Karl Kraus and Music Criticism: The Case of Max Kalbeck

Abstract

Any discussion of Vienna in early decades of twentieth century is bound to include mention of Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Indeed, he has even been described as greatest figures of Viennese fin de si&cle.l His sharp-eyed, and equally sharp-tongued, criticism of decaying culture of late-imperial Vienna reads as particularly telling to a posterity that knows how near both empire and culture were to their fall. The insanity that was World War I is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in The Last Days of Mankind. In light of his concern for language and its relationship with ethics, Kraus's critique of use of language by largely liberal broadsheets of his day is accorded a particular authority. Such, indeed, is Kraus's posthumous authority that, if he exempted Robert Hirschfeld (1857-1914) from his attacks or characterized Max (1850-1921) as exemplifying the vacuousness and pretentiousness of Viennese cultural journalism,2 such reputations have tended to stick. While numerous studies of Kraus's vast and varied output exist, however, his opinions of music critics have been largely allowed to rest on authority accorded him on account of his stature as a satirist and social critic in general. The principal aim of this paper, then, is as simple as its method: to investigate Kraus's authority as a judge of music critics by testing his most sustained attack on a particular music critic, Der Fall Kalbeck of 1904, against actual published criticisms to which he referred and in light of such other documentary and historical information as may be brought to bear in reconstructing intellectual and political context of debate. Although himself not particularly musical, Kraus included music critics among journalists whom he saw fit to attack in his periodical, Die Fackel. In particular, he attacked music critics of liberal broadsheets of widest circulation, Neue Freie Presse and Neues Wiener Tagblatt. These were, initially, Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904) and Max Kalbeck. Kraus was maliciously delighted to notice, in 1903, that a copy of latter's Wiener Opernabende (1898), with an inscription in author's hand to former, was for sale in an antiquarian book shop.3 Hanslick's reasons for giving up what was presumably a gift from its