The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist (review)

Scholars of German music and music criticism in the first decades of the twentieth century would presumably welcome a study that aspires to provide new insights into the complex relationship between music and society in this period. The field is very rewarding, and needs further investigation—especially perhaps by musicologists with philosophical and sociological leanings.

Claire Taylor-Jay's book is the first book-length study of 'artist-opera' (Künstleroper), a genre characterized by its portrayal of conflicts between the opera's artist-protagonist and his/her society. The author sums up her study as follows: 'This book investigates re-assessments of the artist ideal which took place in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century' (p. 1), 're-assessments' that she considers to have grown out of nineteenth-century ideas about how artists positioned themselves in relation to society. The book is divided into five main chapters: an Introduction, three case studies—each considered in relation to its own political context—and a brief Conclusion. In 'Pfitzner, Palestrina, and the Nonpolitical Composer', Taylor-Jay compares the political and aesthetic views of Pfitzner and Thomas Mann, and proposes a reading of Palestrina in the light of Mann's distinction between the 'political' and the 'non-political'. 'Krenek spielt auf: Jonny, Jazz and the Modern Composer' provides a contextual outline with special attention given to Americanism, mass culture, and jazz. The influence of Paul Bekker on Krenek provides the basis for a reading of Jonny spielt auf. In 'Painting and Politics in Hindemith's Mathis der Maler', Hindemith is seen as a composer who embraces ideologies from both left- and right-wing politics and who therefore belongs to a 'grey area' between the two extremes. Mathis der Maler is discussed with a focus on expressions of Mathis's place in society, as well as the role of his art. In an attempt to determine the extent to which the opera is autobiographical and expressive of Hindemith's own political views, Taylor-Jay considers Hindemith's position within the Third Reich.

In the introduction, Taylor-Jay first gives a brief and general, mainly historical, summary of nineteenth-century aesthetics of music (with a focus on Wagner and Liszt) and of the way in which nineteenth-century Romantic ideals of the artist influenced twentieth-century aesthetic thought (exemplified by Schoenberg and Adorno). There is, curiously, no mention of expressionism, although it would have supported the story she wants to tell (e.g. on pp. 20–1). By employing the works of Pfitzner, Krenek, and Hindemith, Taylor-Jay wishes to 'trace an alternative story to modernism' (p. 23). This takes her to the first theoretical part of the book, a subsection entitled 'Artist-operas as Self-(re)presentation' (pp. 23–6). Here psychoanalysis is presented as a means by which operas of this genre can be 'understood', that is by supporting the idea that 'the central artist-character acts as a projection by the composer and embodies an attempt at self-definition' (p. 24). A few quotations from Stephen Frosh's Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self (London, 1991) follow, in an attempt to substantiate this idea. It is, however, a very vague attempt: to provide a series of quotations of Frosh's statements on the psychoanalytical theory of Daniel Miller, devoid of any critical commentary or discussion, hardly even begins to unravel such a complex concept as 'identity'. Therefore, when Taylor-Jay concludes that 'An artist-opera is thus an exploration and a statement of self-identity, directed both internally, to the composer himself, and externally, to the world around him' (p. 25), this 'conclusion' is an unsupported statement: it remains an idea, not an argument. This is a shame, since a well-argued thesis from a psychoanalytical angle could potentially have proved very rich indeed.

A similar problem occurs with the...