ABSTRACT
In the penultimate chapter of his magisterial history of nineteenth-century music (Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts), Carl Dahlhaus grapples with the vexing problem of hitting upon the term that best captures the essence of European art music at the turn to the twentieth century. Drawing on the historiography of Hermann Bahr, Dahlhaus ultimately decides in favor of modernism as the designation for the musical era bounded by Richard Strass's Don Juan and Gustav Mahler's First Symphony (1889), on the one hand, and the advent of atonality in Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1909), on the other. Characterized structurally by a will to monumentality and affectively by a heightened, feverish intensity, musical modernism emerges most clearly in the tone poem and the post-Wagnerian music drama. 1
