Musik & Ästhetik, 2008, Jg. 12, Ausgabe 47

Carl Dahlhaus and the Political

Having grown up in a household where art was cultivated as a means of resisting total domination by a terror regime Dahlhaus still considered the protection of art's autonomy as an alternative to society indispensible within a democratic state. Dahlhaus adopted various Marxist criteria in the 1950s and early 1960s primarily following Adorno; by the 1970s at the latest however in the face of rampant tendencies towards vulgar-sociologically agitative revolts and an undiminished rigidity in the aesthetic doctrines of real-socialist cultural bureaucracy Dahlhaus saw a confirmation of his basic belief that the work of art must be perceived as an autonomous organism. For only then can one explore its conceptual and emotional potential recognise the »premonition« of possible freedom within it and thus counteract its misuse as an ideologically instrumentalised object.

New Paths. Carl Dahlhaus and Ludwig van Beethoven

In the 1970s if not earlier the essays on Beethoven by Carl Dahlhaus provided the discussion with far-reaching new impulses. The idea of a structural and processual thinking that became a music-historical reality through Beethoven's compositional work runs through Dahlhaus's texts on the subject extending to his 1987 Beethoven monograph. The relationship between the categories of >structure< and >content< that still dominates the current discussion was of increasing interest to Dahlhaus though he did not express any final preference: on the one hand he does not want the understanding of technical details as an irrevocable prerequisite for all historiographically and hermeneutically relevant statements to be mistaken for a reduction to formal and technical concerns; on the other ahnd his reluctance to indulge in irresponsible speculation about the profile of compositional content does in fact lead to an ennoblement of structural analysis as the methodical foundation of historiography. At the same time however this methodical decision systematically serves an exclusion of most reception- and interpretation-historical aspects from historiography on the grounds that their material basis can never take on the textual coherence that the compositional history (viewed by Dahlhaus as the >problem history of composing<) offers for text-based structural analysis. Today the question is to what extent a reading of Beethoven is possible without an implicit reflection on the history of the practical (not only hermeneutical) interpretation of Beethoven.

Work Versus Theatre. Carl Dahlhaus in Conflict with Richard Wagner

This article critically examines aspects of Carl Dahlhaus's Wagner interpretation which revolve in different ways around the same basic problem: the conflict between the concept of the work and the theatre on the one hand and the corresponding forms of analysis on the other. The first section attempts to develop the idea of a work that is theatrical and musical in itself with all its contradictions. Section II analyses the thesis of Wagner's empirical and metaphysical concept of music. In a countermove to Dahlhaus it shows the significance of the late writings in practical theatrical terms. The theme of the third section is Dahlhaus's music-analytical contribution to the field of Wagner research: at the time his reflections on »musical prose« and leitmotivic complexes stood for a new beginning in musicology but passed over the problematics of sound and orchestral technique. It is precisely this question which embodies something in the manner of a theatrical a priori for the music that is sketched briefly to conclude the essay.

At the Opera with Carl Dahlhaus. The future historian as a music critic

Before the start of his academic career Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) worked at the Göttingen Theatre as a dramatic adviser and from 1960-62 as an editor and music critic at the Stuttgarter Zeitung. His five reviews of opera productions by Wieland Wagner show the changes in his view of the relationships between performers work and production with a clear opposition to a directorial approach that disregards the >text of the work<. - This position was consolidated in his 1984 essay on >director's theatre< [Regietheater]; it stems largely from the defence also evident in the realm of instrumental music and in part politically motivated of work autonomy - even if the >work concept< is a problematic one in opera history before Wagner and Verdi.

How does Dahlhaus write History? The chapter »Lied-Traditionen« (1814-1830) from »Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts«

The author analyses a chapter of music history by Carl Dahlhaus with reference to the questions both explicitly posed and unmentioned to which the text can be considered a response. This also offers an opportunity to compare this musical historiography with the premises laid out by the author in Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte [The Foundations of Music History] (1977) and locate these within the context of scientific history. It transpires that Dahlhaus is a practitioner of a decidedly modern self-reflexive type of musical historiography in the sense of a >sentimentalist historicism< but at the same time also continues some of the main lines of earlier genre historiography - like his predecessors he still sees Schubert's Lieder as the solitary peak of the Lied traditions in the European context around 1820.

Analysis of a Value Judgement. »The Idea of Absolute Music« by Carl Dahlhaus

This essay deals with Carl Dahlhaus's central work of aesthetics: Die Idee der absoluten Musik (1978). His theory that the idea of absolute music was the paradigm of 19th-century musical aesthetics and the guiding idea of the Classical-Romantic period is critically examined from a philosophical and historical perspective using the sources cited by Dahlhaus himself and essentially disproved through new readings of texts by Karl Philipp Moritz Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder Ludwig Tieck E. T. A. Hoffmann Arthur Schopenhauer Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick.

Metahistory and the Scepticism of the Historian. New Music and the Avant-garde in the Work of Carl Dahlhaus

Although Carl Dahlhaus belonged to the generation of leading West German musicologists who helped to establish New Music publicistically after 1945 his view of modernity was characterised by a scepticism based as much on questions of scientific history as aesthetic premises. He acknowledged the groundbreaking significance of the developments before the First World War in the work of Schoenberg and others - to an extent also in the avant-garde - for the physiognomy of the music of the 20th century but he felt that its establishment had occured at the expense of the Classical-Romantic work concept. Dahlhaus therefore read the historical event of New Music as the document of a failure; not in Adorno's emphatic-auratic sense but as the real process of the decay of 19th-century music whose image was accordingly corrected. This negative assessment was to an extent mitigated by a meta-historical approach which Dahlhaus adopted to thematicise and subject to irony the fundamental problematics of any understanding of the (respectively) new - not only on the part of the historian but also the composer. Dahlhaus's attempt at a latent equation of critical and productive methods is not without risks however: it involves both the danger of a circular argument and a tendency towards a one-sided interpretation of developments based on other historical and intellectual-historical foundations than European art music.

Dahlhaus in America

With the translation of eleven of his books into English Carl Dahlhaus is without question the most influential European musicologist among Anglo-American music historians in the past generation. Two of his works in particular have exercised unusual attention in America: his Foundations of Music History and The Music of the 19th-Century. Yet by the time of the author's death in 1989 his aura was distinctly in decline with the advent of new currents of post-modernist thought evident prominently in the »new musicology« arising in American circles. Nonetheless many of Dahlhaus's major concerns - particularly in situating the musical artwork between aesthetic and social poles - are ones that are still of acute relevance in American musical scholarship today and in which Dahlhaus's lasting influence may yet be discerned.