The Musicologist as Historian and Patriot: Imagining National Identity with the Musical Past in Modern Austria

Abstract

For a country like Austria that had six official names and four national anthems just within the first half of the twentieth century, how can its collective memory and identity be anything but vague and disputed? In her desperate search for national identity, native musicologists with patriotic concern have inevitably engaged the musical past to imagine her continuity and distinction. Yet this issue is somehow marginalized in recent studies such as Most German of the Arts (1998) and Music and German National Identity (2002), although it is exactly Austria's German identity that has been so controversial. Two major and contrasting approaches in the historiographical writings since 1918 can be observed, and each not without its own difficulties. First, the essentialist approach, with ”Austrian Music” as its subject matter-but should the Austrianness in music be determined by formal essence or just by being composed by an Austrian, and Austrian by jus soli, jus sanguinis, or naturalization? Second, the territorial approach, concentrating on ”Music in Austria”-but should all those former Hapsburg territories be neglected? Nevertheless, this study attempts a critical and yet empathic reading of music historiography in twentieth-century Austria, and does not share Carl Dahlhaus' repeated objection to the whole project (1977, 80, 84). Although his skepticism, that a music history of Austria confined to the present national border could do justice to all historical and aesthetic circumstances, is quite sensible, it is insensitive for a German musicologist to disregard his Austrian colleagues' legitimate desire for participation in the nation-building process. In facing the problem of identity, we would rather invoke Wittgenstein's notion of ”family resemblances” (1953) to imagine identity without essentializing, and Charles Taylor's ”politics of recognition” (1992) to embrace differences without appropriating.