Musik & Ästhetik, 2016, Jg. 20, Ausgabe 77

A Book for the 20th Century: Paul Bekker’s Beethoven of 1911 – The essay attempts, from a distance of 100 years, a characterisation of Paul Bekker’s book on Beethoven and an appraisal of its effect. Here there is a particular focus on three aspects: its widely-praised, but also often-criticised »poetic« language (descriptions of music), the purpose behind the analytical survey of Beethoven’s work by genre, and the image of history contained in the overall construction. A few of the traces left in Beethoven scholarship by Bekker’s book are discussed separately.

Wagner’s Phantasms: Paul Bekker with Lacan – The text is not a commentary on Paul Bekker’s Wagner: Das Leben im Werke of 1924; it would be more accurate to describe it as inspired by the monograph. Two aspects of Bekker’s Wagner interpretation seem especially questionable today: on the one hand the author’s stance, which leads him to interpret Wagner not from a historical perspective, but rather within his own contemporary horizon; and on the other hand, Bekker’s original and productive reversal of the traditional life/work approach to biography. The article begins by following these central ideas and puts forward a subject- and space-theoretical view of the places where Wagner lived for discussion. An interpretation of the final scene of Siegfried then transfers this discussion onto an engagement with Wagner’s work. If one adopts Bekker’s interpretative stance today, however, the limits of Bekker’s interpretation, which revolves around Wagner as a person, become clear.

The Negative Body and the Reverse of the Mirror: An Essay with Paul Bekker on Anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Work – Paul Bekker’s approach differs clearly from the manner in which anti-Semitism in Wagner’s work has been discussed in recent decades. Firstly, Wagner’s »anti-Semitic portraits« are directly evident for him – a fact, not a scandal. Secondly, Bekker argues neither politically nor morally, not even historically, but only aesthetically. Only in the artistic aspects of the works does the question of anti-Semitism become relevant. Thirdly, he sees these elements less »romantically« than »realistically«. The way in which music opens up »physis« in Wagner’s work also enables it to produce negative bodily images and make them anti-Semitically »readable«. Fourthly, one must distinguish between this physiognomic aspect and the psychological »exclusion of the other« that affects Wagner’s late works as a whole. The consistency with which Bekker pursues his aesthetic line ultimately proves more complex than the usual political discussions about anti-Semitism in Wagner.

The Final Problem as a Construction Idea: Paul Bekker’s Book on Mahler – By Bekker’s own account, his books rest on specific »construction ideas« developed in the respective first chapter (most comparable to Max Weber’s »ideal type«). The »construction idea« of the Mahler book lies in setting up two polar types that, according to Bekker, define the history of the symphony genre: the »Beethoven symphony« and the Mahler-influenced »final symphony«. Despite the seemingly rigorous restriction to two convenient polar principles, Bekker manages to open up a new perspective on the symphonic field of the 19th century that, with the category of the »final problem«, identifies a central point of the genre’s development.

»Battle Cry« or »Unanswered Question«? On the Ambitions of Paul Bekker’s »Neue Musik« – Paul Bekker’s Neue Musik (1919) is considered an important founding text for the terminological establishment of this phrase in the musical discourse. Here Bekker attempts to determine, according to stylistic typology, the epoch-defining caesura after which the new was identified as something exceeding previous things (I). Whereas his »sociological aesthetics« of 1916 had still subordinated music to a community-forming ideal, the emphasis is now on the critical substance of aesthetic and political practice (II). In contradistinction to the educated middle-class attitude to reception, Bekker conceives the aesthetic dimension of music as an equally indeterminate and original space of human self-disclosure (III). Through the polemical discourses of subsequent years, New Music experienced a terminological, historical and institutional consolidation (IV) from which it draws both its preconditions and its (self-)critical impulse today (V).

Paul Bekker, the Sociologist of Music – Paul Bekker’s book Das deutsche Musikleben (1916) was one of the first works of music sociology in Germany. With its central thesis that a musical work only attains its form in the listener’s perception, Bekker parted ways with the traditional object-centred concept of form, in which the shaping of the form is carried out exclusively by the composer. On the one hand, society provides the conditions for the production of works and thus enables their »shaping«, enables them to take form. But on the other hand, the work, as a social sound symbol, holds a society-forming potential whereby the perceptual process – in so far as it succeeds – allows listeners to develop into a cultural community. Bekker’s aesthetics turns away from the aesthetics of autonomy and aims to overcome the chasm between art and life. His thesis that form only comes about in the listener’s consciousness anticipates the musical aesthetics of reception that gained current relevance in the second half of the 20th century.