New German school

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

The New German School was a movement in the musical development away from the conservative understanding of music as absolute towards the programmatic in music.

Historical development

A group of musicians and musicologists formed around Franz Liszt in the second half of the 19th century who coined the term “music of the future”. The expression New German School comes from Franz Brendel , editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik . Alongside Liszt, the role models of the New Germans included the composers Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner , and their representatives included the Liszt students Joachim Raff , Peter Cornelius , Alexander Ritter , Felix Draeseke and Wendelin Weißheimer . Ludwig van Beethoven (as a composer) and Robert Schumann (as a critic) were used as historical models .

The Neudeutsche Schule wanted to redefine the artist in society; in addition to the composition of music, the intellectual examination of music, the music criticism, was raised to a substantial area of ​​responsibility of the artist, the musician became an intellectual . Many modern composers retained this role.

However, the New German School also had opponents, among whom were in particular Johannes Brahms , Joseph Joachim and Eduard Hanslick . Also Hans von Bulow , the first followers of the movement was, later turned against them. This opposition got caught up in the so-called music dispute with the New Germans , which was carried out in the current music magazines, especially the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and the Rheinische Musik-Zeitung . The themes and paradigms of the New German School shaped the music-aesthetic debates until the beginning of the 20th century . The term Neudeutsche Schule established itself in Germany for that direction that declared musical drama and program music to be the epitome of progress in music. In the 20th century, Friedrich Klose , Richard Strauss and Siegmund von Hausegger, as well as the musicologist Arthur Seidl, were classified in this context.

Political Influences

The term neudeutsch implies a political direction or at least a national affiliation. However, their distinct internationality speaks against this (in the triad Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner). In fact, the young Liszt and the young Wagner were guided in their writings by early socialist social utopias, which were connected with the striving for a nation state. This political dimension was quickly lost in the journalistic dispute, only Brendel speaks in his essay "The artwork of the future and the individual arts" of a global society whose main art is the musical drama (Wagner's). The New German School and especially Liszt's symphonic poems, however, provided a way for many European artists to identify with their country and to develop their own “tonal language”: This is how almost all national schools and styles (e.g. Russia, the Czech Republic and Finland) in the late 19th century directly or indirectly derived from the aesthetics and music of Liszt, Wagner and Berlioz.

literature