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It may at first glance seem that political conservatism left no traces in the history of music. Conservatism is usually mentioned in relation to music when identifying works that shirk from certain progressive ideas or those that simply want to ‘preserve’ something. In contrast, a different approach has been taken here: Using works composed between 1914 and 1939, an attempt is made to show how conservative political attitudes were able to be reflected in music through aesthetic concepts and references connected to aspects of content or textual sources.

It may at first glance seem that political conservatism left no traces in the history of music. Conservatism is usually mentioned in relation to music when identifying works that shirk from certain progressive ideas or those that simply want to ‘preserve’ something. In contrast, a different approach has been taken here: Using works composed between 1914 and 1939, an attempt is made to show how conservative political attitudes were able to be reflected in music through aesthetic concepts and references connected to aspects of content or textual sources.

The poem In Danzig by Joseph Eichendorff, which appeared in the second edition of his works collected in 1848, is one of the most famous and important poems of the 19th century about Gdańsk. Its author, an important German poet of the Romantic era, has visited Gdańsk three times. From 1821 to 1824 he lived and worked here for the first time as a Prussian civil servant. In 1838, he spent several weeks in Gdańsk with his eldest daughter. The last time he spent in the city was in the years 1843–47 and lived with his family on Chlebnicka Street. At that time a poem was probably written in 1843 with the original title Nachts, later changed to Nachts in Danzig, finally entitled In Danzig.This outstanding example of German romantic poetry proved to be an important source of inspiration for the work of composers of different formats. The most well-known example of the song based on the poem comes from the work of Hans Pfitzner, the German composer of the turn of XIX/XX. I also noticed two other works on the Eichendorff text by lesser-known composers during the inquiry in the Gdańsk Library: Max Stange and Alfred Balfanz. The latter was Gdańsks citizen. The immediate impetus for dealing with this problem was the work of the young composer Kamil Cieślik with the eponymous title, which was premiered by the Gdańsk Vocal Ensemble Art’n’Voices.The object of the proposed reflection is therefore an attempt to compare the characteristics of the musical layer of the four works with regard to the expression of the poetic layer of Eichendorff’s poem. The thesis, which emerges in the initial stage of observation, follows intuition: the clarifications of the poem acquire a universal form to a certain extent. This means that the expression of the word in the works depicted is of utmost importance for the music.

An examination of Hans Pfitzner's musical work is presented.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is being acknowledged as one of its most significant and multifaceted composers.Schoenberg and His Worldexplores the richness of his genius through commentary and documents. Marilyn McCoy opens the volume with a concise chronology, based on the latest scholarship, of Schoenberg's life and works. Essays by Joseph Auner, Leon Botstein, Reinhold Brinkmann, J. Peter Burkholder, Severine Neff, and Rudolf Stephan examine aspects of his creative output, theoretical writings, relation to earlier music, and the socio-cultural contexts in which he worked. The documentary portions ofSchoenberg and His Worldcapture Schoenberg at critical periods of his career: during the first decades of the century, primarily in his native Vienna; from 1926 to 1933, in Berlin; and from 1933 on, in the U.S. Included here is the first complete translation into English of the remarkableFestschriftprepared for the 38-year-old Schoenberg by his pupils in 1912; it presciently explored the diverse talents as a composer, teacher, painter, and theorist for which he was later to be recognized. The Berlin years, when he held one of the most prestigious teaching positions in Europe, are represented by interviews with him and articles about his public lectures. The final portion of the volume, devoted to the theme Schoenberg and America, focuses on how the composer viewed--and was viewed by--the country where he spent his final eighteen years. Sabine Feisst brings together and comments upon sources which, contrary to much received opinion, attest to both the considerable impact that Schoenberg had upon his newly adopted land and his own deep involvement in its musical life.

A strong critical tradition,virtually contemporary with the work's creation, interprets the title figure of Hans Pfitzner's 1917 opera, Palestrina, as a thinly veiled allegory for the composer himself: a lone figure at the end of an age, pessimistic and conservative, fighting against a decadent culture. The scent of decay, of overripeness, is strong; in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), Thomas Mann describes Palestrina as `something ultimate [`Letztes'], consciously ultimate, from the sphere of Schopenhauer and Wagner, of romanticism ... its metaphysical mood, its ethos of ``cross, death, and grave,\" its mixture of music, pessimism and humor' (297). Critics have been led along this interpretive path owing to the striking similarities between the argument of Palestrina and the positions taken by Pfitzner in his many polemical writings. Even the titles of these works, written around the time of Palestrina, make clear his conservative stance: The Threat of Futurism (from 1917) and The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence: A Symptom of Decline? (1920). Despite John Williamson's attempt to contest this view in his recent monograph on the composer, it seems most fruitful to follow, and perhaps even intensify, this interpretative tradition by highlighting several contradictory aspects of the opera — most particularly, the striking (and apparently unnoticed) aesthetic inconsistency at the heart of the work.

Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice.

  work with moments of a peculiarly melting beauty. The performances present the wistful peculiarities of [Hans Pfitzner]'s often austere style in an appealing light. url.ie/4qdb MICHAEL DERVAN

Hans Pfitzner's \"musical legend\" may still be seen and heard far more often in Germany and Austria than anywhere else in the world, but it is now very respectably represented on disc.