Two Cautionary Tales
TLS June 19 2009 from Marina Frolova-Walker's review of Klara Moricz's Jewish Identities: Nationalism, racism, and utopianism in twentieth-century music : Schoenberg's desire to ensure the supremacy of German music through his own work is well known, but Moricz shows that these concerns were not merely aesthetic: [Schoenberg's letter to Alma Mahler, August 1914] I never had any use for all foreign music. It always seemed to me stale, empty, disgusting, cloying, false, and awkward . . . . Now I know who the French, English, Russians, Belgians, Americans, and Serbians are: barbarians . . . . For a long time this music has been a declaration of war, an attack on Germany . . . . Now we shall send these mediocre purveyors of kitsch back into slavery, and they shall learn to honor the German spirit and to worship the German God. Even the rise of the Nazis failed to cure Schoenberg of his German supremacism. From his American exile he lamented the fact that the Nazis had...