'Beethoven, Munich and the Anschluss' Seminar

This paper places a performance of Beethoven's IX symphony given by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in April 1938 - just a month after the 'Anschluss' (Union) with Austria, and a couple of months before the Sudeten crisis - at the centre of a discussion of what German audiences were doing when they consumed the canon of German art music in the interwar era. It critiques accounts which connect the disciplining of the body and the senses in the concert hall arena directly to authoritarian and aggressive proclivities within the political arena writ large; in seeking to decouple discussion of the social practice of symphonic concert hall attendance in the era from accounts of fascism and nationalism in favour of asserting the banal everydayness of the phenomenon it asks what, if anything, is at stake in the anthropological continuities of concert hall attendance across political regimes and what scope exists, indeed, for reading that very continuity politically.