Item 20 - Music in Germany from 1918 to 1933

22 pages, typed, with edits in Zuckerkandl's hand in pencil and pen.

A lecture providing an overview of the four major aspects of musical life in the Weimar republic: creation, performance and audience, the Youth Music Movement, and music education. Explains the massive changes that musical life underwent after the First World War, including the abandonment of tonality and the subsequent alienation of composers from their audiences, the counterbalancing dependence on older works, the push towards performative perfection, and the dissolution of the bourgeoisie as an audience. The Youth Music Movement emerges as a communitarian organization to restore the spiritual life of music but is adopted by the Nazis and transformed into propaganda. Music education undergoes significant reform to extend and standardize, which is retained after 1933. Zuckerkandl explains how the musical revolutionary spirit—a dissatisfaction with the norm, a push to restore power to the common people, and animosity towards the bourgeoisie, was also found and adopted in the Nazi movement, albeit to very different ends. Extensive edits in pen and pencil to phrasing; passage explaining how the lack of sufficient new music led to a rediscovery of older neglected works is cut from the final version.

• English

ONB, Misc100_V_15