Gesammelte Werke

Archaic Greece of
Electra
and the smart pervertedness of
Salomé,
the second-hand Goethe edition of the
Frau ohne Schatten,
and the rococo of the
Rosenkavalier
which proved to be so convenient for the taste of the German industrial upper-class who got out of this work a mirrored reflection which made them look as if they were a legitimate aristocracy.
    What remains, apart from such stimuli made to order of the quickly changing tastes of those German layers with whom Strauss identified himself, is a kind of cult of the
élan vital,
which has become, in the
Schwung
of this music, almost synonymous with the spirit of success, recklessness and expansionism fitting only too well with imperialist Germany from Emperor Wilhelm to Hitler. If complete cynicism and relativism are among the foremost characteristics of Fascism, these characteristics come clearly to the fore in an author who is apparently so faithful a child of the liberal era as Richard Strauss. To be sure, his managerial broad-mindedness is quite irreconcilable with the narrow and petty bourgeois fanaticism of the Nazi movement. Yet he only put the seal under the secret text of his life-work when he grudgingly compromised with the Nazi government.
    It is this spirit of pseudo-hedonistic complacency and shallow showmanship – in spite of all the virtuosity of the composer – against which everything rebelled that was productive and responsible in German musicianship. But it is also this very rebellion by which the great music which Germany has produced during this century, and of which the life-work of Arnold Schoenberg is representative, became definitely and radically antagonistic to the audience and to the whole sphere of commercialized musical life, of the official German
Musikleben.
It has often been alleged, and also repeated in this country, that it was a kind of guilt or an expression of snobbishness, of the ivory tower idea, that the real musical
avantgarde
in Germany lost more and more its touch with the audience. The work of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern never became familiar to the non-musicians to any extent comparable with Wagner or even Strauss.
    In a deeper sense, however, the
avantgarde
represented the true societal interests against blindness, spite and conventionalism of the actual audience. The musical discord, which became the symbol of so-called
Kulturbolschewismus,
and which is the conspicuous identification mark of the musical
avantgarde,
the supposed spirit of negativism and destruction, kept faith to Beethoven's humanism by expressing in an undiluted way the sufferings, the anguish, the fear, under which we live today long before the political crisis arose, instead of covering it up by idle comfort. It thus has maintained the link between music and philosophical truth. This does not only refer to the expressive sincerity of artists such as Schoenberg, but also to their purely musical qualities, their severe and undisguised construction shunning all ornamentation, embellishment, everything which is not strictly necessary. We know today how deeply the often denounced subjectivism of the so-called atonal
avantgarde
was bound up from the beginning with functionalism, with those tendencies within art which try to regain its real dignity by purifying it from all the remnants of romanticism which today are nothing but empty pretenses.
    This is perhaps the appropriate moment to illustrate by a very specific example the danger of a survival of the Nazi spirit after its defeat. I mentioned before the idea of
Kulturbolschewismus
which served as a means to denounce every artistic impulse which threatened to shatter the conventional belief in the good and natural order of things. Today we find the heritage of this denunciatory notion among some of the sincerest foes of the Hitlerian system. The world has become so ugly and terrifying, so runs the argument, that art should no longer dwell upon distorted forms, discords and everything branded as being destructive, but should return to the realm of beauty and harmony. The world of destruction, terror and sadism is the world of Hitler. And art should show its opposition to it by going back to its traditional ideals.
    The amazing similarity of such enunciations with those of the jailers would not be a counter-argument in itself, but it is highly indicative of the perseverance of the Nazi frame of mind, a perseverance which is not merely due to the minds of the intellectuals but to the situation as such.