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This book review discusses the lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné of the work of Mary Warburg, nee Hertz. Warburg is undoubtedly best known as the wife of art historian Aby Warburg. This catalogue aims to highlight, for the first time, Warburg’s independent achievements as an artist. The review highlights the merits of the book, in particular its in-depth contextualization of Warburg’s work within the social and cultural history of Hamburg. The review also reflects more broadly on the merits of such large-scale cataloguing endeavours today, especially when ‘minor figures’ such as Mary Warburg are concerned.

This paper addresses writer Itsuki Hiroyuki’s 1966 debut novel Farewell to Moscow Misfits through the lens of middlebrow novels, jazz novels, and repatriates. This novel draws from Itsuki’s personal experience being repatriated from colonial Korea after the war and visiting the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s. Farewell was unique for its time in representing jazz, music, and youth “stilyagi” counterculture in the Soviet Union. This counterculture movement was roughly contemporaneous with the student movement of the 1960s in Japan. This period also saw the popularization of the “middlebrow novel”—an ambiguous term that was used to describe literature outside of the established pure/popular dichotomy. These amorphous “middlebrow” works allow us to read some of the cultural dynamics of the 1960s. Itsuki published many of his early works in so-called middlebrow magazines, not “pure” literary journals. Itsuki himself claimed that his works were neither pure literature nor popular literature; they were simply “entertainment”. He placed his works in relation to jazz, the circus, and enka. His unique views on cultural production and media emerged from his repatriation experiences and his encounter with Russian culture. This paper examines not only genre conventions in literature but also Itsuki’s objections to the pure/popular literary structure, as well as his place in cultural representations of the 1960s.

This article examines the relationship between Aaron Copland’s activities as composer and as pedagogue in order to illuminate the fraught midcentury relationship between musical modernism and middlebrow culture. I situate his unpublished lecture notes and music appreciation books within the middlebrow context and trace their connections with the works he composed during this period. At the center of my investigation is the contentious midcentury category of “style,” which implicated both Copland’s music and his pedagogy in ways that illuminate middlebrow cultural appreciation at large. Challenging long-standing modernist depictions of the middlebrow as the straightforward commercialization of high culture, I excavate characteristic middlebrow commitments to compromise, novelty, and breadth that proved even more unsettling to midcentury hierarchies than mass culture’s supposedly shameless pandering. By emphasizing Copland’s commitment to a canon of modern “styles,” in composition as in music appreciation, I draw out underlying tensions between his “middlebrow” approach to modern music and a “higher,” purer form imagined by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. At the same time, I show how these distinctions often threatened to collapse. On a broader methodological level, I chart a middle course between “social” conceptions of the middlebrow—as a means of marketing, distributing, and teaching high art to a mass audience—and “aesthetic” discussions of it as a compositional style. By examining the reciprocity between Copland’s pedagogy and music, I ultimately suggest that the problem which middlebrow culture posed to high modernism lay not just in its ability to mediate between high and low, modernism and mass culture, but also in the challenges it posed to fantasies of aesthetic immediacy and autonomy.

Franz Lehár's 1928 Berlin operetta Friederike boasts an unusual subject: a romantic incident in the early life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Weimar Berlin is usually considered as a haven for experimentation between high and low culture, a bifurcated view which has dominated German studies, but in this article I argue that Friederike is best considered as an example of the middlebrow. I examine the many sources which contributed to Friederike, from Goethe to Wagner to contemporary plays; analyse the score's stylistic allusions and the performance of star tenor Richard Tauber; and finally turn to Lehár's rhetorical positioning of his work on the Berlin theatrical scene. I argue that operetta scholarship itself has traditionally been ill-equipped to deal with Lehár's late works and operetta more generally, and that middlebrow studies’ nuanced consideration of questions of art, commerce and prestige can contribute more widely to operetta and Weimar historiography.

Symphonic music composed under Stalin presents both ethical and aesthetic problems. Often assumed to have been composed in a compromised style by composers who were either coerced into abandoning their “real” modernist inclinations or who were in any case second-rate, these works have been labelled variously socialist realist, conformist, conservative, or even dissident, depending on the taste and opinion of those passing judgement. This article argues that picking and choosing which symphony is socialist realist and which is not cannot be justified either logically or historically, and that we should no longer attempt to define any non-texted or non-programmatic music in this way. The Anglophone term “middlebrow” holds out the possibility of describing this repertoire without implying ethical or artistic compromise on the composers’ part, acknowledging that, in the absence of any elite or “highbrow” musical culture, composers shared the aim of reaching a mass audience.

The brief period when Zelda Fitzgerald and Dawn Powell both published in the magazine College Humor offers a unique lens through which to view not only each author's larger body of work but also this critically neglected magazine. By placing the stories within a middlebrow context, this article charts the way these authors utilized such conventions to make pointed critiques of gender expectations as represented by the flapper. Such an approach also helps us understand the underappreciated role that middlebrow magazines played as a venue for female authors who sought to protest restrictive gender ideals in an era of unprecedented freedom.

This article argues that, through her regular “Letter from London” column, British writer Mollie Panter-Downes was a key figure in transforming “The New Yorker” from a humorous weekly into a serious venue for literature and political content after World War II. This transformation, moreover, involved a recasting of individual experience in terms of global realities. Total war necessitated language and style that would make vast, seemingly incomprehensible events meaningful, but not overwhelming, to the individual subject. Drawing on material from the New Yorker records at the New York Public Library, I show how Panter-Downes's literary journalistic aesthetic facilitated this sea-change.

The paper focuses on the registered but barely discussed intertextual aspects of Magda Szabó’s prose, which can be linked to the popular culture of the first half of the twentieth century. The comparative analysis compares one of her most famous novels, Abigail, with Baroness Emma Orczy’s Pimpernel stories and the relatively late entry in the Pimpernel franchise, the 1941 film “Pimpernel” Smith, directed by and starring Leslie Howard. The paper concludes that The Scarlet Pimpernel may have influenced the story and characterization of Abigail, particularly the portrayal of the dual-identity hero, Mr. Kőnig. It is also suggested that the novel’s schematic historical representation can be linked to Magda Szabó’s choice of literary template.

On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück (Children’s Piece) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.

As a popular experimental poet, E.E. Cummings embodied the intersection between \"middlebrow\" and \"elite\" cultural arenas as well as their competing claims to cultural institutions, such as the early-twentieth-century \"Shakespeare industry\" in the United States. Archival documents from Cummings's education at Harvard University and middlebrow studies together help to contextualize Cummings's conventional Shakespearean sonnets against middlebrow culture's emergence in the US. Cummings's Harvard notes show how the formal experimentation for which he is best known mirrors his readings in Shakespeare. These parallels signal the Shakespearean foundation of his own modernism and Cummings's participation in contemporary efforts to designate Shakespeare as an early modern modernist. Historicizing Cummings's conventional verse in this way also reveals how Cummings's Shakespeareanism, which blurs cultural hierarchy, has been obscured in the history of Cummings's reception as a middlebrow modernist by the mid-century \"Battle of the Brows\" and the cultural stratification it entailed.