Forbidden Music (28 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
To musical conservatives, Hans Pfitzner's pamphlet
Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz. Ein Verwesungssymtom?
(
The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence: A Sign of Decay?
), written in 1919 and published the following year, must have seemed like a godsend. It was a response to the critic Paul Bekker, the author of a popular and well-received biography of
Beethoven in which he suggested that the music of the early twentieth century was the fruit of Beethoven's legacy. As reactionaries and progressives both claimed Beethoven as their own, Pfitzner's attack on Bekker was intended to dispute the legitimacy of the modernists’ claim. However, Beethoven was only the
casus belli
of Pfitzner's tract on ‘musical impotence’. It irked him that a year earlier Bekker had suggested in a pamphlet that the only contemporary composer who could be considered a legitimate successor to Richard Wagner was Franz Schreker.
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Bekker had arrived at this conclusion after careful consideration of the potential claims by a number of other composers, including Pfitzner.
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It is worth focusing on one central point in Pfitzner's essay as this would ultimately harness many intellectuals into the anti-Semitic thinking of National Socialism. Clearly, there was more at stake than the question of which strand of musical development had a legitimate claim to Beethoven's inheritance, and accordingly Pfitzner moved the debate to something even more profound by making a claim on behalf of musical conservatives of the German soul itself. Composers of all musical tendencies believed that music was somehow a privilege uniquely bequeathed either by fate or by God to the German people. Pfitzner, in common with Wagner (whose
Das Judenthum in der Musik
he described in his own tract as ‘serious, brave and loving‘
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) saw Jews as non-German foreigners. He goes on to accuse the Jewish Bekker of leading an international assault, and uses the words ‘international’ and ‘Jewish’ in tandem so often that they soon become interchangeable. ‘International’ thus becomes the opposite of ‘German’. The Communist Party was at this time called the ‘International’, which was described as ‘Bolshevik’: thus, ‘international’ = ‘Jew’ = ‘Bolshevik’ = ‘non-German’. In due course, other euphemisms for Jews would stand in for ‘international’, 'cosmopolitan’ emerging as a favourite used by both National Socialist and Communist anti-Semites alike. Ultimately, all these euphemisms meant outsiders, usurpers, parvenus,
Möchtegerns
and confidence tricksters. To Pfitzner and others, such as his journalist ally Alfred Heuß, editor of the nationalist, conservative
Zeitschrift für Musik
, these were merely synonyms for ‘non-German’.
Paul Bekker was born in Berlin and was briefly a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic before leaving to work as a conductor in Aschaffenburg and Görlitz. He started writing music criticism in 1906 and from 1911 to 1923 he was chief music critic of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, Germany's liberal answer to Austria's
Neue Freie Presse
. This placed him in a similar position to Julius Korngold, and their rivalry was legendary. In an
open letter to Korngold from 1924, Bekker wrote the following attack on him:
My dear Dr Korngold!
One taunts those whom one loves – this truism occurred to me as I recently read in the
Neue Freie Presse
your anguished cry regarding atonal insanity and the demise of human feeling and passion. I continued to be reminded of this truism as I noticed that despite these human catastrophes, you still managed, somehow, to intone your predictable grandiose song in praise of the natural order. It was at this point that I suddenly realised that it was my own good self you meant when naming the un-credited spokesman for the ‘journalistic pulp’ that calls itself the ‘Vienna Newspaper for Atonal Music’ [
Anbruch
]. So, I thought to myself, you really love me, don't you Julius? Why deny it? Only a deep love can bring forth such great pain, such grievance and such anger. […] For this reason, I shall attempt to explain why I, Julius, cannot love you, at least as far as such things can be accounted. […] You see, Julius, I happen to view Beethoven as being different from Wagner, just as Krenek is different from Schoenberg. I see two operas by Schreker from different perspectives and am proud of the inconsequence that it does not result in me being against Schreker, though he doesn't happen belong to the [atonal] ‘movement’. […] When I walk through the garden, I cherish the apple tree, the pear tree, the peach tree, the roses and the thistles. I do not value a single one of these to the exclusion of others. Rather, I am conscious of the fact that apples, pears and peaches are fundamentally different in both taste and appearance. I still enjoy eating all of them, according to the individual tree's fruit and whims of the season. I'm delighted by the rose. As far as the thistle goes – please don't blush, Julius – I must admit it pleases me the least of all. But I think to myself, God also created the thistle and he surely must know why. For that reason, it should continue to stay where it is, growing and bringing whatever fruits it may bear – even if only asses enjoy eating it.
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On the recommendation of Leo Kestenberg, Musical Advisor to the Prussian Ministry of Culture, in 1923 Bekker was made director of the opera house in Kassel, where he worked closely with Krenek. As Krenek relates in his memoirs, one of Bekker's first productions was, ironically, Pfitzner's
Der arme Heinrich
, mounted prior to Schreker's
Die Gezeichneten
, which was scheduled ‘towards the end of his directorship’.
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Bekker had written, in addition to his Beethoven monograph, biographies of Offenbach and Oskar Fried, along with numerous articles and essays on Schreker, Mahler, ‘Art and
Revolution’, and other aspects of German music of the day. The Nazi
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
accords him a particularly blistering entry:
Bekker, Paul (H [= Half Jew]), * Berlin 4.12.1882, + New York 1937: music critic; from 1925 director of the State Theatre in Kassel; 1927–32 director in Wiesbaden. Famous writer during the time of general decline; well-known by his work at the
Frankfurter Zeitung
(1911–1925); promoter of such degenerating tendencies as Mahler, Schoenberg, Schreker etc. Hans Pfitzner directed his polemic
The Aesthetic of Musical Impotence
against him, in which he states clearly that ‘Whoever took the nihilistic views seriously of this “Frankfurt darling”, in proclaiming who the legitimate successors to Beethoven and Wagner were, wasn't in a position to tell the difference between the production of art and shit.‘
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The lexicon goes on to detail the withdrawal of Bekker's German citizenship and accuses him of hiring only Jewish minions to carry out his work while at Kassel (though Krenek, as we have seen, was certainly not Jewish). It goes on to recycle Pfitzner's accusations of Bekker's Bolshevism, which were so ludicrous that when Pfitzner brought them up in his
Impotence
polemic, Bekker never even bothered to address them.
In an article entitled
Beethoven und die Moderne
,
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printed as part of the Berlin Staatsoper's Almanac in 1926, Pfitzner had his own chance to reclaim Beethoven from the modernists. Julius Korngold, in his review of this morose essay, wrote:
It would occasionally appear that the pessimism which befalls the composer of
Palestrina
may compel him to give up composing altogether. ‘All music has something of the wilting bloom about it’, he opines, before suddenly reaching for yet another of his many contradictions and dismissing this thought by expressing the belief that the creative artist's sense of self-preservation is such that he cannot find the wherewithal to stop believing in himself. Good. Inevitably, the sun must set, ‘but should and must one’, he wails, ‘speed up this inevitability by throwing muck at the horizon?’ This is a singularly powerful thought that appeals to us more than Pfitzner's latest bloodless musings. However, it could be argued that most of the muck thrown at the horizon comes from those who write about it rather than from those who compose.
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It would be wrong to suggest that Pfitzner was placing himself in the same aesthetic position as Wagner with
Das Judenthum in der Musik
. In fact, he was
aesthetically closer to Hanslick in matters of musical purity and its inappropriateness in disseminating extra-musical ideas. It was, in Pfitzner's opinion, Bekker's cheek at placing non-musical concepts at the heart of understanding Beethoven that became one of the most contentious points of his biography. For Pfitzner, the inspiration of the musical idea must come uniquely from within the music itself. On the other hand, his German Nationalism was obsessive and it would appear that this very non-musical impulse was the agenda behind his cantata
Von deutscher Seele
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to texts by Eichendorff, first performed in 1922. Thomas Mann explains the origins of Pfitzner's German nationalism as follows:
Until the height of summer in 1914, the composer believed that as far as he was concerned, the devil could take politics. He saw himself as a Romantic composer, that is to say a
national
, but not a political composer. It was with the outbreak of war that he realised that national feelings would inevitably be transmuted into the political: this introspective, gentle and cerebral artist thus transformed himself into a power-seeker. He longed for the warrior triumph of Germany: at the height of the morality-debate on the waging of U-boat attacks, he dedicated a chamber work to Admiral Tirpitz. In a word, Germany's national composer had politicised himself into the anti-democratic nationalist. And who should be surprised? He was steeped in the spirit of German music as no one else. His fundamental instinct […] was antagonistic to such foreign things as European intellectualism or the artifices of democracy.
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Pfitzner had already thrown down the gauntlet in 1917 in an anti-Futurist polemic directed against Busoni, whose
Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music
had appeared ten years earlier. The tract
Musical Impotence
caused far greater controversy. According to Pfitzner, ‘international’ influences included Impressionism, and the fact that both Schoenberg and Schreker had used Impressionistic effects in their earlier works only confirmed, in his view, how un-German they were. His use of the concept of ‘impotency’ as an aesthetic idea, with its alternative notion of ‘potency’ (implying, of course, Pfitzner himself), carries forward the subliminal idea of the artist as hero and the female as non-creative and passive, thus preparing the way for Nazi propaganda that would dismiss music by Jewish composers as ‘weak and effeminate’.
The responses to Pfitzner's polemic were many and varied. The German music historian Eckard John, in his book
Musik-Bolschewismus
of 1994, sees it as a pivotal moment in the politicisation of music. The German musicologist Alfred Einstein, writing for British readers, makes the point that Pfitzner
was only stating what the historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler had cited in his ultra-conservative
Downfall of Western Civilisation
(1918).
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Einstein goes on to cite Pfitzner's point of view, more in sorrow than anger, as a symptom of Germany's lingering plight over Romanticism:
We must go a different way if we want to overcome the pathos, the overbearing sentimentality, and the natural aversion to romanticism. Germany was deeper under the spell of Romanticism than any other country. Romanticism was indeed a specifically German creation. We must overcome this disease, and therefore cannot afford to treat the attempts at deliverance as a question of fashion, no matter how ridiculous the gestures these attempts may produce. […] We believe that we write new music: yet we only avoid writing old music. The old music no longer exists, and the new music does not yet exist as a positive expression of our times. We, too, try to parody and to ridicule the bourgeoisie and the sentimentality of romantic music […] to come near a so-called musical ‘Gothic’ by linear development of melody or to do away with the old methods of composing by inventing new matters, and by depriving all motives, themes, and concords of the original soul, to create the
tabula rasa
, the chaos which is to bring forth a star. The star is not born yet, neither do we know whether it will be born, but we know that we cannot go back and that our present evolution is necessary even if there are few spectators. The evolution will be all the quicker the more passionately the issue is fought.
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If Einstein's view was that Germany was stuck in some sort of late-Romantic time-warp, Alban Berg highlights the associations between Pfitzner's German nationalism and his use of unfettered emotion as a blunt object against reason. He starts by quoting from Pfitzner's own essay: ‘With such a melody [Schumann's
Träumerei
] we simply float on air. Its quality can only be recognised, not demonstrated; there is no intellectual path to its understanding. Either one comprehends its beauty innately through the delight one feels or not. He who cannot empathise has no arguments to bring, nor can he be met with counter-arguments. One can only play the melody and say, “how beautiful”. What it says is as deep and clear and mystical as truth itself.‘
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Berg then offers the following observation:
To read these words from a composer of such standing as Pfitzner must have been to many musicians, certainly it was to me, a grave disappointment. In addition to everything else, they come from a book that is so full of erudition that it hardly omits a single field of human intellectual
endeavour in its contents. In equal quantities it offers philosophy, politics, music history and racial-theories; aesthetics, ethics, journalism, literature and frankly, God knows what all else! The one place it leaves us wanting most is precisely the area it was meant to cover, namely music. It takes a position right from the outset that suppresses every possibility of judging good from bad.
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