Performing ‘Art for the People’: Politics, Spectatorship, and Schoenberg’s Music at the Berlin VolksbÜhne

Abstract

ABSTRACT In early 1920, a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony sponsored by the Berlin Volksbühne (People’s Theatre) set off a dialogue of remarkable vehemence and duration in the musical press. Writing as spectators of what they imagined to be a working-class audience, professional music critics framed the event as a musical performance that itself was a carefully staged piece of political theatre. Their accounts detail and debate the use of casting, symbols, and rituals to enact a ‘leftist’ agenda in which Schoenberg’s music was not the subversive project of a radical few, but a legitimate exemplar of ‘art for the people’—the motto of the Volksbühne. By engaging with the recent ‘performative turn’ in studies of the Weimar Republic, this article presents a rich microhistory of this experimental concert and its afterlife in the press, revealing vital connections to broader practices of political performativity in Weimar democracy.