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  • August Bungert: Ein Komponist im deutschen Kaiserreich
  • John Warrack
August Bungert: Ein Komponist im deutschen Kaiserreich. By Christoph Hust. pp. xii + 608. Mainzer Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, 43. (Schneider, Tutzing, 2005, €95. ISBN 3-7952-1131-X.)

In 1903 the second edition of Max Chop's study of Bungert (August Bungert: Ein deutscher Dichterkomponist) hailed him as 'fraglos der meistgenannte Tondichter der Gegenwart', which even as a statement of bald fact seems far from fraglos. The first opera of his Homeric cycle of operas to be performed, Odysseus' Heimkehr in Dresden in 1896, did indeed arouse a good deal of interest, and led to a Hamburg production and no fewer than sixteen performances in Berlin in 1898. But for all Chop's efforts—which included the foundation of a Bungert Bund and a journal, Der Bund, dedicated to his work—interest in the remaining three operas of the Odyssey cycle was barely sustained outside Dresden. Even more ambitious plans for an Iliad cycle were never realized. Nor were hopes of a special festival theatre to house these Homerische Welt operas in Godesberg, despite the generous sponsorship of Bungert's principal supporter, Queen Elisabeth of Romania, also the poet of many of his songs as 'Carmen Sylva'. Bungert's reputation was already waning when he died in 1915, aged 70, and his operas have sunk with so little trace as to match, perhaps, the position of Britain's once-leading contender as post-Wagnerian opera composer, Josef Holbrooke.

Christoph Hust's comprehensive new study does not attempt to follow Chop with claims for Bungert as a now forgotten genius, but sets out to discuss him as a composer representative of the musical life of his age—at any rate, its conservative elements in turbulent times. It makes sense, then, to treat life and work chronologically together, from the forty-five songs that make up his first eight opus numbers in the 1870s by way of chamber and orchestral music, a comic opera with a Spanish setting (Aurora, 1884), the Homeric project, music for a festival play on two major figures of the Reformation, Hutten und Sickingen (1889), and for Goethe's Faust, a further flood of songs, a three-part 'Mysterium', Warum? Woher? Wohin?, after the Book of Job (1909), and much else up to the music of his last years, which included a pair of symphonic works, Sinfonia victrix on the artist's life and Genius triumphans on the disastrous crash of Count Zeppelin's first airship.

Behind the first movement of the Sinfonia victrix of 1912 lies a poem that Nietzsche had dedicated to Bungert in 1883. As part of the anti-Wagnerian stance Nietzsche had by now adopted and that led him to espouse the values of Carmen and promote the music of the hapless Peter Gast, he seized upon Bungert and the 1884 Aurora as a stick of apparently suitable size and weight with which to beat Wagner. When he met Nietzsche, Bungert had already begun work on his Homeric enterprise, and discussion of this forms the most important part of Hust's book. Though Bungert's interests were centred on a German national spirit, he saw this, in Hegelian fashion, as rooted in Homer, and surviving down the centuries by way of the Reformation and Goethe into a time when the Homeric spirit could be reinterpreted with reference to contemporary German philosophy. Some special pleading was clearly involved here. How much Nietzsche managed to influence Bungert with ideas of Odysseus as Übermensch is doubtful, and Hust does not press the case. By then, Bungert had absorbed too much of Schopenhauer, chiefly, it seems, through Wagner and the latter part of the Ring. If his intentions were to an extent Wagnerian, in that he intended a German national tragic drama in music, he evidently hoped that by basing himself on Homer he could claim a source more universal than the Nibelungenlied. His aim was still to dramatize Schopenhauerian renunciation as the fundamental thought of his work, though in fact he differs in terminology and interpretation from Schopenhauer, let alone from the effect Schopenhauer had on Wagner. His Odysseus must overcome the demands of Gaia (an abstract...

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