Search Results

Searching for Redemption: The Salzburg Festival Meets Yiddish Theater

Lisa Silverman

in Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars

This chapter outlines how the need for Austrian Jews to come to terms with their changed social status after World War I drove the creation of new cultural productions that provided potential ... More

This chapter outlines how the need for Austrian Jews to come to terms with their changed social status after World War I drove the creation of new cultural productions that provided potential answers—or, at the very least, an escape—for both Jewish and non-Jewish Austrians seeking an inclusive national cultural ideal. Max Reinhardt’s involvement in—and passion for—both the baroque Catholic Salzburg Festival and the Yiddish theater in Vienna points to the significant role of Austrian Jews as driving forces behind two seemingly oppositional forms of culture which both thrived at a time of deep social crisis. The fact that Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal played major roles in creating the conservative Salzburg Festival revisits the overdetermined portrayal of Jews at the forefront of modernity in all aspects of European culture. But the fact that both Jews and non-Jews were avid enthusiasts of Yiddish theater in Vienna emphasizes the appeal of an explicitly Jewish theater to broad audiences in the city. Despite their differences, both forms of theater sparked intense, emotional reactions in audiences, using provincial and urban stages to reinvent mystical worlds of the past and create new ethical and cultural ideals with possibilities for future redemption.Less

The Body in Motion: Staging Silent Expression

Alys X. George

in The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body

This chapter traces the interdependence of three modes of cultural production—pantomime, dance, and silent film—that eschew spoken and written language in favor of body language. What began as a ... More

This chapter traces the interdependence of three modes of cultural production—pantomime, dance, and silent film—that eschew spoken and written language in favor of body language. What began as a response to a perceived crisis of language in the 1890s was increasingly seen as a way to address pressing social problems by the 1930s. Initially, authors and directors revived the folk tradition of pantomime, turning to gesture as an idealized mode of communication. The development of free dance in Vienna after 1900 merged with this trend. Viennese cultural producers, moreover, used pantomime and dance to negotiate questions of Jewish identity. By the 1920s, Viennese dancers had begun critiquing the social implications of urban industrial modernization in their choreographies. The gestural principles and performative presence underlying pantomime and dance were important templates for silent film and, later, film theory. In Viennese modernist dance, pantomime, and film, gesture was viewed as a kind of urlanguage, a seemingly more truthful, immediate, and universal form of communication than written language. That notion operated on the premise, informed by Vienna’s nineteenth-century anatomical and physiological traditions, that bodies are not only fundamentally legible but also sources of initially hidden knowledge.Less

Fernweh, Travel, and the Re-enchantment of the World in Hofmannsthal, Dauthendey, and Hesse

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

in Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

The relevance of atmosphere to the evocation of exotic spaces is outlined with reference to theories of spatial experience, such as by Georg Simmel, and in Hofmannsthal’s travel writings, in the ... More

The relevance of atmosphere to the evocation of exotic spaces is outlined with reference to theories of spatial experience, such as by Georg Simmel, and in Hofmannsthal’s travel writings, in the novel Andreas, and in Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrtens. The notions of Fernweh and Heimweh (longing for far-away places and homesickness, respectively) are shown to be evoked in writers’ critical response to the experience of European modernity. The disenchantment of the modern world as defined by Max Weber is shown to describe the situation to which the writings of Max Dauthendey offer alternative. Enchantment and re-enchantment, which suggest critical distance from the modern European experience, describe the possibilities of exotic experience in Dauthendey and in Herman Hesse’s travel writing in India, Aus Indien.Less

Dance in the Museum: Body and Memory

Gabriele Brandstetter

in Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes

This chapter first examines text-based manifestations of the “crisis of culture” circa 1900, focusing on the problem of language and identity reflected in the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and ... More

This chapter first examines text-based manifestations of the “crisis of culture” circa 1900, focusing on the problem of language and identity reflected in the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and analyzed by Botho Strauß. It then turns to how the break with nineteenth-century traditions took place in dance. It describes how prominent representatives of free dance and Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance) such as Isadora Duncan used the words decadence and degeneration often in their programmatic writings when referring to the system and the stage presence of ballet. By referring back to the great works of art history and transforming their pathos formulas into movement, these artists introduced a new dimension to early twentieth-century dance: the realm of historicism as an active, interpretative act of referencing art history on the one hand and as a reflective recourse to the traditions of dance history on the other.Less

Music and the idea of conservative revolution

Nicholas Attfield

in Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918-1933

This chapter begins by considering the numerous appearances of the term ‘conservative revolution’ in cultural writings of the 1920s and 1930s: particularly in those of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arnold ... More

This chapter begins by considering the numerous appearances of the term ‘conservative revolution’ in cultural writings of the 1920s and 1930s: particularly in those of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arnold Schoenberg, and Moeller van den Bruck. Into this emerging discourse, it weaves the capturing of the term for German historiography by Armin Mohler (1949) and the influence and controversy of Mohler’s usage in subsequent historical debates. Having argued that ‘conservative revolution’ may indeed serve as a revealing lens through which to view musical phenomena of the Weimar era, it proceeds—using the writings of Roger Griffin and Peter Osborne—to place its futural drive amidst the modernist thought with which it is usually contrasted, and thus offers a segue to the studies presented in Chapters 2–5.Less

The Promised Land: Toward a Retotalized Theatre

David Roberts

in The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin ... More

This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin Artaud’s theatre writings and manifestos for a “theatre of cruelty.” The connections between them rest on inner and outer coincidence: the Catholics Hofmannsthal and Claudel both turned to the world theatre of the Spanish baroque. Hofmannsthal collaborated with the director Max Reinhardt in the Salzburg Festival, and a commission from Reinhardt was the occasion of Claudel’s spectacle Christopher Columbus, with music by Darius Milhaud. Brecht was greatly impressed by the premiere of Claudel’s play at the Berlin State Opera in 1930; his own treatment of the crossing of the Atlantic, the 1929 Lehrstück on the aviator Lindbergh with music by Paul Hindemith, can also be read as his version of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Artaud (1896–1948) and Brecht (1898–1956)—like Mallarmé and Nietzsche—were almost exact contemporaries.Less

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Language of the Future

Leonardo F. Lisi

in Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce

Chapter 6 shows how the contradiction between style and conceptual content in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Lord Chandos Letter, which the secondary literature has frequently pointed to, must in fact ... More

Chapter 6 shows how the contradiction between style and conceptual content in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Lord Chandos Letter, which the secondary literature has frequently pointed to, must in fact be viewed as a constitutive moment in a structure akin to the aesthetics of dependency. From this perspective, not only does the elusive relation of parts to whole in the text become apparent, but The Lord Chandos Letter also shows itself to contain a previously unrecognized critique of modernity's scientific turn. This critique is embedded in a mediation that inscribes the condition of contradiction in a positive evaluation of the sequence of past, present, and future on the basis of its relation to a transcendent telos.Less

‘Fin de Siècle and No End’: The Austrian Art of Being Late

Ben Hutchinson

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 ... More

The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 focuses on how the key terms Epigonentum, Fin de siècle, and Dekadenz express variations on lateness in the Viennese literature of the latenineteenth century. Focusing in particular on essays and poems by figures such as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as on cultural criticism by the likes of Carl Spitteler, Max Nordau, and Otto Weininger, the chapter explores the extent to which Viennese modernity is predicated on a sense of arriving too late, after the perceived high point of European culture. Hermann Broch’s era-defining cliché ‘the Gay Apocalypse’ captures the Dionysian duality at the heart of the period: modernity is understood to be dying, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.Less

Richard Strauss (1864–1949): A Life Review In Music

Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon

in Four Last Songs: Aging and Creativity in Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten

The death of his librettist Hofmannsthal, his fraught relationship with the Nazi regime, and the wartime destruction of the German musical culture he treasured made Richard Strauss’s last years ... More

The death of his librettist Hofmannsthal, his fraught relationship with the Nazi regime, and the wartime destruction of the German musical culture he treasured made Richard Strauss’s last years difficult ones. In the middle of World War II, he completed his last opera, Capriccio, a self-reflexive opera about opera, musically recapitulating the history of the form and placing his own work within it. The seemingly escapist work is presented here as the start of the composer’s musical “life review” in which the increasingly isolated and aging Strauss looked inward and began an ongoing retrospective self-study to review and assess his musical legacy. Facing ill health, social stigma, and financial distress, he fell into a period of depression. Encouraged to return to writing songs, he composed the (posthumously named) Vier letzte Lieder which, critics agree, represent an “Indian Summer” of creativity. Their autumnal mood and themes suggest an acceptance of age and death, and the enriched, traditional diatonic and chromatic tonality that he had used and refreshed from work to work here came to its apogee with the elegant soaring lyrical melodies and the rich vocal color that are uniquely his own.Less

Conclusion

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

in Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the ... More

The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the European self and the familiar world which it ordinarily inhabits. The observation, imagination, or appreciation of exotic foreign topographies in works by Hofmannsthal, Hesse, Dauthendey, Mann, Zweig, Kafka, Musil, Benn, Kubin, and Brecht, provokes critical self-reflection about modern European forms of consciousness. The theoretical context for this critical self-reflection includes some of the major thinkers of German modernity, including Simmel, Weber, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Worringer, and Freud. Revealed are radically different possibilities for understanding and for living life, recognition of the precariousness of the familiar world. These works testify to the power and relevance of imagination, of cultural memory and expectation, of history, emotion, and the aesthetic sensibility in our experience of the world as a shifting symbolic topography.Less

Sprachkritik: The Crisis of Perception

in Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber's Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik

Buber considered the experience of the unity of being to be ineffable. Yet he also appropriated the teachings of the Hasidic masters to address not only central problems attendant to the ... More

Buber considered the experience of the unity of being to be ineffable. Yet he also appropriated the teachings of the Hasidic masters to address not only central problems attendant to the representation of ecstatic mysticism, but also issues pertaining to the Sprachkritik. In his early writings, Buber refracted the relation between language, speech, and mystical experience through the mystical teachings of the Hasidic masters. With Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his principal interlocutors, he situated himself firmly in the contemporary discourse on the critique of language. Buber's approach to language resonates with features of the new mode of linguistic analysis introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the twentieth century.Less