Conference Agenda

In her 2016 study on the cultural histories of Nazi Germany, Pamela Potter noted the “diachronic isolation” of the Third Reich, or the tendency of arts scholars to bracket off those years as a “historical aberration… that was bookended by the exuberance of 1920s Weimar culture and the postwar renaissance after 1945.” In music scholarship, this isolation has traditionally been maintained by depicting the Third Reich as an artistic wasteland in which the modernist currents of the Weimar era were brutally suppressed, resulting in conservative, neo-Romantic works of musical mediocrity. This narrative is apparent in the standard portrayal of German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). While scholars praise his compositions of the Weimar Republic as vigorous, imaginative, and innovative, those written during the Third Reich are dismissed as dull, regressive, and “morbidly languid.” This characterization stems, in part, from Hindemith’s move away from his dissonant, contrapuntal style of the 1920s toward a simpler, more accessible style featuring homophonic textures, flowing melodic lines, and clear tonal centers.

Many have attributed this “regressive” aesthetic shift to the rise of National Socialism, born out of Hindemith’s melancholy over the political crisis in Germany and/or the implementation of an antimodernist Nazi arts policy. Based on his correspondence with his publishers and contemporary music criticism, I argue that Hindemith’s aesthetic about-face instead reflected an international conservative swing in the arts that would continue throughout the 1930s. I then suggest that this retreat from the “chaos” of postwar musical experimentation echoed a larger desire for stability amidst the chaos of the worldwide economic crisis. Examining this sea change in music contributes to recent research by scholars such as Nicholas Attfield and Brendan Fay that complicates the linkage between musical and political conservatism in the Weimar era. More importantly, it sheds light on the impact of the worldwide economic depression on artistic creation and reception, while demonstrating the continuities in musical style between the Weimar Republic and Third Reich.