Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 [Hardcover]

Karen Painter (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674026616 | ISBN-13: 978-0674026612 | Publication Date: January 15, 2008

Can music be political? Germans have long claimed the symphony as a pillar of their modern national culture. By 1900, the critical discourse on music, particularly symphonies, rose to such prominence as to command front-page news. With the embrace of the Great War, the humiliation of defeat, and the ensuing economic turmoil, music evolved from the most abstract to the most political of the arts. Even Goebbels saw the symphony as a tool of propaganda. More than composers or musicians, critics were responsible for this politicization of music, aspiring to change how music was heard and understood. Once hailed as a source of individual heroism, the symphony came to serve a communal vision.

Karen Painter examines the politicization of musical listening in Germany and Austria, showing how nationalism, anti-Semitism, liberalism, and socialism profoundly affected the experience of serious music. Her analysis draws on a vast collection of writings on the symphony, particularly those of Mahler and Bruckner, to offer compelling evidence that music can and did serve ideological ends. She traces changes in critical discourse that reflected but also contributed to the historical conditions of the fin de siècle, World War I, and the Nazi regime.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Familiar questions are addressed to freshly illuminating effect in Karen Painter's Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945, one of the first books in English to take a wider historical view of the phenomenon of the politicization of classical music in Nazi Germany.
--Terry Teachout (Commentary )

About the Author

Karen Painter is Associate Professor at the School of Music, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (January 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674026616
• ISBN-13: 978-0674026612
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,839,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Karen Painter is Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she also teaches in the History Department, Jewish Studies, and the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch. She was previously a professor in the music departments at Harvard University (1997-2007) and Dartmouth College (1995-1997). In 2005-2006, Painter was on leave from Harvard to serve as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, overseeing a major study of classical music on public radio.

Painter has written on the relationship between music, listening, and ideology in the context of nineteenth-century Austrian and German social history, fin-de-si'cle cultural debates, World War I, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism. Her research interests include Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hindemith and Orff. Painter has also remained committed to providing a public stage for musicology. She co-directed symposia with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2003 and 2005 and within the Ojai Music Festival in 2001-2003, from which resulted her Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (Getty Research Institute, 2006), co-edited with the art historian Thomas Crow. Her Mahler and His World (Princeton University Press, 2002) appeared in a series associated with the Bard Music Festival. Painter has moderated panels with Pierre Boulez, Kurt Masur, Elliott Carter, and Christopher Hogwood, and organized the American participation in several German and Austrian conferences. In Salzburg, Painter collaborated with Thomas Hampson and the Mozarteum to organize a symposium on the European musical encounter with American poetry.