Beth Snyder | University of North Texas (original) (raw)
Papers by Beth Snyder
Twentieth-Century Music, 2019
In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration.... more In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn's place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn's life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR – Georg Knepler – to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist–Leninist) account of the s...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017
German Studies Review, 2017
Eighteenth-Century Music, 2020
The Opera Quarterly, 2011
Eighteenth Century Music, 2020
The Opera Quarterly, 2011
The project of art historian Juliet Koss’s recently published monograph Modernism after Wagner is... more The project of art historian Juliet Koss’s recently published monograph Modernism after Wagner is a double genealogy of sorts. To a lesser extent, Koss is interested in revisiting and reexamining the history of the term Gesamtkunstwerk, most famously (or infamously) associated with the theoretical and artistic work of Richard Wagner. It is this association that, in Koss’s estimation, contributed to the devaluation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in twentieth-century aesthetic discourse. She claims that, due to the growing association of Wagner’s oeuvre and thought with fascism, the term became adopted as shorthand in modernist discourse for an artwork that demands a passive and emotionally overwhelmed audience response. Far more, however, Modernism after Wagner proposes a reconsideration of the range of ideas that underlie Wagner’s formulation of the “total work of art,” ideas that, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, become increasingly dissociated from the composer and the label Gesamtkunstwerk. Koss identifies what she takes to be the two most significant of these ideas: the unification of different art forms in a total artwork (one that still retains each art form’s distinctness) and a model of spectatorship that requires empathetic and active engagement. Her thesis is that these ideas remained central not only to late nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse and artistic production but also to modernist debates and artwork in the first decades of the twentieth century. She is, in essence, constructing an alternative history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, one that looks beyond terminology in order to unearth conceptual affinities and that seeks to move the Gesamtkunstwerk from a peripheral and disreputable position to a central (if often obscured) place in German modernist artistic production and discourse. Koss’s goal, then, is to demonstrate the continual working through of these two most significant ideas behind Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet the two ideas are not given equal attention. The notion of an artwork that unifies different art forms is a significant element of only a few of Koss’s case studies— most notably, perhaps, in her discussion of the Bauhaus theater in chapter seven.
Twentieth-Century Music, 2019
In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration.... more In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn’s place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn’s life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR—Georg Knepler—to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist-Leninist) account of the significance of the composer’s music to East German audiences.
Twentieth-Century Music, 2019
In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration.... more In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn's place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn's life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR – Georg Knepler – to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist–Leninist) account of the s...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017
German Studies Review, 2017
Eighteenth-Century Music, 2020
The Opera Quarterly, 2011
Eighteenth Century Music, 2020
The Opera Quarterly, 2011
The project of art historian Juliet Koss’s recently published monograph Modernism after Wagner is... more The project of art historian Juliet Koss’s recently published monograph Modernism after Wagner is a double genealogy of sorts. To a lesser extent, Koss is interested in revisiting and reexamining the history of the term Gesamtkunstwerk, most famously (or infamously) associated with the theoretical and artistic work of Richard Wagner. It is this association that, in Koss’s estimation, contributed to the devaluation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in twentieth-century aesthetic discourse. She claims that, due to the growing association of Wagner’s oeuvre and thought with fascism, the term became adopted as shorthand in modernist discourse for an artwork that demands a passive and emotionally overwhelmed audience response. Far more, however, Modernism after Wagner proposes a reconsideration of the range of ideas that underlie Wagner’s formulation of the “total work of art,” ideas that, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, become increasingly dissociated from the composer and the label Gesamtkunstwerk. Koss identifies what she takes to be the two most significant of these ideas: the unification of different art forms in a total artwork (one that still retains each art form’s distinctness) and a model of spectatorship that requires empathetic and active engagement. Her thesis is that these ideas remained central not only to late nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse and artistic production but also to modernist debates and artwork in the first decades of the twentieth century. She is, in essence, constructing an alternative history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, one that looks beyond terminology in order to unearth conceptual affinities and that seeks to move the Gesamtkunstwerk from a peripheral and disreputable position to a central (if often obscured) place in German modernist artistic production and discourse. Koss’s goal, then, is to demonstrate the continual working through of these two most significant ideas behind Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet the two ideas are not given equal attention. The notion of an artwork that unifies different art forms is a significant element of only a few of Koss’s case studies— most notably, perhaps, in her discussion of the Bauhaus theater in chapter seven.
Twentieth-Century Music, 2019
In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration.... more In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn’s place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn’s life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR—Georg Knepler—to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist-Leninist) account of the significance of the composer’s music to East German audiences.