Classical Music in Weimar Germany

This book presents a set of case studies examining commentary by conservative music critics in response to musicological causes célèbres or concerns. Its stated goal is to complicate the longstanding historiographical assumption that conservative or traditional preferences in art music corresponded with conservative politics—essentially, that these Weimar traditionalists carried water for Nazi cultural policy. Fay acknowledges that musicology, music history and indeed exile studies more generally have been moving away from this assertion for quite a while. Many other historians have noted modernist Arnold Schoenberg’s political monarchism, for example, or that Paul Hindemith, in Ankara exile, saw his wartime teaching as amplifying the greatness of the German nation. But Fay’s book looks past composers, conductors and musicians to sketch out the intellectual diversity of Weimar’s musical press. The book’s most important intellectual context is the history of German writing about art music, reaching back to the eighteenth century. Its chronological...

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