Michael Haas
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300154306
- eISBN:
- 9780300154313
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300154306.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter examines the political aspects of the works of Jewish composers. It explains that the vast majority of secular Jewish composers and writers were resolutely anti-religion and discusses ...
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This chapter examines the political aspects of the works of Jewish composers. It explains that the vast majority of secular Jewish composers and writers were resolutely anti-religion and discusses the work of Hanns Eisler, who used music as a political weapon which would be a defining element in Weimar Germany. The chapter also highlights the emergence of Berlin Cabaret during this period and describes some of the most memorable ones, including those composed by Friedrich Hollander.Less
This chapter examines the political aspects of the works of Jewish composers. It explains that the vast majority of secular Jewish composers and writers were resolutely anti-religion and discusses the work of Hanns Eisler, who used music as a political weapon which would be a defining element in Weimar Germany. The chapter also highlights the emergence of Berlin Cabaret during this period and describes some of the most memorable ones, including those composed by Friedrich Hollander.
Philip V. Bohlman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195178326
- eISBN:
- 9780199869992
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178326.003.0009
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
Identifying certain forms of music as Jewish and establishing the criteria for how Jewishness in music would be recognized preoccupied ideological and aesthetic concerns of many Jews entering ...
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Identifying certain forms of music as Jewish and establishing the criteria for how Jewishness in music would be recognized preoccupied ideological and aesthetic concerns of many Jews entering modernity by the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter concerns itself primarily with the ways in which Jewishness would counterbalance the nineteenth-century notion of absolute music, in which textual meaning negated contextual functions. Richard Wagner’s invective 1850 essay on “Jewishness in Music” unleashed responses until the Holocaust, and the chapter summarizes many of these, especially by leading Jewish music critics. Examples are drawn from Mahler, Jewish social organizations, and political musical traditions of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Tucholsky, and others from the Weimar period separating the world wars.Less
Identifying certain forms of music as Jewish and establishing the criteria for how Jewishness in music would be recognized preoccupied ideological and aesthetic concerns of many Jews entering modernity by the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter concerns itself primarily with the ways in which Jewishness would counterbalance the nineteenth-century notion of absolute music, in which textual meaning negated contextual functions. Richard Wagner’s invective 1850 essay on “Jewishness in Music” unleashed responses until the Holocaust, and the chapter summarizes many of these, especially by leading Jewish music critics. Examples are drawn from Mahler, Jewish social organizations, and political musical traditions of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Tucholsky, and others from the Weimar period separating the world wars.
Howard Pollack
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199791590
- eISBN:
- 9780199949625
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791590.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, History, American, Popular
The chapter covers Blitzstein’s marriage to Eva Goldbeck; his involvement with the Dartington School; his and Eva’s deportation from Brussels for alleged communist activities; his return to New York ...
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The chapter covers Blitzstein’s marriage to Eva Goldbeck; his involvement with the Dartington School; his and Eva’s deportation from Brussels for alleged communist activities; his return to New York and involvement with Charles Seeger and the Marxist Composers’ Collective; his growing interest in the German socialist composer Hanns Eisler; and the illness and death of Eva from anorexia.Less
The chapter covers Blitzstein’s marriage to Eva Goldbeck; his involvement with the Dartington School; his and Eva’s deportation from Brussels for alleged communist activities; his return to New York and involvement with Charles Seeger and the Marxist Composers’ Collective; his growing interest in the German socialist composer Hanns Eisler; and the illness and death of Eva from anorexia.
Joy H. Calico
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520254824
- eISBN:
- 9780520942813
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520254824.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This book looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society ...
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This book looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.Less
This book looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.
Ehrhard Bahr
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520251281
- eISBN:
- 9780520933804
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520251281.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
It was Bertolt Brecht who gave Los Angeles a bad name in German literature. Even critics who are not familiar with the original German verse love to cite Brecht's scathing poem comparing Los Angeles ...
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It was Bertolt Brecht who gave Los Angeles a bad name in German literature. Even critics who are not familiar with the original German verse love to cite Brecht's scathing poem comparing Los Angeles to hell. In the poem's first stanza, Brecht refers to Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem entitled “Hell,” which was part of a parody, “Peter Bell the Third,” ridiculing a cycle of poems by William Wordsworth. Brecht continues his diatribe against the movie industry in his “Hollywood Elegies,” a cycle of six poems that he wrote for Hanns Eisler's Hollywood Songbook. In order to understand Brecht's California poetry as modernist poetry, one has to look at his household poems and at his garden poetry written in imitation of classical Latin poetry that reflects on nature and politics. This chapter explores Brecht's lyric poetry as a paradigm of dialectics in exile modernism. Brecht had to reinvent Los Angeles as a city of exiles in order to be productive as a poet.Less
It was Bertolt Brecht who gave Los Angeles a bad name in German literature. Even critics who are not familiar with the original German verse love to cite Brecht's scathing poem comparing Los Angeles to hell. In the poem's first stanza, Brecht refers to Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem entitled “Hell,” which was part of a parody, “Peter Bell the Third,” ridiculing a cycle of poems by William Wordsworth. Brecht continues his diatribe against the movie industry in his “Hollywood Elegies,” a cycle of six poems that he wrote for Hanns Eisler's Hollywood Songbook. In order to understand Brecht's California poetry as modernist poetry, one has to look at his household poems and at his garden poetry written in imitation of classical Latin poetry that reflects on nature and politics. This chapter explores Brecht's lyric poetry as a paradigm of dialectics in exile modernism. Brecht had to reinvent Los Angeles as a city of exiles in order to be productive as a poet.
