Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina and the Impotence of Early Lateness

Abstract

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.