The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

Chapter 29 centres on Goethe’s idea of China. Goethe was initially ambivalent, even condescending, about Chinese culture and aesthetics, but in later years, this attitude was replaced by a greater degree of interest in the country. This chapter explores the evolution of Goethe’s position on China, beginning with the eighteenth-century fashion for chinoiserie and Goethe’s disparagement of it; it then considers Goethe’s more open-minded engagement with Chinese literature in translation towards the end of his life, noting at the same time the gulf between Goethe’s source material and China’s most representative cultural outputs.

Chapter 25 examines Goethe’s Italian journey of 1786–8, the turning point in his life. It was crucial not only in furthering his knowledge of antiquity, which had been the original purpose of his journey, but also for his development as a poet and as a human being. The chapter focuses in particular on his time in Sicily, which Goethe had wanted to visit as a proxy for ancient Greece, but which exerted a lasting influence both on his aesthetics and on his science. For Goethe, Italy represented an organic fusion of nature and culture.

Bernstein wrote five books during his life: The Joy of Music (1959), The Infinite Variety of Music (1966), Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (1962), The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (1976), and Findings (1982). The first four were part of his desire to make his lectures and commentary from his televised appearances available in written form and the fifth book is a compilation of mostly minor writings from throughout Bernstein’s life. This chapter is a summary of the contents of each of these books, with commentary on what the more substantial efforts tell us about the author’s musical philosophy. The major essay from Findings considered here at some length is Bernstein’s senior honours thesis written while a student at Harvard: ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’. Although better known as a conductor and composer, Bernstein’s writings are also important representations of his thinking.

The complex relationship between Wagner and Liszt has been much caricatured. Liszt is usually perceived as long-suffering, patient, and generous in his support, while Wagner appears self-serving and ruthless. This chapter unravels how their relationship was shaped by contemporary economic, political, and, artistic forces. In doing so, it observes the contrasting ways Liszt and Wagner attempted to reconcile revolutionary republican sympathies with their desire for royal patronage. It examines the advice and practical support Liszt provided Wagner through his position as Kapellmeister at the Weimar Court Theatre, Liszt’s ambitions to position his relationship with Wagner as equivalent to Goethe and Schiller within a new artistic ‘golden age’ in Weimar, and their differing responses to contemporary aesthetic debates. It highlights similarities and differences in their ideas about the future of music, the relationship between music and drama and its implications for musical form, and their compositional approaches.

In his search for publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote a letter to Ludwig von Ficker while trying to explain the deeper meaning of his work, which he considered to be an “Ethical one”. Whereas other philosophers would establish theories about ethical and religious matters, Wittgenstein emphasized his decision to keep silent about the sphere transcending the world of language and of science. In this chapter, I discuss the limits of language and of science, the significance of silence, the view sub specie aeternitatis, the dimension of wonder, the difference between what can be said and what can only be shown, and Wittgenstein’s mystical approach toward the ineffable.

The reception of Wagner’s music as physically affecting, sound that manipulates the bodies of listeners, took place within a context of research into human and animal physiology. From reflex mechanisms to sense energies, the physiological response to art brought about new understandings of ‘physiological aesthetics’ in figures from Herbert Spencer to Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton, with a corresponding ‘physiological music theory’ applied by Ernst Mach and Hermann von Helmholtz. This led to various efforts at quantification of ear acuity and the role of the auditory nerve.

In the shadow of decadence, critical evaluation of works like Tristan and Tannhäuser traverse the spectrum from appreciation (‘bliss of the spinal cord’) to anxiousness (‘Wagner increases exhaustion’). Against these claims, Wagner’s numerous writings on sentience (Sinnlichkeit), rooted in Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy of perceptual realism, were directed towards topics as diverse as a theory of performance, the role of critics, and animal testing.

Although there seems to be an essential relationship between scholarship and performance of the Lied, the process by which scholarly inquiry and practices of performance mutually benefit one another can seem mysterious and undefined. In this introduction to The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology, the editors trace the state of research touching these issues, including the role of the “performative turn” in Lied scholarship, historical performance practice research in the genre, and the tradition of scholars’ guides for performers. They then summarize how the essays of the collection model new ways in which scholarship can contribute to new performance experimentation in the genre, and how reflecting on performance can continue to lead to new research perspectives.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the idea of Weltliteratur and argue that it was one of the most successful tools through which Europe negotiated with and made sense of the colonial history of the literary sovereign. Though mostly associated with Goethe, its clearest outlines were available through a combination of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Weltliteratur, I argue, is the culmination of a set of ideas Kant introduced to account for the peculiar nature of the power of judgment or taste – that such judgments cannot have any a priori or universal principles and yet claim universality. Whether framed as the beautiful or the sublime, he suggested, such claims remained contingent, relying on a communal consensus that could have been established only according to anthropological principles. Kantian aesthetics is “impure” as it always and already relies on something external to it, that cannot be made sense of within the borders set by aesthetic judgment itself. Similarly, Weltliteratur was a combination of aesthetic and anthropological principles, advocating a form of comparative judgment replicating the Kantian model.