Berlin and New York were widely considered emblems of modernity. The essence of that modernity, in terms articulated most famously by Max Weber, Sombart’s contemporary and rival, was viewed with ambivalence. The domination of what Weber called “purpose rationality”—the hallmark of modern economic life—had shattered any inherited value system derived from religion and tradition. It had led to a collapse of any hierarchy of humanistic values. In the vacuum of values, modernity’s “iron cage” of mere calculation and material progress dominated life.78
At the same time, modernist artists and architects who rejected Romanticism and the historicist aesthetics of the late nineteenth century saw in Berlin’s and New York’s material progress a way out of the grip of an aesthetic tradition that celebrated decoration and ornament and a surface sense of beauty. The efficient industrial structures of modernity—in their materials and in the rationality of a design that privileged structure—became new aesthetic inspirations for design. The work of architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) and the inherent beauty of functional, industrial designs in bridges and factories became emblematic of a new aesthetic to Viennese critics such as Adolf Loos.
This new aesthetic, rooted in the historical imperative of industrial progress and scientific reason, sought an alliance between the aesthetic and rational ethics and social reform—and a break from notions of beauty rooted in the connection between art and privilege, and the need to camouflage reality and hide the consequences of science and industry beneath a façade of historicism in art. Amid the enthusiasm for the materials and methods of modern industry within a new generation of artists, architects, and composers, particularly in Vienna, came a predictable conservative reaction: the widespread fear that traditional norms of beauty, and the autonomy of aesthetic values, would vanish and that valid hallmarks of aesthetic judgment would be set aside. The modernism represented by abstraction, cubism, constructivism, atonality and, ultimately, the twelve-tone system, would become identified with the harsh rationality of economic and technological progress—a sterility devoid of links to the past, particularly to eighteenth-century humanism and the expressiveness and emotionally accessible (and residually humanistic) fantasy of Romanticism. In defending Vienna against this reflexive fear of a radical, discontinuous aesthetic modernism remote from valid, inherited canons of taste, Sombart took pains not to limit his praise to mere tradition, but to Vienna’s contemporary artistic culture.
His perception was not far off the mark. What emerged in Vienna between 1897 and 1914, amid the complex and often contradictory strains of modernist movements, was a distinctive variant of modernism and anti-historicism. Vienna displayed a unique approach to the embrace of modern materials, and the need to be truthful in design. The Viennese pioneered the belief that the substance of art should reflect a transformative synthesis of form and function, without purposeless ornamentation. In the realization of modernism, particularly in the work of Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, the Wiener Werkstätte, and even Adolf Loos, a traditional pre-modern Viennese sensibility of grace and elegance was visible. The origins were local, and dated to the years of Schubert’s brief life. (Compare, for example the designs, one from 1803, the other from 1905, in Figures 1 and 2.)
This distinctive quality in Viennese modernism may perhaps not have been so evident to Sombart, but it was nonetheless crucial. Its source was a special shared enthusiasm among Viennese modernists: a nostalgia for the aesthetic ideals of the Biedermeier period.79 Viennese designers and architects adored Biedermeier furniture, fabrics, utensils, buildings, and clothes. The Viennese modernists who were most impressed by the local traditions of Biedermeier design produced an elegant variant of modernism, one that lent Viennese design, in the first decades of the twentieth century, its distinctly intimate and human character. The persistent glorification of “old Vienna”—this seemingly regressive taste for an old-fashioned simplicity—turned out to be fortuitous. Conservative nostalgia lasted long enough to be an impetus behind a novel progressive aesthetic and ideology in the visual arts.
Modernism in music in Vienna on the eve of World War I is best understood through the prism of the so-called scandal concert in March 1913. The music of Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern was attacked as rejecting traditional aesthetic norms, for being pompous, grandiose, abstruse, abstract, and vulgar.80 But most of all, their modernism in music was inaccessible to the participatory audience—the mass of amateurs. It was too advanced and complex. Much of the first wave of modernism—music by Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky, and the young Schoenberg—had been rather more Wagnerian in character. The extension and rejection of tonality, the fragmentation and condensation of form, and the eschewing of repetition seemed logical progressive advances beyond late Romanticism, but to the general public the music on the March concert, with the possible exception of Mahler, sounded radical indeed.
Figure 1. Silver teapot, Vienna, 1803. Franz Würth.
All the composers on that program venerated Schubert. But that respect and admiration for the very Biedermeier attributes of clarity and refinement celebrated by contemporary painters, artisans, and architects did little to solve the paradox. The progressive aesthetic ideology of musical modernism sought to reconcile itself with a progressive social and political agenda along lines pioneered by modern architects. But how could one justify music that only a few could comprehend and follow? The art, design, and architecture of Viennese modernism were comprehensible even when controversal and also useful and susceptible to being spread throughout all social classes. But the music was not. Liberal and progressive Viennese, inherently sympathetic to a new movement in the arts, understood this problem. They realized the imperative inherent in the nineteenth century cult of Schubert to reach a wide populace. A new music was needed that retained the norms of aesthetic beauty characteristic of Classicism and early Romanticism while emulating Wagner’s success in reaching a wide audience. In this context, Schubert emerged as a model for a progressive populist musical art. The question of how that might be realized remained unresolved.
Figure 2. Coffee pot, 1905, Josef Hoffmann.
For Viennese composers concerned with retaining the wide audience Schubert had amassed during the nineteenth century, he became a source of inspiration: the moral equivalent of Biedermeier design. Echoes of Schubert can be heard first in Zemlinsky’s music, and later in that of Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), who grew up in Vienna. The public had been nurtured on Wagner as well as Schubert, and those on the left called for a modern music to which the masses could relate based on both or either—traditions once considered opposites. Among those who understood the relevance of Schubert for a populist modernism that merged an elegant Biedermeierstyle beauty with contemporaneity was David Josef Bach (1874–1947), the music critic for Vienna’s Arbeiterzeitung. The insight informed his ambivalent advocacy for Schoenberg.
Bach defended Schoenberg and his followers against the reactionary Christian Socialist and anti-Semitic cultural critique. But for all Bach’s efforts to reconcile Schoenberg’s music with his own commitments to socialism, he sensed contradictions. Like Schoenberg, Bach shared a belief in the autonomy of music, their mutual admiration for Wagner not-withstanding. Therefore the traditions of instrumental music remained ideal vehicles for the education of the masses. For Bach, new music had to be “understood plainly” and “respond to the basic needs of people.” Music was not an “intellectual process” but one of sentiment, thereby making music an art form that could elevate the masses without inadvertently using art to beautify and justify economic and social injustice. Mahler’s music suggested the accessibility of art for the masses, just as Schubert’s did. Bach believed that succeeding generations of composers needed to do the same.81
Schubert therefore offered a mirror of how to respond to and elevate the aspirations of the working classes—the musical analogue to Biedermeier design. Bach developed Hirschfeld’s dream of symphony concerts for the people with the production of Worker
’s Symphony Concerts in Vienna. They began in 1905, but were organized in earnest between 1919 and the early 1930s.82 In June 1920, amid extreme postwar poverty and shortages, Bach announced a music festival devoted to “Great Performances of Viennese Music.” He argued: “Viennese music is not a mere topographical concept, but an artistic one … this land, this air brought forth a particular kind of music … this landscape, that has its own music also has its saint: his name is Franz Schubert. This saint is also its martyr.”83
A contradictory and competing appropriation of the myth of Old Vienna and the cult of Schubert also defined the character and politics surrounding the 1928 Schubert Centenary in Vienna. During the 1920s, Schubert had once again emerged as a contested figure. He was claimed by modernists like Bach with sympathies for the political left and by reactionary anti-modernists, protagonists of a renewed Austro-German cultural tradition in the neo-Romantic sense.
The revival of interest in the Biedermeier era in its local Viennese expression provided not only a more elegant and perhaps even humane path out of the labyrinth of eclecticism, density, and intensity of late Romanticism and historicism, but an impetus to scholarship. Otto Erich Deutsch’s painstaking effort to reconstruct the historical Schubert reflected the need to emancipate the image of the composer from the sentimentalizing that had made him an emblem of privileged middle-class culture. The late nineteenth-century Schubert had entered popular literature and the operetta, but mostly as a tragic figure, a composer of songs, emblematic of romantic dreams of love. He was at one and the same time a symbol of local middle-class virtues and a tragic figure. Schubert was more local hero than a great composer in the tradition of Beethoven. Wagner had succeeded in diminishing his importance in music history. The impact of the kitsch glorification of Schubert in Vienna between 1897 and 1938 cannot be underestimated; it ranged from a cup and saucer from 1897 with a Schubert picture, to postcards and Schubert marzipan, to the use of Schubert’s nickname “Schwammerl” as the title of Rudolf Hans Bartsch’s 1912 wildly popular Schubert novel, to Heinrich Berté’s legendary 1916 operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus. (As prime examples, see the illustrations in the portfolio commissioned by the Männergesangverein for the 1928 centenary, reproduced in Figures 3 and 4).
Deutsch sought to reconstruct Schubert and reassert his authentic historical roots as a Vormärz figure. Between 1905 and 1914, he immersed himself in Biedermeier culture with the intent to rescue Schubert from trivializing sentimentality—from the kitsch emblem of the Romantic that he had become—and from his place as an icon of local Viennese conservative middle-class provincialism. The garish sentimental cult of Schubert in fin-de-siècle Vienna thrived in the creation of tourist sites; Schubert was reduced to the Viennese cliché of the lighthearted, inspired, yet lovelorn hero. While seeking to puncture this image Deutsch also sought to strengthen, through research, Schubert’s place as a sympathetic, populist figure. The intense realism audible within Schubert’s music, as well as the trajectory of his life as outlined by Deutsch, could be readily associated with the profound alienation Marx described in his economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844.
The pioneering research into the brutal details of Schubert’s life, including his syphilis, the economic struggles of his father and brothers, and the difficulties posed by the absolutist tyranny of the pre-1830s era of Metternich, were dimensions of a cleansing of Schubert’s image. In Deutsch’s hands Schubert retained his singularity as a composer whose voice was motivated neither by the intent to amuse aristocratic patrons nor to please a bourgeois philistine audience. This reclaiming of Schubert as a Biedermeier figure and a spiritual forerunner of an egalitarian socialist ideal rooted in the authentic life of ordinary people caught in the web of nascent capitalism, laid the groundwork for the way in which Schubert would later be interpreted by T. W. Adorno as well as the eminent Viennese music historian Georg Knepler (1906–2003).84
The tension between two images of Schubert—the middle-class hero caught up by the personal search for love, master of songs and tunes uniquely expressive of local culture on one hand and, on the other, the troubled innovative genius, whose life experience inaugurated a new era in music history as a uniquely accessible composer in the tradition of Mozart and Beethoven—came to a head in 1928. Deutsch’s scholarship and the modernist Biedermeier revival in Vienna challenged the appropriation of Schubert as the exponent of local middle-class virtues by Austro-German nationalism and its successor, Austrofascism—heirs to Karl Lueger and the anti-Semitic Christian Socialists.
Figure 3. Cover from a portfolio commissioned by the Wiener Männergesangverein, 1928.
The contentious character of the 1928 centenary celebrations in Vienna stemmed as well from the politics of the moment. The Austrian Republic was in the midst of civil strife if not actual civil war. In July 1927, violence in the streets of Vienna between the Heimwehr on the right and the Schutzbund on the left, both paramilitary organizations, brought years of strife to a head; in these years of conflict the seeds of what would become the Austrofascism of the 1930s were sown. The Schubert centenary was planned to coincide with a massive gathering of German choral societies, including German-American choral groups from New York, San Francisco, and Ohio: the tenth annual Sängerbundfest.85 Pan-German choral society gatherings had been common since the mid-nineteenth century,86 and 140,000 participants assembled in July 1928 in Vienna. The events included a pageant on the Ringstrasse (Figure 5) and a gathering in the Prater.
Figure 4. Art by Karl M. Schuster, from a portfolio commissioned by the Wiener Männergesangverein, 1928.
Figure 5. Participants in the Tenth German Sängerbundfest, 1928.
The 1928 Sängerbundfest was a symbol of pan-German sentiment in conflict with local Austro-German patriotism. The relentless public display of German cultural chauvinism and bourgeois pride (the Austrian Railroad Officials Chorus float in the parade featured a bust of Schubert), despite passing obeisance to a special “German-Austrian” tradition located in the Lied, fueled the Anschluss fantasies of the Austrian right (which were shared by some on the left during the early postwar years). It was an extremely tense moment in the history of the fragile First Republic.87 Anton Wildgans (1881–1932), the playwright and poet who briefly directed the Burgtheater and was a fierce defender of postwar Austrian independence, took pains in his poetic prologue to the official memorial concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on March 26 to stress Schubert’s roots in Vienna, his role in bringing a different sensibility to the notion of the “German soul,” his suffering in his own day, and his place as a “man of our times.” Schubert, Wildgans proclaimed, embodied the hopes, dreams, and joys of Austria.88
The official Schubert celebration took place in Vienna, the home base of Austria’s socialist movement, where the left was strongest, and the program became the object of severe criticism from that quarter. Key personalities were conspicuously absent, including Guido Adler, who, though associated with Mahler and Schoenberg, was nevertheless the nation’s most distinguished music historian and a proud supporter of the Schubertbund and local Viennese musical traditions. Paul Pisk, the Schoenberg student and composer, writing in the socialist journal Kunst und Volk, argued that the centenary highlighted a “bourgeois” misunderstanding of Schubert as a bohemian and a superficial composer whose only real achievement was the Lied. Pisk averred that it was up to the working classes, the proletariat, to redefine Schubert as the great artist he was, whose inspiration came from the people and whose mastery of technique and form was both original and at the highest level.89
Pisk was taking aim at the lecture given by Robert Lach, an undistinguished musicologist who, through political maneuvering, had been named the successor to Guido Adler at the University of Vienna.90 Lach’s lecture on Schubert would become notorious, ridiculed by progressives as well as conservatives loyal to local Austro-German traditions. The historical revelations of Deutsch, the forging of a connection between Schubert and the harsh social realities
(as opposed to a romanticized view) of Biedermeier Vienna—as well as its refined aesthetics—and the consequent link between Schubert and both modernism and socialism inspired Lach to assert a contrarian view. The old Romantic legend of Schubert as middle-class icon, bearer of stolid bourgeois virtues, and emblem of the ordinary Viennese of Old Vienna so cherished and exploited in the 1890s, was in his view no longer viable.91 Modern scholarship had exposed it as a fiction, just as it had the legendary biographical connection between Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and the mill at Höldrich.92 Schubert actually led a dissolute life, as far as Lach was concerned. Schubert, the mythic albeit sentimental reminder of an outdated Austro-German middle-class ideal, had been exposed as a fraud. He had been an undisciplined genius whose personal habits, including drinking and carousing, prevented him from reaching the true heights of German music and what his own talent might have made possible.
Lach’s critique of Schubert was both aesthetic and moral. He paved the way for what ultimately would become Schubert’s ambiguous place in Nazi aesthetics. Lach put forward views on the connection between health, manliness, and art favored by many pan-German groups and ultimately by fascism. He outraged both the socialist left and the Austro-German Christian Social right. His speech was one unintended consequence of the strategy to lend the 1928 centenary a more conservative anti-socialist bent. Using the most recent research of Deutsch, Lach criticized Schubert’s habits and exposed his shortcomings as a composer in a manner that echoed familiar criticisms in the nineteenth century by Brendel and Köstlin about the composer’s inability to handle long forms and techniques of development. Beneath “a mask” of friendliness and lightheartedness, Schubert was possessed by demons he could not control: “burning longing, boundless thirst for love, and a heart filled with a nameless pain.”93 He was bewildered and lacked the chance to develop the disciplined personal attributes characteristic of greatness. Schubert’s struggle did not lead to its transcendence and, owing to his early death, left his work a promise unfulfilled.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 43
