Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music by Elaine Kelly (review)

Since the state archives of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) opened after German reunification, artistic life in East Germany has become a thriving field of interdisciplinary investigation that encompasses the study of cultural bureaucracy as well as investigations into East German literature, theater, film, and the plastic arts. Contributing to a growing body of scholarship on East German music on both sides of the Atlantic, Elaine Kelly's Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic is the first full-length monograph in English dedicated to East German art music. Kelly cites the need for alternatives to current frameworks for the analysis of cultural life in the Eastern bloc, which often adopt the extremes of "totalitarian" and "everyday life" approaches to GDR scholarship (p. 2). As one possible alternative, Kelly embraces plurality. She puts sources from state archives and discussions of East Germany's founding historical narratives into dialogue with analyses of musicological debates, musical works, opera productions, and East German intellectual discourses. In doing so, she demonstrates how the Austro-Germanic canon not only was a site of competing meanings, but was also continually refashioned into a "usable past" over the 40-year history of the GDR.

Although the book's title emphasizes composition, Kelly ultimately argues that narratives of Germany's musical past were mobilized to shape musical practices in the East German present. Canonic nineteenth-century composers, particularly Ludwig van Beethoven (who adorns the book's cover), consistently served as a site of ideologically charged debate about the nation's bourgeois cultural heritage, as well as an often-proscribed source of musical inspiration for state-supported composers. But equally important, Kelly argues, is the legacy of Romanticism as a musical and literary concept. The individualistic and subjective currents of Romantic music were first "othered" in early discussions of the role of music in the state and later embraced to reflect a younger generation's growing disillusionment with state socialism in the 1970s and 1980s. Charting the rise and fall of the canon, Kelly argues, is therefore a means to map the ascent and decline of the GDR itself (p. 3).

Composing the Canon is organized in two parts to reflect this central argument. Part one focuses on musical discourse and practice in the early decades of the GDR, revealing how the canon became a template for the new country's "socialist future." Chapter 1 provides an overview of East Germany's centralized system of cultural power and elucidates the connection between early musicological discourses and the state's antifascist narrative of the German past. Adopting György Lukács's theories of realism and critique of romantic aesthetics, GDR musicologists upheld Beethoven's heroic style as a proto-socialist embodiment of revolutionary spirit. The more inward-looking aesthetics of later German Romantic composers were selectively reframed as the unfortunate result of their repressive, postrevolutionary social climate. Chapter 2 shifts from discourse to practice, focusing on the early reception of Richard Wagner as part of an effort to create an aesthetic identity in the GDR that was both in line with the state's antifascist narratives and independent from the capitalist West. Reframing the nation's bourgeois heritage to suit the socialist and Cold War present was not a situation unique to music, nor is Kelly the first to explore the reception and reformulation of the musical canon in East German musical practice. But the introduction and opening chapters powerfully capture the relationship between musicological discourse, state power, and performance history in the early GDR.

In some ways, though, part one serves as an extended upbeat into the most significant contribution of the book: an investigation into the intellectual debates and musical practices of socialist aesthetics in the final two decades of the GDR. The three chapters in part two chart the aesthetic consequences of late socialism as a growing disillusionment with the real existing socialism manifested in new...