Gesammelte Werke

helped to prepare the climate for Fascism with the generation of our parents and has doubtless soaked through innumerable channels into the unconscious of most Germans. However, Wagner's work itself had largely ceased to be a living force. This holds for the musicians as well as for the public. Since 1910 at the latest there started a revolt of all composers of any independence and talent against Wagnerianism and all it entailed. One may easily regard anti-Wagnerianism as the common denominator of all the different schools that have sprung into existence since the beginning of this century. Concomitantly, Wagnerian philosophy lost its hold on the artists. But what happened with the audience is perhaps even more significant. The lack of knowledge of the Wagnerian work among the younger generation in Germany was simply astonishing. The spiritual demands of the
Weltanschauungsmusik,
the exacting length of the
Musikdrama,
the spirit of high fallutin' symbolism so antagonistic to the positivistic matter-of-factness spreading over the youth of the whole world – all this helped to bring Wagner into almost complete oblivion. His old Germans became associated with the idea of the »beaver«. I can give you an example which, at that time, struck me as most characteristic. In the winter term 1932/33, immediately before Hitler took over, I had to conduct at Frankfurt University a seminar on Hanslick's treatise
Vom musikalisch Schönen,
on the musically beautiful, which is essentially a defense of musical formalism against the doctrines of Wagner and the programmatic school. Although the seminar was focused on philosophical issues, the participants, about thirty, were mostly musicologists. In the first meeting I tried to ascertain to what extent they were familiar with Wagner's works, acquaintance with which is the prerequisite for any understanding of Hanslick's polemics. Since I did not satisfy myself with vague statements about their knowing this or that
Musikdrama,
I asked who was capable of writing the Siegfried motif, the most famous of all Wagnerian
leitmotifs,
on the black-board. Nobody was.
    This little event is symptomatic not only of the oblivion into which Wagner had fallen but of a much broader issue. You may call it the musical decultivation of German middle classes. Of course, I do not want to speak in quantitative terms here. We have no means of measuring statistically musical culture during the nineteenth century and now, and even if we could I don't think the result would amount to much. The millions of people who have been brought into some kind of contact with music by the means of modern technical communication, particularly the radio, have altered the picture so completely that no straightforward comparison would make much sense. By speaking about the decultivation of the middle classes I mean something different. During the nineteenth century there existed certain groups who, without being professional musicians, were in real contact with music, were moved by the ideas expressed by music and were capable of a subtle and discriminating understanding. The attitude of writers, such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche towards music were not understandable without the existence of such a nucleus of musically truly cultured non-musicians. This nucleus has disappeared. Musical knowledge and understanding has become the privilege of experts and professionals. I cannot go into the reasons for this process which is deeply connected with certain changes undergone by the whole German middle class which, on the basis of its own material interests, was more and more alienated from the same culture which their fathers and grandfathers had brought about. At any rate, it is this decultivation, this loss of any life relationship with what is supposed to be the tradition of great German music that has contributed more to the fascist climate than the allegiance to even a nationalistic and chauvinistic author, such as Richard Wagner. This is hardly exaggerated. For the idea of humanism, the true counter-tendency against violent nationalism throughout modern history was in Germany inseparably bound up with the taking serious of music. One may say that the cultural impact of music in Germany was the equivalent of the humanistic tradition in great French literature. To be sure, Beethoven's greatness is not explained, as our appreciation orators want us to believe, by the fact that he composed
Fidelio,
the opera which