Wagner in Dresden (1972)
A monumental volume on Wagner in Dresden initially conveys the impression of a scientific investigation written solely for specialists. However, the reader quickly discovers a compelling book that renders visible a decisive period of Wagner’s life within his environment. No Wagner scholar has ever taken such pains to elucidate details, and even from apparent trivialities, essential insights emerge for a more correct image of Wagner and for decisive corrections thereof.
Since the key to Wagner’s later stance lies in many of the circumstances of the years presented here, the book assumes a central significance for all subsequent Wagner research, which will largely have to align itself with it. Kirchmeyer’s volume constitutes one of the rare examples demonstrating that scholarship of high rank can also be readable for anyone interested in the subject matter.
Easter Edition of the Ruhr Nachrichten Dortmund, April 13, 1974, by H. Gk.
For any future engagement with the person of Richard Wagner, Helmut Kirchmeyer’s situational history of music criticism and the musical press in Germany from the close of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century will be indispensable. The value of this gigantic study can only be estimated in superlatives. Kirchmeyer’s approach is as plausible as it is unusual. Far removed from any essayistic license of speculative conjecture, the author develops the phenomenon of Wagner by stringing document upon document, laying out a mosaic that reconstructs contemporary modes of behavior and reaction in gapless density and relieves the Wagner debate of all polemical priming. Wagner is encircled historically. Kirchmeyer disentangles the felt of facts in order to then transition to a superordinate level of discourse. Kirchmeyer does not stop at the mere concatenation of facts and their immediate references; his conclusions provide for intermediate nuances. Throughout nearly 850 pages, an attitude of sober emphasis on scientific compilation, discussion, and extrapolation prevails. What Kirchmeyer has undertaken is the documentation of an artistic epoch, mirrored in a dispute over the most momentous artistic potency. Wagner is hereby not merely the exotic center of a biographical tangle, but a crosshair of targeted and—as Kirchmeyer demonstrates—reconstructible strategies. Furthermore, a century of cultural-political trajectory is recorded in a singular manner, not solely from the perspective of the philologist primarily interested in music, but under the conscientious pressure of multidisciplinary thoroughness. In this respect, Kirchmeyer provides with this book a model of comprehensive subject mastery without commending himself behind a screen of diluting value-neutrality. Musicology would be well advised to accept this volume as a methodological as well as content-related obligation, for it now appears to me negligent to express anything regarding Wagner without having first consulted Kirchmeyer.
Peter Cossé, Salzburger Nachrichten, Easter Edition Saturday, March 29, 1975, Page 29a-c
A new, objectified image of Wagner. The present work unquestionably sets the signals for a new form and for new perspectives in Wagner research. It objectifies the historical phenomenon of Richard Wagner by placing this fascinating figure back into the time and into the intellectual and political currents from which he emerged and which influenced his creative work just as decisively as any of his written and verbal reactions. As Kirchmeyer spreads out the documentarily proven results of his eminently diligent research with infinite meticulousness and love for detail, thereby allowing a vivid picture of the social, political, intellectual, and above all the press system of Dresden in the period from 1840 to 1850 to arise, he succeeds in setting new directions for modern Wagner research. For the majority of what biographical Wagner research has produced in its inexhaustible eagerness for publication suffers, even in the fortunate exceptional case, from the more or less pro- or anti-Wagnerian orientation of its authors. This intended or unconscious subjectivity has hitherto seduced nearly all Wagner biographers into seeing in this giant of the 19th century more the mover of his present than the one moved by the Zeitgeist. It is Kirchmeyer’s greatest merit that he accomplishes the long-overdue correction with this book and thereby provides a magnificent example of how modern Wagner research is capable of meeting the scientific standards of our present. In addition to all this, the author still possesses sufficient breath to bestow well-founded and uncommonly knowledgeable, readable interpretations upon the genetic contexts of the operas created and performed in Dresden, their immediate scenic and musical effects, and their interrelations with other works of that time.
All in all, a work that, thanks to its exact scientific nature, is capable like hardly any other of imparting immediacy to Wagner’s contemporary historical physiognomy.
Erich Rappl, Nordbayerischer Kurier 1975, Festival News ‘Meistersinger’, Page [15a-c]
The task now is to summarize, unify, and systematize the multifariously diversified individual research. The research of Helmut Kirchmeyer represents a contribution to this whose scope and breadth cannot be estimated highly enough. This is the distinctiveness of Kirchmeyer’s method: that he portrays Wagner’s work and impact as growing out of the social situation mirrored in the press, which is why he rightly speaks of a ‘situational history.’
Very numerous—and they are what truly make the book a compendium of Dresden music history—are the ‘secondary strands’ drawn. The content of the 846-page book, which the Leipzig Opera Director Joachim Herz, alerted by the reviewer, rightly calls in a letter “a phenomenon of density in every sentence, a truly scientific impact research into the past,” could only be depicted in broad outlines. It is worthwhile to engage with it thoroughly.
Karl Laux, Die Musikforschung 1976, Columns 112-116
I. Stravinsky 1958
Kirchmeyer’s book may today already, a few months after its publication, be confidently designated as the most scientifically significant publication on the history of New Music. By abstaining from the usual templates of almost all musician biographies, it unveils in a downright European perspective, in a brilliant outline conceived with captivating clarity despite the immense abundance of utilized material, the intellectual backgrounds against which a phase of the development towards New Music took place. Diogène – Paris
Kirchmeyer remains objectively in the background like an anonymous chronicler in the Middle Ages—a scientific achievement of paramount knowledge and of enduring value. Deutsche Literaturzeitung der Akademien der Wissenschaften
The most monumental work ever written about a living composer. Norddeutscher Rundfunk – Hamburg
An authentic work on the social and cultural problems of our time, which, encompassing like no other, sooner or later everyone must take into their hands who wishes to familiarize themselves with musical modernism. Divadlo – Prague
. . . a compendium of new music—or should one call it a pandemonium? Die Furche – Vienna
. . . whoever wants to know how things happened will find exhaustive information here. Literarische Rundschau – Bonn
The book has the value of a series of books, but can by no means be replaced by a series of books. Die Schulfamilie – Munich
. . . forms the most carefully substantiated and most richly documented music history of our time—a musically oriented cultural history. Die Weltwoche – Zurich
Admirable, surprising, commanding respect, sovereign in analysis and method; to this day there is no second publication that bears witness over the entire realm of musical modernism in even an approximately comparable manner. Musik und Szene – Düsseldorf
Critical distance — broad cultural-historical basis — new fundamental thoughts — solid analysis — excellent indices. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – Frankfurt
Entirely new paths of research — breathtaking the style, breathtaking the exactitude and the multiplicity of the foundations that are researched with apparent effortlessness. Radio Bremen
Kirchmeyer’s construction technique places the entire music-theoretical thinking with decisiveness upon a new basis. Bayerischer Rundfunk – Munich
For the first time, a monograph has truly been created here that leads far away from the manner and design of earlier biographical works. A peculiar, novel, modern book that, with a downright frightening power of portrayal, allows the entire kaleidoscope of the first five decades of European cultural, literary, and musical life to emerge. Theater-Kourier – Dortmund
. . . a unique and complete collection of material on the music of the twentieth century. Nutida Musik – Stockholm
. . . one of the most well-founded guides to the music of the twentieth century. Schweizerische Musikzeitung – Zurich
The most profound study on the music of our time. Nieuwe Haagsche Courant – The Hague
The musical bible of our time. Feuilles musicales – Lausanne
A book of inestimable value. Sender Freies Berlin