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PARTISAN REVIEW
sheer pantomime, dreamed up by ballet-dancers who seemed to have
little sense of ballet-structure or of choreographic direction. In a
pavane, the infantas of the Munich production bowed like men instead
of curtseying.
Egk's music, though neither very original nor very novel , deserved
a better fate. Rene Leibowitz once analyzed the main trends of modern
German music in terms of a dialectic which, at first, opposed Richard
Strauss and the Munich School to Arnold Schoenberg and the Vienna
school, then the latter to Stravinsky and the Paris or international
school. In terms of this argument, Egk belongs clearly, with Thomas
Mann and Spengler, to the Munich school of post-wagncrians rather
than, with Freud and Robert Musil, to the Vienna school. Egk relies
heavily on the same kind of tone-poem plot, with musical imitations of
dramatic actions, as Strauss once did; but Egk rejuvena tes this idiom by
relying just as heavily on melodic, rhythmic or orchestral devices bor–
rowed from Stravinsky, though his choice of Stravinsky idioms is char–
acteristically traditionalist.
Abraxas
thus contains reminisc('nces of
Petrouchka, L e Sacre du Printemps
and
L'Histoire d'un Soldat,
mixed
with other memories from Ravel's
Bolero
and
Daphn is and Chlo e,
and
from Gershwin's
Rhapsody in Blue.
I failed to detect, in Egk's music,
any memories of Stravinsky's latcr work, or even a tone that might be
traced back to any of Schoenberg's major works, except perhaps his early
Verklaerte Nacht.
This curiously German mixture of post-romantic traditionalism or
antiquarianism and of superficially modern melodic or decorative or
stylistic devices is perhaps best illustrated in the work of a young Munich
painter, Horst von Guggel. His drawings and paintings reproduce sur–
realist fantasies, but entirely in the technical manner and style of the
minor baroque painters and engravers of seventeenth and early
eighteenth-century South Germany. This crisis of style is reflected in
post-war German literature as clearly as in music or in painting. There
is, for instance, no tradition of modern poetry in Germany as there has
been, in France or America, for the past thirty years. Since the "Geb–
rauchslyrik" of Brecht's ballads and songs of the twenties and early
thirties, still imitated today by a number of Communist poets as well as
by Brecht himself, no new German poetic style has managed to impose
itself. Goethe, Hoelderlin, Rilke and, to a lesser extent, Stefan George,
still dominate the work of nearly all of Germany's newer poets. The
work of most of these poets is thus hymnic or elegiac. Ernst Juenger's
brother, Friedrich Georg Juenger, is one of the more outstanding poets
of the hymnic school; he praises and describes such objects as a flower
