Themes of Nostalgia and Critique in Weimar-Era Brahms Reception.(Johannes Brahms)

I

Despite Brahms's secure place in the repertory, many leading Austro-German music critics and historians of the early 1900s, conservative, moderate, and progressive alike, felt uneasy about his position in music history. During the years of the Weimar Republic, however, the composer's critical stature in the opinion of this group increased dramatically. This essay aims to explore the components of this positive reappraisal.(1)

The best-known example today of Weimar-era Brahms criticism is a radio lecture given by Arnold Schoenberg in 1933, which the composer later revised and published, in 1947, under the title "Brahms the Progressive." Yet Schoenberg's image of the composer--and in particular his claims of Brahms's relevance for contemporary music--was not, as we shall see, representative of the critical norm. Indeed, the popular Brahms-Bild of the Weimar era was deeply influenced by a belief that the composer had never truly been appreciated. More important, there was a widespread sense that something valuable had been lost through this neglect. These related ideas are clearly evident in the conclusion to Walter Niemann's popular biography of the composer, which appeared in 1920. Niemann argued that the public needed to become reacquainted with Brahms's art because it possessed qualities of which:

 
   we Germans of today stand urgently in need [dringend notig]. At no period 
   has this been more true than today, and for this reason perhaps this book 
   may prove to have appeared at the right time. Brahms is the last great 
   musical representative of this important, vital, and beautiful 
   introspective side of German spiritual life [innen gewandten, wichtigen und 
   schonen Seiten des deutschen Geisteslebens].... If this book has made a few 
   solid contributions to a fresh consideration of Brahms [Brahms-Betrachtung] 
   in the future and laid a solid foundation for it, it will have fulfilled 
   its aim in the best possible way.(2) 

This "fresh consideration" was most evident in the way in which aspects seen as liabilities in the years leading up to the First World War were now considered assets. In the first two editions of his Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (1898, 1900), Felix Weingartner portrayed Brahms as a bloodless and somewhat pedantic composer of "scientific" music that expressed nothing beyond "technical mastery." Listening to Brahms was like watching "a doctor dissecting a body well put together," Weingartner wrote, continuing: "I feel the same powerless frigidity that that doctor would feel in making himself try to put life back into a dissected corpse."(3) In the 1926 edition of his book, however, Weingartner retracted this position in toto, calling it a "grave mistake" that merited a "thorough revision."(4) What he had formerly dismissed as cold pedantry was now viewed as intellectual excellence and spiritual depth.

Weingartner's change of attitude reflects larger concerns about the state of contemporary music. From the turn of the century to the end of the Weimar era, a wide range of musical figures, including Niemann, Weingartner, and other Austro-German critics, consistently claimed that modernism had pushed contemporary music into a state of degeneration, or Entartung.(5) These critics did not employ a model of Entartung drawn from history or aesthetics; they were not claiming that a historical era or an artistic style was in a final, decadent state of mannerist decline. Their concept of degeneration was drawn instead from a body of medical theory based on ideas first proposed, in 1857, by the French physician B. A. Morel.

This degeneracy theory was ostensibly a response to pathologies that were attributed to the rapid growth of technology and urbanism during the second half of the nineteenth century. Its proponents argued that the modern industrialized city offered an environment that was physically and mentally detrimental. Regular exposure to the pollution, noise, and hectic pace of urban life was linked to the deterioration of the nervous system. On a sociological level, the lack of supervision that one enjoyed in cities was blamed for the promotion of harmful vices like gambling and excessive drinking. Refining Morel's thesis, other doctors, such as J. M. Charcot and Cesare Lombroso, attempted to catalog the factors that caused degeneracy (such as minted water and air pollution) and its effects on the individual. Moreover, the physical appearance and behavior of an afflicted individual were said to be clearly recognizable.(6)