by Michael Haas
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’.5 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.‘6
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,7 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.8
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 Seele9 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.10
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).11 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.12
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.‘13 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.14
Pfitzner would appear to speak to a small group which had preserved the instinct to recognise melodic quality – a group of which Berg happily counted himself a member. Pfitzner is quoted as making the ‘German demand’ which he sets forth as: ‘Those of us who still have this sense of quality must be brave enough to romanticise!‘15 Berg responds:
For my own part, I'll choose to leave the romanticising to that much larger group from whom the sense of melody has not yet been driven. Instead, I'll preserve my own, if not nobler, at least more objective relationship with music. In any case, I suddenly realised that the tiny group he believed he was addressing may not be that tiny after all. He addresses this question of innate musical quality by picking up that most difficult of nuts to crack, Schumann's ‘Träumerei’ from his Scenes from Childhood … a work that to my knowledge, even during Schumann's lifetime, was in no particular [aesthetic] danger.
Berg then turns his attention to some of the most fatuous of Pfitzner's generalisations regarding the intrinsic perfection of Träumerei and deconstructs them bar by bar. Berg is annoyed that Pfitzner's attack on modern music is vague and offers no concrete examples. He provides counter-evidence of innate melodic quality in contemporary music by proffering ‘Ach Knabe, du mußt nicht traurig sein’, taken from Mahler's Wunderhorn song, Der Schildwache Nachtlied. For good measure, he throws in the second subject of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony as an alternative example.16
Julius Korngold finds much to agree with in Pfitzner's essay and would certainly have welcomed any attack on Bekker (the only major critic who would disparage Erich Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt later in 1920). But his brief summary is revealing:
Readers who know our point of view in such questions will find immediate conviction in a polemic that Hans Pfitzner has recently published entitled The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence: A Sign of Decay? Pfitzner, in response to what he sees as a dubious understanding of Beethoven, peevishly defends the uniquely and specifically musical. Nothing that Hanslick would have said could have been more clearly stated. The determining factor for Pfitzner is musical ‘potency’, which is the result of the imagination and expressed in individual thematic and melodic creativity. Like a high-strung fighting-rooster with his cocks-comb inflated to full fury, he attacks any and all who dispute this perspective. He's savage with any belief that music may be able to express extra-musical content, and he's against all attempts to impose new-fangled sound-experiments or decadent tonal systems that potentially discredit the supremacy of melody. He is equally savage with anyone and anything that may try to reverse the fundamentals of thematic and melodic structures, thereby undermining the foundations of musical architecture. Behind any attempt to do things differently, Pfitzner finds mere incompetence while hammering away at perceived ‘impotence’. Alarmingly, he had the misfortune while wielding his mighty sword of German music to raise it against a composer who, if fact be known, is in possession of considerable musical potency: Gustav Mahler, who cannot reasonably be held responsible for all of the crazy ideas that have lined up in his name after his death. Mahler, to whom the plasticity of harmony and melody were fundamental to everything he composed, would have been bemused at such accusations. All of the pan-German excesses and excursions within this book dull the ringing purity of Pfitzner's battle cry. The Wagner who composed Meistersinger is a happier example to cite than the Wagner who addressed matters regarding [the Jewish] race. If we simply ignore the nonsense and follow his basic reasoning, we can find much to recommend.17
Reading Korngold's appraisal, along with Berg's counter-attack, we sense a shift within the musical landscape of Jewish assimilation and its many detractors. The positions of Wagner, the German superiorist who heaped function upon function onto opera until he had created a Gesamtkunstwerk, and his opposite pole, the aesthete Hanslick (who was of Jewish descent, and therefore, according to Wagner, not German), had now been reversed. Pfitzner, in his attempt to rescue Wagner from ‘non-German’ Jewish Wagnerians such as Mahler, Schoenberg and their followers, had unwittingly resorted to representing the composer Wagner in the purist aesthetic image of his arch-enemy Eduard Hanslick.
Korngold goes on to say that in Vienna, the issues that Pfitzner addresses are in any case irrelevant, as younger Viennese composers have abandoned the experimental ‘impotency’ that Pfitzner derides. He cites as examples the Schreker pupils Felix Petyrek, Egon Kornauth and above all, Wilhelm Grosz, who have exemplary skills in all disciplines and show great creativity. Korngold is particularly fulsome in his praise of another young Viennese composer, Hans Gál, and congratulates him on the success of his recent opera Der Arzt der Sobeide (Sobeide's Doctor) in Breslau.18 The point that Korngold makes is that there were a number of composers for whom the de-sensitised New Objectivity was irrelevant. However, it was equally valid that these young composers did not see themselves as slavish adherents to the Wagnerian Romanticism of the previous century. They saw their own music as a reflection of their individual personalities and their singular melodic and harmonic ideas which were all that was needed to view themselves as ‘new’ and ‘modern’.
As we have seen in Krenek's conversation with Josef Lechthaler in the previous chapter, this was particularly the case among Jewish composers. With the exception of Schoenberg, Austro-German Jewish composers still saw themselves as vulnerable to accusations of not being sufficiently ‘German’. They did not want to risk new-found, albeit cautious, successes for the uncertain glories bestowed by future generations potentially more able to comprehend what contemporary audiences found alienating. This was simply not the case with the more self-assured children of the non-Jewish bourgeoisie, many of whom congregated at the more extreme margins of the avant-garde such as Webern, Krenek and Berg. If Jewish composers were to count for anything, they needed to write music, even ‘modern’ music, which appealed to the public of the day in all of its many permutations. On the other hand, many of the brightest and most talented of them recognised that continuing with Austro-German Romanticism in the manner of Wagner and Liszt was not a viable long-term solution either, despite its undoubted appeal amongst the largest section of the concert- and opera-attending public. A group of young composers, predominantly Viennese and predominantly pupils of Guido Adler, decided that the solution was to write new music by reaching back to models provided by a previous era. As such, they intellectually, if not always aesthetically embraced the values of Mendelssohn's ‘old German School’.
Anti-Romanticism
Hans Gál was one of the most successful of these musicians who had studied with Brahms's friend and musical executor, Eusebius Mandyczewski. Together, Gál and Mandyczewski edited the complete works of Brahms, a feat that was highly regarded by all musical factions. With Mandyczewski editing only Brahms's vocal works, it was left to Gál to provide critical editions of everything else, drawing him more deeply into Brahms's world than any other composer of the time. When Hanns Eisler was asked what the hardest part of exile was, his reply was abandoning his treasured set of the complete Brahms edition in Berlin.19 Gál was very conscious that he needed to be vigilant against Brahms influencing his own work as a composer, especially as work on the edition took place at a time when Robert Fuchs as Vienna's principal composition professor was also promoting a strict Brahmsian line at the music academy. With the North German's musical spirit guiding so many of the city's young composers, in later life Gál withdrew pieces he felt were unoriginal or, worse, derivative.
As Julius Korngold relates, Gál was a master of his craft. There are no flaws to be found in his harmony or counterpoint unless they are intentional. He was an accomplished pianist and a fine cellist and, as with many other Adler students, he was also a musical polymath: his doctoral dissertation had been on the stylistic characteristics of the young Beethoven, a subject t
hat would have been close to Pfitzner's heart. In 1925 and 1928, he edited volumes of Strauss waltzes, marches and polkas for Adler's Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. Gál was, in many ways, the archetypal composer of his day and he could potentially stand as a representative of musical creativity during the years of the Weimar Republic. Certainly, he was more regularly performed in mainstream venues than the likes of Eisler, Weill, Toch and even Hindemith, though with the press feasting on their controversies, they attracted more discussion, generating often scurrilous publicity.
Gál, in comparison with these enfants terribles, was conventional without being derivative, and he could never be accused of banality or empty sentimentality – he was no nostalgic Romantic. Nevertheless, he may have had some sympathy for Pfitzner's music and even his ideas, while avoiding any allegiance to his wilder polemics. Gál took the more considered view that modern music should grow organically out of the nineteenth century while retaining its classical integrity, with roots in Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. In this respect, it could be inferred that he shared some of the neo-classical tendencies of Stravinsky. Gál, however, was both too individual and too conventional, too firmly rooted in the German school to travel down the paths of Constructivist neo-classicism favoured by Russian, Italian, French and Spanish composers, along with the likes of Hindemith, Weill and Krenek. For Gál, unresolved dissonance remained a means, never an end.
