Below is an article I originally wrote for submission to the ITG Journal. They have declined it, but I believe it is an important piece and worth getting out there. Enjoy!
Introduction
If one were to retrace the history of Nazi occupation in Prague through the narrative offered by one of the city’s many local historical walking tour guides, the experience would likely unfold through a series of ordinary places marked by extraordinary absences. Such tours often pass former schools, orphanages, and residential buildings from which Jewish children and families were deported to the Terezín ghetto-camp. Guides frequently recount the later discovery of drawings and other artworks created by those children, fragile artifacts that survived despite the Nazi regime’s systematic destruction of records. While the specific details of any individual story may vary, the broader historical reality is well established: Terezín sustained a remarkable artistic and musical life, and creative work produced under conditions of extreme coercion has since become a crucial lens through which that period is understood.
Such artifacts underscore a broader problem for performers and scholars alike. When music is created alongside political coercion or mass violence, purely formal or ahistorical listening risks erasing the conditions that shaped its rhetoric. Context does not replace musical analysis, but it can sharpen its purpose. Under such circumstances, analysis is not only a matter of structure and style, but of how musical language absorbs, reflects, or resists the pressures of its environment.
Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Trumpet and Piano (1939) occupies precisely such a pressure point. Composed during his Swiss exile as Europe moved toward war, the sonata has become a central work in the trumpet repertory, yet its expressive stance remains ambiguous. Hindemith provided little programmatic commentary, and later secondhand reports of political meaning are too fragmentary to serve as firm evidence. The interpretive problem therefore persists: how might this work be heard in relation to the cultural and political forces that surrounded its creation?
This paper approaches that question by treating Susan Sontag’s description of the “Fascist Aesthetic” as a limited vocabulary for public rhetorical style rather than as a diagnostic tool for authorial intent. Sontag’s work stands within a longer critical lineage: Walter Benjamin famously argued that fascism aestheticizes politics,¹ while later scholars such as George L. Mosse examined how myth, ritual, and symbolism stabilize authoritarian power in public life.³ Philosophers and cultural critics including Theodor W. Adorno and Guy Debord further explored how mass culture and spectacle condition submission through repetition and immediacy. Within music studies, scholarship has largely focused on institutions and cultural policy rather than musical rhetoric itself, though historians such as Michael Kater and Pamela Potter have demonstrated music’s deep entanglement with National Socialist ideology,⁶ ⁷ and writers like Richard Taruskin have insisted that musical style cannot be separated from ethical and political context.⁸ Heard against this background, Hindemith’s Trumpet Sonata can be understood as engaging recognizable public gestures while refusing the ideological closure they typically imply.
Hindemith and the Nazi Cultural Program
The Nazi regime treated culture as a domain to be managed. Through institutions, censorship, professional pressures, and propaganda, the state attempted to define “German” art against supposedly “degenerate” modernism. Hindemith’s public position shifted accordingly: initially praised as a major German talent, he became politically vulnerable as the regime tightened its cultural controls, culminating in restrictions on performances and increasing hostility from state-aligned authorities. By the late 1930s, like many artists, he left Germany and worked in Switzerland.
Hindemith’s exile matters here less as biography than as condition: the Trumpet Sonata is a work written by a German composer who had been publicly contested by the Nazi state, composed as the state’s military project expanded. Even if the sonata were “non-programmatic,” it would still live inside a world saturated with propaganda.
Riefenstahl and a Public Aesthetic
Leni Riefenstahl’s films, especially Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), helped canonize what many later critics recognized as the visual rhetoric of fascism: bodies arranged as geometry, mass ritual rendered sublime, discipline stylized as beauty, and political devotion staged as sacred fate. Riefenstahl’s work matters here primarily as a record of public style. This paper does not claim that Hindemith directly referenced her films, only that they exemplify the aesthetic atmosphere through which German audiences learned to read certain gestures as power, unity, and sacrifice.
Sontag’s “Fascist Aesthetic” as a Tool
Susan Sontag’s description of the fascist aesthetic was formulated in response to film and photography, media in which image, body, and mass choreography are immediately legible.² Translating this framework into musical analysis therefore requires restraint. The goal is not to identify a set of musical features that are inherently or exclusively fascist, but to describe families of rhetorical gestures that acquired particular cultural meaning under authoritarian conditions.
In this paper, Sontag’s framework is adapted only where musical rhetoric operates in an explicitly public register. This limitation reflects a broader historical reality: political authority has repeatedly sought to shape artistic narratives by leveraging institutional platforms, ceremonial programming, and symbolic endorsement. Such interventions rarely appear as overt censorship. More often, they operate through selection, framing, and omission, converting cultural institutions into stages for legitimizing public rhetoric while preserving the appearance of artistic autonomy. Under these conditions, aesthetics become a means of managing consent, and artistic form acquires ethical weight regardless of authorial intent.
Five such rhetorical families are relevant here:
- Public signal and ordeal rhetoric. Fascist aesthetics frequently stylize physical exertion, discipline, and command. In music, this can appear as declarative, signal-like gestures; registral extremity; sustained intensity; or writing that foregrounds physical strain, particularly in instruments historically associated with ceremony or authority.
- Repetition and ritualization. Authoritarian spectacle relies on repetition to produce familiarity, inevitability, and submission. Musically, repetition does not function ideologically by default; however, when formal returns, ostinati, or refrain-like structures are emphasized in a manner that foregrounds public address rather than organic development, they invite rhetorical interpretation.
- Staged opposition and managed tension. Fascist regimes often construct antagonism in order to dramatize unity and resolve. In music, this may be suggested by layered or conflicting metric, rhythmic, or textural strata that resist full integration, particularly when such tension is highlighted rather than resolved through conventional synthesis.
- Sacralization through borrowed tradition. Fascist aesthetics frequently appropriate religious or historical symbols to legitimize political authority. In musical terms, chorale, hymn, or quasi-liturgical textures can function rhetorically when they invoke collective memory or inherited authority, regardless of whether the material is newly composed or historically authentic.
- Death, mourning, and historical destiny. The exaltation of sacrifice and death is central to fascist myth-making. Musical references to mourning, funeral rhetoric, or explicitly named lament can therefore carry ideological weight, especially when framed within otherwise public or ceremonial musical discourse.
These categories are not diagnostic tools, nor do they imply that the presence of any single feature indicates ideological alignment. They describe modes of authoritarian spectacle that recur in periods of perceived legitimacy crisis, when public rhetoric emphasizes mobilization, discipline, and the erosion of ordinary civic norms in favor of performative unity. Rather, they provide a vocabulary for describing how certain musical gestures became culturally legible within the aesthetic environment of the Third Reich. Their value lies in interpretive listening: identifying moments where music stages public rhetoric and examining whether that rhetoric is affirmed, destabilized, or denied.
In this paper, Sontag’s vocabulary is used only where the sonata’s rhetoric is both recognizable as public style and unusually emphasized or framed in a way that invites cultural reading.
Musical Rhetoric in the Trumpet Sonata
I. Movement I: Public gesture under pressure
The first movement opens with a rhetoric associated with public space: declarative trumpet writing set against an insistent piano texture (mm. 1–8). The gesture resembles a form of strongman address, projecting resolve and command while relying on immediacy rather than persuasion. The material is not “march music” in any literal sense, but it draws on a family of topics that, in early twentieth-century Europe, were culturally adjacent to civic ceremony: signal calls, fanfare contours, and the posture of command.
The movement’s form intensifies that public quality. Its return structures (often described as rondo-like) foreground repetition and recurrence, a technique that in public rhetoric functions as message discipline (A-theme returns at mm. 1–8, 33–40, 65–72, and 97–104), converting insistence into inevitability. In propaganda, repetition can function as simplification and insistence; in neoclassicism, it can function as architectural clarity. Hindemith places the listener between these two readings. The repeated returns do not stabilize into comfort. Instead, they arrive with altered weight: registral strain, textural thickening, and rhythmic friction.
One of the most striking friction points is Hindemith’s layered meter late in the movement, which stages managed antagonism rather than organic conflict, dramatizing tension without permitting full resolution (most prominently mm. 105–120). Rather than presenting rhythmic unison as communal unity, the texture strains against itself. The effect is not merely complexity for its own sake: it places the trumpet’s declarative stance inside a field that will not fully align. If fascist spectacle relies on the appearance of perfect synchronization, this passage dramatizes the opposite: public gesture that cannot secure total coherence.
II. Movement II: Interior speech
The second movement’s lyricism does not erase the first movement’s public rhetoric; it reframes it (opening mm. 1–10). Hindemith writes sustained melodic line with harmonic motion that feels more private than ceremonial. This movement can be heard as the sonata’s refusal to remain in the posture of mass address. If the first movement stages the “public voice,” the second explores what that voice sounds like when it turns away from the crowd.
III. Movement III: Trauermusik and the limits of heroic death
The final movement’s title, Trauermusik, is unusually explicit (movement III, mm. 1–12). Hindemith’s sonata output often ends with athletic brilliance; here, the arc aims toward mourning. The ending chorale, Alle Menschen müssen sterben(“All people must die”), grounds death not as glorious sacrifice but as shared fact (chorale entry at mm. 43–56). That distinction matters. Fascist death-cult rhetoric typically frames death as proof of devotion and as fuel for historical destiny. Hindemith’s chorale instead levels the room: death is not a political instrument; it is a human horizon.
The chorale’s presence also carries historical resonance. Chorale language can be used to sacralize authority, but it can also serve as an ethical counterweight to state mythmaking by invoking older, non-state traditions of communal meaning. In the sonata, the chorale arrives not as triumph but as a deliberate cooling of rhetoric. The trumpet, an instrument culturally associated with ceremony and command, is asked to speak here with restraint.
The Sonata as Critique: What We Can Claim, and What We Cannot
The Trumpet Sonata can be heard as critique not because Hindemith embeds a hidden program that can be decoded, but because the work’s rhetorical trajectory moves from public stance to private speech to mourning, ending in a chorale that refuses heroicizing death. This is compatible with Hindemith’s historical position as a composer formed inside a regime that attempted to monopolize cultural meaning.
What cannot be claimed on present evidence is that Hindemith consciously set out to parody Nazi propaganda or to quote any specific filmic or musical materials from the regime. The strongest scholarly claim is therefore interpretive: the sonata stages culturally legible public gestures and then denies them the ideological closure that fascist aesthetics requires.
Conclusion
Listening to Hindemith’s Sonata for Trumpet and Piano with historical attention does not reduce the work to politics; rather, it clarifies the stakes of its public rhetoric. The trumpet, an instrument long associated with ceremony, authority, and announcement, is placed in the position of delivering a kind of authoritarian spectacle that never fully stabilizes. Gestures of command, repetition, and mobilization are repeatedly staged, only to be strained by friction, interior withdrawal, and ultimately by mourning.
The trajectory of the sonata resists the logic of message discipline that characterizes strongman rhetoric. Instead of converting repetition into inevitability or tension into triumph, Hindemith allows instability to remain audible. The final chorale does not sanctify power or sacrifice; it refuses the conversion of death into destiny. In doing so, the work denies the listener the emotional closure that authoritarian aesthetics typically demand.
To perform this sonata, then, is not merely to execute a canonical trumpet work, but to navigate a musical discourse shaped by crisis, mobilization, and the erosion of ordinary civic language. The performer is asked to articulate public gesture without surrendering to it, to project authority without endorsing domination, and to sustain intensity without collapsing into spectacle.
In this sense, the Trumpet Sonata participates in what contemporary German discourse has termed Vergangenheitsbewältigung: not an effort to resolve history, but an insistence on keeping its pressures audible. Each performance reanimates a moment in which musical rhetoric was inseparable from the conditions of public life, reminding both performer and listener that sound, like speech, carries ethical weight.
Endnotes
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–252.
- Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 73–105.
- George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).
- Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 26–52.
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
- Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
- Richard Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 90–154.
- Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl (Berlin: Reichsparteitag-Film, 1935), film.
- Paul Hindemith, Sonata for Trumpet and Piano (London: Schott Music, 1939).