A New Left-Wing Radicalism in Contemporary German Music?

Abstract

‘Communism is dead’, crowed a recent Prime Minister, little realizing that the shaky condition of capitalism would precipitate her downfall in short order. ‘Socialist art is a phenomenon of the past’, pronounced many post-modernist critics, who equated creative expressions of radical politics with a modernist aesthetic they had already consigned to their re-interpretation of history. Yet as the developed economies totter from one crisis to the next, interspersed with stock market upheavals or corruption scandals, and the ‘new world order’ fails to materialize, a new left-wing idealism is beginning to assert itself in the work of several German composers, and the growing number of discs of their music testifies to the existence of a substantial international audience for their output. It is a movement of considerable diversity, but also genuine sophistication, for it takes account of the limitation of modernism, and is not averse to encompassing expressions of radicalism from the ‘romantic’ era, where appropriate. Thus, it does not shun post-modernism, but incorporates those features which have not been sucked into the new world chaos, or into the prevalent nostalgia, usually associated with the banner of ‘pluralism’. Above all, the new radicalism reaffirms certain fundamental truths, respected by socialism, which have been overlooked both by postmodernists and proponents of the ‘new world order’. It also asserts the importance of artistic integrity at a time when consumerism is undermining creative values.