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Once Misjudged and Banned: Promoting the Musical Heritage in the GDR and Discourse Surrounding the 1959 Felix Mendelssohn Festwoche
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2019
Abstract
In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn's place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn's life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR – Georg Knepler – to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist–Leninist) account of the significance of the composer's music to East German audiences.
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Footnotes
Research for this article was supported by the DAAD and New York University. I thank Barbara Wiermann and Nicole Höppner at the archives of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, Jörg-Uwe Fischer at the archives of the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Potsdam, and Werner Grünzweig, Director of the Music Division of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, for generously facilitating my research. Portions of this article were first presented at the fifty-fourth annual conference of the Royal Musical Association in Bristol (September 2018), at the eighty-first annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Louisville (November 2015), and at a Pacific-Southwest chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society in Riverside, California (September 2015). I wish to thank the audience members at those presentations, Stanley Boorman, Michael Beckerman, Martin Daughtry, Michael Gallope, David Samuels, Stephen Bero, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their invaluable comments and criticism.
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