Gesammelte Werke

glorifies the powers of humanism in their struggle against tyranny, or the IX. Symphony which expresses the promise of joy to all and every human being without any exception to race or creed. The greatness of Beethoven has to be understood in musical concepts first. Yet, the fact that he was bound up with humanistic philosophy permeates his whole work and determines even the most subtle details of his musicianship. The German boy of our era who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the Kreutzer Sonata played by some friends of his parents when he is supposed to go to bed does not merely miss a piece of erudition or information. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him somehow of one of the strengest experiences of the
humane.
It is this lack of experience, of the imagery of real art, partly substituted by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism which has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people. Musical culture in Germany had not died away, it survived with the artists and the level of performance was extraordinarily high. But it had largely become a museum piece or an export article, somehow reminiscent of the cultural function of Renaissance architecture in today's Italy. The tie between the idea of humanism, of music as an art, and social reality was definitely broken. This is the most essential characteristic of the musical climate for Fascism in pre-Hitler Germany.
    This has been reflected in musical production. 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, with philosophy in the sense of a basic relationship to truth, has been severed. 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 rather may say that this philosophy, as well as the estheticism of Oscar Wilde or the religious symbolism of the
Frau ohne Schatten,
the Rococo of the
Rosenkavalier,
or the intimacy of the private life of the modern upper middle class, have been put on exhibition by Strauss in a gigantic sale of all cultural goods. They first have become neutralized, have lost any intrinsic seriousness they ever may have possessed and are then transformed into consumer goods which are enjoyed as stimuli without being related to any ideas transcending the comfort offered by the world as it is. The only spiritual contents that remains is a kind of cult of the
élan vital,
of a spirit of success, recklessness, and expansionism which fits 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 broadmindedness is quite irreconcilable with the fanaticism of the Nazi movement, and yet, it is not an accident that he compromised with Hitler.
    It is his spirit of hedonistic complacency and shallow showmanship against which everything rebelled that was productive and responsible in German musicianship. But it is also this very rebellion by which the truly great music which Germany has produced during this century, and of which the life work of Arnold Schoenberg is representative, became 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 and obsolete
l'art pour l'art
ideas that the real musical
avantgarde
in Germany lost more and more its touch with the audience, so that the work of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern never became familiar to the non-musicians to any extent comparable with Wagner or even Strauss. Whereas the fact as such cannot be denied, I do not think that the blame is justified. It is just this opposition to the conformism of a public to whom music meant nothing more than distraction and entertainment which defended the humanistic tradition of German music against its decay. It is my thesis – which again I cannot