Review of Lee Rothfarb, August Halm: A Critical and Creative Life in Music (University of Rochester Press, 2009)

[1] A strange sense of melancholia kept coming over me as I was reading Lee Rothfarb's absorbing study of August Halm. Perhaps it had something to do with the repeated vexations of Halm's life, such as his perpetual frustration in finding stable and satisfying employment. Maybe it was that he never seemed to have settled the question of his vocation: was he a music educator or a theologian? A theorist or a critic? A composer or a conductor? He made efforts in all those areas, yet each seemed only a piece of some greater ambition, some greater project that never quite materialized in his life. Then again, there was the obvious discontent he felt-and expressed in his writings-about the sorry state of musical culture as he scanned the landscape of Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. Like Schenker, with whom he enjoyed an avid correspondence, his "theory," if we may call it that, was conservative in its pedigree yet almost utopic in its aspiration. Of course, Halm never attained the fame of Schenker (and it is not hard to detect an obvious intimidation in the tone of many of his letters to his Viennese counterpart). One is not surprised to learn that at the end of his life he lamented that no one would be reading his writings in another twenty years (173).[2] Fortunately, this prophecy has proven not quite accurate. Thanks to Lee Rothfarb's book, we can learn a great deal about Halm's writings today, and many of us will hopefully be inspired by this critical biography to start reading some of them ourselves.(1) They are well worth the effort. I found it somewhat gratuitous for Rothfarb to justify at the end of his book the significance of Halm's words (Chapter 7, "Halm's Oeuvre: Wisdom and Prophecy") on account of the surprising intimations they hold for much of the new "critical analysis" that we have witnessed in recent decades or the "return to tonality" by many composers. Still, there is no doubt that Halm could be a bracing voice for so many of us who are trying to incorporate critical perspectives within our music analyses. If Halm's writings were not the future of music criticism avant la lettre, they might still provide an invigorating tonic to our ongoing disciplinary conversations.* * *[3] The life of August Halm was comparatively uneventful, although Rothfarb has industriously dug up just about every piece of evidence one could hope to find in piecing together his biography. (Rothfarb has not only exhausted the archives for his book, he evidently interviewed and befriended descendants of Halm still alive in Germany for additional information and documentary material; tellingly, the end notes of the book come to some 77 pages, over a third as long as the text itself!) The basic facts of Halm's life are easy to recount from Rothfarb's first chapter ("An Intellectual and Creative Life in Music," 1-47). He was born in 1869 in Schwabisch Hall in Baden Wurttemberg and rarely ventured far beyond this southwest corner of Germany. His initial training at Tubingen for the Protestant clergy was soon derailed by his passion for music, and he left his first church appointment in 1893 to pursue advanced compositional studies in Munich with the composer Joseph Rheinberger, then one of the leading doyens of music education in Bavaria. While Halm ended up deeply disappointed by his studies with Rheinberger, whom he considered to be hopelessly pedantic, the experience obviously had the effect of cementing his determination to pursue a career in music (13). More importantly, it was in Munich that Halm began to recognize the need for a new kind of music education that would break through the academicism and elitism he found pervading the Munich conservatory.[4] In 1895 Halm passed his final exams in Munich and accepted an appointment in the city of Heilbronn as director of the Verein fur klassiche Kirchenmusik. This would be only the first of some half-dozen minor appointments over the following years, in which Halm was called variously to teach piano and violin to children, to conduct amateur choirs or youth orchestras, and to give lectures on the appreciation of music to a generally untutored audience. …