Walter Frisch. German Modernism: Music and the Arts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. x + 322 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-24301-9.

Reviewed by Pamela Potter (School of Music, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Published on H-German (March, 2006)

The Sonderweg of German Musical Modernism

Walter Frisch is one of the foremost experts on the music of Brahms and Schoenberg and possesses an unmatched fluency in explaining complex musical processes with clarity and eloquence. Frisch is to be applauded for bringing his sensitive musical insights and dexterous integration of non-musical, especially literary, trends into this confrontation with perhaps one of the thorniest issues of cultural history: how to set the aesthetic and istorical parameters of modernism. This undertaking is indeed courageous, even daunting, for the parameters of modernism particularly in the musical realm have been extremely elusive. Although Frisch admonishes his readers that he is not attempting to write a Begriffsgeschichte (p. 3), one cannot help wondering throughout how Frisch's cast of characters, their works and their thoughts on contemporary conditions broaden or confine the more commonly held notions of modernism, muddy as they may be.

In his introduction, Frisch points, first, to the tyranny of the Jahrhundertwende and how it has led to an oversight of important artistic developments in the 1880s and 1890s and of crucial works by composers who were important in their day. Just as modernism in literature and art is generally identified with the rejections of logic, syntax, realism and perspective, the conventional yardstick for musical modernism measures works by the advancement of their harmonic language and their rejection of the past. Such views have generated the consensus that Schoenberg's abandonment of conventional harmony after 1900 marks the dawn of musical modernism. Frisch, however, understands modernism instead as a movement that begins with Nietzsche and Wagner in a nascent "ambivalent" state, finds its true beginnings in Germany with the naturalist movement in the 1880s and 1890s (other scholars exclude naturalism from the modernist vocabulary), brings composers into close collaborations with artists and writers and involves an engagement with the past rather than its wholesale rejection.

In chapter 1 ("Ambivalent Modernism: Perspectives from the 1870s and 1880s"), Frisch adapts Marion Deshmukh's notion of "ambivalent modernism" as a positive acceptance of rapid social, economic, and technological advances tinged with nostalgia for the pre-industrial world. Frisch sees this ambivalence as a marker of the "Sonderweg or special path" of German modernism (p. 8) and uses it to untangle the often self-contradictory views of Wagner and Nietzsche. Wagner's "conservative thought did not match with the modern style of his music" (p. 14), making him the paragon of ambivalent modernism. Nietzsche's ambivalent modernism is even more vexing, as he embraces and then rejects Wagner's aesthetics, yet keeps returning to Wagner as a point of reference in his attempts to rationalize art with science. Frisch concludes this chapter with a close musical analysis of passages from Wagner's Parsifal, showing how Wagner uses progressive musical language to give meaning to an anti-modern cultural message.

The second chapter ("German Naturalism") is, in my mind, the strongest and most compelling, in no small part because it draws attention to the modernist features of long neglected composers and their works. Arguing naturalism to be "the first self-conscious, programmatic movement of German modernism" (p. 36), Frisch traces its proliferation in German periodicals and its manifestations in painting and literature, citing as most important the poetry of Arno Holz and the dramas of Gerhard Hauptmann. Although music was often mentioned in naturalist manifestos, musical creations--and particularly operas--struggled to emerge from Wagner's shadow until Italian verismo works took the German stages by storm (for example with Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci). Frisch reads hints of nationalist xenophobia in critics' inability to understand the huge success of this Italian invasion, but the texts he cites actually help to resolve a perplexing problem: there is really nothing musically modern or progressive about Italian verismo operas, yet Frisch's eyewitnesses suggest that the operas' "newness" may have been exaggerated, simply because they were welcomed as an escape from the Wagner legacy. We then learn how the songs of Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf and the operas of Max von Schillings, Schoenberg, Eugen D'Albert and Franz Schreker embraced naturalist aesthetics not only by modeling works on Italian verismo prototypes but also by experimenting with declamatory vocal composition, playing out scenes in real time, and delving into the psyche of individual characters.

Frisch takes his interdisciplinary comparison in another direction in chapter 3 ("Convergence: Music and the Visual Arts"), drawing on Theodor Adorno's 1965 essay "Convergences" as a basis for assessing how music and painting come together in the symbolist movement and later in abstraction. Frisch, however, turns a more conventional approach on its head by seeing how music serves as an inspiration for the visual arts rather than vice versa. He first analyzes Max Klinger's drawings, which were inspired by Brahms's lieder (one would normally never think of Brahms in connection with modernism, even though Frisch has already cited instances where even Nietzsche made such inferences). Then, he moves to the more canonical example of modernist convergence with Wassily Kandinsky's painting Impression III (Concert), inspired by a performance of Schoenberg's works.

Although Frisch is not explicit in this regard, the remaining three chapters of the book seem to revive the theme of ambivalent modernism--as artists looked to past masters for inspiration, turned to irony and parody and grappled with various self-imposed constraints (what Frisch calls in the title of the final chapter "dancing in chains"). Aside from the frequent references to the influence of Thomas Mann, who becomes a constant presence particularly in the last two chapters, these discussions turn more to purely musical issues than those in the first half of the book. Chapter 4 ("Bach, Regeneration, and Historicist Modernism") explores how music critics and scholars around the turn of the century looked to J.S. Bach to find remedies for present-day cultural "decadence," and how composers such as Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni and Gustav Mahler appropriated Bach not in nostalgic terms but rather within a modernist framework. The next chapter ("Ironic Germans") uncovers a slightly different, ironic attitude toward the past, looking first to Mann's exploitation of music (especially Wagner) in employing irony in Buddenbrooks, Tristan, and Wälsungsblut, and then pursuing brilliant close analyses of Mahler's use of irony. Frisch concludes that with Mahler, "as for Mann, irony provided both an escape hatch from German Romanticism and a lens through which to view it in sharp focus" (p. 203). The final chapter ("'Dancing in Chains': Strauss, Hofmannsthal, Pfitzner, and their Musical Pasts") highlights the musical and textual allusions to Wagner, Mozart and Molière in the collaborations between Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos). It then focuses on Hans Pfitzner, looking to the cultural conservatism expressed in his polemical writings, the "regressive modernism" in his opera Palestrina (based on the legendary tribulations of the Italian Renaissance composer) and the views expressed in his correspondence with Thomas Mann on the meaning of Palestrina (and on Mann's political turn after 1918 to support the Weimar Republic). As a final observation, Frisch notes that such connections with the past, so deeply felt by the early modernist composers he examines, were irretrievably lost with the outbreak of World War I, implying that musicians managed to isolate themselves from the political realities longer than other contemporaries such as Mann: "[Mann] observed [that] a musician might not feel the same 'sense of responsibility' as a writer" (p. 254).

The greatest value of this work is, of course, that it finally brings music into the discourse of modernism in a comprehensive, learned and sensitive manner. While some readers may initially feel intimidated by the detailed and often technical discussions of the music, one has much to gain by working through them in order to benefit from Frisch's eloquence in describing musical events and bringing out their essence and his ability to perceive and weave together common threads among the arts. And even though Frisch has explicitly avoided a Begriffsgeschichte, it is important to point out how this work redefines modernism. If up to now we have thought of modernism as the dominant aesthetic force of the twentieth century, as Leon Botstein has proposed in setting the parameters for musical modernism,[1] then Frisch has in effect begun to argue for a "long" twentieth century by including Wagner and Nietzsche in his discussion. He pushes the envelope in two directions, in fact, not only by reaching back beyond 1900 to locate the first manifestations of modernism but also by paying more attention to German music and arts than other scholars of modernism have done. In comparison with other recent studies (largely the work of literature scholars), the few that have brought music into their discussions pay little attention to Austro-German composers prior to World War I and set even the beginning of "early" modernism no farther back than 1900.[2]

Although it is less obvious, we also benefit from this work through the important questions it raises about the existence of a German cultural Sonderweg, characterized by ambivalence toward modernism, nostalgia, naïveté and isolationism. While Frisch does not pursue this theme overtly, I detect the constant presence of the Sonderweg notion of German modernism throughout the work. The overall structure of the book suggests that--rather than moving beyond the ambivalent modernism of Wagner and Nietzsche--German artists, writers, and above all composers spent most of the prewar years caught in a sort of cultural Vergangenheitsbewältigung, engaging, reinventing and slowly and reluctantly moving away from the past. Frisch could, of course, be taken to task for exaggerating the importance of such confrontations, and one may initially regard such coinages as "historicist modernism" and "regressive modernism" as oxymoronic. Furthermore, I believe that this focus has led him to overlook some very aggressive modernist tendencies in, for example, the Strauss-Hofmannsthal works he analyzes. Some of the vocal writing in Rosenkavalier presents wonderful examples of the real-time, declamatory naturalism Frisch describes in chapter 2, and the disjuncted structure of Ariadne has been characterized by the scholars Frisch quotes as "recogniz[ing] the disunities of modern life" and conveying them in a non-unified musical style (quoting Bryan Gilliam, p. 227). And while Frisch begins to place Hofmannsthal's Ariadne text in the context of other contemporary stage adaptations of the Greek myth, a broader comparison with trends in German theater would likely reveal how the work embraces other modernist tendencies by virtue of its structure, its manipulation of the audience and its experiments in breaking down the barriers between high and low culture (enlisting, for example, the piano in its orchestration as a gesture to the popularity of cabaret).

Looking at Frisch's work as a whole, however, one could argue that, despite the ideological baggage acquired in historical debates, the term Sonderweg may be the most fitting way to describe German modernism, especially with regard to music. Frisch does occasionally fall victim to the more flawed manifestations of the "Luther-Bismarck-Hitler" constellation of the Sonderweg theory. His citations of Paul Lawrence Rose's interpretation of Parsifal as a call for the Aryanization of Christianity do little to fortify his argument for ambivalent modernism, and connections to the Heimat movement in the analysis of D'Albert's Tiefland (a verismo-inspired opera set in a Catalonian village) seem forced, especially when Frisch observes: "One could without much difficulty alter the characters' names and situations to make Pedro a rural Aryan youth and Sebastiano an urban Jew" (pp. 68-69). Yet one is nevertheless tempted by the possibility of taking Frisch's material and arguments one step further to propose that, indeed, German modernism is characterized by a Sonderweg, a refusal to abandon the past and an ambivalence toward moving ahead, fed by underlying suspicions toward rapid industrialization, urbanization and increasing social tension that were exaggerated in the German Empire and that underlie the more traditional Sonderweg theories.

With this book Walter Frisch has given us a masterful exploration of music, literature, and visual arts in a time and place that most modernism scholars forgot. It draws attention to the works of composers who were pivotal and influential in their time but fell victim to a canon that privileged inventiveness in harmony, rhythm and phrasing as the only standards for assessing musical modernism. The summary provided here does not do justice to the richness of detail, the subtlety of argumentation and the incisiveness of analyses contained in the work. Provocative in the questions it raises, Frisch's study will become indispensable for further investigations into the nature of modernism, providing models for investigating not only what modernism was but also what it was not, and conceptualizing it not simply as an aesthetic movement but more as a process that involved constant negotiations with both the present and the past.

Notes

[1]. Leon Botstein, "Modernism," Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed March 2, 2006), http://www.grovemusic.com .

[2]. See, for example, Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) and Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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Citation: Pamela Potter. Review of Frisch, Walter, German Modernism: Music and the Arts. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11595

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