Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe by Stephen Downes (review)

Stephen Downes’s monograph on musical manifestations of decadence as a cultural phenomenon of the European late nineteenth century is, without doubt, a major achievement. Following upon the author’s previous book-length exploration of eroticism in Romantic and modernist musical contexts, Music and Decadence in European Modernism again tackles a large-scale concept and attempts to add dimension to current understandings of musical modernism through a study that intertwines cultural critique with close readings of individual works. Impressive in its coverage and scope and rich with insight into the repertory under consideration, this is a significant study of an aesthetic that remains difficult to define and has been more often named (and not infrequently dismissed) than treated to serious critical and analytical scrutiny, in musical contexts especially. Studies of decadence as a broader cultural phenomenon exist in other disciplines, but not yet in musicology, and this is a contribution that will surely be much cited, especially considering its depth of scholarship, and the impressive scope of resources it encounters across the disciplines—texts that Downes reads and interprets with considerable subtlety. He works with enviable competence and flexibility within an interdisciplinary field, extending, deepening, and adding substance to our understanding of what is essentially a literary term broadly applied here to musical contexts. This move is grounded in part by the viable assertion that the musical is itself a frequent and important trope for decadent writers (p. 5).

Downes’s central intention for this study is to recognize in writers such as Nietzsche, and then to revive, a ‘positive’ sense of decadence, in terms of the creative energies it inspires, without relinquishing its necessary and essentially inherent negativity. The driving concept is that of the decadent as not merely the dissipated and disreputable, but also the productive. In carrying out his interpretative agenda Downes accomplishes the admirable feat of dealing with the usual, canonic suspects while also achieving a greater breadth of coverage of composers outside the expected centre—yet always and almost exclusively regarded from a German frame of reference. The reference throughout is to a central decadent concept that draws upon Wagner in musical terms and, from the literary perspective, relies principally on Nietzsche and on Mann (and, unsurprisingly, on their readings of Wagner again), but not so much on other contemporary and more local sources of thought on what might define decadence.

This is not, however, to deny how very widespread and pervasive was the influence of these figures, nor to take away from the value of a study that manages both to expand the expected scope of compositional figures by including several typically marginalized ones, and to view some better-known figures through original lenses. Thus, while Wagner and Strauss garner the expected attention, Karłowicz, Szymanoswki, and Lyadov are all included here, alongside Mahler—perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, considering that his ideologies so frequently tended towards the earlier Romantic rather than the modernist, and the redemptive rather than the pessimistic. Other creative inclusions are the unusual but convincing pairing of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, and the rather original emphasis on the ‘inorganic’ in Bartók. Alongside his canonical Viennese companions Schoenberg and Berg, Franz Schreker, still marginal from today’s perspective if certainly not in his own context, makes his way into these pages; but although he might have formed a fascinating counterpart here, Pfitzner does not, perhaps unfortunately, considering the potential for viewing both his musical and prose rhetoric as a counterpoint to the productive dialectic of decadence for which Downes argues.

Judiciously selected works across this refracted compositional spectrum are ranged within chapters that are titled as a series of thematic pairings, some complementary couplings and some oppositional binaries. ‘Pessimism and nihilism’ is followed by ‘Degeneration and regeneration’, and ‘Deformation and dissolution’ by ‘Mannerism and avant-garde’, with ‘Convalescence and primitivism’ closing the volume. The extent of this...