In 1922, German music critic Adolf Weissmann published Die Musik in der Weltkrise. One of many challenges to the future of contemporary Western music, he maintained, was the struggle between for and content, manifested at the time through a dissolution of rhythm as expression of will. Rhythm, somehow, provided the key to rescuing music from its contemporary state of disillusionment. Weissmann was hardly the first to depict modern music in such dramatic terms; decline in public demand for contemporary music caused concern all over the German-speaking world in the decades after 1900. This chapter explores how perceptions of "crisis" and its possible conclusions were articulated by critics of the German musical avant-garde in the early 1920s.