Un contrepoint contesté : appropriation « juive » et libération polyphonique

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, modern polyphony became a symbol for the problems of new music, threatening both tradition and comprehensibility. This article examines the ideology behind listening to counterpoint, with a focus on reception sources from the concert season 1906-07-in particular, how the rhetoric from the premieres of Mahler’s Sixth and Strauss’s Salome influenced the reception of Schoenberg’s First String Quartet. The influence of Salome (the antisemitism it spawned and the debate over Jewish-German identity) was so strong as to override the different attitudes towards counterpoint on the part of Viennese and German critics. Broader issues the article addresses are forms of antisemitism in the early twentieth century and how influenced the counterpoint artistic avant-garde outside music.

Keywords

• Mahler
• polyphony
• counterpoint
• Schoenberg