The “Lutheran Style”: Aesthetics, Theology and Politics in Oskar Söhngen’s Writings

• The twentieth-century reception of Luther’s life, work and thought was thoroughly shaped by the German Luther renaissance, a movement that itself grappled with the legacy of the “long” liberal nineteenth century. The findings of both Luther studies and musicological investigations shaped the mind-set of Oskar Söhngen, arguably the most strident champion and influential systematic thinker behind the reinvigorated Lutheran musical culture of the century. While his writings suggest a shift from the authority of theological tenets to culture, German scholarship has paid increasing attention to contextual aspects of his thought and promotion of new music. Jonas Lundblad provides the first English-language investigation of the conflation of Lutheran aesthetics and strands of National Socialist thought in Söhngen’s oeuvre. A method of radical contextuality reveals how the furthering of a closely demarcated “Lutheran style” in music both responds to and reacts against aesthetico-political rhetoric in Germany of the 1930s. Recent criticism has suggested that Söhngen was overly influenced by too narrow a theological ideal of “vocality” in music. In contrast to the kerygmatic level of their surface, Lundblad finds Söhngen’s writings infelicitously caught within the cultural orbits of a politically charged phenomenology of aesthetic subjectivity.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Musikvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Musicology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Oskar Söhngen

Martin Luther

Lutheran music

Church music

aesthetics

Nazism

Third Reich

systematic theology

style

20th century music

Musikvetenskap

Musicology

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