Peterson-Berger och Nietzsche, eller Peterson-Berger och Herder?

Bidrag till den svenska upphovsrättens estetiska förhistoria

Abstract

Peterson-Berger and Nietzsche, or, Peterson-Berger and Herder?

The composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger was also a famous music critic, propagating his own brand of Nietzschean aesthetic. This aesthetic implied, among other things, an outspoken aversion to the new Swedish Performing Rights society, STIM. What does Peterson-Berger’s view on music tell us about the general Swedish attitude towards copyright during the first decades of the twentieth century? The answer is interesting since it is often claimed that the first Swedish copyright law of 1919 was a result of more than a century’s struggle for the self-evident rights of the composers. Reading Peterson-Berger’s aesthetic writings through the lens of two contradictory ideal types — a Herderian and a Kantian view of music — reveals that Peterson Berger, despite his Nietzschean bent is very much a Herderian in his locating of the source of musical creativity in the collective Volksgeist (likewise Peterson-Berger also favours melody over form in a manner common to the nineteenth century). Since a Kantian location of creativity in an individualized will is not articulated in Sweden until the ”modernists” of a later generation, it is concluded that the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of the first Swedish copyright law lacked wider support among composers, musicians, and listeners.