Gesammelte Werke

philosophy. Ultimately consumption of the art became a mere appendage to the business interests of those who were in command of the market.
    We can, therefore, not blame the masses for the process of decultivation, the broadest pattern of which I have tried to indicate. The loss of knowledge and interest in the products of art which may ultimately lead to a completely barbarian severance between serious artistic production and universal tastes in not a matter of degeneration or bad will but is the almost unavoidable consequence of the relegation of art into the realm of pure embellishment brought about by the technological development itself.
    This process, however, does not only imply a crisis of the general relationship between arts and audience and concomitantly of art itself which is condemned to an ever more threatening isolation, but it also has much more immediate social consequences. For the idea of compelling and objective truth, however differentiated its artistic and philosophical expression might have been, is inseparably bound up with the idea of humanism. German humanism was the most substantial counter-tendency against violent nationalism. This holds good for music above all. One may say that the cultural impact of music in Germany was the equivalent of the humanistic tradition in great French literature.
    Humanistic philosophy permeates Beethoven's whole work and determines even the most subtle details of his musicianship. The lack of experience of this humanistic spirit – and here I mean experience in a deeper sense than the listening over the air to some standard performance of a standard work – reflects, viewed in broad social terms, a vacuum ready to absorb the arbitrarily super-imposed doctrines of totalitarianism. The German boy of our age who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the
Kreutzersonata
played by friends of his parents, and who never listened passionately and surreptitiously when he was supposed to go to bed, does not merely miss a piece of information or something which might be recognized as being educational. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him somehow of the very life phenomenon of the humane. It is this lack of experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people.
    This is not to say that musical culture in Germany simply died away. It survived within some artists, and even during the first years of Hitlerism the average level of performance was often astonishingly high. But musical culture became under Hitler what it had started to become long before, a museum piece of an export article, somewhat reminiscent of the cultural function of the Renaissance architecture in today's Italy. The tie between the idea of humanism, of music as an art, and the actual outward and inward life of the people, was definitely broken.
    This is the most essential characteristic of the musical climate for Fascism in pre-Hitler Germany. It is certain to increase, not only in Germany, dangerously with the impoverishment of the European continent after the present war.
    I wish to emphasize that the process in question does not merely engulf the attitude of the masses toward art, but artistic production per se and its inherent values. If we take a quick glance at the most successful German post-Wagnerian composer – as a matter of fact the only one whose fame is internationally established – Richard Strauss, there is clear evidence that the link with German humanism, in the sense I have discussed it right now, has ceased to exist. The fact that Richard Strauss at one time attempted to translate a philosophical work, Nietzsche's
Zarathustra,
into program music, is no proof to the contrary. One may rather say that philosophy, as well as religion or as the
l'art pour l'art
doctrine of symbolism, is for sale in Strauss' music, and that the very way it is treated as a subject matter destroys it as the true life basis of the works which so glibly deal with all kinds of philosophical ideals and values. Everything becomes a cultural good to be looked at, to be bought, to be enjoyed as a stimulus for the nerves of the big but tired businessman. This holds for the whole range of Strauss'
œuvre:
the