Cozarinsky's La guerre d'un seul homme and musical categories : (Re)-framing Pfitzner, Strauss, Schreker, and Schoenberg cinematically

The framing of music, especially that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is bound up not only with the effects of the two World Wars that (dis)figured the period but also with the discourse on musical value and identity within which that music’s reception was cast. When that reception is also associated with the political turbulence of the first part of the twentieth century and its aesthetic and political aftermath, it becomes yet more noteworthy as a testament to how musical reception is a powerfully engaging tool, whose historical effect can be long lived. The ‘wrecking’ of some composers and the ‘elevation’ of others—either as Aryan or ‘advanced’ modernist, as populist or old-fashioned—is a familiar story