Nicholas Attfield – författare

This book challenges commonplace conceptions of musical conservatism during Germany's Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Its primary goal is to offer scrutiny of uncritical links often made by musicologists and historians between musical conservatism and political conservatism of the era. It does so through a critical and nuanced application of the term 'conservative revolution', as used throughout the Weimar era and popularised in its historiography after 1945.After an opening discussion of the time-honoured notion of 'Weimar Culture' and its tendency to obscure parts of the contemporary cultural landscape (and their relation to modernity and modernism), the book presents four contrasting studies, each focused on a particular 'conservative' musical figure or movement, and informed by readings of a complex discourse drawn together from contemporary journals, speeches, letters, scores, and archival sources. The first two studies address Thomas Mann and his relationship with Hans Pfitzner in the aftermath of the First World War, and Alfred Heuss's 1920s tenure as editor of Schumann's Zeitschrift für Musik. The second two studies turn to the so-called 'Bruckner-Cult' of the Weimar era and its representations of its central composer as medieval mystic, and the work of August Halm - another dedicated Brucknerian - within the German Youth Movement, as defined by the radical pedagogue Gustav Wyneken. An extended epilogue considers advocacy for these Weimar-era 'revolutionary conservatisms' under the Nazi regime after 1933.

In his 1985 book The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others, Peter Franklin set out a challenge for musicology: namely, how best to talk and write about the music of modern European culture that fell outside of the modernist mainstream typified by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern? Thirty years on, this collected volume of essays by Franklin’s students and colleagues returns to that challenge and the vibrant intellectual field that has since developed. Moving freely between insights into opera, Volksoper, film, festival, and choral movement, and from the very earliest years of the twentieth century up to the 1980s, its authors listen with a ‘critical ear’: they site these musical phenomena within a wider web of modern cultural practices - a perspective, in turn, that enables them to exercise a disciplinary self-awareness after Franklin’s manner.

The first book in the English language to take a comparative look at the various roles played by all kinds of music and musicians in the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. It provides detailed overviews of musical life in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and identifies and challenges some of the stereotypes that became ingrained over the latter half of the twentieth century. Alongside comparative studies drawn from the German and Italian examples, the book presents case studies from a variety of regimes and situations. It analyses and compares numerous aspects of fascism (ideology, thought, practice, policy) in their interfaces with music and musicians across the twentieth century. Its broad range of topics expands the reader's horizons beyond a debate on 'music and totalitarianism' currently too often restricted to Stalinism on the one hand and Nazism on the other.

The first book in the English language to take a comparative look at the various roles played by all kinds of music and musicians in the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. It provides detailed overviews of musical life in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and identifies and challenges some of the stereotypes that became ingrained over the latter half of the twentieth century. Alongside comparative studies drawn from the German and Italian examples, the book presents case studies from a variety of regimes and situations. It analyses and compares numerous aspects of fascism (ideology, thought, practice, policy) in their interfaces with music and musicians across the twentieth century. Its broad range of topics expands the reader's horizons beyond a debate on 'music and totalitarianism' currently too often restricted to Stalinism on the one hand and Nazism on the other.

In his 1985 book The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others, Peter Franklin set out a challenge for musicology: namely, how best to talk and write about the music of modern European culture that fell outside of the modernist mainstream typified by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern? Thirty years on, this collected volume of essays by Franklin’s students and colleagues returns to that challenge and the vibrant intellectual field that has since developed. Moving freely between insights into opera, Volksoper, film, festival, and choral movement, and from the very earliest years of the twentieth century up to the 1980s, its authors listen with a ‘critical ear’: they site these musical phenomena within a wider web of modern cultural practices - a perspective, in turn, that enables them to exercise a disciplinary self-awareness after Franklin’s manner.