The Paul Bekker Collection in the Yale University Music Library

Abstract

Posterity is not kind to music critics. Their writings are quickly consigned to a limbo reserved for period documents, curiosities of limited perspective whose relative value is gauged against present prejudice; critical missteps are the subject of tittering censure, while insights earn patronizing praise for their prescience. A few critics like Eduard Hanslick stand above their time-bound errors and insights by virtue of the coherence of the aesthetic philosophy revealed in their judgments. Others, like Francois-Joseph Fetis, make such manifold contributions to musical life that their stature as historical figures overshadows any critical shortcomings. By such measures Paul Bekker, arguably the most articulate and influential German critic of the first third of this century, ought to be triply blessed. Not only have the bulk of his critical opinions been affirmed by posterity, but the keen and original intellect informing his judgments and the range of his contributions to the musical life of his time should assure him an important place in music history. And yet Bekker's ideas and activity, like the culture of which they were so integral a part, have been largely buried by the tortuous course of events in our century. To recover any measure of Bekker's stature and relevance therefore requires a patient archaeology that reconstructs from historical artifacts those links that reveal the path of our passage from past to present. During the period of Paul Bekker's critical activity in Europe, roughly 1905 to 1935, a world war, revolutions in communications and transportation technology, and an unprecedented politicization of the arts helped transform the critic's function from a chronicler and arbiter in a relatively stable cultural environment to an active participant in an ongoing debate about the very nature and purpose of art within contested cultural terrain. Bekker's influence extended from the reading public of music lovers to the inner sanctums of cultural power; his interlocutors were the composers, performers, conductors, and administrators -- men and women like Ferruccio Busoni, Luise Dumont, Alfred Einstein, Leo Kestenberg, Ernst Krenek, Franz Schreker, Georg Schunemann, Heinz Tietjen, and Werner Wolffheim -- who shaped German musical life of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, and who themselves increasingly formulated the premises of their works and activities in print. Whenever Paul Bekker took up his pen, whether in writing essays, lectures, books, or private correspondence, he contributed to elevating this often stormy discourse, eschewing polemics for reasoned analysis, prejudice for imaginative insight. In Bekker's passionate engagement in more than three decades of German musical life (including his years of exile in Paris and New York) his voice was that of both a perceptive witness and engaged activist. Born in Berlin on 11 September 1882, Paul Eugen Max Bekker was the only child of Hirsch Nachmann Michel Bekker (1852-?) and Olga Elsner (18??-1943). Bekker's father, a tailor by trade, apparently abandoned his family in 1888 and emigrated to the United States (no further traces of his activities there have yet come to light). Olga Elsner Bekker, who worked in the costume department of the Berlin Court Opera, subsequently married Julius Panse, likewise an employee of the Court Opera. Bekker's musical education included piano studies with Alfred Sormann (1861-1913) and violin instruction with Benno Horwitz (1855-1904) and Fabian Rehfeld (1842-1920). He was professionally active as a violinist before being engaged as a conductor, first in Aschaffenburg (1902/03), then in Gorlitz (1903/04). Upon his return to Berlin he served a year in the military (April 1904 to March 1905) before turning to music journalism. Bekker's articles appeared in a variety of journals and periodicals, and he served as music critic for the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten 1906-09 and the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung 1909-11. …