“Music mattered” (270). So Karen Painter demonstrates in her study of the symphony in German-speaking Europe during the early twentieth century. This is not a history of compositions per se; Painter's aim is “to recover the listening habits and aesthetic values … writers [critics and biographers] aspired to instill in the public, along with the political and cultural values they passionately believed were at stake and at risk” (2). Her concentration on Germanic culture is hardly arbitrary: the symphony was regarded as its crown jewel and stood for an ideal.

Painter begins at the fin de siècle, when the symphonic tradition (defined largely by Beethoven) collided with modernism. A major theme is the discourse of Entartung and how critics interpreted symphonies as symptom (e.g., Gustav Mahler's Third) or antidote (Anton Bruckner's Fourth). Indeed, the Catholic Anton Bruckner and Jewish Gustav Mahler were charged poles. Owing to his traditional forms and choral textures, Bruckner was “the most German among Austrian composers” and “useful to the majority of Austrians who wished for annexation to Germany” (17). Conversely, Mahler's “eccentric polyphony” (54), in the words of Viennese critic Theodor Helm, unconventional forms, and novel orchestration branded him a scourge for all but the most progressive writers. Painter outlines the “ominous” (109) associations: attention to surfaces, sensual, feminine, foreign, unhealthy, Jewish.

Part two concerns the period 1914–1933. Painter illuminates how an emphasis on “intensity of closure” (78) resonated with the worldview during wartime, when the Romantic per aspera ad astra (through adversity to the stars) symphonic archetype conveyed “fullness and force at once” (158). A symphony could not only serve as a musical call to arms, but also as a metaphor aestheticizing battle. Liberal critics continued to favor Mahler, whose Sixth Symphony drew inspiration from the vitalism of Nietzsche and Bergson. Illustrating that Bruckner appealed to nationalists, Painter charts the rise of spatial listening: Bruckner draws “the listener … into motivic processes,” but does not “undermine the larger pillars of the overarching structure. Architecture, finally, replaces drama” (197). Thereby, Bruckner's oeuvre represented a return to objectivity and order. Painter sees this, too, as portentous: “The aesthetic experience sought by so many commentators … aimed at collective exaltation. … Fascist ideologues would need little help in developing a discourse of spatiality that sought to transcend time, aspiring to control more space than any European empire since antiquity” (197).

In part three, on Nazism, Painter goes productively against the grain. She argues that “references to heroism and violence, strength and unity were more important in symphony criticism after World War I than during the Third Reich,” and although “National Socialism ushered in extremes of political rhetoric, [it] did not finally strengthen the role of music as cultural ideology or propaganda” (4). Ironically, the tradition of criticism that delivered music to Fascism was a threat. “With guidance from a reviewer,” Painter explains, “a listener must finally reexperience the energy of musical sound and the power of musical form on his own terms, refuting the political implications of the review” (240). Hence, Goebbels-sanctioned writing about music was limited to reportage and biography that did not “find metaphors that bridged musical experience to life itself” (260).

By the 1930s, the symphony as “musical form” was eclipsed by “the idea of the genre” (243). Enter Paul Hindemith's Symphonie “Mathis der Maler” and Carl Orff's Carmina burana, neither of which are symphonies. Recounting attempts to salvage prestige—musical and political—as the loss of the symphony (and Reich) was imminent, Painter reveals how Orff's work undertook the “ritualistic and affirmative vocation” expected of symphonies and was “celebrated as ‘symphonic’” (243). Carmina burana is an end run around the nineteenth-century symphony: it “absolved the listener … from an active listening that necessitated musical work, such as following complex counterpoint or perceiving thematic development, as had long been requisite of serious German music, for Bildung.” (265).

Painter is only partially successful in “recover[ing] … listening habits” (2); it remains a question to what extent writers actually listened. Often, preconceptions about composers inflected one's experience of their music—in reviews, one symphony could replace another with only trivial revisions to details. Mahler's Seventh was at once an anti-modern reinvestment in per aspera ad astra and “decadent” (116). And Austrian Socialists ushered Bruckner into interwar politics before Fascists co-opted him. Still, Painter's exposure of musical compositions as tabulae rasae reminds us that “music” in the abstract is often more powerful than real “abstract” music.