Nationalistic tendencies and 20th century music – the German case

I belong to a generation of Romanian musicologists educated during the last years of the Communist period, and the idea of balancing historiography and structuralist analysis has been on my mind a lot. I inherited from Romanian historiography clichés such as “the tension between national and universal”, the “transfiguration” of the folkloric source (in avant-garde composition), the “Moldavian Orpheus” etc. Over time, I felt the need to reformulate, nuance, fight such clichés and other previously accepted ideas, and each time I encountered manifestations of nationalism in music. But these are not only characteristic of the Romanian environment, so I looked at other European cultures to learn from what was happening there: to the French with the Dreyfuss and Vincent d'Indy cases, to the Soviets with the compromises made by Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, but also with Igor Stravinsky's “export nationalism”. Other themes to explore are Béla Bartók and folklorism, Enescu and Communism. In this article, I limit myself to the great German musical traditions and how they were handled by Nazi ideology. I will talk about the “trial of German musicology”, which started after 1990 and shed light on historical aspects during the Third Reich.