Bruckner's Annexation Revisited: A Response to Manfred Wagner

Author(s): Bryan Gilliam

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 124-131
Published by: Oxford University Press
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 Bruckner's Annexation Revisited:
A Response to Manfred Wagner

Bryan Gilliam

Manfred Wagner's opinion piece focuses on Bruckner and the aesthet-

ics of Richard Wagner reception from the nineteenth century through
the modem era; the role of ideology within this context is both
important and problematic. Though some scholars, most recently
Margaret Notley and Benjamin Korstvedt, have addressed the issue, I
agree with Wagner that much remains to be done. But as large and
important as this issue may be, it was not part of my essay for this
journal. My article focused on the ways in which Bruckner was useful
for National Socialist political strategies beginning in summer 1937,
nine months before the annexation of Austria, and during the war as
well. I was specifically interested in the way Bruckner was used to
justify Goebbels's ban on art criticism, as well as the formulation of a
new religious confession, Gottgldubig ("God-believing"), some months
later. Wagner, indeed, says little of substance about my article. I shall
start with some comments concerning the relevant points he does
address, and then I would like to offer some of my own views about
the aesthetic problem that Manfred Wagner addresses in his short
essay.
Wagner begins his essay with three vaguely worded points.
Without an agent the first point ("the lack of familiarity with foreign-
language publications in both the German and the Anglo-American
literature") can assume various meanings. If he refers to scholars on
both sides of the Atlantic, I would heartily agree that there is room
for improvement. Certainly one step forward was the important four-
day Connecticut College-Yale School of Music International Bruckner
Conference (1994) that I highlighted in my conclusion and which
goes unmentioned in Wagner's piece. It was the first of its kind in the
United States, and in a footnote I even listed the various panels. At
that conference my paper on Bruckner and the National Socialists
was, more specifically, preceded by Margaret Notley's (United States)
"Bruckner and His Symphonies in Wagnerian Ideologies of the Late

124

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 Response to Wagner 125

Nineteenth Century." My paper was followed by Christa Briistle's

(Berlin) "The Reception of Anton Bruckner's Fifth Symphony" (part
of her dissertation on Bruckner reception history from 1896 to 1945),
Benjamin Korstvedt's (United States) paper on the ideology of the
Bruckner Gesamtausgabe of 1934-44, and then Stephen McClatchie's
(Canada) "Bruckner and the Bayreuthians," which focused on
National Socialist ideology and Bruckner analysis. These and other
papers1 are being published by Cambridge University Press and might
help fill the void to which Wagner refers in his conclusion. In Current
Musicology 57 (1995): 95-100, which Wagner admittedly could not
have seen before writing his essay, I discussed this conference ("Per-
spectives on Bruckner") within the larger context of Bruckner scholar-
ship today, which seems quite active indeed.
The second point, "a view of National Socialism which no
longer accords priority to aesthetics over ideology (a position which,
however, has only been elaborated in broad strokes and is not yet
widely accepted)," is, I believe, Wagner's main point-that we need
to understand the aesthetic roots before we can discuss a Nazi ideol-
ogy. More than once Wagner suggests that there is nothing new in
what the Nazis said about Bruckner, which is of course the point of
my article about political appropriation. Clearly Goebbels said nothing
new in his speech; what is important is the way in which stereotypes,
cliches, prejudices, and the like were exploited for specific political
purposes. The National Socialists were not concerned with real aes-
thetics as such but rather with an opportunistic spinning of historical
threads into an ideological web that could condemn as "degenerate"
both the atonal Schoenberg and overtly tonal Korngold without bat-
ting an eye. As for point three: Who are these "certain members of
the generation of scholars and interpreters from that period," and who
is doing the "tabooing"? I would not hasten a guess in print and leave
it to the readers to decide.
This third point is followed by a list of prominent Bruckner
scholars, implying that they have all written extensively on the sub-
ject of Bruckner and National Socialism; it is a rhetorical device
unworthy of Wagner and does disservice to these individuals. Bruck-
ner specialists on both sides of the Atlantic are well aware of their
important work. I have been privileged to know personally three of
these distinguished scholars and have gained much insight from them.
As for the issue of German versus Austrian, I believe that Wagner
knows more than he lets on. The distinction has always been complex
and problematic; it is a fluid, thorny issue that deserves more than the
well-worn pan-Germanic quote by Schoenberg to Joseph Rufer from

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126 The Musical Quarterly

the early 1920s. The difference between Austrian and German must
always be seen in the light of its specific context: when, where, and
by and to whom? For a Jew on the Austrian side of the border in
1937, the distinction was abundantly clear. Wagner, moreover, could
have mentioned that the last installation of a bust in the Walhalla
before Bruckner was that of the Austrian Franz Schubert, in 1928,
celebrating the centennial of his death-but, of course, that occasion
lacked the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1937 ceremony.
Why was Bruckner inducted in Walhalla in 1937, which was
not, after all, a commemorative year,2 and why did Hitler and Goeb-
bels regard this event as important enough to warrant not only their
presence but also their participation? Manfred Wagner's unwillingness,
in the face of such glaring evidence, to recognize a connection
between the Regensburg ceremony and the months-later annexation of
Austria is beyond me. It is no secret that Bruckner was used by anti-
liberal factions during and after his lifetime. But neither this nor even
the fact that the modern Anschluss movement had become a force in
the wake of World War I alters the political realities of the Nazi
Bruckner ceremony, which celebrated the Bruckner bust as "the first
monument of our empire." Without question it set the stage for Hit-
ler's pre-Anschluss speech (cited in my article) later that afternoon in
Regensburg, a speech where Hitler spoke of a fragmented German
nation of the past, of "warring religious camps" now unified under the
religion of German self-identity, a speech that posed the vital ques-
tion: "Are you German and do you want to be German?" The side-by-
side headlines (Bruckner's to the left, Hitler's to the right; see Fig. 1)
in the Vdlkischer Beobachter on the next day illustrates how well syn-
chronized these two events actually were.
Wagner's problematic fourth paragraph serves as an elision to
some interesting commentary on a "German-nationalist ideology of
culture."3 Unfortunately, in order to launch this discussion Manfred
Wagner first must misrepresent me: "It is also not true that the cliche
of Bruckner as a 'Wagner symphonist' had to be coined anew by
National Socialism." The sentence in question reads: "Wagner and
Bayreuth had been politicized by the new regime within the first year
of Hitler's takeover, and the Nazis saw much to gain by reinforcing
the cliche of Bruckner as 'Wagner-Symphonist'." There is a world of
difference between "coining anew" and "reinforcing" an old stereo-
type. But this misreading of my article, implying that I am somehow
ignorant of the threadbare Wagner-symphonist stereotype, is necessary
in order for Manfred Wagner to begin his survey of Richard Wagner
reception and, more specifically, how it affected the reception of
Bruckner.

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 Response to Wagner 127

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Figure 1. The side-by-side newspaper headlines regarding the Bruckner cere

speech

In creating a context for "the duality of cultural views," Manfred

Wagner creates in one paragraph a sweeping cultural dichotomy that
holds unchanged from post-Congress of Vienna through the present
day. While it is perhaps irresistible to link Ringstrasse architectural
"megalomania" with Richard Wagner, the project is more accurately

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All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
128 The Musical Quarterly

seen as an ultimate outgrowth of the first wave of Austrian liberalism.

I also have problems with the monolithic way in which Richard Wag-
ner is treated in this overly generalized paragraph. The composer was,
to be sure, a magnet for nationalist forces, even a volkisch fringe ele-
ment, but in the late nineteenth century he was also the catalyst for
such young modernists as Mahler and Strauss. Only well after his
death would Richard Wagner become an emblem of musical conserva-
tism. In a short article ("Monumental oder Intim: Betrachtungen zur
Bruckner-Rezeption") on Bruckner reception in Germany for the
Leipzig Gewandhaus-Magazin 7 (1995), I suggested how this problem
of progressive versus conservative relates to Bruckner.
I wholeheartedly agree with Manfred Wagner that we cannot
look at second versions of Bruckner symphonies without considering
their cultural context. In fact, I wrote an article on the subject over
four years ago ("Rehearings: The Two Versions of Bruckner's Eighth
Symphony," 19th-Century Music 15 [1992]: 59-69). This article-not
mentioned in Manfred Wagner's response-was, in fact, partly cata-
lyzed by two excellent works by Wagner: Wandel des Konzepts (see
Wagner above) and his 1988 article "Zu den Erstfassungen der Sinfo-
nien Anton Bruckners."
In my 1992 essay (68) I observed that an

undeniable impulse behind the revision [of the Eighth Symphony] was
Bruckner's lifelong preoccupation with obtaining performances for his
works . . . [thus] one must apply caution in characterizing the revised
Eighth Symphony as a continuation of the creative process, as some
early Bruckner studies do, for these two versions document widely dif-
fering artistic impulses.4 The first version [of the Eighth] represents a
confident composer at the zenith of his creative powers, a man who
envisioned a massive work of unprecedented boldness and scope with-
out precedence in his symphonic output. The second version, with its
greater balance, continuity, and economy, serves as a compelling wit-
ness of a composer's search for the Viennese bourgeois mainstream as
he and his colleagues understood it. The programmatic associations
surrounding the revised Eighth (in the form of the 1891 letter to Wein-
gartner, the "Totenuhr" anecdote, or even Schalk's unauthorized pro-
gram for the premiere) might well be seen as part of that search.

Moreover, I argued that in the second version we see both the aes-
thetics of Hanslick-Brahms and the aura of Wagner-Liszt, the former
in terms of certain structural changes and the latter in terms of certain
sonic revisions, as well as the cutting of the original loud ending of
the first movement: "the subdued post-romantic tragic ending was on

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 Response to Wagner 129

its way to becoming commonplace, especially among composers of

the so-called New German School. One thinks of the closing mea-
sures of Tristan, Gotterdammerung, and Parsifal, and all but two . ..
of Strauss's nineteenth-century tone poems."
As for the importance of Goebbels's Bruckner keynote address, of
course it was of central importance, not in terms of purely musical
reception but because of its coordination with decisive political
events. Up until the time of the Regensburg ceremony, Germany's
focus had been essentially domestic: rebuilding its infrastructure and
its military force and erecting its massive propaganda apparatus. The
next step (Goebbels privately termed it "the danger zone") was toward
foreign expansion: first Austria some months later, then Czechoslova-
kia and beyond. Curiously, the aspects of Goebbels's speech that I
found the most fascinating are not mentioned by Manfred Wagner,
and, in a way, I find Goebbels's scant overt references to Richard
Wagner the least interesting aspect of the speech. More important to
me is Goebbels's appropriation of cliches and anecdotes in a biographi-
cal sketch with a subtle, yet specific three-point political strategy:

1. the romanticization of Bruckner's Upper Austrian peasant

roots, stressing his "love for his native soil and for the German father-
land," coupled with strong Blut und Boden imagery that helped set
the cultural stage for the Anschluss, which occurred within months;
2. the exploitation of the well-worn image of Bruckner as the
victim of vicious criticism to support Goebbels's recent policy banning
all art criticism (Bruckner is specifically acknowledged in the eighth
paragraph of the speech); and, most important,
3. the intentional disregard for Bruckner as a devout Catholic
and as a composer of important religious works in order to make his
music, paradoxically, a sacred language for the Gottgltubig. This non-
Christian formulation, which recognized German nationalist identity as
a religion in itself, was created in the wake of the breakdown of rela-
tions between Berlin and the Vatican in late 1936. In his afternoon
Regensburg speech, Hitler used the word Gottgltubig in public for the
first time, cleverly connecting a National Socialist religion with Ger-
man expansionism.

Manfred Wagner ultimately poses an important and difficult

question: If Bruckner had been known by his first versions, would he
have been so easily appropriated by the National Socialists? Would he
have become the religious icon referred to in the above third point?
In such clear-cut cases as the Eighth Symphony we might say no to
the first question, but I do not know if there is a definitive way to

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130 The Musical Quarterly

answer the second. In my MQ article, in the short piece for the Leip-
zig Gewandhaus-Magazin, and (in greater detail) in the more recent
Current Musicology essay I posed a related question that extends the
issue to the topic of performance practice.

The rise of Bruckner recordings (mostly by Austro-German conductors

and orchestras) during the 1930s and 40s, when technological advances
made recording orchestral performances more feasible, coincided with
the rise of National Socialism. Could one argue that the Nazi-deified,
"German" Bruckner, removed from his Austrian heritage and placed
alongside Wagner, became a paradigm for a modem Bruckner perform-
ing tradition? Have postwar Bruckner interpretations (exemplified by,
say, slow tempi or lush sonorities) unwittingly carried over this phe-
nomenon of Bruckner as Nazi religious icon to the contemporary sym-
phony hall or recording studio and, thus, minimized the more
important - and historically more accurate - relationship between
Bruckner and Schubert ?

In this respect, Manfred Wagner and I seem to share quite a bit of

common ground, for I believe the answer to this question is yes.
Despite their lush timbres and highly polished surfaces, the "Wagner-
ized" (Manfred Wagner's apt term) interpretations of Bruckner, which
still seem to fill the record catalogues and concert halls, fall short of
giving us a fully accurate picture of Bruckner. I only regret that, of my
Bruckner publications, only my article on Bruckner and the National
Socialists seems to have got the attention of Manfred Wagner, who
rightly laments the "lack of familiarity with foreign-language publica-
tions."

Notes

1. Brtistle's essay will not appear in the Cambridge volume but rather in a future
issue of this journal.

2. The original plan, as stated in the Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik (June 1936), was a
Walhalla induction in Oct. 1936, but the ceremony was postponed until the June
1937 date.

3. The question of Hitler's private musical tastes is an issue larger than merely
Bruckner or Wagner, who I would argue were more representative of his public tastes.
Various memoirs, such as those of Albert Speer, suggest that Hitler's domestic phono-
graph probably played Lehar's "Lippen schweigen" more often than Wagner's "Immo-
lation Scene."

4. Originally note 28: "Manfred Wagner makes a strong argument for first versions
in general when he observes that they are his most direct, personal, and least influ-

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 Response to Wagner 131

enced from outside. See 'Zu den Erstfassungen der Sinfonien Anton Bruckners,' in
Anton Bruckner: Leben, Werk, Interpretation, Rezeption, Kongressbericht zum V. Inter-
nationalen Gewandhaus Symposium, ed. Steffen Lieberwirth (Leipzig: Peters, 1988),
pp. 96-103."
5. "Perspectives on Bruckner," p. 99.

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