Recoge: 1. Introduction -- 2. Reincarnating history: the up-rising 100 years on -- 3. The poor sinner Andreas Hofer: contradictions between 1809 and 1909 -- 4. Hofer and the Heimat: literary utopias -- 5. Disillusion and scepticism: some popular perceptions of Hofer -- 6. The chapel at Sand in Passeier (1899) -- 7. The Hofer-Denkmal on the Berg Isel (1893) -- 8. Conclusion.

Andreas Hofer’s Ver sacrum seu flores musici is the first printed collection of paraliturgical music for the archiepiscopal court of Salzburg published in a modern edition, an important reparative to the overemphasis on the court’s instrumental virtuosos, Heinrich Biber and Georg Muffat. The eighteen pieces of the collection are ordered liturgically, with each composition assigned to a specific feast day. Hofer’s texts are a unique collection of centonized scripture, poetry, and prose, which, through creative manipulation of instrumentation, texture, and style, the composer musically dramatizes for the celebration of each feast. Referred to in the note to the reader as works “for the offertory” (despite the absence of any prescribed liturgical texts), these pieces demonstrate the malleable nature of the musical genre in the early modern period.

Lenbachhaus München, 29.01.2005 bis 01.05.2005

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors. Robert Scholz, the leading art critic in the Third Reich, became an officer in the chief art looting unit in France and Kajetan Muhlmann--a leading art historian--was probably the single most prolific art plunderer in the war (and arguably in history). Finally, there is Arno Breker, a gifted artist who exchanged his modernist style for monumental realism and became Hitler's favorite sculptor. If it is striking that these educated men became part of the Nazi machine, it is more remarkable that most of them rehabilitated their careers and lived comfortably after the war. Petropoulos has discovered a network of these rehabilitated experts that flourished in the postwar period, and he argues that this is a key to the tens of thousands of looted artworks that are still "missing" today. Based on previously unreleased information and recently declassified documents, The Faustian Bargain is a gripping read about the art world during this period, and a fascinating examination of the intense relationship between culture and politics in the Third Reich.