Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic

These essays examine the way in which German music was performed, staged, programmed, and received in the 1920s.

Bryan Randolph Gilliam (Edited by)

9780521022569, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 November 2005

236 pages, 30 music examples
24.4 x 17 x 1.3 cm, 0.38 kg

"[The book is] alive to the extraordinary contradictions and inconsistencies which ran through the Western world's most intensely developed musical culture as it weathered the upheavals of Weimar radicalism and Nazi manipulation....[It] is an exceptionally interesting collection of essays which open out into discussions of major aesthetic questions, of the political and economic pressures bearing on music and theatre, of the works produced and, to a lesser extent, issues of their dissemination and reception." Patrick Carnegy, Times Literary Supplement

Following the collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire in Germany, a new generation of artists found a fresh environment where they might flourish. Their optimism was accompanied by an equally powerful distrust of the immediate past, for post-romanticism - and ultimately expressionism - served as symbols of a bygone era. Composers, performers, and audiences alike sought to negate their recent past in various ways: by affirming modern technology (electronic or mechanical music, sound recordings, radio, and film), exploring music of a more remote past (principally Baroque music), and celebrating popular music (particularly jazz). The essays contained in this volume address these fundamental themes. Examining the way in which German music was performed, staged, programmed, and received in the 1920s, they not only offer deeper insights into Weimar culture itself but shed light on our contemporary musical world.

1. Stage and screen: Kurt Weill and operatic reform in the 1920s Bryan Gilliam
2. Rethinking sound: music and radio in Weimar Germany Christopher Hailey
3. 'Overcoming romanticism': on the modernisation of twentieth-century performance practice Robert Hill
4. Lehrstück: an aesthetics of performance Stephen Hinton
5. Singing Brecht versus Brecht singing: performance in theory and practice Kim H. Kowalke
6. German musicology and early music performance, 1918–1933 Pamela Potter
7. Jazz reception in Weimar Germany: in search of a shimmy figure J. Bradford Robinson
8. The idea of Bewegung in the German organ reform movement of the 1920s Peter Williams.

Subject Areas: 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6]