Critical Formalism: Max Graf, Julius Korngold, and the Language of “Modern Music” in Vienna around 1900

Abstract

Max Graf and Julius Korngold legitimated modernism in music. These two Viennese music critics redefined the avant‐garde music of Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, and others by incorporating literary concepts of “die Moderne” into the analysis of musical form. Not only did Graf and Korngold take the concept of modernity as a synonym for “avant‐garde” seriously in order to refer to an era of rapid change, energetic movement, and technophilia, but they clarified how avant‐garde music expressed these qualities at the level of musical language, i.e., form. As “critical formalists,” Graf and Korngold pioneered both twentieth‐century terminology for music and analytical methods that anticipated Adorno. This article reassesses the origins of musical modernism in Vienna by focusing on critics and their ambivalence toward “die Moderne,” rather than on composers and a crisis of politics.