Arousing Patriotic Sentiments in the Concert of Nations

The founder of musicology in Vienna, Guido Adler, referred repeatedly to the importance of music for international understanding; at the same time in 1917 he did, however, emphasize the superior role of Austrian music. This was, of all the cultural elements of the Austrian nation, ‘undoubtedly one of its most valuable possessions. … In it the life of our spirit and imagination is revealed in a splendid way, we can say in all modesty and without presumption.’ The author Anton Wildgans saw the matter in a similar manner, when at the beginning of the war he contrasted the Austrians as the ‘people of dancers and of fiddlers’ with the Germans as the ‘people of poets and thinkers’.

Patriotic invocations of qualities supposedly found in or claimed for a people were made by all the nations waging war, with musicologists and critics – but also musicians – placing themselves at the service of war propaganda every bit as much as other intellectuals. ‘The ability of music to liberate, inspire and seduce has never been felt more strongly than at the present time,’ Richard Specht, one of Vienna’s best known music critics, commented at the beginning of the war.

Even if Adler repeatedly regretted the horrors of the war, which hindered international exchange and harmed music because it led to the deaths of talented young people, he nevertheless pointed to the necessity to defend cultural achievements. And at the same time he confirmed that in the nature of Austrian music, which represented the ‘purest image of what is genuinely Austrian … in its ramifications and concentration’, there was to be found, as it were, a practical guide to ‘solving the burning political problems of our time’. This was, according to him, to be seen in the ‘undeniable’ fact that it was the German element that stood at the centre of everything that was Austrian and that in its perfection led to its supremacy in music, which was enriched by exchange with ‘other ethnic elements’, which could only attain ‘limited validity in their own right’. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century other national schools of art had succeeded in developing freely – admittedly under the leadership of German art! ‘It is precisely in Austria that we can … learn a great deal from comparing art and life, just as this war will for a long time be the master of world history,’ Adler concluded.

In Germany, too, there were similar patriotic sounds. Arthur Seidl, a musicologist who had won respect with his works on Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, published his theses on the danger for German culture from its opponents in the war, a culture which was ‘the first, most important, the “deepest” and superior to all of them’. The French composer Claude Debussy expressed his patriotic frame of mind in a pithy way: ‘Since Paris has been cleansed of those tiresome foreigners, whether by shooting them or by throwing them out, it has become a charming place from one moment to the next.’

Translation: Leigh Bailey