Carnegie Hall

Is there a symbiotic relationship between social crisis and cultural flourishing? Although a matter of some debate among historians and other scholars, perhaps no period in history saw as much artistic and musical innovation alongside such political and social breakdown as Germany after the First World War. The Weimar Republic—as Germany’s first experiment in democracy came to be known—emerged in the wake of a catastrophic war that had seen more than 2 million German soldiers killed and 4 million more seriously wounded.

The personal loss and grief associated with mass death on such a scale was accompanied by a sense of national humiliation as the war’s other costs came closer into view. Yet amid all of the political and social dislocation, Weimar Germany bore witness to an explosion of creativity in music and the fine arts—making “dancing on the precipice” a particularly apt metaphor for Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival.

In many ways, World War I marked an interruption in the cultural life of Europe. If before the war Vienna stood as the center of gravity within German-speaking Europe, after the conflict, Germans’ new musical capital was unquestionably Berlin. Ernst Krenek’s Little Symphony and Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra both had their world premieres there in 1928, and numerous musical luminaries—from Schoenberg and Fritz Kreisler to Franz Schreker—would make the musical migration from the Austrian capital to Berlin during the interwar period.

Berlin acted as a magnet not only for composers, but performers as well who regularly gave recitals and concerts there throughout the 1920s, from American contralto Marian Anderson and Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. What they found in Berlin was a city awash in all the contradictions of modern life in the early 20th century—a place where horse-drawn carriages and automobiles coexisted uneasily alongside one another on busy streets, and wealthy foreigners rubbed shoulders alongside sex workers and wounded soldiers on the city’s famed Kurfürstendamm avenue.

Political violence and economic misery were a feature of daily life in Berlin for much of the period, but for the culturally minded, there was no other place like it on Earth. As historian Peter Gay wrote: “To go to Berlin was the aspiration of the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its 120 newspapers, its 40 theaters, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was in Berlin that they became, and Berlin that made them famous.”

Many Berliners could not get enough of America’s latest cultural export—jazz—and composers such as Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill incorporated the idiom into their own musical offerings. New technologies like the radio presented opportunities for cultural enrichment that were unthinkable a generation before and some undeservedly forgotten composers wrote music explicitly geared towards the medium, from Max Butting’s suites for radio to Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, the most celebrated and widely performed opera of its time.

While today we typically associate Weimar culture with 20th-century modernism in the arts, the music of older masters likewise continued to hold considerable sway over many members of the listening audience. Countless music festivals commemorated the 100-year anniversary of Beethoven’s death in 1927, as critics and listeners from across the political spectrum each claimed the composer’s legacy for themselves. Bruckner was among the 10 most-performed composers by the Berliner Philharmoniker between 1922 and 1925, with audiences flocking to hear his and Gustav Mahler’s Ninth symphonies, the latter of which Carnegie Hall Perspectives artist and conductor Franz Welser-Möst calls “the strongest, most impactful farewell ever written in music.”

In addition to this cultural rebirth and novelty, vexing challenges plagued Weimar from the outset as the government faced unrelenting crises that hung over it during its short 13-year existence. The ink was hardly dry on Weimar’s new constitution before reparation payments began imposing huge costs on the German economy, culminating in a disastrous inflation in 1923 that saw Germans receive their weekly wages in wheelbarrows. In his moving memoir The World of Yesterday, music-lover Stefan Zweig recalled attending performances in unheated and dimly lit concert halls unable to pay for electricity and heating oil. Yet even in such dire settings, Berliners’ desire to hear music continued unabated as contemporaries huddled together in gloves and overcoats to listen to works like Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, two of which were premiered in June 1923 at the peak of hyperinflation. Such anecdotes remind us, as Maestro Welser-Möst has observed, that “music offers an enormous amount of not just emotions, but spiritual guidance of how we go about life, especially in difficult times.”

Even the concert hall, however, did not always offer respite from the vexing political and economic problems that afflicted Weimar. Modern works, in particular, could elicit impassioned responses from audiences unaccustomed to atonal and other kinds of new music as composers faced ever-shifting boundaries over what audiences and critics deemed acceptable for public consumption. Igor Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring had caused a near-riot at its Paris premiere in 1913, was among the most widely performed composers in Weimar. Béla Bartók, for his part, was less fortunate. When his one-act pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin debuted in Cologne in 1926, it was immediately banned on moral grounds by the city’s mayor and future German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Even concerts dedicated to canonical composers provoked outbursts. According to a music critic writing in the music journal Zeitschrift für Musik, a 1923 concert dedicated to the music of J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms under the baton of Henri Marteau provoked a group of nationalist agitators to hurl stink bombs at the conductor before declaring in front of the astonished audience, “[He] is a French national who spied on behalf of the French government during the war … Whoever calls themselves a German must leave the hall!”

For what so many contemporaries saw as Weimar’s iconoclasm and exuberance, others interpreted it as signs of cultural decay and disorder. For the Nazis, the culture of Weimar typified everything wrong with the new Germany. In their eyes, modern music and expressionist art counted as little more than entartete Kunst, or “degenerate art.” The 1929 stock market crash marked the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic and many Jewish composers, from Schoenberg and Weill to Hanns Eisler, left Germany immediately following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. Others, such as Richard Strauss, went into a self-described “inner emigration” and continued working and performing in Nazi Germany while remaining silent on politics. Still others chose the path of collaboration, whether stemming from ideological affinity or sheer opportunism, with composer Carl Orff even going so far as to write a suitably “Aryanized” version of Felix Mendelssohn’s beloved A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1939.

Weimar democracy may have died in 1933, but the same cannot be said of Weimar culture. Rather, it went into exile, first to Paris and London, and eventually Los Angeles and New York City, where it found—and continues to find—new audiences eager to experience all the richness and vitality it has to offer.

Photography: Dancing bar in Baden-Baden by Max Beckmann, Welser-Möst by Roger Mastroianni, most other photography from Wikimedia Commons.