Estranging German Lieder: Kurt Schwaen's Settings of Günter Kunert (original) (raw)
Related papers
Traces of a Tune: Form and Ideology in Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's "An die Nachgeborenen"
Word and Music Association Forum Conference Volume 2012, Stockholm University, 2014
As if anticipating Theodor Adorno’s 1949 dictum on lyric poetry after Auschwitz, Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 elegy “An die Nachgeborenen” (To Those Who Come After) describes a time when “to speak of trees is almost a crime.” Hanns Eisler’s three-part setting of the poem, which draws on traditions of lament but resists traditional poetic form in its irregular meter and plain language, seems at first hearing to be equally wary of the lyric impulse. The music’s grounding in, if not strict adherence to, twelve-tone principles reflects Eisler’s early training under Schönberg; it also expresses his own convictions about musical difficulty as a form of protest, in an age of fascist appropriation of canonical works. At the same time, formal residues such as recitative, refrain, pedal point, and chorale surface and dissolve in Eisler’s score. My paper investigates these ephemeral elements, drawing on the work of Rose Subotnik and Jean-Jacques Nattiez on the musical trace. The core of my project is a response, in musical terms, to Joyce Crick’s question in her 2000 essay on Brecht’s Svendborg poems, “what residual language is available, and to whom, in dark, indeed darkest times?”
The Krabat Motif in the Songs and Musicals of ‘Liedermacher’ Gerhard Gundermann
Music & Politics, 2024
This article looks at Gerhard Gundermann’s use of the Krabat motif from Jurij Brězan’s novel Krabat or the Transformation of the World in his Liedertheater productions with Brigade Feuerstein in the GDR and, post-unification, in his solo songs. From Hoyerswerda in South-East Germany, Gundermann was an open-cast miner and simultaneously a singer/songwriter and dramatist who died prematurely in 1998 at the age of 43. Emerging out of the GDR singing club movement in the late 1970s he relentlessly exposed the ruling SED Party’s monopoly on power in his work with Brigade Feuerstein. After German unification, as a solo performer, he became the mouthpiece of culturally disenfranchised East Germans. Twenty-five years after his death – in the wake of renewed interest in this performer as evidenced by Andreas Dresen’s film Gundermann (2018) and Grit Lemke’s documentary Gundermann Revier (2019) – it is time for a proper academic assessment of his work. This study breaks new ground, firstly in its analysis of the unpublished works of Brigade Feuerstein and secondly by exploring the extent to which Gundermann’s life work was underpinned by the philosophy of Krabat, in its exposing of humans’ exploitation of one another and their environment. In this one can see how Gundermann created an aesthetic approach that successfully spanned two political systems.
Political sound : National Socialism and its musical afterlive
2014
ion’ (1995: 19). Let’s call this the slippery-sticky-empty paradigm of music. My claim is that it has been the dominant conceptual paradigm steering how the relationship between music and ideology, if not the political tout court, has been addressed during the last quarter century (or so) of music scholarship. I say steering, but as we are about to see, the slippery-sticky-empty paradigm has also proved a kind of limit or impasse, a theoretical obstruction to the cultural historian’s effort to grasp the music-politics relation in its plenitude. (This has certainly been true of recent work on music in the Third Reich, as noted in the introduction to this thesis.) Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s influential theoretical work Music and Discourse (1990; first published in French in 1987) sheds light on this disabling aspect of the paradigm. The crux of the problem is circumscribed in a simple tripartite schema, introduced in the opening chapter, where ‘trace’ refers to the musical object, ‘poieti...
2010
Recent scholarship on Nazi music policy pays little attention to the main party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, or comparable publications for the general public. Most work concentrates on publications Nazis targeted at expert audiences, in this case music journals. But to think our histories of Nazi music politics are complete without comprehensive analysis of the party daily is premature. One learns from this resource precisely what Nazi propagandists wanted average party members and Germans in general, not just top-level officials and scholars, to think-even about music. Therein, we see how contributors placed a Nazi "spin" on music history and composer's biographies. Using heretofore untranslated materials, this article will fill part of this gap in our historiography of Nazi music policy. It will first detail Völkischer Beobachter attacks on prominent representatives of musical modernism in the Weimar era. Thereafter, this presentation will cover "acceptable" alternatives to Weimar decadence that the Völkischer Beobachter posited from the so-called Era of Struggle [Kampfzeit ] through the Third Reich. With the war, however, the theme most emphasized in Völkischer Beobachter cultural coverage was militarism. My paper will conclude with a survey of how revered figures such as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner were scrutinized for indications that they could serve as inspiration for the German Volk at war. "WEIMAR MUSIC" IN THE VÖLKISCHER BEOBACHTER With its outlook so strongly rooted in the romantic German music tradition, what the Völkischer Beobachter found most disgraceful in Weimar culture was cultivation of musical modernism, the whole of which it referred to as, at best, the "farcical imitation of a carnival barker selling a tent full of musical freaks,"[1] and, at worst, " Jewish terror in music."[2] The newspaper stood firm in its rejection of works by "Jews and assorted foreigners" or Germans who supposedly associated with "international, Jewish circles"[3]-applauding "brave acts of resistance" such as when a lone Nazi [Hakenkreuzler] stood up and shouted "pfui" at a concert of Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartok.[4] The "musical foreigner" whom the Völkischer Beobachter derided most was Igor Stravinsky. While an early attack identified him as a "spiritual Polack," [5] Fritz Stege described Stravinsky as a "Russian composer with half-Asiatic instincts hidden under the cover of French civilization" who simply knew how to
The Movement of a Musical Work: Ernst Krenek's Opus 20 in the Interwar Years
2024
The dissertation studies how one ‘modern’ piece of music from the early 20th century became conceptualised as an idealised musical work: the Third String Quartet, opus 20 (op. 20) by Austrian composer Ernst Krenek (1900–1991). The idealistic musical work concept holds that any piece of music has an eternal, non-spatiotemporal existence and that it is the product of an identifiable creator’s work. While this concept has been studied critically, there are too few historical studies on its everyday practices. Drawing on nominalist music philosophy of for instance Lydia Goehr as well as the sociological perspective Actor-Network Theory (ant), op. 20 is studied as an historical actor or actant participating in events and associations of actors and objects, forming a broader movement which constitutes its historical conceptualisation as a musical work. In this movement, aspects of ephemerality, fixity, concreteness, and abstraction are explored and discussed. Together with ant, micro-history is used to explore op. 20’s history and its many gaps. Beginning with Krenek’s composition process in 1922–1923 within the ‘New Music’ networks, then ending with the piece’s reappearance in American exile in 1940, the study identifies three main mechanisms for conceptualising op. 20 as a work. These were the agency of the piece itself in influencing its co-actants, the degrees and repertoires of fixity which helped stabilising it, and its affinity with certain associations and actants such as Paul Hindemith, Universal-Edition, and Ernst Krenek. Having experienced a highly acclaimed premiere in 1923, publication in 1924, recording in 1925, and international performances by various ensembles during the 1920s, op. 20 nearly disappeared from musical life between 1929 and 1937, although it remained as a fixed yet abstract work in musical literature. With New Music associations in Europe scattered following the rise of Nazi Germany, op. 20’s subsequent ‘exile’ reappearances as concrete-ephemeral performances in Switzerland and the u.s. testified to the interplay of agency, fixity, and affinity in the work’s interwar movement.
Barnboken , 2019
This paper focuses on German poetry for children published during the interwar period and written by left-wing authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Friedrich, and Edwin Hoernle. Their poems propagated socialist and communist ideals, in line with antifascist and anti-imperialist views that call for class struggle as well as fighting against fascist ideology. Moreover, many poems supported pacifistic ideas which turned against the glorification of war. In this regard, Bertolt Brecht played a significant role. His poems "Die drei Soldaten: Ein Kinderbuch" (The three soldiers: A children's book), with illustrations by George Grosz, and "Kinderkreuzzug 1939" (Children's crusade 1939) present prime examples of radical publishing and aesthetics in the interwar period, since they express a sharp critique of the destructive power of war and its effect on afterwar society.
Rhythm and its Absence in Modern Politics and Music (German Life & Letters, 2017)
This piece reflects on the significance of periodic time structures in the institutions of modern democracy, drawing inspiration from the theorisation of rhythm in music. Three features of rhythm are discussed using the concepts of temporal integration, coordination and rationalisation. Each helps us understand how the institutionalisation of periodicity has helped underpin the democratic principle of legitimate opposition. As contemporary political developments tend to disrupt such rhythms, so legitimate opposition becomes harder to maintain.
6 Why sing? Lieder and song cycles
The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, 2007
Survey of Schumann's Lieder, including critique of Solie on Frauenliebe, and analysis of 'Du bist wie eine Blume.'