The German Concept of Absolute Music (Professor Rainer Kleinertz, Universität des Saarlandes)

The term ‘absolute music’ has been widely used from the 19th century right up to more recent musicological literature, without ever really becoming tangible. Even attempts to critically overcome it have only served to perpetuate this ambiguity. The fact that the term is often used in fundamentally changing, sometimes more sometimes less, connected meanings should not exempt us from first shedding light on the thicket of associations and contexts that have accrued. A fundamental problem is the widespread conflation of aesthetic and historical judgements. To make matters worse, the personal quarrel between Brahms and Liszt, and Schumann’s subsequent article ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), turned these discourses into a party dispute, ostensibly about the ‘innermost nature’ of music, but in reality, about a dichotomy between ‘German’ and ‘non-German’ music. The conviction, also shared in Vienna, that the Prussian Victory of 1871 went hand in hand with a hegemony of German music further denatured the idea of absolute music well into the 20th century. Accordingly, Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck described Brahms, who, alongside with Bruckner, became the leading figure of absolute music, as a ‘true son of his people’, while Liszt had never been able to shake off his so-called gypsy nature. The question arises as to the subliminal survival of such prejudices in post-war German musicology.

Biography

RAINER KLEINERTZ is Chair in Musicology at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. He studied music (viola) at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, and Musicology, German and Romance Literature at Paderborn University. He was visiting professor at Salamanca University (1992–1994), reader and professor at Regensburg University (1994–2006), and visiting fellow at Oxford University (2000–2001). His main areas of research are the music and writings of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, and Spanish music theatre. Since 2014, together with Meinard Müller (International Audio Laboratories, Erlangen), he has been leading a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on computer-based analysis of harmonic structures. With Stephanie Klauk (Saarland University) he published a widely acclaimed study on ‘Mozart’s Italianate Response to Haydn’s Opus 33’ (Music & Letters, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcw102). In collaboration with the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (Trier University) and Dorothea Redepenning (Heidelberg University) he is currently directing the digital edition of Liszt’s complete writings.