Hans Pfitzner and the Anxiety of Nostalgic Modernism

Abstract

The perception of sound unfolds in the modernist imagination across a trajectory of polar oppositions that are legacies of long-standing musical traditions. Already in the nineteenth century, Wagner’s juxtaposition of German versus non-German aesthetic practice formed a conceptual nexus, a structure of thought, that reappears in the works of Nietzsche, with its polarization of northern and southern art, and in the reflections on music in the writings of a host of celebrated German and Austrian authors of the early twentieth century, such as Hauptmann, Dauthendey, Schnitzler, Werfel, Hesse, and Thomas Mann, and of course in the critical reflections of Theodor Adorno.