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Audiences, Critics and the Depurification of Music: Reflections on a 1920s Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Franklin
Peter Franklin*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Extract

The tendency to accept that music has a social context while resisting its definition as a social commodity is not particular to the conservative wing of British musicology (albeit influenced by Carl Dahlhaus). The aesthetics of European musical idealism have consistently, and since well before Hanslick, opposed any suggestion that ‘serious’ music should be seen or heard to engage with the market-place, let alone that it might, willy-nilly, be in one. The cherishers of musical purity, however, are to be found not only amongst reactionary critics, with their specific culturally inherited involvement with the Classical style. Pre-1914 modernists and decadents saw the market-place as the creation and province of a philistine bourgeoisie and expressed an often uncompromising, anti-popular idealism of their own. Debussy in 1901 stated:

The enthusiasm of society spoils an artist for me, such is my fear that, as a result, he will become merely an expression of society

- a fear that would have been comprehended by the Viennese Schoenberg, who later formulated the belief that

no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as ‘Art for all'… . If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art … .

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 114 , Issue 1 , 1989 , pp. 80 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Royal Musical Association

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References

1 This paper was conceived in part as a response to Dahlhaus's essay ‘Avant-Garde and Popularity’, where a distinction is drawn between intentionally ‘functional’ music and a Beethoven symphony, where ‘the functional element, even if it should happen to predominate in socio-psychological terms, remains extraneous to the object .. in aesthetic terms’ (Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), 29).Google Scholar

2 When the first version of this paper was read at the RMA conference ‘Music in the Market-Place’ in Oxford, April 1988, the proximity of the name of Hanslick and the subsequent reference to ‘reactionary critics’ led Dr Bojan Bujić rightly to assume that Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (first published 1854) was being referred to, and to point out that Hanslick does not present a simplistically conservative argument there. I accept this point but remain specifically interested in the tone of Hanslick's hostile reference to Wagner's ‘intoxicating effect of opium’ in the 1885 preface (see Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans Gustav Cohen (Indianapolis, 1957), 6); in his suggestion that, by comparison with those of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, some of Verdi's and Donizetti's themes seem ‘fit only for low music-halls’ (Ibid., 125; German: ‘in der Kneipe sind’); and in Hanslick's careful distinction in Chapter III between the art historian's interest in a determining historical context and the nevertheless autonomous concerns of the ‘aesthetic inquirer’ (Ibid., 62–3).Google Scholar

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6 References by English writers to this controversy have tended to give the impression that it was primarily one between Pfitzner and Alban Berg. Hans Keller does so in Criticism (London, 1987), 28 Mosco Carner (The Musical Times, 118 (May 1977), 379–80) does deal with Bekker, although even his article was entitled 'Pfitzner v. BergGoogle Scholar

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35 See Keller, , Criticism, 28–9.Google Scholar

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