Title: <i>The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist</i>. By Claire Taylor-Jay. pp. viii + 225. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2004, £42.50. ISBN 0-7546-0578-7.)
Abstract: Scholars of German music and music criticism in the first decades of the twentieth century would presumably welcome a study that aspires to provide new insights into the complex relationship between music and society in this period. The field is very rewarding, and needs further investigation—especially perhaps by musicologists with philosophical and sociological leanings. Claire Taylor-Jay’s book is the first book-length study of ‘artist-opera’ (Künstleroper), a genre characterized by its portrayal of conflicts between the opera’s artist-protagonist and his/her society. The author sums up her study as follows: ‘This book investigates re-assessments of the artist ideal which took place in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century’ (p. 1), ‘re-assessments’ that she considers to have grown out of nineteenth-century ideas about how artists positioned themselves in relation to society. The book is divided into five main chapters: an Introduction, three case studies—each considered in relation to its own political context—and a brief Conclusion. In ‘Pfitzner, Palestrina, and the Nonpolitical Composer’, Taylor-Jay compares the political and aesthetic views of Pfitzner and Thomas Mann, and proposes a reading of Palestrina in the light of Mann’s distinction between the ‘political’ and the ‘non-political’. ‘Krenek spielt auf: Jonny, Jazz and the Modern Composer’ provides a contextual outline with special attention given to Americanism, mass culture, and jazz. The influence of Paul Bekker on Krenek provides the basis for a reading of Jonny spielt auf. In ‘Painting and Politics in Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler’, Hindemith is seen as a composer who embraces ideologies from both left- and right-wing politics and who therefore belongs to a ‘grey area’ between the two extremes. Mathis der Maler is discussed with a focus on expressions of Mathis’s place in society, as well as the role of his art. In an attempt to determine the extent to which the opera is autobiographical and expressive of Hindemith’s own political views, Taylor-Jay considers Hindemith’s position within the Third Reich.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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