music approximates philosophical criticism.346

Botstein’s reading of Mahler’s music as world-critique echoes much of Adorno’s argument, but both modifies the object of critique and gives the process a productive affirmation. If Adorno’s

Mahler casts a vote against “bourgeois” or “capitalist” norms, Botstein’s Mahler critiques the illusion of fixed constructs generally, both internal and external. Moreover, this very exposure to indeterminacy seems designed to create self-awareness and self-determination. Although he does not here assign to Mahler the same direct political potency he does to Schoenberg, Botstein’s

Mahler is one who cultivates individual autonomy and subjectivity in relation to an unstable world filled with inadequate norms. This is Mahler as philosophical, and perhaps political, liberal.

Botstein’s argument has been very recently elaborated on by Carl Niekerk and Karen

Painter. Niekerk argues almost verbatim that Mahler “was invested in a modern way of looking at the world, in humans’ ability to invent their own norms and values, rather than their need to rely on others for those norms and values.”347 He goes on to say that Mahler’s influences privilege the most “self-reflexive” aspects of the German cultural tradition, and that Mahler’s

346 Leon Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, Interpretation, and History” in Mahler and His World, ed. Karen Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 41-42. 347 Carl Niekerk, Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010), 218.

156

music emphasizes difference and diversity. Niekerk paints Mahler’s work as having political relevance in counteracting Wagnerian political and cultural missions (named as anti-Semitism, conservatism, nationalism, normative). It is not exactly clear what the progressive politics of

Mahler are for Niekerk, but the outlines look like liberalism, fitting the typical other in the War of the Romantics binary. Painter, who has more of a historicizing interest than Botstein or Niekerk, names names in characterizing Mahler’s politics. In the article “Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitic

Critique in the Austro-German Reception of Mahler, 1900-1945,” she notes that nationalists – both anti-Semites and Zionists – condemned the Mahler’s heterophony and lack of smoothly integrating counterpoint, which she reads as an affirmation of liberalism.348 Given the harsh reactions of the liberal press and the investments of liberal aesthetics, it seems hardly apt to characterize Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony as politically liberal. As the disapproving rhetoric of contemporaneous liberals confirms, Mahler’s molecular music challenged the dualisms and educational prerogatives of liberal autonomy.

Botstein and others portray Mahler’s as the music of liberalism, but the liberal critics of his First Symphony in no way experienced it as such or encouraged others to read Mahler as liberal. In fact, the liberal periodicals were perhaps most critical and rightly so. According the aesthetic discourses of the day, the autonomy, rationality, intersubjectivity, and protection of all

“individuals” involved were violated by these compositions. The respect for the sovereignty of the composer and composition were questioned by the lack of concern for artistic intent, forcing one to look beyond those enclosures for meaning. The Hanslickian liberal listener was unable to have their unadulterated, architectonic experience, everywhere disturbed by association- generating citations, sound effects, and vulgar, enigmatic programs. As with Don Juan, Mahler did not provide the stock rational experience of easily-deciphered musical development. They

348 See Karen Painter, “Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitic Critique in the Austro-German Reception of Mahler, 1900-1945,” Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Burlington, VT.: Ashgate, 2005).

157

did not provide audiences – especially in Vienna – with easy opportunities for educational enlightenment. Most importantly, Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony create lawless musical worlds that are an anathema to the natural and judicial laws that populate the liberal worldview.

The molecular politics of Strauss’s and Mahler’s submits to neither the enclosures nor protections of the person or the nation. That their music is not nationalist is the more immediately obvious and commonly asserted. While Strauss’s expressivity was hailed as New

German and the composer even crowned Richard II (tying him to Wagner), Don Juan was not properly expressive. The composition had none of the philosophical idealism, linguistic metaphysics, and propagandistic program becoming a German nationalist. The Wagnerians by no means found the non-German and non-symphonic musical references in Strauss and Mahler supportive of the establishment of the nation. In fact, it seems that in noting the anti-nationalist trajectory of Mahler, critics have been quick to assume that his music must be liberal, given the common dichotomy between nationalism and liberalism. However, in the course of the 1890s, the gulf between these positions, conceived politically or aesthetically, shrank. However, the opposition to the totalizing features of the nation does not necessarily translate into an affirmation of the totalizing features of the individual. The high esteem for the elemental in Strauss and

Mahler does not equate to praise of the rational individual. Rather it affirms the affective particle of musical that produces and becomes different iterations of desire.

However, the musical expressions of Strauss’s Don Juan and Mahler’s First Symphony are emancipatory only in the context of late 19th-century aesthetic principles, which qualified the terms of musical expression. Furthermore, the insatiable will to police and analyze music by wielders of these aesthetic principles only magnified the lawlessness of such music. Under the gaze of late romantic aesthetics, Strauss and Mahler became increasingly visible as abnormal and modern. It should be noted that musical discourse circa 1890 still attempted to maintain a wall between aesthetic and cultural criticism. Hence, these lawless works were not yet heard as expressions of a rudderless modernity. Yet, over the course of the 1890s the pressures of musical

158

discourse increasingly read new music in the vein of Strauss and Mahler as reflections of modernity, including its biological dangers to the state of music and listenership. Such a multiplication of discourse, as well as new compositions, further clarified the affirmative biopolitics enacted in new music. If Don Juan and Titan stand as iconoclastic works railing against the enclosures of the past, future modernist compositions gave voice to new ideals.

159

CHAPTER THREE Discipline and Flesh: Ambiguous Modernism in the 1890s

In the 1890s performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony piqued wide interest but also provoked an ambiguous spectrum of reactions. In the words of Nodnagel, “It has probably not yet been heard of a composer causing from his first public appearance such passionate judgments, in which extremes of enthusiastic admiration and fanatical enmity so jaggedly burst apart, as over

Gustav Mahler.”349 Mahler’s Second Symphony was hailed and more often booed by both formalists and New Germans. Far more than his First Symphony, something about this composition evoked greater hopes of Mahler’s romantic normality and worse fears of his modernist abnormality. Berlin critic Eugenio Pirani hints at this contradiction in Mahler’s Second

Symphony when he says:

[I]ts five movements of very unequal value…attest to a similar lush, poetic vein, so long as the composer allows his healthy musical talent to lead, but it degenerates into baroque sophistry [Spitzfindigkeit] as soon as the author in the search for originality and the “never before seen” leads off into noisy, raging orchestral effects and for this reason commands an unduly large apparatus into the field. It is sincerely regrettable that such aberrations obscure the innovation and power of the extraordinarily compelling work.350

Though at odds with the growing amalgam of Mahler supporters, Pirani recognizes the

“innovation and power” of Mahler’s “healthy musical talent.” In a disciplinary mode, Pirani sandwiches together encouragements of potential, regrets about its loss, and diagnosis of

Mahler’s “baroque” “aberrations.” Pirani attempts to steer Mahler toward the healthy path already evident beneath the surface of his Second Symphony, but also incites a discourse that fueled the view of the symphony as excessive and degenerate sound effects, that is, hyped up its elementality and molecularity. These were the contradictory pulls on new music in the 1890s: discipline and flesh.

There is a deep ambiguity in Mahler’s Second Symphony and much radical music in

349 Ernst Otto Nodnagel, Musikalische Wochenblatt 28 no. 40 (10 September 1897): 526. 350 Eugenio Pirani, “Berlin,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 6 (1896): 65-66.

160

1890s with respect to modernism. The mid-decade works by Strauss and Mahler certainly betray a complicity in their interpolation back into idealist institutions. Yet, other works and discourses continually pushed compositional bounds and highlight the worldly materialism of their works.

While the discursive attempts to reinsert new music within the terrains of late romanticism neutralized its unsound sonic bodies, other attempts at and mechanisms of discipline only reinforced its overflowing fleshiness. Like Pirani’s review of Mahler’s Second Symphony, critics of ambivalent modernism in the 1890s display in full force the machinations and even success of discipline, but simultaneously multiply the dangers, even biopolitical dangers, of new music.

Such trajectories christened the music of Strauss and Mahler as acceptable extensions of tradition, but also pushed them further into the terrain of modernism.

One of the most palpable effects on German musical culture by these ambiguous compositions and their attendant discourses was a heightening of fear about the state of music.

Specifically, critics were concerned that new works by Strauss and Mahler were harbingers of the end of music as an art form. Whereas Don Juan and Titan had been critiqued for their failures individually as isolated incidents, their later works evoked fears that a pattern of decline had emerged in music. Oppositional critics called out Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and

Mahler’s next two symphonies for doing violence to the very concept of music. If earlier discourse had tacitly suggested that their compositions were musical zoe, by the end of the 1890s most critics were emphatic that such anarchistic sound had no place in a concert hall.

Furthermore, not only were these works considered a danger to the state of music, but they were beginning to be characterized as a health threat to the audience. The biopolitics of musical forms morphed into literal biopolitical concerns about the threat of chaotic music. While critics attempted to delegitimize these compositions as zoe, their rhetoric actually provides the basis for reconceiving this anarchic music from an affirmative angle as musical “flesh,” a concept I will explain later in the chapter. Musical flesh does not legitimate itself through aesthetic law and its protections, but remains open to the world and immediate. In the context of the political

161

implications of late Romanticism, the aesthetic anarchism of budding modernism took on an ambiguously populist valence as a form of non-hierarchical, direct action of forms, both aesthetic and biological.

As a period of ambiguous modernism, musical culture in the 1890s was in flux. The challenges posed by Strauss and Mahler created a degree of vertigo for the arbiters of musical culture. Strauss’s music floated in and out of New German acceptability, while Mahler’s music was passed like a hot potato from one camp to another. One thing was clear: the traditional battle lines of the War of the Romantics were breaking down and losing their interpretive effectiveness with regards to these composers. Traditional opponents who found themselves in sudden agreement frantically backpedalled to explain their differences. However, both camps in the War of the Romantics increasingly splintered between those who supported new music and those who did not, making that the new real fault line in musical culture. It was not really until the first years of the 20th Century that musical modernism as a movement and social problem became evident. Nonetheless, in the last years of the 19th Century, the discourse defining modernism as at least an aesthetic problem developed rapidly, providing the conceptual preconditions for the nascent secessionist movement. As the attempts to dissect and critique modernism expanded, so did it expand as a delimitable phenomenon.

This chapter begins with a survey of the disciplinary mechanisms faced by Strauss and

Mahler. I show the language of discipline threaded through reviews of their work, as well as examples of how they modified their compositions in light of disciplinary expectations. After that I examine the discourses associated with two Strauss tone poems – Also Sprach Zarathustra and Don Quixote – and then return to Mahler’s Second Symphony. The reception of each of these works highlights anxieties about the lawlessness and degeneration of modernist music. As inspired by Nietzsche, Strauss’s Zarathustra helped inject Nietzsche’s philosophy into musical modernism beyond simply this work. For reviewers, Nietzscheanism was related to a total overthrow of standards akin to en vogue anarchisms. With Don Quixote, Strauss’s penchant for

162

orchestral sound effects reached new heights. Not only was it his most controversial work, but it best illustrates Deleuzian musical becoming and the concept of musical flesh, as exteriorized sound. Finally, I look at the ambiguity of Mahler’s Second Symphony as an example of the contradictions and failures of discipline. While the work was formally more traditional and idealist than his First Symphony, through their expert diagnoses the leaders of musical culture only heightened the understanding of Mahler’s music as untamed, irreverent sound. Indeed the performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony, especially in Munich, did more than any other concerts to forge a cohesive movement of modernist music. With each of these three compositions the specter of raw sound was viewed as a threat to both the institution of music and the health of listeners.

Discipline in Musical Culture

As mentioned in chapter one, the techniques of discipline make the object malleable. By scrutinizing and producing knowledge about an object, disciplinary institutions place it on a continuum of normality and map out a path for rehabilitation and enhanced fidelity to the norm.

Foucault simultanesouly maintains that such power is coercively manipulative and subject- forming, establishing the essence of the known object as subject. He describes the history of discipline as the history of the development of the modern “soul,” that is the “psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.”351 While I already establish in chapter one that musical discipline created the inner soul of a composition, I also want to suggest that such discourse formed the soul of the composer. By this I do not mean the general soul of a composer as a person, but their compositional persona or style. In the process of examining individual compositions, critics often aimed to establish a circumscribed musical personality for the composer that leaves its signature on each work. This is what allows critics to speak of

Straussian as a measurement of a composition by Strauss: it is a kind of composer soul created by

351 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 29-30.

163

discipline. Such essentializing of a composer based on a past performance has the curious effect of determining the status of future compositions. Having committed a previous musical crime, the composer becomes a musical criminal, whose productions must necessarily be crimes, so long as the composer is deemed a criminal.352 Surmounting the previous designation is no easy task and makes discipline somewhat counter-productive, to the degree it illuminates and produces deviance. It requires passing multiple tests before a composer’s essentialized status – composer- psyche – can be given a clean bill of health.

Deleuze and Gutarri’s concept of reterritorialization is not unrelated to discipline.353

Indeed they first introduce the concepts in the context of psychiatry’s tendency to produce madness, an analysis similar to the soul-production of Foucault’s discipline.354 Whereas the paradigm of discipline implies concentric degrees of distance from a norm, territories imply inclusion or exclusion across a boundary of identification. Reterritorialization is a stage within the process of discipline. It is the threshold at which an unruly phenomenon becomes known, but less as a deviant, then as a rehabilitated atom. Reterritorialization is the process of bringing the deviant back within the known safe-house of a norm. In the case of the War of the Romantics, both the New Germans and formalists were established musical territories. For the musical forms of Strauss and Mahler to more closely adhere to romantic principles – or for critics to insist that their music was lawful – was to reterritorialize it. Regardless of some discourses which pushed their music further outside romantic camps, their music in form and general discourse clearly moved closer to the territories of those camps in the mid-1890s.

Bracketing for a moment the coercive implications of discipline, one can certainly say that musical aesthetics and critics dissected and produced knowledge about compositions.

352 Foucault speaks of the “criminal” existing before and outside the crime itself through professional analysis. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 252. 353 On the concepts of territorialization and its derivatives in the context of music see Deleuze and Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 300-303. Much like many of their concepts, these are first issued in Anti-Oedipus within a specific critique of psychoanalysis and then expanded in applicability in A Thousand Plateaus. 354 See Deleuze and Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus, 136.

164

Increasingly, especially in the 1890s, musical critics did not simply offer journalistic accounts of concerts, but scientifically explained the operations of musical works. These explorations, however, were not unbiased, incidental statements, but essentialized compositions and composers as properly territorialized or improperly deviant for a musical public. The forces of discipline served to modify the status of music and even its form. Musical critics in the mold of Hanslick did not simply report about music, but exposed its psyche and then offered solutions for the improvement of that subject.

While Brendel and Hanslick pioneered professional musical criticism in the mid-19th

Century, the apparatus of musical discipline – testing and knowledge production in the form of reviews – rapidly multiplied in the 1890s. If few, mostly major liberal newspapers and specialist journals, carried such regulating criticism circa 1890, by the 1900 critics were swarming concerts.

For example, when Strauss’s Don Juan was performed in Berlin in 1890, very few newspapers reviewed the concert. When Mahler’s First Symphony was performed in Berlin in 1896, it was reviewed by numerous newspapers of varying political affiliation. While this disparity may suggest a growing interest in new, challenging compositions, I think it more accurately reflects a quantitative surge in musical criticism. In the mid to late 1890s, newspapers that had previously offered few columns on music increased their coverage. A similar quantitative disparity exists between the Viennese premieres of Don Juan (1892) and Mahler’s Second Symphony (1899).

However, more than numbers, there was a qualitative difference to the new reviews. If the early reviews of Strauss and Mahler tended to be descriptive reportages, the later reviews actually contained concerted analysis, both musical and social. That is, critics became more like

Hanslick in using reviews to make larger statements. Additionally, in analyzing compositions they actually attempted to categorize and regulate them. New music critics did not simply judge, they measured and offered solutions.

Discipline differed from outright condemnation in offering a path to make amends, as a more economic and productive form of censure. The greatest fear within the logic of discipline

165

seems to be the possibility of waste. Rather than being content to dispense with a bad composition or composer, critics were pained to see talent and possibility go to waste. They aimed for maximization of the aesthetic economy. For example, consider the reviews of Don

Juan by critics as different as Otto Lessmann and Bernard Vogel. According to Lessmann,

Strauss had real potential as a great New German composer, but needed to tone down his timbre.355 Indeed by placing Strauss, despite his shortcomings, within the territory of the New

Germans, Lessmann created a gravitational force pulling Strauss toward more proper New

German music. For others like Vogel, Strauss had a fine intuitive sense for expression, but used it indiscriminately. If Strauss were only to use “self-control” and clarity in the development and presentation of content, he may still, in Vogel’s opinion, become a great composer.356

These disciplinary admonitions are aimed at both Don Juan the composition and Strauss the composer. From the perspective of Lessmann, the timbre of Don Juan needs to be minimized so as not to distract from the ideas expressed, as color in the New German aesthetic is external to the content. For Vogel, it is Strauss himself and his intuition, as the composer-personality behind

Don Juan’s composition-personality, which lack control. Nonetheless, Vogel remains confident that this compositional identity can be rehabilitated to a level of productivity. The disciplinary critiques of Don Quixote were even more pronounced just a few years later in 1896. By that time it was clear that Strauss’s aesthetic violations were not singular anomalies, but a pattern that constitutes an essentialized trajectory. M. L., an even more Hanslickian critic than Eichberg at the BBZ, writes considerably about the pitfalls of Strauss’s “path.”357 He urges critics to call out

Strauss as a means of turning him toward a more productive path. Similarly Karl Wolff, noted

Cologne critic, “hopes” that Strauss will turn away from exiting the “borders” of music. Rather than pure judgment, the disciplinary mode of criticism remains optimistic that new music can be

355 Lessmann, Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 17 (1890): 68-69. 356 Vogel, Neue Musik-Zeitung 12 (1891): 78. 357 M. L., “Kunst und Wissenshaft,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung no. 571 (7 December 1898): 7.

166

reterritorialized within proper musical territory.

The critiques of Mahler’s first two symphonies also employ the language of finding the proper path, a shepherding sentiment that seems to share the pastoral care of the Christian tradition. After his second hearing of Mahler’s First Symphony, Lessmann was more convinced than ever of the defective nature of the symphony, but nevertheless harshly repudiates those who would “repudiate” Mahler. Rather than merely dropping the gavel, Lessmann encourages the composer to find the right path and, as a good New German, respects Mahler’s striving after grandiose and original sounds. Lessmann considers Mahler’s musical syntax, specifically orchestral layering, to be a “copycat” of Wagner, though “out of control and attenuated”.358 Even the conservative critic at the Kreuzzeitung – O.K. – recognizes the talent and potential, but contrasts the composer’s worth with his product’s unbeneficial harmony. He says that “he will not amount to anything, if he does not abandon the previously chosen path.”359 The disciplinary mode makes every effort to avoid lost potential.

Despite a more coherent program and one that meshes with New German aesthetics,

Mahler’s Second Symphony was no less subject to disciplinary suggestions. It should be noted that for most critics in Berlin and Vienna, this was the first work of Mahler’s to be heard. Despite musical idioms that extend rather than contradict romantic tradition, the Second Symphony established for many the errant path of Mahler’s music. Even before voicing a similar sentiment with regard to the First Symphony, Eichberg asserts that Mahler “must first learn to find the appropriate tonal expression for his ideas and to give as modest a form and as regular lines as possible to the all too luxuriantly formed images of musical fantasy,” rather than indefinite mass of sound of the Second Symphony.360 The phrase “he must first learn,” exemplifies the pedagogical viewpoint of disciplinary criticism, reading like feedback from an examination. The

358 Lessmann, AMZ 3, no. 12 (20 March 1896): 166-67. 359 ok., “Theater und Musik,” Neue Preussische Zeitung no. 131 (18 March 1896): 5. 360 i. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung no. 587 (15 December 1895): 10.

167

concerned investment in musical management comes across in review in the MW and VZ, whose critics found Mahler’s lack of control “regrettable,” and even say that “it hurts me to have to pick apart Herr Mahler so unfriendly.”361 This critic further writes, “Anyone who is kind to Mahler and sees him fall into a lamentable manner, is to shout warningly to him: ‘Get away from it: here you will never win!’" In the context of the public feuilleton, the statements function as a call for intervention, for Mahler’s private circles to apply the pressure of reform from his

“bizarreness.”362 For Lessmann, Mahler’s Second Symphony represents a “disastrous step” over the “border” of what constitutes music. Indeed he is emphatic that the composition ceases to be music, a source of its fleshiness on which I will later expand.363

It is not the task of this investigation to consider Strauss’s or Mahler’s own reactions to discipline or measure precisely its effect on the composers. It would be a difficult chore to determine what critiques they heeded and internalized. Nonetheless, one can certainly see modifications of the compositions following early critiques, a change I mention to at least suggest the real disciplinary power wielded by critics. Discourses actually changed compositions and the course of compositional development. The most obvious example was the transformation of

Titan into Mahler’s First Symphony followed the bad reception of Titan and Mahler’s Second

Symphony in Berlin. To some degree he took to heart the pastoral suggestions to find the proper musical path. Following the Weimar performance of Titan, the composer cut out the second movement, the Blumine chapter, and all the various levels of programmatic reference. He eliminated much of the ambiguity of form in Titan, trying to decisively make it a symphony, rather than a musical species ambivalently between symphony and tone poem. For every performance thereafter, Mahler’s First Symphony – no longer Titan – had the four movements of

361 Anonymous, “Musikbriefe: Berlin,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 27 (26 March 1896): 180-81; n. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung no. 130, evening (17 March 1896): 5. 362 Anonymous, “Musikbriefe: Berlin,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 27 (26 March 1896): 181. 363 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 22, no. 51/52 (20/27 December 1895): 669-670.

168

a traditional symphony, each with simple musicological titles to the final three movements:

Scherzo, All marcia funebre, Allegro furioso. Similarly, even eliminated the program for Don

Juan for the Viennese performance with an eye to appeasing authorities.

With Mahler’s First Symphony, there is considerable evidence that the disciplinary workings of modern musical criticism actually changed the composition. In his review, Hanslick clearly states that Mahler changed the composition because of what the critics said.364 Titan was not simply judged, but as a composition internalized the normalizing pressures of surveillance, and made to better toe the line. It would be a mistake to say that these modifications violated

Mahler’s own personal desires and artistic individuality. He certainly sympathized with much of the aesthetic standpoints of the New Germans and formalists. Yet, his desire to appease the two aesthetic camps competed with the modernist, experiential sonic world he wished to create. If he took small steps back from the precipice of the radical and unmusical in the mid-1890s, the machinations of discipline should be accounted for in that narrative. If discipline, according to

Foucault, is about modifying individual bodies (rather than populations), the actually score of his

First Symphony was modified and partially normalized in response to the crushing pressure the musical world’s surveillance, testing, rules, and guiding feedback.

Mahler also modified the evolving Third Symphony several times. Most significantly, he was initially going to end with the movement that became the finale to his Fourth Symphony. By ending the Third Symphony with the lyric-less adagio, rather than the Knaben Wunderhorn song

“The Heavenly Life,” the symphony takes on a grander, more romantic air at its conclusion. The reasons for these modifications are far from clear. William McGrath suggests that it stemmed from a specific mystical experience of the composer. Regardless, these changes happened exactly during the time he received the first barrage of negative feedback from the early performances of his first two symphonies. As mentioned in the last chapter, the finale of Mahler’s First Symphony

364 e. h., “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten,” Neue Freie Presse (20 November 1900): 7-8.

169

was repeatedly criticized for being too banal and not sounding like a proper entrance to heaven.

Given the similarly divine intentions for his Third Symphony, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Mahler did not want reap the same blowback by again failing to approach the divine without grave sentimentality. The sum effect of the changes to the Third Symphony were to reterritorialize it – at least its ending – as properly romantic, perhaps even New German.

Again, while it is not my place to assert what Strauss and Mahler were thinking with their compositional decisions, it should be noted that in the mid-1890s their compositions veered back toward acceptable standards. This can be seen in both their follow up compositions to Don Juan and Titan, as well as their new conducting positions. Strauss’s position as conductor in Weimar and Mahler’s as conductor in Hamburg put them within the inner circles of the New German

School. In fact, their next compositions – Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung and Mahler’s Second

Symphony – were each dedicated to preeminent New Germans, Alexander Ritter and Hans von

Bülow respectively. More significantly than the conductorships or dedications, the compositions themselves were formally more in line with New German aesthetics, particularly Tod und

Verklärung. Both compositions avoid the genre blurring of their previous works, though

Mahler’s vocal parts still challenged parameters of a symphony. Both works clearly express a program, without the ambivalent intertextual dialogue of the last two works. If Don Juan and

Titan are primarily musical, Tod und Verklärung and Mahler’s Second Symphony are primarily poetic. At the level of ideas, both of the new works express romantic concepts of death, transcendence, and redemption, themes central to the Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian values of the

New German School. To different degrees these early 1890s compositions brought Strauss and

Mahler further into the New German School.

It would be a mistake to assert that the negative reactions to Don Juan and Titan fueled this repentance and appeasement. Chronologically speaking, the composers began writing this set of works after the premieres of the first set, but not after the real negative reviews. However, if one wants to consider chronology and causation, they began working of the New German

170

compositions in connection with their new appointments, to Weimar and Hamburg respectively.

These were noteworthy positions with New German repertoire traditions and warranted new compositions worthy of them. If there were pressures on Mahler and Strauss to tame the lawlessness of their first famed works, it was general and prior to the critical backlash. If chronology is to be considered, the negative reactions to Don Juan and Titan seem likely to have impacted the composition of Strauss’s Guntram and Mahler’s Third Symphony.

While Mahler’s Second Symphony put him on better terms with the most radical of New

Germans, it also sparked a new line of thought of Mahler as formalist. Despite the dedication to

Bülow and the parallels with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – a New German favorite, frequently invoked to defend program music – one very vocal critic asserted that Mahler was not really writing program music, a new kind of bold but law-abiding symphony of steadily developing musical logic. That critic was Ernst Otto Nodnagel, the very critic whose review of Mahler’s

First Symphony set the standard for Mahler vilification and interpretation. Indeed, just as

Nodnagel established the terms of Mahler the deviant, he also successfully reterritorialized

Mahler’s music – even the First Symphony – as Mahler the formalist.

Nodnagel’s complete conversion is one of most fascinating developments in critical discourse around Mahler. After having been Mahler’s most vocal and scathing opponent in 1894, by 1897 he was Mahler’s most ardent supporter. The point of conversion is easy to pinpoint: the performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony in Berlin in 1895, first in March of the introductory three, non-choral movements, and then in December of the entire symphony.365 Nodnagel describes the positive reaction of himself and much of Berlin to these concerts as “warm and cordial,” perhaps an exaggeration of the elsewhere noted divided audience.366 Then when he heard the modified First Symphony in 1896 with no program or andante he had a completely

365 After the March concert, Nodnagel quotes Strauss saying that the Berliners impress him. Nodnagel, MW 28 no. 40 (10 September 1897): 526. Nodnagel does not mention that the third movement of Mahler’s Second was actually first performed on Feb 8, 1895, Mahler’s introduction to Berlin. 366 Nodnagel, MW 28, no. 40 (30 September 1897): 526-27.

171

different opinion of it. Why this difference? Certainly, as I will show, Nodnagel’s aesthetic did not change. I suggest three reasons for this change. First off, Mahler’s piece had morphed from

Titan to First Symphony, placing in the work in a more clearly established genre. The piece of music had been transformed by disciplinary pressures and Nodnagel could use this transformation as his own case study of the improvement of music. Secondly, Nodnagel, having studied the score, found the formal integrity that allowed him to listen to the work differently. He was now able to read it as an affirmation of his aesthetic and read Mahler as a uniquely modern proponent of logical development and sublime expression. Finally, and here I speculate somewhat,

Nodnagel’s experience of the Second Symphony gave him a new respect for Mahler as a serious and transcendence-seeking composer. Nodnagel writes about the Second Symphony, and his own almost religious experience of it, with such glowing terms that it became problematic to condemn the First Symphony in the way he had previously. In fact he concludes his 1897 biopic on Mahler by writing the “The C minor symphony was for me so far the most intense of my artistic experiences. I do not doubt that Gustav Mahler is a ‘Candidate of the Future.’”367 How could

Mahler the violent caricaturist also be Mahler the soundtrack of resurrection? All of these reasons show the disciplinary perspective of Nodnagel, while his reassessment of Titan further disciplines the composition. In fact, the partisan potency of his criticism and support show two sides of the same disciplinary coin. On the one hand Nodnagel’s analysis creates deviancy, but on the other hand does so in the hope of creating normalcy.

Nodnagel pats himself on the back by saying he was right to argue that the program of

Titan was unclear and problematic. As evidence he cites his experience of the modified piece.

He says that, even upon hearing the rehearsal, the work was “all at once clear and comprehensible, even in the finale remained despite all its boldness and complication not unclear; the movement appeared on the contrary quite extraordinarily vivid and clear.”368 While Nodnagel

367 Nodnagel, MW 28 MW 28, no. 42 (14 October 1897): 562-63. 368 Nodnagel, MW 28, no. 41 (7 October 1897): 544-45.

172

confessed that Mahler’s First Symphony, on account of its “idyllic” character could not compare with his sublime Second Symphony, he still found it praiseworthy in all categories. He says of

Mahler’s First Symphony after its modifications:

Now the longingly pressing mood of the first movement delighted the exuberantly blessed; the second – formerly third – movement electrified through its dainty grace; the grotesque, sarcastic funeral march, which relies basically on the well-known canon “frère Jacques” in dismal minor, with its rupture, gives off an almost grimacing mood, where one must not search after relationship – in that act it reminds of Jean Paul’s moods and emerges as a genuine master work of mood painting; the finale with its intense oppositions formed the high point.369

Gone are the descriptions of the instrumentation in the first movements as “baroque,” “quirky,” and “banal.” Only the funeral march is still considered somewhat of a musical caricature, but apparently, an acceptable and even tasteful one as it no longer requires a confusing search for relationship to the program. In fact, he now finds it to evoke a mood reminiscent of Jean Paul, the primary programmatic reference for the symphony, which was by that time completely removed from the work. Gone are the descriptions of Titan as a tasteless baroque joke and as a bad satire of program music, bordering on “idiocy.” Most notably, gone are the descriptions of the danger of Mahler’s music and of its tendency to cause headaches and unnecessary stress.

Nodnagel is not unaware of the severity of his change of opinion and makes some effort to explain it. He describes his previous review as “energetic and disapproving,” which is to put it diplomatically. However, he largely blames that opinion on trying to hear Mahler’s First

Symphony as program music, even if satirical program music. Nodnagel also backpedals on his critique of the piece’s supposed plagiarism. Showing his musicological and disciplinary chops,

Nodnagel says that after careful study of the score he could only find two citations (presumably from canonic art music), and that where he thought he had first heard them, they did not exist.

Furthermore, Nodnagel confirms that neither of those citations is plagiarism. The first from

Mendelssohn was apparently incidental and not known to the composer, while the second was

369 Nodnagel, MW 28, no. 41 (7 October 1897): 544-45.

173

from Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, which was composed after Titan, pointing to an apparent case of simultaneous melodic invention. Finally, Nodnagel blames the bad acoustics, lack of rehearsal, and bad performance of Titan in Weimar for his previously negative review. Upon hearing it properly in Berlin, the piece appeared differently to Nodnagel.

Given some of the inconsistencies in Nodnagel’s narrative, I find his reassessment of

Mahler’s First Symphony curiously deflecting. No doubt the Berlin performance was better rehearsed and more to the composer’s liking, but blaming the Weimar theater for Mahler’s bad introduction as a composer is one of the many myths about Mahler’s life. In fact, it seems that

Nodnagel started this one. If one compares, as a whole, the reviews from the two concerts,

Nodnagel’s notwithstanding, it was the Berlin concert that sounded harsher. Separating conceptual discourse from the empirical specificity of the historical event becomes nearly impossible here. My solution is to make them meet each other half way. Sure the Berlin concert was better, but not better enough to warrant an entirely different opinion. Lessmann was the only other person to review both concerts and found them equally bad, critiquing the second concert more harshly. If there was any difference, the Berlin performance was considered noisier and more dissonant, though perhaps less of a caricature. In fact, improved acoustics might even enhance the clarity of “dissonant” chromaticism. Even with the removal of a program, most

Berlin critics found the piece to lack formal unity, to be instrumentally peculiar and excessive.

They even still found the piece, especially the finale, to parody the New German School, but on account of the musical style rather than its literary program.

Finally, I am suspicious of Nodnagel’s claims that the removal of the program had such a clarifying effect. He writes,

Mahler’s error has also been the, that he had sought to add to the completed work a “program,” that he had undertaken the futile search to find concrete expression for the vague sensations not graspable in words, which animated him during creation. Now, where he allowed the music to work directly, it became self- explanatory.370

370 Nodnagel, MW 28, no. 41 (7 October 1897): 544-45.

174

Nodnagel does several things in this quote. First, he creates a narrative about Mahler’s method of composition, the truth of which is debatable, making the program absolutely external to the real work of art and superfluous. Second, he shows the consistency of his aesthetics. Nodnagel asserts that “ungraspable sensations” “animated” Mahler’s compositional process and that these sensations cannot be put into words, making the addition of a program a hindrance to musical expression. This is traditional German idealist aesthetics. Ultimately, Nodnagel uses this second

“review” of Mahler’s First Symphony as a general critique of program music, as music itself is adequately expressive of the ideas that inspire it. However, Nodnagel specifically mentioned in his Weimar review that he was not hostile to Titan because it was program music, but because it was grotesque. Even at the purely musical level, Nodnagel initially found Titan to be a caricature of proper music. His reversal of opinion is quite dramatic and not fully explained. Nonetheless, the reversal demonstrates the extremes to which a composition can be disciplined and mobilized for specific causes.

Nodnagel’s positioning of Mahler as a formalist represents another example of the disciplining of modernism. As Foucault argues, the taxonomic organizing of the scientific enterprise, in seeking to understand the human object, produces its subjectivity, placing it within a continuum of legibility.371 Such discipline is at work equally in the identification of a deviant, as it is in the identification of a viable, productive entity. In the case of musicology, a then emerging scientific discipline, meticulously demonstrating how an apparently aberrant form like Mahler’s symphonies actually corresponds to known territories, like formalism, represents a successful docilization. While Nodnagel was the first to put in motion such an understanding of Mahler’s music, he was not the only one. With Mahler’s apparent rejection of programs in his Fourth and

371 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23-31.

175

Fifth Symphonies, Max Kalbeck briefly defended the formalist logic of Mahler’s music.372 More importantly, after Mahler’s departure from Vienna in 1907, his former assistant Bruno Walter attempted to establish Mahler’s legacy as a kind of mystical formalist, a discourse which will be discussed in chapter five.373 Despite differences in their formalism, all attempted to redirect the understanding of Mahler from secessionist to extension of 19th-century norms.

Ironically, Mahler’s Second Symphony was not only the occasion for reassessing his still small oeuvre as formalist, but was also the composition that most attracted New Germans.

Though only the most radical New Germans embraced this work as their own, performances in

Berlin and especially Munich provided a chance for some New German critics to claim Mahler.

In Berlin, Eichberg, a formalist opponent of Mahler, writes that Mahler “belongs to the extreme left wing, to the ultras of the New Germans.”374 In Munich it was these “ultras,” which included the critics Arthur Seidl and Ludwig Schiedermair, who helped organized the first indisputably successful concert of Mahler’s music.375 The fact that Mahler’s Second Symphony was more easily reterritorialized than his others, and that it was disciplined by multiple territories, suggests a lingering romanticism within the work. Whatever the criticisms that still portrayed it as abnormal, its formal coherence and familiarity betray a slackening of the eight modernist violations/emancipations in this composition.

A similarly trajectory inhabits Strauss’s follow ups to the lawless Don Juan. Both the tone poem Tod und Verklärung and the music drama Guntram are more easily identifiable within the landscape of the War of the Romantics. Whereas Mahler was interpellated by both formalists and the New Germans, Strauss was only hailed by the latter, though discernibly so. As mentioned

372 See analysis of Kalbeck and his review of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and His World: 306-312. Here Kalbeck considers Mahler’s Fifth Symphony his first substantive accomplishment and a sign of a healthy trajectory. 373 Bruno Walter, “Gustav Mahler’s III. Symphonie,” Der Merker I, no. 1 (10 October 1909): 9-11. 374 i., “Kunst und Wissenschaft.” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung no. 590 (17 December, 1901, evening): 5. 375 On the Münchner Gesellschaft der modernen Tonkunst see See Arthur Seidl, “Münchner Rundschau,” Die Gesellschaft 17, no. 4 (1901): 242-244.

176

above, the music adhered clearly to the narrative of the program, a program which reflected

Schopenhauerian themes of renunciation and a personal, mystical experience. The original program ends with the stanza, “But mightily there sounds to him / Coming from the broad expanse of heaven / What he yearningly sought here: / World-redemption, word- transfiguration!”376 Only in death is existence redeemed and illuminated. To an even stronger degree, Strauss’s first operatic endeavor – Guntram – exhibits on first glance a conformity to

Wagnerian themes and musical norms. Not only is the brassy score sentimental and bombastic, but the story is didactically philosophical and pseudo-medieval. The characters Guntram,

Freihold, and Freihild participate in a revolt against a dukedom, which neglects its poor.

Guntram, who kills the duke, decides in the end to seek redemption through solitude rather than return to Freihold’s fraternal order or fulfill the romance between the duchess Freihild and himself. As Charles Youmans has argued, the message of Guntram is even more properly

Schopenhauerian than Wagner’s own Parsifal, because of the former’s ultimate rejection of community as fulfilling.377

In narratives of Strauss’s career the long 1890s remain largely undifferentiated as the era of his late New German tone poems. However, there was a tremendous vacillation in musical form and discourse into and out of the New German fold. It is well known that his early works in the 1880s display the formalism in which he was first trained. However, he did not immediately turn toward New German ideals with the adoption of programs. In addition to Don Juan, the early tone poems Aus Italien and lack the idealism and musical expression of ideas present in Tod und Verklärung and Guntram. The former are full of vulgarities, color, and impressionist sounds rather than narratives. On the other end of the chronology, Strauss’s post-

376 In the Wilhelm Mauke guide book “Tod und Verklärung,” in Richard Strauss Symphonien und Tondichtungen (Leipzig: E. Haberland, 1905): 76. 377 See chapter 3, “Music and the ‘Denial of Will’: Schopenhauer in Strauss’s Life and Work,” in Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005): 59-82.

177

Guntram tone poems all depart in different ways from the high tide of Strauss’s Wagnerism.

Recent scholarship has explored the palpable departure of Strauss’s music from the New German

School in the late 1890s, beginning with Till Eulenspiegel.378 This turn has largely, and correctly, been read as a result of the failure of Guntram and Strauss’s infatuation with Nietzsche’s writings.

However, considered from another angle, Tod und Verklärung and Guntram represent the exception, a momentary New German reterritorialization within the largely anti-romantic flow of

Strauss’s career.379 The point of mentioning this narrative is to emphasize Strauss’s temporary integration within New German norms as a form of discipline and the self-imposed identification with established norms. This is part of the ambiguous modernism of Strauss and Mahler in the

1890s, which vacillated widely between tradition and iconoclasm.

Following Strauss’s first operatic endeavor - Guntram, premiered in 1894 – his music and career rejected the party-line of the New German School. As has been recently and convincingly argued, Strauss’s new direction can best be delineated by its overt Nietzscheanism.380 His next five major works – four tone poems and another opera – form a cohesive unit of music, which all featured socially aberrant protagonists. I argue that through humor, everyday music, sound effects, and highly symbolic programs these works serve to undermine musical idealism and articulate a breakaway, secessionist worldview. Not only are these works more Nietzschean, but also more Mahlerian. It is in this period that Strauss and Mahler began to be spoken of in one breath as the leaders of a new musical direction. In reenacting the Nietzschean critique of

Wagner, Strauss encountered resistance within the ADMV. After the election of a comparatively traditional president, Strauss left the organization in 1898, providing a tangible manifestation of the secessionist attitude within the musical realm.

378 See Youmans’s chapter 6, “Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Quixote, Strauss: Crystallization of a Persona,” in Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: 180-213. 379 No doubt later in his career the deviancy of his compositions ebbed again and further. 380 See Youmans; Morten Kristiansen, “Richard Strauss’s Feuersnot in Its Aesthetic and Cultural Context: A Modernist Critique of Musical Idealism,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2000); Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

178

This turn in Strauss’s compositional output began with the 1895 premiere of Till

Eulenspiegel, which while regarded as musical caricature, was largely pardoned for its roguery, given the work’s relative brevity and lack of transcendent aspirations, as if Strauss had permitted himself some levity after the heavy labor of Guntram. But Till Eulenspiegel was just the beginning and a model for a series of compositions – Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote,

Heldenleben, and Feuersnot. In retrospect they all grow out of Till Eulenspiegel and echo its

Nietzschean exuberance. As critics noted, Don Quixote and Feuersnot reflected Till

Eulenspiegel’s comedy and expanded with more philosophical depth on Till’s mocking of priests

(Don Quixote) and political authority (Feuersnot). On the other hand, the more serious narratives of development – Zarathustra and Heldenleben – extend Till’s mocking of science and aesthetic philistines. The last two compositions of this period – Heldenleben and Feuersnot – are both solipsistic aesthetic statements in which the composer positions himself as the protagonist, and the narrative as a story of his aesthetic struggles. In doing so, it becomes clear that the roguish attitude from Till to Kunrad in Feuersnot is a story about the musical present, about musical

Nietzscheanism and Strauss’s secession. In the following sections I will focus on Zarathustra and Don Quixote not only because they most effectively illustrate the shared themes of these works, but because they generated the most controversy, the first because of its program, the second because of its music. While both works raised concern about the dangers of unmusicality,

I use Zarathustra to first discuss new music as a form of unprotected musical Zoe, whereas with

Don Quixote, I read the work as an affirmation of musical flesh, which reformates the Zoe discourse into a positive vitalism.

Strauss’s Zarathustra: The Threat of Musical Anarchism

Strauss’s post-Guntram departure from the “brotherhood” of the New German School marked a renewed upsurge in the excessive corporeality of his compositions. Unlike the ascetic somberness of the character Guntram, Strauss’s music follows a path set out by its first extra- musical subject, Till Eulenspiegel, a blasphemous and impetuous rogue on par with the subjects

179

of Rabelais’s novels. As a short, seemingly comedic piece, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche did not provoke much controversy. The same cannot be said for Strauss’s next work, Also Sprach

Zarathustra. The reactions to this work added lasting threads to the contemporaneous understanding of post-Romantic music. While hardly following Nietzsche’s own arguments,

Strauss’s programmatic inspiration in Nietzsche forged a link between Nietzsche’s thought and the lawlessness of new music. From that point on, works by Strauss, Mahler, and others were coded as Nietzschean, a stereotype that stood for a violent overthrow of traditional values – aesthetic, moral, and political. A discourse of modern music rapidly development characterizing it as anarchist and terroristic. These compositions were considered lawless forms that existed outside of legitimate music and its good legal standing, but which also sought to make war against proper music. Such a discourse propped up claims of musical zoe, demonstrating modernism to be dangerous, unlawful, and affective sonic material, a kind of sound without spirit or body. The anarchist label gave new music a political dimension, merging its aesthetic rebellion against late romanticism with a philosophical critique of 19th-century liberalism and nationalism.

Indeed the emancipatory claims of anarchism to organize society outside the law, rethinks the claim of musical zoe as worthless form, retranslating/transposing the discourse of zoe into one of productive musical flesh, which does not justify its existence through a recourse of sovereign law and its vivisection of the subject, musical or otherwise.

During the 1896-97 concert season, Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra was performed in numerous German cities, twice in Frankfurt and Berlin, the locations of the first performances on

November 27 and 30 respectively. These concerts had a number of significances. According to the reviews, these concerts seemed to mark Strauss’s coronation as Germany’s most famous young composer.381 For the Frankfurt public, it marked the beginning of a close relationship with

Strauss, much like Mahler formed with Munich after the successful performance of his Second

381 “Münchner Musikleben,” Die Kunstwart 11/6 (vol. 1, Dec 1897): 191-94 . Reviewer mentions that Strauss is the most famous and recognized younger composer, but not being played in Munich that season.

180

Symphony in 1900. Frankfurt critics even noted how quickly the city had become a center of progressive music, when only a few years before one could not even hear New German music.382

It was also Strauss’s first work to rely, not simply on a program, but on guidebooks, which generated significant pre-concert discussion and post-concert commentary. Such guides were on par with the numerous guidebooks for Wagner’s music dramas and reaped all the same criticisms of leitmotif hunting. However, now transplanted to the tone poem, these programmatic apparatus were a major source of advertisement for the composition and its controversies. Albert Hahn’s guide was the “authorized” and better-known book, but Heinrich Riemann published his own, which was widely referenced by the Berlin musical public.

Strauss’s Zarathustra had its greatest significance neither in Berlin nor Frankfurt, but for the Viennese musical public. After Frankfurt and Berlin had each heard Zarathustra twice, and performances in Dusseldorf, Dessau, and Heidelberg, the composition finally came to Vienna on

March 21, 1897, near the end of the concert season. It was arguably the first major modernist work performed in the city and generated controversy comparable to Mahler in Berlin. While

Strauss’s Don Juan had stirred controversy five years earlier, at that time it was not yet clear that the composer and his compositions stood at the head of a nascent “secessionist” movement in music. Unlike in Germany where the guidebooks to Strauss’s Zarathustra were available up to a month before the premiere, the Viennese musical public apparently only received access the day before the concert, which added to the aura of expectation and spectacle around the performance.383 Following the performance, according to Helm, the audience engaged in a ten minute tug of war between booing opponents and applauding supporters.384 According to Gustav

Brecher’s 1900 essay on Strauss, this concert caused a literary war unprecedented since Wagner.

In the same way the Wagner and Liszt ignited a fissure in musical culture, dividing it into two

382 S. “Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung no. 331, 2nd morning edition (28 November 1896): 1. 383 Theodor Helm, “Musikbriefe: Wien,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 15 (8 April 1897): 214-16; n. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung 56 (1 December 1896): 1. 384 Theodor Helm, “Musikbriefe: Wien,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 15 (8 April 1897): 214-16.

181

major parties, so also did Strauss and Mahler for a new generation.

In Sandra McColl’s history of Viennese musical culture, she notes how Zarathustra split the Wagnerians, with Helm and Horn supporting it and Hirschfeld, Schoenaich, and Kralik disavowing it. At numerous points, she expresses surprise that Strauss was not “automatically regard[ed]” “as a legitimate heir to the Wagnerian tradition.”385 Additionally, McColl finds the unity of opinion among both formalists and Wagnerians unusual, saying “For once, Hanslick seemed to be enjoying the company of considerably more than Heuberger and Kalbeck.”386 There should be nothing surprising about Viennese opposition to new music or unanimity among both branches of musical idealism. In fact 1897 was the year Vienna resident later looked back to as the cessation of the War of the Romantics in his own mind.387 Both Strauss’s earlier (see my analysis of Don Juan in chapter two) and later compositions consistently divided and caused hesitation among Wagnerians, especially in Vienna. The actual peculiarity of

Zarathustra’s reception in Vienna was not that “Strauss” the secessionist was partially pushed out of the Wagnerian fold, but that Zarathustra, one of Strauss’s more universally enjoyed works, was the source of such scandal in Vienna.388

Despite the Viennese controversy and the fact that Zarathustra was Strauss’s first composition to completely “secede” from old musical forms – organized into nine sections without the returning regularity of a rondo – it was musically speaking, one of his least controversial compositions. Outside of Vienna, the Wagnerians were quite enthusiastic about the work. In German cities, even the liberal formalists, Strauss’s most vehement opponents, were split on the work. Half reiterated the common critique that such tone painting was not music, but

385 McColl, 139. 386 McColl, 140. For all the value of this book’s slice of musical culture in 1896-97, it lacks a multi-year perspective that would account for change over time and a larger sample size of reactions to unusual, challenging works like Zarathustra. 387 Arnold Schoenberg, “Brahms the Progressive,” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Anrold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975): 399. 388 Such was the conservative state of Viennese musical culture and lack of exposure to new music.

182

other formalists, especially outside of Berlin, were comparatively receptive. Karl Wolff in

Cologne considered it a major improvement over the Wagnerism of Tod und Verklärung and the base comedy of Till Eulenspiegel.389 Reviewers for the NDAZ, BT, and the NZfM all said that it could be enjoyed without the program or Nietzschean philosophy as pure and comprehendible musical development.390 Even a quite harsh review in the BZ considered Zarathustra less bizarre than Strauss’s other compositions. The most objectionable aspect of the music was the lack of resolution between B and C in the conclusion. Nodnagel, who considered it Strauss’s best work, references the undue obsession over the unresolved conclusion and writes that one can read all about the “reckless ranting and rude puns” of the “grumbling sticklers and nitpickers,” who he argues miss the whole idea of the work and its insistence on the endlessness of the existential quest.391

Far more than the music, it was the program of Zarathustra that caused offense, both the perceived attempt to express philosophy in music and the specific philosophy espoused. Much of the history of Zarathustra reception has emphasized the skeptical attitude of critics toward the notion of a philosophical program and the many comments about potential future works on Kant or Hegel.392 However, taken as a whole, critics were fairly cognizant that Strauss’s composition was merely inspired by Nietzsche and not a translation of his book or philosophy. Strauss’s divergence from Nietzsche was a point of emphasis in the guidebooks, which perhaps the more formalist critics refused to consult. Even Lessmann, the arch-defender of program music, understood that Strauss was not translating Nietzsche, but rather expressing musically a more general narrative of social or individual development.

389 Karl Wolff, “Das neuste Tonwork von Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik Zeitung 18, no. 1 (2 Dec 1897): 6. 390 Paul Hiller, “Musikbriefe: Köln,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 93, no. 25 (23 June 1897): 307; R. F. “Feuilleton,” Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (3 December 1897): 1; H. N. “Die Musikalische Woche,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 612, evening edition (1 December 1897): 1-2. Even H. N. at the BT, though insistant that it was neither absolute music, nor musical philsoophy, considered it quality tone painting. 391 Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Musikbriefe: Berlin,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 13 (25 March 1897): 182-184. 392 See McColl, 194.

183

Strauss’s Zarathustra begins with an introduction, made famous by its prominent use in

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the glory and terror of the natural world are articulated by a massive C chord that alternates between minor and major. According to Hahn’s guidebook, this vacillation represents the “world riddle,” that is, the enigmatic quest to know the nature of the universe and the meaning of life.393 Perhaps the indecisiveness about major or minor asks whether nature is affirmative or melancholically indifferent, joyful or nihilistic. During this same period, biologist and cultural luminary Ernst Haeckel wrote a book on the Welträtsel, a concept which both Strauss and Haeckel culled from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.394

The view of Strauss’s Zarathustra as primarily an inquiry into the world riddle, a view regurgitated by critics, made the introduction into a depiction of the abstract, pure natural world as seen from the perspective of the inquisitive human, not the cosmic beginning associated with

Kubrick. In juxtaposition to the nature theme, there is a theme in the strings that according to the guidebooks represents the striving of human consciousness to unravel the riddle.395 Strauss’s

Zarathustra is a story of the human attempt to understand the world and existence within it, a philosophical inquiry more akin to Goethe’s Faust than Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, as explicitly stated by the guidebooks.396

After the introduction, the work is comprised of eight further episodes, which I think can be usefully broken down into four sets of exposition and deconstruction. In each of these four sections, a solution to the world riddle is proposed and then negated through the reoccurrence of the C-G-C nature theme. Musically each exposition has a distinct style which comes unraveled and morphs into stylistic exploration in the attendant deconstruction sections. The titles of the four “solutions” are 1) On the hinter-worldly, 2) On the Joys and Passions, 3) Science, and 4) the

393 Arthur Hahn, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” in in Richard Strauss Symphonien und Tondichtungen (Leipzig: E. Haberland, 1905): 111-13. 394 Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universie: At the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900). 395 Hahn, 114. 396 Hahn, 109.

184

Dance song. While each of these headings is taken from Nietzsche’s book, they very inconsistently relate to Nietzsche’s arguments about them. Rather, Strauss pilfers the Nietzschean lexicon in order to tell his own story, which is not the plight of Zarathustra, but rather a more general intellectual history. Critics understood this narrative to varying degrees and interpreted it in reference to world history and as an individual story of Bildung, Nodnagel’s interpretation of choice.397

Musically, the hinterwordly displays smooth lyricism and a credo, often interpreted as representing Christianity’s urge for an afterlife, though as in Nietzsche, Strauss’s hinterwordly music does not simply express religiosity, but also philosophical idealism. As in Zarathustra’s speech of the same title in Nietzsche, Strauss’s music seeks to avoid worldly suffering through an afterlife or aesthetic opiate. The music longs for a perfect sphere and transports to a distant

“realm” in the manner Hoffmann speaks about Beethoven. The human subjectivity and world riddle themes of the previous section find temporary satiation and resolution in the pleasant hinterwordly section, which is a stereotypically romantic. It begins as something like an enlarged string quartet and morphs into grandiose, sludgy Wagnerian undulation and slow modulation.

Indeed, the inadequacy of this solution to quell the “great longing” theme only serves to underscore Strauss’s critique of the musical idealism and even the Wagnerism he was departing from. Like Don Juan, Zarathustra’s most Wagnerian music is in the earliest sections sections, but in Zarathustra it is made utterly clear that the later musical departure is an explicit critique of that music.

In the succeeding stages of the development Strauss’s music contemplates hedonism

(Don Juan like music), science (represented by a fugue), and quasi-Nietzschean ideal of the dancing overman (represented by a waltz). However, all of these solutions ultimately prove untenable and unstable musically – unable to solve the riddle and quench existential longing. It

397 Nodnagel, “Musikbriefe: Berlin,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 13 (25 March 1897): 182-184.

185

should be noted that during the “dancing song” the gulf between nature and humanity appears temporarily bridged. It is the one point at which the consciousness theme in the strings – the instruments of human subjectivity – dance in the key of C, nature’s key. However, in Strauss’s narrative, this is not sustainable. While some critics such as Hirschfeld read the concluding juxtaposition of B and C as an irrational birth of the overman, more often, as Heinrich Riemann argues persuasively, the world riddle is not solved in Strauss’s Zarathustra.398 It is ultimately a more pessimistic conclusion than Nietzsche’s own Zarathustra, without reference to the central concept of Nietzsche’s book – the eternal return – and consequently more Faustian than

Nietzschean. Strauss even seems to intimate, perhaps with premonition about his own future, that

Nietzscheanism has its limits and will be superseded.

Despite the possibility that Zarathustra was Strauss’s least Nietzschean work of his

Nietzschean period, it was precisely the allusion to Nietzsche that made the composition highly inflammatory. By the mid-1890s Nietzsche’s name and primary catch phrases (overman, master morality, beyond good and evil, death of god, will to power) were well-known and regurgitated by every critic, both those who considered Strauss intoning Nietzsche and those who did not.

Generally speaking, Nietzsche was considered, in the words of Helm, a philosopher of “crass egoism.”399 While not every critic considered Strauss to be sonically expressing Nietzsche’s ideas, they all considered the invocation of Nietzsche as an act of espousal and identification. In fact Max Kalbeck’s famous parody of Strauss the “overmusician” was simply the most elaborate analysis of Strauss as Nietzschean, and by no means unusual. It is hardly surprising that the liberal reviewers were revolted by the pride of place given to Nietzsche in this composition, but such distaste for the immoralist was shown by both formalists and Wagnerians, both supporters and opponents of the purely musical element.

398 Robert Hirschfeld, “Zarathustra” Neue Musikalische Presse 6, no. 13 (27 March 1897): 5; On Riemann’s guide book see H. N. “Die Musikalische Woche,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 612, evening edition (1 December 1897): 1-2. 399 Theodor Helm, “Musikbriefe: Wien,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 15 (8 April 1897): 214-16

186

The formalists who were able to favorable review Strauss’s Zarathustra could do so because they disregarded Nietzsche. H. N. is very explicit about this saying that Strauss can keep

Nietzsche, while he will stick with Kant.400 Such an espousal of Kant by the BT critic is quite fitting given the affinity between formalism, liberalism, and Neo-Kantianism discussed in chapter one in the context of Hanslick. The juxtaposition between Kant and Nietzsche is instructive, given Kant’s place as the fountainhead of German Idealism and especially the Neo-Kantian undertones of Hanslick and other such Hanslickian critics, such as H. N. Furthermore, just as

Nietzsche’s list of negations included that “elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian”401 philosophy, so also Strauss, in his functional Nietzscheanism, negated musical idealism, formalist or

Wagnerian. For strident formalists, such as Pirani, Hanslick, and Kalbeck, who, as might be expected, completely rejected the work, they found it immoral and improper for a high art setting.

Not only does Strauss fail in their ears by trying to express or even depict concepts musically, but furthermore by choosing concepts as profane as Nietzsche’s. Hanslick questions whether

Nietzsche’s book is really “ideal for a musician, a subject for the purest, most immaterial of all the arts?”402

Even Wagnerians such as Helm and Lessmann, who were otherwise favorably disposed toward the composition, took jabs at Nietzsche, referring to his individualism as divisive and his ideals as “earthly.”403 It seems that for those Wagnerians who rejected Strauss’ Zarathustra,

Nietzsche proved to be the stumbling block, whose very words they heard in the music. For

Hirschfeld the “anarchistic music-bomb” and “blasting work” was made only for Zarathustra’s snake and eagle, or more literally for a generation of would-be overmen.404 For E. E. Taubert and

400 H. N. “Die Musikalische Woche,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 612, evening edition (1 December 1897): 1-2. 401 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 485. 402 Eduard Hanslick, “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse (23 March 1897): 1-2. 403 Theodor Helm, “Musikbriefe: Wien,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 15 (8 April 1897): 214-16; Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 23, no. 49 (4 December 1896): 704- 705. 404 Robert Hirschfeld, “Zarathustra” Neue Musikalische Presse 6, no. 13 (27 March 1897): 5

187

Richard von Kralik the large and colorful orchestra was recoded as Nietzschean, rather than

Wagnerian.405 Taubert presumes that because Strauss was supposedly trying to demonstrate the overman musically, “previously unheard expressive means” were necessary, while for Kralik, such Nietzschean means are pure superficiality, bereft of Wagnerian depth: “The funniest thing is that now a representative of hyper-Wagnerian music should make music, with all the extravagance of every artistic means and trick, out of the philosophy of this opponent of all profound music, this modest admirer of the shallowest of musical treats.”406 There were many attempts at a Wagner-Nietzsche synthesis by the left Wagnerians, yet for the remaining “right

Wagnerians,” Strauss’s Nietzscheanism sounded like defection. Nationalists could agree with liberals that Nietzsche represented the negation of all higher aspirations.

Nietzsche was a highly toxic and symbolic figure in this period, with distinct aesthetic and political associations. Most descriptions of Nietzsche’s ideas by critics tend to simply repeat catch phrases, such as when Wolff writes, “So Nietzsche’s Uebermensch, who has fully shed the normal humanity and risen above all conventional moral standards, may recognize solely one’s own will as the single law.”407 But beyond the clichés about will and morals, what did Nietzsche really represent and why was he such a maligned figure? Regardless of the accuracy or variance of Nietzsche interpretations circa 1900, there are common denominators in what he stood for in the ears of the musical public. Those seem to be: anarchism, materialism, existential quests, and hyper-individualism.

One of the reasons for the strong associations between Strauss and Nietzsche comes from the writings of Authur Seidl. Not only did he pen the first monograph on Strauss, but was a huge

405 E. E. T., “Feuilleton,” Die Post no. 331 (2 December 1896): 2; Richard Kralik, “Feuilleton,” Vaterland, supplement (28 March 1897): 1. Whereas previoulsy large orchestration had been the mark of Wagner, at the turn of the century it became a feature of Nietzschean excess, standing opposed to Wagnerian order. The accusation of superficiality was deflected from Wagner to newer music. 406 E. E. T., “Feuilleton,” Die Post no. 331 (2 December 1896): 2; Richard Kralik, “Feuilleton,” Vaterland, supplement (28 March 1897): 1. 407 Karl Wolff, “Das neuste Tonwork von Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik Zeitung 18, no. 1 (2 Dec 1897): 6.

188

champion of Nietzsche and influential figure in the emergence of the secession. Seidl was a writer and cultural critic, who initially distinguished himself as a perfect Wagnerite in the 1880s, a devoted pilgrim to Bayreuth and correspondent for the MW. He held numerous posts in various cities, though notably in this period as editor of the complete works of Nietzsche at the newly formed Nietzsche archive in Weimar from 1898-99 and as editor of the premiere journal of

German Naturalism, Die Gesellschaft, from 1900-1902. As Die Gesellschaft and much of

German Naturalism were based in Munich, it was during this time that he served on the board of the influential Munich Society for Modern Music (hereafter MGMT), the first secessionist organization in German musical culture. Strauss and Seidl knew each other from their gymnasium days, but became closer in the mid-1890s, as evidenced by Till Eulenspiegel’s dedication to Seidl. This dedication is significant in moving beyond Alexander Ritter as an intellectual mentor – the dedicatee of Tod und Verklärung – and showing Till Eulenspiegel to have

Seidl-esque, that is Nietzschean, philosophical implications.

In 1896, months prior to the premiere of Strauss’s Zarathustra, Seidl published a short book, Richard Strauss: Charakterskizze, essentially an artistic biography of Strauss with considerable analysis of the recent works Guntram and Till Eulenspiegel. As the first book about

Strauss, it gave Seidl first crack at interpreting the composer’s legacy. In concluding his reading of the of Guntram – though he reads the music as expressing a similar philosophical ambiguity – Seidl writes:

While here the hero makes claim to the autonomy of his own spirit, which “self- importance” also – all community-consciousness expelled from him – dedicates to the service of the negation of the will, he stands still with one foot on the ground of the Schopenhauer-Wagnerian path. However, a new spirit (to some extent the spirit of Nietzsche) already announces itself in him clearly and distinctly. Clearly the creator of the work speaks here through Guntram in equal contemporary language of an inner experience, a deep worldly wisdom, a personal worldview, indeed not simply spiritual or religious, no, also a real artistic confession. A little further on and it will then perhaps no longer end with resignation; while here he further develops from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche in himself, self-improvement from world-denial to self-affirmation, converting from democratic principle to rigorous aristocratic principles, and for the individualism of distinct personality to determine itself. His [Strauss’s] creation appears in this

189

developmental phase as a transitional stage, positioning his work at a cross roads to realize further transformation, and therefore “Guntram” the poem no doubt takes on a middle position in his currently ongoing intellectual-artistic-ethical development.408

So for Seidl, Guntram has one foot in Schopenhauer and one in Nietzsche, but is moving toward the later. There is a definite overly humble, self-immolating negation of desire – the

Schopenhauerian renunciation of will – but also a social iconoclasm and project of self-creation associated with Nietzsche. Seidl calls this a mix of the “old-German garb” and “modern consciousness.” This is actually the exact reading of Guntram by Charles Youmans in Richard

Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The philosophical Roots of

Musical Modernism.409 Along with Morten Kristiansen, particularly his analysis of Feuersnot,

Youmans and to some degree Bryan Gilliam should be credited with reviving Seidl’s Nietzschean interpretation of Strauss. What can be added to Youmans’s and Kristiansen’s readings of Strauss is their historical relevance. Insofar as the Seidl interpretation of Strauss predominated, as it did among many supporters and especially opponents, this is how Strauss’s music and the music of the secession initially functioned: as Nietzschean. It seems likely that Nodnagel read Seidl’s book, because in his review of Zarathustra he reads it as an extension of Guntram and the move not only from Wagner to Nietzsche, but from socialism to individualism, taken to be the political equivalent of this aesthetic schism.

In fact, in the midst of his reading of Guntram, Seidl explicitly states the “contemporary significance” of the opera for the composer and musical culture generally. He writes:

The most important and most meaningful aspect of it is certainly the brand new, if I may say, modern-philosophical direction, which here reaches a break with the “Wagner-school,” a direction which has indeed not yet completely “overcome” Schopenhauer, but nevertheless already is decisively influenced and pervaded by the Nietzsche-Stirner-Mackay-ish spirit, announcing then a radical (almost revolutionary) left wing so to speak within the Wagner movement.410

408 Arthur Seidl and Wilhelm Klatte, Richard Strauss: Eine Charakterskizze (Prague: Löwit & Lamberg, 1896), 26. 409 Youmans, 85. 410 Seidl and Klatte, 25.

190

Seidl then uses his personal and literary insights to show the changes in the third act wherein

Guntram’s break from his mentor is no longer for altruistic, religious reasons, but to be his own god. Further on, Seidl suggests that this represents Strauss’s own break from Alexander Ritter, and the “right Wagnerians:”

Incidentally in my review of the Weimar performance of “Guntram” in the “Neuen deutschen Rundschau” I had already implied that, in the end, one should know that the Bayreuth grail community lay beneath the mysterious “Order,” to which his mentor Freihold (Alex. Ritter) wanted the “lone wanderer” (Guntram- Strauss) to return from Stirner-Nietzsche. That in the act his madness [Wähnen] would not in the long run find every peace [Frieden] in the modern “Wahnfried,” which the master from Bayreuth found there in his old age, was already foreseen since Frau Wagner’s memorable oft-repeated saying, with which she had welcomed Strauss after his first Bayreuth conducting of “Tannhäuser” (1894): “Oh! Oh! – so modern und yet so well directed, the Tannhäuser.” With time the inner, compelling need has emerged to him to independently detach – as a fearless radical left wing – from the quite conservative right wing of the Wagner movement.411

These two quotes about tensions between two branches of Wagnerism provide insight into the political and philosophical foundations of this split, at least as Seidl saw and wanted to exacerbate it. If the right wing was Schopenhauerian, overly identifying with Parsifal’s grail community, and aesthetically conservative in the literal sense of attempting to conserve Wagner’s sound, then the left wing was modern, radical, and Nietzschean. However, what is perhaps most striking about Seidl’s comments is the way Nietzsche is soldered by hyphens to the anarchists Max Stirner and even John Henry Mackay. Nietzsche does not stand alone, but as part of a philosophical- political movement that underpins the new musical movement. Philosophically this movement recognizes a post-liberal individualism that resounds with what can only sound now like clichés about self-creation, autonomy, and assertion. Chronologically, this trio of “anarchists” move from Stirner, who died in 1856, to Nietzsche, who stopped writing in 1889, to Mackay, the chief popularizer of Stirner and only still-writing contemporary of Seidl’s left wing Wagnerism. Stirner is primarily known for his 1845 work, The Ego and its Own and the “conscious” pursuit of self-

411 Seidl and Klatte, 29.

191

interest, however defined or developed. He vehemently opposed the legitimacy and ego limitations of social institutions such as the state, recognizing might over right, with the former not necessarily producing the later. Mackay’s anarchism was a more developed political theory, which militated equally against capitalism and the state, especially what he saw as the emerging state socialism of Marxists and social democrats. In contradistinction to these groups, his espoused syndical societies, terroristic vandalism, and anti-bourgeois cultural values such as open sexuality.412

This vogue for a multifaceted anarchism sheds considerable light on the political significance of the schism among and secession from the New Germans. While there certainly were aesthetic differences between the Wagnerian camps, as indicated by ’s exclamations upon hearing Strauss’s version of Tannhäuser, Seidl almost exclusively paints the schism as philosophical and political, dependent on one’s preferred cannon of thinkers. Seidl even suggests that this left wing Wagnerism is not only radical, but possibly revolutionary, a semantic jump from aesthetic to political extremism. As Seidl was heavily invested in this anarchist cannon circa 1896 (and supposedly Strauss as well), he certainly might be projecting his own views too broadly on the musical secession.413 However, as the chief voice among the mostly voiceless early secessionists, Seidl’s interpretation carries weight. Indeed the view of the secessionists by opponents confirmed and reinforced their anarchism. Musical discourse by established critics consistently portrayed them as looking to overthrow state, church, marriage, market economics, philosophical idealism, and the German musical tradition. Without a doubt the invocation of Nietzsche – by Strauss and others – had political connotations. For example, the Viennese Wagnerian critic Gustav Schoenaich, in his review of Strauss’s Zarathustra, could

412 See R. W. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); John Henry Mackay, The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. George Schumm (Boston: Benj. R. Tucker, 1891). 413 On Strauss’s friendship with Mackay and personal investment in anarchism see Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronivle of the Early Years: 1864-1898, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 258-259.

192

declare that he did not approve of the “political implications” of Nietzsche’s similarly titled book.414

Seidl’s writings on Strauss and his significance clarify what were the “political implications” of Nietzsche, Strauss, and even Mahler, whose Second Symphony was also derided as “anarchistic” and belonging to “the most modern camp.”415 This anarchist association also illuminates what was at stake in critical discourse about the politics, violence, and even political violence of the musical secession. For that minority of critics who flatly decried the music of

Strauss’s Zarathustra, they emphasized its violence to the listeners. Max Marschalk, writing for the NZfM, says that the work “goes overkill in the search for a new effect or a previously unheard sound effect, and places superhuman [übermenschliche] demands on the auditory nerves of the listeners.”416 Similarly, in his second review of the piece, Pirani identifies the music itself with the intrusive overman, calling it a musical overman, whose “heinous monstrous mixture of dissonance and taste-free, trivial ideas,” produced in him a physical revulsion.417 In his first review he said that the music made him want to either plug his ears or run out of concert hall.418

While similar things had been said about new music from Wagner to Mahler’s first symphonies, the references to violence have a particularly anarchistic and terroristic association with

Zarathustra. Hirschfeld famously described the performance as an “anarchistic music-bomb.”419

Though he was not alone. Carl Söhle in Dresden called it a “pure musical anarchistic assassination attempt.”420 Given that Seidl was a major figure in Dresden at the time, it seems likely that Söhle’s comments in some way reflect Seidl’s imprint. Further on in his review, Söhle supposes that the enthusiasm of the “Straussians” and “young champions” was generated by their

414 Gustav Schoenaich, “Feuilleton,” Die Reichswehr (22 March 1897): 3-4. 415 Heinrich Welti, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 56 II (7 March 1895): 9. 416 Max Marschalk, “Korrespondenzen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 97, no. 14 (3 April 1901): 194. 417 Eugenio von Pirani, “Korrespondenzen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 97, no. 13 (27 March 1901): 179. 418 Eugenio von Pirani, “Korrespondenzen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 52 (23 Dec 1896): 581. 419 Robert Hirschfeld, “Zarathustra” Neue Musikalische Presse 6, no. 13 (27 March 1897): 5. 420 Carl Söhle, “Musikbriefe: Dresden,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 28 (8 July 1897): 379.

193

“deep philosophical cohesion” rather than any musical innovation. When Söhle refers to

Straussians in Dresden, Seidl was chief among them. And when Söhle refers to a philosophical unity of the secession, he apparently refers to their Nietzschean anarchism.

In the quotes from Hirschfeld and Söhle, one can see the direct link between political anarchism and terrorist attacks on people: bombs, assassinations. Without diving too deep into the history of terrorism, it should be noted that the most notable acts of political violence in this period, from assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I to the Arch Duke Ferdinand, were perpetrated by various anarchist groups. Internationally, from the assassinations of Czar

Alexander II in Russia to President McKinley in the United States, anarchists were a major social and political presence and were often used to discredit socialists, given the similar emphasis on social and class revolution. This is not to say that all anarchists were terrorists. Much more the reverse was true.

As critical rhetoric, the terrorism of secessionist music was a threat to the literal bodies of the listeners, as well as abstractly to the very concept of music. In Hirschfeld’s review he writes,

“From such explosions [the juxtaposition of B and C] should we deduce the ‘Uebermensch” of

Nietzsche! Certainly this blasting operation also lit up with brilliant sparks, over which flashed out the madness of the symphonic other-world [Hinterwelters]. But this ingenuity raises horror; because we are at the end of music.”421 The established rhetoric of musical zoe – the unmusicality of certain compositions – takes on a new “horrific” valence. This unmusical music is now a danger to the lineage of composition, a threat to “end” music, a metaphorical correlation to the extinction of a species. Pirani similarly connects the musical violence to himself with the assault on the status of music itself: “when the harmonies sound so disharmonic, that one at best wanted to plug their ears or run out, so it is no longer music, but a repulsive monster that does not serve the sacred name.”422 Like other idealists, Pirani makes evident here his elevated regard for

421 Robert Hirschfeld, “Zarathustra” Neue Musikalische Presse 6, no. 13 (27 March 1897): 5. 422 Eugenio von Pirani, “Korrespondenzen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 52 (23 Dec 1896): 581.

194

music, and the bios requirement to be music. Strauss’s Zarathustra is rather a blasphemous monster, an overgrowth of musical flesh that causes repulsion.

In the reviews of Strauss’s Zarathustra there is a feedback loop between music’s violence to the listener, its violence to music, and its political significance. Radical political connotations and monstrous effects were intertwined, reinforced by an emerging discourse on modernism. The threat of new music was multi-pronged, against material and imagined bodies, against social and state institutions. Nevertheless, the insistence on its threatening status reveals a biopolitical preoccupation in musical discourse, that is, the effect of music on biological well-being, and the intense political focus on the production and protection of life, as evidence by the direct action of anarchist terrorism and the heightened, even violent, security measures against it. As monstrous post-music, or the end of music, Zarathustra provides a clear example of lawless, unprotected musical zoe, further subject to elemination because of its imputed danger. However, considered from the affirmative position of Seidl, Strauss constructed musical forms that acted directly, without the mediation of idealist philosophy or legitimation of its aesthetic laws. Strauss’s music does not defend itself as adhering to the mechanism of musical rights. “Sound effects” in Strauss lose their negative connotation, emancipating music from aesthetic autonomy, linking music to the wider world by constructing it of the same stuff. Just as sound effects or bombs have a materiality, connected to a chain of affect in the non aesthetic realm, so also Strauss pushes music into closer proximity to the everyday elements of the world. The affirmative potential of such an emancipation from aesthetic autonomy, sparked by Zarathustra, burst into illuminating flames with his next work, Don Quixote.

Strauss’s Don Quixote: Biopolitical Critique of the “Right” Wagnerians

If the program of Strauss’s Zarathustra caused major uproar, it was the music itself of his next composition – Don Quixote – that scandalized. While there was always something contentious about Strauss’s works, Don Quixote produced more upheaval than any of his compositions outside of Salome. According to a correspondent for the FZ, the premiere made Till

195

Eulenspiegel and Zarathustra look tame.423 As with Zarathustra Arthur Hahn wrote a guide book for listeners to make sense of the 14 different scenes and their narrative. Unlike Zarathustra, as the Frankfurt critic S. (perhaps Söhle) observed after Don Quixote’s premiere in that city, the composition’s trajectory was musically incoherent without the program and raised again all the questions about the value and limits of program music.424 Don Quixote premiered in Cologne, the site of Till Eulenspiegel’s successful premiere, but experienced rather the opposite reception and a sizeable volume of hissing. A correspondent for the NZfM called it a “mistake of the worst kind and its fiasco a painful mar in the glowing annals of the Gurzenich Concerts.”425 The Berlin performance on December 5, 1898 was also a site of controversy and something of a miscalculation, as the concert was organized by the Wagner Society. According to H. N. from the

BT – no friend of the Wagnerians – one of the propagandistic goals of the society was to dispel incorrect assumptions about New German, i.e. program music.426 Don Quixote had the opposite effect, drawing condemnation not only from formalists, but every Wagnerian, who considered it a mockery of program music that only proved its opponents right.427

Just months before the premieres of Don Quixote, Strauss left the ADMV in protest, threatening to form his own organization for contemporary music. After an unsuccessful bid for the presidency of this New German association, he temporarily abandoned it for at least two reasons. The ADMV and its newly elected president Fritz Steinbach failed to back his mission for increased rights of composer’s for their composition, especially the right to a larger percentage of the profits for instrumental music. By contrast opera composers were rewarded handsomely.

This is the most cited reason for Strauss’s dissatisfaction with the ADMV and the origins of

Strauss’s not unwarranted reputation as greedy opportunist. However the presidency of Steinbach

423 Anonymous, “Kleines Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung no. 69, II morning edition (11 March 1898): 1. 424 S. “Kleines Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 77, II morning edition (19 March 1898): 1. 425 Paul Hiller, “Musikbriefe: Köln,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 94, no. 21 (25 May 1898): 244. 426 H. N., “Konzertfälle,” Berliner Tageblatt, evening edition (6 December 1898): 619. 427 Karl Homann, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau, no. 287 (8 December 1898): 1147-48.

196

also meant a cooling of the organization’s support of contemporary and radical music. Almost never before had the organization been so cannon-bound in its programming. Strauss deemed the

ADMV to be out of step with the times, both commercially and aesthetically. Consequently, the secession by this apostate New German further impregnated Don Quixote with an adversarial, anti-romantic spirit. Deemed “progressive” and “most modern of music,” Don Quixote functioned as a scathing critique of musical idealism, especially the “Right Wagnerians” and the

Bayreuth ideal.428

Strauss’s Don Quixote elicited numerous comparisons to Till Eulenspiegel. Both featured a series of episodes or adventures for the traveling “protagonist” or main musical theme. Both programs inhabit a pastoral world with similar musical idioms. Both compositions were understood as primarily humorous. However, rather than featuring a roguish protagonist who does the laughing, the delusional knight of Don Quixote is the one laughed at. Don Quixote is not another Nietzschean variation of Till, Zarathustra, the hero, or Kunrad from Feuersnot, but his opposite, an anti-hero of (musical) idealism. Given the mix of tragedy and comedy, and their associated musical languages, it is not surprising that Don Quixote also received comparisons to

Mahler.429 Reviewers describe Don Quixote with vocabulary generally reserved for Mahler: satire, clumsy, derb, potpourri of tiny motifs, etc. Don Quixote is Strauss’s most Mahlerian piece in its persistent integration of every day and pastoral sounds. In fact, the figure of Don Quixote’s squire, Sancho – unique in Strauss’s catalog of heroes, philistines, and decadents – supplies the unique Mahlerian touch. Whereas Strauss from Don Juan to tends to juxtapose his comic color and elevated lyricism in clearly delineated sections, Sancho’s motifs (as well as those of their vulgar encounters) remain continuously integrated and in programmatic dialogue with the serious cello of Don Quixote’s theme. In fact it is the careful delineation

428 Professor Bluths, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 25, no. 11 (18 March 1898): 170; Karl Homann, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau, no. 287 (8 December 1898): 1147-48. 429 Interestingly, champions of each composer argued perceptively about the differences between the composers. But it is noteworthy that such argument was necessary, as it had not been a few years before.

197

between high and low idioms in Mahler’s Second Symphony that make it his most Straussian.

As with the narrative of Cervantes’s novel, the protagonist of Strauss’s tone poem

(perhaps tone-novella) becomes overcome with the fantasy that he is a knight after reading too many works of medieval chivalry. Taking Sancho as his squire Don Quixote sets out on a series of (mis)adventures, which Strauss orders selectively and differently from Cervantes’s story, before returning home, emerging from his delusion, and dying. In their adventures Sancho provides grounding in reality, trying to deflate the grandiose visions of his master, who constantly mistakes common objects and people for something more fantastic and threatening: the windmill for a giant, the heard of sheep for a pair of armies.

The parallels with romanticism, musical idealism, and especially the self-aggrandizing cult of Parsifal are unmistakable. Ever since the early 1880s, in anticipation of Parsifal’s premiere, Wagnerians had strongly identified themselves with the grail knights of Wagner’s final work. Between the Monsalvat-like pilgrimages to Bayreuth every summer and the “grail brotherhood” associations like the one founded by Oskar Merz and Friedrich Hartmann in

Munich in 1881, the fanatical support of Wagner, especially by young men, went hand in hand with an identification with the knights. When a 26-year-old Engelbert Humperdinck journeyed down to Naples to visit Wagner’s winter home, he presented his card as a member of the “Order of the Holy Grail.”430 Even the Post-Wagner, but persistently Wagnerian operas of Humperdinck,

Pfitzner, Hausegger, Weingartner, and Strauss’s own Guntram perpetuate the medieval fixation of

Wagner, which contained anti-modernist critique of industrialization, replete with nationalist fantasies about a timeless, but repressed German folk and its stories. In writing a composition, which like Parsifal takes place in Spain, Strauss exposes the knightly fascination of Wagnerians as absurd play acting, a self-glorifying delusion about the actual situation. Strauss recuperates

Cervantes’s critique of nostalgia for an ideal and pre-modern past. Whereas in the 17th Century

430 Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 557-58.

198

such medieval nostalgia mourned the supersession of the knight by the sovereign state and associated institutions of early modernity, medievalism returned in the 19th Century under the banner of a no less nostalgic romantic critique of the Enlightenment and industrialization.431

Nowhere was such nostalgia stronger than in the operatic settings of Wagner and his imitators.

Consequently, Strauss appropriates Cervantes’s part tragic, part mocking critique of “proto- romanticism” just at the moment the naturalism or even “realpolitik” – as Seidl calls it – of the left Wagnerians sought to distinguish itself from the idealism of the right Wagnerians.432

Even musically, Don Quixote enacts a similar unmasking of the delusional aspirations of musical idealism. Audiences themselves experienced the “cinematic” illusion of being present in the story, experiencing the encounters of the protagonists through orchestral “sound effects.”

Whether in astonishment or critique, the parts of the composition most frequently referenced were the unique objects evoked by Strauss’s music: sheep, windmill, wind machine. However, the manner of Strauss’s sonic re-presentation of these objects never allows the fantasy to remain unacknowledged. Rather than “depicting” objects through associative melodies – which tend to be “melodic” and pleasant – Strauss creates sounds with musical instruments that approximate the sounds of the non-musical world, an experience that audiences found jarring and disenchanting.

Consider the ride of Valkyries next to Don Quixote’s notorious bleating sheep: two very different approaches to animals. Instead of satiating the idealist pursuit of grand narratives and self- inclusion in the story, audiences were faced with the transparent and self-conscious production of effects and fantasies. Just as Don Quixote must deal with the embarrassing realization that his illusory armies are merely sheep, the music forces the audience to realize that the pseudo-illusory sheep are just musicians flutter-tonguing their horns. Moreover, Don Quixote’s tone painting chafes against the norms of musical idealism – even program music – by choosing such base

431 On Cervantes critique of medieval nostalgia see Louise D’Arcens, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 29. 432 Seidl understood Strauss’s Don Quixote as a critique of hyper-idealism. See Arthur Seidl, Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, 1901), 84.

199

objects and subjects for a grand symphonic orchestra. The trivial quality of the misunderstood objects only makes the knightly fantasies appear more exaggerated and ridiculous. Perhaps the almost universal revulsion to the work stemmed from its unveiling of fantasy to reveal banality and productive forces. Given the audiences’ inability to enjoy the story, dismissal can be read as discomfort.

Like Hitchcock’s bird sounds, Strauss does not reproduce sheep bleating, but initiates divergent becomings of musical language that open new sonic flows and worldly confluences.

Beyond the amorphous becoming molecular discussed in chapter two, the music of Don Quixote becomes wind and animal. In the context of Hitchcock, Deleuze and Guattari argue that

“becoming is never imitating,” but the production of “an electronic sound like a field of intensity or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat welling up inside us.”433

From the reviewers’ accounts there can be no doubt the dissonant vibrations of horns in sheep scene of Don Quixote, where music approximates the vibrations of besieged animals, produced palpable unease for concert audiences.434 Unlike most tone poems before it, the music Don

Quixote does not represent or express its imputed object – as a mode of being – but simulates its in the virtual manner of becoming. As with Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Debussy and

Ravel, Strauss molecularizes music into a series of speeds and intensities that are open to becomings, especially those minoritarian configurations (women, children, animals) previously blocked by aesthetic rules demanding a transcendent organizing principle, which in some way seems majoritarian. The musical configurations of late romantic program music were often heroic men and organized in supposedly highly rational forms. “Male rationality” figures as a supreme majoritarian becoming by comparison with the frequent minoritarian becomings of

433 Deleuze and Guatarri, Thousand Plateaus, 305. 434 On the unease see Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 25, no. 49 (9 December 1898): 737; M. L., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, no. 571 (7 December 1898): 7.

200

sound in Strauss such as animals, children, women, and the insane.435 The emancipation of musical elements allows sonic particles to assume new proximities, like sheep, a becoming animal of music.

The general critique of Don Quixote was that it took program music too far, tried to paint with too much detail, and in being too realistic, was not musical. Yet, it was more than just overly fine “brush strokes” that offended, but the simulatory manner and content of musical forms, as well as the effect on audiences and musical life. According to Pirani, whose review summarizes a number of common sentiments:

This work gives us a sad picture of decay, of “Decadence" in music. When one finds intact the composer in his upper room, writing these repulsive, ear-torturing cacophonies, when a public finds itself without energy to protest against such a grotesquely botched effort…so that in fact for all those who would like to know music not regarded as unpleasant noise, it is a sad, remorseful appearance. Is then the noble art of music, are the orchestra players there for this reason, to imitate the bleating of a herd of sheep? That one should leave to the special stages the clowns, eccentrics, whose only objective is to tickle the diaphragm of the listeners. They understand how to do it much better than Herr Strauss with his insipid comedy.436

As this quote suggests, Don Quixote was considered an overextended caricature, “over which one could laugh, if it was not meant so seriously,” as E. E. Taubert writes.437 The reviews not only read like those of Mahler in the perceived excess of effects and satire, but also in the music’s attributed affective pain and violence. Much like Pirani’s accusation of “repulsive, ear-torturing cacophonies,” M. L. considers Strauss’s music irresponsible and insensitive about the negative effect of his music on his audience:

Whoever goes to the front of his time has to bear various responsibilities. Strauss does not yet know how to bear such responsibility towards his art…He should give some thought to how he wants to come to terms with the responsibility he has towards the flock of his worshipers, which only wait for the opportunity itself to create as a flock of imitative listeners.438

435 Strauss is not without his heroic men as in Heldenleben, but by comparison his music frequently dips below the top of traditional hierarchies. 436 Eugenio Pirani, “Musik: Konzert des Wagner-Vereins,” Das Kleine Journal (7 December 1898), 5.* 437 E. E. T., “Concerte,” Die Post no. 335 (8 December 1898): 2. 438 M. L., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, no. 571 (7 December 1898): 7.

201

He even suggests that Strauss should act more responsibly if he were to write a tone poem on

“stomach pain,” perhaps hinting at the “harm” caused by his compositional “jokes” like Don

Quixote. Even Lessmann admits that the noise of Don Quixote made him uncomfortable:

It remains to be seen if in a later time the musical ear will rightly find itself in this tangle of keys, and if what today seems ugly, will seem beautiful to aesthetic sensation. I cannot at all hide that even at the points which for me no longer contain ‘music,’ and where the cacophony awoke in me a feeling of discomfort, yet a brilliant musician is to be detected in the expression of a struggling creative force.439

Lessmann here continues to defend Strauss and abstract “progress,” even when it is against his own body’s better judgment.

The quote from Lessmann reiterates a common theme in this chapter about the interrelationship between unmusicality, violence to the audience, and violence to music itself. Far more than with Zarathustra, Don Quixote was considered threatening to the concept of music, a threat echoed consistently by supporters of absolute and program music alike. In fact the unity of critical discourse on Don Quixote is almost incomparable, with all citing its lack of musical pleasure, its negative physical effects, and especially its status as non-music. Don Quixote even brings out the disciplinary urge in multiple critics, who advise him to shape up.440 M. L. of the

BBZ calls it a “return to the original state of music as noise,” and notes that even those who usually enjoy program music were disappointed.441 This included the reviewers for the AMZ,

Post, and TR, who considered it an insult to the tone poem and a work which only served to prove right the critics of program music.442 If there is a difference in rhetoric between the formalists and New Germans, the later were more concerned about the harm to their cause, while the former

439 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 25, no. 49 (9 December 1898): 737. 440 On the disciplinary treatment of Don Quixote, see especially his treatment in these reviews of the Berlin premiere: Karl Homann, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau, no. 287 (8 December 1898): 1147-48; M. L., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, no. 571 (7 December 1898): 7; Eugenio Pirani, “Musik: Konzert des Wagner-Vereins,” Das Kleine Journal (7 December 1898), 5.* 441 M. L., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, no. 571 (7 December 1898): 7. 442 Professor Bluths, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 25, no. 11 (18 March 1898): 170; E. E. T., “Concerte,” Die Post no. 335 (8 December 1898): 2; Karl Homann, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau, no. 287 (8 December 1898): 1147-48.

202

the harm to their persons. Nevertheless, the common link between harm and unmusicality remains unbroken and further extrapolated by Pirani in the rest of his review:

In principle I have no objections to program music. For all I care the poets of the sad form should also be considered in criticizing a symphonic poem – although we have recently experienced that this substance can be fatal for a tone poet – because the music relies so much on the program and seeks to illustrate it, so music should nevertheless always remains music and not exceed the limits beyond which it is no longer tones, but noise. A program for musical works is only permissible then, if the composition also has a right to exist [Existenzberechtigung] alone in itself. That does not apply to Strauss’s ‘Don Quixote.’ A pair of decent melodic phrases are scattered within – the ‘rari nantes in gurgite vasto’ (cello-solo masterly performed by Herr Hekling) – do not compensate for the terrible noise, for the grotesque (un)musical product of Herr Strauss. The direction in which he now strikes out is, if it does not spring from impulse, is to be spoken of tout prix as regrettable aberrance, is to be described as sickly. Of course there is another question, whether Herr Strauss would be capable of writing something enjoyable without the aid of these extravagances. I spoke recently with a well-known painter about the deviant taste in painting today and he expressed quite frankly the conviction that only the lack of creative power can yield such monstrosities as one sees in today’s exhibitions. It is not different in music. Such malformed creations as ‘Don Quixote’ owe their existence only to artistic impotence.443

The string of embodied language in Pirani’s review is very Hanslickian: fatal, pathological, edible, monsters [Missgeburten], impotence. More importantly, Pirani reinforces the parallels between life and music, especially the “right to exist,” that is the bios/zoe distinction. As with other works of modern art, Don Quixote is a freak, impermissible in musical life, representing a pathological direction and a lack of vitality. While Pirani’s description of whole musical genre as sick is perhaps metaphorical, his description of the composer as sick and the composition as sickening is not, especially considering his deep investment in music’s bodily effect.

Consequently, the danger posed by the composition as a monster lacking rights – musica sacer – was quite real. In a way, Don Quixote’s program itself addresses such multiplication of dangers by idealists, as well as the confluence of perceived and experienced dangers. Don Quixote’s knightly delusions never minimize threats, but always create or maximize them, also infusing them with a charged level of evil, otherness, or racism. The sheep become armies, the windmill a

443 Eugenio Pirani, “Musik: Konzert des Wagner-Vereins,” Das Kleine Journal (7 December 1898), 5.

203

giant, the muleteers magicians, and so on. The real danger comes in Don Quixote’s reaction to a perceived threat and the positions in which he puts Sancho and himself. Such paranoia certainly reflects the idealist fear of music’s violation by noise or non-German music, and its degenerative effects on listeners and the cannon. As I have maintained throughout this study, critics did not simply describe, but created and cultivated. This includes the danger of new music as Zoe, as a devolving “return” to pre-music or savage sound. Indeed, Esposito argues that the fears about the

“state of nature” as biologically dangerous, provide the originary justification in Hobbes and others for the biopolitical protectionism of sovereign political institutions. Consequently, the insistence that Don Quixote returns music to a state of nature, actives a biopolitical anxiety about bodily and aesthetic harm.

Perhaps the single most discussed aspect of Don Quixote was the sheep bleating sounds.

Returning to the long quote from Pirani above, one can get a sense of just how outrageous Don

Quixote’s animal sounds struck the symphonic audience. After asking rhetorically, “Is then the noble art of music, are the orchestra players there for this reason, to imitate the bleating of a heard of sheep?” he goes on to speculate sarcastically:

He wants to imitate the lifelike “bah” of sheep, so he should integrate a pair of actual sheep into the orchestra and in the desired moment let fly a couple hearty “slaps.” The bleating will then naturally be heard; only he will not thereby humiliate educated musicians with such imitation of inarticulate animal sounds. The innovation would be epoch making. One would have then made the beginning, so nothing would stand in the way, that one would take other animals to strengthen the body of the orchestra [Orchesterkörpers]. When especially suited for characteristic color mixtures I recommend dogs for hunting music, cats, geese, and chickens for pastoral, quacking ducks for barcaroles, perhaps also sea lions, and donkeys, oxen, and lions for large intensifications. It would then of course be convenient to arrange such a symphony at the zoological garden, because there one would have handy the necessary participants.444

Just as with Zarathustra, which opponents of program music criticized using hyperbolic thought experiments about future musical expressions of major philosophical concepts, here Pirani exerts considerable effort theorizing a ridiculous zoological symphony. While certainly trying to poke

444 Eugenio Pirani, “Musik: Konzert des Wagner-Vereins,” Das Kleine Journal (7 December 1898), 5.

204

fun at the reproduction of animal sounds, Pirani betrays a sense that such reproduction itself is a violation to “the noble art of music.” In his two scenarios, either animals join the orchestra on stage, or the orchestra joins the animals at the zoo. For the German musical public Don Quixote’s sheep sounds were far too artistically outrageous to belong in a concert hall with its Bildung implications. Yet, such suggestions also bolster claims about the power of musical becoming, that the orchestral approximation of animal sounds hardly differ from the animals own simulation of an orchestra, asserting the common property of sound and its intensities.

Pirani was far from alone in expressing repulsion to the bleating, though perhaps he best explains the significance of the revulsion. O. K. of the KZ calls the scene a “disdainful vilification of all musical art” and Wolff at the premiere in Cologne makes clear that the sheep scene was central to the controversy:

If Strauss wished to use his abilities for portrait painting of sheep voices by means of muted brass instruments, then a carnival-like joke would have offered him a good opportunity for it. But in a composition – with enormous demands because of the virtuosic orchestra, under the direction of a competent conductor, in the noble silence of performance which only a concert can attain – this signifies the height of tastelessness for the installation of such things. A single “bah” considered within the whole of great orchestral music a la ‘Eulenspiegel,’ one would still put up with and then one could perhaps jokingly say sorry, and the zoological sections of Haydn’s immortal ‘Creation’ would have now found a correlate. The brilliant miniaturist Haydn contented himself with the speech from herds and the ‘numerous, soft sheep’, with the known, passionate pastoral manner, in which he paints as he were the shepherd and not the sheep. With this orchestral bleating however our public, otherwise very occupied with Strauss, was clearly uneasy, and this mood was for many decisive to mix at the conclusion of the whole work lively applause on the one side with harsh hissing.445

In an effort to explain why Strauss’s sheep music was the “height of tastelessness,” Wolff juxtaposes Don Quixote with Haydn’s pastoral themes in his Creation. Aside from highlighting the difference between tone “painting” and tone association, Wolff’s comparison of Strauss with

Haydn points to significant periodizing implications. As Strauss’s program music turns away from the transcendent and expressive ethos of musical idealism – a point I continue to insist on –

445 Karl Wolff, “Don Quixote von Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 19, no. 9 (1898): 111.

205

it is interesting to note that one has to return to a composer just “before” Beethoven, or pre- idealist, in order to find something comparable. Certainly, Weber, Wagner, and others invoked animal, particularly bird sounds with their operas, but vaguely pictorial, even animalesque music, was far more prominent in the 18th Century, than in the idealist 19th Century, the century in which music became “noble” rather than merely earthly and sensual. However, even then, Wolff notes that Hadyn sonically paints the sheep from the perspective of the shepherd and does not, like

Strauss, give the animals expressive agency. Strauss’s sheep seem to resound without the safe mediator of the aestheticizing human touch.

Don Quixote’s sheep were not an anomaly in terms of generating backlash through post- idealist soiling of the concert hall with animal sounds. In chapter two I mentioned the offensive

Derbheit of Mahler’s First Symphony. However, a more apt parallel is the second movement, the so-called Tierstück, of his Third Symphony, which received a partial premiere in Berlin in 1897.

As with Don Quixote, which was performed the following year, the Tierstück was the movement most criticized and booed, Paul Moos at the BNN adding that it made Wagner roll over in his grave.446 Lessmann refers to the movement as “completely unpleasant,” “ear-numbing noise” that

“ceases to be music.”447 As in his other reviews of secessionist music Lessmann speculates that future generations may clearly understand Mahler, but in 1897 the music remained unintelligible to the majority, Lessmann included. While Mahler’s Tierstück is perhaps somewhere between

Strauss’s specific animal sounds and Haydnesque association, it generated a similar reaction as

Don Quixote. In dismissing Strauss’s and Mahler’s “zoological” music as gimmickry, shock effect, and superficial novelty, critics also betray a deep anxiety about animal expressions. It was not simply that Don Quixote’s sheep were a decadent, indulgent, extreme take on New German

446 Both the nationalist Moos and the liberal H. N. note that the Tierstück was the most booed movement. See Paul Moos, “Musik und Theater,” Berliner Neueste Nachrichten no. 117 (11 March 1897): 2 (says that Wagner was rolling over in his grave); H. N., “Die Musikalische Woche,” Berliner Tageblatt (16 March 1897): 137-38. 447 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertzaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 24, no. 11 (12 March 1897): 164.

206

ideals, but a new cinematic style of effect. In other words, the simulation of sheep bleating did not simply extend detail in tone painting or expressive capacity, but directly challenged idealist claims about musical music. It provided a tangible manifestation of the heated issues of musical zoe, unformed sound.

Don Quixote’s bleating sheep brought together zoe on a number of levels. Musically, the unique sounds effects exemplified the oft-referenced non-music of the composition. The music re-presents sheep, themselves life forms unprotected by the status of bios. Finally, the human relationship with domesticated herds as resources reflects the sphere of human activity reserved for zoe, that is, the economics or bare production of food, clothing, and the maintenance of life.

These over determined “bahs” reinforced their vulgarity through this nexus of unmusical noise and pre-political life representations. As the logic of the reviews bears out, the “bahs” lack of right to exist in musical life stem from both its physical noise and animal associations.

Yet, if one inserts these “bahs” back into the programmatic narrative of Don Quixote, they appear not as dismissible zoe, but part of a larger effort to critique delusions of grandeur, showcase the naked power of production, and assert an elemental music not severed from the elements of the material world. Don Quixote imagines a battle between Emperor Alifanfaron and

King Pentapolin, with whom he sides in his chivalry, a scene certainly worthy of a symphonic poem. Yet, Strauss does not compose such an epic, but lets the listener in on the truth from the beginning. While one hears Don Quixote’s knightly theme plunge into the sheep, one knows the entire time that he is only killing sheep, not fighting a glorious battle. As Don Quixote attacks, the “bahs” get louder, signaling the pain and ridiculousness of their death, as well as an incursion of material reality and experience into the fantasy. There is nothing particularly redeeming about

Don Quixote the butcher, as when Siegfried slays Mime. Additionally, Strauss’s music here as elsewhere exposes production processes. Not only are base animals like sheep shown in the story to be the real elemental terrain of a righteous war, but music is shown to be sound effect generated by musicians. The fantasy that one is even “listening” to Cervantes’s story is made –

207

quite literally – painfully obvious as produced fantasy. The performative source of the illusion draws due attention to itself.

In the very form of his musical structures Strauss’s emphasis on production over product

– becoming over being – by no means slipped through the cracks of critical discourse, but was often embedded in discussions of his superficiality or virtuosity. M. L. of the BBZ writes, “When he writes an orchestral work, he really depends a little more on the ‘how’… However he should depend more on the ‘what,’ as it occasionally makes an appearance.”448 The pursuit of “how” cuts across Strauss’s whole output not only in his multiplicity of musical styles and voices, but also the vulgarity of subject matter. Whether in his Nietzschean period or in his succeeding works on domestic life, Strauss’s compositions make the messy corners of the self and the world the subject of art, contemplation, and even affirmation. As with Cervantes story, Strauss’s composition revels in semi-humorous encounters with animals, village laborers, travelers – everything that lies outside the political/philosophical realm of bios. The very fact that Strauss fixates on the mechanics of production and reproduction (sexuality included) within the musico-philosophical context suggests a heightened biopolitical perspective. Zoe, musical and literal, does not remain outside for Strauss, but part of the larger monistic, fleshly plane of direct and unabashed consideration and manipulation.

If zoe is a concept of political philosophy charged with negativity, I want to introduce the concept of “flesh” as an affirmative alternative. Even as bare or pure life, zoe cannot help but be caught in the tide of what it is not: bios, worthy, qualified, higher life. Flesh attempts to cut across and invalidate this dichotomy, a project which can easily be mistaken for a fetish for bare life. Flesh can also be mistaken for a fixation on the body, especially abnormal bodies, as agents of power.449 However, like zoe, the concept of the body always seem to imply and be eclipsed by

448 M. L., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, no. 571 (7 December 1898): 7. 449 Published the same year as Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Multitude: War and Democray in the Age of Empire similarly argues for a political resurrections of flesh. However, their reading of flesh reads it as both “unformed life force” and contained within the

208

what it is not: soul.450

Near the end of Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy Roberto Esposito places Maurice

Merleau-Ponty’s ruminations on the concept of “flesh” in a biopolitical context.451 While

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh is thoroughly devoid of political import, Esposito demonstrates how such an affirmation of flesh unravels political philosophies of a unified body, both individual and corporative, particularly the Nazi vitalization of politics and the total indistinguishability of the biological body and the political soul-subject. Merleau-Ponty’s affirmation of the exteriorized bodily elements becomes a launching off point for Esposito’s affirmative philosophy of biopolitics, a vision of the non-exclusionary privileging of biological life over a subject-oriented political existence. In late writings this is the power of the impersonal to combat the dualisms of personhood.452 If Esposito drags phenomenological flesh into politics,

I want to pull both into a musical orbit, a move justified by the magnetism between compositions and bodies in German musical discourse. As I have demonstrated previously, at the musical register the logical unity of the composition, indeed its interiorization, gave it a legitimacy of existence as a fit musical subject. However, by affirming the outward facing, heterogeneous composite of musical elements present in Strauss and Mahler, one can begin to see that what was feared to be musical zoe, actually functioned as enactments of musical flesh, with non- hierarchical and non-exclusionary implications for aesthetics and society.

For Merleau-Ponty the concept of flesh encapsulates the common stuff, the elements that make up and unite the material world. Considered from the vantage point of flesh the living organism becomes exteriorized as heterogeneous material, open to and linked to the flesh of the world, rather than interiorized as a body. When Merleau-Ponty writes, “my body is made of the

identity politics of monstrous bodies. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 190-196. 450 Esposito, Bios, 165: “…a body always has a soul, or at least a head…” 451 Esposito, Bios, 157-169. 452 Esposito, Third Person, 11.

209

same flesh as the world (it is perceived) and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world,” he asserts a mode of thinking that merges the living and non-living.453 Moreover, he conceives a living being as folded into the world and the world folded into it in an indivisible commonality. Esposito, who attempts to give political import to the flesh by first demonstrating the repeated philosophical taming of its “rebellious” and “anarchic impulses,” asserts that the flesh “is both singular and communal, generic and specific, and undifferentiated and different, not only devoid of spirit, but a flesh that doesn’t even have a body.”454 Like Spinozian concepts of the multitude, which does not attempt to choose between the equal molar trappings of the isolated individual or homogenous group, the flesh is infinitely communal and infinitely singular. As the assembled molecules that make up the world, the flesh is shared corpuscles that can assume any iteration or becoming. The life forms that configure themselves out of the ether-like flesh cannot be divided into zoe and bios, as all are of the same order and deaf to distinctions or worthiness and unworthiness. Furthermore even the lines between life forms (as well as nonlife forms), cannot be concretely drawn as all partake in the same elements. Without the projections afforded by hierarchy, flesh remains a dangerously communal conceptualization of life.

Transposed back into musical compositions, rather than living organisms, musical flesh reconceives the elements of the composition as constructed out of the same generic molecules of the world. The colorful sound effects, idioms, and orchestration of Strauss and Mahler do not interiorize themselves within the composition, but bend its sound back towards the world out of which it came. Their compositions manifest a heterogeneity and disunity shared by the flesh of the world. Because the sounds and forms of the wider world are folded into music, which folds itself and the listener into the world, listening becomes not a haven of the composition’s autonomy, but a rude jettison into the world. Hierarchies between musical form, as well as between art and life, are broken down by this affective, fleshy music. That process bears a

453 Quoted in Esposito, Bios, 160. 454 Esposito, Bios, 167.

210

distinct political resonance, if only because it undoes the dualisms and repressions undertaken with the political aspirations of a homogenous, secure, and ultimately exclusionary society. Such an aesthetic and political project underlies the attempt by musical authorities to demonize fleshy music as zoe.

Mahler’s Second Symphony: Harbinger of the Musical Secession

In the reception of Mahler’s Second Symphony the slippages between zoe and flesh are quite pronounced. Like Zarathustra and Don Quixote, the symphony raised the specter of musical zoe as a threat to the end of music and healthiness of audiences. Discourses around the symphony show a blurring of metaphorical aesthetic biopolitics and biopolitics more literally in musical culture. Like other early modernist works Mahler’s Second Symphony was the subject of much discipline, yet discourses that attempted to analyze this work as unmusical and deviant, only served to heighten its aura as emancipated musical flesh. Indeed with each performance,

Mahler’s Second Symphony served as a rallying point for a growing movement of musical secessionists. The reactions demonstrate a clear erosion of the War of the Romantics in face of such deterritoralizing music and its attendant discourses. The emergence of the secessionists perhaps signals a new musical reterritorialization, altering the musical landscape for the early 20th century.

Even bad press was good press for Mahler. After the disappointing performance of Titan at the ADMV festival in 1894, Mahler attracted the attention of Berlin’s most adventurous conductors: Arthur Nikisch, Felix Weingartner, and Richard Strauss. In the span of two years,

Mahler’s symphonies were performed in Berlin, either in full or in part, at least six times. During that period, the Dresden public was the only other to hear Mahler’s music at all, though just a partial performance of his Second Symphony. For much of his early compositional career,

Mahler was considered an export from Berlin. Until Mahler took the post of court opera director in Vienna in 1897, Berlin was the center of Mahler’s compositional career, where the composer developed a circle of devoted followers. While opponents lambasted Mahler’s symphonies

211

equally and with similar objections, his initial supporters in Berlin, and later in Dresden, Vienna, and Munich, largely coalesced through his Second Symphony. Mahler’s arrival in each of these cities began with his Second Symphony and both his popularity and controversiality remained wedded to it. For his initial followers, this work was the yardstick by which other symphonies were found somewhat wanting.

Mahler’s Second Symphony has a privileged history and place in Mahler’s catalog. From its premiere until the present it has often been held up as one of Mahler’s most popular and spectacular works, while more discerning critics from Adorno onward tend to attach an asterisk to the symphony as one of Mahler’s weakest and least sincere pieces.455 From this critical perspective, spectacular stems from spectacle. Certainly, the distinct popularity of Mahler’s

Second Symphony offers reasons to pause over this work. Historically speaking, it functioned to garner Mahler wide support, and also, as I will argue, exacerbate a growing rift in the New

Germans. The work, especially in the beginning and conclusion seemed similar enough to New

German aesthetics to find some favor from within that fold, but ultimately it was different enough to widen the breech between left and right. With the anachronistic perspective of his entire symphonic output, Adorno can rightly argue that the symphony is “regressive” – and ultimately very New German – but what mattered in the era of its premieres was how it differed from the established New German mold. For critics, it was just as Mahlerian as the First Symphony, while for supporters drawn from the “left” portion of the New Germans, it fulfilled traditional expectations using dazzling new techniques. It is no surprise that Taruskin uses it to demonstrate maximalism, because it does extend traditions.456 While the aesthetic and politics of the symphony are less than revolutionary, the critical discourse around it continued to reinforce its fleshiness.

No work better exemplifies the competing trajectories of discipline and flesh in the 1890s

455 Adorno, Mahler, 136. 456 Taruskin, Oxford History, vol. 5, 9-22.

212

than Mahler’s Second Symphony. On the one hand it was orderly enough to be positioned as late romantic. Whether by Nodnagel, Mahler himself, or later musicologists, this work scales back the musical emancipation of his First Symphony. Yet, for all its taming of experimentation, it still evoked considerable calls to be disciplined. More importantly the reactions to it, in the process of discipline, could not help but highlight its fleshiness, which some followers found quite appealing as a form of post-romanticism. Mahler’s Second Symphony was his first to draw comparisons to

Strauss, first putting them in the same conversation as leading, albeit ambiguous, modernists.

The new but lasting link with Strauss may have had as much to do with changes in Strauss’s compositional output as with the differences between Mahler’s first two symphonies. In either case this symphony provided a rallying point for musical secessionists and for discussions of new divides in musical culture. In sum, it provoked controversy about dangerous music and precipitated changes in aesthetic wars by placing liberals and nationalists on the same side.

In 1895, Mahler’s Second Symphony was premiered in three phases in Berlin: just the second movement in February, the first three movements in March, and its entirety in December.

The most striking characteristic of the critical reactions to these concerts is their homogeneity.

Not only did the reviews of Mahler’s Second Symphony mirror those of his First Symphony, and for that matter the partial performance of his Third Symphony in 1897, but also critics of all aesthetic and political camps shared the opinion that this symphony was not music. No less than

Mahler’s First Symphony, his Second Symphony (heard first by anyone who did not attend the

ADMV festival in Weimar or hear it in Budapest and Hamburg, a caveat which included most critics) was considered unmusical. Nevertheless, given the formal differences and disparate popularity of the two symphonies, it is surprising that reviews between the two symphonies were almost interchangeable.

Likewise, reviews from critics on both sides of the War of the Romantics read similarly.

The following four excerpts represent reviews from a liberal daily, a nationalist daily, a formalist journal, and a New German journal:

213

[S]uch a gigantic intensifying debauchery of fantasy, as it is in the last movement of Mahler’s C-minor symphony, cannot even be found in Liszt and Berlioz. Mahler has thereby trumped Berlioz, out-Liszted Liszt!...The boldness of its harmonization is quite amazing. Sometimes he lets various keys directly run alongside each other, thus leading here to almost impossible chord combinations, cacophonies of the most evil kind. Apart from their excesses this music has but still a further cardinal error: ambiguity; it is program music that lacks the program and which remains however incomprehensible without a program.457

Before the finale without any indication from the composer every listener must stand at a loss: such a wealth of haunting images, partly interesting, partly storming our ears with the most horrifying harmonies to such an outrageous extent that the most curious sound combinations can no longer induce physical exhaustion. 458

[I]ts five movements of very unequal value…attest to a similar lush, poetic vein, so long as the composer allows his healthy musical talent to lead, but it degenerates into baroque sophistry as soon as the author in the search for originality and the “never seen before” leads off into noisy, raging orchestral effects and for this reason commands an unduly large apparatus into the field. It is sincerely regrettable that such aberrations obscure the discovery and power of the extraordinarily compelling work.459

Never has music had such a repelling effect on me. The hollowness of the nothingness of this noisy orchestral mass, moving in a chaos of (not dissonance, but) discord – the incapacity for even a good thought, a viable motif – is not music, but “noise,” “scandal,” “mischief,” and “overthrow,” or whatever else you want to call it. For example the first movement contains something that if only for a moment captures the listener, but the triviality of the melody in the second movement recalls old Charles Voss and his Tyrol-ness, while a pure black Sabbath breaks out in the brutal tastelessness of the third movement (songs even not a little like a Berlioz-ish), where the witches broom itself thrashes in the figure of the giant drums that is beyond all measure.460

In these reviews and many others, one can find repeated almost verbatim many of the same critiques of Mahler’s First Symphony. The symphony was described as formless, lacking musical thought, lacking logical development between movements, drenched in color, full of strange sound effects, dissonant harmonies piled on top of one another, baroque, grotesque, desolate noise, trivial, blasphemous, and just plain confusing. Despite Mahler’s own resolution to make

457 i. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung no. 587 (15 December 1895): 10. 458 E. E. T., “Musik,” Die Post no. 343, 2nd supplement (15 December 1895): 1. 459 Eugenio Pirani, “Berlin,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 6 (1896): 65-66. 460 Erich Reinhardt, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 22, no. 10 (8 March 1895): 139- 140.

214

his second major composition a definitive symphony, his Second Symphony, like his altered First

Symphony, still elicited claims of generic ambiguity. In a similar manner to Eichberg, who claims the work is “program music that is missing the program,” reviewers of the symphony argued that it was difficult to tell what Mahler attempts to illustrate.461 Even Tappert, original founder of the AM-Z and defender of program music, demanded a program in his scathing review of Mahler’s Second Symphony.462 In fact, the following year, Berlin critics were actually more willing to accept Mahler’s First Symphony as a symphony than his Second. As with his First

Symphony, Mahler’s disavowal of the program/absolute music divide actually brought into question the very status of the symphony as music.

Perhaps even more so than with Mahler’s First Symphony, the reviews of his Second

Symphony classified the work as musical zoe. That such a similar thing can be said about

Strauss’s works of the same period, speaks to a growing trend, not only within composition, but musical criticism in the last few years of the 19th Century. Mahler’s Second Symphony was considered less of a joke, less of a caricature of serious music, yet even more bereft of musical legitimation. As an extension of its illegitimacy, Mahler’s Second Symphony was almost universally portrayed as detrimental to the physical well-being of the audience. As mentioned in the context of Strauss, I want to suggest that the rhetoric which excludes artwork from the status of music can be turned inside out (or perhaps outside in) to read the function of the symphony as an enactment of musical flesh.

Despite sympathy from the small cohort of “left Wagnerians,” most defenders of the expressive musical aesthetic were up in arms over Mahler’s Second Symphony and its status as music. Tappert writes that, “The symphony is in the first movements a complete (in the last a partial) negation of everything that until now was held up as beautiful and right.”463 Not only does

461 Eugenio Pirani, “Berlin,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 6 (1896): 65-66; i. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung no. 587 (15 December 1895): 10. 462 Wilh. Tappert, “Aus der Musikwelt,” Kleine Journal (15 December 1895): 3.* 463 Wilh. Tappert, “Aus der Musikwelt,” Kleine Journal (15 December 1895): 3.*

215

the finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony fail to measure up to aesthetic beauty or “properness” – a measure of “right” within the disciplinary paradigm of normativity – but the symphony negates musical law. Similarly, Muntz of the DZ, reviewing the performance of Mahler’s Second

Symphony in Vienna in 1899, writes that the composition "not only failed to meet the basic conditions of a true work of art not, but really slaps them in the face…The philharmonic and the choral society offered its capabilities to Mahler who sacrifices the golden calf of art.”464 The gall of Mahler’s work was not simply a passive failure or waste of potential, as the liberal formalists portrayed the symphony, but a blasphemous attack, an assault on aesthetic standards and a misleading veneration of false gods.

Similarly, the arch Wagnerian Otto Lessmann spends a considerable portion of his review explaining Mahler’s failure to write proper music and opposing the liberal/formalist tendency to lump Mahler in with the New Germans. He writes:

In view of this orchestral noise, heightened to the most extreme brutality with his sought after gruesome discord, the concept of “music” even desists for me. One wants still to be such an enthusiastic follower of the modern aesthetic, which no longer treats music as play with “sounding forms,” but as “expression,” so then one will yet have to accept a border over which no composer may go, if he does not want to turn his back completely on an artistically formed, sensory manifestation of his emotional world. According to my estimation Herr Mahler took this disastrous step, for out of his work I can also not hear logical progression.465

Here Lessmann carefully categorizes the expressive ethos of the New Germans as modern and the specifically Hanslickian “sounding forms” as apparently not modern, despite the fact that these aesthetics emerged simultaneously. In fact, Hanslick’s might be historically the more recent.

Regardless, Lessmann lays out this aesthetic landscape to suggest that Mahler fulfills the objective of neither aesthetic camp, nor is able to tap into his own deeply moved inner self, a shared aspiration of musical idealism. Lessmann is quite explicit that the symphony not only fails

464 Max Muntz, “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3. 465 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 22, no. 51/52 (20/27 December 1895): 669-670.

216

these tests of musicality, but remains a noisy, unmusical brute.

Not only was the unmusical zoe of Mahler’s Second Symphony dangerous to the metaphorical body of music, but also to the bodies of the listeners. This perceived violence and danger was one of the most striking developments in Mahler’s ongoing reception. The critics were consistently divided in how they described the physicality of Mahler’s Second Symphony, with the liberal critics voicing the symphony’s violence in terms of overwhelming strength and the nationalist critics in terms of nerve rattling and tingling. In these reviews the liberal critics did not focus so much on the effects of the music on the audience, but rather on the music as an agent of violence – which nonetheless implies an effect on the audience. In Pirani’s quote at the beginning of this section, he compares Mahler to a battlefield general leading his orchestral army.

At the end of his review, he extends this metaphor by listing Mahler’s orchestral weapons and saying that, “In the total equipment one could already tell that a great battle was to be waged.

The field general stood battle-ready in the middle with desolate countenance – in the next moment even fired.”466 While Pirani does not fully explain this metaphor or articulate with whom

Mahler is attacking, it seems pretty clear that it is the audience. Rather than edifying, Mahler and his music assail the audience.

In his two reviews of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the critic “N.” makes it explicit that the composition’s violence was directed at the audience. In his review of the non-choral movements – so not even counting the colossal finale – he speaks of the music’s “Gewaltsame.”

“Gewalt” is a common word used in reviews of Mahler’s music, which can be translated as force or violence, but lends itself to the latter with the plural Gewaltsame (violences, or acts of violence). If there was any doubt whether or not “N.” meant to imply that Mahler does violence to the listeners, he goes on to write “Indecently however, he included much dry brooding and many ear-offending orchestral effects.”467 This is hardly different than the formalist/Viennese

466 Eugenio Pirani, “Berlin,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 92, no. 6 (1896): 65-66. 467 N. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung no. 108 (5 March 1895): 9.

217

critique of the New German School. Yet, this discourse comes to Berlin in the context of Mahler.

In his second review, as if to affirm his Hanslickian style of writing and unmoved opinion of

Mahler, he similarly writes, “Equally then it delivers in these sections all that today repels on it, especially the impulse for musical deeds of violence. Which blaring dissonances, which brutal extremes in instrumentation must the ear further put up with!468 He raises the common critique of orchestral effects from a mere performative short-coming to something deleteriously affective as

“musical deeds of violence.” Additionally, though, rather than focusing simply on orchestral volume as a source of musical violence, the Berlin critics of Mahler – viz. critics in other cities and viz. the formalist critique of the New German – focus especially on dissonance in Mahler, and dissonance as an additional source of violence. However, “N.” does not really elaborate on the impact of those deeds beyond the rather symbolic and amorphous appendage of the ear.

For the nationalists, the violence of Mahler’s Second Symphony seems to penetrate deeper. In his review of the three movement concert, Taubert at the Post finds that in the finale,

“it is much harder to find resolution, as nerve tingling effects play cleverly, which are immediately over as soon as each begins, just to further plot something even crazier.”469 If there is any question as to whether the reviewer thinks this rapid succession of physiological effects was bad, he makes clear his position in a later review of the full premiere, quoted above.470 Not only are the harmonies hard on the ear, but they leave the entire audience so physically exhausted, that they become unfazed, even blasé according to the neurasthenic cliché.

The other New German reviewers came to similar conclusions. Tappert says, “the orchestral accompaniment delivers nerve-cutting dissonances,” while his successor at the AMZ,

Lessmann, writes, “In view of this orchestral noise, heightened to the most extreme brutality with

468 N. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung no. 586 (14 December 1895): 5. 469 E. E. T., “Musik,” no. 64, 2nd supplement (6 March 1895): 1-2. 470 E. E. T., “Musik,” no. 343, 2nd supplement (15 December 1895): 1: “Before the finale without any indication from the composer every listener must stand at a loss: such a wealth of haunting images, partly interesting, partly storming our ears with the most horrifying harmonies to such an outrageous extent that the most curious sound combinations can no longer induce physical exhaustion.”

218

his sought after gruesome discord, the concept of ‘music’ even desists for me…it seemed to me in part as the epitome of musical ugliness and violent artistic artificiality [Unnatur].”471 Lessmann connects his larger claim about the symphony’s failure to become actual music with its brutality and even connects musical ugliness with Mahler’s “violent artistic artificiality.” In his review of three movements from Mahler’s Third Symphony, Lessmann’s review employs a similar logic, saying that with the work’s “ear-deafening noise,” ceases to be music.472 By implication, properly musical music is both natural and non-threatening, if not physically beneficial.

Max Muntz similarly aligns the negative nerve effects with the unmusicality of Mahler’s

Second Symphony, which he calls a “pseudo-symphony:” “However, Mahler felt the necessity in his pseudo-symphony not only to offend auditory nerves, but also to coaxingly titillate them, and thereby have provided anti-artistic interpolation.”473 In Muntz’s analysis the nerves themselves become a subject, standing in danger of being both assaulted and seduced, either of which presents a threat to autonomy. Perhaps Taubert expresses a similar sentiment as Muntz, when observing the symphony rushed the “ear” with both “tickling harmonies” and “haunting images.”474

However, the anti-Semitic Muntz makes even more radical proclamations than his nationalist cohort, asserting the decadence of the music. He writes, “This purely analytical, thematic work gives the work the pronounced character of musical decadence, which naturally through the purely sensory overstimulation of the auditory nerves expresses its loathsomeness through striving excess of instrumentation.”475 Here, Muntz defines musical decadence by not only its formal excesses, but by its medical effect (overstimulation) on the auditory nerve.

Despite its absence, the term “degeneration” is implied. Physical degeneration of the individual

471 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 22, no. 51/52 (20/27 December 1895): 669-670; Wilh. Tappert, “Aus der Musikwelt,” Kleine Journal (15 December 1895): 3.* 472 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 24, no. 11 (12 March 1897): 164. 473 Max Muntz, “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3. 474 E. E. T., “Musik,” no. 343, 2nd supplement (15 December 1895): 1. 475 Max Muntz, “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3.

219

(not yet hereditary, or of the population) for Muntz results from aesthetic decadence, a state of non-biological decline. The blurring between the biological and aesthetic is reinforced in

Muntz’s review by his later invocation of “Jewish decadence in music,” referring to Mahler’s conducting style. While the decadence may be cultural, the agency for this decline for Muntz is a racialized people group. While it is not entirely clear if Muntz’s “Jewish decadence in music” and “musical decadence” measure the exact same decline or cause of decline, they have similar qualities. While one phrase refers to a person (Mahler) and one to a composition (his Second

Symphony), they both involve physical excess, sensory overload, arrogance, flattery, and

“loathsomeness,” difficult to define given its lacing with underarticulated prejudice.

As I will argue in chapter five, the medical nexus between nerve damage and degeneration was an important factor in portraying new music as dangerous and mobilizing the forces of a new musical conservatism against it. In the context of Mahler’s Second Symphony, it was Muntz who most fully articulated the biological threat to social well-being supposedly posed by the work. Nevertheless the seed of that rhetoric was present in all reviews by liberals and nationalists alike, who universally portrayed the symphony as a physical threat to listeners. They only differed in articulating the seriousness and bio-medical specificity of this threat. However, it should be noted that the bio-medical rhetoric was not simply the provenance of the nationalists, as can be seen in the reviews of Mahler’s other symphonies. Indeed, the New German critique of

Mahler’s Second Symphony as a medical hazard really demonstrates how Hanslick’s style and biopolitics were becoming universal as the 19th Century waned.

For all the disciplinary pressures of music critics, as well as Mahler’s own attempts at normalized romantic idealism with his Second Symphony, musical discourse more demonstrably pushed Mahler’s music into uncontrollable zones of deviancy. The calls by writers like Nodnagel to claim Mahler for tradition were hardly heeded, nor was Mahler’s own homage to tradition heard as acceptable rehabilitation from his First Symphony. Rather every analysis only seems to strengthen the symphony’s degeneracy as an explanation for its overwhelming affect and

220

discomforting effects. Faced with a challenging work of ambiguous modernism, critics quickly declared the work as far beyond the boundaries of “music” and the protections of that status. As a work of aesthetic terrorism, Mahler’s Second Symphony was made hyper zoe, open to every and all attack. The justifications for such vitriol seem to be that the aesthetic zoe was creating human zoe, that is, nonmusic was making nonpersons out of an audience subject to the debilitating effects of brute sound. The thin veil between aesthetics and society was being torn by modernism and its attendant discourses, and it was being done under the flag of biopolitics. The erosion of art’s autonomy was part of the effect of modernism and its break with the past.

Like Don Juan and Titan before, the reactions to Mahler’s Second Symphony betray a blossoming détente in the War of the Romantics. Not only did the symphony arouse the interest of the growing secession, but the remaining New Germans found themselves in uncomfortable aesthetic company. This uneasiness came from finding themselves on the same side as the liberal formalists, as well as seeing Strauss – whom many still claimed as New German – compared with

Mahler. While both were young tone poets using large orchestras, in 1894 the two composers were quite distant in the minds of the musical public, when Strauss premiered Guntram at the

ADMV festival where Titan was also performed. However, 1895 was a different story. With

Mahler’s Second Symphony he was perceived as a less satirical composer and Strauss more so with the premiere of Till Eulenspiegel, putting the composers on a similar middle ground. As I mentioned earlier, Mahler’s Second Symphony is his most Straussian with its greater delineation between the elegant (one and five) and colorful (two, three, and four) movements. Perhaps even the accusations of insincere bombast echo those of Strauss. Regardless of formal similarity or dissimilarity, in 1895 musical discourse began to group them together.

Both Lessmann and Muntz, New German defenders of Strauss, hoped to shut down the comparisons between the two composers, whose groups of supporters were beginning to intersect.

Lessmann writes in his review of Mahler’s Second Symphony:

The comparison between him and Rich. Strauss is too close, when it should not

221

be drawn like that. With the orchestra and all resources of his art, Strauss certainly proceeds no less boldly and daring as Mahler, but for him the application of expressive means always grows out from an inner necessity of representation of the attaining idea…Strauss is at the same time true and brilliant in his creations, Mahler appears to me by contrast to strive after what he wants – to be interesting at any cost. The former creates music from the inside out.476

Here Lessmann invokes the category of “necessity,” central to musical idealism and especially

New Germans as Wagner used it constantly in his aesthetic writings. Quite simply, from

Lessmann’s perspective, Strauss’s large and colorful orchestra is necessary according to the idea, while Mahler’s is merely a pathetic attempt to be interesting. Though it should be noted that when Lessmann lists Strauss’s idea-faithful works with proper, necessity-driven means, Don Juan fails to make the list.

Although Lessmann does not mention it in his review of Mahler’s Second Symphony, his critique of Mahler very much mirrors the formalist critique of the New German school, especially of Bruckner and Strauss (as much as he is part of the New German School). This is not simply ironic, but a crucial, and at times, confusing development in German musical culture in this period. Suddenly, those who had prided themselves on being aesthetically progressive and modern found themselves in agreement with their opposition and sought to defend themselves against accusations of conservative taste and entrenched fidelity to the past. Lessmann directly addresses this anxiety in his 1897 review of Mahler’s Third Symphony, where he states that he does not wish to pull out the “Beckmesser [read Hanslickian] tablature,” just because the work deviates from classical form. Nonetheless, despite a rigorously self-conscious progressivism, his review eviscerates the symphony in like manner to Hanslick’s reviews of Wagner.477

Muntz likewise wrestled with this disorientation wrought by new music and felt compelled to address it and defend New Germans against comparison with Mahler. In his review of Mahler’s Second Symphony, he writes:

476 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 22, no. 51/52 (20/27 December 1895): 669-670. 477 Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 24, no. 11 (12 March 1897): 164.

222

For an opponent to Mahler and his affiliated clique…it would be very tempting to easily lump together the criticism of the work of Mahler with the rant and revile lexicon of the reviews of a Bruckner, Liszt, Richard Strauss and so on through the members of the clique. It indeed called for the use of buzzwords from the Viennese musical Beckmesser and nitpickers about the “pompous impotence” (beginning pretty much all of them) this time even justifiably. That must however in principle be avoided, because a criticism of the Mahler symphony would fail immeasurably if battled with the weapons of the Viennese clique and its critics. With the scarcest objectivity and restraint the rod must be broken over the composer Mahler and his symphony.478

Like Lessmann, Muntz does not want to become Beckmesser, but Mahler forces him to. Muntz displays a particular interest in the various camps of Viennese musical culture and provides a unique vantage point for their transformation. He observes first the “odd” demographic that makes up the musical secessionists in Vienna – Brucknerites, anti-Brucknerites, friends, and Jews

– but also he suggests that the Hanslickian formalist clique has a distinct musical discourse. He finds it “tempting” to invoke this discourse, which had been used to condemn Bruckner, Liszt, and Strauss, and was really the old critique of Wagner. By “pompous impotence,” Muntz seems to mean the critique that New German music made up for its lack of formal logic – its impotence

– with expressive bombast.479 In the case of Mahler, Muntz actually finds this critique

“justifiable,” but insists that a proper, “objective” critique of Mahler must go further. The fact that it must go further – and completely shatter the aesthetic judge’s rod – seems to be part of

Muntz’s attempt to go beyond imitation of his aesthetic opponents or risk possible justification of their aesthetic attack on the New Germans. Yet, despite saying that new “weapons” are needed, his critique of Mahler, though hyperbolic, differs in almost no palpable manner from the

Hanslickian critique of Wagner. For Muntz, Mahler’s Second Symphony is noisy, nerve rattling, bizarre, and decadent. When he says of Mahler’s work that, “in addition to the smallness of his musical ideas, the size and volume of resources are quite bizarrely and disproportionately deployed,” he sounds like an echo of Hanslick.480 In his review of Don Quixote, Muntz also

478 Max Muntz “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3. 479 Max Muntz “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3. 480 Max Muntz “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3.

223

expresses uneasiness over the claims of similarity between Strauss and Mahler. Here he dubs

Mahler the higher “tide of modern music,” with its rich sound combinations, but defends

Strauss’s “externally complicated music,” because of its superior organization and originality.481

The one, yet quite notable, area in which Muntz’s critique might differ from the formalists is in the blatant anti-Semitism. He begins the review by unnecessarily lambasting the

Jewish “slavish” propensity to support fellow Jews.482 However, his direct anti-Semitic comments actually do not directly pertain to music, but rather people, both the formalist musical cliques and Mahler’s person, manifested in his conducting style. As K. M. Knittel has written, in

Vienna there was a tradition of critiquing Mahler’s animated conducting as nervous, decadent, and distinctly Jewish.483 Muntz writes:

One had to have seen Mahler on the podium and at a rehearsal in order to gain complete insight into the most outrageous arrogance of Jewish Decadence in music, as Mahler himself embodies it. There is no measure for it, no regard, no restraint, in order to arrive at his purpose. He does not conduct, he rants and rages on the podium, he flatters and looks out after every resourceful orchestral trick for its effect.484

While focused on Mahler’s person and conducting, there is a connection to his music and the standard critique of its propensity for tricks, effects, disrespect, lack of regard, and flattery. These sentences, published in 1899 are perhaps the first anti-Semitic diatribes against Mahler in reviews of his work. For all the criticism against Mahler’s music in Berlin between 1894 and 1901, there is no real evidence of anti-Semitism. It was not until the first performance of a Mahler symphony in Vienna – this 1899 performance of his Second Symphony – that anti-Semitism enters the

Mahlerian musical discourse.

Yet, it should also be noted that Muntz’s Anti-Semitism is here aimed at Mahler the conductor, or perhaps even the person, not directly at his music. In fact, as I will argue in chapter

481 Maximilian Muntz, “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (19 December 1898): 1-2. 482 Max Muntz “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3. 483 See K. M. Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Farnham and Burlington, VT.: Ashgate, 2010). 484 Max Muntz “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung (11 April 1899): 1-3.

224

six, directly Anti-Semitic critiques of Mahler’s Symphonies do not begin until the premiere of his

Eighth Symphony in 1910. By this time the musical landscape had changed again dramatically from 1899. For all the scholarship on Anti-Semitism as a context of Mahler’s music and its reception, the issue is largely muted until 1910. Whatever Anti-Semitism circulated in private or between the lines in musical discourse, it was almost wholly absent from the original critiques of

Mahler’s first seven symphonies. The scandal of Mahler’s music was not due to the ethnicity of its composer, but the secessionist innovations of the compositions. Additionally, in terms of the declining War of the Romantics, I want to stress that Muntz’s anti-Semitic critique was first mobilized in a larger project of distancing his own aesthetics from the traditional conservatives and Mahler from the New German School. Anti-Semitism here functions as a strategy for dealing with the twilight of the War of the Romantics and the confusing reorientation of musical culture.

Anti-Semitism is Muntz’s only method for separating himself from the “Jewish liberals” with whom he increasingly shared aesthetic and political interests under the rubric of “new conservatism.” Circa 1900 Muntz dilemma was widespread, but his anti-Semitic solution was not.

Analyzing similar disorientation about the changing musical landscape will be a major theme throughout the rest of this project. A root of this confusion was the initial failure to recognize the existence of a new musical school that largely seceded from the New Germans. The music and circles of Strauss and Mahler operated as a difference of kind, not magnitude, from the

New German tradition. This vertigo experienced by “right” New Germans has been passed on to scholars, who remain unsure how to characterize progressiveness or conservativeness in turn of the century German musical culture, leading to phrases such as “ambivalent modernism”

(Frisch), “reluctant modernist” (Cook), and “a political conservative and artistic progressive”

(Painter).485 Moreover, the slippery slopes between 19th- and 20th-century social structures, and between aesthetics and politics, have led to convoluted and contradictory understandings of the

485 Frisch, 7-35; Cook, 89-139; Painter, Symphonic Aspirations, 61.

225

aesthetic politics of this period. The secession changed the terms of progressiveness in German musical culture, sending former progressives to the right side of the spectrum. And while there was a generational aspect to this change, it was more aesthetic and ideological than simply the side effects of growing old and falling behind the times.

The performances of Mahler’s symphonies in Berlin were not only critical for the development of criticism opposed to new music, but also for the formation of “musical secessionists.” Nearly every review of Mahler in this period took considerable time to address the enthusiasm of his supporters. These references provide a sense of who these supporters were and how they clashed in the concert hall with the large opposition to Mahler’s works. In all his reviews of Mahler, Eichberg spends considerable space describing the concert scene and the different aesthetic camps. While Eichberg always mentions the divided cacophony of booing and furious applause, his descriptions of this split ramp up with each Mahler performance in Berlin.

In the reviewing the world premiere of Mahler’s Second Symphony in December 1895, he writes,

“The stormy applause, which repeatedly called him back to the podium after the completion of the symphony, wants to endorse Herr Mahler as acceptance for the future, not, what he has so far done.”486 Here, Eichberg seems to suggest that Mahler’s supporters liked him for what he symbolized: yet another music of the future. By end of Mahler’s initial run of performances in

Berlin, he had developed a fiercely loyal and combative following. With the March 1897 partial performance of his Third Symphony, reviewers noted the rather calculated tensions between aesthetic camps. J. L. for the BBZ notes that the “fanatics of Mahlerian” “shooshed all opposition,” at least after the first two movements.487 Fours years passed between that concert and the next performance of Mahler’s music in Berlin – the critical Fourth Symphony concert. In that time Mahler’s following had in no way diminished, but was rather quite strengthened and visible,

486 i. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung no. 587 (15 December 1895): 10. 487 J. L., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung (10 March 1897): 3.

226

having even expanded beyond Berlin.488

Between 1898 and 1900, Mahler’s symphonies were “exported” from Berlin to other cities – Prague (#1), Frankfurt (#1), Vienna (#2 and #1), and Munich (#2). These concerts produced similar aesthetic schisms that did not exactly correspond to the War of the Romantics.

A Prague reviewer noted that Mahler had recently become known everywhere and that the audience contained a large contingent of those with an “urge for newness.”489 As noted in chapter two, the Berlin and Vienna reviews of Mahler’s First Symphony emphasized the vocal minority of supporters, evidence of growing support following performances of his Second Symphony the previous years. Significantly, the review of Mahler’s Second Symphony by Helm in Vienna describes the animosity of opinions among the audience as north versus south and Mahler’s performance as “made by an intrusive party.”490 Here Mahler is a representative of Germany and

German – perhaps even New German – music in Vienna. However, the correspondent does not want to dismiss Mahler’s work too soon, given the praise he had been given by respectable

German authorities such as Arthur Seidl, Felix Weingartner, and Hermann Kretschmar.

The following year, on October 23, 1900, Mahler’s Second Symphony would receive a crucial performance, often described as his first major success. It was successful because the cards were stacked. The performance was sponsored by the Society in Munich, which had formed to promote Wolf’s music. However, around the time of the Mahler concert, the society changed its name to the “Munich Society for Modern Music” (hereafter MGMT).

Perceiving their promotion of Wolf to be successfully completed, in that his music was part of regular repertoire, they had broadened the scope of this interest group to “modern music.” Given their programing – Berlioz, Strauss, Bruckner, Wolf – it seems that “modern music” meant New

488 On Mahler’s following in Berlin by 1901 see i., “Kunst und Wissenschaft.” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung no. 590 (17 December, 1901, evening): 5. 489 Dr. v. B., “Theater,” Prager Tageblatt no. 63 (4 March 1898): 7. 490 Theodor Helm, “Musikbriefe: Wien,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 30, no. 20 (11 May 1899): 287-288.

227

German works less codified than Wagner and Liszt.491 The governing board of the MGMT consisted of a range of Munich cultural figures, including Arthur Seidl, a poet/critic (Wilhelm

Wiegand), the court conductor (Bernhard Stavenhagen), a minor Straussian composer (Hermann

Bischoff), and Ludwig Schiedermair, a young music critic at the beginning of a long successful career.492 Bischoff, Schiedermair, and especially Seidl were all key figures in the emerging musical secession. Certainly, the entire Munich public was not of the same “extreme left” ilk as the MGMT, but it was the first time that the organizers of a Mahler concert were also supporters of his music. So it should not be surprising that the concert was a rousing success. This concert must have been something of a rallying cry for Mahler supporters, because the following year

Weingartner performed Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in four different cities and critics were extremely cognizant of Mahler as representing a new musical faction.

The MGMT is significant less for its longevity and important music premieres than for what it symbolized and the cultural dynamic manifested in it. It was the first secession-like musical interest group. While continuing the Schumann and Brendel tradition of advocating for new music, it also signals a fissure within Brendel’s ADMV. In 1898 Strauss himself left – seceded from – the ADMV and contemplated starting his own musical pressure group, perhaps a less localized version of the MGMT.493 Schoenberg’s “Society for Creative Composers” (hereafter

VST), which he founded in 1903 very much mirrored the aspirations and aesthetics of the MGMT.

Musically, Strauss and Mahler, as well as other less controversial composers, were noted favorites of the moderns. The leaders of the MGMT were all noted Straussians, while Seidl and especially

491 See A. H., “Gustav Mahler’s C-moll Symphonie,” Neue Musik Zeitung 21, no. 23, supplement (1900): 285; Karl Pottgeisser, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 44 (2 November 1900): 658. 492 There is also Herr Mayr, but I’m not sure who that is. Bernhard Stavenhagen was a formal pupil of Liszt’s and from 1898-1907 the court opera director in Munich. Bischoff was a composer often mentioned at the time as a prominent young, radical composer, on a wrung of notability just below Strauss and Mahler. His works were performed at later ADMV festivals and VST concerts. Schiedermair was a young music critic who went on to be a famous musicologist during the Nazi period. 493 As a result of not being elected President and excluded from the steering committee.

228

Schiedermair were also some of the first critics outside of Nodnagel to really praise Mahler.494

Despite all the breakaway rhetoric, a “secessionist” aesthetic distinct from the New Germans is difficult to pin down, given the Wagnerian roots of the most vocal members. It seems that highly pictorial music was praised, rather than obvious formal integrity, though there seems to be less emphasis on narrative specificity, nationalist themes and idioms, and the expression of the “idea” amongst this group versus the “right” wing of the New Germans. As mentioned previously in the context of Strauss’s Zarathustra, the secession was distinguished more by its politics and worldview than a specific musical aesthetic.

Out of the competing vectors in 1890s progressive German music, discipline and flesh, reterritorialization and deterritorialization, emerged a new musical movement: the secessionists.

The disciplining of Strauss and Mahler failed to rehabilitate their music as romantic idealism. If anything the examining spotlight and Beckmesser-esque rod of critique only illuminated their unmusicality and ultimately immusicality, that is, an agnosticism with regard to the concept of the

“musical.” In a perspectival shift from negative zoe to postive flesh, the discourses of Strauss and

Mahler as writing nonmusic can be read against the grain. Rather than the end of music, their compositions signaled a new kind of art music that operated outside the bounds of aesthetic law.

This anarchic music – exteriorized, worldly, fleshy – was the sound of a musical secession. In the first years of the 20th Century, the secessionist movement would coalesce as a briefly extant musical territory. However, lacking dogmatic leadership, philosophy, or aesthetic, it remained open and amorphous like fleshy music it supported.

494 However, it should be noted that not all supporters of Mahler were necessarily of this broad sucessionist group. Mahler’s Viennese assistant Bruno Walter, as well as the already mentioned Nodnagel, were exponents of Mahler as the absolute music composer and the symphony of the future.

229

CHAPTER FOUR The Nietzschean Biopolitics of the Musical Secession

On December 16, 1901 Mahler conducted his Fourth Symphony along with the finale of

Strauss’s opera Feuersnot in Berlin. To the musical public this concert served as an unprecedented coming out party for the contingent of musical modernists. Not only did critics compulsively remark on the modernity of these compositions, but also on the following they generated. Leading Berlin critic Leopold Schmidt observed that “at the concert were gathered the community of radical progressives,” while E. E. Taubert noted that “it comes as no surprise that the composer this evening reaped abundant applause from the cohesive, growing swarm of followers of the musical secession.”495 What did surprise critics was the size of the “community” supporting the “musical secession.” Oskar Eichberg concludes that “the evening gave evidence that the followers of the musically ‘modern,’ whose interests indeed these concerts should primarily serve, must be quite numerously represented in the Berlin public.” Later on in his review, Eichberg includes Mahler among these moderns, describing him “as a composer belonging to date to the extreme left wing, to the ultras of the New Germans.”496 The labels

“radical progressives,” “moderns”, “left Wagnerians,” and “musical secessionist,” indicate attempts to characterize a newly visible movement in musical culture identified with Mahler and

Strauss. I prefer to use the term “musical secession” because it offers the most historical and conceptual specificity, given the better-known secessionist movements outside of music as well as the historical vagaries and protracted definitions of musical modernism from Wagner to

Schoenberg.

With the advent of the 20th Century, German musical culture recognized a new musical faction in its midst. This modernist movement – a convergence of composers, their music, and their fans – began their “secession” from the New Germans in the mid-1890s, but only with the

495 Leopold Schmidt, "Aus den Konzertfälen," no. 640 (17 December 1901): 1; E. E. T., "Feuilleton," Die Post, no. 590, evening edition (17 December 1901): 2. 496 i. "Kunst und Wissenschaft," Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (17 December 1901): 5-6.

230

premieres of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and Strauss’s opera Feuersnot did the aesthetic and political severity of this schism become evident to the musical public. Between 1895 and 1902, performances of music by Strauss and Mahler raised public awareness of a musical secession, not only in Berlin, but notably in Munich, Vienna, and Dresden. The secession’s breaking off from the New Germans and other concert institutions marked the formal end to the War of the

Romantics and the development of new battle lines. Rather than absolute vs. program music, the meaningful opposition in musical culture transitioned to what I am calling new conservatism vs. the musical secession. Just as each camp in the War of the Romantics was philosophically and politically charged, so also distinct political ideals were embedded in this new aesthetic conflict.

However, the politics of this new war of the moderns divided neither along the liberal/nationalist lines of the War of the Romantics, nor along simple progressive/conservative distinctions seemingly imputed by their aesthetics.497 Each side consisted of tense coalitions, but can be differentiated by their biopolitics. If the new conservatives (liberals included) operated within a biological (if not always racist) nationalism, the secession affirmed a pre-political, dionysian democracy. The multitudinal explosion of biological energies, sometimes even dangerously communal, were projected by the secession’s images and approximated in sound structures. In contrast to aesthetic and political systems that relegate elemental or biological properties to a lessor and subservient function, such affirmative biopower creates non-hierarchical structures through a union of flesh according to common bodily needs.

From within and from without the German musical secession was heralded above all as a form of musical Nietzscheanism. At the most superficial level the intersection of the musical secession and the popularization of Nietzsche’s thought can be seen in the numerous programmatic references to Nietzsche and lyrical settings of his writings. Strauss’s Zarathustra

497 As discussed in the introduction, nearly all scholarship on turn of the century musical culture insists on imputing the liberal/national (qua progressive/conservative) divide onto this formative vintage of modernism.

231

and Mahler’s Third Symphony are only the most famous of a whole string of Nietzsche compositions, mostly by other secessionists. These overtly Nietzschean works will be discussed in the following chapter on the spread of the musical secession. Beyond the direct invocation of

Nietzsche in compositions, the Nietzsche connection was fostered by the discourse about the musical secession generated by critics. Not only did they consistently refer to the movement’s enthusiasm for Nietzsche, but also characterized the music itself, particularly its high octane expressivity, as Dionysian and Nietzschean. Even when not making direct reference to Nietzsche, secessionist compositions like Strauss’s Feuersnot communicated Nietzschean messages through both musical and extra-musical content. These compositions not only voiced the aesthetics and politics of the musical secession, but illuminate the biopolitical vectors within Nietzsche’s paradigm, including the collective power of biological life viz. the subtractive power of law.

As the first major premieres of this secessionist era, Strauss’s new opera Feuersnot and

Mahler’s Fourth symphony best articulate this new aesthetic movement and its broader cultural significance. These two compositions premiered in 1901 within four days of each other and were each promoted by the composer of the other. Feuersnot is Strauss’s modernist manifesto, a didactic allegory of modernity, musical modernism, and their relationship. The opera enacts an historical allegory of the eclipse of sovereign power by new life-producing technologies and interests, best described as biopolitical. In dramatic form Feuersnot articulates the way biopower and specifically musical modernism disrupt the “immunizing” properties of sovereign law, a concept explained further on. Similarly, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony affirms the power of anarchic life forms to reverse the exclusionary effects of social immunization, particularly through its parallels with the novel in its carnivalesque and grotesque forms. In their lyrical component both compositions feature a dionysian festival of children that reinforces the music’s jubilation and enactment of emancipated and shared flesh. As key works of the musical secession, Strauss’s Feuersnot and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony echo the message of becoming- child in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

232

This chapter begins with extended analysis of the plot and music of Strauss’s Feuersnot before moving onto Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. In the case of Feuersnot, my analysis decodes the strata of thinly-veiled allegory and places those layers in the context of the emerging musical secession. With Mahler’s Fourth Symphony I reassess the frequent linkages of Mahler’s music with the novel by comparing it to Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetic theories. In contrast to Adorno’s and Botstein’s reading of Mahler as the deconstructive novelist, I demonstrate the joy and affirmation in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

Feuersnot: Strauss’s Modernist Manifesto

Feuersnot was Strauss’s aesthetic manifesto, a solipsistic work of art about one’s artwork, much as Meistersinger was for Wagner. As with Meistersinger, Feuersnot manages to integrate politics, social life, and philosophy into this total manifesto. It is Strauss’s rather didactic statement about the onset of modernity, aesthetic modernism, and the conflicts with tradition generated by both. As a self-proclaimed “singpoem” rather than an opera, music drama or even operetta, Feuersnot reinforced the generic ambiguity common to many secessionist compositions.

Thematically, Feuersnot offers an operatic take on the Philistine conflict of Till Eulenspiegel, which Strauss had once thought to turn into an opera.498 As a manifesto, Feuersnot illuminates the whole series of Nietzschean compositions from 1895-1901, but also points the way forward for Strauss’s compositional trajectory as a champion of opera and Eros. Unlike Guntram, Strauss engaged another artist to write the libretto, Ernst von Wolzogen, whose satirical style ensured that the story burst with wit and social commentary. As confirmed Nietzscheans invested in the artistic avant garde, both composer and librettist formed Feuersnot into banner for modernism, replete with a detailed allegory of the secession. In fact, Helm called the collaboration of Strauss and Wolzogen an “alliance of bold secessionists.”499

498 That this should be seen as completion of Till Eulenspiegel is clear in that people often make reference to the Eulenspiegel themes. And in fact the Vorwärts critic says that without knowing Till Eulenspiegel, Feuersnot is unclear. See s. z., “Feuersnot.” Vorwärts no. 254 (30 October, 1902): 846-47. 499 h-m., “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 521 (24 November, 1901): 1.

233

The one act opera begins with children collecting wood for a mid-summer’s eve bonfire in pre-modern Munich. Seeing a dark, strange-looking house, the children inquire to the townspeople – Leitgeb, Bäck, Bräuer, Fragner, Schäffler, Schmied – who explain that a reclusive sorcerer lives there by the name of Kunrad. The children come to Kunrad’s door and after convincing the cranky recluse of the gaiety of the festival, he offers his whole house as firewood, which he and the children gladly destroy. At the fire, after giving a speech about his new found worldview, he suddenly kisses Diemut, the mayor’s daughter, and elicits the outrage of the entire town. Diemut and her friends hatch a scheme to revenge Kunrad’s indecency. She arranges a midnight rendezvous with Kunrad and lowers a basket from her balcony to hoist him to her room.

However, she leaves him hanging half way until morning, when he becomes the laughing stock of the town. Kunrad uses his magic to put out the fire, the town’s source of light and heat, which sends Munich into an uproar. Kunrad then delivers his central monologue, condemning the town for its backwardness and inhospitable reception of him and his former master – Reichardt. In exchange for relighting the fire, Kunrad requires Diemut’s sexual favors, declaring that all warmth and light stems from the body of a virgin. The town agrees to this exchange and at the height of the orchestra’s climax the fire reignites. Against the background of the lover’s duet, the town continues its celebration.

Musically, Feuersnot accentuates the tendencies of Strauss’s previous four tone poems. It demonstrates an extreme musical eclecticism and intertextuality. Traditional Munich is musically characterized by traditional beer hall folk idioms, the celebration by dance and waltz numbers, and a love scene by New German orchestral bombast. Strauss not only cites Wagner’s Valhalla theme, but also themes from his own Guntram, a comic and polemic play with musical language.

Völkish cultural critic Willy Pastor describes the variety in Wolzogen and Strauss:

This dramatic account, injects a maximum of action into the plot, claims no strategy for the rules of the game, welcomes the public of the Ueberbrettl and one act plays, and is consistant with the musical aptitude of very many post- Wagnerians...This time [Strauss] strove first of all for the juxtaposition of the most contrasting images possible. Folk songs were assimulated into

234

composition, even popular songs. Waltz melodies are played and sheep form against the background.500

Yet, each style shares a dense polyphony. According to the Septuagenarian Hanslick, still writing critiques as wity and bighting as ever, Feuersnot’s orchestration overflowed with detail like

“thousands of stars,” blended into “the monotony of one sour Milky Way.”501

As with Strauss’s tone poems, critics characterized the music of Feuersnot as a danger to audiences and music itself. The critics of liberal dailies like the BBZ, FZ, and HC camped on the excessive sensuality and color as “intoxicating” and “monstrous.”502 Hanslick predictably calls the music “nerve tormenting” and J. S. in Hamburg says that Strauss’s “venom” has no concern for his audience, which does not possess an “organ” capable of comprehending such a

“‘sucessionist‘ tone language.”503 Even the reviewer for the conservative KZ described the harmonies and modulations of Feuersnot as violent, and that with such violence, the music ceased to be music.504 As demonstrated in the previous chapters, these are hardly innovative assessments of secessionist music. Hanslick cleverly declared the work “Melodiesnoth”– derth of melody – and accused Strauss as having chained melody.505 For Hanslick, “Now and then a friendly

Melodienköpfchen appears, but it is cut off after two or three modern bars and pitilessly drowned in the flood of modulations and orchestral combinations.”506 According to this liberal aesthetic,

Strauss oppresses his music and does not allow it to attain the melodic integrity necessary for respected musical existence. While Helm was much more supportive of Feuersnot, he similarly noted at a broader level Strauss’s tendency to cut short moments of musical beauty, which he

500 Willy Pastor, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 254 (29 October, 1902, entertainment supplement): 1016. 501 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 2. 502 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 2; i., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung no. 507 (29 October, 1902, second supplement): 1; G. “Kleines Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung no. 336 (4 December, 1901): 3; J. S., “Feuilleton,” Hamburger Correspondant no. 549 (23 November, 1901): 1. 503 J. S., “Feuilleton,” Hamburger Correspondant no. 549 (23 November, 1901): 1. 504 o. k., “Feuersnot,” Neue Preussische Zeitung no. 549 (23 November, 1901, supplement): 1. 505 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 2. 506 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 2.

235

attributes to contradictory impulses in Strauss.507 These descriptions of Strauss’s orchestral language – unmusical, violent, fractured, inauthentic, colorful – were not new, but took on new meaning in dialogue with the allegories of the self-reflexive libretto. In declaring himself an apostle of vitalism and urbanity through the text, Strauss‘s musical poupouri became a definitive mediation of those things.

Feuersnot was first performed in Dresden on November 21, 1901, followed by Vienna and Berlin in 1902. In Berlin and especially Dresden, the audiences cheered enthusiastically through around a dozen curtain calls. The critical reception was far less positive, but thoroughly mixed. Some considered it pure satirical comedy, others serious drama, though most landed somewhere in between. Generally speaking, critics found such a polemical and allegorical story lacking in compelling drama and depth of character.508 With some notable exceptions – including

Hanslick – reviewers did not find the story overly obscene. Aside from enjoying the clever word play of Wolzogen’s libretto, most critics considered the orchestra overbearing and patently

Strauss, though nothing new for him. In Feuersnot the operatic scaffolding seemed like a new context for tone painting, making the narrative and lyrical melodies secondary and operatically unconvincing. Strauss remained to the public a tone poet, but “no playwright.”509 Some reviewers were split, such as left Wagnerian Paul Riesenfeld, who was an ardent supporter of the symbolism of message, but found the “musical mosaic work” to fall short of supporting its subject.510 On the other side Erich Urban writing for the newly formed (and new conservative)

507 Helm, “Hofoperntheater,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 54 (31 January, 1902): 4. 508 J. S., “Feuilleton,” Hamburger Correspondant no. 549 (23 November, 1901): 1-2; s. z., “Feuersnot.” Vorwärts no. 254 (30 October, 1902): 846-47; Lg. “Das Singgedicht ‘Feuersnot’ von Richard Strauss am Dresdner Hoftheater.” National Zeitung no. 634 (24 November, 1901, morning): 1-3; Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1-2. 509 Lg. “Kunst, Wissenschaft und Literatur.” National Zeitung no. 623 (29 October, 1902): 2: “Wohl muss man daran festhalten, dass Strauss kein Dramatiker ist. Er is der Pfadfinder auf dem Gebiete der modernen sinfonischen Musik, und ein Tonsetzter, dessen schaffender Geist nach Zielen strebt, die weitab von dem sinnlich Fassbaren liegen, wird naturgemäss jede szenische Schranke als unübersteigbares Hinderniss empfinden müssen. 510 Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 839: Aber diese musikalische Mosaikarbeit, diese ohrenflüchigen Skizzenkunst beeinträchtigt eben manchmal die Gesammtwirkung der grossplanigen Vollbilder; sie setzen sich zum Theil aus akustischen

236

Die Musik liked the beauty of the music, but not the vulgarity of the message. Despite such variety in the reception, there is one major theme dividing critics. The most positive reviews were published in the Pan-German and socialist papers, which best represented mass, postliberal politics. This trend remains consistent for both German and Viennese newspapers. The liberal and old-conservative papers and journals did not like either the message or music of Feuersnot, an appropriate response given the opera’s modernizing manifesto.

That Feuersnot is in some way allegorical or symbolic was obvious to all critics, though not all pursued interpretation with equal depth. The specific music-historical allegory was obvious to all, yet its broader philosophical allegories did not go unnoticed. The music-historical allegory involves decoding the barely veiled figures of Reichardt, Kunrad, and medieval Munich:

Wagner, Strauss, and modern Munich. Through musical citations and clever textual inclusions of the German words “Wagner,” “Strauss,” and “Wohl zogen” – not as surnames – the opera does not mask its allegory. Above all Strauss identifies himself with the character Kunrad, whose prank on medieval Munich and condemnation of its closed-mindedness was taken as staged satirical revenge for Munich’s rejection of the music of Wagner and Strauss. Many critics specifically mentioned Wagner being driven out of Munich in 1865, though often noted that it was less for aesthetic reasons, than for the political problems wrought by Wagner’s influence on

King Ludwig II. Schmidt was only stating the obvious when he said that below the mask of

Kunrad lay the leader of the musical secession, implying Strauss, but also giving him a revolutionary air.511 Clearly through the narrative and musical references Strauss mocks his home town of Munich as Otto Schmid for the DJ plainly states: “Strauss scolds Munich through the mouth of Kunrad.”512 While the folk idioms and vernacular lyrics came across as a less than

Geistes-blitzlichtaufnahmen zusammen, die zwar des musikalischen Momentphotographen Virtuosität bekunden, aber unsere ästhetischen Bedürfnisse nicht immer zu befriedigen vermögen. 511 Paul Riesenfeld cites Schmidt in , “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 819. 512 O. S. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Dresdner Journal no. 272 (22 November, 1901): 2207.

237

vindictive chiding of Munich’s backwardness, it was less clear how Kunrad’s rejection by Munich represented Strauss’s own life. While Wagner’s rejection by Munich was well known, critics were somewhat confused by Strauss’s own feelings of being slighted by the city. While the

Munich reception of Guntram was not warm, I think it makes more allegorical sense to read

Kunrad’s relationship with Munich as Strauss’s with the ADMV. Like Munich, the organization rejected his Guntram and bid for presidency in 1898. Strauss’s self-imposed exile from the

ADMV and then take over in 1901 (discussed in chapter five), approximates Kunrad’s relationship with fairy tale Munich in Feuersnot.

Before dissecting these specific musical-historical allegories in Feuersnot I want to point out its more conceptual allegories in this highly metaphorical work. Reichardt, Kunrad, and medieval Munich do not only stand in for Wagner, Strauss, and modern Munich, but also clashes between modernity and tradition, between the avant garde and philistines. Additionally, other elements of the opera are highly symbolic, through are not laden with such musical-historical specificity. These include the Kunrad’s house (Hexenhaus), the love interest Diemut, the fire

(Subendfeuer), and the mayor (Bürgermeister). It is these symbols and the broader reading of

Reichardt, Kunrad, and Munich that expand Feuersnot from aesthetic to socio-political manifesto.

In fact it is precisely in the relationship between property, fire, and political authority that

Feuersnot tells an allegorical tale about the biopolitical dynamics of the modern world, as will be explored further on.

The dominant theme critics identified in Feuersnot was the onset of modernity. Kunrad’s conflict and victory represented the difficult ascension of a new worldview within a provincial community. The character of Kunrad is overloaded with markers of the modern: musical style, lyrical expressions, narrative trajectory, description by Munich’s citizens, and the description by critics. In fact, S. Z. in Vorwärts argues that Kunrad is rather a tool for speaking, than an

238

interesting character.513 One of the first distinguishable characteristics of Kunrad – and noted by most reviewers – is that he “speaks” in High German, whereas the rest of the characters speak in a thick Bavarian dialect. Similarly his leitmotifs and vocal lines approximate the lyricism of

German art music, specifically Wagnerian music drama. The rest of the cast sings with light- heartedness against a backdrop of folk idioms. In addition to these markers of the old and the new, Kunrad’s philosophical monologues articulate his exuberant worldview in a self-reflective style that differs palpably from the guarded and suspicious demeanor of the townspeople. Around the Subendfeuer Kunrad delivers a speech foreswearing his past and declaring his emancipated passion for life, light, and the senses. In word and deed Kunrad, in the eyes of critics, stood for both the modern individual and artist.

Paul Riesenfeld best sums of the how contemporaries defined the modern individual – a definition quite specific to the fin de siècle. He says that Kunrad, “is the free spirit, the man of instinctive impulses, the conqueror of petty morals, the great apostle of free personality. We say confidently that Kunrad is in fact the modern element among the dusty small-town life. Ever he treads, the ‘intensely alone’ in sharp contrast to the ‘small all-to-many.’”514 Riesenfeld goes onto say that this loneliness is the “favorite theme of the moderns.” Here the modern individual is coded with a certain disinterest for social pressures and moral restraints, rather motivated by gut reactions and creating a distinct persona. Not only is this modern person seemingly urban, but also under the sway of Nietzsche, as the references to the “free spirit” and “all-too-many” indicate. Reviewers frequently noted the Nietzschean themes of Feuersnot, and Scheu even calls

Kunrad’s transformation as that of becoming the Uebermensch.515 Like Riesenfeld, Willy Pastor, writing for the TR, praises such emancipation, though takes a more protracted definition of modernity. In a very Lutheran historical narrative, he begins his review with a long description of

513 s. z., “Feuersnot.” Vorwärts no. 254 (30 October, 1902): 846. 514 Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 819. 515 J. S., “Feuilleton. Feuersnot,” Arbeiter Zeitung no. 29 (30 January, 1902): 1.

239

the Reformation as a free-spirited reaction against the backward Middle Ages. Pastor, consequently, reads Feuersnot as a satire on the premodern mindset in the broadest historical sense.516

By contrast, the liberal critics were far more condemnatory of Kunrad as modern individual. Hanslick first describes Kunrad as a “lonely Junker, living there criticized and misunderstood.”517 He then goes onto say, “Finally, Kunrad remembers that next to many others he also has to embody the modern obsessed Renaissance man, the unbounded individualists.”518

To Hanslick’s definition of the modern individual, Eichberg adds that Kunrad is in search of

“modern sensation,” a notion which fits squarely with the definitions of modernity examined by contemporaneous cultural critics, specifically , Karl Lamprecht, and Max Weber, whom I will discuss in the following chapter. While liberals like Hanslick and Eichberg were certainly interested in the cultivation of individuality, what distinguishes the “pathological,”

“modern” individual is the “unbounded” relationship with desire and sensation. According to the stereotype then dominant, the modern individual wore their heart on their sleeve, or more precisely, biological aspects of the self which should be confined to the private sphere – sexuality, desire, bodily experience – remained exposed and open to the public. By contrast the liberal individual was perceived as erecting the barriers of rationality and socialization as protection against the world and untrustworthy corners of the self.

The narrative passage of Kunrad from outsider to insider provides an allegory of the passage to modernity, which was not lost on critics. Kunrad, as symbol of modernity, is initially portrayed as threatening from the perspective of parochial Munich. The citizens muster every prejudice against Kunrad as a foreign stranger. He is dangerous, mysterious, inferior, and of disputed origins. As Riesenfeld notes, Kunrad is the subject of rumors and “old wives tales”

516 Willy Pastor, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 254 (29 October, 1902, entertainment supplement): 1015-16. 517 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1. 518 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1.

240

which are used to scare children. They are further offended by his fashion, his destruction of his own home, and, of course, his impetuous kiss of Diemut. However, after Kunrad holds their fire for ransom, the citizens themselves undergo a rapid change of custom and begin, literally, to sing the song of Kunrad. They denounce Diemut’s prudery and in a town-wide chorus repeat

Kunrad’s mantra: “All warmth springs from woman, all light from comes from love.” This spread of Kunrad’s ideas is also accompanied by a spread of his musical idioms. The final choruses possesses a Wagnerian flare absent from the earlier comedic, folk sing-a-longs. They have discarded their folk songs and become modern operatic Germans. Just as Kunrad speaks High

German, he speaks with Wagnerian leitmotifs. Leopold Schmidt notes that throughout the opera, the “harmlessly cheerful” and even “capricious” folk motifs gradually give way to “lyrical loftiness” and “hot blooded melody.”519 Strauss’s revenge on Munich is most comic and disciplinary in making its citizens recite the melodies and eternal feminine philosophy of the

Wagner they drove away.

Finally, in terms of Kunrad as allegory of modernity, I want to suggest that his magical powers – and that of his master – represent a kind of technological power and innovation. He possesses a new and unusual ability, which he uses to first take away their means of production and then reconstitute it in a new manner. While, rhetorically, virginal bodies may be the source of the fire, ultimately Kunrad’s sorcery provides the real spark, or at least, the technology to translate love into production. If the fire represents the “Lebenselement,”520 then Kunrad’s fire- producing magic symbolizes a new power to produce and manage life in its most immediate and distilled form. Modernity recognizes and amplifies the idea that biological life does not remain outside or prior to the built environment, that is, technology – abstract and machinic. Life is not bare life, but within a specific technology of life – or means of living – connected to other

519 L. S., “Königliches Opernhaus,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 595 (23 November, 1901): 2. 520 Wilhelm Tappert, “Feuersnot.” Das Kleine Journal (29 October, 1902):13.

241

technologies.521 Moreover, the power to mold life (Kunrad’s fire) becomes the basis for a new society order, replacing a social order in which the question of the maintenance of life is not asked or politicized.

As a socio-political allegory, Kunrad’s magic represents, not only a new basis for political power, but industrialization or power in an industrial age. As a musical history, the sorcery of Kunrad and his master represent a heightened affective power of the late 19th century orchestra. Wagner and Strauss possess a new technology with the ability to impact the physiology of their audiences.

In Feuersnot Strauss identifies himself with the modern world. I have already mentioned that Kunrad stands in historically for Strauss and conceptually for modernity, but now it is time to complete the triangle: Kunrad-Strauss-modernity. It is this solipsitic connection that makes

Feuersnot into a manifesto and which became such a focal point in the critical reception of

Feuersnot. Unlike Wagner, who while composing the “music of the future” had a negative stance toward modernity broadly, Strauss fully embraces the modern and considers his music in step with the times. With both the music and libretto of Feuersnot, Strauss and Wolzogen were considered by critics to be apostles of the modern and were associated with all things “modern,” including worldview, aesthetics, and metropolitan life. Musical qualities of the modern which I already have expounded on include generic ambiguity, excessive timbre, and bizarre amalgamations, as well as textual qualities specific to Feuersnot, such as cabaret, obscenity, theatrical naturalism, artistic secessionism, polemics, in-authenticity, and all things Nietzschean.

What was most distinct about the characterization of Feuersnot viz. Strauss’s previous works, was the copious allusions to other avant garde, “modern” artistic movements. This makes sense given Feuersnot’s function as a manifesto, the explicit polemics of its message, and

Strauss’s collaboration with Wolzogen, the leader of Berlin cabaret. However, Feuersnot, along

521 On technologies of life see Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 65.

242

with Mahler’s contemporaneous Fourth Symphony, mark a watershed in German musical culture’s transformation. In addition to the comparisons with secession movements in the visual arts, critics linked Feuersnot with the closely related cabaret movement and theatrical naturalism.

Given the notoriety of the Viennese secession, formed in 1897 under the presidency of Gustav

Klimt with its own building and journal, it is not surprising that the Viennese critics more frequently made parallels to a musical secession. However, the secessionist label was not confined to Vienna, but usefully deployed by those looking to categorize new music and deride its perceived passion for everything new. J. S., who calls Strauss’s tone language secessionist, goes on to write that:

[Strauss’s] conviction has not been shaken – that new chosen path is for him correct – and he is appointed to carry out a kind of revision of music after Richard Wagner and to show us a whole new perspective. I do not want to examine here today how far he overestimates his mission, but Richard Strauss does not forget and indecently he thought to retaliate with accumulated interest especially against those in Munich who did him wrong. Whether this is actually the job of a true artist and the ultimate purpose of art, is another question. 522

Although J. S. – in a rhetorical strategy – fails to elaborate on the importance of Strauss’s

“mission” and Feuersnot’s fidelity to art, the critic is clearly skeptical. He does however go on to say that Strauss’s secessionist strive for newness does not constitute enough of a basis for a new school, which he interestingly does not think Strauss will form. Strauss’s presidency of the

ADMV and numerous “Straussian” composers that he nourished suggests otherwise, though

Strauss’s “school” was never as cohesive as Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School.

In the first years of the musical secession it was often compared with new styles of intellectual cabaret. While the secessionist label would stick for almost a decade, the obsession with Strauss and Mahler as cabaret-esque was short lived, concentrated during the era of

Feuersnot and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, 1901-02. The reasons for this timing and connection

(at least with Strauss) are quite obvious. Feuersnot librettist Wolzogen founded Berlin’s first

522 J. S., “Feuilleton,” Hamburger Correspondant no. 549 (23 November, 1901): 1.

243

cabaret in 1901, which was first named Ueberbrettl and later “Colorful Theater,” both names also used to characterize Feuersnot. As the word play “Ueberbrettl” suggests, Wolzogen’s cabaret attempted to bring together the vulgar variety show – brettl, referring to vaudeville – with high

(Ueber) philosophical aspirations related to Nietzschean vitalism. Ueberbrettl became a stylistic designation for early cabaret, referring to a popular, low culture variety show that mixed together humor, sexuality, social critique, personal vendetta, and other Derbheiten formally excluded from high art. In a way one could read Ueberbrettl as a secession from both high theater and purely entertaining vaudeville. Whatever other associations attached to Ueberbrettl it was considered highly urban and modern. As Peter Jelavich notes in his book on German cabaret, neither

Wolzogen’s conceptual aspirations, nor his actual theaters lasted long, the Colorful Theater closing in 1903.523 Nonetheless, Ueberbrettl was significant in laying the foundation for a distinct German cabaret and, relevant to this project, provided a temporary lens of intelligibility for new music. Almost every reviewer noted that Wolzogen was the Ueberbrettl man and/or that

Feuersnot was in some way stylistically Ueberbrettl. This was most obvious in the libretto, with its clever word play, inside jokes, satire, polemics, local color, and sexual innuendo, but critics also referred to Strauss’s music as Ueberbrettl. Willy Pastor hears the musical Ueberbrettl in

Strauss’s contrasting moods and styles.524 While the Berlin reviewers were more likely to make

Ueberbrettl allusions, even Hanslick calls the combination of “artsy word jingling and gibbering of Tristan bombast” the “forced humor of the ‘Colorful Theater.’”525 The humor of both cabaret and Feuersnot were considered especially modern, that is, distinct from healthy musical humor, such as is found in Haydn.526

523 Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See specifically chapter 2: “Between Elitism and Entertainment: Wolzogen’s Motley Theater.” 524 Willy Pastor, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 254 (29 October, 1902, entertainment supplement): 1016. Riesenfeld also calls the music “Milieu-Kunst.” Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 839. 525 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1. 526 s. z., “Feuersnot.” Vorwärts no. 254 (30 October, 1902): 846-47.

244

Despite the burlesque comedy of Strauss’s music in Feuersnot and elsewhere, at times his music also approaches the grand and bombastic style of Wagner. Indeed not only is the musical finale of Feuersnot patently Wagnerian, but the message seems to defend Wagner. This tension between cabaret and music drama – really between Nietzsche and Wagner – animates much of

Strauss’s early works and the confusion they provoked among audiences. This ambiguity led to both the search for the “real Strauss” and divided Wagnerians between left and right, between those who could embrace both Strauss’s humor and Wagnerism and those who could not.

Riesenfeld concluded that Strauss had a divided artistic soul, split between Wagner and satirical humor.527 On the other hand the Pan-Germans Pastor and Helm asserted that the Kunrad motifs and the culminating love scene were genuinely Strauss, while the folk scenes were decidedly not, rather imitative of Humperdinck or Smetana.528 Despite noted Nietzschean and naturalist diversions, many still claimed Feuersnot for the cause of Wagner, especially given the opera’s allegorical claim to be the heir of Wagner.529 At stake in this ambiguity and the allegorical claims of Feuersnot were legacies of both Wagner and Strauss circa 1900. I want to propose that a close reading of Feuersnot reveals the specific modernist vectors of Strauss’s claims to Wagnerian appropriation and continuity, rather than pure break. Assessing this difference will help clarify the social and aesthetic modernism of Strauss vs. the idealist romanticism of Wagner.

So far in my analysis of the allegorical significance of Feuersnot I have emphasized the opera as Strauss’s modernist manifesto, aligning himself with modern life and the secession, in part a secession from Wagner. However, the assertion of Wagnerism within the libretto of

527 Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 838:“Two souls shine in Richard Strauss's chest: a philosophical polemical and elegiac lyricism…The music is full of humorous and satirical, partly, sometimes almost ingenious, but also grippingly dramatic characteristics, partly capricious rich, baroque, but always realistic observation of sharp, sometimes, however, the echo-blooded lyricism and outbursts of eroticism.” 528 Helm, “Hofoperntheater,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 54 (31 January, 1902): 3-4; Willy Pastor, “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 254 (29 October, 1902, entertainment supplement): 1015-16. 529 In addition to some Pan Germans, so did the liberals like Schmid and Hanslick. Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1-2; O. S. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Dresdner Journal no. 272 (22 November, 1901): 2207.

245

Feuersnot complicates the question, given the less than enthusiastic posture of Wagner and especially early 20th-century Wagnerians toward urban modernity. The relationship of Strauss to

Wagner generally and in the context of Feuersnot illuminates just what aspects of Wagner the left

Wagnerians inherited. In claiming to be Wagner’s heir Strauss creates a connection, but also generational distance. While Strauss comes to Wagner’s defense in satirizing the philistinism of

Ludwig II’s Munich, even Wagner is not safe from Strauss’s polemical caricatures. Though some critics were content to label Feuersnot Wagnerian, the ambiguities and subtleties of the work gave pause to others.530 I will explore this question of Strauss’s and the secession’s relationship with

Wagner, by unpacking the other allegories in Feuersnot including Reichardt, the sorcerer’s house,

Diemut, the communal fire, and the mayor.

In both of his reviews of Feuersnot Otto Schmid says that the medieval and folkish setting of Feuersnot is patently romantic and Wagnerian, though notes that it lacks the magic and wonder typical of such retreats to the medieval.531 However, even the stage directions of

Feuersnot indicate that Feuersnot’s “fabled non-time” should be a caricature – exaggerated, grotesque, and comical – which was noted by most critics. Strauss continually invokes stereotypes of Wagnerism, only to mock them. On the other hand incisive critics observed that the overbearing orchestra drew from the tradition of music drama. In the words of Hanslick,

“The tyranny of the orchestra begins to threaten the dramatic principle.”532 As mentioned before, the vocal lines are fairly meager and overpowered not simply by the size and sound of the orchestra, but the Wagnerian tendency to give authority to music. Even mildly supportive critics such as Helm considered Strauss and Feuersnot primarily symphonic, rather than good theater,

530 Particularly see: Lg. “Das Singgedicht ‘Feuersnot’ von Richard Strauss am Dresdner Hoftheater.” National Zeitung no. 634 (24 November, 1901, morning): 1-3. 531 O. S. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Dresdner Journal no. 272 (22 November, 1901): 2207; O. S. “ Feuersnot’ von Richard Strauss,” Neu Musik Zeitung no. 24 (26 November, 1901): 317. 532 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 2. Carl Söhle says something similar in “Tagesgeschichte: Musikbriefe, Dresden,” Musikalische Wochenblatt 32, no. 50 (5 December, 1901): 665-66.

246

narrative, or opera. In this sense, Feuersnot like Guntram, but unlike Strauss’s later operas, follows the Wagnerian model. Yet the model of the master, and Kunrad’s master Reichardt, are consistently critiqued within the work. After the children rouse Kunrad from his seclusion, in his first speech of emancipation and love of life, he declares, “Master, how dumb you were!” In his second speech to the townspeople he says that in learning magic from his master, he abandoned sun, moon, and stars for a prison, but now is free from his master’s magic to live in light. As Otto

Schmid observed, this smacks of Nietzsche’s break from Wagner and celebration of clean air.533

Another element of Feuersnot that drew claims of Wagnerism was the apparent invocation of the eternal feminine. Hanslick, Riesenfeld, and Schmid all suggest that Strauss recycles the theme of woman’s loving power to save and even ennoble.534 However, whereas

Riesenfeld defends the sexuality of Feuersnot as voicing an “ideal image,” Schmid considers the obscenity too excessive for communicating the values of the eternal feminine. Certainly, Strauss is playing off the Wagnerian trope, but he rather mocks, exposes, and reverses its traditional emphases. In Feuersnot, Diemut is the symbol of the eternal feminine, but she herself is a flat and unsympathetic character, far from a Senta or an Isolde. Even E. E. Taubert in the Post calls her a boring character.535 In no way does she save Kunrad, but rather the other way around.

Kunrad’s modern morals prevail over prude Diemut and her backwater city. Musically and lyrically Strauss makes her secretly enjoy both the uninvited kiss and the town-sanctioned rape.

Strauss makes everyone chant a Wagner inspired line “all love flows from woman,” only to be exaggerated in the next line: “all warmth from the body of a virgin.” In the move from the first line to the second Strauss exposes the redemptive and idealized Eros of Wagner as sublimated soft porn. What really motivates and animates man’s higher activities is a zeal for purely lusty

533 O. S. “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Dresdner Journal no. 272 (22 November, 1901): 2207. 534 O. S. “ Feuersnot’ von Richard Strauss,” Neu Musik Zeitung no. 24 (26 November, 1901): 317; Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1; Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 839. 535 E. E. T., “Concert.” Die Post no. 590 (17 December, 1901, evening): 2.

247

pleasure. Even bourgeois marriage – to a young virgin – is satirized as libidinally motivated. In sum, just a Strauss exposes the knightly enemies of Don Quixote as merely sheep, he exposes the

Wagnerian appeal to the eternal feminine as little more than the temporal coital. While Hanslick ostensibly objects to this obscenity, he cannot help – in his overly descriptive, liberal technique – from lingering on it and thereby cultivating its forbidden excitement.536 He describes the finale of

Feuersnot as embarrassing with women hiding their faces in their hands and men chuckling mischievously, all privy to the bare truth of rhetoric about the eternal feminine.537

Another common comparison with Wagner was the similarities of the Munich of

Feuersnot to the Nuremburg of Meistersinger.538 However, it is the instructive differences between the cities that separate Strauss and Wagner, secessionists and New Germans. As with

Walter von Stolzing in Nuremburg, Kunrad challenges and changes the mired conventions of a traditional Bavarian city. However, the dynamic and landscape of these two encounters are quite different. Generally speaking if Wagner’s tale is about the evolutionary adaptation of an inherently good German folk, Strauss presents a story of revolutionary modernization of the backward. For one, the Munich artisans are depicted as vulgar and ignorant, not treated with the high esteem of those of Nuremburg. In Feuersnot there is neither the singular scapegoat

Beckmesser, nor the enlightened and amicable Hans Sachs, but rather as J. S. observes, “the individual citizens almost all sing like Beckmesser.”539 The only real social distinction in

Strauss’s Munich is between the philistine citizens and the fearless children, who are not yet socialized to citizenry norms, which seem much stronger in Munich than in Nuremburg. The sense of one against all dominates Feuersnot. In Meistersinger Walter is incorporated into

Nuremburg tradition, while in Feuersnot, Munich converts to Kunrad’s new standards. And if the

536 Hanslick’s own innuendo are pretty raunchy. 537 Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1. 538 Hanslick directly calls Munich another Nuremberg: Ed. H., “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse no. 13447 (31 January, 1902, morning): 1. 539 J. S., “Feuilleton,” Hamburger Correspondant no. 549 (23 November, 1901): 2.

248

first results from a lofty intellectual and aesthetic realization, the second is out of pure social and bodily need, a need maliciously created. The narrative arc certainly apes Meistersinger, but mocks the smoothness and good feeling of Wagner’s story. If anything, Strauss rather lampoons the supposed moral fiber of the German people, by showing their backwardness and then fickle change and willingness to sacrifice their own.

Perhaps the best way to conceive of Strauss’s relationship with Wagner, and indeed his status as heir, is in the symbolism of the Hexenhaus where Reichardt and Kunrad had lived.

Riesenfeld rightly notes that the house “is built on symbolic grounds” and is a “temple of art.”540

In the libretto the house is described as damp, elaborate and dark, much the way Nietzsche described Wagner’s music in “The Case of Wagner” as musty and claustrophobic.541 The fact that the house is constructed of wood is historically accurate and a necessary plot devise, but nonetheless further symbolic, given its association with Wagner’s powers and isolation. Just as

Reichardt was unwelcomed by the fairy tale Munichers and forced to take refuge in a large, wooden house, so also Wagner, once driven out of historical Munich where he was unable to build a permanent, marble temple on the Isar, had to settle for an initially temporary – famously wooden – structure in Bayreuth. Kunrad’s destruction of his master’s wooden house serves as a condemnation of the escapist refuge and religious airs of the Bayreuth ideal. Kunrad not only leaves behind his heritage, but breaks it apart and leaves it unusable in its historic form as a temple.

With Kunrad, Strauss pokes fun at his own past connections to Wagner and the New

German School, deciding to gain freedom by razing his past to the ground. This is Strauss seceding from Wagner and even leaving the ADMV as he did in 1898. Yet, Kunrad and Strauss do not simply leave the shunned Wagnerian heritage in ruins, but reappropriate this inheritance.

540 Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung no. 50,51 (13 December and 20/27 December, 1901): 837. 541 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1966): 621.

249

Kunrad donates the magical materials of his former home to the communal fire, which sustains the community’s livelihood. Indeed it seems that the midsummer festival is not possible until

Kunrad’s contribution and then becomes a super-festival with this new resource. Similarly,

Strauss does not, in Feuersnot and other compositions, dispose of his inherited Wagnerian musical materials, but puts them to different use than the New German School and its idealist aspirations. Strauss deconstructs this musical language and uses it as one element among others in the communal fire and musical experience. Elements are emancipated, both musical and architectural. Stripping New German music of nationalist associations, Strauss democratizes this hot-blooded lyricism, just as Kunrad donates the Hexenhaus to all of society. Moreover, by injecting humor and transparency to the point of satire, Strauss exposes the Wagnerian magic as effect-producing and an elemental resource – like a pile of wood. The shared Reichardt/Kunrad magic represents a new productive power, which the fairy tale town initially resisted, but which by the end became central to its social organization and way of life. This new affective power creates a grander communal fire. Musically, Strauss unveils New German expressivity as a new form of affective production that does something to its listeners, like magic. Strauss embraces the

Nietzschean and Hanslickian critique of Wagner as a sorcerer, without rejecting Wagner’s music and the power of sorcery.

Here we come to the fire, the central symbol in Feuersnot. It is a meta-source of power representing sexual desire, economic production, and, by the end, Kunrad’s magic, which I read as Wagnerian expressivity within the plot’s musical allegory. The fire is perhaps a less metaphysical version of the grail in Parsifal, equally over determined with symbolism as

Wagnerian music and a source of community. Unlike the grail, the fire is accessible to all and contributed to by all. The story of Feuersnot hinges on a solstice festival and its bonfire, called in the libretto a Subendfeuer, a community fire, from which all citizens take for use in their own homes and workshops. It is a traditional commons, which provides, light, heat, and general energy for producing food and other objects. Strauss certainly makes playful ties between

250

sexuality and the fire of life, much as Freud makes sexual desire foundational to the Id. However, as reviewers of Feuersnot noted, the highly symbolic fire stood for the power of life more generally.542 Feuersnot oozes the monism and vitalism prevalent in European intellectual life circa 1900. Like public intellectual such as Nietzsche, Ernst Haeckel, and Henri Bergson, Strauss argues for a single origin to all life, conceived biologically, socially, and culturally. Within

Feuersnot specifically the fire is not only a symbol of sexuality, but also economic and affective production

It is the political drama of a need for fire in Feuersnot that shifts its message from sheer vitalism to biopolitics. In Feuersnot the mayor is the sole political authority, whose powers and limitations reflect the primary traits of sovereignty. He is charged with protecting the citizens of

Munich, who turn to him in moments of danger. The opera begins with the mayor instructing the children, like civil servants, to gather contributions from each citizen to this communal fire. As sovereign, the magistrate has the right to both demand a donation from citizens and exile the lawless, all in the interest of protecting life. As sovereign, he can partially violate the autonomy of the law-abiding citizens and fully violate the autonomy of the lawless, both in the broader interest of insuring some level of autonomy for citizens. In the narrative of Feuersnot the only threats are Reichardt and Kunrad, which the mayor can exile and worse. While Reichardt’s crimes are unknown backhistory, Kunrad manages to disrupt the town by exciting riotous celebration among the children, publically kissing Diemut against her will, and then, of course, extinguishing the fire.

Feuersnot reenacts the dynamics of the social contract from classical political theory.

The mayor possesses all the punitive powers of the Hobbesian sovereign, yet he does not seek to comprehend, manage, and stimulate economic production and population growth.543 The

542 Wilhelm Tappert, “Feuersnot.” Das Kleine Journal (29 October, 1902):13; G. “Kleines Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung no. 336 (4 December, 1901): 3. 543 Esposito argues against Foucault that even in classical sovereignty there is a biopolitical element in the impetus to protect life. In some way biological life is already a factor in post-Renaissance sovereignty, in a

251

sovereign’s major function is to protect life (Hobbes) and property (Locke), but can only do so through the removing powers of taking life or exile. As Foucault argues, the interest in or will to produce marks a biopolitical departure from negative modes of power. The mayor aims to protect the fire and the city, but he does not directly produce it, that is, he does not produce life. Rather, the citizens produce it. He lacks the power to light the fire that produces and determines life.

Once Kunrad puts out the fire, the mayor loses all real power, in having failed to do his part of protection in the social contract. The citizens not only revolt, but turn to a new leader with a new source of power: Kunrad, who is able to produce life. The narrative of Kunrad’s coup is also about modernity’s shift from a traditionally sovereign power to one more explicitly biopolitical.

Kunrad’s takeover represents not only the ascension of modern music, but also social modernity, here defined as biopower’s eclipse of sovereign power. Kunrad supersedes the mayor who has the most to lose in this revolution. When Kunrad kisses his daughter Diemut, the mayor is the first to react in indignation and sends his daughter to the refuge of her father’s house.

Kunrad’s eventual covert entry into that house through the balcony symbolizes this new modern powers entry into the private realm, which the mayor’s rule had kept autonomous so long as citizens offer up some tax-like wood for the fire. The kiss, which seems to embolden the children to scurry chaotically through the streets, produces a crisis of social order for the mayor, who attempts to quell the rebellion, in part by instructing his wife to keep the fire to a minimum.

Again, sovereign power can only negatively diminish, not increase. In fact the desire to quell the fire signals a kind of liberal moderation and governmentality, such that life and the economy are sustained but not overflowing.

However, the true exchange of power structures occurs when Kunrad extinguishes the fire and exposes the thin conceptual bonds that ordered traditional Munich and kept the mayor in charge. Putting out the fire causes mass chaos and concern. At this point the magistrate appears

manner it was not before. However, the production and maintenance of biological life is explicitly excluded from responsibilities of sovereign power. See Esposito, Bios, 57-63.

252

helpless and often speechless in the face of the citizens’ cry for help. His only solution is to kill

Kunrad. He has the power to take life, but not the power to make life – to make fire. The town’s embrace of Kunrad’s solution – the exchange of Diemut for fire – strikes directly at magistrate’s own family. Furthermore, Kunrad’s power over fire – that is life – supplants the magistrate’s power over death. After Kunrad’s offer of terms, the mayor loses his autonomy, even his vocal autonomy. He can only sing as part of a chorus, except to be the one who comments on the new growing light from his daughter’s bedroom. He speaks only to reinforce his shame and lack of power. Kunrad’s magic, his new means of economic and affective production, becomes the guarantee of social order.

Feuersnot can be read as a biopolitical manifesto. Feuersnot articulates a historical narrative in which biopolitical powers supplant sovereign power of the magistrate, the traditional social contract, and the judicial municipal powers. Moreover, the opera defines modernity specifically as the biopolitical eclipse of sovereign politics and articulates the crises of that passage, which had reach a tipping point by 1900. In the era of Strauss and the secession, law becomes visibly secondary to, even the handmaiden of, life-enhancing interests. As a mediation of contemporary politics, Feuersnot explicitly makes life the primary political and philosophical topic. In extinguishing the Subendfeuer, Kunrad attacks the town in the particularly modern manner of sabotaging the means of production, like a strike, boycott, or embargo. His politics operate without mediation at the level of production and pose a crisis wherein sovereign power can only reassert its hegemony by taking a more direct role in the production and protection of life. The magistrate has to strike a deal with Kunrad, sovereignty making amends with the supremacy of biopower.

Feuersnot not only enacts the historical ascension of biopolitics, but provides dramatic material for conceptualizing an affirmative biopower. At numerous moments Kunrad sheds the social contract of sovereign power and opens a porthole to a more communal, biologically- affirming society. I am going to explain this first by way of Esposito’s concept of immunization

253

and then Nietzsche’s Dionysian. In both Immunitas and Bios Esposito demonstrates the functional logic and biological referent of immunization throughout modern politics from Hobbes to Neo-liberalism.544 As with the literal medical process of immunization, modern politics introduces into society a modicum of violence in order to prophylactically prevent greater future violences. Per the social contract, citizens submit to the possibility of violence from the sovereign – through the apparatus of law and police – as protection from other violences. Life is at the heart is at the heart of the this exchange, making it at some level biopolitical, and making the thematic of immunization highly appropriate as this exchange is literally about preserving the living human being.545

However, as Esposito elaborates, political immunization is not merely against dangers from without, but an inoculation against community. Like violence, community – which necessitates a level of danger and violence itself – is also a violation of individual sovereignty. In fact root word munus shared by both immunization and community opens up the interlocked dichotomy of these functions.546 The immune citizen is free from the obligation to give munus, that is, the donation. Once the citizens of Munich in Feuersnot pay their firewood tax, they are immune from further communal responsibility or orientation and can retreat to their homes, also the site of their crafts. However, even more clearly than the process of immunization in modern politics, Feuersnot stages a temporary immunitary reversal, another key concept Esposito introduced as a vital solution to the violence and negations of excessive immunization.

Immunitary reversal simply implies undoing one’s status as exempt from giving to the community, but that also means a greater exposure to danger. For example, Kunrad’s Dionysian destruction of his home undoes the immunizing procedure of the social contract in overly

544 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 545 If early modern sovereign power primarily protects life, Foucault sees the development of biopolitics proper with the urge to produce or expand life. 546 Esposito, Bios, 50.

254

dramatic fashion. He gives beyond his obligation, not to secure his autonomy, but to liquidate it.

Along the same conceptual trajectory of munus he moves from immune to commune. The citizens are taken aback and nervous about his brash donation to the community, even threatening to “throw the bum out.” He has no private wealth or home, but has given it all to the community, which he joins around the fire. It is noteworthy that the children, who function as a kind of utopian multitude in this work, are ecstatic as ever and participate in Kunrad’s destruction of his house and dance around its fire. Kunrad’s change of worldview is intimately connected with the loss of his home and its symbolic and protective sovereign barriers. Part of his being a “modern individual” is that he does not separate public and private, but declares his love of the world and sensation, a love that cannot hide behind domestic walls or rationalizing inhibitions. In fact, his pivotal kiss of Diemut reflects his hew homelessness. He has no place to take her back to and has no qualms about acting on desire.

It is no coincidence that the Nietzschean Feuersnot shares themes with Esposito’s immunitary reversal, given that Esposito locates a theorization of such a reversal in the thought of

Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s enmity towards politics is not directly its stifling of community, but more generally the disregard for biological life shown by political institutions. Frequently, in his analysis of decadence and degeneration Nietzsche notes an overprotectiveness in politics that seeks to limit the expansion of life and exposure to conflict, danger, and even sickness.547 In an analysis of Nietzsche’s “Ennoblement through Degeneration,” Esposito asserts that “The greatest danger that the community faces is therefore its own preventative withdrawal from danger.”548

However, the point of perhaps greatest confluence between community and danger in Nietzsche is the concept of the Dionysian, also a frequent designation for secessionist music. It is fitting that the moment of Kunrad’s Nietzschean speech is the explosive solstice fire with its throng of

547 Esposito, Bíos, 91. In a distillation of Nietzsche’s thought, Esposito states that “the state is organized to diffuse explosivity.” 548 Esposito, Bíos, 105.

255

bacchanal children. Both the language and actions of Kunrad’s self-discovery are thoroughly dionysian.

Nietzsche famously introduced the concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy as an antipode to the Apollonian. Without digressing into a full discussion of this dichotomy, it should be noted that Apollo stands for form, representation, individuation, and meaning making – the “soothsaying faculty” in art and philosophy.549 By contrast, Dionysus stands for drunkenness, awe, destruction, forgetfulness, and primal community. In his first exposition on the concept,

Nietzsche writes:

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man…now all the stubborn, hostile boundaries, which necessity, caprice or “shameless fashion” have erected between man and man, are broken down…In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak; he is about to take a dancing flight into the air. His very gestures bespeak enchantment.550

While many kernels of Nietzsche’s later light-hearted philosophy can be detected in this early definition of the Dionysian, it is still suffused with his penchant for Schopenhauer and Wagner.

This early dionysian is not only orgiastic and communal, but also taken with nihilism and

“mystical self-abnegation.”551 By itself, the destructive force and anti-individualism of the

Dionysian is looked on in The Birth of Tragedy with suspicion and a fear of existential meaninglessness.

The reassessments in Nietzsche’s more mature philosophy also entail a reconceptualization of the Dionysian. As Walter Kaufman notes in his translation of The Gay

Science, the Dionysian takes on new meaning when no longer juxtaposed with the Apollonian, but rather with ascetic tendencies in Western culture from Epicureans to Protestants.552 The later

549 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Clifton P. Fadiman (New York: Dover, 1995): 3. 550 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 4. 551 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 5. 552 See footnote 124 in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974): 330.

256

Dionysian is more affirmative and originary, defining life and its creation through surplus discharge. In section 370 of The Gay Science Nietzsche argues that dionysian music is desired by those who suffer from “over-fullness of life.”553 He goes on to juxtapose the desire for immortality and being with the dionysian urge for becoming: “The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this, as is known, “Dionysian”).”554 Destruction remains an underlying theme in

Nietzsche’s evolving philosophy of the Dionysian, but it becomes a necessary perquisite for creation, including self-re-creation and the Overman project. From this point forward Nietzsche thinks dionysian deconstruction not as hostility to the will, but rather as a better approximation of internal struggle and the inherently divided self.555 Not only does the Dionysian move away from its mystical and suicidal connotations, but also away from an affirmation of community. In abandoning Wagnerian nationalism, in which the Dionysian was initially implicated, Nietzsche also exorcises affirmative statements of community.

Yet, in resisting the tendency to yield to a conception of the self as molar – undivided individual – the Dionysian self remains a molecular, fleshy, communal self, capable of being reinserted affirmatively into the original communal terms of the Dionysian. In reading a reversal of immunization into Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, Esposito similarly suggests it as a recipe for community:

We can see in the Dionysian – understood as the in/original dimension of life in its entirety – the trace or the prefiguration of the common munus in all of its semantic ambivalence; as the donative elision of individual limits, but also as the infective and therefore destructive power of itself and the other. It is delinquency both in the literal significance of a lack and in the figurative sense of violence. Pure relation and therefore absence or implosion of subjects in relation to each other: a relation without subjects.”556

553 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 328. 554 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 329. 555 On Nietzsche’s critique of unified subjectivity, Esposito writes: “In the body neither sovereignty – the utter domination of another – nor the equality among many exists as they are perennially engage in mutally overtaking each other.” Esposito, Bios, 85. 556 Esposito, Bios, 89.

257

In Feuersnot, Strauss and Wolzogen enact Kunrad’s Nietzschean self-discovery within the context of a highly communal dionysian festival. While Kunrad’s destruction of his master’s

Hexenhaus no doubt reenacts Nietzsche’s turn on Wagner, rather than retreating to Sils Maria,

Feuersnot’s Kunrad represents a more communal Nietzsche. Throughout Feuersnot the enthusiastic children prove to be Kunrad’s only collaborators. They participate in his dionsyian destruction of his home and personal recreation in the light of the fire. As a meditation on the

Dionysian, the dual purpose of the Hexenhaus exhibits the interdependency of destruction and creation – the wood is both the scorned object of the past and fuel for dancing. Herein lies the recognition that the dangerous bulldozing of the autonomous Hexenhaus is directly proportional to communal abundance: a reversing of immunitary to produce community.

Above all, the children ensure the communal element of the Dionysian in Feuersnot. In fact, part of Kunrad’s revolution seems to be joining the children, a kind of becoming-child intimated by Nietzsche. The figure of the child appears two times at crucial moments in Thus

Spoke Zarathustra. In Zarathustra’s first speech of book one, “On the Three Metamorphoses,” he outlines the need to transform into a camel, a lion, and finally a child. If the camel takes the weight of socially-imposed self-abnegations upon itself and wanders alone into the desert, the form of the lion invokes the power of negation to say “No” to law and “All the value of all things” as created phantasms. However, by comparison with generic programs of individualism,

Zarathustra’s most innovative assertion is the further need to become a child, a form needed to create value anew. The claim that the destructive lion lacks creative power mirrors the limits of sovereign power. Of the child, Zarathustra says, “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying.”557 While

Nietzsche does little to elaborate directly on becoming-child in the rest of Zarathustra, clearly the process hints at the two major principles of the book: the Overman and the eternal return.

557 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy Martin (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), 26.

258

Ostensibly, the lion is fated to resentment and lacks the playfulness, amnesia, and affirmation of the child. While the child’s ability to imaginatively and instinctually create approximates the

Overman’s recalibration of values, at the end of book two the figure of the child returns as if to remind Zarathustra that he is still too somber and lion-like. The voice of the “stillest hour” tells

Nietzsche “You must yet become a child and without shame.”558 It is at this moment that the book transitions into a philosophy of the eternal return and a narrative of Zarathustra’s attempt to embrace it. In the third and especially the fourth book, Zarathustra acts out a becoming-child, a more light-hearted, affirmative, and even social figure than the cranky sage of the first two books.

So while Nietzsche does little to elaborate directly on the metamorphous into the child, the figure is a major engine in and foundation of the dithyrambic dancer who prances above the existential nausea and misplaced ideals of the higher men, who aspire to the heights of Western philosophy and culture.

Consequently, the prominent role of children in Feuersnot – as Strauss’s Nietzschean manifesto – should not be overlooked. It is the children who are the social revolutionaries and only ones who lack a socialization according to norms, such as those that have ostracized Kunrad for his magic. They go to his door as if they do not know better. They reach out to the social pariah without the fear of danger shared by their parents. They tear down his house with gaiety and throw it on the fire, to the horror of their parents. Most importantly they seem to laugh and dance without ceasing. A similar emphasis on the utopian and biopolitical potential of becoming- child enervates Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and is given more musical substantiation than in

Feuersnot. Whereas the children function as background to Feuersnot, becoming-child is the culmination of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Indeed, the retreat of the role of the children over the narrative of Feuersnot signals a slackening of its emancipatory message.

The Carnivalesque in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony

558 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 127.

259

Next to its immediately comparable compositions, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony most thoroughly enacts the affirmative Dionysian. The finales of Mahler’s Second Symphony, his

Third Symphony, and even Feuersnot ultimately concede to representation, reterritorialization, and/or violence. By contrast Mahler’s Fourth Symphony steadily intensifies its powers of musical immunitary reversal. Mahler accomplishes musically what Strauss, or really Wolzogen, primarily put in words. Compared to Feuersnot, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony better speaks the language of the Dionysian, or more precisely, it registers on the wavelength of the Dionysian, because it does not seek to primarily represent the concept poetically, but rather enact it musically. If the dionsysian festival is background for Feuersnot’s real dramatic work of revenge, such a festival is the conclusion of Mahler Fourth Symphony.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was his first to be widely performed in its first season. It premiered in Munich – a year after the MGMT successfully put on his Second Symphony – and was then conducted in Berlin and Vienna by Mahler. Shortly after the premiere, Weingartner also conducted the work on a tour of Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and . By all accounts Mahler wrote it as a more accessible work (shorter in length with fewer instruments) than the enormous and presumptuous Second and Third Symphonies. However, it became

Mahler’s most controversial work to date, resulting in unprecedented hissing. Not only were the new conservatives (right Wagnerians and Hanslickian formalists) united in their criticism, as they had been with Mahler’s earlier symphonies, but even many moderate Wagnerians confessed disappointment. Max Graf said that it replaced Mahler’s First Symphony as object of scorn.559

Yet, critics everywhere noted unusually “stormy applause” from a vocal minority, as previously demonstrated in the case of Berlin.560 Nevertheless, the performances provided heightened visibility for the musical secession, which were associated with Mahler’s work and his fan base.

559 Dr. Max Graf, "Kritik: Konzert," Die Musik 1, no. 2 (4 February 1902): 845. 560 At the Vienna concert, Max Graf said that the Viennese were too polite to hiss (as they should), while Theodor Helm argues that the Mahler party “applauds at any cost,” even louder if people are trying to hiss.

260

The reviews of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony largely read like exaggerated critiques of his previously performed symphonies. Take for instance this long excerpt from the local Munich daily, the Allgemeine Zeitung:

The first movement is reminiscent of the second…musical sophistication of the first order, which almost always deals with the various orchestral instruments solo-istically: on a large scale, at times salon music al fresco. In between, an amusing, technically quite refined smattering chatter of the orchestra: Twangs, babbles, squeaks, plucks, tugs, hums, creaks above all winking; an attempt to translate into music and cacophony the Saint Anthony from the paintings of Breughel or Callot. The second was similar, and that is his weakest; the lack of variety, contrast. This movement contains a few fairly tasteless orchestral jokes, which are not just musical ear boxing, but to continue the metaphor, the listener is everywhere pinched by a boisterous crowd of goblins, whacked on the ears, tickled, hair pulled and a fillip [nose smack] given after the others. Then one bar later a charming, mischievous melody, a correct, healthy, mature melody full of sweet grace, true-blooded Viennese, half Ländler, half mock-sentimental couplet; also resounds softly a distinctive yodel. The slow movement brings some quite stretched theme, almost without physiognomy. Similarly, the following [movement] sometimes sounds quite empty, which suggests not so much the Knaben Wunderhorn, but in baroque manner, the ideas of paradise and the lands of plenty are combined. Its folk character is pretty suspect and in no way does it qualify as the Finale of a symphony. With that begins my objections to the work as a whole…The grotesque-comic makes good sense in music drama, but in the symphony it requires at the very least a clear program if it is not to degenerate into an unartistic, engineered gimmick with disharmony and instrumental jokes. I find the intellectual and purely musical content of the work insignificant in relation to the pretensions that it places on the endurance of the listeners (it lasted almost an hour) and on the ability of the orchestra. In enters with the greatest symphonic airs and the listener is not yet clear whether the composer was serious or whether he merely let rattle an ironic, feuilleton-istic firework. That certainly contradicts the Holy Spirit of Music, which as a true spirit tolerates no lack of authenticity, even in humor.561

Much like Mahler’s First Symphony, his Fourth Symphony was taken to be tasteless, unnerving caricature, not befitting the serious symphonic genre. Again there is generic ambiguity and suspicions of a hidden program. Again Mahler is praised for technical ability, but disingenuous with its multiplicity of styles. The symphony’s status as music is questioned by the onomatopoetic interpretations of the orchestra’s “chatter.” The reviewer even notes the strong

Dr. Max Graf, “Kritik: Konzert: Wien,” Die Musik 1, no. 2 (4 Feburary 1902): 845-46; h-m, “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 20 (13 January, 1902): 5. 561 Anonymous, “Feuilleton,” Allgemeine Zeitung (27 November, 1901): 1-2.

261

and violent affective power of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in its “musical ear-boxing” and devilish pestering of the listener, which is juxtaposed with healthy music. The review also display’s Hanslickian embodied language about healthy and physiognomy, and need for holiness and spiritual depth for art music to attain the rank of bios. All the previous analysis of musical zoe and flesh could be even more aptly applied to this work, but it also pushes in new directions.

The finale’s oft noted “earthiness” and the extreme range and grafting of polyphonic elements gives the music a populism absent in Mahler’s Second and Third Symphonies. In Mahler’s

Fourth Symphony the fleshy qualities of the music take on affirmative interrelationships that I will characterize as carnivalesque, anti-immunitary, and dionysian.

As indicated in the above review by characterizations such as ironic, grotesque-comic, and fun, the critique of Mahler’s music as distasteful caricature, so prominent with his First

Symphony, returned with a vengeance. Although rather than being heard as a satire of New

German music, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was heard as a satire of more “naïve” music, such as classical lyricism and folk idioms. Eichberg writes “The worst part is only that one cannot really believe this naiveté in him…indeed melodies, which with presumptuous clarity sound like the

‘good old times,’ slightly suggest something to the effect of mockery, as an intentional practical joke [Nasführen] on the listeners.”562 Similarly, Helm writes, “I confess that I have absolutely no appreciation for this kind of grotesque musical humor and therefore am also unable to take seriously Mahler’s Fourth Symphony…as artwork.”563 Certainly critics were unable to take the work seriously, but given the destabilizing effect of caricature and the elevated position of symphonic music, neither did they find it comical.564

562 i. "Kunst und Wissenschaft," Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (17 December 1901): 5-6. 563 h-m, “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 20 (13 January, 1902): 5: “Ich gestehe, dass ich für diese Art grotesk musikalischen Humors schlechterdings keinen Sinn habe und demnach auch Mahler’s vierte Symphonie – trotz der sich auch in ihr wieder offenbarenden ungewöhnlichen orchestralen Geschicklichkeit und vieler interessanter Einzelheiten – als Kunstwerk unmöglich ernst zu nehmen vermag.” 564 A. H., “Gustav Mahlers neueste Symphonie,” Neu Musik Zeitung no. 1 (1901): 6.

262

If Mahler’s previous symphonies were interpreted as sounding superficial – perhaps the accident of a young composer – his Fourth Symphony was considered purposefully superficial, a polemic attempt to write “trivial” and “spiritless” music. Many of the Berlin critics heard it as an attempt to invoke Viennese superficiality in its dance themes and Gemütlichkeit, even making reference to popular Viennese composers.565 Schmidt, in particular, argues at length that despite the work’s “technical merit,” it “doesn’t really have much to say.” Very much echoing the common critiques of Strauss, he states that “the how in such senseless manner is permitted place over the what.”566 Schmidt and others go to lengths to reinforce the well-entrenched critique of new music as all Technik and no ennobling Geist. As discussed previously, idealist aesthetics separated form and content, with their proper conjunction producing a kind of musical bios.

While idealist critics denigrated the secession as mindless musical zoe for lacking inner content, the secessionist penchant for celebrating musical means itself as content provides an affirmation of musical flesh that reverses the negative declination of musical zoe, in actuality evading the zoe/bios distinction altogether. Meditation on a monistic musical flesh is nowhere more prominent and earnest than in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. The aesthetically radical, even politically revolutionary, implications of this molecular music are first apparent in the many contradictions and multiplicities that the symphony assembles together on the same plane.

Even more than Mahler’s previous compositions, his Fourth Symphony integrates – not merely juxtaposes – a diversity of musical idioms, such that they cannot be easily separated and interpreted apart from each other. According to Helm’s review:

Apparently, this time he allowed it to be arranged with the simplest possible melodies – folk-like (or at least intended folk-like), old-fashioned, even childlike, though not to say childlike to perform – which he then however arranges in such intricate combinations that a heard unity is completely lost, so that sometimes

565 See n. “Theater und Musik,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 591, morning edition (18 December 1901): 3; Willy Pastor, “Theater und Musik: Neues königl. Opern-Theater: Drittes Strauss-Konzert,” Tägliche Rundschau, no. 591 (18 December 1901): 3. Pastor even sees Mahler's Fourth Symphony as a critique of Germanness. 566 Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzertfälen,” no. 640 (17 December 1901): 1.; Lessmann also did not consider Mahler's Fourth Symphony to be meaningful art. See Otto Lessmann, "Aus dem Konzertsaal," Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 51/52 (20/27 December 1901): 835-36.

263

one receives the impression of the most colorful clutter, especially in the first movement. And for what?567

For Helm, the symphony is rife with details, out of which no sustained melodic hegemony can emerge, but rather it moves along steadily without climax. For Leopold Schmidt the interplay between the themes produces a “strange mix” wherein the mixing changes the elements assembled:

Themes of the first movement sound like Lanner and Koschat – Austro- Hungarian light composers. An easy allusion to the old Viennese gemütlichkeit; then comes the matter of another visage. The performance piece surprises by its stylistic antipode. The colors become crude and strangely mixed, an unpeaceful spirit plays in part through his essence, foreign material. When the folksy theme returns, it strikes one as trivial.568

For Schmidt, the Freund Hein violin themes in the second movement are a “foreign” intrusion into the “folksy” themes, which give them a more “trivial” and less “cozy” feel. The easy listening of Viennese classicism is problematized and forced to mature in the back and forth dialogue. In response to the proliferation of “Viennese folk music and heterogeneous atmosphere moments,” A. H. from the NMZ exclaims: “What opposition!” and then suggests that the audience had to picture “a gaggle of Turkish guards.”569 Given the Viennese flavor of many themes, its antipode is ominously described as eastern, violent, mob-like, and dangerous, as if to highlight

Austrian anxieties about and prejudice against the eastern European influx. The multicultural condition of the modern European metropolis migrates into the form of Mahler’s musical mélange. Mahler’s musical heterogeneity was also interpreted as particularly modernist, described as both “secessionist variety” in Vienna and “Ueberbrettl” in Berlin, further reinforcing the links between these two avant-garde developments.570

567 h-m, “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 20 (13 January, 1902): 5. 568 Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzertfälen,” no. 640 (17 December 1901): 1. 569 A. H., “Gustav Mahlers neueste Symphonie,” Neu Musik Zeitung no. 1 (1901): 6. 570 See h-m, “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 20 (13 January, 1902): 5; E. E. T., “Feuilleton,” Die Post, no. 590, evening edition (17 December 1901): 2.

264

In order to further unpack the significance of Mahler’s “strange mix,” I am going to make parallels with the novel. Such a comparison is far from unique, as commentators from Adorno to

Botstein have elaborated on the novelesque quality of Mahler’s symphonies. Adorno’s chapter

“Novel” in Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy gives numerous reasons for the novelesque quality of Mahler’s music, including its “pedestrian” and familiar material, its unexpected twists and entries, and a process of development that does not efface the stability of characterization.571 For

Botstein, Mahler’s music, like post-realist novels of the period, created perspectival uncertainty through the shifting of dominant voices, a style which demanded greater audience participation in sense-making.572 However, rather than making parallels with the novel through (character) development or reader/listener relations, I want to focus on the formal qualities of the novel as articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his view of the novel as a dialogue of multiple voices, filled with reflexive humor, and charged with contemporaneous immediacy.

Among literary genres, Bakhtin argues that the novel was the first genre to integrate on a single plane the heterogeneous modes of speech that correspond to different social castes. Indeed this multi-vocity defines the novel. Bakhtin writes, the “novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized…[E]ach of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized).”573 If Botstein and his interpretive model borrowed from Dominick LaCapra focus on the uncertainty created by an unstable or absent author/composer, for Bakhtin, such a lack rather opens up an interface for the multiplicity of perspectives to contact, conflict, and link.574 The often observed and even berated stylistic potpourri of Mahler, which reaches new pungency in his Fourth Symphony, enacts the

571 Adorno, Mahler, 61, 72. 572 Botstein, “Whose Gustav Mahler?’ 35. 573 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 262-63. 574 See Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

265

dialogic property of the novel. Mahler interweaves thematic types not only attributed to different epochs, but also different people groups. The metaphor of Mahler’s layered music as Bakhtin- novelesque is an apt inversion of Bakhtin’s metaphorical description of the novel – especially after Dostoyevsky – as “polyphonic,” giving each voice weight equal to that of the author. 575 If there is uncertainty in Mahler, it is in regard to ideology, which is inherently rebuffed by the dialogized form of the novel as seen by Bakhtin.

The novelesque quality of Mahler’s music also distinguishes it from the epic, even ideological, forms of musical idealism. In his essay on “Epic and Novel” Bakhtin argues that the epic is a closed genre – from the past and about the past – which creates distance between the text and the reader because of its seamless totality and unblemished heroes. By contrast, the continually evolving genre of the novel makes everyday life and voices its materials. So just as the growing prominence of the novel from the 17th to the 19th Centuries signals a proliferation of temporally modern experiences, Mahler’s novelesque music mediates a present-orientation that may be designated modernist. While there is hardly anything pre-modern or pre-industrial about

19th-century art music, the epic quality of its extra-musical narratives created distance between time-full present and a presumably timeless art, a distance mirrored formally by a homogeneity of idioms and identification with the singular voice of the composer.

Bakhtin argues that the qualities of the novel can be and have been appropriated by other literary genres. He writes:

What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally – this is the most important thing – the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain sematic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present). As we will see below, all these phenomena are explained by the transposition of other genres into this new and peculiar zone for

575 The first chapter of Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky is called "Dostoyevsky's Polyphonic Novel and its Treatments." See Michael Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

266

structuring artistic models (a zone of contact with the present in all its openendedness), a zone that was first appropriated by the novel.576

Such an outline for the extension of the novel to other forms can easily be extended to music and the symphony, a transposition first truly accomplished by Strauss and Mahler. Merely substitute musical for literary in the above quote. Not only does this involve the dialogized layers of musical language, the incorporation of extra-musical discourses (heteroglossia), and the “living contact with the unfinished” present, but also parodist position towards inherited musical languages. In fact, these three elements are all interrelated. For example, the approachable contemporaneity of the novel and the novelesque interweaving are tied to the novel’s humor. If, as Bakhtin writes, “One can only accept the epic world with reverence,” because the characters are superhuman, there is an immanence produced by the novel’s humor and the present orientation of the novel, a perpetual modernism that necessitates humor.577 Additionally, this humor in the form of parody is part of the self-awareness and self-critique generated by dialogized forms: “Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel….This ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever- developing genre.”578 Consequently, the wide-ranging humor and conscious parody in Mahler should be read as intimately connected to its mediation of the contemporary world and stylistic diversity, qualities shared by the novel. Mahler’s music does not speak as if only from the composer, but from history and from the world in a manner conscious of its stylized appropriations. Merely on account of being novelesque, according Bakhtin’s theory, Mahler’s music moves towards modernism, social critique, and communal liminality.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is not merely novelesque, but carnivalesque and grotesque, two Bakhtinian modes that undermine hierarchy and celebrate the communal power of corporeality. In his book on Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin expounds on the historical affinities between

576 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 6-7. 577 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 17. 578 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 6.

267

carnival practices and the development of the novel. He identifies the actual practices of early modern carnivals with a broader “carnival sense of the world” and the “carnivalization” of aesthetic forms, both of which the mature novels of Dostoyevsky exhibit. According to Bakhtin, the carnivalesque can be characterized by four major themes: 1) the suspension of “all hierarchical structure;” 2) “free and familiar contact among people;” 3) new “carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise and the stupid;” and

4) “profanation: carnivalistic blasphemes, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc.”579 These categories share the dialogization and humor of the basic novelesque, but in carnival it is not simply a matter of joyous relativism and neutralizing ideological stricture, but a revolutionary overthrow of church and state, a celebration of “reproductive power” and the unifying power of bodily functions. In all his writings, Bakhtin asserts that carnival practices are not substitutions for or distractions from real political action, but the very living out of a democratic, revolutionary social order.

Consequently, the mediation of carnival in aesthetic forms functions as an enactment and reminder of its political potency.

Not only does Mahler novelize the symphony, but his Fourth Symphony intones a

“carnival sense of the world.” In its musical form and imagery of the finale it fulfills Bakhtin’s four carnivalesque categories. The music suspends hierarchies of style, which are able to intimately interact as melodies pass freely between instruments. The musical mixtures especially bring together the noblest officialdom of German symphonic tradition with popular songs of all manner. As reviewers noted these combinations had an unsettling effect as a form of parody and debasing. The heavenly scene of the finale – something of a festival – only reinforces the musical

579 Bakhtin, Problems, 123.

268

forms. The voice in the fourth movement sings about living angelic lives, “but having a merry time besides.” Luxurious food is plentifully, even spontaneously provided, and the wine is free, while they frolic, laugh, and dance to the music of Saint Caecilia and her band. The saints, the heavenly elites, are even parodied by being turned into the servants of the children, fulfilling their every, quite unspiritual, whim. While the sexuality of the heavenly scene is partially muted by the child-like imagery, the music still communicates that which is most base, far from the rapturous finales of other of his symphonies.

Yet, according to Bakhtin’s aesthetic categories, the carnivalesque remains something of a clearing house for intersubjectivity. He hints at its biopower and communal familiarity, but ultimately sees in the carnivalesque – and in Dostoyevsky – the affirmation of the individual. The same cannot be said for his later assessment of grotesque realism in Rabelais, whose forms and images are more proximate to literal carnival rituals. Of grotesque realism Bakhtin says, “the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egoistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all people…This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.”580 For Bakhtin, the grotesque – which he says is revived in aesthetic modernism – has to do with grotesque attenuation of bodily orifices, a celebration of the unfinished, open quality of the body, which participates in unending processes of birth and death. Bakhtin’s chapter on banquet images in Rabelais informs the finale of

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, in which exaggerated and publically shared food and drink are prominently featured. Bakhtin writes:

The popular-festive banquet has nothing in common with static private life and individual well-being. The popular images of food and drink are active and triumphant, for they conclude the process of labor and struggle of the social man against the world. They express the people as a whole because they are based on the inexhaustible, every-growing abundance of the material principle.581

580 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984), 19. 581 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 302.

269

While Mahler’s parodist heavenly scene invokes the communal flesh of the grotesque, it is really the grotesque music that ensures the symphony’s celebration of liminality and becoming. Critics insisted with their onomatopoetic language that the music’s timbre, color, and orchestral variety was grotesque, derb, and basely exaggerated. As argued in the previous chapters, musical color and orchestration were coded in musical aesthetics as the body of the music. Mahler’s sound bodies were anything but “sound,” as in smooth and healthy. Rather in scoring the melodies – in themselves the source of musical individuality – they spit and smirked as they emanated from each instrument and piled atop one another.

If Mahler’s polyphony was the source of his carnivalesque mixtures, their exaggerated

Klängfarbe or timbre made the musical interaction grotesque. Within German musical discourse dating back at least to Hanslick, instrumentation and color were considered the metaphorically corporeal aspect of music, as opposed its inner cerebral being in themes. Consequently, the grotesque sound colors of Mahler figure as something like attenuated, grotesque bodily actions of his music. Bahktin insists that it is the high valuation for exaggerated bodily functions that gives grotesque realism in someone like Rabelais its fleshy, communal properties. He writes, “The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements.”582 Bakthin further makes clear that this body is in contrast to the liberal individual: “The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.”583 The source of musical unity in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is not the interacting melodies (as potential ciphers of subjects), but the coarse coloration, the musical

582 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 26-27. 583 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19.

270

bodies that expanded into one another and pass back and forth. It is through the gate of the grotesque that the carnivalesque passes into the realm of the Dionysian.

Returning to Strauss for a moment, it is no accident that Don Quixote is his most

Mahleresque, indeed most carnivalesque and grotesque work. Not only does the music carnivalize a diversity of themes, but Cervantes’s episodes are replete with grotesque bodily activities and inverted social relations. Although Rabelais provided Bakhtin his most radical and explored example, he also recognized Don Quixote as “one of the most carnivalesque novels of world literature."584 In Strauss’s oeuvre of programmatic inspirations, Don Quixote stands as the only real novel, and so in staying faithful to that genre musically, the music is appropriately novelesque. Just as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is far more an epic than a novel, so also the interaction of themes in Strauss’s Zarathustra are more didactic. In fact, it is in moments of doubt about the solution to the world riddle that Strauss’s music is actually most carnivalesque, not in moments of affirmation.

An epic versus novelesque difference between Strauss and Mahler can also be seen in the choices for Nietzschean and festive music. In Zarathustra the choice of a waltz for the “Dancing

Song” was found to be particularly surprising and unsatisfactory for many critics, who, like

Nodnagel, expected something more “dionysian.”585 Perhaps the category of the Dionysian, which in its vitalist festivity shares much with the carnivalesque, is better served musically by something more grotesque and less homogenous than a bourgeois waltz. Mahler’s Fourth, by contrast, was a dionysian assuage of the miseries of life.586 By retaining elements of carnivalesque familiarity and grotesque liminality Mahler’s music reactivates the communal biopower of the Dionysian muted in Nietzsche’s later work. In fact, in The Birth of Tragedy,

Nietzsche himself explicitly names the Knaben Wunderhorn in the context of folk songs as a

584 Bakhtin, Problems, 171. 585 Nodnagel, “Musikbriefe: Berlin,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 28, no. 13 (25 March 1897): 182-184. 586 See the review of Mahler's Fourth Symphony in the Münchener Post from November 25, 1901.

271

source of the unfixed, dynamic Dionysian. About Arnim’s and Brentano’s collection he says that the “continuously generating melody scatters picture sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and steady flow.”587 One wonders if Mahler had such analysis in mind when setting “the Heavenly

Life” to music. Not only does the novelesque humor and polyphony undermine the transcendence of epic styles, but the incessant acceleration and deceleration of the soprano’s lines aptly fit the spontaneity and verve of Nietzsche’s dionysian.

As with Strauss in Zarathustra and Feuersnot Mahler chooses waltzes and popular songs to arouse festive and light-hearted associations. Yet with Mahler, the elaborate orchestration, ceaseless (re)entry of melodies, and oscillation of mood do not simply work to multiply the size of the music, as often seems to be the case with Strauss. Rather the music struggles to achieve coherence and remains light-hearted, giving the dance music a less staged and sterile feel. This contradiction between easy music and hard polyphony was frequently noted by critics of

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and also heard as old music mixed with “modern means.” For

Eichberg and others, such a conglomeration only comes across as caricature, a bad comedy.588

While the suspicion of caricature in Mahler rightly hints at its grotesquery, such suspicions completely miss the serious and affirmative achievements of the musical assembly.

Schmidt writes about the listener being repeatedly “expelled from the Viennese dance floor,” just when they were settling in.589 Additionally, E. E. Taubert writes that the “orchestral means contradict the simplicity of the motifs,” and that such “refinement” of the means undermined the

587 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 18. 588 Eichberg asks, “What meaning have these simplistic and cozy things, these deliberate leanings toward the old and oldest on the one hand, and on the hand this formlessness and massive fallacies, the newest of new, the ‘hypermodern’?” He does not go on to directly answer this rhetorical question, except to pin Mahler down as a caricaturist. i. "Kunst und Wissenschaft," Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (17 December 1901): 5-6. 589 Leopold Schmidt, "Aus den Konzertfälen," no. 640 (17 December 1901): 1.

272

“naivety” and “naturalness” of the Haydn- or Dittersdorf-like themes.590 Or in the words of N. from the VZ, “The most harmless themes imaginable transform with refined orchestral effects.”591

The sum effect of Mahler’s old fashioned melodies and polyphonic integration of those melodies modifies how musical elements are heard. Music that intimates “harmless,” “naïve,” and “natural” becomes affective (perhaps even harmful), conscious, and produced, that is, a human construct vs. the supposed purity of the non-human world. In the words of Adorno, it becomes second nature. Whatever gaiety is communicated by the music, it is an achieved and self-conscious joy, rather than a child-like, innocent joy. To employ the Nietzschean category, the simple airs of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony act out a becoming child, not a returning to childhood

– a becoming classicism, not a return to or restoration of musical classicism. The moment of verisimilitude in this becoming child is, of course, the Wunderhorn soprano solo. The naïve- lessly youthful final movement is a social event – a festival – in both the imagery and the return of the symphony’s numerous musical themes. If the last movement is the most superficial, it is purposefully so. In fact, the music is no longer deep or superficial, but a deepening of surface, a universalization of elementality. What is on first glace taken as superficial – the wide-eyed singing and Wunderhorn motifs – assumes a role that is quite serious and “cosmic,” to borrow

Bakhtin’s assessment of the grotesque. The festival fourth movement celebrates in images and tones the universal elementality of the bodily stratum, shared by all living beings. In the context of a symphony, one does not actually dance, but contemplate the gravity of such cosmic anti- gravity. The monist stratum of fleshy music, which like the novel is stylistically open-ended and inclusive, is not static, but a horizon-less plane of interpenetrating conflict. Mahler’s carnivalization in his Fourth Symphony achieves an effect far more dionysian than Wagnerian

590 E. E. T., "Feuilleton," Die Post, no. 590, evening edition (17 December 1901): 2: "Die Themen, aus denen die Sätze sich entwickeln, athmen eine Naivität, eine kindliche Harmlosgkeit, die an die Haydn’sche oder Dittersdorffsche Art erinnern, man kann aber nicht an die Natürlichkeit dieser Empfindung glauben, denn aus der Ausnutzung der orchestralen Mittel spricht ein Ueberraffinement, das in schreiendem Widerspruch zu der Einfachheit der Motive steht." 591 n. "Theater und Musik," Vossische Zeitung, no. 591, morning edition (18 December 1901): 3

273

music drama or Strauss’s works. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony never really ends, resolves, or congeals, but merely fades away, as a curtain falling in the midst of an ongoing drama, like

Bakthin’s material cycles of the earth.

The Nietzschean overtones of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony should not be underestimated.

While the connection between Nietzsche and Mahler’s Third Symphony is obvious and a frequent point of discussion, scholars rarely find Nietzschean themes in the closely connected Fourth

Symphony.592 Not only is the fourth movement of his Third Symphony built around an alto solo singing “the Midnight Song” from Zarathustra, but Mahler contemplated calling the whole thing the “My Gay Science.” Just as Strauss’s Zarathustra loosely invokes Nietzsche in order to tell a story of human development, Mahler’s Third Symphony likewise intones an evolutionary progression, but on a much larger scale than Strauss. Initially, the final movement for the Third

Symphony was going to be titled “what the child told me,” using the material that Mahler decided to save for the finale of the Fourth Symphony. Whatever the reasons for this omission, the change partially alters the Nietzschean message of the Third Symphony, by substituting child-like yea-saying for a purely musically, almost New German adagio in the finale.593 The Third

Symphony retains Nietzsche’s existential nausea and questions, but omits his answers.

Nevertheless, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony very much functions as a continuation of the Third, or perhaps even an alternate, less transcendent ending. It is as if the grand conclusion needed a whole symphony’s worth of space. Given that both symphonies were largely written as a build up to the same conclusion, they share many melodies that finally unite in the finale of the Fourth

Symphony. There are also structural and programmatic parallels, such as the angelic imagery of

592 Despite his attempt, the only connection Carl Niekerk can find between Nietzsche and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is perhaps the composer’s attempt to critique the hollowness of religion. See Carl Niekerk, “Mahler Contra Wagner: The Philosophical Legacy of Romanticism in Gustav Mahler’s Third and Fourth Symphonies,” The German Quarterly 77, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 188-209. 593 William McGrath attributes the change to a specific mystical experience of Mahler's. On a more pragmatic level, one could argue that the Third Symphony was simply becoming too long and Mahler had to end it sooner than he originally planned. Furthermore, one could argue that the negative reactions to his First Symphony dissuaded him from another lighthearted ending.

274

the fifth movement in the Third Symphony and finale in the Fourth Symphony, which basically have the same liberating light-heartedness youthful voices after each symphony’s heaviest movement.594 The major difference between them is what music gets the last word: the longing adagio movement (last in the Third, second to last in Fourth) or a movement of merriment (last in the Fourth, second to last in the Third), a distinction which makes all the difference in each symphony’s overall meaning.

Given its initial context within the Third Symphony, as well as the remaining links between the two symphonies, “the Heavenly Life” of the Fourth Symphony, despite its Christian imagery, represents an Uebermensch-like, becoming child. Within in the context of the Third

Symphony the movement’s becoming-child is the culmination of an evolutionary narrative replete with humanity’s nauseating existential crisis, whereas localized in the Fourth Symphony it is a less evolutionary and more immediate human achievement. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony then is an extended meditation on learning to laugh and dance, and laugh while dancing. Indeed

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is one long series of dances. In Mahler, perhaps more than in

Nietzsche, the guilt free gaiety of becoming child also entails a becoming common. In contrast to the privation and privatization of food in Mahler’s Wunderhorn song “the Earthly Life” where the mother’s autarkic economy makes no reference to a larger community, the abundance and production of food in “the Heavenly Life” is profoundly shared with no reference even to family as the horizon of community.

For example see the central stanza of “the Heavenly Life:”

Good greens of every sort grow in the heavenly vegetable patch, good asparagus, string beans, and whatever we want. Whole dishfuls are set for us! Good apples, good pears and good grapes, and gardeners who allow everything!

594 In fact, the fifth movement in the Third Symphony was going to be “what the morning bells told me,” a more Nietzschean/earthly affirmation.

275

If you want roebuck or hare, on the public streets they come running right up. In this child-like ideal, desire is intuitively fulfilled “on the public streets,” in this case, the desire for specific foods. It is a scene of “whatever we want.” The flow of wine and other pleasures in the poem certainly depicts a utopian society, but notably not one based on political categories of rights, liberty, or equality, but founded in physical well-being, bodily connections, and overflow of life. Here the affirmative biopolitics of the Dionysian and carnivalesque emerge in the contrast to the negative declination of sovereignty. Rather than a politics of protection, the elimination of obligation, the removal of threats, and life-less guarantees, the symbolic festival scenes of bacchanal and carnival are based on discharge, surplus, and the intensification of biological processes. In fact, the Dionysian and carnivalesque make no distinction between life and politics, which are already co-implicated in one another. In other words the production of equalities through the inversion of hierarchies and norms is inseparable and impossible aside from the biological grotesquery. Yet what the carnivalesque probably more than the Dionysian ensures is that the flows of desire do not congeal into single-headed mob. Make no mistake about pure difference, there is the common use of commons – the functioning of biological systems. In

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony the common festivity is narrated by the soprano, but the music ensures a multiplicity of thematic participants – a variation of dance steps that are nonetheless dancing together.

Feuersnot begins by articulating such a Nietzschean immunitary reversal, only by the end to return to a new form of social immunity and contract. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony by contrast never erects the barriers of protection or homogenization, nor completely expels dangers. The different trajectories of the two works are evinced by the location of the child-driven festivals, which begin Strauss’s opera, but conclude Mahler’s symphony. Additionally, if the immunitary reversal of Feuersnot is sustained by the narrative, Mahler’s symphony performs the act primarily through musical carnivalization, which is then confirmed by the lyrics of the finale. According to

276

critical discourse of the early 20th Century, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony harbored sick and dangerous music within its polyphony. The characterization of themes as “foreign” gives the threatening music a particularly anthropomorphic and political visage.595 The reviewer for the

NMZ writes that the “combination of elements from Viennese folk music and heterogeneous atmosphere moments - Indeed such opposition! – made everyone want to picture a gaggle of

Turkish guards.”596 Given the strong Viennese associations with this symphony, it is noteworthy that music’s supposed undermining of innocence also generated associations of a city under siege from Eastern threats. In his review of Mahler’s symphony, William Ritter described Vienna as a

“carnival of races,” bringing together the carnivalesque nature of the music, the biopolitical metaphor of immunitary reversal within the symphony, and multinational Vienna as a site of such conflict and potential.597 Within its critical context, Mahler’s music stands in for a chaotic, multinational society – but celebrates it without fear. Even in the symphony’s concluding heavenly scene danger is not fully excluded or resolved musically or lyrically. Herod the butcher remains a figure in heaven, and a seemingly necessary one for the festivities. The idyllic music constantly returns to the conflicting themes, deemed “pathological” by critics. As a symphony with heavy Nietzschean connections, the symphony’s becoming child retains much of the affirmative biopolitics within Nietzsche’s thought, without resorting to the immunizing reterritorialization or infatuation with overcoming in the finales of his Second and Third symphonies.

Adorno similarly insists on the utopian yearnings of Mahler’s music, but considers them unfulfilled and ultimately pessimistic and nostalgic – Mahler as a poor yea-sayer. However, despite being the negative dialectician or perhaps in his immanent negation, Adorno projects utopia as without conflict. In Adorno’s reading, one can see the limits of deconstruction and

595 See Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzertfälen,” no. 640 (17 December 1901): 1. 596 A. H., “Gustav Mahlers neueste Symphonie,” Neu Musik Zeitung no. 1 (1901): 6. 597 See William Ritter's review of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, quoted in Henri-Louis de la Grange, Mahler: Volume One (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973): 649-51.

277

negation. Regardless of its pessimism or optimism, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, nevertheless, in articulating utopian scenes, articulates ideal political aspirations. Whatever the hinterworldly element of Mahler’s music generally, in his Fourth Symphony earthly, bodily delight is the measure of perfection that serves to critique the failure of social systems meet such basic desires.

The utopian solution is not properly political, but biopolitical – imminently material rather rooted in transcendent, abstract rights. This is the Nietzschean politics of the musical secession at its communal and altruistic outer edge.

I have gone into such depth analyzing Feuersnot and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, because of their pivotal role in the development of musical modernism. They premiered at the exact moment that the secessionist movement – the first wave of German musical modernism – was coalescing institutionally and in view of contemporaries. Additionally, these two works helped define the secessionist movement, less in terms of its indeterminate aesthetic style than its philosophical Nietzscheanism. Part of this influence was simply quantitative, since Feuersnot and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony received more press than any of their previous works. These intertwined compositions headlined the birth of the musical secession, which expanded for several years in prominence until the widespread crisis of musical culture in 1907. Those two topics – the spread of the secession and the ensuing crisis – are the subjects of the final two chapters.

278

CHAPTER FIVE The Musical Secession as a Mediation of Modernity

During the summer of 1901 Strauss went to the ADMV festival in Heidelberg with the expressed purpose of fomenting a revolution for contemporary music by getting himself elected president of that increasingly traditionalist organization.598 His successful coup and ensuing presidency of the ADMV from 1902-1907 opened up a new chapter in music history by once again making the ADMV a platform for young, experimental composers to have their works heard. More broadly his election was a recognition that musical culture was in flux. Late- romantic partisanship and power was waning as younger audiences wanted to hear new forms of music. Vehement support for Strauss and Mahler by a radical aesthetic faction confirmed for critics that a secessionist movement was at hand in music. If the new music of Strauss and

Mahler in the 1890s had uneasily coexisted within late 19th-century musical culture and positioned them as radical outsiders, they became in the dawning 20th Century the insider leaders of musical modernism. Though the secessionist label propery fit organizations like the MGMT in

Munich and the VST (Vereinigung schaffender Tönkunstler) in Vienna that broke away from each city’s philharmonic, Strauss’s own “secession” broke back into existing institutions.

The more prominent waves of “modernist” music – New German, Second Viennese

School, Neo-classicism, Gebrauchsmusik, Young Ravelites, – have managed to eclipse the secession in the historical record. In some cases this was done on purpose.599 Historians and musicologists acknowledge Strauss and Mahler as leaders of their era, but usually as the last in a long line of romantic innovators, and not as the leading members of a distinct movement with its own organizations, aesthetic, and worldview. The biographical myopia of most music research has also obscured the way composers were attached to broader structures. Biographies of Strauss

598 See Matthew Boyden, Richard Strauss (Boston: Northeastern University Press), 155. 599 Dahlhaus notes that the broad and obfuscating term “late romantic” was invoke by apologists for contemporary music and new objectivity in the 1920s. So began the re-writing of the fin de siècle. See Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 334.

279

tend to say little, if anything, about his relationship with ADMV, the most important organization in German musical culture, which he temporarily radicalized.600 By contrast, Mahler is historiographically quarantined to “fin de siècle Vienna,” erasing his deep relevance to Berlin,

Munich, the ADMV, and the musical secession, its Viennese branch not excluded.601 Perhaps other avant-garde schools have overshadowed the musical secession because they possessed more doctrinaire and polemic leaders. The prose output and public statements by Strauss and

Mahler were meagre compared to someone like Schoenberg and were never aimed to codify an aesthetic or movement. Even in the midst of the 1907 crisis of the musical secession, Strauss’s essays display a disinterest in aesthetics, debate, and the whole distinction of avant-garde.602

During that crisis it was actually Max Reger who became the vocal leader for modernism and took it in new directions.

The prominence of a musical secession was short lived – no longer than a decade – but it was a tumultuous era in German musical culture, heradling a restructuring of music and criticism.

The emergence of the secession upset the balance of the two party system in German musical culture and ushered in major adjustments in writing about music. Established critics reached across the aisle in the War of the Romantics, uniting in a common front of new musical conservatism against the musical secession. Additionally, just as secessionists did not neatly compose within the late romantic bounds, so also a new generation of critics did not stick to the old forms of writing. These circles of largely younger critics included both vocal supporters of the musical secession, as well as new, “historicist formalists” who stood outside the late romantic partisan debates about absolute music. A common factor uniting new musical criticism, even by

600 Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Matthew Boyden, Richard Strauss (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999); Raymond Holden, Richard Strauss: A Musical Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Bryan Randolph Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 601 A recent example is Carl Niekerk, Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010). 602 Richard Strauss, “Is There an Avant Guarde in Music?” Recollections and Reflections, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. L. J. Lawrence (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974): 12-17.

280

some of the older critics, was the assertion that musical relationships mediated social relationships. By mediation I invoke Adorno’s concept of social structures unconsciously permiating aesthetic forms.603 Compositions are not immediate, independent and spontaneous particularities, but mediated by the whole of history and culture, so that they become sedimented in the composition’s very form. In fact the “historicist formalists” like Julius Korngold, David

Joseph Bach, and Max Graf should be seen as precursors to Adorno. Specifically, critics suggested that secessionist music mediated modernity’s affinities for Nietzsche, urban stimulation, and technophilia. Using these three themes critics coherently defined the secession as modernist music, that is, as expressing modernity, defined as urbanity and democracy, both serious threats to national health.

This chapter examines the expansion of the musical secession up through 1905, the year of Salome’s premiere. I first look at Strauss’s transformation of the ADMV festival into a secessionist showcase for his young followers and colleagues. Through the avowed

Lebensphilosophie interests of the movement, as well as the how critics characterized it, the secession was intimately linked with Nietzschean vitalism. The center of this chapter focuses on

Mahler’s Third Symphony, the crowning jewel of the secessionist coup. While the reception was quite varied, the evolutionary themes of the symphony sparked biological discussions of cultural issues. Indeed, during this height of the secession, health became common currency in musical discourse. Across aesthetic party affiliation, good music was defended for its healthiness, and not simply vice versa.

With the reception of Mahler’s Third Symphony and the spread of the musical secession, one can see a turn toward cultural criticism within music criticism. Rather than simply analyzing the forms of the new music, reviewers began to read broader social significance into compositions. Specfically the secession was heard to intone metropolitan stimulation and the

603 On mediation in Adorno see Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Especially chapter 3.

281

growing penchant for Technik over Kultur. The premiere of Strauss’s only major new work in this period – Sinfonia Domestica – reinforced these associations with the secession, and raised fears among new conservatives about neurasthenia and the revolt of the masses. With the advent of mediation in musical criticism, aesthetic problems morphed into outright social problems. As a new aesthetic party and musical population, the secession was viewed as an unhealthy growth.

In representing Nietzschean vitalism, overstimulation, and mindless technology, the musical secession stood for volatile productive powers. Within the biomorphic discourse of musical aesthetics, the compositions of the secession mediated abberant life forms, not simply zoe, but monstrously dangerous creatures whose bodies could not be controlled by their mind or any mind. Within the aesthetic politics of German musical culture, these celebrations and denunciations of exuberant vitalism had (metaphorically) biopoltical implications. More than ever, musical culture was monitored and regulated according to the perceived (and metaphorical) vitality of compositions. Yet, within the context of mediation and general fear about the rise of the secession, much like the threatening democratic politics of Central Europe, the biopolitical regulation of music became increasingly literal. Musical expressions were managed for their effect on human poputions, literal living organisms. However, it was not until after the crisis of the secession in 1906-07 that new conservatives began their counter revolution, replete with removal of biological threats. That will be covered in the final chapter.

Strauss’s ADMV Festivals as Sucessionist Rallies

At the 1901 ADMV festival, Strauss lived out the narrative of Kunrad. At the time

Feuersnot was completed, but yet to be premiered. Strauss had left the organization in 1898 after failing to be elected president. He even declined his consolation election to the leadership committee rather than sharing power with its more conservative members.604 However, in 1901 he returned to run for president, only on the condition that the committee be nearly gutted of

604 See Kennedy, Richard Strauss, 108; Boyden, Richand Strauss, 155.

282

those that opposed him. Under the previous presidents – Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf and

Fritz Steinbach – the organization had steered toward increasingly older works, Italian composers, safe repertoire, and even reconciliation with formalists. Under Strauss, only

Lessmann remained from previous leadership, though even his influence was muted. While formally Strauss expressed a desire to keep programming open and inclusive, he was able to transform it into an organ for the secessionists. Programming decisions remained in the hands of the steering committee, but Strauss was able to press his influence and even override its vote, as in the case of getting Mahler’s Third Symphony performed against Lessman’s will at the 1902 festival.605 Simultaneously, Strauss began conducting a new concert series in Berlin that showcased new music and was critical for getting Mahler’s Fourth Symphony performed there.

During the years that Strauss was president of the ADMV (1902-1907) the festival became again – as it had been under Brendel – a forum primarily for contemporary composers, especially those whose works were too radical or involved to be easily performed elsewhere. The first festival under Strauss’s direction – in Krefeld in the summer of 1902 – boasted performances of no less than 31 contemporary composers and an orchestra of one hundred and sixteen members.606 The crowning achievement and widely acknowledged highlight of the festival was the world premiere of Mahler’s Third Symphony. In fact, Mahler’s works were so prominently featured at the ADMV festivals under Strauss that Paul Marsop snidely dubbed it the

“Allgemeiner deutscher Mahler Verein.”607 However, it would be much fairer to describe it as

Strauss’s society, as many of the young composers whose works were performed were described as members of the Straussian school or at least under the influence of Strauss.

Max Hehemann, secessionist supporter, described the 1902 festival in Krefeld as a

605 Gustav Mahler, Richard Straus: Correspondence, 1888-1911, ed. Herta Blaukopf, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124-25. 606 On the large Krefeld orchestra see Wilhelm Klatte, “Die 38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins zu Krefeld,” Die Musik 1, no. 4 (1902): 1761. 607 Paul Marsop, “Die Konfusion in der Kritik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 12 (1907): 250.

283

“Young Germany musical parade.”608 Aside from the conventional festival ending “Kaisermarch” by Wagner and Liszt’s infrequently performed “Christus,” the festival showcased by a variety of young, contemporary composers. The formal inclusion of old guard standards Wagner and Liszt functioned like the lingering presence of the mayor in Feuersnot’s Munich, which in reality was run by Kunrad, i.e. Strauss. The musical “Young Germany” included not only Strauss and

Mahler, but composers who had similarly had a measure of success in the 1890s including Wolf,

D’Albert, Humperdinck, Weingartner, , and Max Schillings. However, the most monumental and unique part of the programming was the vast number of minor Straussians, the most well-known of which were Leo Blech, Conrad Ansorge, Hermann Bischoff, Otto Naumann, and Siegmund von Hausseger. The festival featured a large number of tone poems and especially lieder, which enabled so many composers to be heard over the span of six concerts. The lieder matinee even included a work by Max Reger, who was quickly becoming the most famous contemporary composer of absolute music, but nonetheless considered a secessionist in his own right.609 These composers remained the mainstay of Strauss’s festival programming and the core of the musical secession until he was ousted from the presidency in 1907.610 Never before had

German musical culture’s most avant-garde contemporary composers had such broad and national exposure. After Strauss’s presidency they never would again.

While no doubt these composers represent a variety of styles, as a whole they coalesced into a perceived movement, a coup by the young, the moderns, the secessionists. Edmund Uhl., correspondent for the FZ, begins his account of the Krefeld festival by saying that it could be summed up in one phrase: a “musical secession exhibition.”611 As a formalist Uhl sees Strauss as

608 Max Hehemann, “38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Krefeld,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 69, no. 26 (18 June 1902): 365. 609 See Max Hehemann, “Max Reger,” Die Musik 4, no 16 (September, 1905): 410-424. 610 Other notable secessionist composers not featured at this festival include Jean Louis Nicodé, Oscar Fried, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg. 611 Edmund Uhl, “Feuilleton: Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Krefeld,” Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 159 (10 June 1902): 1.

284

hardly doing anything different than Liszt before him, but identifies Strauss’s presidency of the

ADMV as an attempt to preserve the organization’s history as an “alliance of every progressive- minded spirit.”612 That the ADMV had been taken over by a new musical faction was immediately obvious to reviewers of its annual festivals. Paul Marsop and Arthur Seidl both describe the reformed society as part of a trend towards “Ortsgruppe,” interest groups looking to promote a cause.613 Marsop, considers the word “allgemeine” (general) in ADMV somewhat ironic, given the relative aesthetic singularity of the new crop of tone poets. Leopold Schmidt even suggests that the challenging music of the new ADMV was not aimed at the public, but for its own members, reinforcing the partisan insularity of the secession.614

Schmidt’s review of the 1903 ADMV festival in Basel, which discusses its general spirit rather than analyzing specific compositions, reiterates the same sense of secession and offers an incisive analysis of this new musical movement. He says that new influences, best exemplified by Strauss, were taking the festival away from the New German tradition of Wagner, Liszt and

Berlioz. He complains that “these influences have penetrated the whole area of music; it is as if, after advancing a single point, one wants to choke out all other seeds of development, as if one had lost the awareness of the presence of other possibilities.”615 Schmidt goes on to usefully catalogue the new styles pursued by young composers, which he finds disastrous for music.

Common to Berlin musical criticism he emphasizes the expanded toleration of dissonance. Not only was the diatonic in retreat among contemporary music, but also architectonic form, originality of melody, inner content, and idealism. These composers emphasized the “how” with a showy lack of concern for moderation. Their works were large, loud, noisy, trivial, influenced

612 Edmund Uhl, “Feuilleton: Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Krefeld,” Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 159 (10 June 1902): 1. 613 Arthur Seidl, “Die 39. Tonkünstler-Versammlung in Basel,” Die Musik 2, no. 8 (1903): 54; Paul Marsop, “Von Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikverein: Ortsgruppen,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1904): 41-46. 614 Leopold Schmidt, “Die Tonkünstlerversammlung in Basel,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 300 (16 June 1903): 2. 615 Leopold Schmidt, “Die Tonkünstlerversammlung in Basel,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 300 (16 June 1903): 2.

285

by the extra-musical. Notably he observes the focus on “Klangfarbe” in new music:

However, their preference for “tone color” is always the decisive factor; orchestral stimuli are used for their own sake. Ultimately the comospers rely less consistently on the what then on the how, focusing their creative powers, not on thoughts, but on their attire. It is unbelievable, as if jokes [Gerluges] themselves often reduce the content of their pretentious works, if one considered it thematically. On cannot avoid the impression that in such cases, the complexity of the apparatus is intended only to cover the lack of originality of thought itself… There is apart from the lack of concise musical ideas still for a second repulsive [problem] with the products of the recent school of composers: that is the draw toward excess. Everwhere a chasing after the utmost, then slackening and finally eliciting reluctance. Insufferable duration, summoning all means of sound, accumulation of the harshest dissonances and a lingering in the most egregious Fortissimo, whose intensity is increased further by abrupt contrast – that all goes hand in hand. After all directions are always worked out to the endmost, regardless of whether it is internally justified or not.616

Schmidt here directly connects timbre with the productive means of “how” and superficiality, using the metaphor of clothing. Color is expected to be a vehicle or container for musical themes, not emphasized by the compositon.

Schmidt’s critique reads much like earlier critiques of Strauss and Mahler. In addition to excessive timbre, the above review from Schmidt critiques the massiveness of volume and duration in music, as was levied especially at Mahler’s Second Symphony. Schmidt finds secessionist music to not only lack concision, but to transition too quickly to seemingly unrelated idioms, like in Don Juan and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. However, by 1903 the eight violations of modernism outlined in chapter two are applied to a whole school of young composers. This new generation, while influenced by the giants of the New German School, differs palpably in its impure, derivative manner, which takes after Strauss. It is noteworthy that Schmidt commends

Strauss as the one new composer to actually provided some architectonic foundation to his mass of sound. His imitators were not seen to have his attention to form. Unlike his later analyses,

Schmidt does not at this moment offer solutions, nor make a social-political connection to modernity and mass society. Like the majority of earlier reviews of Strauss and Mahler, he lays

616 Leopold Schmidt, “Die Tonkünstlerversammlung in Basel,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 300 (16 June 1903): 2.

286

out the general style of their whole school and its perceived failures. In just a couple years,

Schmidt would begin to see the faults of society in the failures of new music.

These sucessionst festivals of the ADMV were frequently likened to parades, a public exhibition of an invested interest group. Writing for the formalist NMZ, Hans Pfeilschmidt describes a general disappointment with the new music in 1904:

So the festival was then in a manner a parade march of what one understands musically as the “secessionist direction.” A parade however now is certainly not yet victory. Few will have left from Frankfurt again without confessing to themselves in secret that the very rich program right there – where the pronounced secession marched – was relatively disappointing.617

Whatever the shortcommings of the “parade,” Pfeilschmidt makes it clear in his review that this movement had a Nietzschean tone to it. He describes the festival by linking it with Jean Louis

Nicodé’s , which was with Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica, the big draws of the festival:

The first title [On the Desire to Become and a Thousand Goals] would not have made a bad motto for the spirit of the entire festival. An urge to become of the greatest intensity spoke there to us…[It is] a restless work assisted by the urge to expand, a passionate search and struggle for the variety of goals, a striving of music to explode its artistic shell and to burst out in boundless floods, not only in the “Allkunst” as Richard Wagner meant it and Liszt also before, but almost in the collective intellectual life and essence of the time. It was not in the least in the essence of Friedrich Nietzsche, who should be thought of less for the conclusions of his philosophy as for his pronounced poetic style of philosophizing.618

With its Mahleresque proportions, including six movements, a boy soprano, a chorus, organ, harp, and large orchestra, Gloria represents for Pfeilschmidt the unbounded desire for becoming and expansion endemic to the secession. Specifically, he observes a tendency of secessionist music to spill beyond the borders of art itself, not just music itself, and communicate the dominate ideas of the time. As with Schmidt, he recognizes in Strauss’s ADMV the influence of the New German tradition, but also something new. The secession is post-New German in chanelling the spirit of

617 Hans Pfeilschmidt, “Das 40. Tonkünstlerfest des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins in Frankfurt A.M.,” Die Musik 3, no. 11 (1904): 446. 618 Hans Pfeilschmidt, “Das 40. Tonkünstlerfest des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins in Frankfurt A.M.,” Die Musik 3, no. 11 (1904): 446.

287

its own time, a spirit linked with Nietzsche, the consummate post-Wagnerian figure. Unlike other critics, Pfeilschmidt downplays the connection between Nietzsche’s thought and the worldview of members of the secession, yet he does find a correlation between secessionist musical style and

Nietzsche’s unsually method of philosophizing, presumably his curt assertiveness and extravagance.

From within and from without the German musical secession was heralded above all as a form of musical Nietzscheanism. After 1900 the specter of a recently deceased Nietzsche provided a major point of cohesion for the secessionists and the attempts by critics to interpret their music. This is especially true of the new crop of Straussians that the festival was able to promote. The Nietzsche connection was actually established by the composers themselves in their frequent use of Nietzsche’s writings as programmatic references in their compositions.

Strauss’s Zarathustra and Mahler’s Third Symphony are only the earliest and most famous of a whole series of Nietzsche-inspired compositions, many of which were performed at the ADMV festivals. These include Hausseger’s Dionysian Fantasie, E. N. von Reznicek’s Ruhm und

Ewigkeit, Oscar Fried’s Das trunkenes , Arnold Mendelssohn’s Aus dem Nachtlied

Zarathustra, Eugen Lindner’s Der Herbst, and serveral lieder by Fritz Kögel.619 The Nietzsche connection was also included in and strengthened by the discourse about the musical secession generated by critics. Not only did they consistently refer to the movement’s enthusiasm for

Nietzsche, but also characterized the music itself, particularly its high octane expressivity, as dionysian and Nietzschean. Within the biomorphic discourse of musical criticism, these compositions constituted new forms of musical life shaped by vitalist philosophy. Secessionist works were considered conversely excessive and exuberant, unhealthy mutants by detractors and healthy discharge by supporters.

In his 1905 article, “Nietzsche’s Significance for Modern Music,” Paul Riesenfeld

619 For a more complete list of Nietzsche compositions see Arthur Seidl, Moderne Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst (Regensburg: Bosse, 1900): 139-40.

288

provides a survey and interpretation of the Nietzsche fad among young tone poets.620 Like his more accomplished colleague Paul Bekker, Riesenfeld was a young critic hired around 1901 to write for the AM-Z who supported new music more enthusiastically than the journal’s editor,

Lessmann. They gave the AM-Z a more modern, less New German doctrinaire flavor than

Lessmann, whose influence was simultaneously waning within the ADMV. Riesenfeld’s stated claim for his article is to assess “why and how much Nietzsche’s ideology has influenced modern tone poets.”621 To suggest such an influence for the musical secession was hardly novel, but

Riesenfeld, like Seidl, offers the perspective of a supporter of new music, rather than simply using the Nietzschean label as slander and a shorthand for the ills of modernity. Riesenfeld’s article primarily focuses on the works of Strauss, but also considers his emulators who in varying ways and to varying degrees of accuracy set Nietzsche’s verses to music. Towards the end of the essay, he concludes that Nietzsche’s:

meaning for modern music lies also then not only in the fact that one’s products convert into music his thought and poetry at all cost, but in the cultivation of his spirit. It is in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche, which gives the modern composers the ability to carry forward from Richard Strauss’s initial reform work of the musical ideology in the sense of an enlightenment of the musical horizons through the displacement of pessimistic clouds. The musical disciples of Nietzsche would like to bring that to expression in their art, wherein their master became a master: the high art “to jump with both feet in gold-emerald rapture.”622

Here one can see the parameters of Riesenfeld’s analysis. The Nietzscheanism of modern music was not simply textual, but a “cultivation of his spirit,” which had bearing on instrumental music as contributing to the message. Moreover, Riesenfeld’s Nietzsche and the secession were, in opposition to late romanticism, vigilant combatants of pessimism and “Weltschmerz.”

Riesenfeld’s analysis of Strauss’s recent music and musical development very much echoes that established by Seidl almost a decade earlier. He tells a similar story of Strauss’s

620 Paul Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches Bedeutung für die moderne Musik,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 32 (16, 23, 32 June 1905): 427ff, 442ff, 457ff. 621 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 428. 622 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 459.

289

Nietzschean emancipation from Schopenhauer in which Guntram and Till Eulenspiegel serve as the fulcrum. However, as Riesenfeld is less beholden than Seidl to the Wagnerian tradition and the continuity of German culture, he praises this break with more elated language. In speaking about Strauss’s post-Guntram programmatic heroes, whom Riesenfeld calls a “soul-mirror” of

Strauss himself, he writes that they are

…the proclaimers of an aristocratic philosophy; in the opinion of their characters one can clearly read Nietzsche’s “pathos of distance.” Shadows of harsh energy, of serious grandeur and strong solemnity lie sometimes on their soulful countenance; then they are apostles of great, free personality, conquerors of smallish thoughts and morality. And if they find their devil all too serious, thorough, deep, and ceremonious, they kill there the “spirit of gravity” through liberating laughter and dancing and flying over the everyday outmoded fellow humans, away to the regions of Olympic mountain air. Or they deal with the whole wide world of the philistines as foxes of the carnival prince or ride as victory-conscious runaways and daredevils, who instead of the staleness of gray theory want to breathe the fresh air of Dionysian life spirit.623

Riesenfeld goes on to reiterate these same descriptions of Nietzschean ideology with numerous metaphors. Here, Riesenfeld clearly thinks of Nietzsche and Strauss’s characters as pretenious

“reformers” of cowardice thinking and values, but not bogged down by the seriousness of the task, able to revel in a weightless gaiety.

The markers of vitalism are everywhere is Riesenfeld’s description of Strauss and musical modernism. He consistently describes Strauss’s characters by endless and disruptive movement, who value physical experience over the wisdom and book learning of elders. They are driven by “instinctive impulses and recklessness,” who wish “to pluk the golden fruit from the youthfully green tree of life and, living healthy, bathe the passionate chest in the light of the morning thaw.”624 Such descriptors invoke my earlier of affirmative vitality in Feuersnot and

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and even invert the stereotype of Strauss as pathological. Rather, for

Riesenfeld, Straussian music is healthy in its Nietzschean overcoming of unhealthy music. In this narrative, Strauss’s transcendence of the pessimism of his forbearers is both a personal and

623 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 441. 624 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 441.

290

music-historical achievement. Through Nietzsche, Strauss was able to overcome “lung and soul disease,” perhaps a reference to both the tuberculosis of Tod und Verklärung and Strauss’s own personal illness retroactively, though incorrectly, associated with that work. In opposition to

“gloomy ingrown pessimistic worldview,” the “ailing pallor of mystical Weltschmerz,” “Salvation mud,” or the “musical nihilism of Tchaikovsky,”

So Strauss’s music has become an art full of brash comedy, slightly exhilarating passion and hearty, cheery high culture. One could call Strauss the antipode of Tchaikovsky’s musical nihilism; he gives us rather tones promulgating the positivity of our existence, sings for us the high song of existential desire and affirmation. His music is a “Yes and Amen Song” and for this reason not a means to squaring the root of life, but to its exponentiation.625

As Riesenfeld makes clear this cheery affirmation is not purely textual but also musical. There is something about Strauss’s “tones,” perhaps even color rather than melody per se, that he finds inherently additive in terms of the listener’s existential hunger. Just as with Brendel’s Young

Hegelianism, the critic Riesenfeld connects the latest in music (Strauss) with contemporaneous philosophical trends (vitalism).

Riesenfeld goes on in his article to analyze other overt Nietzschean musical settings that he had heard, which does not even exhaust the number that were written. Of these composers, he finds Arnold Mendelssohn’s and especially Oskar Fried’s works to be faithful to Nietzsche’s writings. Riesenfeld begins his article with a reference to Strauss’s even then famous advice to a young composer to “Read Nietzsche.” At the end he asserts that Fried had read Nietzsche “with penetrating understanding and capturing his spirit intuitively and creatively expressed.”626 Unlike musical settings of Nietzsche by Mahler, Renicek, and Kögel, which primarily focus on the existential crises articulated by Nietzsche, Fried intones a properly Nietzschean solution to existence. By contrast with Fried’s musical bacchanal, Riesenfeld finds Mahler’s Third

Symphony too otherworldly and mystical, while Renicek’s lieder are too brooding and

625 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 442. 626 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 459.

291

intellectual, overly reliant on texts to tell the story.627 Arnold Mendelssohn’s lieder strike a positive note, but a more “erotic” version of the Dionysian than Fried. According to Riesenfeld’s analysis, then, the common characterizations of Mahler’s other symphonies as bacchanal, dithyrambic, dionysian, or even Walpurgis-like should be read as bearing Nietzschean significance. While Mahler’s Third Symphony may lack at moments a decidedly Nietzschean message, his other compositions, especially his Fourth, do not.

The view of Fried’s compositions as faithful to Nietzsche’s philosophy was apparently widespread. In a biopic from 1905 on Fried by Hugo Leichtentritt, he writes, “He stands analogous to Nietzsche, who has hardly found in music a stronger interpreter as Fried.”628 The article was, in fact, part of a whole series in the NZfM on young composers, perhaps a recognition of their growing significance within the ADMV. Despite the fact that Leichentritt was not particularly fond of Fried’s “curious” “Drunken Song” he reiterates its gay urge for a jubilous experience. He particularly emphasizes the difficult “bacchanal Choral parts,” and the Heiterkeit of the part where they sing “my soul dances,” and “enormous jubilation.”629 When Wagnerian E.

E. Taubert reviewed Fried’s masterwork, he noted its power, but found it as incoherent and unhealthy as an ailing Nietzsche.630 After setting several of Nietzsche’s texts in his music, Fried moved onto Dehmel, including a version of “Transfigured Night,” less well-known than

Schoenberg’s version. Nevertheless, reviews of this piece describe Fried as “standing in the most extreme wing of the moderns, not only as a musician, but also, as it seems, in his social view.”631

As mentioned previously about the secessionists, critics and supporters seemed to lump them together as a camp, not merely or even primarily based on musical style, but on perceived ideological position. There was an elective affinity between radical music associated with Strauss

627 Riesenfeld, “Nietzsches,” 459. 628 Hugo Leichtentritt, “Tonsetzer der Gegenwart V.: Oskar Fried,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 71, no. 15 (5 April 1905): 316. 629 Leichtentritt, 313. 630 E. E. Taubert, “Konzerte: Berlin.” Die Musik 6, no. 18 (1906): 350-351. 631 Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 33, no. 1 (5 Jan 1906): 9.

292

(and sometimes Mahler) and radical thought associated with Nietzsche.

Aside from the sheer number of compositions that set Nietzsche’s texts to music, a strong connection linked Nietzsche’s thought and the musical secession, both as a collection of compositions and as an ideological circle. When compositions did not set Nietzschean texts to music, the link was even reinforced by vaguely Nietzschean-themed programs and, above all, by the insistence of critics that secessionist music was Nietzschean. The programs of works like

Hausegger’s “Dionysian Phantasie,” Nicodé’s “Gloria,” Bischoff’s “Pan,” and Naumann’s

“Junker Uebermut” certainly invoked Nietzschean aspirations for vital discharge. Rudolf Louis’s interpretation of Nicodé’s “Gloria” as well as Reznicek’s “Ruhm and Ewigkeit” at the 1904

ADMV festival provides an example of the “relationship with the fashionable Nietzscheanism of our day.”632 He criticizes the intellectual depth of these works, saying, “The most disastrous of the whole works is probably the boyish program, in the worst sense of the word, which one could cite as an example of the effect of Nietzsche’s influence on the brain of a school boy.”633 As earnest supporters of both Nietzsche and new music, Riesenfeld and Seidl were similarly aware of and confirm this “Mode-Nietscheanismus.” They even heed Nietzsche’s followers against jumping on the bandwagon carelessly or without a deep understanding. Such repeated concerns about the dangers of a Nietzschean fad among the youth and the secessionists, warnings by both supporters and detractors, only solidified the overwhelming affinities between Nietzschean vitalism and the musical secession.

While vitalism is not biopolitics, the Nietzscheanism of the secession morphed into the latter as its biological prerogative encountered law and partisan conflicts. As discussed in the previous chapter, the effervescence and cheerfulness of dionysian forms (musical and organic) ruptures the walls separating public and private, mind and body, self and other. As such exuberance violated the aesthetic laws of late romanticism, these Nietzschean compositions were

632 Rudolf Louis, “Tonkünstversammlung,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 15 no. 19 (1904): 407-408. 633 Rudolf Louis, “Tonkünstversammlung,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 15 no. 19 (1904): 408.

293

deemed unmusical, sonic zoe within the biomorphic discourse. Indeed given the biological language of Nietzsche’s writings, his associations with the secession only heightened the biological implications of their musical lawlessness. Regulating deviant musical forms increasingly meant dealing with their metaphorical vitality, using vitalist language to determine if such Nietzschean iconoclasm was indeed healthy. Assessing the health of a secessionist composition meant simultaneously judging the health of Nietzschean gestures, the brio of young secessionists.

Secondly, the vitalism of the secession became biopolitical in the process of becoming a tangible musical party. Whereas the music of Strauss and Mahler was something of a tolerable aberration in the 1890s, after Strauss’s coup of the ADMV it formed a leading edge of a distinct musical party, a new dangerous population in musical life. This population included not only the aggregate of compositions, but the enthusiastic throng of supporters, who were also viewed as threatening. If biopolitics is ultimately about the state and fate of the species, the secession created a crisis about the future of music. The secession was a tangible new breed within musical culture that threatened to displace other types of music. Dionysian compositions were not outliers to the state of music, but the determinate of the unstable condition of contemporary music. Critical discourse first established the secession as a circumscribed subpopulation of music, then increasingly characterized that population as dangerous. The rise of the secession was at least initially just a musical problem, but one wrapped in biological discourse that slowly migrated the problem from music to society more generally.

As will be explore in the following section, the third manner in which vitalism transitioned to biopolitics is in the universalization of health as a measure of good music. No longer did a few especially Hanslickian critics judge a work by its degree of healthiness, but nearly all, from every aesthetic camp. This turned political, at least within musical culture, as critics widely disagreed over the tenets of healthy music. The nature of biological well-being itself was up for debate and manipulation through the lens of music. While initially secessionist

294

music was lambasted as unhealthy by old guard critics, those who did defend it, did so precisely because of its healthiness. The vitalism of the secessionist entered into an aesthetic-political tug of war with critics fighting over the definition of healthy compositions and a healthy state of music. These vicissitudinal ambiguities of vitalism were heavily prominent in the reactions to

Mahler’s Third Symphony.

Mahler’s Third Symphony and the Vicissitudes of Musical Vitalism

Mahler’s Third Sympony was premiered at the 1902 ADMV festival in Krefeld. Given the organization’s heavy association with both Mahler and Nietzsche, the symphony was a fiting inauguration of the secessionist phase of the ADMV. A performance of the symphony, completed in 1897, had not been possible until Strauss amassed the necessary, large orchestral apparatus in

Krefeld, as well as an audience that would tolerate an hour and a half long work. Mahler’s Third

Symphony was not only welcomed at the ADMV, but was its crowning moment. While there was an extreme diversity to the reception of this symphony – including just how Nietzschean it was – critics were united in attributing to it some measure of vitalist philosophy. Entrenched opponents reaffirmed their distaste for Mahler, but couched their analysis of his over-zealous expressions in the language of health. Indeed, all of Mahler’s diverse supporters similarly praised the Third

Symphony for its metaphorical healthiness, making biological well-being the common standard of good aesthetics. Even those Mahler supporters who did not interpret the symphony as advocating untamed life force, nonetheless, placed Mahler’s music in a vitalistic context, if only as a Schopenhauerian extinguisher of insatiable will. Even those who disliked its biological emphasis, could not help but making reference to it, and drawing it into the musical sphere.

The reviews of Mahler’s Third Symphony from established formalists and Wagnerians read like carbon-copy critiques of his other symphonies: noisy, colorful, bizarre, lacking unity. Leading

Berlin critic Leopold Schmidt sums up his analysis of the Berlin concert by saying, “They most clearly reflect the ridiculous tendency to collapse minutia and the most complex representations, in which the cult of expressive means for its own sake sacrifices everything: invention, structure,

295

logical relationship.”634 This stereotypical interpretation of Mahler as convoluted means lacking the mark of mind was already present in the mid-1890s when Mahler conducted three of the symphony’s movements in Berlin. Whereas during that concert the third movement (the

Tierstück) had been the object of scorn – a decade later that was replaced by the first movement:

Pan’s awakening. Berlin formalist Eichberg cleverly notes that Pan must have been dead asleep to require so much “dreadful noise” to be woken.635 While the premiere at Krefeld offered an intermission between the third and fourth movements, the later concerts divided the piece between the first movement and the rest, giving that bacchanal first movement an autonomy of its own.

Despite growing positive support within the ADMV for Mahler, traditional Wagnerians like Lessmann and Muntz continued their heated disapproval of Mahler’s lack of substance.

Lessmann writes that the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony confirmed his previous unsympathetic view, because:

For my senses the unprecedented amount of expressive means stands in inverse proportions to the thought and feeling content of his work. Like others I also marveled at Mahler’s strange capacity for combinations of peculiar, often quite wonderful sound effects, but the inorganic plethora of details, partly grotesque, partly trivial and playful, referring to specific poetic ideas, shatter the structure of his symphonies, still largely one of the most horrible, cacophony inducing, violent and harmonically raping any previous notion of musical beauty through little independent and meaningful melodic invention. 636

As with his previous reviews of Mahler, he finds the music superficial and assaulting to both the listener and the very concept of music, calling it a rape of traditional beauty. Lessmann reaffirms his commitment to Brendel’s aesthetic by complaining that Mahler refused upon request to send his journal an explanation of the “underlying program” or thematic account of the symphony. As before, Lessmann throws up his hands in confusion and pain, stating, “it does not for me succeed

634 Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzerten,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 26 (Jan 15, 1907): 3. 635 “i.,” “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, no. 23 (15 Jan 1907): 6. 636 Otto Lessmann, “Die 38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, no. 25 (20 June 1902): 464.

296

in constructing a corresponding mental image from the terrible tone chaos, the ear-splitting dissonances and bizarre, heightened to repulsive ugliness of every instrumental effect.”637 Five years later, when the symphony was performed in Berlin, Lessmann confesses that his opinion of the first movement was much improved because of both Paul Bekker’s program and his ear’s acclimation to new, even worse music.638 This change demonstrates the New German dependency on detailed programs – which Mahler wanted to eschew – as well as the effect of the secessionist era in proliferating new music. One cannot know which “worse” pieces he means, but almost assuredly he had not yet heard Schoenberg, whose music had only been selectively performed in

Vienna, to little notice elsewhere. The years between Lessmann’s two reviews of Mahler’s Third

Symphony, 1902-1907, bracket the exact period of the secession’s predominance in the ADMV and German musical culture more generally. Because of the opportunities presented for new music during these years, even Lessmann’s ears could somewhat acclimate.

After the Viennese performance in 1904, Maximilian Muntz reiterated many of these same sentiments, though with a hyperbolic attenuation befitting his anti-Semitism. He says that the first movement, “is probably one of the strangest pieces of all time brought forward by serious music.”639 He further describes Pan’s awakening as a “masquerade,” continually emphasizing its discrepancy between means and ends. Notably, Muntz insists on the sickliness of the music and musical experience, though not in this case the composer. He refers to the “secessionist” symphony as possessing “artistic unhealthiness,” “sickly and bizarre passages,” and “nervous sickness of sensation.”640 Here the symphony itself is diagnosed as neurasthenic, a negative assessment that nonetheless reinforces the agitated sense of life common to strains of over- enthusiastic vitalists.

637 Otto Lessmann, “Die 38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, no. 25 (20 June 1902): 464. 638 AMZ 1907; Otto Lessmann, “Aus dem Konzertsaal,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, no. 3 (18 Jan 1907): 47-48. 639 M. M., “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung, no. 11840 (17 Dec 1904): 1-2. 640 M. M., “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung, no. 11840 (17 Dec 1904): 1-2.

297

With Mahler’s Third Symphony, the composer finally received a large degree of public advocacy, mostly by a younger crop of critics. Inverting the frequently rehearsed rhetoric of

Mahler’s unhealthiness, these supporters invoked the expanding and politicized rhetoric of health to praise Mahler’s music. Max Hehemann, native of Krefeld and proponent of Reger, calls

Mahler a “great one” with “primal power” and “health.”641 While fully acknowledging the complexities of Mahler’s works – the interweaving of motifs (which he compares to Strauss), the folk-like vulgarities, the rich instrumentation, and brutality – he also recognizes a clarity of expression. For those who were not confused, he says, “Mahler has spirit, a fresh nature soul that, despite all the oddities, speaks to us with the magic of innermost health, which in these days we sorely miss.”642 Much like Reger’s own writings, Hehemann appropriates the language of cultural despair and declining health established by aesthetic conservatives, but sees in new music not the problem, but the cure.643

Noted secessionist critic Ludwig Schiedermair likewise praises Mahler’s Third

Symphony as a narrative of the ever-expanding urge for life. In contrast to Hehemann, a young critic with formalist roots, Schiedermair, exposing his New German heritage, embraces Mahler as a tone poet. Much like Seidl’s early appraisal of Strauss, Schiedermair wrote the first monograph on Mahler and interpreted him as Nietzschean.644 After all, both writers hail from the MGMT, the original secessionist organization for German music. Schiedermair interprets Mahler’s Third

Symphony in light of perceived leitmotifs, primarily the development of the so-called “life-will motif.” Indeed, much of William McGrath’s leitmotivic reading of Mahler’s Third Symphony in

Dionysian Art and Populist Politics seems to borrow unknowingly from Schiedermair. This

641 Max Hehemann, “38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Krefeld,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 69, no. 26 (18 June 1902): 365. 642 Max Hehemann, “38. Tonkünstler-Versammlung zu Krefeld,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 69, no. 26 (18 June 1902): 365. 643 See for example Max Reger, “Degeneration und Regeneration in der Musik,” Neue Illustrierte Musik- Zeitung 29, no. 3 (1907): 49-51. 644 Ludwig Schiedermair, Gustav Mahler: eine biographisch-kritische Würdigung (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann, 1901).

298

ascending melody first occurs in measure 27 and thereafter recurs in various forms in each movement.645 In the fourth movement, in which an alto solo accompanies the orchestra, the fullest expression of the motif in the vocal melody sings the words “all desire wants deep, deep eternity,” a quote from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. As the conclusion to Nietzsche’s “Midnight

Song,” the recognition that the will wants to live forever, or live as if it is part of the cyclical eternal recurrence, stands as a triumph over the nihilistic will to die in light of the struggles of early existence. Within the original Nietzschean context of this line, the desire to live takes on meaning as “deeper” than both the “day” and “woe,” making survival perhaps more primal than reason and hardship. Consequently, this leitmotivic precision of meaning provides the basis for

Schiedermair and others to read the symphony’s thematic development in light of this melody and its assertion of a desire to live. Whether it is the awakening of spring in the first movement or the melancholic wrestling with life’s woes in the fourth movement, the recurrence of the life will theme unites the desire of living beings to break away from not living.

Not surprisingly, Nodnagel was appalled by Schiedermair’s specific poetic-philosophical explanation of Mahler’s Third Symphony, especially because Schiedermair’s published his interpretation as a guide book, which was widely referenced at the Krefeld premiere and, according to Nodnagel, led to misunderstandings. Nodnagel might have exaggerated the influence of Schiedermair’s reading, given that ADMV steering committee member Lessmann does not seem to have known about it. In his mission to make over Mahler as a formalist – a mission which the composer only hesitantly encouraged – no program would do. In an open letter to Schiedermair, Nodnagel tries to undermine his opponent’s legitimacy by suggesting blatant errors in his interpretations of Mahler and other composers. Nodnagel suggests the reductionism of labeling the “life-will motif” the central theme, given its relatively brevity, infrequent deployment, and lack of development. Secondly, he mocks Schiedermair for

645 Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 3, Universal Edition (Vienna, n.d.), 8.

299

suggesting that Arnold Mendelssohn better interpreted Nietzsche’s “Mitternachtlied” in “Aus dem

Nachtlied Zarathustra” than Mahler in the fourth movement of his Third Symphony. Nodnagel delightfully points out that Mendelssohn was setting Nietzsche’s “Nachtlied” from book two of

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Mahler the “Mitternachtlied” from the third and fourth book.646 While Nodnagel was apt to separate Mahler from program music and the radicalism of the secessionists, like them, he affirmed the health of Mahler’s music.647

Just as Mahler’s Third Symphony became a platform for supporters like Hehemann,

Schiedermair, and Nodnagel to interpret the composer’s legacy, so also Bruno Walter, the greatest of Mahler’s apostles, launched his interpretation of Mahler in 1909 with an analysis of this symphony. Walter published his reading of this symphony in the first edition of Der Merker, the first music journal to advocate heartily for post-Wagnerian music. The journal’s editors were

Richard Batka and Richard Specht, the latter of whom wrote laudatory monographs on both

Mahler and Strauss. On this preeminent stage, Walter as an intimate of the recently emigrated

Mahler, published his unique and lasting view of the composer. Walter provides a glimpse into the likely accurate estimation of Mahler himself that the music’s meaning existed between the specifics of the programmatic titles and the formal musical relationship. In this way, Walter shows Mahler’s embrace of formal ambiguity with relation to the genres of the War of the

Romantics. Yet, Walter insists that Mahler only provided the titles as an aid to the listener, which he later found only hindered the sought after purely musical (though not necessarily formalist) experience.

While Walter is one of the fountainheads of the view of Mahler as a composer of absolute music, he steered Mahler’s legacy in a new direction. Whereas Nodnagel celebrated and explained the formal integrity of Mahler’s works in detail, Walter strongly emphasized the

646 Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Offener Brief an Herrn Dr. Ludwig Schiedermair,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, no. 34/5 (22, 29 August 1902): 570-72. 647 Ernst Otto Nodnagel, Musikalische Wochenblatt 28 no. 40 (10 September 1897): 526.

300

listener’s musical experience as mystical. Citing Nietzsche, not from Zarathustra, but from the

Wagnerian Birth of Tragedy, Walter suggests that Mahler’s programs are suggested dream-like images that emerge from the “dionysian-musical enchantment.”648 However, these images are far from equal for Walter, who seems to point to the adagio of Mahler’s Third Symphony as the real

Mahler, the mystical transcendence of the violence of the natural world. For Walter, violence seems to be a very immediate threat, even within the musical expression of Mahler. As with other contemporaries Walter notes the grotesquery, humor, and banality of the early movements, but intentionally tries to downplay the view of Mahler as light-hearted. For Walter the first movement no doubt demonstrates the dionysian potential and danger of both music and nature, but he presents them not as the achievements of life, but that aspect of life which must be overcome. In a mirror of Wagnerian defenses of Strauss, Walter makes the serious Mahler, the real Mahler. Walter, like McGrath, reads Mahler’s Third Symphony as more akin to

Schopenhauer than Nietzsche.649 Through a transcendental aesthetic experience, as well as an ascetic abandonment of humor, the music (like the participant listener) negates the will.

While performances of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony marked the coming to public consciousness of a secessionist movement rooted in Nietzsche, it is with the Third Symphony that secessionists and other Mahler supporters took to ardently defending his music publically and as something healthy. Yet, as I have shown, that defense differed widely. A major index of that difference was how critics heard each movement’s relationship to Nietzschean vitalism. Perhaps no movement was more divisive than the first. For every old guard critic the excesses of the

Pan’s awakening in the first movement pointed to all that was wrong and sick in modern music and culture. For his supporters – Schiedermair, Hehemann, Bach, Nodnagel, and to a lesser degree Julius Korngold – it was the ultimate expression of musical vitalism, even health. The

648 Bruno Walter, “Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie,” Der Merker 1 (1909): 9-11. 649 Walter’s conclusion and view of Mahler as mystic in many ways coincides with that of McGrath. The biggest difference is that Walter rejects the Schiedermair leitmotivic approach of McGrath and his emphasis on overcoming existential crisis.

301

reception of the first movement divides sharply between old and new (young) critics. With the first movement, Mahler summed up the spirit of the first ADMV festival as a secessionist coup, a festival that also featured dionysian music from Strauss, Blech, Schillings, Ansorge, Pfitzner,

Naumann, and even another work about Pan by Bischoff. Pan’s awakening in Mahler’s Third

Symphony symbolized the awakening of a movement of musical modernism, replete with an emancipatory philosophy of life. The opening of Mahler’s Third Symphony like the opening programming of the ADMV under Strauss placed en vogue Lebensphilosophie at the forefront of the movement. Against a tradition and organization in which musical elements and corporeality were sleeping – an enforced sleep – spring dawned in the ADMV, giving birth to new forms of musical flesh. In a partisan display of affirmative biopower, the secessionist “parade” marched to

Pan’s tune.

Musical Criticism as Cultural Criticism

The emergence of the musical secession marks a serious upsurge in the amount of cultural criticism within music reviews. The reception of Mahler’s Third Symphony, his first premiere after Strauss’s secessionist coup, marks a significant rise in mediation. As in Adorno’s writings, the slippery notion of mediation refers to the broad way formal aesthetic structures reflect and even bear the imprint of contemporaneous social structures. Critics during this high tide of the secession began to assume some level of mediation in musical works, using their reviews to comment on society in addition to music. The most common themes in these writings was the focus on neurasthetic sickliness and an obsession with technological production. A turn toward cultural criticism and even historicism within music criticism can be seen amongst a younger generation of Viennese critics and German critics influenced by the historian Karl

Lamprecht. Within the context of the surge of secessionist music, critics asserted that this new music illuminated contemporary conditions, especially the ills of urban modernty.

Mahler’s Third Symphony and Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica were first performed in

Vienna in 1904, ushering in a new era of criticism for that city. The latter, which will be

302

discussed in the next section, was part of the secessionist VST programing. The old guard of formalists and Wagnerians were predictably opposed, but by 1904 one can detect the growth of new factions and modes of criticism. Muntz, who is hardly representative, not only considered the music sick, as discussed above, but as a reflection of a sick time. His early criticisms of

Mahler had considered the composer himself as a reflection of social degeneration, but did not write about the music itself as harboring social forms in its musical forms. However, in 1904 he emphasizes the “secessionist” work as a mediation of modern, self-obsessed culture, and likewise, offers the hope that, “A coming time will undoubtedly correct these erroneous decisions.”650 In the process of critiquing Mahler’s Third Symphony, Muntz slips from musical criticism to explicit cultural criticism, an increasingly common facet of reviews. The performance of this symphony – the first grand achievement of the formal musical secession – provides an opportunity for reviewers to critique not simply the music, the musical movement, and the composer, but modernity itself.

More significantly and more representative than the anti-Semitic Muntz, there was in

Vienna a new generation of formalists no longer consumed with the polemics of the War of the

Romantics. These new formalists did not offer knee-jerk reactions to new music, but rather penetrating analysis which sought to explicitly link music to society. These musical critics were also cultural critics who rejected music’s autonomy. Mahler’s Third Symphony was the first major work of new music to be reviewed by two such critics: David Josef Bach and Julius

Korngold. Arguably they penned the most well-written and insightful critiques of the symphony.

Both of these reviewers had recently taken over for major old-guard critics, Bach for Josef Scheu and Korngold for Hanslick. Unlike their Wagnerian and formalist predecessors, both Bach and

Korngold display openness to and sharp analysis of new music, rather than the party-line reactions. Yet, neither critic can really be categorized as a supporter of Mahler and his new

650 M. M., “Musik,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 11840 (1904), 2.

303

symphony with the likes of Hehemann, Schiedermair, Nodnagel, and Walter. Compared to the toxic criticisms often leveled at Mahler, especially in Vienna, Bach and Korngold can seem at first glance like enthusiasts in their even keel manner. In truth they simply provided objective analyses that nonetheless embraced the artistic-witty traditions of Viennese music criticism, but purged of its staunch conservatism. Both critics have a modern, 20th-century sensibility, though not a modernist, i.e. secessionist, aesthetic taste.

As the famous critic of the socialist paper in Vienna, David Josef Bach’s take on Mahler differs from the others and is in some ways presages Adorno’s.651 Unlike his predecessor Scheu,

Bach is unfazed by the chromaticism, vulgarity, and lack of direct poetic expression, yet he notes that the music risks a loss of cohesion. While a defender of the educational value of the German musical tradition – evidenced by his mission and programing for worker’s concerts – he also highly valued the historicist urge for musical progress and was more open to the worth and category of musical experience than older formalists. With very Hegelian tones, Bach accepts that Mahler must create music that expresses his own time, but also considers the German symphonic tradition to have been expanded with Beethoven and Brahms to its limits.

Consequently, Mahler’s lack of musical cohesion exposes the lack of room for development, essentially Adorno’s point of departure in his later analysis of Mahler. Bach emphasizes the great mixture of emotions in Mahler – joy and pain, earnestness and sport – as an expression, not of the program, but of “inner psychic experience,” the side of Mahler emphasized by Walter.652 Mahler’s use of programmatic titles, like “Pan awakes,” is merely an attempt to add philosophical weight to music that embodies “life joy and gaiety.” However, in terms of interpreting the final movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, Bach uniquely suggests that it is in no way a refutation

651 There is a growing literature on David Josef Bach. See Jonathan Koehler, “‘Soul is But Harmony’: David Josef Bach and the Workers’ Symphony Concert Association, 1905-1918,” Austrian History Yearbook 39 (April 2008): 66-91; Christian Glanz, “David Josef Bach and the Viennese Debates on Modern Music,” Austrian Studies 14, no. 1 (1 October 2006): 185-195. 652 D. J. Bach, “Feuilleton. Mahlers Dritte Symphonie,” Arbeiter Zeitung no. 352 (20 Dec 1904): 1-2.

304

of Nietzsche and his proclamation of the death of God. Rather, he says, “Mahler’s God is man himself, one’s own ego. For this reason his symphony does not calm itself through the heavenly song. The music floats up to a sphere even higher than the religious heaven: man, who is himself conscious of the glories of his soul, stands higher than God.”653 The finale moves beyond the religious tones of the fifth movement to place a human experience of subjectivity as the pinnacle achievement. This is Bach the secular humanist and socialist.

Julius Korngold’s review similarly exhibits this discourse of Mahler as healthy, though the real significance of his review lies in the way it reads new music as a mediation of society.

The typical characterization of Korngold as a Mahler supporter is somewhat exaggerated. Rather, like other new formalists, and unlike most older Viennese critics, he could be quite even keel in his analysis of new music. Like his forbearer at the NFP, Hanslick, Korngold was quite opposed to program music, the New German School, and Strauss. Like Nodnagel, Korngold aimed to separate Mahler from that tradition as well as from aesthetic modernism for generally. While some older Strauss supporters like Lessmann and Helm sought to defend Strauss from being lumped in with the unmusical Mahler, Korngold does the reverse. In fact, he offers what I think is perhaps the first real incisive view of the differences between Strauss and Mahler, an analysis that still sounds contemporary. Korngold divides the genealogies of the composers, suggesting that Strauss is an exaggerated extension of Liszt, Wagner, and the New German School, while

Mahler is influenced by the religiosity and naivety of Bruckner and the realism of Berlioz. In this combination, he calls Mahler both more and less progressive than Strauss. On Mahler’s mix of traditional form and new expression, he writes,

Mahler does not break completely with the old style formalist principles. He penetrates rather with the increased subjectivity of the new art, with its far-driven principles of expression, with poetic, dramatic and speculative tendencies, with inconsiderate realistic detail in the old multi-movement symphony. In the midst of a formal language, which served the great masters of symphonic music, we hear the boldest musical poetic vocabulary of "modernity.”654

653 D. J. Bach, “Feuilleton. Mahlers Dritte Symphonie,” Arbeiter Zeitung no. 352 (20 Dec 1904): 1-2. 654 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14482 (17 Dec 1904): 1.

305

For Korngold, one can hear the modern world in Mahler’s tonal realism and expressitivity. By contrast Strauss only seems to be more progressive because of extended chromaticism. Korngold was actually unique for his time in interpreting Mahler as diatonic viz. Strauss, given that critics far more often decried Mahler’s dissonance and scrambling of key signature. Korngold’s review describes each movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony with clarity, but characterizes the sounds as merely “interesting.” It would be a mistake to lump Korngold in Mahler advocates such as

Schiedermair, Hehemann, Nodnagel and Walter. By comparison with the venom usually spewed at Mahler by Wagnerians and formalists, Korngold’s analysis is fresh and productive, though not wholly affirmative.

To the degree that Korngold praises Mahler, he does so because he interprets Mahler’s music and musical trajectory as moving away from program music. He makes much of the instrumental finale of Mahler’s Third Symphony and the completely textless Fifth Symphony as evidence of Mahler’s formalism and “escape from the confusion of a degenerate Technik, debauched artificiality, decadent tone thoughts.”655 Korngold’s invocation of Technik in this review harkens back to his more in depth analysis of the musical secession, published only a month earlier. In that feuilleton, analyzed further on, he not only juxtaposes the means- mindedness of Technik with the subjectivity of Kultur, but reads this aesthetic divide as part of larger social developments. In the review of Mahler’s Third Symphony, Korngold’s primary aim is to separate Mahler’s healthy Kultur from the superficial Technik of Strauss. If Strauss’s stylized music invokes the social plagues of decadence and even neurasthenia, Mahler’s naturalness provides a healing balm: “Mahler rejoices with awakening nature, the sun kisses overexcited, nervous people; allowing for milder beauty, he leans toward flowers and wonderfully illustrious fairy tales about the animals of the forest.” 656 In a tremendous reversal of formalist

655 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14482 (17 Dec 1904): 1. 656 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14482 (17 Dec 1904): 1.

306

opinion, Mahler’s music no longer exacerbates the overstimulation of modernity, but rather it offers a cooling of nerves. While Korngold does not directly link Strauss’s Technik with overstimulation, the two concepts are co-implicated within his musical dichotomies. They seem to meld into a feedback look wherein both produce the other. Indeed technology (broadly conceived) and nervousness served as twin concepts frequently invoked to explain how modern music reflected modernity.

As an element of 20th-century musical criticism, the assertion of social mediation in music marks a significant break with the 19th Century. Rather than a composition as an expression of the composer, or even the state of music, it becomes a measure of the state of society. The Vörwarts critic’s phrase, “so now in music,” encapsulates this change in a single short clause.657 Such a statement may be found in some earlier music journals, especially New

German, but it was very new to the formalist world of the feuilleton. The origins of this change seems to be threefold. This shift was made possible by the musical secession and its organizations, which provided a new musical movement in need of deciphering aesthetically.

Perhaps given its lack of specific aesthetic doctrines and innovations, the secession was difficult to decipher without making reference to broader cultural analysis. Secondly, like many other facets of musical criticism, the emphasis on mediation appears to first emanate from Vienna, specifically the younger crop of reviewers who seem beholden to Hegel. This surge of Hegelian social analysis throughout Central Europe – not only in musical criticism, but also new forms of history and sociology – provides the third strand of possible origins for the changeover in musical criticism.

The critical perspective of mediation was pioneered by formalist critics less beholden to

Hanslickian, liberal autonomy of art. The Neo-Kantian Hanslick was concerned with beauty and not society, at least not directly. Of course his medical discourse betrays a deep concern with

657 sz., “Aus dem Musikleben,” Vorwärts (13 Dec 1904): 980.

307

society beyond the boundaries of aesthetics, but he prevented himself from formally crossing that line in his writings, a self-control displayed by his many imitators. In the late 19th century only the Hegelian influenced New German critics dared to make music extra-musical, even extra- aesthetic, a quality sometimes shared by their programmatic composers.658 However, in early 20th century, in the fall out from the collapse of the War of the Romantics, one can see a new kind of critic that merges a formalist musical aesthetic with a Hegelian sense of history, politics, and culture. Examples include Korngold, Bach, and Graf. Gone was the semi-conservative resistance to innovation and in was an urge for music to evolve.659 Formalist critics did not simply have to come up with fictional metaphors of structure like architecture and the body in describing a composition, but could speak of it as an extension of the world, not autonomous from it.

In 1903, the Viennese critic Max Graf wrote an influential article in Die Musik about musical modernism. This is a great document of the Hegelian turn among formalists (and political liberals for that matter) at this time. He begins by asking “What to we perceive as modern in music?” This question assumes that music too, like society, participates in the forward rushing course of history. He answers this question by outlining how music necessarily speaks of its time. In the context his own present, Graf’s answer is two-pronged: “greater technical richness and greater psychological differentiation.”660 As with Korngold, the concept of Technik provides an easy link to bring together large, complex orchestration or instrumentation with the machinery of the modern world and its instrumental role in maximizing production. In terms of psychological variety, Graf suggests that new music including Wolf’s lieder and Strauss’s

658 Both Wagner and Brendel shared a similar pantheon of aesthetic opponents (Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Rossini). Moreover they conceived of these Romantic composers as mediating the ills of modernity, primarily concieved as a kind of individualism, rampant subjectivity, and entrepreneural opportunism. Yet, Wagner and the New German School did not really consider their own music as representative of the modern world. If anything the reconcilliations of their music was seen as an engine for, not a mediation of, potential national reconciliation. 659 Max Graf writes, “It is probably the general feeling that such a great time should correspond to a great art, new forms of life to new art.” Max Graf, “Gedanken über das Moderne in der Musik,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1903): 22. 660 Max Graf, “Gedanken über das Moderne in der Musik,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1903): 22.

308

orchestral works express inner human life with a broader range and with heightened intensity.

Bach’s review of Mahler’s Third Symphony echoes Graf’s emphasis on psychic variety. Modern music delves into more kinds of inner experience than previous music, from the “magnificent to the tenderest” as can be heard in Strauss’s Heldenleben, but also observed in contemporary literature and painting.661 Part of his emphasis on the variety of psychic life in new music sounds echoes the theme of stimulation and addictive need for increase. The idea of swooshing of nerves as an aesthetic correlate to modernity was already pushed by fellow Viennese, Hermann Bahr, in his influential 1890 essay “Die Moderne.” Yet, music had remained aloof from such direct mediations until critics like Graf. Notably, though, Graf himself transposes Bahr’s 19th-century emphasis of the variety of physiological stimulation to the language of 20th-century psyche.

Graf’s close friendship with Freud – evidenced by Freud’s mention of Graf’s son in The

Interpretation of Dreams – provides context for Graf’s unique emphasis on psychology, and perhaps what he meant by psychic variety.

Graf’s article does not actually spend considerable time exploring the specific contemporary significance of technology and psyche – those were givens at the time. Rather he attempts to defuse the whole discussion of the secessionist’s modernism by showing how all great artists – especially those who become canonized – are “modernists” in their time. For Graf the modernism of contemporary music circa 1900 lay simply in its reflection of the time, as all great artists do compulsively: “Like all great artists were classics in the center of the intellectual life of their time: so they were Modernissimi.”662 In some way Graf’s argument approximates the New

German historical model of avant-garde development, but rather than emphasizing the newness of the classics in their time, he emphasizes their timeliness. Rather than focusing on their artistic innovation, he focuses on their intellectual cohabitation with their time. Throughout his essay

Graf still confesses doubts about the merit of contemporary composers as future greats. He sees

661 Max Graf, “Gedanken über das Moderne in der Musik,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1903): 21. 662 Max Graf, “Gedanken über das Moderne in der Musik,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1903): 24.

309

them as of their time, but in their fragmentary genius only laying groundwork for future greats.

Citing the likes of Bruckner, Klinger, and Manet he argues that these artists were dominated by their own power, rather than dominating it. Whereas, “[e]very previously mentioned artist has content, but no form, these [have] form, but not content.”663 Despite his tolerant manner, Graf still reinforces the view of contemporary music as superficial and without the legitimation of inner content. Nevertheless, Graf differentiates himself from the cultural pessimists by making a caricature of those who cry out about wrong directions in art. Rather he suggests that new, experimental music contains both truth and falsehood.

While in Vienna a generational gap defines the turn towards mediation in musical criticism, its development in German cities is more muted and gradual. If anything it seems to have come from outside musical criticism, from cultural critics talking about music. Above all the historian Karl Lamprecht should be credited with changing musical discourse. It is difficult to measure the influence of Lamprecht, but his books were reviewed in musical journals and cited by music critics and historians. In general, the new emphasis in musical criticism on mediation seems to stem from the applications of new, post-Rankean forms of historical analysis to the present. Though beginning from the opposite sides, both Lamprecht (starting from culture broadly) and Graf (starting from music) assert that music must speak for its age. By extension these “historians” look for modernity within new music. In a sense this is a revival of the musical-historical analysis of Brendel, but an analysis which makes Brendel’s New German music and its successors – not its early romantic opposite – as emblematic of modernity and its ills.

Lamprecht was a pioneer of cultural and total history, ultimately influencing the Annales

School.664 His primary work – Deutsche Geschichte – is a synthetic, sweeping account of

663 Max Graf, “Gedanken über das Moderne in der Musik,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1903): 25. 664 On Lamprecht see Roger Chikering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856-1915) (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993.

310

German history from the classical period to the founding of the Kaisserreich that uniquely incorporated economics and culture. Lamprecht identified a psychic drive within each cultural era that determined every aspect of its history, an updated version of the romantic Volkseele. In identifying the underlying mentalities of the past, Lamprecht marked off history with various periods and subperiods. He designated 1450-1700 (or 1750 in later works) as the era of individuals and thereafter to his present as the era of subjectivity. He even called the Kaisserreich the era of Reizamkeit – excitability or stimulus – as a subcategory of subjectivity. His story is suffused with a teleological emphasis on progress, defined in a Hegelian manner as greater consciousness, but also greater individuation. He was no generic critic of modernity, but rather praised its energy and potential, much like the new school of sociologists after Ferdinand

Tönnies. His historical research placed great emphasis on the arts as manifesting these sentiments, though music only came to play a large role in the age of subjectivity. Indeed often his analyses of a period began with art and culture, before moving onto economics, society, and politics.

After having reached the 17th Century in his multivolume opus Deutsche Geschichte in

1895, Lamprecht put the project aside. When he resumed work again, he first skipped to issues of his present and recent past with the supplementary volumes of Zur jüngsten deutschen

Vergangenheit. He published the first volume in 1902, but a preview of the section on music appeared in Maximilian Harden’s journal Die Zukunft the year before.665 Incidentally, these were the same years as Strauss’s secession coup. Notably, he begins his total history of the Kaiserreich with music, before moving onto the other arts, economics, and finally politics. He argues, in fact, that music best defines the contemporary era, which he calls an epoch of excitability

[Reizamkeit]. His analysis primarily focuses on the work of Wagner, which he calls historically

“essential for the understanding of modern art and modern life of the soul at all.”666 However, he

665 Karl Lamprecht, “Alte und neue Tonkunst,” Die Zukunft 10 (28 Sep 1901). 666 Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1902): 53.

311

also mentions the works of Peter Cornelius, Bruckner, Wolf, Strauss, and even Brahms as representing this new era of musical and culture history. Unlike most music critics and historians, he was no romantic warrior and did not take any sides in absolute vs. program music debate. In fact it is hardly an issue in his historical project of showing the unity of the age, rather than its schisms.

In terms of formal analysis, this formal musical argument by Lamprecht is not particularly original.667 The importance of his analysis comes as a historian, linking these musical changes with an epochal Zeitgeist, arguing that a new character has had a “clear and unitary effect on the soul life of the time as on the development of music.”668 This new quality that he reads as uniting contemporary psyche and music is a sensitivity towards and desire for stimulation of the nerves. He writes, “The most recent large epoch of German soul life begins with the sensibility and crosses over the decades of romanticism through to the modern condition, which is long since recognized psychologically as that of nervousness.”669 For Lamprecht the condition of modernity is manifest in the ability to actually perceive and feel more than before. In terms of music he writes:

Today, it is clear: an increased capacity of the nerves has been obtained for musical impressions of their shading as of their harmony and sequences. The field of perception for arriving nerve stimulus is also extended to the sides, which until then lay uncultivated: above all a thousand new nuances of sensation have become available to us, especially further nuances in the territory of floating- ethereal, mysterious, idea rich, and painfully nervous. Here lies the main feature of the new art.670

In his holistic Hegelian analysis, the change in musical expression necessitated a change in human physiology. He does not chide the stimulating tendencies of new art for harming timless biological conditions, but rather asserts that art has evolved appropriately to its conditions.

667 He characterizes music beginning with late Beethoven by increasing chromaticism and modulation, leading to strange, new chords. See Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1902): 27-31. 668 Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1902): 30. 669 Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1902): 59. 670 Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1902): 32.

312

In articulating the nervousness of modern music – and by extension the modern psyche –

Lamprecht tries to dispel entrenched stereotypes. He begins his whole discussion of the nerves by noting that people unprepared for the dissonance of modern music talk about it “getting on the nerves” in the “vernacular,” idiomatic sense. For Lamprecht, this is not a condemnation of new music and certainly not an indication of its sickness of that of the present age. Indeed he chooses

“Reizsamkeit” over “Nervousness” as an epochal designation, precisely because the former has a less medically stigmatized meaning. And in fact, he never uses the pathological diagnosis of neuthasthenia to speak of the nervous excitement.

Lamprecht reads this nerve fascination as an intensification of the modern age of subjectivity, not a departure. Whereas previous music and audiences emphasized “the mind, the feelings, and the overall emotional additude,” the contemporary period considered a more primary level of intimacy. Lamprecht also considers the nerve life as more primal – hence

Wagner’s interest in the medieval and ancient past – but sees the modern interest in the nerves, not as a return to the past but as a coming to consciousness of new realms of subjectivity.671

Lamprecht goes on in this first section to cite the research of psychologists (he studied with

Wilhelm Wundt) and decadent authors like Huysmans to confirm that the turn of the 20th Century was indeed the age of stimulus. However, it is significant that he begins this analysis of recent modernity with art music and interprets it as the most potent artistic mediation of the age.

In christening his age that of nervousness, Lamprecht tapped into a broad cultural obsession with stimulation and nervous exhaustion. Much like his contemporary Georg Simmel,

Lamprecht adopts a neutral, scientific attitude about stimulation and modern nervousness.

However, rather than seeing the age of excitement as producing greater consciousness of one’s feelings, Simmel read stimulation – specifically that of the metropolis – as creating blasé subjects, numb to sensation. Yet, for Simmel, there is a dialectic to nervousness. The barrage of

671 Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1902): 62.

313

stimulations for the urban dweller not only violates one’s autonomy and even creates uniformity, but also provides the context wherein one must work to stand out. Simmel asserts that this need to be different explains such “metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness.”672 In this way, the Weberian Simmel like the neo-Hegelian Lamprecht sees the modern age of stimulation as one of enhanced subjectivity. Nonetheless, Simmel recognizes in the condition of the metropolis an ever greater regress of sensation, requiring blasé persons seek out ever heightened excitement. A similar logic was used to analyze the secessionist and their music, asserting that their extravagant expressions stem from over extended nerves. However, until the cultural and musical assertions by the likes of Lamprecht and Korngold, the blasé quality of modernist art was not likened to a blasé modernity.

Unlike Lamprecht’s and Simmel’s neutral and even positive readings of the growing nervousness of modernity, most cultural critics took it as a sign of decay.673 The pathological diagnosis of neurasthenia was catch all malady of the early 20th Century and especially prevalent in Berlin. Earlier reviewers of Strauss and Mahler had certainly invoked their music’s ability to exhaust the nerves, statements with varying levels of metaphoricity about such physical damage.

However, as the sucession spread, as well as statements about mediation, so did the nervousness of modern music. Discussions of nerves not only took on associations with the condition of modernity, but also a pathologized condition. Modern music was neurasthethenic and caused neurasthenia.

A prominent example of Lamprecht-like mediation in German musical criticism can be

672 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 183. 673 On neurasthenia see: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997); Joachim Radkau, “Neurasthenic Experience in Imperial Germany: Expeditions into Patient Records and Side-looks upon General History,” in Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 2001), 201-2; Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervostät: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck and Hitler (München: Hanser, 1998).

314

seen in Berlin’s leading critic Leopold Schmidt. His previous analysis of the musical secession, while derogatory, did not really read it as reflecting the ills of modernity. Beginning in 1905 that began to rapidly change, even before the premiere of Salome. In a biopic from 1905 on Strauss, he not only calls him “the musical problem of our age,” but also “a right child of our nervous times.”674 This is the big shift, from the state of music to the state of society. In the immediately preceeding years, critics frequently spoke of new music as exhausting the nerves, but did not outright link it to the present. In 1907, Schmidt takes the same stylistic approach toward

Mahler’s Third Symphony. He states that, “Mahler’s works now belong in a total picture of our time,” before launching into the discussion of his “cult of expressive means,” as quoted above.675

These two themes raised by Schmidt with regard to Strauss and Mahler – nerves and means – are the same two themes of modernity suggested by Graf and Korngold. While

Korngold refers to means as Technik and Graf to nerves as psyche, both are conceptually mining a similar intersection of directionless overproduction and human exhaustion. Indeed the two themes are interrelated as a cycle of caused and effect, and continue to recur in the analysis of musical modernism and its mediation of modernity. The overemphasis on technical means, like modernity’s own fetish for technical know how and new gadgets, seems to exponentially tax the nerves. In critical discourse, these categories of nervousness and technology are frequently merged and applied equally to society and music. All of these developments – the rise of the sucession, the development of mediation in musical criticism, and the intertwined themes of nerves and means can be seen in the other major composition of these years: Strauss’s Sinfonia

Domestica.

Symphonia Domestica: Technik and Democracy

The 1904 ADMV festival provided the occasion for the European premiere of Sinfonia

674 Leopold Schmidt, “Richard Strauss,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 72, no. 40 (27 Sep 1905): 747. 675 Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzerten,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 26 (Jan 15, 1907): 3.

315

Domestica, which along with Nicode’s Gloria, was considered that year’s highlight.676 After a fitting world premiere in New York on March 21, 1904, a performance in a Manhattan department store, and the summer performance at the ADMV festival, the work was featured in numerous cities during the 1904-05 performance season. Between the operas of Feuersnot (1901) and

Salome (1905), this tone poem was Strauss’s only large-scale orchestral work and can be read as a bridge between them, both musically and conceptually. It moves away from the iconoclastic heroism toward the family drama of Salome and enhances the cinematic and novelesque properties of Strauss’s music. The bourgeois subject matter should not mask the fact that Sinfonia

Domestica exemplifies the biopolitical tenor of the musical secession. If Mahler’s Third

Symphony brings biological life into the public, i.e. symphonic realm, at the grand, cosmic level,

Sinfonia Domestica intones the intimacies of life at its most banal and everyday. Whether Pan’s awakening or the child’s, both exemplify realms of life especially profane or biological that had been considered improper subjects for public art contemplation.

Compared to other works by Strauss, Sinfonia Domestica did not evoke strong reactions.

Opinions diverged widely on this tone poem, though neither support for the work nor opposition were particularly inspired. Across the aesthetic spectrum, from formalists to New Germans, secessionists to new Viennese formalists, there is no party consistency in the reviews of this composition, except its accessibility.677 Compared to Strauss’s earlier tone poems, Sinfonia

Domestica seemed relatively easy to understand, both musically and in terms of the program about the daily home life of a family. Indeed, the specificity of Strauss’s program was a frequent point of critique, even for those like Lessmann, who found the music masterful.678 Formalists like

676 Otto Lessmann, “Die 40. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 31, no. 24 (10 June 1904): 431. 677 On the wide popularity and frequent initial performances of Sinfonia Domestica see Mark-Daniel Schmid, The Tone Poems of Richard Strauss and Their Reception History from 1887-1908 (Ph.D. Dissertation: Northwestern University, 1997). 678 Otto Lessmann, “Die 40. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 31, no. 24 (10 June 1904): 431.

316

Schmidt considered the four section work to be musically comprehensible as a symphony without movement breaks and predictably found the program apparatus completely unnecessary.679 Many critics – even supporters of program music – considered the detailed program an insult to listeners and an impingement on their imagination.680

A year after the premieres of Domestica, secessionist Paul Riesenfeld published an extended defense of the composition, in which he notes the common stereotypes about the work.

He writes:

Among the objections that one has raised against Rich. Strauss’s “Sinfonia Domestica,” particularly striking, because one meets them in almost all reviews, even in the reviews of friends and admirers of Strauss’s music, is the allegation that the content of the work does not stand in proper relationship with the form and expended means.681

Riesenfeld’s article provides a nice barometer of the general perceptions of Strauss’s composition.

Specifically he notes that critics viewed the work’s content and form as incommensurate because of its juxtaposition of comic subjects and melodies with pompous orchestration. The over- accessibility of the work was no doubt a rallying point for critics, but that should not obscure a general distaste and the further softening of aesthetic lines between Wagnerians and formalists.

Critics as different as E. E. Taubert and W. A. both considered the music an extension of Strauss’s crass tendencies, noting the work’s “ugly blobs of color,” “rude sounds,” “burlesque ideas,” and

“cacophony and desolate noise.”682 Outside of Schmidt, most reviewers considered it somewhat of a lessor regurgitation of Strauss’s earlier work, both the vulgarities of Till Eulenspiegel and the pomp of Heldenleben.683 As one of Strauss’s most vocal and influential opponents, Schmidt’s

679 Leopold Schmidt, "Die Tonkünstlerversammlung in Frankfurt a. M.," Berliner Tageblatt, No. 289 (June 9, 1904): 1. 680 See Otto Lessmann, “Die 40. Tonkünstler-Versammlung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 31, no. 24 (10 June 1904): 431; U.H., “Theater und Musik,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 292 (13 Dec 1904): 1167-68; sz., “Aus dem Musikleben,” Vorwärts (13 Dec 1904): 980. 681 Paul Riesenfeld, “Domestica und Domestiken,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 21 (26 May 1905): 379. 682 E. E. Taubert, “Konzert,” Die Musik 4, no. 14 (1905): 63; W. A., “Kleines Feueilleton,” National Zeitung, no. 711, evening edition (13 Dec 1904): 1. 683 See o.k., “Theater und Musik,” Berliner Neueste Nachrichten no. 583 (13 Dec 1904): 3; Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1-3.

317

endorsement of Sinfonia Domestica as his best work of absolute music is the most unusual aspect of the work’s reception.684 On the other side, Seidl, Strauss’s biggest defender, considered the tone poem a serious regression, lacking a unity of real and ideal, as well as a worthy subject matter. Similarly, Strauss’s supporter Muntz considered it a mix of noise and beauty.685 This view was expectedly, but not heatedly, also affirmed by old Wagnerians such as Schönaich and formalists like Schmid.686 In general critiques rehashed well established themes about Strauss and new music, but these criticisms took on new significance with Sinfonia Domestica, both because of the mundane subject and contemporaneous changes in modes of musical criticism.

The occasion of Bach’s review of Sinfonia Domestica was a particularly momentous concert in the history of modernist music. The tone poem was the finale of the first concert organized by the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (VST), a concert which sparked considerable commentary in Vienna about the emergence of a musical secession. The organization was founded by Alexander Zemlinsky and Arnold Schoenberg to promote new music in Vienna in much the same fashion the ADMV under Strauss fostered new music in

Germany. With Mahler as honorary president the VST organized four concerts during the 1904-

05 concert season, though was unable to secure funding and support for future seasons, the first of

Schoenberg’s failed attempts to reach a wider audience. In addition to Sinfonia Domestica, the concert featured “Das Trinklied” by Hermann Bischoff and “Dionysische Phantasie” by

Siegmund von Hausseger. As the inclusion of Bischoff and Hausseger suggest, the VST programming was much the same as the ADMV at the time, though with Viennese composers included in future concerts. The third concert of the VST was the occasion of the premiere of

Schoenberg’s own Pelleas and Melisande. With the VST a city famous for both its modern art

684 See Leopold Schmidt, “Die Tonkünstlerversammlung in Frankfurt a. M.,” Berliner Tageblatt, No. 289 (June 9, 1904): 1; Leopold Schmidt, “Aus den Konzertleben,” Berliner Tageblatt (13 Dec 1904): 1-2. 685 Max Muntz, “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 11817 (24 Nov 1904): 6-7. 686 Gustav Schoenaich, “Kritik: Konzert, Wien,” Die Musik 4, no. 13 (1904): 462; O.S., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Dresdner Journal no. 267 (14 Nov 1904): 2149.

318

and conservative taste in music finally had the musical equivalent of a secession, this time from the philharmonic.

The concerts of the VST were not only an institutional coup, but they had a symbolic value for critics who devoted considerable thought to this secession in music. The Wagnerians

Hirschfeld and Muntz actually said little in their reviews about either the state of music or compositions, of which only Hausseger’s was considered tasteful.687 However, they both confirm the rhetoric of a secession, and the concert as rallying such a movement, Muntz writing that the organization “stands on the extreme left wing of New German music of the most modern direction with the utmost determination to express.”688 The feuilletons of the new formalists –

Kalbeck, Bach, and Korngold – rather than simply reviewing the concert and Sinfonia Domestica, spend the majority of their article ruminating about the significance of the movement. The thrust of Bach’s analysis is that the movement does not have a strong singular artistic direction or

“Kunstpolitik,” but rather aims for experimentation and creative freedom. On the one hand he fully commends the VST for carving out a space for artistic autonomy, but cautions against experimentation for its own sake. He notes that the society is for “creative musicians” and not simply music lovers who might not appreciate the serious work of composition. In this way, the society was more straight forward and consistent in its avant-garde sympathies than the

Allgemeine deutsche Musikverein. Bach argues that while innovative composers deserve respect and the “right to create,” that does not necessarily give them the right to be heard. He ends his general comments saying, “They are ‘creators,’ giving them the right to an artistic permissiveness. But in the end, not everyone is a musical savior, who tried once to slice musically from left to right, instead of right to left.”689

Compared to Bach, Korngold is more skeptical about the claim of the VST to be open to

687 M. M., “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 11817 (24 Nov 1904): 6-7; rh, “Konzert,” Weiner Abendpost no. 271 (26 Nov 1904), 3. 688 M. M., “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 11817 (24 Nov 1904): 7-8. 689 D. J. Bach, “Feuilleton. Sezession in der Musik,” no. 334 (2 Dec 1904), 2.

319

all artistic directions, much as writers criticized the hollow claims of openness of the ADMV under Strauss. Korngold points to Mahler as president, Strauss as “leading member,” and the

“insular club badge of a common attitude,” as evidence of a distinct VST aesthetic and movement.690 Making reference to the building which housed Klimt’s visual artistic secession,

Korngold wonders if the VST “does not already have a golden dome to arch over a temple for modern music?”691 Despite the claims of the VST to be open to apollonian and dionysian music,

Korngold suggests that the VST leaned toward the latter as evidenced by opening its first concert with Hausseger’s “Dionysischen Phantasie.”

It is in this article on the VST and Sinfonia Domestica that Korngold elaborately introduced his concept of Technik, musical and cultural, which he reiterated a few weeks later in his review of Mahler’s Third Symphony. He reads the secession and its popularity as an example of the modern fascination with Technik, that is, technology in the broadest sense of the enhanced power to produce. In short he says that “One can shed light on the state of affairs in a word: we live in a time of the worship of technology.”692 As part of the society that produced it, the musical secession worships technology. At this point Korngold directly contradicts Seidl’s view of new music as a natural, healthy mediation of “trees with flowers and fruit,” though a month later

Korngold would praise Mahler’s naturalness. In assessing the unhealthy and unnatural surplus of

Technik in new music Korngold invokes Goethe’s juxtaposition between technology and art, between construction and genius. Whereas J. S. Bach and even Wagner possessed both, modern music lacks the latter. While Korngold paradoxically asserts that new music lacks the essence of modernity, he considers the “expanded techniques of the foray into new, unclear art ideals” a reflection of unreflective technophilia.693 He wonders whether Technik itself, not “ingenious, creative ability,” drives the secession. In providing and unpacking a compelling “Moderne” link

690 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1. 691 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1. 692 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1. 693 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1.

320

between music and society, the review is monumental in both its method and message.

In terms of method Korngold takes the tools of the cultural critic and openly applies them to music, specifically modern music. By comparison, Otto Schmid’s review of Sinfonia

Domestica reads the work’s worship of means as merely a mediation of the composer’s lack of genius, calling Strauss an “artistic middle man.” 694 Such analyses were not particularly original to this composition or these critics. However, Korngold goes a step further and suggests that modern music’s worship of means is not limited to the aesthetic or personal sphere, but a seismograph of cultural sentiment more broadly. Musical form is more than a biographical expression, but a social one. Additionally, in terms of the biopolitical valence, a composition stands in not only for the musical population but for the human one as well. Such mediation extends the biopolitical investment in music addressed in early chapters from a metaphorical to a more literal level. Music is not alive, but it is part of the technology that extends from and supports life. It is implicated in questions of biological well being.

Not only does Korngold make this leap, but he does it well with a careful analysis of the technophilia of new music. While numerous critics had previously emphasized the means-focus of new music, Korngold explicates what this signifies at the level of musical form. An example of another critic demonstrating how Sinfonia Domestica acts as a cipher of society’s worship of technology is S. Z. at the Berlin socialist paper Vorwärts:

The so-called age of technology also makes itself evident in areas that you initially did to want to expect it. In music it is already thus the case that really the technical, also the domination of all so-called means, stands at the top. But not only like this. We recognize our technical age also in the fact that today so many external works of human life are extraordinarily highly developed, while the inner works, so to speak, are fewer or even wither. The actual human betterment is not at its best today. The same is true in music. The mastery of all that is intended to serve the expansion of real essentials – embellishment and so on – has risen to a barely unsurpassed height. But where it is necessary to take the decisive core of artistic effects, there is less accomplishment.695

694 O.S., “Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Dresdner Journal no. 267 (14 Nov 1904): 2149. 695 sz., “Aus dem Musikleben,” Vorwärts (13 Dec 1904): 980.

321

In juxtaposition to Strauss, the critic goes on to trumpet Wagner as model innovator who paired technical development with intellectual depth. However the age of Technik lacks such music. As the leading music critic of the NFP, it seems likely that Korngold’s feuilleton attracted the attention of other critics. Even if there is no direct influence from Korngold, the language of “so- called” in the Vorwärts review reiterates that Technik was a common way of viewing the contemporary condition. Like Korngold this discourse on “technology” and culture, specifically music, is basically an elaboration on form and content – nothing terribly new. The inward aspect of music withers with the growth of means. What is most astounding about this review is the method. Now the excessive orchestration and technological music of the secession has the ability to set off discussions about the age of technology. Even the phrase “so now in music” speaks of a formal continuity from social to musical structures. What S. Z. calls the interior of the work,

Korngold in the above quote as creative power, which he goes on to identify with melody.

Returning to Korngold, his article actually articulates how the worship of technology translates musically by specifically focusing on the difference between melodic creation (Kultur) and polyphonic layering (Technik):

The course of things goes askew with orchestral accompaniment. More clearly stated: in the orchestra instrumental sounds currently command the orchestra. Sounds belong to the sphere of musical fantasy, and they are also to be discovered, but they are also merely to be found. In the sonic regions of the orchestra, honor is bestowed on the external mixture, the combination, the experiment, the manual skill. And the undeniable progress, rather leaps and rushes forward of harmony - which we recognize half with wonder, half with horror at the actual elements of new techniques – does it cohere with every mastery of orchestral music? There is a harmony of the vocals and one of instrumental thought. The extravagant alterations, the permitted and executed harmonies of our day, are not in small part brewed in the reponse of modern orchestras, which democratize the instrumental voice. Similarly, it is consistent with the “motivic polyphony.” This formula itself salvages impotence under thematic discovery and development.696

In many ways this distinction between melody and orchestration harkens back to Hanslick’s own aesthetic of surface and depth, which I earlier analyzed as a musical metaphor of biopolitical

696 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1.

322

distinctions between mind and body, sovereign power and the production of life. Here Korngold focuses specifically on music and not its specific mediation of culture, but that can be inferred from the context. As far as potential arguments for mediation, he does make the intriguing comment that orchestration represents the “democratizing” element in music. Democracy here is not invoked in a laudatory way, but as an example of the reign of technology and its function of leveling and detronging unique genius in the production of art music. Lacking the power of cultured discovery, democratic composing merely gathers found sounds and combines them as a kind of “manual skill.”

It is not too far of a leap to suggest that from the perspective of Korngold, both political democracy and the musical secession manage to displace higher intellect with productive, material powers. With mass politics, workers most directly responsible for the production and maitenance of life became the decision-making majority over the minority of former elites.

Korngold goes on to link the development of technology with the educated musician’s turn toward program music and extra musical content. Consequently, he concludes, “Not for nothing is Richard Strauss, the supreme, the most talented representative of those fascinating technologies.”697

In the thematic of Technik, Korngold locates and vocalizes a compelling link between the aesthetic modernism of the secession and modernity, politics included. In a musical context he suggests that democratization and emphasis on procedure are coextensive and, more importantly, lead to depersonalization and the withering of genuine creativity. This analysis of musical modernism by a new generation of critics mirrored contemporaneous analysis of society by a new generation of sociologists including Sombart, Weber, and Simmel. Indeed this so-called youngest school of German economics turned toward culture at the same time that cultural critics turned toward economics. A similar principle of holistic social analysis enervates both developments.

697 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton. Musik,” Neue Freie Presse no. 14461 (26 Nov 1904): 1.

323

Ferdinand Tönnies has some influence on these thinkers, specfically the division between Technik and Kultur as a historical measure of social and communal structures. Yet, these thinkers were just as inclined to search for intersections, for the technology in culture and culture in technology.

Max Weber’s method of analysis shares much with Korngold’s and other’s analyses of aesthetic modernism. Not unlike other educated men of his era, he had a passion for music which crept into his research both directly and in tertiary remarks. He even wrote a book on the sociology of music, which dealt with the pre-modern music of the west. He aims in this short work to demonstrate over vast time periods the rationalization of western music viz. other traditions. His colleague Werner Sombart actually said more about the sociology of contemporary music, but Weber’s reaction to Sombart is illuminating. At the first meeting of the

German Sociology Society in 1910, Sombart delivered an influential talk on “Technik und

Kultur,” which largely focused on the influence of new technology on modern society and art, specifically orchestral music. Weber reprimands Sombart and others for deploying a Marxist concept of technology, which is not only hopelessly vague, but too limited to the province of machinic inventions. Weber critiques historical materialism for ignoring values, which are obviously present in something like property relations. In his cursory statements, Weber encourages sociologists to look at technology, not as a precondition for social relations, but as having a corresponding value system, something properly cultural.

In distinction to Sombart’s technological determinism in music history, Weber attempts to insert his methodological prerogative:

Whether the inner desire for this specifically modern kind of musical expression, and whether the simultaneously sensual-emotional and intellectual character of this tone-paining music (which is certainly the decisive factor) may be understood as a product of technological situations, seems highly questionable to me because in these instances technological factors only serve as a more or less perfect means.698 and

698 Max Weber, “Remarks on Technology and Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 4 (August 2005): 31.

324

[Sombart] talked about the influence of technology on modern orchestral music and the like. Now the selection of subjects is a very important element in the cultural-historical assessment of a cultural-historical situation, but it certainly does not touch on what is specifically artistic. In my opinion, the decisive question we have to pose would instead be to what extent formal aesthetic values have emerged in the artistic field as a result of very specific technological situations.699

In the context of the musical secession, one could expand on Weber to say that the “technological situation,” or built environment of fin de siècle Central Europe, led to an esteem for aesthetic forms that mirrored the mindless production and urban bustle. In different words, Korngold seems to suggest as much. While Korngold is less sensitive to different “technological situations”

– rather simply designating his time as the age of technology – he shares with Weber an insistence of value in relation to technology, specifically its worship. According to Weber, innovations in the technology of musical instruments may expand available means, but not a composer’s discerning selection.

For Weber, the technological situation did not simply mean the existant machines or worship of them, but methods of living determined by built environment. In his continuing critique of Sombart’s emphasis on musical change through instrumental invention, Weber links modern “tone painting” with urban experience:

For its part, there may be other contributing causal influences in our culture of a “technological” (though not of an orchestral) kind that have a role to play in the search for a new unity conditioned by the cultural situation which is beyond the old bounded elemental forms. And indeed these influences would have to be differentiated from the instrumental-technological, in so far as far as ‘technology’ is also involved. The question of the relation between artistic will and musical- technological means in this problem area belongs only to music history. To sociology, however, belongs the other question concerning the relation between the ‘spirit’ (Geist) of a particular music and the overall technological basis that influences the vital feeling and tempo of our present-day and (once again) metropolitan way of life.700

The phrase “overall technological basis” seems to be an inclusive concept of Technik that

699 Max Weber, “Remarks on Technology and Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 4 (August 2005): 28. 700 Max Weber, “Remarks on Technology and Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 4 (August 2005): 31.

325

includes value, in this cause the frenzy of the metropolis. Earlier in his response to Sombart,

Weber posited the poetry of Stephan George as an example of modern technology’s mediation into art. He writes that George “allowed the impressions of the modern metropolis to pass completely through himself, though they may try to devour him and to shatter and parcel out his soul, and though he himself may want to condemn them to the abyss.” The image of social structures passing through the poet to the poem provides a perfect image of mediation, the artist as mediator, rather than simply author. Musically speaking, Weber, like Lamprecht and

Korngold, makes the same allusions to Wagner and Strauss as expressing, not themselves, but modernity.

Whereas Korngold sees modern music as mediating an age of technology, Weber suggests that it is a very specific technology, that of the metropolis. In his masterwork, Economy and Society, Weber suggests that

There are techniques of every conceivable type of action, techniques of prayer, of asceticism, of thought and research, of memorizing, of education, of exercising political or hierocratic domination, of administration, of making love, of making war, of musical performances, of sculpture and painting, of arriving at legal decisions. All these are capable of the widest variation in degree of rationality.701

In his response to Sombart he describes the metropolitan experience in the context of mediation in modern art:

With its railways, subways, electric and other lights, shop windows, concert and catering halls, cafes, smokestacks, and piles of stone, the whole wild dance of sound and color impressions that affect sexual fantasy, and the experiences of variations in the soul’s constitution that lead to a hungry brooding over all kinds of seemingly inexhaustible possibilities for the conduct of life and happiness.702

This almost dionysian image is its own Technik of living that is ascribed to modern art, including

Strauss’s tone painting. The phrase “variations in the soul’s constitution” echoes what other critics like Graf said about the varieties of stimulation, psychic and corporeal. Moreover, Weber’s

701 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, et al. (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978): 65. 702 Max Weber, “Remarks on Technology and Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 4 (August 2005): 29.

326

concept of the Technik of the Grossstadt brings together the major themes of the secession as mediating technophilia and stimulation.

For reviewers of Sinfonia Domestica, its very form and bloated orchestration communicated modern values. Whether Technik, Grossstadt, or perhaps technology of the metropolis, the tone poem and the secession more generally stood for a contemporaneous and mindless hustle and bustle. Yet, there was also something unnerving to many critics about the composition’s frank meditation on discrete and banal affairs of family life. The program invites the public to voyeuristically gaze into the private sphere. Some supporters like Riesenfeld deflected this invasion by asserting that with its grandiose musical forms, Strauss had transfigured the domestic world into “vita domestica.”703 Through artistic ennoblement, an unfit subject for public contemplation became classicized and philosophical. Either way – the intrusion of the public into the private or the ascension of the private into the public – the programmatic subject of Sinfonia Domestica betrayed an elision of traditionally separate spheres.

Frenchmen of letters Romain Rolland – a friend of Strauss no less – made a perceptive and suggestive comment about the broader significance of a symphony about home life. After attending a 1905 performance of Sinfonia Domestica at a French-German music festival in (then still German) Strassburg, he writes, “The disproportion is too great between his subject and the means he has of expressing it. Above all, I do not like this display of the inner and secret self.

There is a want of reticence in this Sinfonia Domestica. The fireside, the sitting-room, and the bedchamber, are open to all-comers. Is this the family feeling of Germany today?”704 He reiterates the common critique of disjunction between subject and means, but then goes on to criticize the rush to self exposure. While this at first sounds like the analysis of Nietzschean stereotypes of unbounded disclosure, Rolland makes it into a subtle social analysis. Here Strauss

703 Paul Riesenfeld, “Domestica und Domestiken,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 21 (26 May 1905): 379. 704 Romain Rolland, Musicians of Today, trans. Mary Blaiklock (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914): 226-27.

327

speaks for all of Germany, which feels its most private details open to all.

Rolland’s liberal anxiety about social incursion in the home is clearly echoed in Hannah

Arendt’s historical reading of modernity. For Arendt, modernity is marked by the emergence of society, a unified category that collapses public and private, and in the process destroying what each supplies the world.705 The very title of Strauss’s tone poem combines words that usually signify two separate worlds: the public world of the bourgeois symphony and the private interior of bourgeois domestic affairs. Just as Arendt calls “political economy” a contradiction in terms according to traditional politics, “Sinfonia Domestica” is a contradiction in terms according to traditional art music.706 Politics and the symphony belong to the public, with economy and domestic life confined to the private. While in general it was not received so differently from other heretical combinations in Strauss and Mahler, German musical critics were generally appalled by Strauss’s conjunction of the mundane and the transcendent. Only by transfiguring the banal homelife into a philosophical “vita domestica” can Paul Riesenfeld justify the message of

Sinfonia Domestica against its critics.707

With Sinfonia Domestica Strauss achieves a unity of form and content, both highlighting means, that of music and that of biological production and reproduction. Even more than Don

Quixote, the musical technique emphasizes the reproduction of real life sounds with phonograph- like sound effects. It is also the narrative of a bustling home, not a tranquil retreat. Sexual reproduction, not merely intercourse, but generational reproduction is even brought into the public symphonic realm with the rearing of the child. For Arendt the household sphere or oikos

(root word of economics) is the realm of the production and maitenence of life, from child rearing

705 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 38: “The emergence of society – the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices – from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizens.” 706 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 29. 707 Paul Riesenfeld, “Domestica und Domestiken,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 21 (26 May 1905): 379.

328

to food production. In a line of thought now regarded as ground breaking in the conceptualization of biopolitics, she defines the direct cultivation of human biological well-being as traditionally and necessarily separate from the public domain of politics.708 Consequently, with the development of political economy and mass politics, those boundaries became porous. The images and notions attributed to Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica, including Riesenfeld’s very

Arendt-like assertion of the category of “vita domestica,” illustrate the historical development of society, according to Arendt’s categorization. As a fictional family drama, the composition communicates a historical biopolitical reality, in which the maitenence and production of life no longer happened behind closed doors, but was the object of public interest. As Rolland fears, the

Wilhelmian family feels their bedchamber open to trespassers.

For Arendt, no less than Korngold, modern democracy is defined by a rupture in which production is loosed from protective bounds. In The Human Condition Arendt describes the pre- modern wall separating life and politics as a form of mutual protection: “the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.”709 Moreover, Arendt makes clear that modern democracy has a biological importance in rupturing this separation of life and politics. In terms of identifying the chronology of this biopoltical rupture, Arendt writes, “The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden.”710 The timing of this is exactly the years around the turn of the 20th century.

While Germany stubbornly avoided electoral reform, it politicized the working class with the

708 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 72: “but it is striking that from the beginning of history to our own time it has always been the bodily part of human existence that needed to be hidden in privacy, all things connected with the necessity of the life process itself, which prior to the modern age comprehended all activities serving the subsistence of the individual and the survival of the spieces.” 709 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 64. 710 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 73.

329

relaxation of the anti-socialist laws in 1890, while Austria gradually extended the franchise to universal suffrage between 1884 and 1918, and cultural trope of the New Woman populated the streets. In both politics and aesthetics the basic mechanisms of production (“bodily functions”) ceased to be excluded. Korngold’s interpretation of modernity as the collapse of the distinction between Kultur and Technik shares the same dynamic as Arendt’s blurring of politics and life.

The unveiling of “material concerns” applied equally to modern politics and modern music.

While Korngold’s aesthetic arguments lack the direct invocations of biopolitics involved with

Arendt’s political arguments, he still, nonetheless, sees this democratizing emancipation of production as dangerous to the health of listeners, specifically in terms of nerve damage. With

Technik, like life, no longer hemmed in by Kultur, secessionist music becomes for Korngold a direct threat to public health. Without the protective guidance of genius and controlled composers, new music produces anarchic sounds that destroy both music and people. Indeed with the rise of mediation in the methods of critics like Korngold, the heretical music of the secession ceased to be merely a musical problem and increasingly became a social one, akin to democratization.

Korngold ultimately describes the musical secession as a mediation of democracy, not intended by the liberal as a laudatory term, but invoking the rise of mass politics. Specifically, the large, colorful orchestration of the secession is coded as diluting the subjectivity of melodic invention, that aspect of Kultur potentially engaged by the genius composer. Mass democracy then entails the proliferation of accessible, but brainless technical power and the twilight of immortalizing action by great men. Korngold’s analysis of modern society, mediated by modern music, compares favorably with that of Arendt, who mourned the supersession of immortal

“action” by earthly “labor” through the erosion of a truly autonomous public realm. The frequent metaphors of musical secession concerts – especially the ADMV under Strauss – as “parades” or

“parade marches” reinforced the aesthetic movement’s mediation of mass political movements.

Such politics of the streets subverted the legal and purely rational machinations of electoral

330

politics. The musical secession argued its case, not really with pamphlets or programmatic statements, but with a surge of post-idealist musical experiences.

For a brief few years the musical secession was a tangible aesthetic party, a self- promoting interest group and a form of musical Nietzscheanism.711 Like other musical parties before it, the secession aimed to make in roads to the conceptual and organized institutions of musical culture, that is, to have its ideas and music heard. Along with the professional posts of secessionist music critics, the concerts of the MGMT, Strauss’s ADMV, and the VST were their most concrete successes. As an aesthetic party, the musical secession cannot really be interpreted as a mediation of specific political movements, in the way the New Germans and Hanslickian formalists expressed nationalist and liberal political parties. Rather, as a form of musical

Nietzscheanism, the aesthetics of the secession shared the impolitical fate of Nietzsche’s reception, spread across the surface of the political spectrum, but not penetrating it. While the musical secession can be viewed to mediate the post-liberal technique of all mass politics in the early 20th Century, perhaps the musical secession is best heard as part of democratization itself.

The affective, participatory musical enactments of the Dionysian and carnivalesque were not substitutes for a specific brand of politics, but were direct politics itself, seeking an immediate reformulation of life.

711 Paul Marsop himself compares the development of partisanship in music with the growth and fragmentation of political parties in the age of mass culture. See Paul Marsop, “Von Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikverein: Ortsgruppen,” Die Musik 3, no. 9 (1904): 41-46.

331

CHAPTER SIX Musical Degeneration and Regeneration: The Biopolitics of New Conservatism

On October 4, 1906 Felix Draeseke published the article, “The Confusion in Music,” sending German musical culture into a frenzy of debate. As a self-styled Jeremiah, Draeseke railed against the decrepit state of modern music and the need return to timeless traditions through the active repression of the “cult of ugliness.”712 Unlike like Hanslick, who trusted the natural course of culture to flush out impurities, Draeseke insists that the active “healing” of

German music could only occur through greater policing: “Now the lazy ‘laisser aller’ cannot be tolerated by us, because that will improve nothing, but only make the necessary healing more difficult, if not totally prevented.”713 By the time the dust settled at the end of 1907 – the highly touted year of confusion – German musical culture had radically changed. The secessionists were ousted from the ADMV and concert stages, while the formalists and New Germans formed a loose coalition of new conservatism against all brands of modernist music. The most immediate and obvious manifestation of that coalition was the fact that Draeseke – a high ranking New German

– published his much heeded “exhortation” in the leading formalist journal.

Two months later German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow dissolved the Reichstag, calling for new elections. The Center Party, which had been part of the ruling coalition with the conservative parties, refused to continue funding the military to suppress the Herero and

Hottentot rebellions in the southwest African German colonies. The 1907 elections resulted in the so-called Bülow Bloc which pitted the ruling conservatives and liberals against the Center

Party and the Social Democrats, the party most vehemently opposed to imperialism. With the backing of a supportive Reichstag Bülow defended the brutal suppression of the colonial uprisings as necessary for the “well-being and future of our entire country.”714 As with what might

712 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7. 713 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7. 714 See Hans Fenske, ed., Quellen zur deutschen Innenpolitik 1890-1914 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991), 203.

332

be called the “Draeseke Bloc,” the “Bülow Bloc” pitted the established 19th-century parties against the new 20th-century parties in the interest of improving national greatness through the active removal of threats. The threat of revolutionary insurgency, both foreign and domestic, musical and political, birthed new proactive means of biological betterment of the nation through violent negation.

The parallel between Draeseke and Bülow is not at all farfetched, especially if one considers the antipathy of both toward democracy. While Draeseke’s most immediate problem was Salome rather than the Social Democrats, for him they were part and parcel of the same problem. In the confusion article he likens the cultural anarchism of the secessionist era to the socialists taking power. Essentially, he argues that the state of music was even worse than that of politics (at the time dead-locked over imperial wars) because, while the secessionists had taken power in music, the Social Democrats had not yet done the same in politics. Similarly much of the Draeseke-inspired debates trade on allusions to the political debates of the period, especially the fear mongering of conservatives. Moreover, both engaged in a new techniques of biopolitics that did not shepherd through liberal discipline, but aimed to improve the health of the population via preventive removal of pathological subpopulations. There was nothing metaphorical about

Draeseke’s musical biopolitics, as new music threatened the biological well-being of the German nation.

During the height of the secessionist movement – as surveyed in the previous chapter – they had become a circumscribed school. No longer was this “unmusic” the product of a few aberrant composers, like Strauss and Mahler. They now had musical progeny, whose works coalesced into a whole school of music, demonized as a dangerous population. Like the Social

Democrats or Herero, the secessionists had become an anarchist thorn in the side of liberals and conservatives alike, sapping nationalist strength. For critics, the lawlessness and Zoë- characteristics of music had reached epidemic levels, such that the degeneration and regeneration of the entire state of music seemed to be at stake. Additionally, many musical authorities insisted

333

that the secessionists were not simply a musical problem, but an issue of public health. If the political implications and overt biopolitics of musical debates had been previously muted, they were played in fortissimo after the Draeseke controversy.

The first part of the chapter examines the reactions to Strauss’s Salome, Mahler’s Sixth

Symphony, and Schoenberg’s First String Quartet. As some of the last major works of the secessionist era, one can see the change in musical opinion leading up to the Draeseke controversy. Secessionist musical language itself – not simply the composer – was injected with pathological connotations and even deemed a contagious threat to the health of the listeners. The second section examines the Draeseke article and the many responses to it. While critics widely disagreed about how to regenerate music, its healthiness remained central. Specifically, I look at the turn towards cultural policing advocated by Draeseke sympathizers, which should be viewed as a new method of negative biopolitics, given its emphasis on biological improvement through proactive subtraction of threats. The chapter’s final section looks at the fallout from the Draeseke controversy in the years leading up to the First World War. The conservatives were successful in ousting secessionist music from German culture, not simply by pathologizing it and limiting concert opportunities, but because modernist composers themselves changed styles. Modernism managed to survive by following the program laid out by Max Reger in “Degeneration and

Regeneration,” which preserved new music by instilling it with a new type of bios.

From the Perverse Implantation to Contagious Music

Richard Strauss’s Salome premiered on December 9, 1905 in Dresden and was an immediate success and scandal. In the next two seasons it was performed in over 50 cities, though notably not in Vienna, where the censors could not be prevailed upon. The scandal stemmed from its oft noted “perverse” characters and events. The blend of sexuality and gore in

Wilde’s play reached a high point in Salome’s necrophiliac kiss of the severed head of Jochanaan.

While the libretto showcased fin de siècle anxieties about sexuality, decadence, and mental health,

Strauss’s innovative music was also complicit in raising such concerns. Indeed from a purely

334

musical standpoint, Salome marks a moment of crisis about the health of new music. Given that the music was more than a backdrop, but actively participated in telling a perverse story, Salome served as a warning about the dangerous perversity of new music. In terms of music history, the opera is the crowning jewel of the musical secession, the most monumental achievement of ornamental music. However, the associations with this colorful music made by the libretto and by reviewers precipitated a heated reaction against new music.

With Salome Strauss adopted Wilde’s play into a libretto himself. As part of the late 19th- century fascination with the femme fatal, Wilde’s story, like Flaubert before him, takes the

Biblical story of the house of Herod and makes it a tale of intermingled sex and violence. Rather than Salome’s request of Jochanaan’s (John the Baptist’s) head as originating from her mother, it is her own request, motivated by a mix of lust and revenge. The first part of the narrative pairs

Salome’s fascination for Jochanaan with the obsession over Salome by Narraboth, a Syrian guard.

Salome uses her sensual hold over Narraboth to gain access to the prisoner Jochanaan, whose beautiful voice arouses her curiosity and desire. Narraboth kills himself and Jochanaan rebuffs

Salome’s advances. When Herodes arrives with his wife Herodias he demands that Salome dance for him in exchange for up to half his kingdom. After she performs the seven-minute dance of the seven veils, she asks for the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter. Herodes reluctantly agrees.

Salome sings her final aria on desire to the severed head and kisses it. The opera ends quickly with Herodes demanding her execution.

Each of the characters and people groups in Salome are beset with debilitating obsessions that contemporaries read as pathological conditions. Critics frequently referred to Salome as hysteric, though that was hardly an interpretive innovation as Parsifal’s Kundry and others had received the same diagnosis from Nordau and even earlier critics.715 However, with Strauss’s

Salome critics released a whole litany of further medical characterizations. Leopold Schmidt

715 Heinrich Platzbecker, “‘Salome’ von Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 26, no. 7 (1905): 150: Otto Neitzel, “‘Salome’ von Oscar Wilde und Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 18 (1907): 391.

335

writes:

However, we are not dealing with pathology only in the main character. The warped portrayal of sickness occurs in the neurasthenic Herodes, the overexcited, restless Narraboth, and the monomaniac Jochanaan, while a secret sultry, unhealthy atmosphere camps over the entirety, readied by the purposefully chosen manner of spatial and temporal milieu.716

The markers of Herodes’s neurasthenia are the frequent invocations of stimulation, both his bottomless appetite and over-sensitivity to the elements. Even Jochanaan, the ostensibly healthy figure, is pathologized by Schmidt as overly prude and single-minded.

Schmidt does not mention the Romans or Jews here – except perhaps as part of the unhealthy milieu – but they are stereotyped as equally obsessive in a story that seems to lack a single stable individual. Critics’ frequent pathologizing of characters also included statements about their degeneration, which moves diagnosis from the isolated individual to that individual’s relationship with society and species. Leading Cologne critic Otto

Neitzel ends his analysis of the characters Salome and Herodes by saying, “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.”717 The convergence of biology and culture in the years after 1900 was made evident by slippages like Neitzel’s between degeneration and decadence. For Neitzel the former is internal and the latter external.

While it might not be surprising that such designations as unhealthy, sickly, degenerate, and abnormal litter the reviews of Salome, the resort to medicalization should be read a mediation of contemporaneous strategies for managing disorder and making it legible.

The most unique and frequent medical designation for the characters in Strauss’s Salome was “perverse.” The designation was so widespread and fashionable that reviewers often felt the

716 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 55. 717 Otto Neitzel, “‘Salome’ von Oscar Wilde und Richard Strauss,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 18 (1907): 391.

336

need to wrap it in scare quotes. Arno Kleffel calls the audiences enjoyment of the opera a

“perverse pleasure.”718 The unusual and fixated sexual drives of Salome, Herodes, and even

Narraboth all earn the designation “perverse-characteristic.” Schmidt writes, “The story of

Salome, who demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward for her seductive dance – and the manner in which Oskar Wilde motivates them from a pathological, abnormal sexual instinct – comes to full consciousness.”719 In the late 19th Century the word “perverse” developed its specific reference to deviation from normal sexuality, defined loosely as heterosexual conjugal sex. By 1905 perversity was both a subject of medical inquiry and cultural concern, as Schmidt calls it “the favorite word of our time.”720 In fact Freud devotes considerable thought to the concept in the first of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905, the same year as Salome’s premiere. For Freud, classically defined perversity, aka multiplicitous sexual desire, is originary to the sexual drive. Whereas such polymorphous perversity is still evident in young children, in adults, perversity takes on a singular obsession that lies outside the bounds of

“normal” sex. The sexual desire of adults who have not been socialized to normal sexuality tends to coalesce around a limited fetish. For Herodes and Narraboth the object of desire is Salome, a desire which seems perverse in general sense, because of their destructive obsession, but also in a more specific way because the object is a precocious adolescent. However, the perversity of

Salome herself can be read as more properly Freudian, as a fetish. Her narrative arc is something of a maturation, from an innocent child praising the beauty of the moon to a powerful woman boasting of lust and revenge. In the process of growing up, her desires continuously shrink from the wider world to Jochanaan to finally just his lips, which she obtains in the finale.

Though Strauss’s libretto masterfully retains and even mutes some of Wilde’s pathological imagery, the real accomplishment of his Salome is musical. The heavily

718 Arno Kleffel, “Salome,” Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 50 (15 Dec 1905): 839. 719 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome in Dresden,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 630 (11 Dec 1905): 1. 720 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome in Dresden,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 630 (11 Dec 1905): 1.

337

“decorative” and “illustrative” music accentuates Strauss’s exuberant, but well-known orchestral style. On first glance the critical analysis of Salome actually resembled that of his previous works. An anonymous correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung calls the orchestra “Makart-like splendor of colors,” an allusion to the Viennese painter that harkens back to the earliest reviews of

Don Juan’s timbre and layering. In referring to the Salome vogue among contemporary artists,

Oscar Bie says that Strauss’s music is closest to Gustave Moreau’s paintings with their luxurious and sensual ornament.721 Schmidt asserts that this seemingly unprincipled music actually has color as its principle, which is the “strongest side of the newest music.”722 Additionally, critics noted the mosaic and speckled quality of the musical illustration. Hamburg critic Friedrich Adolf

Geissler, writes that:

Mosaic-like, composed of small and even smaller pieces, it seeks to individualize, to describe, but not to resolve the stirrings of our soul. It is a restless music, in which a number of times even the practiced ear can barely detect a key. A continual confluence of chords, a constant alteration of tempo and sketches, an accumulation of subtle effects of orchestration always keep the listener’s interest awake and always give him new surprises, but on the other hand letting a peaceful enjoyment to come to him for only a moment.723

As an incarnation of musical flesh, Salome reduces music to its smallest building blocks.

However, as Geissler articulates, their sum assemblage in Salome, in part due to the vague tonalities and rhythmic alterations, leave the listener stimulated and exhausted. However, the excitation and “tickling of nerves” in Salome was hardly different from Strauss’s earlier works.724

Reviewers considered the music of Salome as only an intensification of Strauss’s earlier music, rather than a formal divergence.725 Yet, in the context of Salome, Strauss’s music was uniquely heard – libretto aside – as a reflection of human decadence.726 For all the chromatic harmonies in

721 Anonymous, “Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung no. 343, evening edition (11 Dec 1905): 1. 722 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 55. 723 F. A. Geissler, “‘Salome,’ von Richard Strauss,” Die Musik 7, no. 18 (1905): 57. 724 Arno Kleffel, “Salome,” Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 50 (15 Dec 1905): 839. 725 See Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 50; Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 56. 726 See F. A. Geissler, “‘Salome,’ von Richard Strauss,” Die Musik 7, no. 18 (1905): 58. For Geissler this is because of its individualized quality.

338

Salome, what had changed most between Don Juan and Salome was not Strauss’s musical style as much as its cultural context. Through the insistence on societal mediation and pathology of the music by critical discourse, the terse, fractured, colorful style reflected a decadent modernity.

The debased content of the Wilde’s story only served to reinforce this.

From a musical standpoint, the historical significance of Salome lies in what I want to call the “perverse implantation,” borrowing the title from the second chapter of Foucault’s The

History of Sexuality. By “perverse implantation” I mean the discursive injection of perversion and other mental illness into the already established musical language of the musical secession.

For all the accused abnormality of the secession’s law-breaking compositions, music itself was never heard as “perverse.” Just as the actual sexual acts long predated the medical discovery of their perversity in the 19th Century, so also the musical language of the secession predated its classification as perverse and pathological by aesthetic authorities. With the diagnosing of

Salome’s music, musical discourse reached a point of normalizing the pathologization of new music. If the musical secession had been previously labeled as sick with some frequency, that interpretive framework really stuck and became firmly implanted in musical culture with the reactions to Salome.

While Strauss contributed to this implantation by setting Wilde’s play to corresponding music, the bulk of the work of implantation was accomplished by critics who quite directly pondered the question of perversity in music in the wake of Salome. Otto Hödel poses this question this way:

As a musician Strauss was apt for this task and from this arose the preponderance of painting in his works. Does this imply that he handles the method and manner of his Salome instrumentation pathologically? Can music even be made pathologically? Is pathological or, I will say, perverse music at all possible? Is it still music? 727

The basic assumption in this line of thought is that Strauss was trying to write music to

727 Otto Hödel, “Salome in Graz,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 73, no. 23 (1906): 513.

339

approximate the characters and milieu. Hödel never answers his rhetorical question as to whether pathological or worse still perverse music can be written. Schmidt, however, is not afraid to answer the question. He begins his analysis of the “total character of the score,” by suggesting that one could read it as a “musical correlate” to the story’s “perversity.”728 Beginning with assumptions about normal music and normal mental health, such reactions to Strauss implanted perversity in the musical style. As with Foucault’s analysis of sexuality, the delineation of perverse activities comes from outside the activities, from the authorities of knowledge production.729 Thereafter similar music could be catalogued as perverse.

For Hödel, as for every other reviewer, the very possibility of illness challenged the limits of the properly musical. Like Hödel, Schmidt denied the very existence of perverse music, reading it as a categorical contradiction. Since it was against the nature of music to be perverse, they designated Salome as no longer music, but rather sonic Zoë. Schmidt says that “music cannot lie against its transcendental essence.”730 Geissler says that the “grizzly sexual abnormality” is itself a breech with aesthetics, especially with musical aesthetics.731 While he does not say why perversity so violates music, clearly he invokes music’s higher calling and high responsibility as often articulated by idealist aestheticians. Modernist supporter Richard Batka glibly and satirically echoes similar fears with his catchphrase list of the so-called “end of music, or perversity in music, musical hysteria.”732 The fear of the “end of music” predated Salome by a decade, but was reinforced by such direct implantations of pathology and perversity.

This discursive implantation of medicine into music was most specific in Salome with perversity, but applies to the pathologization of new music more generally. While Schmidt denies

728 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome in Dresden,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 630 (11 Dec 1905): 1. 729 Foucault makes clear that the perversity of an action comes from outside the act, from speaking powers that examine the action, but yet they become part of them: “These polymorphous conducts were actually extracted from people’s bodies and from their pleasures; or rather, they were solidified in them; they were drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by multifarious power devices.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 47-48. 730 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 55. 731 F. A. Geissler, “‘Salome,’ von Richard Strauss,” Die Musik 7, no. 18 (1905): 56. 732 Richard Batka, “Der Monatsplauderer,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 17 (1907): 372.

340

the very category of sick music, he notes that Strauss attempts to make music that is not beautiful, music that characterizes the “sickly degeneration of human nature.”733 With degeneration we move away from the individual implications of specific music that is perverse to declining musical forms that represent the whole population of music as biologically declining in a metaphorical sense. In a latter review of Strauss’s , which Schmidt says has more health and power, he argues that in Salome Strauss’s “music reflects through thousands of iridescent colors a strangely sultry atmosphere and morbid states of mind.”734 No doubt the music of

Salome has more chromaticism and irregular rhythms than his previous works, but above all it is its total emancipation of color, in the words of Dahlhaus, that earned the pathological designation.

Salome is the high point of secessionist ornamentation and sensual music. The music aims ever to “reflect” the wild and varied passions that surge through this story. While the secessionist musical language was previously described as nervous, decadent, degenerate, and pathological, with Salome the degenerate implementation seems to stick and become an essentialized inner property of the music. In the words of Foucault, the perverse diagnoses were “solidified in them

[polymorphous sex acts]; they were drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated.”735

Musical forms are extracted from their immediacy by musical discourse and then returned bearing the tags of a new medicalization.

The reactions to Strauss’s Salome also indicated greater social mediation in the views of secessionist music. The spectacle of Salome was clearly more about the present than the classical world in which it is set. It was about the fantasies and anxieties of urban modernity, through the conceit of a distant, exoticized past. Arno Kleffel is frank and direct in declaring, that the opera was “picture of our time and our perverse degeneration.”736 Similarly, Both Heinrich Platzbecker

733 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 55. 734 Leopold Schmidt, “Elektra in Berlin,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 71 (9 Feb 1909): 2. 735 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 48. 736 Arno Kleffel, “Salome,” Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 32, no. 50 (15 Dec 1905): 839.

341

and Schmidt suggest that the oriental decadence resonates with contemporary culture.

Platzbecker’s assessment that Salome “smacks of the decadent milieu of our times,”737 hints at a deep moral judgment of modern culture. The Berliner Schmidt takes a more diplomatic stance, calling Salome a “sign of the times,” with which Strauss is able grasp contemporary life.738 In a manner reminiscent of Lamprecht, Schmidt links modernity with a nervous pursuit of the new. At times, even, the attempts to use Salome to critique urban modernity assumes a decidedly orientalist tone. The classical Middle East becomes a cipher for the abnormalities of the present, which says as much about cultural critics’ view of a turbulent Europe as it does about their stereotyping of a tantalizing, yet dangerous East. Schmidt describes the first century

Mediterranean as thirsting for the new, including both frivolous sensations and “world-altering ideas.”739 It is almost a sort of inner European orientalism on the part of the critics against the strange voices of modernity and modernism. To invoke Edward Said’s Foucauldian discourse analysis, it is the experts – in this case aesthetic experts – that create the orient with all its dangers

– in this case an inner musical orient.740

At this point I want to suggest that Salome in its musical relationships possesses a musical allegory. Not unlike Zarathustra, Heldenleben, and especially Feuersnot, the motifs

Strauss gives to different characters carry barbed implications for contemporaneous debates about avant-garde music. While Strauss’s musical stereotyping of the Romans and Jews has analogic significance of its own, I want to focus on the relationship between the “decadent” characters and

Jochanaan, that is, the major figures of the story. In contrast to the sharp, hasty vocal lines of

Salome, Herodes, and Herodias – bordering on Sprechgesang – Jochanaan has the most traditionally beautiful lyricism. Similarly, the chromatic leitmotifs and luxuriant timbre of the

737 Heinrich Platzbecker, “‘Salome’ von Richard Strauss. Uraufführung am Dresdner Hoftheater am 9. Dezember 1905,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 26, no. 7 (1905), 150. 738 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome in Dresden,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 630 (11 Dec 1905): 1. 739 Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 55. 740 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

342

royal family can be neatly juxtaposed with Jochanaan’s economic mélange of 19th-century romantic traits. This dichotomy frequently struck reviewers, especially the singularity of

Jochanaan’s romantic melodies in the midst of such challenging secessionist music. While one can never say what music is “truly Strauss,” given his obfuscation of every kind of musical subjectivity, no doubt the stark difference between the immoral decadents and the moralist

Jochanaan functions as an allegory of the secession and its detractors. Like the philistines in

Heldenleben and the Müncheners in Feuersnot, Jochanaan represents a kind of musical conservatism, though one specific to its time.741 Whereas the musical conservatives in those previous works had been characterized as dry academics and anti-Wagnerians – essentially formalists – with Jochanaan’s romantic sublimity in 1905, musical conservatism seems to incorporate the whole 19th Century, Wagner included.

The notion of Jochanaan as a symbol for new conservatism in music was not lost on audiences. At least one critic suggested that Strauss was playing a joke on opponents of new music.742 After all, this conservative character loses his head. In a way one can read the overbearing decadence of the royal family in Salome as something of a caricature of the musical secessionists themselves in their affirmation of sensuality and stimulation. Such an allegory becomes most provoking, not when illuminating party differences, but in the fact that Herodes and especially Salome become enamored of Jochanaan. To the same degree that Salome’s and

Herodes’s music was described as pathological, Jochanaan’s music was considered healthy and pure, if at times boring.743 The affinity that Herodes and Salome feel for Jochanaan is an allegory of the strong attraction that many secessionists had for traditional musical expression. Such penchants can be interpreted at the level of form, including the developing variation of Reger and

741 However, to call Jochanaan a conservative in the biblical context would be technically wrong, given his role as a progenitor of a new religion and worldview. 742 See J. W., “Salome Anekdoten,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 26, no. 8 (1906): 175. 743 On the reception of Jochanaan’s music see Leopold Schmidt, “Salome,” Die Musik 6, no. 22 (January 1907): 56.

343

Schoenberg, the leitmotivic operas of Strauss, and the absolute symphonies of Mahler. This attraction was also an almost neo-classical recognition that diatonic music is powerful and pleasant. Schoenberg aside, modernists desired to write such melodies, without invoking the philosophies imputed to them. They wished to wring musical materials, in Adorno’s vocabulary, from their discursive context, a context which continually pitted the chromaticism of the secession against musical music. Diatonic music is staged as a forbidden love, which does not, like Jochanaan, recognize the secessionists, but nor do they comprehend the morality of his message. It is Jochanaan’s voice that first catches Salome’s interest as she is wandering about, commenting on various beauties like the moon. However, neither she nor any of the other characters seem to be able to comprehend Jochanaan’s philosophy, though they understand his slander. As a budding secessionist, Salome desires the voice of Jochanaan, but not his words, not the message carried on that voice. Within the musical allegory Jochanaan’s puritanism and messianism approximates the idealist and Bildung aspirations of 19th-century music. This is, music as a rational concept or expressive idea. Salome’s desire for the body, hair, and lips of

Jochanaan approximates the attraction to traditional forms, though again, not necessarily what fills those forms. Strauss’s Salome never really clarifies why Herodes likes Jochanaan, but perhaps it is also the strange sense of beauty that draws Salome in. Even the orchestra seems attracted to Jochanaan, as his raising from the dungeon is the most musically dramatized moment of the opera’s first half.

Within this allegory, Jochanaan’s rejection of Salome and subsequent beheading figure as two moments of partisan musical politics between old and new. Despite her adoration, Jochanaan refuses to even look at Salome, let alone kiss her. This is the musical establishment’s stubborn rejection of new music. In turn, Salome’s decision to get what she wants through dismemberment represents a particularly bitter and vindictive, if staged, spirit of Strauss’s musical secession.

While there are moments in Salome’s final aria where she seems to have lost some track of reality, at other moments she seems painfully aware of the stakes of her maturation and the cost of

344

her calculated revenge. She has killed Jochanaan to indirectly attain the lips she desires – part of the old musical forms – even though the lust was unrequited. However, musically she does more than this. As Lawrence Kramer argues, Salome steals his voice, incorporating it in her final monologue.744 This is not unlike the finale of Feuersnot, where Kunrad re-appropriates the broken pieces of his Wagnerian Hexenhaus to preach against both Wagnerism and the conservative Müncheners. Not only does Salome take pieces of Jochanaan’s body, but more importantly his lyrical style.

In the finale of Strauss’s Salome, the title character powerfully asserts her will, a power she seems to extract from Jochanaan. Her final aria blends together the decadence of her house with the purity of the prophet. For a composer known for setting diverse musical styles alongside each other, rather than blending them, Salome’s final aria is a unique intersection. For Schmidt,

Strauss is unable in Salome to combine the “characteristic” and the “beautiful,” which is true in most of Strauss, but I don’t think he listened close enough to the ending. For other critics the ending was a regression for Strauss to more traditional music at the end, but it should be noted that it centers on Salome. While Korngold thought that Strauss was mocking beautiful music by giving it to the most insane and decadent character, this perspective misses two points.745 First, the music of the finale is not simply pilfering from Jochanaan’s voice, but a mixture. Second,

Salome is more than a crazed necrophile, but a powerful woman asserting herself within a repressive milieu of voyeurs and legalphiles. Writing for Vorwärts, “A.” was one of the only critics to really praise Strauss’s Salome, and he does so describing it as healthy, especially because of the ending which he finds different than Wilde. Whereas Wilde’s Salome is pure nympho decadent, through music and an edited libretto Strauss makes her a more affirmative and

744 Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004): 156-60. 745 See Julius Korngold, “Salome,” in Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Randolph Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 344.

345

sympathetic character, “deeper and more soulful than the original.746 This Salome prefigures

Elektra, with its powerful, subversive lead female and an expressionist ethos of the music.

When Herodes emerges from the shadows to demand Salome’s own death, the order is executed quickly and without pomp. As in his tone poem Don Juan, Strauss kills off his amorous hero with undramatic, ungrateful duty. The reasons for both could simply be fidelity to the original texts. Yet, Salome’s death and the reemergence of Herodes’s legal power are an omen of the musical future in terms of the battle between musical moderns and conservatives. Here

Strauss stages the punishment of his own secessionist movement for its excesses, including the dismembered appropriation of old forms for new ornamental music. Here Strauss foresees the reaction against the secession, including his own turn away from ornament in Elektra. Herodes’s final declaration to kill Salome represents the reemergence of sovereignty in all its negating power. It is the voice of Draeseke and new conservatism. Throughout the whole opera Herodes seems anything but sovereign as the elements besiege him and he negotiates with his own step daughter from a position of weakness. Herodes’s eroding sovereign power is even highlighted in his complaint that he did not order the death of Narraboth, as if he should own the monopoly over violence. Throughout Salome, each character’s desire threatens the power of law. Herodes’s power evaporates in the quest for a dance. Narraboth shirks his duties for his muse. Salome herself chooses an unrequited love object over royal power. Even Jochanaan’s new religion of devotion to charisma challenges Jewish legal thought. Yet, the law remembers itself at the end and seeks to eliminate perverse desire. Within the musical historical narrative this is the reaction of new conservatism, which realizes that modern, perverse music can be eliminated simply by refusing to program it. Musical culture rediscovers sovereignty discarded throughout the 19th

Century.

The language of the reactions to Salome signals that by 1906 the perceived danger of the

746 A. “Salome von Richard Strauss,” Vorwärts (1905): 962.

346

musical succession had reached a problematic threshold. When the precocious young Strauss first shocked audiences with Don Juan, no one was more adamant about the music’s sickness than

Hanslick himself. Yet, as I argue in the first chapter, he did not openly ascribe a social danger to that music, nor prescribe its removal from concert halls. In a permissive spirit befitting his liberal politics, he simply tried to shepherd audiences and Strauss himself out of such unhealthy aesthetic terrain. After Salome the permissiveness and patience of the more conservative contingent of musical culture dried up. With the perverse implantation and expansion of mediation in musical criticism, the secession became symbolic of a growing social malady that needed to be checked.

Indeed it was more than symbolism. In the months that followed the crisis ignited by Salome, critics became insistent that the secession was not only a musical problem, but a literal threat to public health.

The premieres of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Schoenberg’s First String Quartet at the final two secessionist ADMV festivals demonstrate absolute music’s lack of autonomy from the same health concerns as Salome. While the critique of Salome was intimately tied to its libretto and operatic form, the crisis it initiated was distinctly musical. The “perverse implantation” accomplished by the libretto and critiques of Salome continued to inject these compositions.

However, critical concern was less about sexuality and more about degeneration and neurasthenia. Additionally, the reactions to these pivotal works by Mahler and Schoenberg show a heightened concerned for the dangerous effect of new music on its audiences. If Salome confirmed that music itself was sick, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Schoenberg’s First String

Quartet declared pathological music contagious. The secession was not simply a picture of the sickness of modernity, but an active agent in spreading biological decline.

More so than his previous five symphonies, Mahler’s Sixth symphony unites the grand and the grotesque. Despite the tragic drama of the Sixth Symphony, it exhibits relentless musical montage and exuberant color. In terms of formal musical descriptions, critics did not read this symphony as so different from the others. They heard it as parodist, composite, misplaced sound

347

effects,747 cacophonous little pieces, and ugly.748 Aside from Nodnagel, formalists especially stressed the lack of unity, both within each movement and across the four, traditionally-ordered movements. Whereas Nodnagel insists on the “economic relationship” of the musical parts to the whole,749 O. K. writes, “This multiplicity in the absence of unity makes for neither aesthetics nor culture, but something quite different.”750 In contrast to Nodnagel’s liberal language of necessity and economic aesthetics, O. K. hears sounds that are beyond the pale of art. Schmidt sums up well the reception of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony:

Mahler’s music suffers from hypertrophy. It always assimilates the entire base material without separating it out, sparing us no incident, no combination. Mahler is certainly a great colorist, but the excessive sound effects also create here often illusory intensification, the harshest Fortissimo only encounters stressed auditory nerves.751

While Schmidt’s assessment of effects, color, and disunity echoed previous perceptions of

Mahler’s works, the emphasis of the music’s strain on audience nerves was more frequently pronounced and tied to extra-aesthetic concerns. Indeed, it was the very question of nerves that moved the discourse from music to society more generally, including its illnesses.

Opinions varied widely on Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, which was considered both more and less musical than Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Though several critics called it the grizzliest thing they had ever heard, many formalist critics were comparatively receptive to

Schoenberg’s first widely-discussed work. O. K. even states directly that he prefers it to Mahler’s

Sixth Symphony.752 His review makes clear that Schoenberg was the subject of much respectful discussion and that “a personality” spoke through the music, that is, it possessed a subjectivity

747 Walter Paetow, “Aus dem Berliner Musikleben,” Tägliche Rundschau no. 237 (9 Oct 1906): 4. 748 Otto Lessmann, “Das 42. Tonkünstlerfest in ,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 33, no. 23 (8 June 1906): 389. 749 Ernst Otto Nodnagel, “Gustav Mahlers A-moll Symphonie no. 6,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 73, no. 21/22 (23 May 1906): 465-67. 750 O. K., “Das Essener Tonkünstlerfest,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 26, no. 18 (1906): 388. 751 Leopold Schmidt, “Mahlers ‘Sechste’,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 276, evening supplement (2 June 1906), 2. 752 O. K. “Eindrücke und Nachkläge vom Dresdner Tonkünstlerfest,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 26, no. 20 (1907), 433.

348

that Strauss and Mahler lacked. Similarly, Schmidt’s review of Schoenberg’s quartet is far more technical and diplomatic than his multifaceted jabs at Mahler’s non-music, though he detects sourness and derailment in Schoenberg’s execution.753 An exception among formalist critics was the Frankfurt Zeitung’s critic, who cut into the string quartet, saying

We frankly confess that we have not yet become acquainted with something worse bearing the name of “music.” The most troublesome degeneracies of M. Reger seem harmless compared to what is here expected of the listener. This dissonant jargon, this so-called polyphony, which with its most recent counterpoint slogan “rhyme or I’ll eat you” and all aesthetics and all that you previously summarized under the concept of art – almost a mockery – formed an almost continuous torture for our ears.754

Though this reviewer certainly highlights the painfulness and danger of this worse than

“degenerate” music, he also confesses, as a good formalist, that it has a good sense of form, even if the polyphonic unities are somewhat trite in their “rhyming.” Whereas this anonymous critic highlights Schoenberg’s depravity by saying that it is worse even than Reger, G. v B. at the

Reichspost compares it unfavorably to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which he had recently heard in

Vienna.755 Like the Reichspost critic, Hirschfeld and the critics at the Wagnerian AM-Z were the most critical of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet.756 These critics were especially insistent that the quartet was neither musical, nor healthy, a case of “aesthetic modernitis” according to Aug.

Püringer.757

Following Strauss’s Salome there was an increase in the pathologization of new music, even absolute music. The FZ critic ends by calling the experience of Schoenberg’s First String

Quartet a “plague” and comparing it to other degenerate music. While one should make a distinction between sick music and sickening music, that distance was frequently collapsed by

753 Leopold Schmidt, “Glossen zum Dresdner Tonkünstlerfest,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 339 (7 July 1907): 1. 754 Anonymous, “Feuilleton,” Frankfurter Zeitung, third morning edition (2 July 1907): 181. 755 G. v. B., “Theater, Kunst und Musik,” no. 40 (17 Feb 1907): 11. 756 Aug. Püringer, “Musikbrief aus Wien,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 34, no. 12 (22 March 1907): 214.; Robert Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton: Konzerte,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 53 (5 March 1907): 1: “Wenn es Musik wäre, so könnten normal veranlagte Menschen ihren gesunden Sinn dabei nicht wach unf heil erhalten. Zum Glücke macht Arnold Schönberg, obwohl es das Talent dafür hätte, kein Musik.” 757 Aug. Püringer, “Musikbrief aus Wien,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 34, no. 12 (22 March 1907): 214.

349

critics. According to Hirschfeld, real music activates the listener’s healing powers, but with

Schoenberg: “normally disposed people could not get their healthy sense there awoken and receive healing.”758 Perhaps an abnormal, secessionist supporter could have a positive somatic response, but according to this discourse, a listener of normal health would presumably not be enervated – the task of good music according to Hirschfeld – but the opposite. In his review of

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Muntz makes a similar jump between the perversity of the music and its supporters. While Muntz had previously marshalled every standard slander and derogatory medical category against Mahler’s symphonies, it is only after Salome that Mahler’s music becomes specifically perverse, that is sexually deviant. After calling the Scherzo a “perverse joke,” he says later that “The mass of dandies celebrate a perverse musical fashion as the revelation of a future art.”759 Muntz even names the demographic of this perverse enthusiasm for

Mahler’s music as “fifteen year old flappers and boys.” It is almost as if Mahler’s following consists of Salome herself. Julius Korngold describes the music of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony as a “collection of abnormal growths,” similar to the ones Jean des Esseintes collected in

Huysmans’s novel. Just as fellow NFP reviewer Oscar Bie compared Strauss’s Salome to Gustav

Moreau’s paintings – which similarly attracted the interest of des Esseintes – Korngold attempts to link Mahler’s music with the most celebrated images of fin de siècle decadence, including

Klimt.760 In the embodied musical language of Korngold, the mosaic music of Mahler approximates a cabinet of monstrous curiosities. Here the language of biological degeneration begins to bubble up, but remain still slightly muted on the eve of the 1907 debates about degeneration in music.761

With Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, the most pressing medical concerns and mediations of a sick modernity revolve around the issue of strained nerves.

758 Robert Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton: Konzerte,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 53 (5 March 1907): 1. 759 M. M., “Gustav Mahlers ‘Tragische Symphonie’,” Deutsche Zeitung no. 12579 (6 Jan 1907): 1. 760 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton: musik,” Neue Freie Presse, no. 15224 (8 Jan 1907): 1-3. 761 Arthur Hahn, “München,” Neue Musik-Zeitung, 27, no. 7 (1906): 153.

350

This is more the case with Mahler than Schoenberg. Scarcely a review of Mahler’s Sixth

Symphony failed to mention nerves in some capacity. For many such as Korngold, O.K., Gustav

Altmann, and Schmidt, they felt that the music churned, rattled, or simply got on one’s nerves.762

Others even attributed to the composition itself a quality of harmonic nervousness, such as

Hirschfeld who calls the work “nervous haste and excitement.”763 For Hirschfeld, such noise and irregularity differentiates this piece from “organic intensification,” which would, again, stimulate a person with a normal physical constitution.

As mentioned in the last chapter, the medical concern with neurasthenia was growing after 1900 and crossing over into cultural debates thanks to figures like Lamprecht and Simmel.

However, unlike their rather neutral moral assessment of overstimulation, most music critics invoked stimulation as preachers of cultural despair. To call a composition nerve tingling music was no longer an objective observation, but a condemnation of its pathological affect.

Stimulation of the nerves was no longer positive in the sense praised by Hermann Bahr in 1890, but a 20th-century epidemic that needed to be stemmed.

The connections between neurasthenia and music were especially intensified with

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Whatever the formal musical origins of this reaction – the melodic and color mosaic – it also seems to stem from the urban and machinic associations with the symphony. It is not clear who coined the term, but from its first performances it was known as the “Krupp symphony,” given that its premiere was in Essen, the headquarters of the German industrial giant. In their reviews both Schmidt and Altmann connect the symphony’s noise with the iron works of Essen, either because of its use of brass instruments or because of the giant

762 Leopold Schmidt, “Mahlers ‘Sechste’,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 276, evening supplement (2 June 1906), 2; O. K., “Das Essener Tonkünstlerfest,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 26, no. 18 (1906): 388; Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton: musik,” Neue Freie Presse, no. 15224 (8 Jan 1907): 1-3; Gustav Altmann, “Das 42. Tonkünstlerfest des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins in Essen,” Die Musik 5, no. 19 (July 1906): 49. 763 Robert Hirschfeld, “Feuilleton: Konzerte,” Wiener Abendpost, no. 53 (5 March 1907): 1.

351

hammer.764 Korngold’s established theme of Technik as a unifier of modernity and aesthetic modernism attains stark imagery with the ironworks associations of this symphony. The

Reichspost reviewer of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet takes the imagery even further. He suggests that if the public likes such musical “undeeds,” then perhaps “the jingle of electricity and the automobile signal would finally be the ideal of music!”765 The idea that new music sounded like modern urban experience and technology became increasingly prevalent and was an important part of the label of “futurism” for this music. It was assumed that their music was simply imitating the urban environment of traffic and machines.

However, even the folk-sounding melodies of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony were considered distinctly urban. Korngold says that they sound like the metropolis with its throng of transplants playing their songs from the country-side.766 Mahler’s pastoral motifs are not even a reprieve from the technological, over-stimulating landscape of his music, but in their highly stylized form, a reminder of the urban origins of the gaze back at the supposedly innocent rural existence. By

1906 the most avant-garde compositions were heard as mediations of urban life and its technologies. And just as these technologies were considered the number one cause of neurasthenia, so also new music was stigmatized for its sickening properties. As both a reflection and cause of social and biological decline, secessionist music generated a network of opponents.

“Pathological” music had become more than a musical problem and unleashed a profound backlash.

Returning to Salome as an allegory of musical culture, Strauss seems to be poking fun at the danger associated with his music, yet the story also confesses that something had to give.

With Salome standing in for the secession, she matures from a flighty girl to a powerful woman

764 Leopold Schmidt, “Mahlers ‘Sechste’,” Berliner Tageblatt no. 276, evening supplement (2 June 1906), 2; Gustav Altmann, “Das 42. Tonkünstlerfest des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins in Essen,” Die Musik 5, no. 19 (July 1906): 49. 765 G. v. B., “Theater, Kunst und Musik,” Reichspost no. 40 (17 Feb 1907): 11. 766 Julius Korngold, “Feuilleton: musik,” Neue Freie Presse, no. 15224 (8 Jan 1907): 1-3.

352

who puts the most modern music into rigorously traditional forms. In her final monologue she embraces Jochanaan’s mutilated body, an embrace of tradition, deconstructed to fit one’s desire.

Indeed that is the musical accomplishment of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Schoenberg’s First

String Quartet. They are the last grand arias of the secessionist era, bringing together standard forms with a highly polyphonic and carnivalesque musical language. But like Salome herself, such outbursts were followed by condemnation and execution. Herodes would order the death of the secession, most forcefully through the mouth of Draeseke. To the musical authorities, the secession had not only become Salome, a perverse adolescent, but a degenerate population of music that threatened to contaminate, not only the musical world, but the health of society at large.

The Year of Confusion: 1907

When Draeseke published “The Confusion in Music” in 1906, just three months after the world premiere of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, he probably could not have imagined its impact.

The article inspired dozens of responses by major critics and was the cornerstone of musical aesthetic discussion well into 1908. In fact, 1907 was frequently called “the year of confusion.”767 Although it is difficult to overestimate the seismic impact of Draeseke’s call for a new kind of musical conservatism, it has been ignored in music history in favor of purely biographical and formal readings of compositional change. The article served as a formal treaty ending the long-halted War of the Romantics. Although Draeseke had been one of the original members of the New German School in the 1850s and a long-time advocate of program music, at age 71 he published the volume-year’s lead article for the staunchly formalist NMZ. Both sides of the former War of the Romantics could agree that musical culture required new tactics and coalitions to stem the tide of decadence. As I will demonstrate, Draeseke offers a vision of a new kind of conservatism, not a knee-jerk reaction to new music, but an active renaissance of German

767 The most substantial overview of the debates unleashed by Draeseke was titled “Annus Confusionis.” See Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 131-69.

353

classics and a repression of unmusical music. In all these discussions, the health and sickness of music and society provided the guiding measure of progress. Moreover, this new musical conservatism was not simply a new aesthetic position, but one with the teeth to reorganize musical culture. Such calls for a new kind of musical conservatism should be placed above

Mahler’s departure for New York and Schoenberg’s first forays into atonality as producing the much noted rupture in German music history in 1907. Indeed, the “departures” of Mahler and

Schoenberg should actually be read in light of the Draeseke-ignited backlash against the musical secession.

Draeseke’s article suggests that a new era in musical culture began in the mid-1880s and became especially prominent in the late 1890s. He characterizes the musical fin de siècle as moving away from the New Germans and Brahmsians, both of which he praises. In fact, he spends much of the article retelling the emergence of the War of the Romantics and justifying (for his formalist, NMZ audience) the principled innovations and respect for tradition by earlier program composers. However, for Draeseke, new music had become full of a “general lawlessness and anarchy,”768 and a musical culture once shaped by distinct parties was a “war of all against all.”769 Draeseke’s article does not actually mention by name the composers and compositions he was preaching against, as if to deprive them the pleasure of recognition. A strategic component of new conservatism was actually allowing new music to wither in the public sphere by failing to speaking it into further existence. The liberal tradition of dissecting pathological music had only enhanced its visibility and attractiveness. Rather Draeseke and company left Strauss’s and Mahler’s compositions to fade from memory. At the same time everyone knew who he was talking about. For some readers, new decadent music meant Strauss

768 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 6. 769 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 1. “Schauten frührere Zeiten erbitterte Kämpfe, die von feindlich gegenüberstehenden Parteien ausgefochten wurden, so erschreckt unsere Epoche durch einen erbarmungslosen Kampf aller gegen alle, ohne das man den künstlerischen Grund dieses Kampfes zu entdecken vermöchte!”

354

and Reger, for others Mahler and D’Albert.770

While Draeseke’s historical placement of new music and calls for restoring older principles was widely influential, his broadly-addressed critique of new music voiced established arguments. He singled out “color” as the driving force of new music, having supplanted the traditional musical “elements” of melody, harmony, and rhythm, a hierarchy which clearly places melody as the preeminent musical element, that which guarantees every esteemed quality of musical music – original and cultivating.771 As merely colorful sounds and sonic means that were

“shrill and harsh sounds,” he declares new music to be “absolute nonmusic,” a clever twist on absolute music, but a quite common assessment of the categorical unmusicality of the secessionists.772

In addition to a focus on color, or perhaps because of it, Draeseke also characterizes new music by its lack of real principles and formal coherence, as well as dissonance, ugliness, and pathology. In opposition to the progressive and historically-oriented perspective of his own

New German revolutionaries, he hears contemporary innovators as mindlessly iconoclastic:

“Grown is the destructiveness towards sacred traditions and beauty as well as the rules and impiety towards the tremendous achievements of a great past.”773 He interprets the expressive ethos of the late 19th Century as having reached farcical limits, in which cacophony itself becomes the ideal. Having abandoned the bounds of harmony and melody, virtuosic composers wrote pieces with previously unimaginable, unjustified musical relationships and dissonances.

For Draeseke such unmusical spectacles produced a damaged musical culture that does not even

770 Generally speaking, everyone knew who Draeseke was talking about, though there is some debate about who was most modern and degenerate. In published letters to the editor of the Neue Musik-Zeitung, Karl Grunsky singled out Strauss and Reger, while the editor for Signale für die Musikalische Welt pointed to Mahler and D’Albert. See Musikalische Zeitfragen. Draesekes Manruf und sein Echo,” Neue Musik Zeitung 27, no. 5 (1906): 98-101. 771 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 1: “weil nach ihrer Meinung dies neu hinzugetretene Element der Farbe die drei alten Hauptelemente der Musik weit überweigt, und gut instrumentieren mit gut komponieren für gleichbedeutend angesehen wird.” 772 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 1. 773 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 1.

355

realize its own twisted desire for non-music: “What above all seems to us even worse is the brutalizing impression, which a cult of ugliness – connected with the contempt for all previously valid traditions – must produce on the entire musical world, lay persons as much as artists.”774 He even suggests that listeners have reached a state of “hyper-blasé-ness,” which needs ever greater dissonance, leading to a “music that does not know healthy development, nor will be useful for it.”775

While the overt bio-medical references in Draeseke’s “Confusion in music” were limited, their deployment was unique and precise. Much like the reactions earlier in the year to

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, he links the state of music with the state of listeners. Draeseke makes the “healthy development” of listeners, who suffer from overstimulation, concomitant with the healthy development of music, a mere metaphor for order. He continually connects the need for musical order and regulation with the protection of a musical public that cannot protect itself.

Not only was the “cult of ugliness” being passed from composer to cultural consumer, but the depths of neurasthenia made musical progress nearly impossible. Because the musical public follows the lead of composers, it no longer knows real music. Draeseke writes, “For the musical public, which has placed before it nonmusic as music by otherwise solid, strictly disciplined, mature artists, must naturally be confused and willingly follows the given example. Eventually the public joins the fashion and acknowledges the ugly as the only worthwhile goal.”776 This is what he means by confusion in music, that the public is lead astray by whims of the irresponsible artists, i.e., the secessionists. Moreover, this is the furthest point in Draeseke’s description of the decline of music after which he stresses the need to return to the classics. Unlike Hanslick’s faith in the musical public to naturally turn back to musical music, the contagious fashion for noise is a cultural development that must be actively checked. Draeseke clearly states that musical culture

774 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7. 775 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 6. 776 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 6-7.

356

will not change from a “sick and rotten” state to a “healthy condition” on its own.777

The real innovation and impact of the article was Draeseke’s spirited call to action. He chides conservative critics for becoming “boring reactionaries,” but also the tendency to do nothing and let anarchy reign. Both of these trends, he suggests, have only intensified the confusion about progress and party lines in music. Only near the end of “The Confusion in

Music,” does Draeseke shift from description of the history and state of music to prescription, specifically in the context of its poor health condition. Draeseke considers himself the first to really stand up and call out the devastated state of music like a prophet.778 In fact he considers his primary role as merely pointing out the sad state of music. It can, nonetheless, be inferred that music needs to return to principles in his consistent complaints about young composers’ lack of training and rules. His only detailed prescription is that change must be actively sought and audiences must be disabused of their attraction to modern music.

Draeseke’s penultimate paragraph is a provocative summation of the need for active change, based on political parallels:

Yes, it could even lead to complete ruin, if no one reverses and there would be no stop. So that the Social Democrats, if they came to power and wanted to clean up art, as with all that is established, would not find much further to eliminate with us…Now the lazy “laisser aller” cannot be tolerated by us, because that will improve nothing, but only make the necessary healing more difficult, if not totally prevented. But to go further on the self-chosen paths is already impossible because it seems quite unbelievable how this collapse of the existing order – this supremely driven negation – should still be surpassed.“779

This call for action – in both music and its political parallel – is the culmination of the entire article. The final paragraph continues this thought in the context of music as the heart of the

German nation: “Be true to your dearest treasure [music], German people, and do not be blinded

777 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7. “Mann glaube um Gottes willen nicht, das es sich von selbst ändern, gesunde Zustände von selbst auf die kranken und verfaulten folgen werden.” 778 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7. “Es wird leider so fortgehen, wenn niemand ernergisch dagegen seine Stimme erhebt, und dies schien beinahe zu fürchsten.” 779 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7.

357

by revolutionaries, who do not want progress, but only the revolution.”780 For Draeseke the musical order of things has been completely demolished, tantamount to the conservative nightmare of the socialists taking the reins of state power. Indeed they seem to be two sides of the same destructive, revolutionary coin. As a solution Draeseke rails against laissez faire policies in music, but the political parallel is made obvious. One cannot simply keep trucking along the same path, i.e. Bülow should dissolve the parliament. More immediately, the “healing” of the state of music can only be accomplished by intervention, not simply letting lawless music freely parade and infect musical culture. In fact, he insists that a hands-off policy only hinders efforts at improving musical health. Furthermore, because he ends with emphasizing the importance of music to the German people, his call for action is not simply about healing the state of music, but the nation.

The immediate audience for Draeseke’s article was the musical formalists. He was trying to shake them from a Hanslick-inspired permissiveness and/or an old school conservatism that ignored contemporary music. He urges them not to be “boring reactionaries.” While the tensions between New Germans and formalists had been waning for years, this was the consummate reach across the aisle to unite against a common enemy: the secessionists. This is the same dynamic at play in Reichstag politics at the time. In an attempt to outflank the socialists, Center party, and colonial insurgents, the conservative parties formed a new and historical unique coalition with the

National Liberal Party. Whatever their other disagreements, they were equally opposed to the

Social Democrats and in favor of strengthening the empire. While there was not always a conceptual affinity between the old and new in music and politics (for example the “old left” in both cases – liberal politics and New German music – shared very little in common aspirations), the drift toward the right and reaction to the new was a common theme. At the center of both transitions, though, lay the fear of anarchy, democracy, and even laissez faire policies, which had

780 Felix Draeseke, “Die Konfusion in der Musik,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 1 (4 Oct 1906): 7.

358

seemingly produced the former. Draeseke’s article tapped into shared anxieties across the stratum of culture and politics. It was not simply an age-old fear of decline, but, as I will demonstrate, a concern deeply couched in the parameters of biology. From the perspective of conservatism, nascent biopolitical measures would have to assume a more prominent and proactive role in reversing degeneration. While Draeseke did make general comments about the health of music and its public, his primary significance was in articulating a need for intervention and a method of general improvement through increased policing and the removal of a dangerous subgroup.

Draeseke’s call to arms stirred reaction widely and immediately. Daily newspapers all over central Europe carried summaries and responses to the article that the NMZ editor called a

“kampfartikel.” Calculated response essays were published in music journals the whole next year, including several series of competing responses. As if to confirm Draeseke’s own estimation of the fracturing of musical politics, the counter assessments of the state of music were scattered across the spectrum. Though few completely sympathized with Draeseke’s anti-modernism, most agreed that something was dreadfully wrong with the present and that the solution lay in the musical past. 1906 was also Mozart’s 150th birthday, making his music as much as Bach’s the standard of needed restoration. If anything Draeseke’s article provoked a general introspective reassessment of music, one which profoundly changed musical modernism.

Draeseke’s publication and its windfall provided rallying momentum for a growing conservatism in German musical culture. This was a movement concerned with restoring the timeless principles of the German past in the interest of healing the present. Inklings of this new, proactive, post-War of the Romantics tendency surfaced in the years before. As far back as

Robert Hirschfeld’s challenge to Hanslick, one can see an aesthetic model that stood for healthy, principled music, across the late-Romantic spectrum. However, the first widespread impetus for this new conservatism was perhaps the founding of the journal Die Musik, which quickly became the premiere music journal in the German language. Appearing in late 1901, this journal stood above the pettiness of absolute music debates, but possessed strong nationalist sentiments and

359

celebrated the German tradition. In 1905 Die Musik published a series of responses from leading members of German musical culture about the meaning of Bach for contemporary music.781 As

Frisch has noted in his book, these responses – Draeseke’s among them – are littered with the imagery of Bach as a healer for a diseased modernity, both socially and musically.782 The resurgence of interest in Bach, significantly supported by the editors of Die Musik, provided a foretaste of the new conservative aesthetic and rhetoric.

Unlike the rather unitary parties of the New Germans or formalists, the new conservatives were a coalition of the similarly minded. The various threads of New Conservatism bonded in an anti-secessionist wish to restore older forms of composition. In his own response to the Draeseke controversy, Strauss himself – a unique foray into public prose – notes that a “united ‘Reactionary

Party’” was emerging with views “based on the petrified aesthetics of the past.”783 This party which purposefully blocked “the natural course of progress with dogmatic prohibitions,” consisted of not only Mozartians and Mendelssohnians, but also, Strauss observes, of Lisztians and Wagnerians.784 However, aside from the absolute reactionaries like Draeseke, a spirit of restoration and anti-secession permeated more moderate critics. For example, the major contributors to the “confusion in music” literature – Paul Marsop, Ferdinand Scherber, and Paul

Zschorlich – all discredit the hyper conservative longing for a return to principles and common aesthetic rules as from a bygone era, even “naïve and brutal.”785 Yet, despite trying to defuse excessive critiques of the secessionists, they suggest that contemporary composition needs to

781 See “Was ist mir und was bedeutet er für unsere Zeit?” Die Musik 5, no. 1 (1905): 3. 782 Frisch, 138-144. 783 Richard Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. L. J. Lawrence (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 15. 784 Richard Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. L. J. Lawrence (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 12. It should be noted that Strauss is in no way condemning these composers, only the dogmatic and nostalgic defense of their styles. In fact Mozart and Wagner were two of Strauss’s dearest models. 785 See Ferdinand Scherber, “Degeneration und Regeneration,” Neu Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 11 (1907): 233- 36; Paul Zschorlich, Mozart-Heuchelei: Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Fr. Rothbarth: Leipzig, 1906): vi-vii; Paul Marsop, “Zurück zu Mozart?” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 3, no. 5 (1906): 512. Marsop calls the controversy a misplaced search for principles.

360

return to various aspects of the past in order to progress and restore health. The sense of needed change and a crisis of musical culture was universal. There was a widespread longing for the traditional beauty of Jochanaan.

In the major articles that followed in Draeseke’s wake, each put forward different causes of the desolate state of music and different solutions. Georg Göhler and Marsop cite the largely unnecessary use of color. While both consider timbre and instrumentation the best achievements of modern composers, too often it hid a lack of real ingenuity.786 On the other hand, Scherber decries the secessionist’s “aristocratic” disregard for the musical public and the cultural mission of music to cultivate. Similarly, Karl Schmalz views new music as having retreated from the traditional inspiration of art in nature, that ultimate guarantor of order and balance. From the opposite position, Zschorlich cites the thoughtlessness of the listening masses as an impediment to needed compositional freedom. If Scherber’s restorative proposition focuses on the need for composers to return to a concern for audience well-being, most other writers emphasize the need for composers to return to the general styles of different giants of the German musical tradition.

Whereas Draeseke does not cite a specific composer to return to, Hugo Riemann points to

Brahms, while Schmalz and Zschorlich look to Mozart as a cure for modern excess. For

Riemann, Brahms is an ideal candidate for emulation, because he draws inspiration from classical forms and masters in the production of new forms of expression. For Karl Schmalz, Mozart supplies a naturalness to counter the machinic modernity, as well as unity of form and content.787

Fellow Mozartian Zschorlich also looks to the classical master for a new balance between the individuating freedom of composition and the “priestly” function of public music making.788 In every sense Mozart provides an equilibrium missing in the unchecked expressivity imputed to

786 Georg Göhler, “Richard Strauss,” Die Zunkunft 15, no. 42 (1907): 99; Paul Marsop, “Zurück zu Mozart?” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 3, no. 5 (1906): 522. 787 Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 163-167. 788 Paul Zschorlich, Mozart-Heuchelei: Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Fr. Rothbarth: Leipzig, 1906): 97.

361

modern music.

In this new era of cultural criticism, the Draeseke controversy slipped easily between aesthetics and politics. Against the backdrop of democratization, the nostalgic longing for order permeated both musical and political discourse. Like Draeseke’s own allusions to the Social

Democrats, almost every participate in the debates makes references to political metaphors or contemporary political anxieties. For all their critique of new music, Marsop and Zschorlich identify with the moderns and defend innovation against what they consider its unreasonable persecution by conservatives, a repression comparable to the reaction against radical political groups like the socialists and anarchists. Marsop considers the comparison of the Straussians to anarchists ridiculous and compares the nostalgia of musical conservative for the past to the

“throne and alter” parties of German politics.789 Like a fly on the wall, Zschorlich notes the fearful rhetoric of aesthetic conservatives against new music as comparable to the notorious stereotyping by political conservatives: “We, who dearly eavesdrop on progress in art in the circles of those who turn from the past, are no less notorious as the anarchists among conservative politicians. We stand as dangerous revolutionaries, where nothing is sacred, who recognize no authority, and accept no laws.”790 It was a perceived lawlessness which united the socialists and secessionists, and why they can be seen caught up in the same mechanisms of control. This discourse about the secession as mediating radical politics, which crept intermittently into criticism around Strauss’s Zarathustra in 1897, seems to have become standard and universalized ten years later. Even Reger, a leader of the secessionists, embraces this identification of new music with the left, frequently describing himself as a proud “rider to the left” in aesthetic practice, without an apparent fear of the consequences of such driven progressivism.

Whereas Marsop, Zschorlich, and Reger defend and poke fun at the supposed confluence

789 Paul Marsop, “Die Konfusion in der Kritik: Offener Brief an Herrn Hofrat Felix Draeseke in Dresden, bei Leipzig,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 12 (1907): 249. 790 Paul Zschorlich, Mozart-Heuchelei: Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Fr. Rothbarth: Leipzig, 1906): 21-22.

362

of radical art and politics, Scherber, Schmalz, and Göhler have reservations about the political implications of unreservedly progressive music. In a cute but insightful use of French catch phrases, Scherber suggests that “l’art pour l’art” leads to “l’etat c’est moi.”791 Essentially, he argues that the evasion of mass appreciation by the overly technical secessionists is both revolutionary and aristocratic, and will lead to a kind of despotism in art. Like many revolutions, he argues that the single-minded reform effort and lack of sincere public concern will lead to a reaction. In a sense, he suggests that both new music and new conservatism are a kind of repression of freedom and public well-being, the former for disregarding the concerns and participation of the public, the later for stifling expression and innovation. Similarly, Göhler and

Schmalz argue that the over-extended individualism of the secession forgets the social imperative and has erected harmful barriers against the social whole in the interest of the individual. As an echo of Draeseke, Göhler rails against the entrenched belief in liberal permissiveness:

But only the really great creative persons are permitted. For every other such laisser aller, laisser faire is a sin against cultural development. Unfortunately it is very common that in every field of human activity that even the best of the middle talents, which too many silence and allow to do what they do not approve. All unhealthy positions in political, social, artistic life of a time are usually the consequences of such indifference.792

Once again the hands off approach of “laisser faire” is cited as a sin against development and health in both politics and art. Essentially, the lack of regulation produces mediocrity or worse.

All forms of social dangers had apparently reached a breaking point through liberal policies and required direct action to remedy, liquidating notions of political or aesthetic autonomy. Schmalz directly addresses the relationship between art and politics, asserting that the former directly affects the later, providing added “gravity” to the aesthetic debate.793 For Schmalz, modernity has turned away from the general and toward the individual – even individual survival – and thus placed the health of the species in danger. This is the biopolitical twist in his argument, not

791 Ferdinand Scherber, “Degeneration und Regeneration,” Neu Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 11 (1907): 234. 792 Georg Göhler, “Richard Strauss,” Die Zunkunft 15, no. 42 (1907): 98. 793 Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 155.

363

simply the concern with society as a whole per se, but the decidedly biological orientation. For

Schmalz liberal policies toward individual life have “tragically” compromised the shared health of the human race. For Schmalz, Strauss’s Salome is a monumental affront, not simply to art, but to status of homo sapiens:

Let us extricate oneself from the confusion in the music, so we have to step out of the field of music, even the arts in general, and concentrate on our duties as human beings. Salome will hopefully be the milestone to mark: this far and no further! Artists and critics will hopefully when the first wobble is gone, rise up and rebel disillusioned!794

After railing against the “perversity,” “illness,” and “nervousness” of Salome, which exposes audiences to sex, bloodlust, and “sensuous overexcitement,” Schmalz finally cries out “no more!”795 It is in that context that he immediately calls the reader to focus on a basic human duty that goes beyond art. Strauss’s opera is inhumane and should not be tolerated under the guise of artistic expression. Both artists and critics – in a Draeseke-like call to battle – must rise up against art’s crimes against humanity. Schmalz urges a return to a concern for humanity in music, ala Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, though with literal biological attachment to the notion of

“brotherhood.” What gives Schmalz’s invocation of humanity such biological orientation is the constant juxtaposition of diseased culture (even “music-generation”) with the needs of nature.

The “cultural man” stands in need of a “healing bath” from nature, which natural music can supply.796 Blurring the line between his concern for music and life forms, Schmalz pushes for art that is a “healthy organism,” in part defined as a unity of form and content.797

In all of the Draeseke-inspired debate there is a heightened investment in health, both of music metaphorically and of audiences literally. The return to order was coterminous with the return to health, locating stability above all at the biological stratum. While Riemann is the only major critic at this time to expound on the “degenerate” condition of modern music, Zschorlich,

794 Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 161-62. Italics added. 795 Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 161. 796 Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 166. 797 Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 166.

364

Göhler, and Schmalz in asides each describe their musical present as in some way sick. While

Scherber doesn’t describe the secessionist music as ill, he chides it for not providing the cultivating protection for audiences against the “bacteria” of popular music.798 New music might not yet be sick, but it is not producing necessary antibodies. In response to Schmalz’s extended review essay on the year of confusion, Hans Sommer describes the tract as a “medical consultation.”799 Sommer goes on to liken the Draeseke debates to confusion between doctors:

The supposedly quite infirm is of course the poor German music, about whose healing – which the artists themselves sadly and foolishly thumb – the experts, the critics, now advise in hot effort. But unfortunately here also: “annus confusionis”! All doctors contradict each other straight away. 800

Just as the problems in modern music are presented as pathological, so also their solutions are framed as medical remedies. Riemann repeatedly refers to Brahms as healthy, like a tree firmly rooted in the German tradition.801 For Schmalz, Mozart – what Sommer calls his “cure-all” – approximates nature’s spring air, fresh water, and “spa bath” to counteract the ills effects of culture’s perfumed rooms and intoxicating drinks.802

Perhaps the most historically significant change associated with the Draeseke controversy

– and the most overtly biopolitical – is the ascension of talk about musical degeneration and regeneration. Draeseke himself does not invoke the quasi-medical term, but the aesthetic crisis becomes infused with these words particularly through a series of articles by Hugo Riemann, his wayward student Reger, and Scherber. Whereas Draeseke frames his argument with the title “The

Confusion in Music,” Riemann jumps into this debate with the loaded title “Degeneration and

Regeneration in Music,” which was countered by Reger’s and Scherber’s identically titled articles. The fact that no writer takes the effort to define “degeneration” as an aesthetic or social

798 Ferdinand Scherber, “Degeneration und Regeneration,” Neu Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 11 (1907): 234. 799 Hans Sommer, “Annus Confusionis,” Die Musik 7, no. 26 (1908): 195. 800 Hans Sommer, “Annus Confusionis,” Die Musik 7, no. 26 (1908): 195. 801 Hugo Riemann, “Degeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2006): 40. 802 Hans Sommer, “Annus Confusionis,” Die Musik 7, no. 26 (1908): 196; Karl Schmalz, “Annus Confusionis: Eine Trilogie,” Die Musik 7, no. 25 (1907): 166.

365

phenomenon, points to just how widespread this notion of de-evolution had permeated multiple discourses by 1907. Like others before him Riemann seems to use degeneration and decadence interchangeably as qualities of decline, which completely blur a nature/culture distinction. For

Riemann the present degenerative path represents “the debacle of modernity” and a “detour” from progress.803

Yet, for all his doom and gloom, which is heightened by the totalizing implications of evolutionary decline, Riemann declares that there is still hope. The compositional body as a whole can pull out of its downward spiral by following the path of Brahms’s and his inspiration in the cannon: “following [Brahms] along the path of a thorough study of the ancients is in fact the way that will lead us out of the chaos of the present aesthetic. Not only for their own value must the works of the past be recovered and made accessible to the present, but also for the return to health of our decadent and degenerate production, and for the regeneration of our whole sense of musical feeling.”804 In true rhetoric of restoration, Riemann calls for performance of pre-

Romantic music and new writing based on this non-chaotic music. The generative biological metaphors here apply to both music itself and the listener, production and feeling. In fact they seem to be tied together, which is precisely why the degeneration of composition is a crisis, because it threatens the sense of feeling – at least in this case musical feeling – of the literal biological human participants. Not only was Riemann explicitly reactionary, but he was an esteemed musical authority, referred to as the aesthetic “chief of police” by Scherber in his retort.805 Perhaps Riemann’s enthusiasm for policing can be attributed to his biopolitical manner, burdening himself with improving the health of music and its audiences.

In the Neue Musik-Zeitung – the same journal that published Draeseke’s original

803 Hugo Riemann, “Degeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2006): 39. 804 Hugo Riemann, “Degeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2006): 40. 805 Ferdinand Scherber, “Degeneration und Regeneration,” Neu Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 11 (1907): 235.

366

“exhortation” – Reger and Scherber published their rebuttals to Riemann and Draeseke. Reger – a far more willing participant in aesthetic debates than Strauss or Mahler – ended up as the central modernist voice in this debate. He writes with pronounced acridity against his former teacher

Hugo Riemann in the attempt to redefine the terms of musical degeneration and the place of

Brahms, Reger’s own compositional model. Reger defends Brahms’s greatness as founded on original subjective expression, not on a fetish for the past. Conversely, he argues that the moderns – defined as lead by Strauss, Mahler, Pfitzner, and himself (in that order) – have by no means impiously discarded the treasures of the musical past, but are neither enslaved to them.

Reger is conscious of participating in a widespread fight against the disciplinary pressures of critics and academics, saying “we nevertheless do not allow ourselves to be bridled, we will not be muzzled and placed under musicological guardianship.”806 Yet, for all his divergence from

Riemann, Reger is almost identically invested in the concept of musical degeneration. While he does not view his musical present as degenerate, the threat of degeneration always lingers. He writes,

What then do we horrible moderns want other than regeneration – of course on our terms! Standing still is impossible, and a real degeneration is the most genuine sense of the word would arise if, over and over again, such “characters” did not step up to regenerate, stubbornly and daringly, their way! Fresh blood, new life, and new goals have never done damage; undeniably, in all periods they have proven themselves the sole measure against actual decadence!807

Reger’s repeated use of biological metaphors for music tend to bleed into non-musical, literal discussions, such that the principles are the same, regardless of music or life. These principles are historicism and a kind of musical eugenics. When Reger says that “standing still is impossible,” he invokes a sense of history as a backwards-running treadmill in a manner similar to Hegel, Brendel, and Lamprecht. History is progressing, requiring music and society to keep up

806 Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 47. 807 Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 50.

367

or else fall behind and become degenerate. For Reger, music cannot simply be composed as music, but must be active in fulfilling its historical mission toward newness. This missional prerogative is not so different from the anti-laissez faire of many new conservatives and contains a need for good musical breeding, that is, for supporting only the most healthy, progressive music. Indeed, like the new conservatives, Riemann makes degeneration an every-pressing threat, an endless war, necessitating a continual barrage of preemptive strikes. For art that means

Ezra Pound’s motto or die: “Make it New!”

Scherber tries to create a middle ground between the nostalgia of Riemann and the avant gardism of Reger. While Scherber rails against the “normative aesthetics” of the policeman

Riemann, he considers Reger and his progressives too aristocratic, meaning that their technical music disregards the mission of art to be popularly accessible. In terms of medical discourse,

Scherber eschews much of the biological language of Riemann and Reger. Only his title mentions the phrases degeneration and regeneration. Yet, the tenor of his article very much taps into this same concern with the condition or state of music, which has population regulation in mind, even when the content is not explicitly medical. However, Scherber does manage to call the modernist desire for originality sickly, even if the whole species does not possess congenital illness. Scherber is actually far more condemnatory of popular music than modernism, but blames the elitism of the secession for “driving people to the vaudevilles.”808 He writes that new music, “gives the people popular operetta hodgepodge, with all bacteria of artistic vulgarity, administers misplaced popular song fare, making them sick.”809 The assertion that vulgar music

(metaphorically) possesses bacteria is a powerful and timely mediation of the latest in medical theory. Just as bacteriology provided new explanations for the origins of illness, it provides a new model for Scherber’s explanation of how certain kinds of music sicken its audience. Popular music is literally contagious and passes its metaphorically artistic illness onto the listener.

808 Ferdinand Scherber, “Degeneration und Regeneration,” Neu Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 11 (1907): 233. 809 Ferdinand Scherber, “Degeneration und Regeneration,” Neu Musik-Zeitung 28, no. 11 (1907): 233.

368

Historically speaking, the contagionist paradigm served to further erode the apparent safety and autonomy of the listening subject. For Hanslick and those following in his aesthetic footsteps music was already an invasive medium in its invisibility, but invisible germs added a new more insidious means of infection. If Hanslick could resist the pathological music of Wagner by not listening pathologically – difficult as it may be – resistance was futile against contagious music.

Simple proximity became dangerous.

The specter of degeneration justified a whole new range of healing methods. It was far more serious than an isolated illness, threatening instead the whole society, even species. Illness presupposes a healthy norm and the possibility of returning to it. Degeneration put normality in jeopardy, for both the individual and group. With the roving possibility of degeneration, no illness was isolated but perhaps a contributor to degeneration, both statistically, but also because of communicable ease. The methods of spread associated with degeneration were both vertical and horizontal, that is, both hereditary and contagious. The notion of hereditary degeneration goes back to the late 19th Century with Morel, Lombroso, etc. However, such degeneration was a minimal threat because it was easily contained within a fringe of mentally ill, criminal, and eccentrics who might pass on their damaged genes only to their children. However, with the ascension of the germ paradigm and neurasthenic concerns about technology’s impact, a state of biological decline could pass from the degenerate to the ostensibly healthy without the lag time and protective bubble of generational change.

The cumulative effect of these new medical discourses, both in and outside of aesthetics, was a post-liberal reformulation of public health ideas and policies. The public health concepts of a previous generation of academics like Hanslick’s contemporary Pettenkofer had been liberal, meaning that they focused on structural policies to maximize natural biological functions. Rather than directing citizens’ lives with required health inspections and duties, these thinkers attempted to clean up the built environment and encourage individuals through media pressure to make their own healthy decisions. However, with the triple threats of contagions, urban overstimulation, and

369

hereditary degeneration of the species, direct intervention was deemed necessary by early 20th- century public health thinkers. “Nature’s course” was no longer considered insurance against illness, but required more active biopolitical measures in order to put human progress on an upward curve.

This policy shift can best be seen in the revived emphasis on quarantine, which had been dominant in the pre-liberal years of the early 19th Century and further back. In early 20th-century

Germany, homes harboring or suspected of harboring people with certain diseases like cholera were required to be quarantined and disinfected. Moreover, not reporting known cases of disease in your neighborhood could be a punishable offense. Governments pumped out waves of quarantine laws, including most notably the contagion laws of 1900 in Germany.810 Special boarding facilities were set up for transmigrants and migrants to minimize contact the population.811 The “new racism” outlined by Foucault intersected with specific ethnic racisms, wherein non-Germans – mostly eastern Slavs and Jews – could be discriminated against for medical reasons. Even the emergence of the mass hospital – versus the tradition of home visits with hospitals reserved for the destitute – reinforced a broad trend toward quarantine. While the contagion paradigm of germ theory may have sparked a crisis about maintaining individual autonomy through the proliferation of invisible, communicable threats, it also reinforced individualism with strict demarcation between health and sickness. Contagionism assumes an attack on an autonomous, otherwise normally functioning body. As a new etiology for diseases, bacteriology could erase a graduated continuum from sickness to health through the definitive marker of infection. The infected and contagious body justified more public intervention by various authorities than the indeterminately sickly body.

With these new medical paradigms and policies, one can see a palpable convergence of

810 Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 173. 811 Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 218.

370

multiplying biopower and the negative power of sovereign law. Diseased portions of the population could be forcibly removed (sovereign power) from the rest of the population with the aim of stimulating its health broadly (biopower). Law and biology were no longer separate spheres, but the former served to aid the latter. Such political new conservatism should not simply be equated with fascism or Nazism, which would not develop for another generation, and which made law and biology absolutely coterminous. In the early 20th-century legal power and biopower overlapped, but not to the point of in-distinguishability.

Esposito calls this hyperimmunity – an intersection of two distinct modes of power.812

According to Esposito’s categorical organization, the hyper-immune path represents a seismic shift in sovereign power during the late 19th and especially the 20th Century. For Esposito, immunization is the underlying logic of most modern political philosophies and policies. That is, the state separates people from each other (through individual sovereignty, liberty, property) and introduces a modicum of violence (or the threat of it from the state) in order to protect citizens and preserve their lives. The “harm principle” of John Stuart Mill – adopted from Wilhelm von

Humboldt – is an example of immunity, wherein the state or society should not intervene in one’s actions (that is the atomization part of being immune from social obligations) unless one harms others (confirming the always present in waiting, if distant, violence of sovereign power). Prior to hyperimmunity, such limited sovereign interference with citizens was seen as the best way to maximize the size and health of populations.

Hyperimmunity then is not simply an intensification of immunities, but a rethinking of the means of preservation. It is using the sovereign power of violence to actively remove threats to the health of citizens. Moreover, it aims to improve and manage life – in the Foucauldian sense of biopolitics – through the negative power of removal, violence, and execution. Rather than allowing people to harm themselves if they so choose, the stumbling blocks of harm must be

812 Robert Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 97-109.

371

removed, at the cost of classical liberty. According to Esposito, political thought and practice veered toward hyperimmunity as one solution to the problem and limits of basic immunization, which merely tackled biological well-being from the perspective of not-death or not-life- threatening-violence. The transition from immunity to hyperimmunity is from the preservation of life by removing it from biological forces to the cultivation of life via the same power of negation.

The momentum of quarantine policies circa 1900 provides a stark example of hyperimmunity. And it was not simply a quarantine of contagious diseases, but a cultural shift toward actively blocking all public health threats from contact with that elusive public. Such hyperimmunity can also be linked with the new forms of political conservatism. While this is most obvious with ascendant racist and Anti-Semitic parties, it can also be seen with the pro- imperialist and anti-socialist coalitions, which included the national liberals in Germany. The

Bülow Bloc aimed to strengthen the empire by prophylacticly removing nascent health threats, both home and abroad.

As I have repeatedly demonstrated, the musical sphere was not exempt from these shifts in public health. With the 1907 year of confusion, German musical culture transitioned from the immunizations of Hanslick’s formalism to the hyperimmunizations of Draeseke’s new conservatism. The specter of musical and national degeneration required a rethinking of liberal permissiveness. Having tried to promote both liberty and health by only acting against the most egregious threats, formalists in the mold of Hanslick had allowed the musical population to devolve into chaos and non-music. Moreover, by the time the curtain closed on Strauss’s Salome, it was more than a musical problem. From the vantage point of new conservatives, the Herodes’s of the world needed to kill (or at least incarcerate and sterilize) the Salome’s of the world, culturally and politically, to bolster national well-being.

The New Conservative Reterritorialization German Musical Culture

The Draeseke controversy created new dynamics in German musical culture. From

372

within the language of the debates one can see emerge the terms of a new kind of aesthetic conservatism, as well as futurist modernism, as exemplified by the Riemann-Reger polemic, that is between the musical chief of police and the proud rider to the left. Between 1907 and 1913 composition and aesthetic debate shifted past the tensions of the secessionist era to something that would resemble interwar musical culture, characterized by expressionism, neo-classicism, anti-

Semitism, retreat into the private, and assertive nostalgia for tradition. Evidence of this broad shift can be seen in the series of growing repressions and scandals of new music, as well as its redirections away from the fleshism of the fin de siècle. For all the sectarianism of musical culture, each camp shared an investment in the degeneration and regeneration musical paradigm.

This signals a radical biopoliticization of German musical culture. Both conservatives and moderns shared a metaphorical musical eugenics, a prerogative of actively aiding the aesthetic species on its evolutionary trajectory, an improvement also designed to counteract and prevent its hereditary decline, that is, to bolster the future progeny of each musical school qua population.

The hyperimmune turn in musical culture was not simply aesthetic, but more importantly a matter of practice. From 1907 on new music became increasingly quarantined from the general musical public and actively discredited based on medical authority. With the Draeseke controversy, musical life became unabashedly biological and medicated with a post-liberal aesthetic practice. Following this famed, but largely misunderstood 1907 threshold in German musical culture, concerts and criticism featuring new music became increasingly scarce. The

ADMV ceased to program new music almost entirely. Vienna lost its most progressive conductor in Mahler, while Strauss discontinued conducting his radical music series in Berlin. Even the concerts that did occur – the premieres of later works by Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg – did not receive the same press treatment as during the height of the secessionist era. It is almost as if conservatives learned from the formalist’s mistake that even bad press is still good press.

Compulsively talking about bad music only encourages its composition and popularity.

The most immediate impact of Draeseke’s exhortation came at the very next ADMV

373

festival in Dresden, where Strauss did not run for reelection as president. Correspondents attending the festival commented on the Strauss’s declining support in the wake of Salome and the Draeseke controversy. O. K. in the NZfM writes about the fierce debate within the organizations assembly and the “growing opposition to Strauss.”813 As a measure of this growing

“tightly-closed reactionary party,” O. K. cited a recent article in the Signale by Detlef Schultz who argues that this camp is continually making Strauss’s life miserable by attempting to poison his relationship with the public.814 Despite his furious opposition to Mahler, O. K. disagrees with such reaction against Strauss, including the growing praise of Bruckner at his expense. O. K. invokes Draeseke’s approval of such a growing conservatism, but suggests rather that

“confusion” about Strauss’s music – invoking the controversy and the catch phrase of the year – stems from misunderstandings. The atmosphere of such dissension at the ADMV clarifies the context and perhaps forced hand in Strauss’s departure from the organization. 1907 was the last year that the festival featured secessionist works, such as Schoenberg’s First String Quartet.

Indeed, beginning in 1908 the festival became again a bastion for 19th-century romanticism, both absolute and program music. Hausegger and Pfitzner were the most radical and contemporary composers performed, and while they were often lumped in with musical Young Germany in the

1890s, by 1910 they stood for Wagnerism as tradition. The dethroning of Strauss and secessionists from the ADMV marked a significant decline in opportunities – both exposure and funding – for avant-garde composers. The changeover of the ADMV was the first and most blatant conservative coup in musical culture, one that exemplified the turning of the Wagnerians firmly away from the secession.

The premiere of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in Vienna in late 1908 set a new benchmark for divisive and riotous concerts, though soon eclipsed by his 1913 concert. While

813 O.K., “Eindrücke und Nachkläge vom Dresdner Tonkünstlerfest,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 20 (1907), 430. 814 O.K., “Eindrücke und Nachkläge vom Dresdner Tonkünstlerfest,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 27, no. 20 (1907), 430.

374

Richard Specht noted that all concerts by the young Viennese composers were scandals, not all were equal.815 Elsa Bienenfeld compared the premiere of the Second String Quartet to the

Parisian Tannhäuser of 1860, giving Schoenberg the biggest concert riot in half a century.816 The

Viennese and ADMV (Dresden) premieres of his First String Quartet in 1907 had not evoked nearly the same reactions. Aside from the formal musical differences or similarities between these two works, what seems to have changed were the discursive and cultural contexts. Leading up to the scandalous premiere of the Second String Quartet, the Viennese press built up

Schoenberg as the epitome of modernity. For both good and ill, Schoenberg and his school became symbolic representatives of the preceding debates about musical progress and cultural mediation, all within the context of the Draeseke debates about regeneration.

For Bienenfeld, as for many other reviewers of Schoenberg’s scandalous concerts, she could not find justification for either the tumultuous support or furious opposition. Both sides seemed to come to the concert with entrenched opinions and agendas. The musical experience itself was lost within a cultural war. According to accounts, the “Schoenberg youths” rushed the front to applaud, prompting the majority to leave early rather than “allowing themselves to be terrorized by a handful of decadent youths.”817 Not only were the actions of Schoenberg supporters likened to the specter of terrorism, but the concert hall was considered medically unhealthy. Multiple critics cited the dangers of the Bösendorfer Hall’s atmosphere. One said that the rotten air must be fumigated and another argued that the hall should have a warning on the outside to prevent pollution.818 Both of these statements enact the fear of contagion, that otherwise healthy listeners will find themselves poisoned against their ability to resist by an

815 Richard Specht, “Die Jungwiener Tondichter,” Die Musik 9, 34 (1910), 3. 816 Elsa Bienenfeld, “Zur Aufführung des Quartetts von Arnold Schönberg,” Neues Wiener Journal no. 5453 (25 Dec 1908), 24-25. 817 Anonymous, “Theater, Kunst, Musik. Ein Konzertskandal. Stürmische Auftritte im Bösendorfersaale.” Reichspost no. 352 (22 Dec 1908), 8. 818 See Esteban Buch, Le Cas Schönberg: Naissance de l’avant-garde musicale (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 165. The critic for the Wiener Montags Journal quipped that the owner of the hall, Ludwig Bösendorfer, should post on the door a warning that forbids “any infection [Verunreinigung] through cacophony.”

375

invisible, but permeating threat. Such a model of aesthetic pathology leaves no room for casual public concerts of experimental music. Only the already degenerate youths should be exposed to this atmosphere. To introduce others would be an egregious public health violation.

Even within broader German cultural criticism one can see a turn against new, noisy music at this time. For example Karl Lamprecht and Werner Sombart, who had previously praised new music for its expressive power and heightened psychological sensitivity – even the ability to cultivate new realms of subjectivity – began to interpret nerve-wracking music as barbarous. Within the Kultur/Technik discussion, secessionist music was read as anti-Kultur

Technik, rather than a promising fusion. Sombart’s lectures on the topic for both his sociologist colleagues and the broader public bemoaned the anti-intellectual decline of culture in the face of mindless technology, leading to a breakdown in mental and physical health.819 A similar sentiment was voiced by Theodor Lessing, philosopher and critic who, among other things, crusaded against urban noise, music not excluded. For Lessing, the heights of culture included the ability to be silent. He considered the constant noises of modern life from carpet beating and telephones to street musicians and trams to heighten the dangerous, subjective aspects of the soul, while dampening the objective, rational dimensions.820 In 1908 Lessing formed the German Noise

Abatement Society, which began fomenting for laws to reduce urban noise and published a journal. Karl Lamprecht himself joined this society, spinning his historical interpretation of modernity as stimulus into a harbinger of decline, rather than progress. The nexus of shared anxieties about urban sound and noisy new music can be seen in Geissler’s article, “The Music of

819 Sombart gave a lecture to the Lessing Society at the Berlin Philharmonic on “Cultural Problems of Modernity.” See Anonymous, “Kulturprobleme der Neuzeit,” no. 43 (24 jan 1907), 3. Werner Sombart, “Technik und Kultur,” in Verhandlungen des ersten Deutschen Soziologentages (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr (Paul Siebeck): 63-83. 820 See John Goodyear, “Escaping the Urban Din: A Comparative Study of Theodor Lessing’s Antilärmverein (1908) and Maximilian Negwer’s Ohropax (1908),” in Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction, ed. Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 19-34.

376

Noise,” published in Der Anti-Rüpel, the organ of Lessing’s society.821 In this article against futurism in music, a major music critic (a formalist nonetheless) joined forces with major cultural figures (mostly Wagnerians) to rail against the ill health effects of noise, musical or otherwise.

Modernist music became another danger to public health, hardly indecipherable from automobile horns, diseases, and alcoholism.

Other famous members of the anti-noise society were and Hans

Pfitzner, a former Young Viennese and a former Young German, both turned conservative cultural elites. While Hofmannsthal’s antipathies to noise may not have included new music (at this time he began collaborating with Strauss), Pfitzner was equally opposed to city noise and noisy secessionists. In the next decade Pfitzner debated separately with Paul Bekker and Ferruccio

Busoni about the value of new music, notoriously publishing an article titled “Futurist Danger.”822

For Pfitzner the fetish of new for newness sake would literally spell the end of music, a kind of extinction, though he did not frame it in such specific biological history. What unites all of these figures – Lamprecht, Sombart, Lessing, Geissler, Hofmannsthal, and Pfitzner – is a firm rejection of secessionist music as the heir of Wagner and the sensuality of even his music. Though most continued to be Wagnerians, it was not for the music’s stimulation, but rather for its reserve and depth of spirit. Wagner’s cultural symbolism shifted quickly and resolutely from modernist mentor to classical master. Moreover, the fight against noisy music by these Wagnerians was active and direct, aimed at totally delegitimizing it in the ears of the public.

One of the biggest events in German musical culture in this era was the premiere of

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in 1910. While the visual and aural spectacle of the “Symphony of a

Thousand” was wildly successful with audiences, critics were sharply divided, though along different lines than previous Mahler reception. Several critics praised the symphony, which

821 F. A. Geissler, “Wohltemperierte Fuge. Die Musik des Lärms,” Der Antirüpel, no. 3 (March 1910): 10- 22. 822 Hans Pfitzner, “Futuristengefahr: Bei gelegenheit von Büsoni’s ästhetik,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte (g.m.b.h., 1917).

377

concluded with a vocal setting of Goethe’s Faust II, a thoroughly German choice, replete with expressive power and the much heralded depth of spirit.823 In a way it was Mahler’s only genuine success with a wide public, as the acclaimed concerts of the Second Symphony (Munich) and

Third Symphony (Krefeld) were secessionist-organized events. However, a vocal minority of critics jumped on this performance as a chance to criticized the Latin and Jewish qualities of

Mahler’s music. My reception research corroborates the claims of Peter Franklin that anti-

Semitic critiques of Mahler’s symphonies only began at this time.824 In this regard the reviews of

Rudolf Louis and Paul Ehlers were particular watersheds. Ehlers claims that the Eight Symphony did not move him because of the “Semitic essence of the music” which originates in Mahler’s

“Jewish character,” which “must involuntarily be alive in his music.”825 Ehlers tries to assert that his critique was not motivated by political anti-Semitism and not intended to degrade any race.

However, he further suggests that music is not a universal language, but its expression and appreciation divide along racial boundaries, naturalizing his own disaffection for Mahler in racial terms.826

The emergence of anti-Semitism in musical criticism, perhaps rather its expansion beyond the Bayreuth circles, should be understood as a variant within the broader new conservatism. Certainly, not all new conservatives incorporated anti-Semitism into their aesthetics. After, all many conservatives were Jewish. Rather, the rising anti-Semitism represented a distinctly ethnic take on the widely biological turn in aesthetics. New conservatives with roots in both program and absolute music shared an interest in the biological well-being of audiences and the well-being of music, conceived in the rhetoric of evolutionary biology.

823 For example see Robert Holtzmann, “Gustav Mahler und seine Achte Symphonie,” Allgemeine Musik- Zeitung 37 (1910): 826-28. 824 Peter Franklin, “Socio-political Landscapes: Reception and Biography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 7-20. 825 Paul Ehlers, “Gustav Mahlers achte Symphonie: Uraufführung am 12. September 1910 in München,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 37 (1910), 805. 826 Notably Ehlers claims that he did like Mahler’s Second Symphony, but none since.

378

Moreover, as with Ehlers’s desire to separate music racially, new conservatives were united in proactively parsing music biologically, but according to broad categories of national health rather than ethnicity specifically. For Foucault, the very paradigm of biopolitics, in looking to manage populations, signals a kind of racism, that is, preferential treatment or mistreatment of specific types of human life.827 With the increasingly negative declination of biopolitics circa 1900 – the impetus for removing threats – the racism of biopolitics expanded to increasingly include ethnicity, rather than merely civility. If ethnic racism was ascendant in the raw political realm of the late 19th Century, it did not openly cross over into debates about new music until around 1910.

Indeed the newness of anti-Semitism and Latin-phobia can be gleaned in the immediate and impassioned rebuttals to Louis and Ehlers. In his review of Mahler’s Eight Symphony,

Holtzmann openly attacks Ehlers’s racial claims, finding such discourse aesthetically without value.828 Holtzmann counters by arguing that neither he nor the German masses could be wrong in finding the symphony as masterpiece of German art.829 Furthermore, while numerous ethnic

Germans like Mahler, many Jews do not. Holtzmann also offers the illuminating window into culture by claiming that the rise of racism – evident aesthetically in Louis and Ehlers – can be attributed to books like H. S. Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899. While Holtzmann, a correspondent for the traditionally New German AM-Z, tries to undermine racism, he remains decidedly nationalistic.

So far I have been focusing mostly on the revamped conservatism of New Germans, but I want to make clear that such a trend was prominent among formalists as well. In fact, if formalists had previously tended towards Hanslickian liberalism in aesthetics and political affiliation, the new conservatism among formalists might have been an even larger shift than that

827 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 258. 828 Robert Holtzmann, “Gustav Mahler und seine Achte Symphonie,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 37 (1910): 827. 829 There are interesting subtleties of racism in this defense – he claims not to have a drop of Latin or Semtic blood, while also categorizing Mahler as primarily Czech-Austrian.

379

within the former defenders of the music of the future. Just as Hanslick should not be pigeon- holed as a reactionary, so also one should not assume that opponents to modernism were simply descendants the critic who inspired Beckmesser. The 20th-century revolt against modernism was something new, based on new post-liberal aesthetics, politics, and methods of regulation.

In 1911 and 1912, two of the leading German formalists critics – Geissler and Schmidt – published major articles that summed up their changing sentiments about new music and musical culture. In their assessments of the state of music they both come across as mongers of cultural despair, bemoaning the unabashed vogue for newness in music and culture. Both critiques are awash with Adorno-esque mediation, Geissler claiming that futurist composers are simply children of their age, like Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. However, rather than living in the time of Rococo sensuality, revolution, or national unification (the examples used for those master composers), modern composers express the time’s “much lamented nervousness,” an interpretation modeled after Lamprecht’s argument.830 Like Wagnerians and Lessing’s anti-noise society, Geissler links the noise of modern life with modern music, specifically polyphony and its ceaseless barrage on the body.831 To reiterate, the biological threat of modern music is the same as modern life. Additionally, it should be noted that even in 1911, Strauss not Schoenberg, and polyphony not dissonance, are the markers of modernism. Geissler uses Sinfonia Domestica as an example of nervous expression, which uses the most heinous noise to depict the most intimate scenes. However, he finds this a fitting mediation of “the nervous husband, the nervous wife, and the nervous child” of contemporary life.832 Beyond the common trope of nervousness, Geissler finds a mediation of capitalism in the desire for fame, money and sport lust in modern musical culture. He uses the examples of an American concert tour, virtuosic feats, and even Strauss’s crowd-pleasing Rosenkavalier as examples in a tremendously modern article linking aesthetic

830 F. A. Geissler, “Modern Musik und Modern Kultur,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 79, no. 41 (1911): 565. 831 F. A. Geissler, “Modern Musik und Modern Kultur,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 79, no. 41 (1911): 566. 832 F. A. Geissler, “Modern Musik und Modern Kultur,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 79, no. 41 (1911): 566.

380

modernism and capitalism. Such a critique might have been found in early New German interpretations of Meyerbeer and Schumann, but here we see formalists stepping beyond the strictures of pure form in their analysis. Geissler concludes that if the era was one of collapse, music was also collapsing. His only solution is to openly go to war, which sounds prophetic three years before the First World War, though seems to refer enigmatically to an aesthetic war. Either way, his only solution to decline is violence, a hyperimmune and preventative fight against threats.

Despite being a formalist, Schmidt shows a heightened respect for Wagner and the quest for musical progress in his later years. Schmidt makes an illuminating statement about that change when he says that critics live in constant fear of missing the next Wagner. This seems like an admission of Wagner’s canonic status and the prolonged, misdirected rejection of Wagner by formalists.833 He even observes that only twenty years prior – 1892 – there was much less openness to new music. Schmidt does not entirely validate this quest for ingenuity, reminding readers of the fruitlessness of most experimentation in a century far too open to change. In the rash futurist pursuit of innovation Schmidt advises the reader to not forget the “viability” of the ancients, that this, past masters. These meta-statements serve to introduce a review of two different concerts, a “futurist” and admittedly “reactionary concert.”834 The futurist concert was

Schoenberg’s first Berlin concert, featuring his Six Piano Pieces (op. 19), a version of Five Pieces for Orchestra (op. 16) and Book of the Hanging Gardens (op. 15), all essentially atonal. Although

Schmidt only caught part of Schoenberg’s concert, he juxtaposes the “soothing atmosphere” of the romantic concert (Weber and Brahms) with the “cheap” and “boring” originality of

Schoenberg. While Schmidt dabbles in the language of musical health, the real significance of his article lies with the open embrace of the labels of anti-modern and reactionary, as the title of his review article is “The Value of the Unmodern.” Rather than retreading the liberal paths of

833 Leopold Schmidt, “Der Wert des Unmodern,” Berliner Tageblatt (6 Feb 1912), 1. 834 Leopold Schmidt, “Der Wert des Unmodern,” Berliner Tageblatt (6 Feb 1912), 1.

381

healthy progress, his aesthetic demonstrates like Geissler and the Wagnerians, a desire to actively return to the past – this from the chief music critic of one of Germany’s leading liberal newspapers. He even ends by saying, “As long as those traditions are still alive, we need not worry about the eccentricities of the day.”835 The present lacked the right to exist unmolested because it lacked the health of the past. This was the atmosphere of German musical culture circa

1910, in which musical authorities were not shy about their conservatism.

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the proud reactionaries carried the day in the post-secessionist era. For all the various discourses and repressions that aimed to stifle new music and the prerogative of innovation, the general public opinion of musical culture was more than ever sympathetic to post-romantic music. However, there were conditions to that sympathy.

In the wake of the Draeseke controversy, modernism and its aesthetic keepers shifted away from the fleshism of the secession toward new avenues. First of all there was a general shift toward

“futurism,” a historicist value in composition and urge for newness that was not present circa

1900. Additionally, the new principles of modernism morphed into what would become neo- classicism and expressionism. It should be noted that the revival of old forms and futurist innovation were by no means incompatible. Moreover, this modernist neo-classicism was not the same as conservative return to the classics. Not only did conservatives place greater emphasis on nostalgic romanticism, but their classicism lacked the chromaticism and polyphony of the modernist neo-classicists. This is also not to say that the musical schisms of interwar Central

Europe – Second Viennese School vs. Neoclassicism (Hindemith/Stravinsky) – were already in full bloom. In fact these two sentiments of neoclassicism and expressionism were not at all juxtaposed with each other, but rather jointly positioned against the sensual, superficial music of the fin de siècle. The urge for rekindling old forms and voicing complex subject positions went hand in hand and were adopted by all the major composers circa 1910. Neoclassicism was not a

835 Leopold Schmidt, “Der Wert des Unmodern,” Berliner Tageblatt (6 Feb 1912), 1.

382

reaction against Schoenberg, but rather Schoenberg was an idiosyncratic participant in the general neoclassical reaction against the secession.

One can first and most clearly see the reconfigured aims of modernism in Reger’s

“Regeneration and Degeneration in Music,” the era’s most notorious defense of musical innovation. By asserting that music must evolve in order to remain healthy, he creats for music the burden of ever-escalating innovation. Whereas Strauss in his limited writings always attempts to evade categories like “avant-garde” and progress – even to the point of appearing disinterested in the concept of modernism – Reger embraces them, anointing his own view as that of a

“forward-striving musician.”836 Reger makes compositional rule-breaking a value in itself by urging each generation to exceed the bounds of comprehension, not least because without innovation, the population of musical compositions would metaphorically degenerate. Strauss and Mahler were accused by critics of being musically lawless, but as I have argued, it was not lawlessness for its own sake. Rather, it was against the specific strictures of late romanticism and in the interest of showcasing the raw elements of music without reproducing the dualisms of idealism. Even more than Reger, Busoni’s “The Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music” – published in various editions between 1907 and 1916 – made a new ethos out of futurism. In

Pfitzner’s attack on Busoni, he calls him a lawgiver, who makes the negation of old forms a form itself.837 Certainly, Schoenberg shared this historicist urge for musical futurism, but it should be noted that the aesthetic prefigures Schoenberg’s own publications and the term “futurists” in music discourse never solely referred to the Second Viennese School or even to a type of composition, but to an aesthetic position.

Beyond articulating futurist historicism, Reger’s defense against the new conservative attacks outlined the ascendant values of modernism. Given Reger’s legacy as a Brahmsian as

836 Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 43. 837 Hans Pfitzner, “Futuristengefahr: Bei gelegenheit von Büsoni’s ästhetik,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte (g.m.b.h., 1917).

383

articulated by Antonius Bittmann and Walter Frisch, one might assume that he primarily defended the right of new composers to draw from the past.838 However, this is secondary for Reger. In

“Degeneration and Regeneration” he suggests that critics are quite mistaken if they think that the secessionists have heretically abandoned the “masters.”839 Yet, his defense of Brahms and his

Brahmsian tendencies is not because of a traditionalist orientation. Rather, Reger writes,

What assures Brahms’s immortality is never and in no case the “reliance” on old masters, rather only the fact that he knew how to set free new, unexpected emotions of the soul, on the basis of his own soul-centered personality. Therein lies the root of all immortality, but never in the mere reliance of the old masters, which the inexorable dynamic of history will form into a death sentence in a few decades!840

Reger voices his historicist paradigm and fear of musical extinction no less than the new conservatives. Yet, real musical value for Reger stems from expression that is genuinely soulful and emanating from a personality. Music must be a cipher of subjectivity and thoughtfulness, not merely decoration. Reger even notes that many formalists have quickly and rightly faded from prominence because they did not possess the individuality of Brahms.841 This hint of soul, psyche, and personality represents a move toward expressionism, conceived broadly and prior to its more refined and tortured visage in Schoenberg. In the years before the First World War, one can hear in major compositions and see in criticism a sharpening of psychological and first person articulations.

A survey of major new compositions premiered from 1908 to 1912 confirms the growth of neo-Classicism and expressionism in the wake of the Draeseke controversy. These include

Mahler’s later works (Seventh Symphony, Eighth Symphony, Das Lied von der Erde, and Ninth

838 Antonius Bittmann, Max Reger and Historicist Modernisms (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 2004); Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 839 Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 48. 840 Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 48. 841 Max Reger, “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music,” in Selected Writings of Max Reger, ed. and trans. Christopher Anderson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006): 47.

384

Symphony), Strauss’s operas Elektra, Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne, and works of the Second

Viennese School. In some of these works the Neo-Classical strain is stronger, in others expressionism prevails, but in all cases there is both an impress of pre-romantic styles and an orientation toward authentic, subjective expression. Musicologists previously pointed to the music of Rosenkavalier as Strauss’s exit from the march towards atonality, and therefore turn away from modernist techniques. However, that interpretation presupposes a specific evolutionary progress oriented around tonality. Many scholars have already clarified that

Rosenkavalier is not an abandonment of modernism, but an intensification of inter-textual parody and self-conscious historicism, two qualities already present in Strauss’s earliest works.842 As to the geography of Rosenkavalier in the history of musical modernism, I want to add that as much as Strauss and Schoenberg represent divergent paths in modernism, they also share a kind of neo- classicism and expressive subjectivity not present in their earlier works like Sinfonia Domestica and Pelleas and Melisande. In fact, even Strauss’s Elektra marks as much a break from Salome in this regard as Rosenkavalier is from Elektra.

Strauss’s Elektra premiered in 1909 in Dresden to much the same success as Salome. By comparison critics were better disposed toward Elektra, even if they still found Strauss to be a poor and depraved dramatizer.843 If the discourse with Salome camped on concepts of perversity and decadence, reviewers of Elektra seemed obliged to characterize the narrative and music as preoccupied with psychology.844 Though the character Elektra was frequently deemed

842 See for example Leon Botstein, “The Enigmas of Richard Strauss: A Revisionist View,” in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 3-32. Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), especially chapter six, “ ‘Dancing in Chains’: Strauss, Hofmannsthal, Pfitzner, and their Musical Pasts.” 843 F. A. Geissler, “‘Elektra’ von Richard Strauss: Uraufführung im Königlichen Opernhause zu Dresden am 25. Januar 1909,” Die Musik 9, no. 30 (1909): 243-46; Leopold Schmidt, “‘Elektra’ von Richard Strauss: Uraufführung im Dresdner Hoftheater,” Berliner Tageblatt, no. 48 (27 Jan 1909): 1-2; Anonymous, “Die Uraufführung von Richard Strauss’ ‘Elektra,’” Die Post, no. 42, evening edition (26 Jan 1909), 1; Wilhelm Altmann, “Elektra in Dresden,” National Zeitung no. 42, evening edition (26 Jan 1909): 1-2. 844 See “Elektra: A Study by Paul Bekker,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Eduard Wahl, “Kritik:Oper – München,” Die Musik 9, no. 30 (1909): 357

385

“hysterical” by comparison with the perverse Salome, she garnered far more sympathy in her plight and her music was considered genuine in turn. If Salome was killed for her outburst against the repressive family and social structures, Elektra has a “psychic breakdown” as the reviewer for Die Post puts it.845 Notably, Elektra lacks the musical politics and satirical stylizations of Strauss’s previous tone poems and operas, wherein the protagonists’ adversaries are given the most traditional music. Additionally, Elektra was considered less “naturalist,” that is less pictorial than Salome in its musical accompaniments. If the music expressed the setting, it was a setting of the character’s moods, less an ornament of their surroundings. All of these stylistic modifications amount to a move away from the sonic third person of Strauss’s secessionist works toward a type of first person expressionism, perhaps already evident in

Salome’s final aria. Additionally, there are elements of Reger’s espoused neo-classicism and futurism in this work. Not only is there more musical unity and resolution in Elektra, but it manages to simultaneously expand chromaticism viz. Strauss’s oeuvre, most prominently in the bitonal “Elektra chord.” Leaving aside the more conservative leanings of Hofmannsthal’s libretto compared to that of Wilde, the music of Elektra is a different kind of modernism, which historians have rightly deemed expressionist. As a “child of his times,” Strauss shift from 1905 to

1909 was emblematic of a whole musical culture.

Rosenkavalier, premiered in 1911, has long caused issues of continuity for scholars of

Strauss. Despite recent attempts to demonstrate the intertextual complexity and satirical modernity (or even post-modernity) of this opera, it is most often read as Strauss’s turn away from the avant-garde, at least in part as a reaction to Schoenberg. However, the musical discourse of the day in no way lends itself to this view. As I will shortly demonstrate, the problem of Schoenberg did not emerge until after Rosenkavalier. Moreover, it was not initially heard as a major departure for Strauss, but a return to his grotesque, comic side, which had been

845 Anonymous, “Die Uraufführung von Richard Strauss’ ‘Elektra,’” Die Post, no. 42, evening edition (26 Jan 1909), 1.

386

so strongly pronounced from Till Eulenspiegel to Sinfonia Domestica.846 Yet, by contrast with those earlier works, Rosenkavalier was considered Strauss’s first masterwork, because of a grounding in both individuality and universal accessibility. Paul Schwers, writing for the AM-Z, suggests a bifurcation between two trends in aesthetics: 1) Romantic expression and innovation; and 2) Classical clarity and form. He considers the contemporary era as the decline of un- impinged romanticism and the surge of a new classicism. Rosenkavalier succeeds in its “modern classicism” because it balances these two forces. It has a power of individual melodic assertion and discovery, as well as accessible and enjoyable forms.

Rosenkavalier strikes me as an instructive example of the Siamese twin developments of neo-classicism and expressionism. While Rosenkavalier is not traditionally considered

Expressionismus in the dark, psychological sense, it fulfills Reger’s call for subjectivity. For

Georg Kaiser in the NZfM, with this opera Strauss finally finds his own original voice, rather than amassing a series of stylized parodies.847 Yet, simultaneously, this voice is in the spirit of Mozart, as if Strauss took seriously many of the post-Draeseke calls to return to Mozart, Strauss’s long- avowed model. Even Schwers in the AM-Z asserts that Rosenkavalier follows the model for modernism set forward by Reger. It should be understood that Reger, not Schoenberg, established the new platform for modernism, with the latter following in the footsteps of the former.

Following his departure from Vienna in 1907, Mahler’s presence in German musical culture quickly, but temporarily, evaporated.848 Moreover, as one who did not publish aesthetic

846 Anonymous, “ ‘: Uraufführung in Dresden am 26. Januar,” Die Post, no. 46, evening edition (27 Jan 1911), 2; Paul Schwers, “Die Uraufführung des ‘Rosenkavalier’ in der Dresdner Hofoper,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 38 (1911): 132-35; Georg Kaiser, “ ‘Der Rosenkavalier:’ Komödie für Musik von Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Musik von Richard Strauss, Uraufführung am 26. Januar 1911 im Königl. Opernhause,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 78, no. 5 (1911): 64-67. 847 Georg Kaiser, “ ‘Der Rosenkavalier:’ Komödie für Musik von Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Musik von Richard Strauss, Uraufführung am 26. Januar 1911 im Königl. Opernhause,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 78, no. 5 (1911): 64-67. 848 Mahler popularity resurfaced in the teens only to dwindle again under anti-Semitism. See Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

387

statements, he fell below Strauss, Reger, and Schoenberg as the leading faces of modernism.

Aside from his Eighth Symphony mentioned earlier, the premieres of his final works evoked neither the voluminous nor venomous responses in the press that his earlier works had. In terms of the new trajectories of modernism, his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies display a kind of broadly-conceived neo-classical exploration of traditional forms. Both works contain a pronounced symmetry between the movements and the clear deployment of sonata form. By contrast with Mahler’s entire previous compositional output, his Das Lied von der Erde and Ninth

Symphony were heard as profound disclosures of the composer’s person.849 Like Strauss’s

Rosenkavalier, with these last works Mahler was heard to have found his own musical voice in proper first person musical execution. Both compositions were considered Mahler’s farewells to the world, expressions of a resigned master on his death bed, no doubt influenced by the fact that they were premiered after his death. Simultaneously, the Viennese figures Walter Bruno, Richard

Specht, and Richard Batka – all of whom wrote for the newly formed journal Der Merker – propagated the view of Mahler’s music as the expression of an untimely, romantic, melancholic, misunderstood figure in a modern world.850 The combination of Mahler’s untimely death in 1911, the proliferation of writing in Der Merker about him, his general decline in popularity, and the view of his last works as intensely personal – all this – added up to a view of Mahler as a tragic character. The sensually and grotesquery of Mahler’s earlier works were shelved and even reinterpreted in light of a music of subjectivity.

Simultaneous with this “Regerization” of modernism, Schoenberg and his school of composers developed into a cultural force concerned with many of the same issues. However, I want to reiterate that any general recognition of the “Case of Schoenberg” did not develop until

849 For example see Richad Batka, “Die Wiener Musikwoche,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 39 (1912), 736; E. von Binzer, “Konzerte: München,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 78, no. 50 (1911), 698. 850 See Richard Specht, “Mahlers ‘Neunte,’” Der Merker 3, no. 14 (1912): 552-53; Richard Specht, “Das Lied von der Erde,” Der Merker 2, no. 29 (1911): 1169-73; Richard Specht, “Mahler,” Der Merker 3, no. 5 (1912): 161-65; Bruno Walter, “Mahlers Weg. Ein Erinnerungsblatt,” Der Merker 3, no. 5 (1912): 166-171.

388

1911. In 1910, Specht published a large article in Die Musik under the title “Young Viennese

Tone Poets,” in order to make them known in northern music circles. Specht complains that

Viennese composers are routinely neglected by German writers like Rudolf Louis, whose sole inclusion of Mahler for contemporary Viennese composers Specht considers symptomatic.851 In addition to Schoenberg, Specht’s article mentions Walter, Zemlinsky, Karl Weigl, Franz Schreker, and Theodor Streicher, but can rightly be regarded as the coming to consciousness of

Schoenberg’s music. The previous performances of Pelleas and Melisande at the VST,

Schoenberg’s First String Quartet at the ADMV, and the scandalous Second String Quartet at

Bösendorfer Hall inked little press and notice in German cities. However, after Specht’s publication, Schoenberg’s name was often noted and Schoenberg himself even began to publish frequently in Die Musik. Indeed, more than any of his concerts, it was actually the publication of

Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre in 1911 that established his fame. Like Wagner before him,

Schoenberg’s progressivism began with a barrage of treatises.

The first analytical point of Specht’s article is that, while the Young Germans follow in the shadow of Wagner, the young Viennese composers take Brahms as their model. In addition to avoiding tone poems and operas, Specht insists that – in opposition to the stereotype of Viennese ornament – “Their music is throughout organically tamed, architecturally logical, thoroughly subjective in avowal.”852 In terms of the romantic schools, they seem to side with the formalists, but yet, as Specht notes, all their concerts are scandals. Half way through his article, he introduces Schoenberg, not as in any way the leader of the young Viennese, but rather its “most intriguing, most problematic, most disturbing” figure. The description of his extremism is only half sympathetic. Specht finds Schoenberg’s fanaticism for all things – not merely music – inspiring, but totalizing. He describes Schoenberg’s music as filled with complicated structures, intuitive discoveries, rich with color, and “against the grain” counterpoint. Specht certainly

851 Richard Specht, “Die Jungwiener Tondichter,” Die Musik 9, no. 34/35 (1910), 3-16, 80-85. 852 Richard Specht, “Die Jungwiener Tondichter,” Die Musik 9, 34 (1910), 6.

389

prefers the earlier works like Verklärte Nacht, finding the Chamber Symphony and Second String

Quartet destined for a future era when they will not be heard as “grizzly mistakes and callously incomprehensible.”853

Between Specht’s article in 1910 and 1912 (the year in which Schoenberg toured his

Pierrot Lunaire through Germany) Schoenberg grew from a problem of Viennese modernism to a serious problem in German musical culture. In the AM-Z, Otto Besch wrote, “The music of

Arnold Schönberg is increasingly becoming a problem. Now that he, as he himself once expressed, has reached his impeding goal of the years, namely the utter breakdown of all barriers of a bygone aesthetic, it is there in distinct proportion. In principle I am sympathetic of

Schönberg’s artview.”854 Among many musical progressives, including Besch and most of the contributors to Der Merker, Schoenberg’s radicalism and principles seemed admissable on paper, but not fully in practice.855 This was the problem. Futurism seemed to futurists to have its limits.

Besch finds no advancement in Schoenberg’s works after Pelleas and Melisande, considering them to be inspired by abnormal instincts and a limiting of expression by fetishizing atonality.

Like Specht who found Schoenberg’s newer works to lack power and artfulness, Besch voices the view that atonality is perhaps a transitory stage in music evolution. While finding the pursuit of newness valuable, Besch suggests that Schoenberg is temporarily lost.

While some were accepting of Schoenberg’s experimentation, others found it just plain obnoxious. Hugo Rasch actually waffles at the border of pathologizing Schoenberg.856 On the one hand he rejects the conclusion that Schoenberg is actually insane. He actually quotes

Lombroso on the irrationality of art produced by the mental ill, before concluding that

Schoenberg should not be put in that catetory. Yet, the very process seems to spark a connection.

By the end, Rasch asserts that Schoenberg‘s works are a product of a “sick imagination,” in

853 Richard Specht, “Die Jungwiener Tondichter,” Die Musik 9, 34 (1910), 13. 854 Otto Besch, “Arnold Schönberg, der Mann der Zukunft?” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 39 (1912), 309. 855 See Richard Specht, “Arnold Schönberg. Ein Vorbemerkung,” Der Merker 2, no. 17 (1911): 697-700. 856 Hugo Rasch, “Nach der Arnold Schönbert Matinée,” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 40 (1912), 146.

390

addition to making other biology-based conclusions. For example, he calls Schoenberg’s music impalatable. However, his whole argument turns on the parallels to architecture and the assertion that there are certain musical laws whose violation create physical danger. Just in the way that architects cannot safely build structures willy nilly, composers cannot violate certain foundational laws of music like tonality. For all his conceptual sympathy to Schoenberg and musical progress, he finds some rules unbreakable for reasons of physical enjoyment and well-being. Even sympathizers with new music like Paul Riesenfeld and Kurt Singer found Schoenberg’s atonal works to be sickening. Riesenfeld finds the feeling behind Pierrot Lunaire to be decadent and morbid on par with sentiment of Huysman’s Against Nature, that common referent for fin de siecle pathology.857 Singer, uniquely qualified as a music critic and physician, finds Schoenberg’s

“pseudo art,” “yet to form a work looking toward sensation, art, life, and health,” in its effort to break foundational walls that should not be broken.858

Having demonstated the overarching trend toward historicist futurism, neo-classical forms and first-person expressionism in musical modernism on the eve of the First World War, I want to conclude by suggesting the biopolitical significance of such a move, in light of the biopoliticization of musical culture initiated by Brendel and Hanslick. Much like its nemisis, new conservatism, futurist modernism signified a pursuit of musical eugenics, metaphorically speaking. If the eugenical imperative means actively trying to improve and accelerate a progressive “evolution” of the human species, the musical parallel is obvious within the historicist paradigm. As was borne out during the year of confusion, followers of both Draeseke and Reger were invested in the threat of decline and the necessity of actively stimulating the musical population. This was most obvious in the rhetoric of degeneration and regeneration.

Both sides considered the totality of musical works in a given era to represent the species of

857 Paul Riesenfeld, “Ästhetische Anmerkungen zu Arnold Schönbergs ‘Pierrot Lunaire,’” Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung 40, no. 1 (3 Jan 1913): 3-5. 858 Kurt Singer, “Arnold Schönbergs Streichquartett opus 7.” Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 40 (1913), 1884.

391

music, whose vitality can be measure generationally.

In popular discourse of the early 20th-century eugenics was considered the solution to the

“great problem of degeneration and regeneration.”859 This was the great problem of music, no less than society. For aesthetic new conservatives, proper eugenics was largely negative, a return to the healthy, normality of the past by way of the active removal of degenerate music. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, that was the hyperimmune direction of anti-modernists. On the other hand, for futurist aestheticians – Reger, Busoni, Schoenberg – the necessary musical eugenics was one of positive encouragement of qualities that lead to advancement. In carefully reproducing the most advanced sounds, the futurists seemed to want to speed evolution up.

Newness was not something to be stumbled upon, but nurtured and maximized. Additionally, they sought to create compositions that were healthy, in so far as they expressed personality or simulated subjectivity. Across the board this ecumenical penchant for eugenics differentiates this era from the lawfulness of the War of the Romantics and sensuality of the secessionists.

Indeed in all its revolutionary implications, Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance is a high water mark in the positive musical eugenics of the futurists. Schoenberg and historians following his propagandist path have suggested that atonality is simply a logical extension of the gradual expansion of chromaticism from Beethoven and Wagner onward. However, I would argue that Schoenberg’s compositions rather condense musical evolution into a few quick jumps.

The distance between the vague tonalities of Salome and the atonality of Erwartung are enormous and represent less a musical evolution then a revolutionary fast-forwarding of composition according to a logic of necessary progress. If Schoenberg’s atonal works sounded shocking, it is because they lacked any real musical-evolutionary links. Additionally, I want to emphasize that the emancipation of dissonance in Schoenberg functions as a privileging of a limited strain within the innovations of modernism as opened up by the secessionists. As articulated in chapter two,

859 Dr. Kost, “Eugenik: Betrachtungen über den ersten Kongress für biologische Hygiene in Hamburg von 11. Bis 14. Oktober,” Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 300 (29 Oct 1912), 1.

392

the secessionist emancipation of musical materials included no fewer than eight elements, only one of which could be characterized as dissonance.

The urge toward dissonance in Schoenberg serves the larger cause of expressionist subjectivity. If the post-idealist modernism discussed in this project initially served to deconstruct subjectivity, Schoenberg’s atonality re-enthrones the subject, even if the enactment places the music and the listener into the throes of alienation. Indeed, atonality does not erupt in

Schoenberg for its own sake, but in the pursuit and purification of original melodies. Within the idealist discourse of German musical culture, original melodies provided the guarantee of a sovereign mind in possession of the music elements. With Schoenberg’s atonality and the whole futurist endeavor, there is a kind of identification with the attackers of modernism, who perhaps rightfully claimed it to lack absolute coherency between content and form, mind and body. In

Schoenberg’s horizontal music, tone color and orchestration are not extrinsic to the dominating melody, but inseparable from it. For all the iconoclasm of Schoenberg’s atonality, it serves the cause of formal development, affirming a controlled relationship between core themes and composition.

If the “bodies” of secessionist compositions were considered attenuated flesh the evaded the bounds of mind and individuality, Schoenberg reintroduces symmetry between mind and body in music, with the former properly guiding the latter. Whether the idealist split between mind and body in musical compositions is considered between melody and color or theme and development, Schoenberg’s music insures that the body doesn’t stray from the mind. This is what makes his music viable specimens. Not only does Schoenberg’s music follow Reger’s call for innovation and personality, but it is lawful and healthy according to the older parameters of idealism to unite surface and depth. Even if the subjectivity of Schoenberg’s music seems damaged and even “unhealthy,” it must be recognized as a resuscitation of bios, a triumph of the transcendent concept over sonic immediacy. The body is completely individuated as an extension of the mind, not sharing in the common flesh of the world. It is tamed by the mind, even if the

393

mind is not in the expressions of works like Erwartung.

In the face of claims of lawlessness, degeneration, detachment, and unhealthiness,

Schoenberg’s innovations stand for a reformulation of modernism as lawful, regenerate, personal, and healthy. This reterritorialization of music under the pillars of neo-classicism and expressionism functioned as a new refutation of music as sound, a repression of musical elements, that is, the body of music. Modernism initially emerged as mediation of a monist affirmation of sensation. However, by 1910 modernism had shifted to a new phase of subjectivity and collectivism, equally molar. Schoenberg did not initiate this shift, nor is he the primary effect of it. From the musical discourse spawned by the crisis of the secession and Draeseke controversy Schoenberg and his emancipation of dissonance emerge out of the problems of the first wave of modernism. If Schoenberg’s atonality is musical modernism proper, it had a period improper modernism at its roots.

Carl Dahlhaus was right that 1907 marks the end of one period of modernism and the beginning of another. However, that shift had little to do with Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance, as often suggested. Rather it was the Draeseke controversy, and the discursive changes and policing policies following in its wake that shaped the transformation of modern music. The Draeseke controversy heralded a radical biopoliticization of the musical world, giving the health of music – literal and metaphorical – added responsibility for national well- being. Such agency for music in regards to public health justified the repression of

“pathological” music, bringing an end not only to the secessionist era, but severing the broader public from avant-garde music, prior even to the radicalism of the Second Viennese School.

High musical modernism would continue to thrive, but was quarantined to smaller, more private settings. The modernism encouraged by Reger and Schoenberg reintroduced a penchant for law, subjectivity, and a dualistic split between mind and body, melody and sound, abandoning the secessionist preponderance for music of the flesh that celebrated sound and sensuality for itself.

As for Dahlhaus’s troubled quest to find a connection between modernism and mass

394

politics, the intersection is to be found in the domain of biopolitics. While fighting on different grounds, populist politics and secessionist music both aimed to tear down the barriers that limited the access of unsound bodies to public power. Whether battling laws that limited the enfranchisement and welfare support for human Zoë, or laws that prevented the recognition of everyday sounds and sonic collages as music, both wanted corporeal productive power to be recognized by legal power. However, the shared plights of musical modernism and democracy were most apparent in the resistance they faced. Feared as anarchic movements that would destroy the existing order, political populists and the musical secession were pathologized as dangerous populations. As the first decade of the 20th Century wore on, they could no longer be tolerated. Medical authority and legal power joined hands to exclude untamed flesh from power in institutions both musical and political.

395

CONCLUSION: Aesthetics and Biopolitics

My analysis of the biopolitics of German musical culture represents a migration of concepts about life and politics into the domain of aesthetics. It is a necessary migration in order to more fully comprehend the rupture that was mass politics and how that affected musical culture. However, this migration also speaks to the durability of the biopolitical lexicon and its applicability to wider fields of scholarship. It is my conviction that biopolitics is not a passing fad of jargon, but a fruitful analytical paradigm that has yet to peak in productivity. That said, one must be cautious not to overextend this concept beyond its proper bounds. Nor should one fail to historicize the nexus of life and politics, and thereby neglect points of greater and lesser applicability.

I am concluding this project, then, with a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and biopolitics beyond simply music. I will lay out a program for future scholarship, but also draw attention to potential obstacles and pitfalls. As the migration of biopolitics to art is my project’s central methodological innovation, I want to examine and interrogate that method.

In the process I also highlight the continued relevance of biopolitics to both our present and musical analysis. Not unlike German politics at the end of the Kaiserreich, we live in an age of bipartisan consensus about the need to improve national health via the regulation and removal of dangerous populations domestic and abroad. Similarly, musical expressions continues to both reflect this situation and be caught up in its mechanisms of hyperimmune censorship.

In the introduction I suggested that there were three different sites to examine biopolitics in music. Now in the conclusion, I want to restate these in relation to aesthetics more universally.

Permit me to crudely divide art according to content, form, and context. In each case the relationship of biopolitics to aesthetics will be slightly different. Consequently, my specific approach to aesthetics and biopolitics in the context of German musical culture from 1850-1910 is not necessarily duplicable with other art mediums at other contexts. While there is wide

396

potential for scholarship on aesthetics and biopolitics, some topics are more privileged than others in pursuing this intersection. The function of this concluding methodological excursus, then, is not only to suggest a program for research, but to demonstrate what is unique about my project and the historical moment it explicates.

By content I refer to the conceptual or representational properties of a work of art. Aside from Hanslickian assertions that the content of music is form, or that musical themes constitute the content of music, the orthodox Kantian conclusion is that music lacks content. However, musical works can acquire content through words, which are laden with specific content. This can occur through programs, vocal lyrics, libretti, and even simply a title. Many of the compositions I analyzed in project were full of content from the tone poems Don Juan and Titan to the opera Salome and chorus of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Indeed, following in the wake of the New German School, art music was uniquely content heavy in the period I researched.

However, it is not in music that one finds the richest content, but in more representational mediums like the literary, visual, plastic, and stage arts. In a novel, painting, or even sculpture one can discover highly conceptual, though fictional, accounts of biological life caught in the crosshairs of politics.

In terms of biopolitics, then, the non-musical arts are primed for the analysis of politicized life in their stories and images. Penetrating biopolitical analyses could be written on the value of life in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or the conditioning centers in Huxley’s Brave New

World. Similarly, the works of Bruegel or Goya vividly dramatize questions of population regulation. As far as the application of biopolitics to art, the domain of content is relatively straight forward methodologically. The autonomous work of art provides a reservoir of imaginings about the relationship of life to power. Unless one ventures into historicizing context, the biopolitical content of art or even aesthetic debates remains outside of biopolitics proper, that is, the management of actual human populations. The content of a work of art can take on new meaning with its context, but its content remains the fictional enactment of potentially real

397

biopolitical themes. For example, Mann’s Death in Venice is in dialogue with his contemporaneous world of global migration and cholera epidemics. However, there is nothing literally biopolitical about Mann’s novella. Yet, the scholarly flexibility in exploring biopolitical content, ripped from historical context, is that one can locate images and stories related to biopolitics from spatial/temporal contexts that were not so biopolitical as something like the

Central European fin de siècle.

A second facet of aesthetics is form. This is perhaps the most prevailing component of a work of art, its actual structure and architectonics. Form includes not only the most obvious examples like the patterns of a musical composition or piece of architecture, but also decisions about narrative structure, punctuation, brush strokes, etc. These are the building blocks of a work of art, whose histories and debates take one deep into disciplinary specialties. In the context of my project, form was the most discussed part of music. This includes not only the choice of genre and traditional forms like sonata, but also the general relationship of the parts to the whole.

What is the relationship of one melody or movement to another? What is the relationship of orchestration to melody or harmony to modulation? These are the technical questions of form.

Compared with aesthetic content, it is far more difficult to locate the biopolitical relevance of form. Indeed, apart from the use of human bodies as part of the form (such as in dance), the aesthetic form is related to biological organisms only as a metaphor. An art form can have parallels to a life form, but they are not the same. In my research I made much of the metaphor of mind/body dualisms in musical forms, as well as the way certain forms were characterized as healthy or sick. While such parallels could certainly be made with many different aesthetic mediums and forms, my research was aided by a contemporaneous discourse that routinized the metaphor. Furthermore, it is only within those discourses that the biology/art equation became politicized. Within the realm of aesthetic politicking, the attempts to regulate and promote certain art forms can serve as an allegory to biopolitics, when one considers the art forms as something analogous to life forms. While I do this in the context of music in a specific

398

place and time, one could profitably look at the power exerted by aesthetic authorities to direct the production of architectural and dramatic forms within a biopolitical paradigm, albeit, a metaphorical one. If content makes for fictional biopolitics, then form makes for metaphorical biopolitics.

Finally, we arrive at context as an aspect of art to be analyzed. It is only through its context – its relationship to a living society – that aesthetics can enter into the realm of literal biopolitics. Since horizons of context are so wide, it is quite plausible that biopolitical pressures may animate the society in which a work of art is situated. However, that does not necessarily implicate the artwork in biopolitics, or even politics. That happens when art becomes an object of management, specifically to biopolitical ends. The regulation of art is not literally biopolitical until it starts to concern its effects on human life and becomes politicized. Whether this is the direct health effects of aesthetic experience or the use of bodies in art like dance, the biological- aesthetic fusion only becomes biopolitical when the regulation of those bodies begins to directly consider their interaction with art a necessary part of regulation. Indeed the demonic and dangerous associations with the tritone in earlier musical eras warrants a literal biopolitical analysis. In my project, the biopoliticization of German music occurred literally, when the perceived negative health effects of modernism on the national population encouraged aesthetic and even legal authorities to more closely police dangerous music.

In pursuing the descent of biopolitics into aesthetics, one needs to be aware of the differences when addressing content, form, and context. Why certainly they are not always so easily demarcated from each other, unnecessary slippages can obfuscate the gulf between aesthetics and biology. Such an error itself might be worthy of biopolitical analysis: an objectification of life or anthropomorphizing of art. Indeed throughout my project, I have attempted to analyze all three parts separately, even though contemporaneous discourse frequently attempted to collapse the differences. Whether that was the assertion that form is content or that music is sick, it was a constant challenge. Perhaps a central reason for such a

399

confluence of biopolitical connections to the works of music under analysis was their placement in a historical moment and geographical location of heightened and transforming biopolitics.

This brings me to my second caution in considering the nexus of biopolitics and aesthetics: the uneven history of biopolitics itself. While scholars fruitfully continue to debate the timeline and development of biopolitics, certain eras seem more privileged than others. Broadly speaking, biopolitics emerges strongly with modernity and Western political institutions of sovereignty and democracy. As mentioned in the introduction, the regulation of life seems to ramp up in political history in the late 18th Century and perhaps peak with Nazism. Perhaps this would make a super long 19th Century, the golden age of biopolitics. However, work on “necro- economics” by Warren Montag and even Foucault’s analysis of postwar liberalism demonstrate a sustained investment in population control up to the present. Most of the leading contemporary scholars of biopolitics see its relevance as not abating since fascism, but only become more pointed. All points of view considered, once can easily make a blanket statement that the closer one’s analysis moves toward the present, the more palpable biopolitics becomes. It is our world.

However, when it comes to art and its regulation, one should not immediately assume such a coterminous history with biopolitical developments. My own research has demonstrated that discernable biopolitical developments in German history like the identification of populations or Anti-Semitism did not reverberate in musical culture until well after their societal diffusion.

By contrast the development of a field of public health seems to exactly correspond with health management in music.

While my topic might not be privileged in relation to biopolitics as a whole, there are certain aspects of my method and argument that could not be used elsewhere. What made musical culture in the late 19th Century so decidedly biopolitical was the merger of aesthetic laws and biomorphic terminology. Indeed, one could say that the notion of timeless, natural aesthetic laws peaked in that period. Certainly, 20th Century musicology further established formal principles, but following in the wake of modernist innovations, did not defend their universality

400

with equal dogma. By contrast, evaluating music with the language and matrix of biology was just picking up in the late 19th Century. By no means did this subside after the First World War with Weimar vitalism and Nazi racism. Consequently, the momentary intersection of musical law and bio-medical concepts at the end of the 19th Century created a unique period of biopoliticization. In sum, law breaking compositions represented an unhealthy, unworthy aesthetic form.

Certainly, one can find biopolitics in music after my period of study, in the libretto of

Berg’s Wozzeck, the community forms of Gebrauchsmusik, and the vicissitudes of the Strauss-

Zweig collaboration on The Silent Woman. It is a much more difficult task to locate biopolitical tremors in earlier periods of music history. Given a greater scarcity of program music, “content” was thinner. In the debates of “form” one can find discussions of organisms, but hardly the bio- medical profusion of the later era. In terms of “context,” it was prior to mass politics in Central

Europe, so one finds less concern for population management. Perhaps what is most missing from earlier periods was the impetus for and apparatus of musical regulation with regard to a whole public. Royal courts possessed real aesthetic sovereignty in making decisions to include or exclude compositions, but with scarcely an eye toward the health or state of music. As recent theorists have demonstrated the biopolitical underpinnings of sovereignty itself, there is certainly important research to be done on the biopolitical regulation of art by early modern states.

However, whereas sovereign leaders used their authority to kill to protect the entire realm, it seems less clear that the power of art censorship in this era was used with a similar regard for the entire realm of art or the biological safety of actual people.

Indeed what seems to imbue the art world with a potential for biopolitics is the creation of a larger aesthetic public. Musically speaking this occurred rather late, in part because of music’s questionable status as art prior to the discourse of idealism. It was only with the early musical journals, following in the footsteps of Rochlitz, that music had a public and new guardians of that public. However, Rochlitz and his imitators made every effort to simply report

401

objectively about musical culture rather than shepherd it. Whether under the sovereignty of the court or the open public sphere of the early 19th Century, musical culture generally lacked a resolve for regulation. Moreover, the regulation that did exist did not use its power to wisely grow the population of music or make it live in a certain manner. It is no coincidence that the shift towards biopolitics in musical culture emerged in the 1830s with the first widespread crisis about the state of music and its public.

The burden of guiding a seemingly wayward public belonged to Brendel, Hanslick, and their followers. It was the intense concern for the state of music, the disciplining of individual compositions, and the desire to actively shape musical life that makes their world stand apart from what came before. I think one has to go no further than the mid-century revolutions for a reason for this rupture. It is not that the ultimately failed 1848-49 uprisings ushered in a new age of regulatory repression per se, but rather they established the ascendance of mass politics in

Central Europe. The problems of the original French Revolution became that of German Europe.

Whether for or against democracy, with the entry of the masses into politics and the public came a resolve to regulate, that is, to nationalize, liberalize, socialize, and/or subjugate. With mass politics also came the examination of the population, including its dangerous elements which needed to be rehabilitated or else expunged. This was the world of a new age of music critics like

Brendel and Hanslick who attempted to corral the dangerous mass within musical forms and the dangerous mass within society. Indeed, as Central Europe edged closer to democracy after 1900, biopolitics in and outside of art redoubled. As I have demonstrated, that was the context in which the secession was brought to an end.

In recent years the ties between biopolitics and democracy have grown stronger. This applies to the theorization of biopolitics as well as its relevance to our democratic present. While

Foucault is often given credit for posing the question of biopolitics, it was really the work of

Agamben in the mid-1990s that shook the dust off Foucault’s concept and opened up the field of inquiry. While Agamben asserts that biopolitics is at the root of sovereignty (in the exclusion of

402

bare life from politics), he nonetheless posits a new relationship between bare life and sovereign power in modern democracy. Unlike classical democracy, modern democracies have paradoxically tried to use sovereign power to vindicate and liberate bare, biological life, the characteristic of living beings that is the source of their oppression by sovereignty. For

Amgamben there is a continuity between liberal democracies and totalitarian states – indeed a tendency for the former to transform into the later – precisely because control over the biological condition of the population is powered by the freedom to kill bare life.

Without diving into an analysis of whether Agamben’s collapse of sovereignty and biopolitics – as well as his theological and ahistorical imputations to bare life – accurately characterize modern states, it is safe to say that his analysis has generated a reevaluation of a latent politics of death within the emancipatory claims of modernity. Biopolitical analysis has become “the name for a certain technique of retelling” modern political philosophy and regimes.860 No system has been spared this cross examination from Marx and Adam Smith to the socialist and neoliberal regimes that carry out their ideas. Indeed for all its distance from

Agamben’s exemplary condition of modernity – the concentration camp – neoliberalism and its most pressing political challenges seem fraught with the need to categorize and control biological life. Recurrent issues like early retirement, health care, abortion, climate change, and immigration seek to qualify life and place a wager on its maximization. These debates are so ingrained that their biopolitical core, indeed the biopolitical core of democracy, has become nearly invisible.

However, nowhere is the biopolitical core and friction of our world of global capital more evident than in the anxiety about dangerous populations. The War on Terror has only made this more obvious and naturalized both the paranoid witch hunts and comfort with extra-juridical confinement and killing of unworthy life. Similarly, the media frenzy for epidemic diseases that

860 Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, “Introduction,” in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 27.

403

originate outside the fortress of the West exacerbate the anxiety that the rest of the world threatens its very health. Dangerous populations take many forms, including those perceived to be a burden to the well-being of the wealthy in developed countries. Such perceived threats include Third World overpopulation, welfare queens, unemployed young men in Muslim countries, poor minorities, and above all immigrants (legal and illegal) to the First World. Like the growth of the racist far right around the world, many residents of Arizona are content to let migrants die in the desert in order to preserve a “way of life.” And indeed as Warren Montag in

“Necro-economics” has made clear, sovereign powers (perhaps of supra-national organizations like the IMF) enforce the stability of the global market, even at the cost of letting the impoverished die. It is not the result of absolute scarcity, but a functional scarcity manufactured by propping up market prices so as to let others live, or live better. Such a logic was already in place in Adam Smith’s necessary “reduction of inhabitants.”861

In a world where dangerous populations are multiplying and the well-being of some is increasingly tied to the death of others, music continues to resonate with biopolitics in content, form, and context. Take for example the pop artist M.I.A., cited by Rolling Stone as one of the eight most influential artists of the last decade. In words and sounds her songs enact the struggles of ostracized populations around the world. Having lived on three on continents, she is a global citizen who criticizes the violence to migrants and minorities around the world. Her lyrics and music videos draw attention to the misplaced stereotypes of unwanted persons as dangerous pariahs. These include Tamil nationalists, Saudi women drivers, Mexican migrants, African genocide victims, diamond miners, Palestinians, Indian tribesman, and non-white immigrants throughout the West. Such images are often juxtaposed with the explicit, but socially justified, violence committed against minorities by police, border control, soldiers, and authorities unseen.

861 Warren Montag, “Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal,” in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 210.

404

This is the crux of hyperimmune, negative biopolitics: national improvement through concerted removal of dangerous populations. M.I.A. allegorically, but explicitly, dramatizes this in her music video for “Born Free,” which was censored in the United States. In this video, U.S. police commit ethnic cleansing against redheads, who are rounded up and shot. In the lyrics she juxtaposes the joys in living for the moment, discovered in music of the “ground,” with the heightening towers of power. But in a true turn towards biopower, the song’s stated justification for freedom and the disregard for state power are rooted, not in citizenship or human rights, but in the universality of being born. Indeed, as an iconoclast, she frequently disavows national identity, saying “They wanna check my papers, see what I carry around / Credentials are boring, I burnt them at the burial ground / They order me about I’m an outlaw from the badlands.”

Like M.I.A.’s personal disavowal of statehood, her music is nearly impossible to categorize. It is electronic dance hip hop that incorporates styles from around the world. Her highly sampled, world beat method integrates rhythm and blues, Asian folk, Caribbean calypso,

Arab woodwinds, and indie rock. It is truly carnivalesque, to invoke the Bakhtin analysis from chapter four, but on a global scale. Additionally, her half-spoken delivery, sampling of sounds, and rough mélange give her music an everyday quality that feels immanent, like it is happening in the moment, far from a highly polished, compressed studio recording. As a form, the music is transnational and nonhierarchical, an enactment of “third world democracy” – to use one of her lyrics – in the act of dancing. Like a dionysian festival, her music is chaotic and celebratory, but lyrically shrouded in a haze of apocalyptic repression of overly security-conscious states.

Notably, her music does not stage the revolt against bad politics with good politics, but, like the music itself, with a reveling in the pleasures, even dangers, of everyday activities. Here her lyrics take on a grotesque quality in the exaggerated tales of the lower bodily stratum, to again return to

Bakhtin. Her affirmative biopower is to assert the basic unity of living beings in their base acts of living – eating, drinking, defecation, and sex. At moments it is not so unlike Bruce Springsteen, who makes partying and driving fast an existential revolt against economic depression and

405

anomie. M.I.A. does not deny the dangers of life, dangers which seem to generate community, only the immunological and violent removal of those dangers.

M.I.A.’s music also demonstrates the continued censorship of music in the present. She was herself placed on the U.S. Homeland Security Risk List, which frequently made her travels to the U.S. difficult and even prompted her to record her albums in other countries. Her songs and music videos have been repeatedly censored in a U.S. musical culture that is still living in the shadow of the policing of popular culture initiated in the 1980s by Joe Lieberman and the Parents

Music Resource Center. Lieberman’s crusade against dangerous music forced many retailers to stop carrying music with violent or sexually explicit lyrics. In Senate hearings, Lieberman brought experts, including psychiatrists, to testify that hip hop and other music of the multitude incited its listeners to commit crimes. Rather than considering how much of this music critiqued the necro-economic restructuring of neo-liberalism that impoverished minorities, the music was taken away from the youths it might empower. Lieberman created a bureaucratic system of policing all music, an authority that continues to pester M.I.A.’s celebrations and critiques.

Indeed the new conservatives who wished to shut down the secessionists could only dream of such power now wielded by a bipartisan consensus. For just as liberals and conservatives in early

20th-century Germany united over the threat of the secessionists, so also now they have united to censor new iterations of a musical multitude in the interest of national health.

406