This chapter examines the ways in which two neglected works in the Middle English tradition, Horn Childe and John Lydgate's Gy de Warwyke, engage with conventions that might be more readily associated with medieval epic than with romance. Both of these works have been categorised as romances and belong to what modern scholars have designated the ‘Matter of England’; as such, they have significant investment in historical events and offer some parallels to the ‘Matter of France’. The latter body of narratives, of course, forms the main subject matter of the French vernacular epic mode, the chansons de geste. Horn Childe and Lydgate's Gy de Warwyke are both part of wider insular traditions that appear to go back to original works in Anglo-Norman. In each case, those Anglo-Norman works have affiliations with the chansons de geste, which have been acknowledged by a number of scholars. However, far less attention has been paid to the impact of epic elements on adaptations in Middle English. It seems to me that Horn Childe and Lydgate's Gy de Warwyke not only carry over epic conventions and values already embedded in their respective narrative traditions but actually heighten such elements and add further ones of their own invention. These two texts engage with the interface between romance and epic in active and, at certain moments, innovative ways.

Previous discussions of Horn Childe and Gy de Warwyke tend to place these works in dialogue with chronicle writing, rather than with epic. Matthew Holford's extensive analysis of Horn Childe concludes that in this work the ‘imperatives of historical writing are combined to an unusual degree with the conventions of romance’. Gy de Warwyke's most recent editor, Pamela Varvolden, adds a further category to the mix, observing that the text ‘mingles characteristics of the genres of history, romance, and saint's life’. This tendency to turn to ‘history’ (or, less frequently, hagiography) as the most obvious generic alterative to ‘romance’ reflects a more widespread convention in discussion of insular romance. The term ‘epic’ is rarely employed as a conceptual category in discussions of Middle English works. There seem to be two primary reasons for this. Firstly, ‘epic’ is, if possible, an even vaguer designation than ‘romance’. Secondly, the epic mode is very firmly associated with the pre-Conquest literary landscape.

William of Palerne, otherwise known more engagingly as William and the Werewolf, survives in Middle English in only one manuscript, but it was much more widely known than that would suggest. The romance was originally composed in continental French in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, for a ‘countess Yolande’, probably a countess of Hainault who died c. 1212. The mid-fourteenth-century Middle English translation – and despite its chosen form of alliterative rather than rhymed verse, it frequently comes closer to being a translation than the kind of free adaptation made of many French or Anglo-Norman romances into English – was composed, as the translator (himself called William) tells us, for a grandson of Edward I, Humphrey de Bohun, sixth earl of Hereford, who died in 1361. Both these versions, the French and the English, were printed in prose renderings in the sixteenth century. The French prose, based on the original Guillaume, was produced some time before 1535, and went through a number of editions into the seventeenth century. It was preceded by the English prose, printed around 1515 by Wynkyn de Worde complete with woodcuts. This survives in the form of only two leaves from near the end of the story, though that is sufficient to demonstrate that, exceptionally among prose romances, it was based on the Middle English poem, not on any French version. Those leaves are also enough to show that it was the immediate source of the Irish Eachtra Uilliam, ‘the deeds of William’ (or, as one might put it in a more medieval formulation, the Gesta Guilielmi). It was composed probably towards the end of the sixteenth century for the high-ranking Anglo-Irish Dillon family of county Mayo. This version too is predominantly in prose but, like many Irish romances, it also contains a number of inset lais such as are recurrently found in other Irish romances, but apparently never elsewhere in one translated from another language. All of these, except for the French prose, survive in only a single copy. The rest of this chapter will focus primarily on three of those various texts, the octosyllabic French, the alliterative English, and the prose with interspersed verse of the Irish; but, taken together with the printed prose versions, they indicate how attractive the story was found across a range of cultures, languages, and prosodic forms into the early modern period.

Typical Scriabin. When Aleksandr Gol’denveĭzerregistered this account in his memoirs, he could notat the time comprehend the full import of thedescribed events; the composer's ‘method’ wouldbecome the Holy Grail to the music theoreticalcommunity. For the following decades, pitchconstruction would be the focus of those engagingwith the theoretical and analytical aspects ofScriabin's music with issues of form and rhythmbarely getting a look-in. Even more remarkable isthe fact that, despite the numerous – and on severaloccasions rather illuminating – articles and bookson the matter, there is still an ongoing debateabout the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ that characterise thecomposer's late style.

This chapter appraises the history and historiographyof the theoretical literature that refers toScriabin's late (post-tonal) style as well as thetransitional period since, in some respects, itprefigures aspects of compositional practice foundin the post Op. 58 repertory. Scriabin's‘post-tonal’ period lasted for no more than sixyears, a timeframe scarcely proportional to theamount of attention it has received. Scriabinhimself was notoriously parsimonious about hismethod of pitch organization, even to close friendssuch as Sabaneev. Interestingly, it took more thansix decades after the composer's death to unearthhis primary pitch resources, and the debatescontinue. To understand why, one needs to tell thestory from its beginning. In actual fact, from thebeginnings, sinceScriabin's historiographical chronicle comprisesmultiple narratives largely unfolded on at least twocontinents. The search of this origin takes us backto a group of Russian/Soviet musicologists, namelyBoleslav Iavorskiĭ, Leonid Sabaneev, and, muchlater, Varvara Dernova, as well as interestedparties in Britain such as Arthur EaglefieldHull.

ISSUES SURROUNDING THE REACTION to and reception of the Holocaust in post-war Germany are complex, owing to the differing politics in East and West Germany and, more recently, the reunified Federal Republic of Germany. The ideological differences between the East and the West far outweighed their geographical proximity and provided two contrasting outlooks on the Holocaust. During the initial postwar decades, the Holocaust was not the focus of much scholarly enquiry worldwide, suggesting that there was not an immediate engagement with the past. Later, debates emerged about how best to engage with the Holocaust in the Germanies, and more broadly in terms of the Germans’ coming to terms with their past, or Vergangenheitsbewältigung. This culminated in West Germany in the late 1980s with the Historikerstreit: a major public debate between left- and right-wing intellectuals, resulting from years of Vergangenheitsbewältigung discourse.

This essay examines the music used in filmic responses to the Holocaust from East and West Germany. The significantly differing musical scores from the two case studies, Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, East Germany, 1974) and Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, a Film from Germany, West Germany/France/UK, 1977), are analyzed and examined in relation to their political and filmic contexts and confines. The two case studies are not intended to be representative of the two countries and their film studios but have been selected for the unique way they each use music to represent their shared National Socialist history.

East Germany

The history of East German cinema has been described as convoluted, contradictory, paradoxical, and complicated: both fascinating and sobering. Films were oftentimes confined by the doctrines of socialism, and at other times enjoyed periods of thaw, whereby restrictions upon the artistic license and creativity of filmmakers were relaxed slightly. East Germany's engagement with the National Socialist past on screen resulted in some memorable films. Largely responsible for this success was DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state-owned East German film company that produced over 750 films during four and a half decades of operation.

Punk Covers

IN THE EARLY YEARS, punk rock was concerned neither with political lyrics nor with cover versions. Punk's infamous performative: “This a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band,” first published in a fanzine called “Sideburns,” asks people to create and perform their own songs instead of reenacting well-known tunes. While the aesthetics of early punk rock was not determined by political manifestos, they nonetheless incorporated this kind of practice that would soon become famous as Do it yourself ethics. However, at the starting point of the second wave of punk around 1978 political lyrics became more popular in West German punk rock. Influenced by such bands as Crass—England's infamous Anarcho-punk ensemble—several German punk groups began to perform political messages by means of their lyrics. The text rather than the sound was the message. Since most lyrics of punk songs were written by the bands themselves, it was rather unusual to play cover versions. There are, however, some notable examples of political cover songs in the history of punk rock. These kinds of cover songs were mostly used to give credit to a certain tradition of political songwriting, thereby establishing an intertextual relation between original and cover version. In this essay, I will examine the transtextual structure of punk cover versions in order to highlight the performativity of the songs. I will argue that lyrics play an important role in punk covers, and that most cover songs by punk bands make use of parody, pastiche, or other forms of transtextuality, thereby transforming rock music into performative politics. In this respect, most punk covers differ from the common practice of covering. This can be observed in the recordings of German punk bands as well as in those of bands from the UK or the US which had a strong impact on West German punk rock. But while British or American punk bands such as Sex Pistols or Dead Kennedys often rely on parody as a means of their cover practice, some West German punk combos such as Slime take a different, more earnest approach to pursue their political messages, as will be shown in the following.

FOUR MONTHS AFTER the Proclamation of the German Empire, in the presence of the newly crowned emperor, Richard Wagner took to the stage at the court opera in Berlin to conduct the Kaisermarsch (WWV 104) that he had composed to glorify the accession of Wilhelm I to the throne. “Ausgerechnet Richard Wagner,” the musicologist Sabine Giesbrecht notes, “der in dem ‘Kartätschenprinzen’ von 1848 nicht gerade das Ideal eines Monarchen sah, verfaßt in einer sich überschlagenden Sprache einen Kaisermarsch mit angefügtem Volksgesang, in den alle einstimmen sollen: ‘Heil! Heil dem Kaiser! König Wilhelm!’” (Richard Wagner of all people, who did not exactly consider the “gunhappy prince” of 1848 an ideal monarch, this Richard Wagner pens an effusive imperial march with its final popular chorus, expecting all to join in: “Hail! Hail the Emperor! King Wilhelm!”; example 1). It seems a far cry indeed from the Wagner of 1849 who, from the bell tower of the Kreuzkirche, had provided the insurgents of the May uprising in Dresden with intelligence on the movement of government troops. On the surface, it seems that two decades later the composer had abandoned the ideals of the March Revolutions—the struggle for political participation and national unification—in exchange for imperial pipe dreams and royal favor.

The music of the Kaisermarsch, however, reveals Richard Wagner's ongoing commitment to the political agenda of the influential German middle classes. The integration of a male-voice choir is a case in point, as men's singing associations had become a bulwark of the national-liberal movement over the course of the nineteenth century. The imitation of sacred musical traditions in the Kaisermarsch is equally telling: this practice had also evolved into a popular expression of nationalist sentiment. Above all, however, it is the prominent citation of the Lutheran chorale “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A Mighty Fortress is Our God; example 2) that aligned the Kaisermarsch with the political goals of the March Revolutions.

The reference to Luther is certainly a nod to the Protestant tradition of the House of Hohenzollern, but this connection had lost much of its appeal during the Enlightenment. It was the emerging national-liberal movement, rather than the Prussian monarchy, that resurrected and laid claim to the Lutheran heritage in this era of the burgeoning middle classes.

IN VIKTOR ULLMANN'S 1943/44 opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (The Emperor of Atlantis or Death's Refusal), the tyrannical Kaiser Overall, ruler of Atlantis and other kingdoms, declares a war of all against all. The character Tod (Death), mortally offended by the emperor's presumption that he will serve in this senseless war, refuses to do his job and let people die. When chaos ensues on the battlefields as a result of Tod's refusal, Overall loses his confidence. However, Tod is willing to restore himself to human existence on condition that Overall be the first to die, and the opera ends with Tod leading Overall away.

The act of writing this particular opera under the unimaginable circumstances of life in the Theresienstadt concentration camp is perhaps one of ultimate defiance, and not only because of obvious parallels between the megalomaniacal Kaiser Overall and the equally megalomaniacal Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime of terror. While the opera's libretto is attributed to the politically outspoken and cynical young poet and gifted artist Peter Kien, the extent of his contribution is, in fact, unknown. Parallels in the subject matter between Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung and Ullmann's 1935 opera Der Sturz des Antichrist (The Fall of the Antichrist), a musical adaptation of a play by Albert Steffen (1884–1963), as well as the history of the opera's genesis, suggest that Ullmann is solely responsible for the libretto in the autograph score. Steffen's “dramatische Skizze in drei Akten” (dramatic sketch in three acts) is an illustration of some major anthroposophical tenets with respect to human development, and while Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung does not present itself with the same degree of esoteric exclusivity, anthroposophical implications—however subtle—abound. In fact, I would like to suggest that Ullmann, not known for outspoken political opposition, used his art as a forum to express political defiance through allegory, the often ironic use of numerous literary and musical intertexts, and his (anthroposophically-informed) compositional style—means that would likely have evaded most of the camp's SS officers, but not his fellow prisoners who comprised a significant percentage of the Jewish intelligentsia from Czechoslovakia and other European countries.

IN MANY WAYS, music and politics have always been in a relationship with one another, albeit not always a harmonious, or necessarily a balanced one. The potential(ly negative) influence of music on politics has especially interested thinkers throughout the ages. As early as the fifth century BCE, Plato warned “against innovations in music … counter to the established order,” since “the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.” Plato's student Aristotle follows suit, and discusses music and its role in the polis in his Politics, concluding that music has “a power of forming the character.” He highlights the connections between music and emotions, as well as the manipulative power music can exert: “rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and to the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.” As an effective means of communication that can cause “our souls [to] undergo a change,” music is always inextricably linked to society and its various concerns, and insofar as an individual's character is affected by music, and the individual is part of society, music has an undeniable effect on the political sphere of that society. Music thereby acts as a link between the private and the public spheres, between the personal and the political, which invariably inform and fertilize each other. Richard Taruskin even goes so far as to describe it as “a powerful form of persuasion that does work in the world, a serious art that possesses ethical force and exacts ethical responsibilities.”

MUSIC PLAYED A CENTRAL PART in the utopian thinking of Ernst Bloch. The trumpet call in Beethoven's Fidelio that announces the arrival of the minister and thus the end of all trials and tribulations serves as Bloch's most powerful example of a work of art anticipating how utopian hope can ultimately be fulfilled.

Musicological engagement with Bloch has often focused on what kind of knowledge Bloch had about music, what he had read, what his limitations were, and how he got certain details wrong. Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, first version 1918; second, significantly revised version 1923) has hitherto been the focal point of scholarship, as it engages with music in more detail than Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope, written 1938−47, published 1959). However, this essay will look at music's role within Bloch's political and philosophical thinking, with particular reference to Das Prinzip Hoffnung. It will consider the following questions: Why did Bloch associate music with such a high degree of agency when it comes to evoking or sustaining utopian hope? What is its special potential compared to all the other arts and activities he analyzes? And what does utopian hope as a political and societal concept have to offer in the early twenty-first century? In intellectual circles the proclamation of the end of grand narratives seems to have killed off utopian concepts, while utopian worlds appear to have migrated to the digital universe where they can be accessed individually by role players via avatars. The age of post-truth with its often dangerously nostalgic retro-utopias (“Make America great again!”) could benefit from reengaging with Bloch's more positive, future-oriented hope.

Over the following pages I will first give an outline of Bloch's thinking with regard to music, hope, and utopia before discussing Rita Felski's assessment of critical theory as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (borrowing Paul Ricoeur's term) which turns out to be a much more influential yet also more pessimistic epistemological approach. In a final step I will argue that much of Felski's thinking can be applied equally to post-structuralism or postmodernism, which in turn has fueled the post-truth ideology that poses probably the most dangerous challenge to our political and societal structures right now.

IN THE SUMMER of 1988, the southern German volkstümliche (folksy Schlager) music group the Original Naabtal Duo scored a hit with “Patrona Bavariae” (Bavaria's Patron Saint), their song dedicated to the solace provided by the Virgin Mary and the Bavarian Heimat. Six months later, in February 1989, the year before the erstwhile German colony Namibia gained its independence from South Africa, the Kinderchor der SWAPO (Children's Choir of the South West African People's Organization) performed at the German Democratic Republic's headline Festival des politischen Liedes (Festival of Political Song). Then in 1990, Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (FSK, Voluntary Self-Control), a Munich-based pop group, bridged the two by recording an album titled Son of Kraut. A record made during the Wende (period of German reunification), Son of Kraut was steeped in memory and provocatively played with categories of (a)political music. Amongst other things, Son of Kraut included a version of the national anthem of the by now defunct GDR, as well as a new song called “Patrona Namibiae” (Namibia's Patron Saint). The latter was effectively a pop history of the former German colony, but clearly referenced the Original Naabtal Duo's Heimat song “Patrona Bavariae.” This essay draws together these various enactments of music, memory, and politics. I argue that FSK's popular music focused new, ambivalent attention on the expanding German Heimat, as well as on Germany's troubled extraterritorial past. It did so in ways that were political whilst eschewing seemingly outmoded concepts of music and politics that had been in circulation during the folk revival of the 1960s, as well as in 1980s’ ideas of “Rock against Racism,” or the GDR's ritualization of political song. This essay throws light on how popular music like FSK's could act as a political memory culture in a way that is not yet sufficiently analyzed in the context of the field of Memory Studies, especially in Germany.

German Music and Politics around 1990

Popular music has contributed at various points to “identifying social problems, alienation and oppression, and facilitating the sharing of a collective vision,” and has been intimately connected with social movements, including during the 1960s’ folk music revival. Music has also been actively employed in order to advance political causes, not least during the Cold War.

Ney's Troubling Legacy Today

ONE OF THE HAUNTING QUESTIONS addressing the role of musicians during the tumultuous period from World War I to the Third Reich concerns the deeply troubling but also highly ambiguous relationship between their musical sensibilities and their political ideologies. As Fred K. Prieberg notes, the history of musical activities during the National Socialist period is replete with composers and performers whose careers were marked by political compromises, betrayals, willful repression of memory, and biographical falsifications. The pianist Elly Ney (1882–1968) is a case in point. Ney promoted herself as an ultimate authority of German classical music, especially of the music of Beethoven, which she regarded as the heroic revelation of a religious mystery transcending rational analysis and demanding a performance style dogmatically faithful to the score and the composer's intentions. The rigor of this artistic self-fashioning tallies suspiciously with Ney's political dogmas. In a double biography of Ney and the young pianist Karlrobert Kreiten (1916–43), a highly promising artist who was executed after making several critical remarks about Hitler and the war, Hans Hinterkeuser has documented the astonishing extent to which Ney fanatically and self-righteously aligned herself with National Socialist politics to promote her own career and fame. Beate Angelika Kraus attributes three factors to Ney's enthusiasm for the Hitler regime: her profiting from the Beethoven mania in all areas of culture, politics, and society during the National Socialist period; her eagerness to reach a wide mass audience including workers, young people, soldiers, prisoners, and refugees; and her obsessive vanity and desire for recognition.

Born in 1882 in Düsseldorf, Ney became an indefatigable concert pianist famous throughout Europe and the United States. Cultivating the contradictory façade of an artist presumably only dedicated to the pure realm of classical music and yet ferociously engaged in politics, Ney was appointed professor of piano by Hitler in 1937 and was a member of several Nazi organizations. She unabashedly confessed to having been deeply moved by the immense power of a Hitler speech, endorsed the public burnings of books staged by the Nazis, displayed racist sentiments, and promoted Beethoven festivals in Bonn for mass audiences under the auspices of the Nazis, although she collided with the organizers’ programming policies.

“VOLK EILT HERZU” (The people rush in): This laconic stage direction in the penultimate scene of Beethoven's Fidelio (1805, revised 1814) offers great potential for identification precisely insofar as this “Volk,” what it is and what it does, its association with the profound ideals and longings articulated in the music and especially the choral passages, can be endlessly reinterpreted. Hence Fidelio's appropriation across the political spectrum in the last two centuries. “Volk eilt herzu”—the literal and symbolic arrival of the people, of the masses—this, no less than Leonore's inspirational loyalty to Florestan, shaped the circumstances of and response to the opera's production and performance at a key time and place in the GDR's final phase, namely Dresden on October 7 and 8, 1989. This is the focus of the first part of this essay. The second part consists of a brief reflection on this production's thirty-year survival in the repertoire in Dresden. Insofar as it forms the production's material and symbolic environment, this is itself a stage for the contests for meaning and ownership of the term “Volk” in a new age of populism. The “Volk” is a German lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora's sense, both multifaceted and notoriously vague, indeed often unthinkingly employed. Moreover, “Volk” as cultural or racial collective both overlaps and clashes with “Volk” as source and site of democratic impulses or grassroots refusal. The “Volk” of the 1989 Dresden Fidelio, whether at the time or thirty years later, needs to be understood in this landscape.

Dresden on October 7–8, 1989, and Fidelio at the Semperoper

On October 9, 1989, the special edition of Neues Deutschland celebrating the state's fortieth birthday declared: “Die Entwicklung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik wird … das Werk des ganzen Volkes sein” (The development of the German Democratic Republic will be the achievement of the whole people). Meanwhile, though, the “Volk” was giving this rhetoric a content very different to that intended by the SED. By no means all the people were protesting, and even those who were wanted notably different things. Nonetheless, the “Volk” proceeded to disturb the celebrations decisively, some by crowding onto the streets, that is, onto the stage that the state had hitherto monopolized, and some by seeking to exit not just this stage, but the state itself.