John Smyth said:

>Back to the Bruckner statement: Would a Secular Humanist make a statement
>like this? What will give the artists and peoples of our age, robbed of our
>gods and monsters by science and history, and borne of an era that at least
>tries to distance itself from what I think are the artistically motivating,
>yet dangerous qualities like ethnocentrism and egocentrism; the will and
>determination to create like those in the past?

I've been following John's thoughts on this subject and I think I can see
more clearly now what he's getting at.  I don't agree that the loss of our
'gods and monsters' in the course of this century has necessarily damaged
the creative impulse in any truly objective way, but there has clearly been
a shift in emphasis.  I'm a complete illiterate as far as post-1945 music
is concerned, but if I think about interpretative and performance trends in
the past decades, I can clearly see a rise in the frequency and quality of
performances of Mahler, Scriabin, Prokofieff, and 'difficult' Schubert and
Schumann:  there is greater interest in, and sensititivity to, the
personal, the vulnerable, the fragmented and ironic, the 'decadent' and
pathological.  That's in line with the greater fragmentation, the loss
of certainty, the discrediting of the public and communal in our culture.
I don't think it's all negative - we can see and admire works of art (eg
Mahler or late Schubert) that the more stable and confident society of
the late 19th century was repelled by or didn't comprehend at all.  The
losers of that shift are those composers whose voice is public, overtly
'universal', untinged by irony - middle-period Beethoven, the Wagner of
Lohengrin, the Ring and the Mastersingers, Bruckner for example.  Someone
like Furtwangler was completely in tune with the message of Beethoven's
3rd, 5th, 6th or 9th symphonies; I doubt whether many conductors today
are.  In Germany certainly it is not PC to admire works of this kind
too unreservedly.  Bruckner's sound-cathedrals, Beethoven's 9th, the
non-ironical humour of the Mastersingers - that's dangerously wholesome
and 'uncritical' - we must be on our guard.

But I don't think all societies have become as sterile and spiritually
burnt-out as John seems to believe.  Looking at the US from the outside,
while I can see much that is cynical and materialistic, there also still
appears to be plenty of religious fervour, idealism and at least regional
patriotism (all of which can of course quickly turn into darker versions of
themselves).  John's concept would seem to me to fit better onto a country
like Germany, where almost everything - religion, patriotism, tradition,
romanticism, 'pathos' - has been discredited and can only be looked at
through the lens of irony and demonstrative emotional distance.  There's
not much to be done about that - what can flourish in the moral ashes of
Nazism? - but to see it in the flesh is bloody depressing.

Felix Delbruck
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