When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing, but a new order remained uncertain, two extraordinary musical works grappled with questions now central to our understanding of the 20th-century political catastrophe. Bartók’s “The Wooden Prince” (1914–16) and Janáček’s “Taras Bulba” (1915–18) help us understand the cultural and ideological forces that prepared the ground for totalitarianism and the end of liberal society in Central Europe. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism offers a theoretical framework for understanding the human experience these composers attempted to encapsulate through musical language. Totalitarianism, she wrote, seeks “total domination” and “terrorizes human beings from within.” Its ultimate aim is “the evisceration of human freedom” through the extraction of “total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty” from atomized individuals.
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