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Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Inter-War Politics of Gebrauchsmusik

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2012

MATTHEW PRITCHARD
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Abstract

By examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, this article attempts to find precedents in Weimar Germany for a contemporary social conception of music, and to trace the effects of this conception on music history between the wars. Although Besseler's position is seen to be complex and not wholly consistent, from his ideal of music as an expression of community (Gemeinschaft) arose two influential claims: that the concert was in crisis because it could no longer correspond to that ideal, and that the real source of communal vitality lay in Gebrauchsmusik, music for everyday use. The article explores the immediate political and musical consequences of these claims, both for the German youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and for Gebrauchsmusik as composed by Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. It argues that the social aims of the Gebrauchsmusik movement were in fact best met when combined with an earlier understanding, rejected by Besseler himself, of the concert's own ‘community-forming power’ – a theoretical combination that was to lead outside Europe to the American musical and the Soviet symphony. By contrast, the sidelining of such ideas in post-war Germany was reflected in Adorno's outright rejection of musical community, a move which served to confirm only Besseler's first, negative claim – thereby establishing as normative an ‘autonomous’ conception of concert music and leaving musicology unable to give any positive account of the concert's social role.

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Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 29 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134/1 (2010).

2 The original text of ‘Grundfragen’ appears (as the only relevant inter-war contribution) in Bernhard Dopheide's collection of twentieth-century essays on musical listening, Musikhören, 48–73. Nikolaus Bacht's introduction to Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives cites Besseler's ‘Grundfragen’ as the ‘first serious challenge’ to the nineteenth-century view of listening as an issue of pure music psychology (1). The volume Perspektiven einer Geschichte abendländischen Musikhörens is introduced by its editor, Wolfgang Gratzer, with similar observations, emphasizing the difference between Besseler's perspective and Adorno's (‘Motive einer Geschichte des Musikhörens’, 11–12); by contrast Sigrid Abel-Struth considers Adorno's music-sociological ‘typology of listeners’ in some ways an extension of Besseler's approach’ (‘Ansätze einer Didaktik des Musikhörens’, 323). Finally, Rob C. Wegman's remarks on Besseler (‘“Das musikalische Hören” in the Middle Ages and Renaissance’) will be considered below.

3 Gebrauchsmusik has also been translated as ‘functional music’ or ‘utility music’. Because of the degree of recognition it has attained as a term in English-language musicology, however, I have opted to leave it untranslated both in this article and in the accompanying translation. The significance of Besseler's essay in relation to Gebrauchsmusik seems to have first been pointed out by Rudolf Stephan (‘Die Musik der Zwanzigerjahre’, 10). As Stephen Hinton notes, the term was used in narrower scholarly contexts in the early 1920s, but it was Besseler who really made it into a focus of debate – and ultimately into a slogan that he found too loaded with public preconceptions to continue using in his own theoretical work (Hinton, ‘Gebrauchsmusik’, 619).

4 Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 27.

5 Lowinsky, ‘Heinrich Besseler (1900–1969)’, 500.

6 Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 22. Gurlitt's term Musizieren (music-making, or perhaps, following Christopher Small's coinage, ‘musicking’), which avoids any suggestion of an a priori division into composing and performing, recurs throughout the text of ‘Grundfragen’.

7 Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 24–5. Cf. David Farrell Krell's translation of (and introduction to) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Heidegger, Basic Writings, 139–212. The way in which art transfigures ‘equipment’ into ‘things’, the contemplation of which can reveal truth, is summed up in the famous discussion of Van Gogh's painting of a peasant's shoes (158–62). Thomas Schipperges’ attempt (Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 50–54) to deny an ‘in any way concrete’ reception of Heideggerian philosophy within Besseler's early work (53) is far less convincing than Laurenz Lütteken's renewed demonstration of Heidegger's importance (see ‘Das Musikwerk’, 220–23); for further evidence of the Heideggerian influence on Besseler's terminology see the footnotes to my translation of ‘Grundfragen’ below.

8 Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, 439.

9 Besseler and Moser, ‘Erwiderung’, 381; trans. in Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 17.

10 Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, 439.

11 In passages such as this ‘Grundfragen’ reads almost like an anticipation of such ground-breaking (or ground-recovering) recent sociological interventions as Tia DeNora's Music in Everyday Life. Perhaps it is not so surprising if a scholar writing against the influence of Adorno comes to the same conclusions as one who wrote before Adorno's influence had made itself felt.

12 Somewhat confusingly for the modern reader, these are referred to initially as a ‘Classical approach’ to music (see ‘Fundamental Issues’, 66). Perhaps Besseler, in the spirit of his contemporary Friedrich Blume, wants to lump the ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ together as part of one continuous epoch – but of course in Besseler's case this leads not to Blume's affirmation of concert music but to a radical doubting of its entire repertoire's social viability (Haydn and Beethoven not excepted). Such iconoclasm is revoked in Besseler's later work.

13 See Botstein, ‘Listening Through Reading’.

14 Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’, 445.

15 See ‘Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit’, in Besseler, Aufsätze, especially 135–51; on Einheitsgestaltung see in the same volume ‘Bach als Wegbereiter’ (1953), 367–419, and ‘Mozart und die Deutsche Klassik’ (1956), 442–54.

16 See Potter, ‘German Musicology and Early Music Performance’, 103.

17 Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 25.

18 Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 107–212.

19 Moser, ‘Zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation der Musik’.

20 Eisler, ‘Über moderne Musik’, Die rote Fahne, 15 October 1927; repr. in Eisler, Musik und Politik, 31–3.

21 Eisler, ‘Die neue Religiosität in der Musik’, Die rote Fahne, 22 January 1928; repr. in Eisler, Musik und Politik, 61–5.

22 See Leaver, ‘Lutheran Church Music’, 376–7.

23 Hinton, ‘Lehrstück’, 64.

24 Hinton, ‘Lehrstück’, 69.

25 ‘Situation der Oper. Heinrich Strobel: Gespräch mit Kurt Weill’, Melos 10 (1931), 43–5; repr. in Weill, Musik und musikalisches Theater, 457–8.

26 Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 40.

27 See Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 90–250.

28 Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler, 13.

29 Hinton, ‘Weill: Neue Sachlichkeit, Surrealism, and Gebrauchsmusik’, 71.

30 Lütteken, ‘Das Musikwerk’, 228.

31 Besseler's letter of 17 May 1937 to Jacques Handschin, cited in Lütteken, ‘Das Musikwerk’, 231.

32 On the Nazi-approved twelve-note compositions of Winfried Zillig and Paul von Klenau see Levi, ‘Atonality, 12-Tone Music and the Third Reich’.

33 Moser, ‘Zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation’.

34 See Potter, Most German of the Arts, 12–16.

35 Kolland, Die Jugendmusikbewegung, 38.

36 Kolland, Die Jugendmusikbewegung, 42–3.

37 Mehlich, ‘Ein Musikbrief’, Kreis 10/3 (1932), 48; cited in Kolland, Die Jugendmusikbewegung, 213.

38 Kolland, Die Jugendmusikbewegung, 214.

39 Kolland, Die Jugendmusikbewegung, 216–17.

40 Doflein, ‘Gegenwart, Gebrauch, Kitsch und Stil’, 295–6.

41 Doflein, ‘Über Grundlagen der Beurteilung gegenwärtiger Musik’, 289.

42 Doflein, ‘Gegenwart, Gebrauch, Kitsch und Stil’, 296.

43 Mersmann, Schultze-Ritter, and Strobel, ‘Die Situation in Deutschland’, 349.

44 Adorno, ‘Gebrauchsmusik’, 447.

45 Adorno, ‘Zur Dreigroschenoper’.

46 Blum, ‘Gebrauchsmusik als unmoralische Kunst’, 95.

47 Weill, ‘Verschiebungen in der musikalischen Produktion’, in Musik und musikalisches Theater, 61–4 (p. 61).

48 Reprinted as section III (222–9) of Adorno, ‘Ad vocem Hindemith’.

49 Lessing, Die Hindemith-Rezeption Theodor W. Adornos, 203.

50 Lessing, Die Hindemith-Rezeption Theodor W. Adornos, 188.

51 See, for instance, Krenek, ‘Was erwartet der Komponist von der Musikerziehung?’, and Adorno's reply, ‘Musikpädagogische Musik: Brief an Ernst Krenek’, in Adorno and Krenek, Briefwechsel, 208–14 and 215–23.

52 Adorno, ‘Ad vocem Hindemith’, 223.

53 Adorno, ‘Bewußtsein des Konzerthörers’, 817–18.

54 Adorno, ‘Bewußtsein des Konzerthörers’, 817–18.

55 Adorno, ‘Ad vocem Hindemith’, 228.

56 Adorno, ‘Bewußtsein des Konzerthörers’, 816.

57 Stuckenschmidt, Glanz und Elend der Musikkritik, 59–61.

58 Adorno, ‘Anmerkungen zum deutschen Musikleben’, 179 and 185.

59 See, for instance, Gutman, ‘Young Germany, 1930’, and Closson, ‘The Case Against “Gebrauchsmusik”’, published in the same issue of the journal Modern Music. Hindemith later complained that ‘the slogan Gebrauchsmusik hit me wherever I went’ after arriving in America (Hinton, ‘Gebrauchsmusik’, 621).

60 Vaughan Williams used the image of a pyramid to express what he saw as the necessary interdependence of professional and amateur: ‘At the apex are the great and famous; below, in rank after rank, stand the general practitioners of our art, competent and enthusiastic […]. These are the foundations of the pyramid, sustaining those above them and at the same time depending upon them for strength and inspiration’ (National Music, 239).

61 Krenek, ‘Musik in der Gegenwart’, 51.

62 Anderson, Imagined Communities. The theoretical conjunction of musical ‘imagination’, conceived through a collective symbolic repertoire, and the ‘nation’ as idealized collective recipient of the composer's work is plainly visible in the writings of contemporary symphonists, whether Copland's Music and Imagination or Vaughan Williams's National Music (first published in 1934), not to mention Russian sources that will be addressed later.

63 Bekker, Beethoven, trans. Bozman, 147–8.

64 Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler, 17–18.

65 Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler, 59–61.

66 Notley, ‘Volksconcerte in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony’.

67 Besseler and Moser, ‘Erwiderung’, 380.

68 Paul Bekker, ‘Gustav Mahler’, New Yorker Staatszeitung, 7 July 1935; cited in Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 608–9.

69 Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 609.

70 Bekker, ‘Musik ist gegenwärtig’, in New Yorker Staatszeitung, 9 October 1934; cited in Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 637.

71 Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 633.

72 Bekker, ‘Singen und Tanzen’, in Neue Züricher Zeitung, 1 April 1934; cited in Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 633–4.

73 Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 635.

74 Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 600–09.

75 Eichhorn, Paul Bekker, 643.

76 See Weill, Gesammelte Schriften, 61–4, and Kim H. Kowalke's remarks in Kurt Weill in Europe, 106.

77 See Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe; Schebera, Kurt Weill; Geuen, Von der Zeitoper zur Broadway Opera; and Hinton, Weill's Musical Theater.

78 See Fay, Shostakovich, 130–33.

79 New York Herald Tribune, 18 October 1942; repr. in Thomson, The Musical Scene, 101–4.

80 Hinton, The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik, 39.

81 On Knepler's disagreement with Dahlhaus and anticipation of the New Musicology's disciplinary critiques see Schreffler, ‘Berlin Walls’.

82 Nowack, Grauzone einer Wissenschaft, 59.

83 Nowack, Grauzone einer Wissenschaft, 42, n. 19.

84 Nowack, Grauzone einer Wissenschaft, 48.

85 Fairclough, ‘Mahler Reconstructed’, 376.

86 Taruskin, Oxford History, vol. 4, p. 796.

87 Small, Music, Society, Education, 172.

88 Erpf, Entwicklungszüge in der zeitgenössischen Musik, 1.