Music in Dark Times: Notes on the Musical Aesthetics in the III Reich

Abstract

In the Third Reich, music occupied a prominent role among the arts, being heavily used as an ideological tool. The aesthetic guidelines proposed by Goebbels in 1938 were based on an ideology already pointed out by Quantz and Wagner, but whose context, in order to fulfill other purposes, distanced from the original context. Departing from an analysis of these authors’ texts, this article seeks to demonstrate the appropriation of the central ideas and their transformations, as well the creation of a different category of music, namely, the musical monuments.