The Rest Is Noise Series: City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties

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Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise Series: City of Nets: Berlin in the Twenties

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This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode Pre-war Berlin: cabaret, satire and the rise of fascism.

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“Beauty of sound is beside the point,” Hindemith instructed the player in his Second Sonata for Solo Viola. He was considered the musical personification of what Gustav Hartlaub called the New Objectivity—a form of expression “neither Impressionistically vague nor Expressionistically abstract, neither sensuously superficial nor constructivistically introverted.” The archetypal Hindemith piece takes the form of a fast, furious, off-kilter march, with fanfares in multiple tonalities and bass lines bent off course. The music is intense, but it does not take itself particularly seriously, or seriously at all. The “Ragtime” movement of Hindemith’s Suite 1922 for piano is inscribed with the placard-like notice “Mode d’emploi—Direction for Use!!” in which the performer is told to “look on the piano as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and act accordingly.” The Kammermusik No. 1, also from 1922, opens with an homage to Stravinsky’s Petrushka and ends with a squealing siren out of a Dada cabaret. All this resembles the up-to-date, streetwise music that Milhaud was writing in Paris, except that Hindemith’s constructions had a rougher, rowdier edge.

There was something bracingly un-German about this new German talent. Strauss, even in his merriest prankster mood, could never have perpetrated something like The Flying Dutchman Overture as Sight-Read by a Bad Spa Orchestra by the Village Well at Seven in the Morning, in which a string quartet plays Wagner’s overture horribly out of tune. Hindemith was anything but visionary in his preoccupations; he was practical, efficient, down-to-earth. Another catchword that became attached to him was Gebrauchsmusik, or music for use. If, say, a bassoonist and a double-bass player were looking for something to play, then Hindemith would dash off a Duet for Bassoon and Double Bass and not worry what posterity might make of it. He worked fast and to order; on one occasion he wrote two sonata movements in the buffet car of a train and performed them on arrival. As violist of the Amar Quartet, he energetically promoted his colleagues’ music as well as his own. He helped to organize festivals and “new-music weeks” in Donaueschingen, Salzburg, Baden-Baden, and eventually Berlin, where, in 1927, he became a teacher at the Hochschule für Musik.

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