»Une grande portée morale pour l’union entre artistes du monde entier«

Schönbergs Tombeau für Debussy und die Anfänge des Parteienstreits um die musikalische Moderne

Abstract

The article deals with Arnold Schönberg's refusal to participate in the multinational project “Tombeau de Claude Debussy” of the journal La Revue Musicale in 1920 and examines his unpublished justification with its claim to artistic independence. The analysis shows the role that Alfredo Casella's polemical statements about the decline of German music played in his musical thinking, which can be seen, among other things, in the rededication of his planned Homage as the opening piece of the Five Piano Pieces op. 23 - an initial work with tone rows. Using archive material, the study places this episode within the debates on national identities and the aesthetic priorities of musical modernism in the interwar period.