@article{Ambivalence:2564,
      recid = {2564},
      author = {Dreyfus, Emily Allegra},
      title = {Classical Music on Screen: Affect and Ambivalence in Nazi  Film},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-08},
      pages = {184},
      abstract = {Over forty-five films made in Nazi Germany foregrounded  classical music, despite the reluctance of film composers  to quote the classics and worries on the part of the  musicological establishment that cinema could only  “trivialize” the “great masters.” But rather than flaunting  the classical tradition as the property of the Nazi state,  these movies expressed conspicuously mixed feelings toward  musical heritage, exposing the contestation for cultural  value in modern society. The claim to musicality as a  Germanic quality—a tenet of self-understanding since the  nineteenth century—unravels in unexpected ways in popular  cinema, highlighting the potential of mass culture to  disrupt ideologemes of national identity.

Part One of this  study shows how the Romantic paradigm of absorbed bourgeois  listening breaks down in film: images of uninvolved  listeners reveal fundamental gaps in the supposed universal  appreciation of classical music and point to social  strivings toward cultural modernization as well as a  politically inconvenient desire for Americanism and its  popular idioms. Part Two considers the rhetoric of uplift  and aesthetic education in two propaganda features: a film  about the Hitler Youth that appropriated elements of  amateur musical culture to “ennoble” Nazi populism, and an  action movie about the Luftwaffe that unwittingly  documented the commodity character of Wagner’s music. Part  Three demonstrates how film could not resist “queering” the  figure of the musician, registering anxieties about the  effeminizing effects of classical music and the  incompatibility of art with the dictates of militarism and  ethno-nationalism. Cinema figures performers as objects of  both desire and revulsion and improbably associates them  with the non-normative, foreign and exotic traits of  persecuted minorities in Nazi Germany: homosexuals, Sinti  and Roma, Jews and political dissidents. The mediations of  cultural capital in film of the Nazi era therefore adhere  to a broader history of consumerism, popularization and  social change, in which the overdetermined ideological  construct of “Germanness” in music turns out to be both  tenacious and brittle, omni-present and yet eminently  unstable. 

A catalogue of musical quotations in Nazi-era  film organized by composer and date is listed in the  appendices. Supplementary files contain clips cued in the  text.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2564},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2564},
}