1 This paper was conceived in part as a response to Dahlhaus's essay ‘Avant-Garde and Popularity’, where a distinction is drawn between intentionally ‘functional’ music and a Beethoven symphony, where ‘the functional element, even if it should happen to predominate in socio-psychological terms, remains extraneous to the object .. in aesthetic terms’ (Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge, 1987), 29).Google Scholar

2 When the first version of this paper was read at the RMA conference ‘Music in the Market-Place’ in Oxford, April 1988, the proximity of the name of Hanslick and the subsequent reference to ‘reactionary critics’ led Dr Bojan Bujić rightly to assume that Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (first published 1854) was being referred to, and to point out that Hanslick does not present a simplistically conservative argument there. I accept this point but remain specifically interested in the tone of Hanslick's hostile reference to Wagner's ‘intoxicating effect of opium’ in the 1885 preface (see Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans Gustav Cohen (Indianapolis, 1957), 6); in his suggestion that, by comparison with those of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, some of Verdi's and Donizetti's themes seem ‘fit only for low music-halls’ (Ibid., 125; German: ‘in der Kneipe sind’); and in Hanslick's careful distinction in Chapter III between the art historian's interest in a determining historical context and the nevertheless autonomous concerns of the ‘aesthetic inquirer’ (Ibid., 62–3).Google Scholar

3 Debussy, Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater, trans. B. N. Langdon Davies, Three Classics in the Aesthetics of Music (New York, 1962), 8.Google Scholar

4 From the conclusion of ‘New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea’, in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (London, 1951), 50–1.Google Scholar

5 The reference is to Music and Society The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge, 1987), and specifically to the review of it by Nicholas Temperley in The Musical Times, 128 (December 1987), 685–6Google Scholar

6 References by English writers to this controversy have tended to give the impression that it was primarily one between Pfitzner and Alban Berg. Hans Keller does so in Criticism (London, 1987), 28 Mosco Carner (The Musical Times, 118 (May 1977), 379–80) does deal with Bekker, although even his article was entitled 'Pfitzner v. BergGoogle Scholar

7 The article, entitled “The Present Cult – Charlatanism and Humbug in Music', is reprinted in A Delius Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (London, 1980). The quotation is the beginning of the article, p 37Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 127.Google Scholar

9 Pfitzner, Hans, Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz (Munich, 1920) Here and elsewhere, translations are my own, unless otherwise statedGoogle Scholar

10 Translated into English by Mildred M. Bozman as Paul Bekker, Beethoven (London, 1925).Google Scholar

11 Weber, William, Music and the Middle Class The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London, 1975).Google Scholar

12 Bekker, Paul, Das deutsche Musikleben (Berlin, 1916 and 1919).Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 11.Google Scholar

14 Bekker, Beethoven, 61–2.Google Scholar

15 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Manchester, 1984), xxiii.Google Scholar

16 I use here the translation by Hans Keller, significantly rescued from Keller's 1968 The Listener article on Palestrina by Julian Hogg, the editor of Criticism (see above, note 6), where it will be found on p. 82.Google Scholar

17 Pfitzner, Die neue Aesthetik, 57.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 45Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 109.Google Scholar

20 The article is printed in translation in Willi Reich, The Life and Work of Alban Berg, trans. Cornelius Cardew (London, 1965), 205–18 See also Berg's letter to Schoenberg of 9 July 1920 (The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey and Donald Harris (London, 1987), 281–2 and n 9).Google Scholar

21 I paraphrase the passage quoted scornfully by Berg at the outset of his article In the original, PFitzner speaks in general terms of inspired melody as ‘so mystisch und selbstverständlich wie die Wahrheit’ (Pfitzer, Die neue Aesthetik, 65).Google Scholar

22 See Webern, Anton, The Path to the New Mustc, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (London, [1975?]), 56.Google Scholar

23 Schenker, Heinrich, Der freie Satz, translated as Free Composition by Ernst Oster (New York and London, 1979), Introduction, p xxiGoogle Scholar

24 Translated by Orin Grossmann in Readings in Schenher Analysis and Other Approaches, ed. Maury Yeston (New Haven and London, 1977), 38–53.Google Scholar

25 See Franklin, Peter, The Idea of Music (London, 1985), 117ffGoogle Scholar

26 See Pfitzner, , Die neue Aesthetik, 114Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 125Google Scholar

28 See Bekker, Paul, Franz Schreher – Studie zur Kritik der modernen Oper (1918) (repr, Aachen, 1983), 14. The original, written in 1918, was published in Berlin in 1919 by Schuster & LoefflerGoogle Scholar

29 The text appeared in Quasi una Fantasia and will be found in Theodor W Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, xvi: Musikalische Schriften, I-III, ed Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfun am Main, 1978), 368–81.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 375Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 380.Google Scholar

32 Adorno believed that in this music ‘the representation of the inarticulate becomes itself inarticulate’ (Ibid., 378)Google Scholar

33 Hört auf Hans Pfitzner' – Kemsàtze deutscher Kunstgesinnung aus setner Schriften und Reden, ed. Alfred Morgenroth (Berlin, 1938)Google Scholar

34 Schrott, Ludwig, Hans Pfitzner, Schriftenreihe des Amtes Kulturgemeinde der N.S Gemeinschaft ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (Berlin-Halensee, [post-1937]).Google Scholar

35 See Keller, , Criticism, 28–9.Google Scholar

36 Bu̇rger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 3.Google Scholar