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Jahrbuch der Musikwelt

(Bayreuth, 1949/1950)

Prepared by Peter Sühring
Online only (2025)

Only a single volume, with the inscription “1st year 1949/50,” of the Jahrbuch der Musikwelt (RIPM code JDM, also subtitled in English and French) was published in Bayreuth by Julius Steeger. It comprised 698 pages and was divided into two large sections. The first, with almost 300 pages, comprised essays on musical history (pp. 1-57), bibliographical contributions (pp. 58-191), so-called “small contributions” (pp. 192-207), and a 90-page essay described as the “main contribution” (pp. 208-98). The second section contained bibliographies, indexes and statistics. All articles were printed in a full-page format but all indexes and lists, except shorter summations or introductory articles and bibliographies, which were printed in columns. Although all headings in the reference section were reproduced in three languages (German, English, French), texts were printed in German only. Scattered throughout the yearbook were advertisements from music publishers, institutions, and individual artists, grouped together in blocks over several pages.

The journal was edited by Herbert Barth (1910-1998) and Richard Schaal (1922-2009). Barth was a music writer who organized the Weeks for New Music in Bayreuth in 1947 and founded the Institute for New Music and Music Education, which organized two working conferences on new music in education and youth and new music in 1948/49. From 1952 to 1976 he was press spokesman for the Bayreuth Festival. He developed the course and the thematic structure of the Jahrbuch and justified them in his foreword. Schaal was a music writer, editor at Bayerischer Rundfunk, librarian, and worked as a bibliographer and source researcher. For the Jahrbuch, he wrote a table of contemporary composers since 1880, a list of musicological dissertations in Germany 1885-1948, a bibliographic article on music dictionaries and a review of various newly-published music dictionaries.

Contributors to the journal included Marcel Beaufils (1899-1985) on French music since 1944; Hermann Keller (1885-1967) with a short portrait of Albert Schweitzer; Axel Kjerulf (1884-1964) on musical life in Copenhagen in the years 1945-1948; Hans Joachim Moser (1889-1967) with the 90-page principal article, on the German-American music theorist Bernhard Ziehn as a representative of a Thuringian musical culture directed against Prussia; Eberhard Preußner (1899-1964) provided a somewhat tendentious description of the musical life of the city of Salzburg after 1945; Hans Rosenwald (1907-1988) explored modern music in 1949 and its cultivation in America; Hans Rutz (1909-ca.1970) wrote on opera and concerts in Vienna from 1945 to 1948; Karl Vötterle (1903-1975), music publisher and founder and director of the Bärenreiter publishing house in Augsburg/Kassel, was interviewed about his career (without mentioning special circumstances during the rule of the National Socialists); Wieland Wagner (1917-1966) wrote on the house and tradition of the Bayreuth Festival House; Herbert Weitemeyer (1901-1967) contributed a report on his and Herbert Barth's activities in Bayreuth; and Karl Würzburger (1891-1978) provided a report on the performances of European baroque operas in the reopened Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth.

Excepting the main article by Moser, almost all articles in this ambitious yearbook deal with the upheaval in musical life after the end of the Second World War and the question, particularly important for Germany, of catching up with developments in new music outside of Germany. However, the definition of new music is vague because, in the editors' view, it includes the anachronistic offshoots of the nineteenth-century concept of music represented by Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner. No critical response to their anti-modern and anti-Semitic attitude is noted. A focus is given to educational questions to eliminate resistance to new music, which was perceived to form from a lack of understanding, especially among young people. The descriptions of the reawakening musical life in Bayreuth, Germany, and other parts of the world strive for continuity and justify the necessary connection to earlier traditions. Criticisms of the National Socialist concept of art were ignored. Moser's contribution on Bernhard Ziehn, a forgotten music theorist and publicist of the nineteenth century who was a propagandist of the New German movement in the United States and influenced Busoni's arrangements of Bach's keyboard works, is an exception.

The documentary, lexical, bibliographic, and statistical sections of the yearbook build on the music bibliographic efforts of the Austrian yearbook of 1904-13, as well as the yearbooks of the Bückeburg and Berlin State Institutes, although ambitions for global documentation chronological continuity were unable to be realized.

This single yearbook is a typical example of the transition period after 1945, in which certain well-intentioned and well-meaning sections of musicians and music journalists in Germany attempted to achieve a revival and revitalization of musical life in a modern sense by building on the tendencies and efforts for new music before 1933, such as singing and youth movements as well as the “New Objectivity,” and by connecting to the worldwide non-German developments.

This RIPM Index was created from a copy held by the University of Maryland, College Park (USA).

 

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