the eyes dazed, absent, listening, all at once; he had stared at them, they got the impression that he had come out of a life-and-death struggle with all the opposing hosts of counterpoint. He had stammered something unintelligible, and then burst out complaining and scolding at the fine kind of housekeeping he had, and how everybody had run away and left him to starve. They had tried to pacify him, one of them helped him to put his clothing to rights, the other ran to the inn to get him some solid food… Only three years later was the Mass finished.
Thus Kretschmar, on “Beethoven and the Fugue”; and certainly it gave us matter for talk on the way home-ground too for being silent together and for vague and silent reflection upon the new, the far, and the great, which sometimes glibly running on, sometimes appallingly impeded, had penetrated into our souls. I say into ours, but it is of course only Adrian’s that I have in mind. What I heard, what I took in, is quite irrelevant.
What principally impressed him, as I heard while we were walking home, and also next day in the school courtyard, was Kretschmar’s distinction between cult epochs and cultural epochs, and his remark that the secularization of art, its separation from divine service, bore only a superficial and episodic character. The pupil of the upper school appeared to be struck by the thought, which the lecturer had not expressed at all but had kindled in him, that the separation of art from the liturgical whole, its liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive, had laden it with an irrelevant solemnity, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering, which was imaged in Beethoven’s frightful apparition in the doorway, and which did not need to be its abiding destiny, its permanent intellectual constitution. Hearken to the youth! Still almost without any real or practical experience in the field of art, he speculated in the void and in precocious language on the probably imminent retreat from its present role to a more modest, happier one in the service of a higher union, which did not need to be, as it once was, the Church. What it would be he could not say. But that the cultural idea was a historically transitory phenomenon, that it could lose itself again in another one, that the future did not inevitably belong to it, this thought he had certainly singled out from Kretschmar’s lecture.
“But the alternative,” I threw in, “to culture is barbarism.”
“Permit me,” said he. “After all, barbarism is the opposite of culture only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something quite different or no opposite at all.”
I imitated Luca Cimabue, saying: “Santa Maria!” and crossing myself. He gave his short laugh. Another time he asserted: “For a cultural epoch, there seems to me to be a spot too much talk about culture in ours, don’t you think? I’d like to know whether epochs that possessed culture knew the word at all, or used it. Naivete, unconsciousness, taken-for-grantedness, seems to me to be the first criterion of the constitution to which we give this name. What we are losing is just this naivete, and this lack, if one may so speak of it, protects us from many a colourful barbarism which altogether perfectly agreed with culture, even with very high culture. I mean: our stage is that of civilization—a very praiseworthy state no doubt, but also neither was there any doubt that we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again. Technique and comfortin that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization—in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture?”
In such talk, with which he teased and irritated me, there was much that was merely imitative. But he had a way of adapting what he picked up
Thus Kretschmar, on “Beethoven and the Fugue”; and certainly it gave us matter for talk on the way home-ground too for being silent together and for vague and silent reflection upon the new, the far, and the great, which sometimes glibly running on, sometimes appallingly impeded, had penetrated into our souls. I say into ours, but it is of course only Adrian’s that I have in mind. What I heard, what I took in, is quite irrelevant.
What principally impressed him, as I heard while we were walking home, and also next day in the school courtyard, was Kretschmar’s distinction between cult epochs and cultural epochs, and his remark that the secularization of art, its separation from divine service, bore only a superficial and episodic character. The pupil of the upper school appeared to be struck by the thought, which the lecturer had not expressed at all but had kindled in him, that the separation of art from the liturgical whole, its liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive, had laden it with an irrelevant solemnity, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering, which was imaged in Beethoven’s frightful apparition in the doorway, and which did not need to be its abiding destiny, its permanent intellectual constitution. Hearken to the youth! Still almost without any real or practical experience in the field of art, he speculated in the void and in precocious language on the probably imminent retreat from its present role to a more modest, happier one in the service of a higher union, which did not need to be, as it once was, the Church. What it would be he could not say. But that the cultural idea was a historically transitory phenomenon, that it could lose itself again in another one, that the future did not inevitably belong to it, this thought he had certainly singled out from Kretschmar’s lecture.
“But the alternative,” I threw in, “to culture is barbarism.”
“Permit me,” said he. “After all, barbarism is the opposite of culture only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something quite different or no opposite at all.”
I imitated Luca Cimabue, saying: “Santa Maria!” and crossing myself. He gave his short laugh. Another time he asserted: “For a cultural epoch, there seems to me to be a spot too much talk about culture in ours, don’t you think? I’d like to know whether epochs that possessed culture knew the word at all, or used it. Naivete, unconsciousness, taken-for-grantedness, seems to me to be the first criterion of the constitution to which we give this name. What we are losing is just this naivete, and this lack, if one may so speak of it, protects us from many a colourful barbarism which altogether perfectly agreed with culture, even with very high culture. I mean: our stage is that of civilization—a very praiseworthy state no doubt, but also neither was there any doubt that we should have to become very much more barbaric to be capable of culture again. Technique and comfortin that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization—in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture?”
In such talk, with which he teased and irritated me, there was much that was merely imitative. But he had a way of adapting what he picked up
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