Although I learned a lot from this book, there is no denying its weaknesses. To dispense with the problems at the outset: Symphonic Aspirations is a very tangled read, sometimes maddeningly so; the writing is murky; there is too little background offered on the people and subjects Painter discusses; the differences and similarities between Austrian and German music cultures are not delineated; context and history enter into the discussion spasmodically; the whole question of text and performance (what were critics reviewing in the newspapers?) is treated weakly. All these things make Symphonic Aspirations a pretty tough slog—probably an impossible one for most undergraduates—but the book still warrants the effort that reading it requires.

Painter's subject is the polarization and politicization of opinion in German and Austrian music newspaper criticism in the early twentieth century. She treats the changing discourse as it relates to different thematic elements she identifies in music writing (structure, progression, coloration, polyphony, etc.) in a broadly chronological way. What she presents is the image of a discursive carapace gradually calcifying: a musical tradition that praised vitalism turning into one that honored violence, critics that began talking about emotion eventually celebrating unreason, writers who cherished order increasingly writing about process. Painter shows how the rhetoric of music criticism transformed itself into ideology. In so doing, Painter succeeds in tracing the strands linking modernism, traditionalism, and even fascism. Anti-Semitism shoots through the polarization of opinion she documents as critics used it to justify their unease over the brutality of modernism before WWI and modernist intellectualism afterward. For conservative music critics, she argues, Jewishness became an explanatory tool in the 1920s when they adopted biography as an instrument of analysis. What all this does, of course, is to show the highly politicized cultural milieu in which fascism developed and to make the surrender of classical musical life to Nazi ideology easier to understand. But more so, it suggests the existence of a Nazi aesthetic: a historically grounded tradition of fascistic art appreciation and criticism. Intriguingly, Painter closes by suggesting that the impact of these developments was to reduce understanding of and confidence in the symphonic form among modern composers. Although the Nazis called on musicians to write great symphonies, by the 1930s few composers knew what the symphony, as a concept, meant.

This is interesting stuff, but most fascinating, to my mind, is Painter's treatment of the critical reception accorded musical modernism before WWI. The book begins with what Painter calls a “crisis of symphonic idealism” as the idea that symphonic music would build cultural understanding and moral virtue fell into disrepute. Denied the foothold that the notion that music created “cultivation” provided, and unsure of the ground, conservative critics simply attacked the symphonic work of modernists such as Mahler and Strauss as calculating, brutal, mechanized, and forced rather than inspirational and organically conflicted. Liberals, in some ways equally adrift, emphasized sensuality, redemption, and pure auditory pleasure of listening to modern symphonic music. Part of what is intriguing in these debates is the way they were politicized after WWI, but they are also interesting in themselves. Painter is deeply attentive to detail, language, and metaphor. She has a nice way of drawing fine distinctions between ideas and making us think anew about the differences they embody: coherence as opposed to unity, organicism in contrast to order, process rather than progression. It is her willingness to reflect on the meanings of words such as these and to link them to broader intellectual trends that makes this first section of the book so thought-provoking. One is prodded to wonder about polyphony and color and cohesiveness and the ways in which modernism created new ways of expressing our appreciation of auditory sensations. Symphonic Aspirations is surely not a clear or coherent read but at its best, it is an interesting one.