7. Between the wars

7. Between the wars.

The political implications of the debate over Modernism before 1914 became far more significant after the war. In the interwar years, musical Modernism became allied with progressive and radical left-wing politics. By the mid-1930s, conservative, anti-Modernist compositional aesthetics had become part of the official doctrine of fascism and Soviet communism under Stalin. Nazi ideology (see Nazism) and the Soviet construct of Socialist realism attacked Modernism as anti-nationalist, unnatural, élitist, degenerate, semitic, foreign and subversive. The leading conservative composers in Germany, Pfitzner and Strauss (who sought to craft a synthesis of Modernism and populism), went along with the Nazi regime, as did most of their talented younger colleagues (e.g. Carl Orff and Werner Egk) who explicitly suppressed any evident residual Modernist tendencies. The Russian Modernism of the 1920s and early 30s – the work of Nikolay Roslavets, Aleksandr Mosolov and the young Shostakovich – was suppressed by 1936. In 1938 Modernism was officially banned and declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis (see Entartete Musik). In 1948 Stalin, through the notorious Zhdanov decree, reaffirmed the attitude of the 1930s and once again decried Modernism as exemplary of bourgeois individualism and empty formalism. The irony in the attack by Hitler and Stalin was that by the late 1920s the continuing failure of Modernism to gain a wide audience had led to defections (in terms of compositional practice) within the Modernist camp by composers on the political left, notably Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill. Nonetheless, the close link between fascism and totalitarianism and a reactionary musical aesthetic, as well as the intense ideological campaign against it, lent Modernism a unique prestige and visibility in the 1930s that continued well into the postwar era, in marked contrast to its lack of success with the public.