- Title Pages
-
Roth Family Foundation
- [UNTITLED]
- Dedication
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
-
1 Et in Arcadia Ego -
2 Only Time Will Cover the Taint -
3 “Nationalism” -
4 Why Do They All Hate Horowitz? -
5 Optimism amid the Rubble -
6 A Survivor from the Teutonic Train Wreck -
7 Does Nature Call the Tune? -
8 Two Stabs at the Universe -
9 In Search of the “Good” Hindemith Legacy -
10 Six limes Sixa -
11 A Beethoven Season? -
12 Dispelling the Contagious Wagnerian Mist -
13 How Talented Composers Become Useless -
14 Making a Stand against Sterility -
15 A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century -
16 Calling All Pundits -
17 In The Rake's Progress, Love Conquers (Almost) All -
18 Markevitch as Icarus -
19 Let's Rescue Poor Schumann from His Rescuers -
20 Early Music -
21 Bartók and Stravinsky -
22 Wagner's Antichrist Crashes a Pagan Party -
23 A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism -
24 Corraling a Herd of Musical Mavericks -
25 Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last? -
26 The Danger of Music and the Case for Control -
27 Ezra Pound -
28 Underneath the Dissonance Beat a Brahmsian Heart -
29 Enter Boris Goudenow, Just 295 Years Late -
30 The First Modernist -
31 The Dark Side of the Moon -
32 Of Kings and Divas -
33 The Golden Age of Kitsch -
34 No Ear for Music -
35 Sacred Entertainments -
36 The Poietic Fallacy -
37 The Musical Mystique -
38 Revising Revision -
39 Back to Whom? -
40 She Do the Ring in Different Voices -
41 Stravinsky and Us -
42 Setting Limits - Index
The Golden Age of Kitsch
The Golden Age of Kitsch
This chapter discusses the Nazi concept of degeneracy in arts and music in Germany, in relation with the release of complete recordings of two operas by record company Decca/London. The record company had released the first complete recordings of operas Jonny spielt auf (Johnny Goes to Town), by Ernst Krenek, and the Das Wunder der Heliane (Heliane's Miracle), by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, as part of a series of releases devoted to the music of German composers who for reasons of race, taste, or politics fell out of favor with the Nazi regime. The Nazi concept of artistic degeneracy was incoherent and opportunistic. The Nazis derived their concept of degeneracy in part from the theories of the nineteenth-century psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, who sought through science to account for criminal proclivities and thereby to predict them, by identifying the “born criminal” or l'uomo delinquente, as a distinct anthropological “type” with measurable physical and mental “stigmata.” The application of these theories to art and literature was first made by Lombroso's disciple, the Hungarian physician Max Nordau, in a two-volume titled Entartung, which appeared in 1892–93 and went through many printings.
Keywords: Nazi regime, Cesare Lombroso, artistic degeneracy, Max Nordau, Entartung, Germany, Jonny spielt auf, Das Wunder der Heliane
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- Title Pages
-
Roth Family Foundation
- [UNTITLED]
- Dedication
- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
-
1 Et in Arcadia Ego -
2 Only Time Will Cover the Taint -
3 “Nationalism” -
4 Why Do They All Hate Horowitz? -
5 Optimism amid the Rubble -
6 A Survivor from the Teutonic Train Wreck -
7 Does Nature Call the Tune? -
8 Two Stabs at the Universe -
9 In Search of the “Good” Hindemith Legacy -
10 Six limes Sixa -
11 A Beethoven Season? -
12 Dispelling the Contagious Wagnerian Mist -
13 How Talented Composers Become Useless -
14 Making a Stand against Sterility -
15 A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century -
16 Calling All Pundits -
17 In The Rake's Progress, Love Conquers (Almost) All -
18 Markevitch as Icarus -
19 Let's Rescue Poor Schumann from His Rescuers -
20 Early Music -
21 Bartók and Stravinsky -
22 Wagner's Antichrist Crashes a Pagan Party -
23 A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism -
24 Corraling a Herd of Musical Mavericks -
25 Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last? -
26 The Danger of Music and the Case for Control -
27 Ezra Pound -
28 Underneath the Dissonance Beat a Brahmsian Heart -
29 Enter Boris Goudenow, Just 295 Years Late -
30 The First Modernist -
31 The Dark Side of the Moon -
32 Of Kings and Divas -
33 The Golden Age of Kitsch -
34 No Ear for Music -
35 Sacred Entertainments -
36 The Poietic Fallacy -
37 The Musical Mystique -
38 Revising Revision -
39 Back to Whom? -
40 She Do the Ring in Different Voices -
41 Stravinsky and Us -
42 Setting Limits - Index
