Paul Bekker was one of the most influential music critics of the early 20th century. One of his studies on Ludwig van Beethoven was thought to have been lost for over 80 years - until musicologist Anna Langenbruch discovered it.
Anna Langenbruch quickly realised that she had found something very special: a 60-page typescript about Beethoven, hidden in the estate of a German exile magazine in the depths of the Paris National Archives. Only the name "Becker" was written on the sheet in which the pages were wrapped.
But this one word was enough to spark a thought in the young researcher, who was looking for articles about music in Parisian exile in the 1930s for her doctorate in 2007: The writing could have come from the typewriter of the German music publicist Paul Bekker. Even if the name was misspelled, the content would fit.
Bekker was one of the most important music critics and writers of the first half of the 20th century. He published on the sociology and history of music - including an extensive book on Beethoven - and coined the term "New Music". He also worked as a theatre director. In 1933, Bekker, who was a key cultural and political figure in the Weimar Republic and was at risk in Nazi Germany because of his Jewish origins, went into exile in Paris via Italy, Switzerland and Greece; the following year he emigrated to the USA, to New York, where he died in 1937.
Reconstruction of the genesis
Langenbruch's research confirmed her suspicions: the typescript was written by Bekker in 1933/34, which makes the find a minor sensation: it is the only unpublished manuscript from Bekker's time in exile that has survived - all other unpublished material from the years after 1934 was destroyed by Bekker's wife after his death. According to Langenbruch, Bekker's aim in his study was to use the figure of Beethoven as a starting point to make a statement about the contemporary approach to music. And what would have to change in order for music to develop further.
A book about Bekker, written by the Cologne musicologist Andreas Eichhorn, shed light on the origins of the typescript. Eichhorn reconstructed the genesis of what he believed to be a lost book about Beethoven from an exchange of letters. "Part of it was supposed to be published in 1935 under the title 'Beethoven's Legacy' by an exile publisher in Paris. However, this never happened because Bekker eventually withdrew the text," explains Langenbruch. Apparently the author was concerned that his cultural-political essay might not fit in with the direction of the series after all. From various letters, the researcher was finally able to reconstruct that the typescript she had found was indeed the lost study.
Complicated context of transmission
In addition to chance, it was also due to Langenbruch's special research interest that she, of all people, found the text: "I looked at archives that are perhaps not typical for a musicologist: police files, for example." As German exiles in France were systematically monitored from 1933 onwards, a lot can be reconstructed from these documents about the individuals and their musical activities. "It is schizophrenic for a historian to benefit from state surveillance in retrospect," states Langenbruch.
The files also include the holdings of German exile journals that were banned in 1940. Langenbruch found the Bekker study in the estate of the anti-fascist publication "Die Zukunft". It is unclear how it ended up there: "'Die Zukunft' was only founded in 1938 - after Bekker's death," explains the researcher. It is possible that he simply never got the typescript back from his Paris publisher, so that it ended up in the magazine's collection via an employee.
This find was made a good ten years ago. Langenbruch has long since completed his doctorate and has been researching "Music History on Stage" at the University of Oldenburg since 2016 with his own Emmy Noether Junior Research Group.
Find as occasion for Beethoven conference
What do you do with a find like this? "At first I thought about incorporating it into the dissertation. But that didn't really fit in with the concept. And perhaps it wouldn't have done the text justice either," says Langenbruch. She repeatedly postponed the idea of developing a larger research project from it - partly because she was looking for new research topics for her habilitation and was no longer focussing solely on exile research. Together with the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, the central research and documentation centre for Beethoven's biography and works, she finally came up with the idea a year and a half ago of using Bekker's text as the occasion for a conference on Beethoven's reception in exile.
The conference with an international programme will now take place in Bonn at the beginning of March. The Bekker study will then be published in a conference volume in the Beethoven-Haus publication series.
