Franz Werfels andere Moderne: Musikästhetische und kunstsoziologische Konzepte in Franz Werfels Roman "Verdi. Roman der Oper" by Amanda Baghdassarians

Abstract

Reviewed by: Franz Werfels andere Moderne: Musikästhetische und kunstsoziologische Konzepte in Franz Werfels Roman "Verdi. Roman der Oper" by Amanda Baghdassarians Steven R. Cerf Amanda Baghdassarians, Franz Werfels andere Moderne: Musikästhetische und kunstsoziologische Konzepte in Franz Werfels Roman "Verdi. Roman der Oper." Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019. 278 pp. Despite its sixteen-word earful of a title, this study, based on the author's doctoral dissertation in German Studies at the University of Zurich, is most helpful. Concentrating on Werfel's contemporary theoretical sources of music criticism that, in part, inspired him to write his first novel, Verdi: Roman der Oper (1924), Baghdassarians divides her book into four telling chapter-sections ranging from thirty-five to seventy pages. These deal respectively with the theories of the post–World War I musical sociologist Paul Bekker, the anti-Wagnerian writings and works of such composer-critics as Ferruccio Busoni and Kurt Weill, and a close discussion of the dominant role of Verdi as the eponymous protagonist of the novel itself, before concluding with a [End Page 108] discussion of the thematic relationship between this first novel and Werfel's later prose fiction. The first chapter, properly titled "Paul Bekkers Musiksoziologie," is informed by a discussion of the importance of Paul Bekker's anti-Wagnerian criticism in the early 1920s. Baghdassarians pinpoints Werfel's own interest in Bekker's musical-sociological theories as an inspiration for the novelist's characterization of Verdi and the Italian composer's inability to understand either Wagner's music or his coterie of followers, who view him as a quasi-religious, trans-national prophet figure. Her arguments throughout this forty-five-page portion are most convincing, and they provide Baghdassarians' greatest contribution to recent Werfel secondary criticism. According to the author, it was Bekker's sociological view of music of the past and of the present that fascinated Werfel in the early 1920s. Formulated as they were during the sociopolitical fragmentation after World War I, Bekker's writings, which championed the grounding of past and present great composers in their own political societies, inspired Werfel in shaping his contrast between Verdi and Fischböck throughout the novel. Werfel's depiction of the "music for music's sake" compositions of Fischböck, devoid of any societal context, stand in marked contradistinction to Verdi's grounded politically social stance as reflected in his operas. The second chapter, properly an extension of the discussion of Bekker's writings, emphasizes such anti-Wagnerian composer-writers as Busoni and Weill as contemporary allies of Bekker and underscores Werfel's creative admiration of these composers. As opponents of Wagnerian illusionistic staged opera, both Busoni and Weill sought to anchor their contemporary audiences' experience in the actual action of what is taking place on the operatic stage. Baghdassarians fittingly brings into her discussion Werfel's 1920 essay "Dramaturgie und Deutung des Zauberspiels Spiegelmensch," in which the essayist roundly attacks Wagner's illusionistic view of the stage. According to Werfel, it is the lack of humor and the starched exclusion of irony that informs Wagner's pseudo-religious view of the stage. Baghdassarians wisely concludes the chapter with a discussion of Werfel's mid-1920s German translations of three of Verdi's mid-period operas, La Forza del Destino, Simon Boccanegra, and Don Carlos and explains how their staging boosted the major Verdi revival during the Weimar Republic. Baghdassarians's third chapter, a close textual interpretation of the novel itself, is literally at the heart of her study. That it is close to double the length of [End Page 109] each of the other three chapters is a key to the critic's penetrating interpretation of Werfel's Verdi. Regarding the novel as a series of duets between Verdi and the novel's other key characters works convincingly. In particular, her treatment of Verdi's extended conversations with the centenarian Senator, Fischböck, the singer Mario, and Dario, the old porter at the opera house, portray Verdi as a committed composer eager to engage others during his incognito two-month stay in Venice during the winter of 1882/83. Baghdassarians's interpretation is so telling that the reader wants even more in her...