Trial scenes at Nuremberg

Music Analysis

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 239-267

  Rehding, Alexander ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949410356     PISSN: 02625245     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2249.00137     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Stephen McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner's Operas: Alfred Lorenz and German Nationalist Ideology (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1998). xiii + 262 pp. $95/£60.00. ISBN 1-580-6023-2. While this book will be an asset to every library, it is a pity that the publisher chose to make it prohibitively expensive, and thus a highly unattractive prospect for individual buyers. Given the expense of the book, it seems difficult to justify the poor standard of copy-editing: the book still contains a considerable number of errors. Most irritating among them is the consistently incorrect use of the single most central term in Lorenz's analyses: instead of the German term 'Periode' - which translates into the English singular 'period' - the non-existent word 'Period' is used throughout. Likewise, the German plural is 'Perioden', not 'Periode'
2. Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner, 2nd edn. (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1966), Vol. 3: [v]
3. Quoted in Stephen McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner's Operas, p. 87 (translation modified)
4. John Deathridge, 'A Brief History of Wagner Research', in Ulrich Muller and Peter Wapnewski (eds)., Wagner Handbook, trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 214
5. McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner's Operas, p. 200
6. This famous passage is translated in its entirety in Thomas Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 375-7
7. Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel/C. F. W. Siegel, 1911-16), Vol. 4, pp. 154-5. Translation from Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose, p. 376
8. Carl Dahlhaus, 'Wagners Begriff der dichterisch-musikalischen Periode', in Beiträge zur Musikanschauung des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1965), pp. 179-87
9. See Dahlhaus, 'Wagners Begriff, pp. 187-94. He intensified his stance in 'Formprinzipien in Wagners "Ring des Nibelungen" ', in Heinz Becker (ed.) Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1969), pp. 95-129
10. Subsequently, only one German scholar, Peter Petersen, took issue with Dahlhaus's exegesis; see 'Die dichterisch-musikalische Periode: ein verkannter Begriff Richard Wagners', Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 2 (1970), pp. 105-23
11. and the exchange between Petersen and Dahlhaus in Melos/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 4/iii (1978), pp. 224-5
12. Rudolph Stephan, 'Gibt es ein Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner?', in Carl Dahlhaus (ed.), Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1970), pp. 9-17
13. Lorenz seems to comment on this suggestion in the first volume of Das Geheimnis der Form Richard Wagners: 'It would be very convenient simply to shift the question towards the development section of sonata form, as a kind of negation of form, as that part which is characterized precisely by creating a link between the "formal" parts, and which achieves its effect through its own formlessness. "Whatever one cannot determine [deklinieren], one considers a development."' Dahlhaus picks up the cue from Stephan (though without acknowledging him) in 'Formprinzipien in Wagners "Ring" ', pp. 126-7, where he continues to explore the technique of 'development'
14. Reinhold Brinkmann, '"Drei der Fragen stell' ich mir frei": Zur Wanderer-Szene im 1. Akt von Wagners "Siegfried"', Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 3 (1972), p. 120
15. Egon Voss, 'Noch einmal: Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner', in Dietrich Mack (ed.), Theaterarbeit an Wagners Ring (Munich: Piper, 1978), p. 252
16. Note, for instance, Ernst Kurth's influential Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1920), which opens in a strikingly similar spirit: 'Harmonien sind Reflexe aus dem Unbewußten'
17. It is interesting to note, in passing, that Voss insists that the utterly unmusical outcome of Lorenz's analyses can only have emerged from the drawing board in the absence of hands-on experience of the music, while Lorenz himself emphasised how his analyses are the direct product of his extensive conducting activities of Wagner's works. See Lorenz, Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 1, p. 10
18. Voss, 'Noch einmal', pp. 259 and 263 respectively
19. Both German and American modes of reception are reviewed by McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner's Operas, pp. 173-95
20. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
21. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990)
22. and Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (eds.), The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)
23. I have particularly profited from two, in many ways mutually opposed contributions: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)
24. and Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). The de Man affair is summarised in two volumes: David Lehmann, Sign of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991)
25. and Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz and Thomas Keenan (eds.), Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
26. Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, p. vii
27. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and 'The Jews', trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 53
28. See also Brinkmann ' "Drei der Fragen stell' ich mir frei"', p. 120, and Stephan, 'Gibt es ein Geheimnis der Form Richard Wagners?', p. 14
29. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 50
30. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts equivalent accusations - Adorno's criticism of Heidegger in Jargon of Authenticity - to the test in his Heidegger, Art and Politics, pp. 105-17
31. For a brief historical account of the differences between 'form' and 'structure' see John Carlos Rowe, 'Structure', in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, (eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 25-6
32. See, for instance, Carl Dahlhaus, ' "Arbeiten des Geistes mit geistfähigem Material" ', in Klassische und Romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1991), pp. 291-364
33. and Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
34. On the specific connections between idealism and Hanslickian formalism, see Mark Evans Bonds, 'Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50/ii-iii (1997), pp. 387-420
35. See particularly McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner's Operas, p. 40
36. See his Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) and Ernst Kurth: Selected Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
37. See also Brian Hyer, 'Musical Hysteria', 19th-century Music, 13 (1990), pp. 84-94
38. On Halm, see Lee Rothfarb, 'Beethoven's Formal Dynamics: August Halm's Phenomenological Perspective', in James Webster and Lewis Lockwood (eds.), Beethoven Forum IV, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 65-84
39. 'Music Analysis, Cultural Morality and Sociology in the Writings of August Halm', Indiana Theory Review, 16/iii (1995), pp. 171-96
40. and 'The "New Education" and Music Theory, 1900-1925', in Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (eds.), Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 449-72
41. Lorenz, Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 2, pp. 19-20. Translation from Robert Bailey, Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan und Isolde (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 211
42. See Brian Hyer, 'The Concept of Function in Riemann', unpublished paper (AMS/SMT/SET meeting Oakland, 1990). The most striking example of Lorenz's use of Riemann is in the diagram of the entire tonal structure of Tristan in Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 2, p. 178. This has been discussed in detail in Brian Hyer, 'Tonal Intuitions in Tristan und Isolde', PhD diss., Yale University, 1989
43. Lorenz, Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 2, p. 20, n.l
44. This confuses, for instance, Robert Bailey. See his Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan und Isolde, p. 205
45. Riemann uses the same strategy, for instance, in his analysis of the 'Waldstein' Sonata. See Sämtliche Klaviersonaten L. v. Beethovens: ästhetische und formal - technische Analyse mit historischen Notizen (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1919-20), Vol. 2, p. 13ff
46. Lorenz, Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 2, p. 13, n. 3
47. Lorenz, 'Worauf beruht die bekannte Wirkung der Durchführung im 1. Eroicasatze?', Neues Beethoven-Jahrbuch, 1 (1924), p. 166
48. Müller and Wapnewski, Wagner Handbook, p. 304
49. See Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 99
50. See also George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), esp. pp. 21-46
51. Lorenz, Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 3, p. 74. He makes the same point in abridged form earlier, in Vol. 1, p. 146
52. Since this iridescent term is charged like few others, it is worth pointing out that the significance of Volk changed continually throughout the nineteenth century. Wagner's own understanding of the Volk may not have been the same as Lorenz's; to a significant extent, however, its later significance was promoted and mediated by Cosima Wagner. See George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Universal Library, 1964), particularly p. 92
53. Lorenz, Geheimnis der Form, Vol. 3, p. 67, n. 1
54. This should not be confused with the kinds of reactivation and reinvention of myths which Wagner tended to use as subject-matters in his later music dramas, and from which Die Meistersinger forms something of an exception. I am here following particularly the analysis of myth as explored by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in 'The Nazi Myth', Critical Inquiry, 16 (1990), pp. 291-312
55. and Nancy, 'Myth Interrupted', in Peter Connor (ed.) The Inoperative Community, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 43-70
56. Nancy, 'Myth Interrupted', p. 49
57. On this issue see particularly, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 'Reworking History: Wagner's German Myth of Nuremberg', in Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (eds.), Re-Reading Wagner, (Madison: University of Madison Press, 1993), pp. 39-60
58. For a reprint of Richard Strauss's speech, see Albrecht Dumling and Peter Girth (eds.), Entartete Musik: Dokumentation und Kommentar zur Dusseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938, 3rd edn. (Düsseldorf: Der kleine Verlag, 1993), p. 59
59. See also Gerhard Splitt, Richard Strauss 1933-1935: Ästhetik und Musikpolitik zu Beginn der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1987)
60. See Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 141
61. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 5