Bayreuth announces its first opera premiere since Parsifal

william osborne says:

There’s a much larger historical context for this view, though its impossible to explain in a short post. The context is tied to the German concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. There’s no word for this in English, but it roughly means coping with the past. The idea is that the recent history of Germany is so horrific that fundamental changes in consciousness and human endeavor are needed to create a new world. It is believed that this will allow society to see the past for what it really is, to sort the good from the bad, and to make the changes needed to chart a more sane future course.

After the war, the new music community in Germany was thus very open to radically new ideas about music. Hitler was defined as the last romantic, the ultimate manifestation of a worldview that opened the way for an insane artist-prophet and master of rhetoric who created radical evil based on the transcendental ideals of the Übermensch.

After the war, this led to a fundamental suspicion toward the rhetoric and emotion of music which essentially became the object of ridicule.

Under this view, aesthetic philosophies evolved that that rejected musical syntax as the West had known it, and sound was defined as an end in itself. (The rise of scientism compounded this perspective.) To put it in vastly oversimplified terms, the principle theorist of sound art was John Cage. For Germans, his theories seemed to offer an emancipation of sound freed from a genocidal past, a rational objectivity removed from an ethos of romantic, transcendental rhetoric that led to insanity. His ideas were thus embraced with unparalleled fervor in Germany.

Never mind that the fervor was deeply ironic, since it was not so much the emotional rhetoric of Romanticism that was at fault, as was Romanticism’s concepts of nationalism and a totalizing transcendental absolutism. Modernist aesthetics ironically became the new absolute, the new totalizing force shaping artistic expression, the new party card, as it were.

And to make things even more complex, the opponents of these developments were just as fanatic, and still are. Classical music was and still is caught in the middle. The result seems to be a historic miasma in its creative output.