Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss, and: German Modernism: Music and the Arts (review)

Three decades after musicology outgrew its obsession with the Renaissance and turned to the favorite repertory of the general listener—nineteenth-century Austro-German music—leading scholars continue to find fascination in the familiar. Kramer and Frisch, both agenda setters in their prime and both widely known outside the discipline, consider again in their latest work the (long) nineteenth century, specifically the complexities of the transition from romanticism to modernism. The authors also share a publisher, but the similarities do not extend much further; indeed, the methods and results are so different that one wonders occasionally whether it makes sense any longer to call musicology a "discipline."

Kramer's reputation outside the field is owed in no small measure to his polarizing effect within it. For some twenty years he has been asking, pointedly, whether there is a meaningful distinction between scholarship, criticism, and art, or at least artful listening. He and a few others (Susan McClary and Richard Leppert, for example) created a sensation in the early 1990s by riling up a learned community that until then was fundamentally and enthusiastically positivist, which is to say focused on source studies, editing, and a kind of musical analysis based on uncritical assumptions concerning music's autonomy. But the New Musicology has reached middle age; the scandal has passed, awareness of critical theory sets no one apart, and a process of assimilation is more or less complete.

All of which must be disconcerting to one who rode the wave, or started the wave, but to his credit Kramer confronts the situation head-on, for example by reporting that even in the world of (non-musical) theory the work of Derrida has, for some, "already dated, and dated badly" (23), and that in musicology "a short-lived era of high theory … has been superseded largely because of its insufficient attentiveness to history" (26). This kind of comment is aimed at the political center, the silent majority; Kramer abandons his base in an appeal to the many who sighed when his promising early historical scholarship gave way to a highly flavored rhetoric all too reminiscent of the poète manqué. "Pardon the interruption," he seems to ask.

This latest work offers many reasons to assent. Kramer captures, powerfully and clearly, the essential difference between Wagner and Strauss: the latter's "antitranscendental critique" was a step that Wagner could conceive but was not willing to take (10). In a brilliant combination of careful, if simple, musical analysis, historical contextualization (through study of correspondence), and criticism, Kramer argues that the music of the Lohengrin Prelude resists the composer's own attempts to impose an anti-Semitic reading (65). Regarding Salome, Kramer gives us a persuasive and nuanced argument that of all the various modernisms invoked in this crucial step beyond romanticism, the least interesting is its ostensible flirtation with atonality (189)—no error has caused more mischief in studies of this era than the conflation of modernism with the "emancipation of dissonance." Even Kramer's trademark risks seem unusually well-grounded here, as for example when he treats DVD versions of Salome as intensifications of the Jugendstil aesthetic: "the flat, intimate, tightly framed image of Salome on the television screen becomes the Jugendstil poster brought to virtual life" (173).

There is no substitute for compelling ideas—claims so powerful that absorbing them feels like "learning"—and this book has plenty of them. The broader arguments they serve are also compelling, though more often when they emerge on their own rather than when Kramer tries to state them directly. For example, the analysis of ironic attempts at resacralization in works by Debussy, Poulenc, Shostakovich, and Henze says something profound about the power of the Wagnerian model and the continuing appeal, not to say authority, of romanticism in the...