Michael Mayer—Music on the Eve of the Third Reich

Michael Mayer
"Music on the Eve of the Third Reich"
in
Towards the Holocaust : the social and economic collapse of the Weimar Republic
ed. Dobkowski and Wallimann
(1983)

[316] Stripped of ideological jargon, the crisis in music is an expression of the inevitable tension between institutional and dynamic art and between different generations of artists. Having matured to Germany's outstanding and internationally reoognized cultural institution, music suffered from its own success.

In other words, institutions are not a priori vehicles of autonomy, but may just as well be (or become) "external" impositions upon music.

[317] The response to an alleged crisis of modern music in the Weimar period involved progressive and conservative formulations that overlapped and became confused with ideological categories and positions. Musicians themselves have contributed to this confusion. At least by the time of Carl Maria von Weber they had become accustomed to explaining their artistic and technical principles in music criticism, music theory, and teaching, which readily expanded into general cultural criticism with ideological overtones. It has been argued that the need for explanation, as opposed to simply composing and musicmaking, might itself be regarded as a symptom of crisis.

Refusing to explain won't make a real crisis go away, nor will it cause people who have merely imagined a crisis to snap of it. But refusal does, at least, allow us to keep our own hands (relatively) clean. And that is not nothing.

[320] Adorno had moved from reductionist Marxian aesthetics, which characterized the earlier work of the Institute of Social Research, to the defense of music's autonomy, its utopian and even transcendental powers, because of his conception of music's crisis in this overly rationalized and administered world, no less represented in Zhdanov's socialist realism of the 1930s than in the market-oriented music of the Weimar Republic or the artificial and manipulated folk music of the Third Reich's Blut und Boden cult.

...

[321] Strauss, the future president of the Reichsmusikkammer, had introduced expressionism to opera with his shocking Salome and Elektra, thus initiating a musical trend of subjectivism, which culminated in the dramatic works of Schönberg and Berg.

This ascription of subjectivism seems problematic; as if subjectivity had not existed prior. The advent of "subjectivism" seems to indicate merely that a conceit or illusion had been shattered, i.e. the conceit to/illusion of an epistemological unity of transmission with reception. The onrushing musical trend could just as well have marked (still can mark) an Eriksonian crisis of development rather than a mere "crisis" of anomie and civilizational decline.

As Rank says, the application of "psychological aesthetic" to creation is "a fallacy." Which is to say, it always was a fallacy, it just took some time to reveal itself as such.

Adorno:

[321] "absolute subjectivity is also subjectless . . . ; the more of the I of expressionism is thrown upon itself, the more like the excluded world of things it becomes."

Yep!

[329] If hindsight seemed to guide many engaged analysts of the background to Auschwitz, there is no doubt that National Socialism had roots and synthesized much in German history: It was not an inevitable product of German history, but the fulfillment of a set among countless other sets of potentiality. What the empiricist thus is forced to document and has indeed traced through careful recording of thought and action in time--always being vulnerable to the charge of drawing on selective data in support of retrospective knowledge--theorists have explained, ordered in intelligible structures, and rendered as a negative program in opposition to and thus in confirmation of their own positive view of the world.