Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema by Christopher Morris (review)

Over the course of the last decade, in what can be identified as a second phase of inquiry following groundbreaking works such as Rainer Amstädter’s Der Alpinismus. Kultur—Organisation—Politik (1996), Christian Rapp’s Höhenrausch. Der deutsche Bergfilm (1997), Dagmar Günther’s Alpine Quergänge. Kulturgeschichte des bürgerlichen Alpinismus, and Helmut Zebhauser’s Alpinismus im Hitlerstaat. Gedanken, Erinnerungen, Dokumente (both 1998), more specialized studies such as Matthias Schirren’s Bruno Taut. Alpine Architektur. Eine Utopie (2004), Peter Mierau’s Nationalsozialistische Expeditionspolitik. Deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933–1945 (2006), Ursula Schreiber’s Politische Berge. Alpinismus und Alpenverein im Spannungsverhältnis mit der Politik (2008) and, most recently, Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann’s coedited volume Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012) have greatly enhanced our understanding of the various cultural and political representations of mountains in Germany over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Christopher Morris’s Modernism and the Cult of Mountains: Music, Opera, Cinema adds to this now quickly expanding body of knowledge by investigating the heretofore barely researched musical representation of mountains in the first half of the twentieth century. Morris, author of Reading Opera Between the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg (2002) and Professor of Music at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, bases his monograph on the observation that “judged by the sheer volume and range of cultural output associated with the mountains, or the philosophical seriousness of the rhetoric produced on its behalf, the German cult of mountains occupied a unique space” (3) and subsequently approaches the Alps as “one of the principle sites at which the struggle with modernity would be waged, metaphorically and literally” (2) with a special eye to the representation of this struggle in twentieth-century art music, especially opera, and its role—in a Foucauldian sense—“in forming and re-forming that [mountain] landscape” (4). Morris’s subjects of inquiry—an inquiry which draws heavily on post-Nietzschean theory, theories of gender and sexuality, and theories of modernism—range from the opera Tiefland (1903) by Eugen d’Albert (to a libretto in German by Rudolph Lothar) in Chapter One via Richard Strauss’s Alpensinfonie (1915; Ch. 2), Edmund Meisel’s score for Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg (1926), Paul Dessau’s music for Stürme über dem Montblanc (1930; Ch. 3), and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf (1927; Ch. 4) all the way to Herbert Windt’s compositions for Leni Riefenstahl’s film Tiefland (1954; Ch. 5).

Exploring d’Albert’s Tiefland against the background of the Heimat discourse at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century—a “discourse of resistance and critique” (19) to Germany’s belated experience with modernity—Morris identifies the Pyrenees as a site invested with “a fascination with the physical purity of the mountains and with a sublime inhospitability that holds the potential to sharpen and harden existence” (24). The opera itself represents a “dramatic enactment of the encounter between mountain Heimat and mountain sublime, both set against the corrupt and debased environment of the lowlands” (23).

In his reading of Strauss’s Alpensinfonie, Morris focuses on the Nietzschean dimension of the Munich composer’s last tone poem. As he observes, Strauss, since the mid-1890s, had mobilized themes developed by Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra and Jenseits von Gut und Böse—the “confrontation with and remaking of the self”—for the purpose of challenging “the metaphysics of music so embedded in German culture and epitomized in the genre of the symphony” (50). Strauss’s post-Nietzschean Alpensinfonie, a work of “Tonmalerei in naked form, a musical pictorialism not even pretending to clothe itself with ideas,” Morris suggests, ought to be read as the composer’s rejection of “the metaphysics of the transcendental sublime and the legacy of...