3 - Positioning Georg Knepler in the Musicological Discourse of the GDR

Summary

You know how tricky it is these days to portray the life of an old Communist without producing either apologetics or a whitewash.

—Georg Knepler

THIS ESSAY SEEKS TO SITUATE Knepler within the musicological discourse of the GDR primarily by assessing his relationship with the regime and the position he took in relevant controversies but also, though to a lesser degree, by reading what his vita as a scholar and author tells us about his attempts to place himself within this context. In terms of the former, I pay special attention to the year 1964, which seems to have been of particular importance for Knepler's reorientation. In terms of the latter, I suggest that Knepler's decision to abort his multivolume history of nineteenth-century music and focus instead on History as a Means of Understanding Music (Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis, 1977; 2nd rev. ed. 1982), while in many ways a perfectly logical extension of concerns that had preoccupied him for many years if not decades, also signified a radical repositioning in terms of his modus operandi.

Knepler as Zhdanovite

In the abstract of her article on “Dahlhaus, Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History” (2003), as far as I can see the only sustained discussion of Georg Knepler (1906–2003, born in Vienna) in Anglophone literature, Anne Shreffler stated that Georg Knepler's work is “comparable to Dahlhaus's in importance” and that “his ideas anticipate many tenets of the ‘new musicology.’” On a similar note, in his short article on Knepler (also 2003) in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Peter Gülke refers to Knepler as “the most important representative of a self-avowed Marxist musicology,” adding that “his personal impact and that of his works as well as the resistance he encountered tell us as much about the recent history of the discipline as they do about him.” No other musicologist had pursued interdisciplinary communication and cooperation as extensively as Knepler and he was in fact “an—albeit unknown—founding father of the New Musicology.”

Yet clearly such attempts to boost Knepler's status have hardly borne fruit and there can be little doubt that Knepler is cited more often than he is seriously engaged, and he is not all that often cited, at that.