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CITY OF NETS

Berlin in the Twenties

One day in 1932, during the last months of Germany’s first attempt at democracy, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s son, walked into a room and saw the corpse of the young actor Ricki Hallgarten, his friend and sometime lover. Hallgarten had shot himself through the heart, splattering blood on the wall. Klaus wrote, “The blood stains looked like the scattered fragments of a mysterious pattern—a last message, a warning, the writing on the wall.” That phrase, from the book of Daniel, became the leitmotif of Klaus Mann’s recollections of Germany in the 1920s, and, lest anyone miss the allusion, he went on to quote the biblical text itself: “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN … God hath numbered thy kingdom … Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting … Thy kingdom is divided.”

The Weimar Republic, as embodied in the culture of Berlin, invites melodrama. Every violent act or image seems to foreshadow the catastrophe to come. But it is too easy to write the story of German culture from 1918 to 1933 as the prelude to the next chapter. Berlin was a city of possibilities, of myriad outcomes, glowing with promise as well as threat. It played host to Communists, Nazis, Social Democrats, nationalists, New Objectivists, Expressionists, Dadaists, and straggling Romantics. Its spirit spoke in the meeting of opposites. In the wake of the humiliation of defeat, Berlin shook off its imperial past and reinvented itself as the prototype of media-saturated urban cultures to come—the first all-night city, the city without shame.

The young composers of Berlin—among them Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Hanns Eisler, and Stefan Wolpe—happily joined in the frenzy. Like their counterparts in Paris and New York, they picked up the rhythms of jazz, the noise of industry, the fashionable clutter of twenties life. They not only gained entry to popular culture but at times took control of it: Weill’s Threepenny Opera charmed Germany as Show Boat charmed America. Weill and company seemed on the verge of solving the ultimate mystery—how to break the divide between classical music and modern society. “Music is no longer a matter of the few,” Weill proclaimed in 1928. “The musicians of today have made this sentence their own. Their music, therefore, is simpler, clearer, and more transparent … Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch.”

Historians of Weimar debate whether German democracy was preordained to fail, or whether Hitler’s rise to power was a freak event. Music historians face a similar problem. Was Weimar a kind of fever dream, its arts programs destined to fall victim to the vagaries of commercial culture? Or might Weimar have given artists a permanent safe haven? As so often, the pessimists seem to have the force of history behind them. Schoenberg, who lived in Berlin from 1926 on, warned his colleagues against a futile chase after popularity, and in this period he devised a new way of working—a “method of composing with twelve notes”—that would protect the serious composer from vulgarity.

Back in Vienna, Alban Berg went his own way; his second opera, the opulent and terrifying Lulu, reconciled his teacher’s latest ideas with Weimar rhythms and Romantic chords. Wozzeck conquered Berlin in 1925; in an alternate universe, Lulu might have had the same reception. But Berg did not live to finish it, and by the time of his death, in 1935, Klaus Mann’s “writing on the wall” had become reality.

Ministry of Enlightenment

When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated his throne on November 9, 1918, Germany fell into a political disorder from which it never fully recovered. Leaders of the Social Democratic Party proclaimed a republic from the windows of the Reichstag. Karl Liebknecht hailed a Communist revolution while standing on the steps of the Royal Palace.

Kurt Weill, an eighteen-year-old student at the Hochschule für Musik, was in the streets that day; he heard Liebknecht’s speech and watched the skirmishes around the Reichstag. “I’ve had indescribable experiences the last few days,” he wrote to his parents. What he saw on the ground led him to make a perceptive comment, which historians of the Weimar period have confirmed: the moderate elements lacked power and influence, so the extremes of the left and the right were setting the tone and the agenda. This was an ominous note on which to inaugurate a republic.

Still, the school stayed open and musical life went on. Cafés were full and the trams were running. Even as the revolution began, the Ufa film studio held a champagne reception for Ernst Lubitsch’s film of Carmen. The previous night Richard Strauss had conducted Salome at the Court Opera, which promptly shook off its royal title and became the State Opera.

The brief life of the Weimar Republic is usually divided into three periods: chaos, stabilization, and the devolution toward Nazism. Chaos lasted a full four years, bringing with it various coups and counterrevolutions and an astonishing total of four hundred political murders. (One victim was Gustav Landauer, commissar for people’s enlightenment of the short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria, whose wife, Hedwig Lachmann, translated Salome into German.) Most damaging to the country’s psychological security was the hyperinflation of 1923, at the height of which the mark was valued at several trillion to the dollar. “Nothing was so mad or so atrocious that it could have caused any awe in people anymore,” Thomas Mann wrote of the inflation. “[Germans] learned to look on life as a wild adventure, the outcome of which depended not on their own effort but on sinister, mysterious forces.”

The “stabilization” period, which lasted from 1924 to 1929, unfolded under the guiding hand of the master politician Gustav Stresemann, who, first as chancellor and then as foreign minister, restored economic order and led Germany back into the world community. Stresemann’s death in 1929 removed from the scene the most powerful personality who might have stopped Hitler.

Directing the “stabilization” of music was a man named Leo Kestenberg, who in December 1918 assumed the post of musical adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Culture, and Education. He had studied piano with Ferruccio Busoni before becoming active in the Social Democratic Party. In the spirit of that well-meaning organization, he aimed to clear away the cobwebs of elitist culture and promote the creation of “art for the people.” One of his flagship institutions was the Kroll Opera, which presented antitraditional stagings to a working-class audience. Half the seats were made available to the Volksbühne, the socialist theater, at prices appropriate to the salary of a manual worker. The conductor was Otto Klemperer, a Mahler protégé, who at this early stage of his long career specialized in subversive productions of classic repertory. Kestenberg also gave Berlin’s new-music scene a shot of adrenaline by appointing two leading progressives to teach at the conservatories: Busoni at the Prussian Academy of Arts and Franz Schreker at the Hochschule für Musik. When Busoni died, Schoenberg moved from Vienna to take his place. Schreker and Schoenberg brought with them bristling cohorts of students, who quickly took over the limelight.

Inconvenient realities soon intruded on Kestenberg’s arts utopia. As the critic John Rockwell has shown in his study of Weimar musical politics, Kestenberg never really figured out who the People were or what they wanted to hear: the working classes whom the Kroll Opera hoped to serve were often confounded by the company’s revisionist take on the classics. At the same time, Kestenberg lacked the political skill to placate the right wing, which deplored all avant-garde doings. While Weimar’s bohemians and leftists had their time in the sun, the reactionary, xenophobic strain in German culture was never far below the surface. One night in 1928, Joseph Goebbels walked around the Tauentzienstrasse cabaret district and returned home to write: “This is not the true Berlin … The other Berlin is lurking, ready to pounce.”

Music for Use

During the Great War, Paul Hindemith banged the bass drum in a military band, racing back and forth a mile or so behind the front lines, playing marches and dances for soldiers who were recovering from their spell in the trenches. He also performed in an all-soldier string quartet, at the behest of a cultured commanding officer, Count von Kielmannsegg, who adored Debussy. The group happened to be playing the Debussy Quartet when news of the composer’s death came over the radio. The count himself died in action a few months later. Such surreal juxtapositions of music and war left their mark on Hindemith’s imagination, and he, more than anyone, set the pace for postwar German music.

A no-nonsense man with a bulbous face and a machine-gun manner of speech, Hindemith had nothing aristocratic or bourgeois in his background. He was the son of a small-town manual laborer, and attended the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt with the help of a full scholarship. In the first months of the peace, he declared his in de pen dence from German Romanticism by completing a series of six sonatas for stringed instruments, crisply constructed pieces in which the influence of Debussy and Ravel was pervasive; few German composers of the preceding fifty years had written music of such uncomplicated grace. The young composer also showed a deep feeling for pre-Romantic traditions, for the stately forms of the Renaissance and the Baroque, although he modernized them relentlessly.

“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.

The idea of “music for use” quickly took root in the Weimar musical scene. The Munich-born Carl Orff, who would find everlasting fame as the composer of Carmina burana, cultivated it assiduously. If Hindemith, like Stravinsky, found rejuvenation in the curt forms and sharp timbres of the Baroque, Orff went much further back in time, to the music theater of ancient Greece. The austere aesthetic of Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Histoire du soldat metamorphosed into a timeless ritual language, tuneful, percussive, and hypnotically repetitive. In his early years Orff tended to the political left, setting poems by Bertolt Brecht. But his most singular achievement was a massive cycle of pieces for children, the School Work project, which, by way of infectious musical invention, instructed youngsters in the basics of mode, harmony, form, and rhythm. Kestenberg took notice, and by the early thirties he was proposing to give Orff control of the entire German music education system. The Nazi takeover in 1933 ended that prospect.

“Music for use” and educational music went hand in hand with what Peter Gay has called Weimar’s “hunger for wholeness”: its obsessive pursuit of arts-and-crafts projects, physical culture, back-to-nature expeditions, youth movements, sing-alongs, and so on. After the war, Theodor Adorno professed to see proto-Fascist tendencies in Weimar’s communitarian music making, playing off the fact that both Hindemith and Orff had become entangled, to a greater or lesser degree, in Nazi culture. Yet the denunciation rests on specious logic. There is nothing intrinsically fascistic about the longing to connect music to a community; it can just as easily serve as a vehicle for the propagation of Democratic thought. Untold millions of children would learn the basics of musical language by tapping out notes on the mallet percussion instruments that Orff had constructed to his purposes. The man himself may have been politically duplicitous, but his passion for teaching was profound, and it probably touched more lives than any music described in this book.

Now Opera

A publicity photo issued by the music publisher Universal Edition in 1927 shows the twenty-seven-year-old Austrian composer Ernst Krenek in a vaguely druggy double exposure, an endless cigarette holder dangling from his mouth. With his sharp suit and unlined face, he looks like a baby gangster gone legit. Another photomontage from that year puts the young artist together with two other celebrities of the moment: the boxer Max Schmeling and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.

For a little while in the late twenties, Krenek acquired certifiable, almost Gershwin-like celebrity; his opera Jonny spielt auf, or Jonny Strikes Up, was enshrined as one of those pop-culture artifacts that every Central European had to know. Fame came Krenek’s way because he dared to bring jazz—or what passed for jazz—onto the hallowed opera stage. Like George Antheil in Paris and New York, he was an ambitious young man seeking to make a splash, although there was a serious side to his enterprise as well; like so many young Austrians and Germans, he yearned to break out of the hot house of Romantic and Expressionist art, to join the milling throngs in the new Democratic street.

Jonny exemplified a new subgenre that came to be called Zeitoper, or Now Opera. Composers working in this mode set works in factories, or on board ocean liners, or, in one case, on “Fiftieth Avenue” in Manhattan. Typical was the plot of Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins, memorably described by Nicolas Slonimsky in his reference work Music Since 1900: “A cuckolding libertine pushes the husband of his mistress to his death in the cogs of a monstrous machine and strangles her when he finds out that she has become a promiscuous prostitute, whereupon the foreman, Maschinist Hopkins, dismisses him from his job ostensibly for inefficiency.” Now Operas almost always contained a scene in which one or another of the characters throws off his or her inhibitions to dance a Charleston, a Fox-Trott, a shimmy, or a tango. Composers thereby liberated themselves.

Several Zeitoper composers, Krenek and Brand among them, studied with the once celebrated and now unfairly neglected Austrian opera composer Franz Schreker, who, back in 1912, had unveiled a remarkable work titled Der ferne Klang, or The Distant Sound. The story of that opera is essentially the story of this book: the cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century. An ambitious young musical dramatist named Fritz decides to abandon his middling career and his adoring fiancée in order to find a new style—a “mysterious distant sound,” a “high, sublime goal.” He produces a work that people call “something really new,” “spine-chilling.” It causes a Schoenbergian scandal, replete with stamping and whistling. Meanwhile, Grete, Fritz’s fiancée, sinks low in the world, ending up as a prostitute. In the opera’s final scene they meet again, and Fritz, dying of an unspecified illness, tragically realizes that the sound he has been seeking has been around him all this time, in the multifarious textures of modern life, and in Grete’s voice.

The magic of Schreker’s opera is that from the first bars we have been hearing the music that Fritz cannot grasp—buoyantly lyrical vocal writing, more Italian than German in style; a golden blur of orchestral sound, more Debussy than Wagner in timbre; a cosmopolitan sensualism, incorporating, in the “grand bordello” sequence of Act II, Gypsy bands, barcaroles, and choral serenades.

Jonny tries to replicate Schreker’s achievement, but with more modern means. The title character is a Negro jazz violinist on a Europe an tour, a sort of Austrian cartoon of Will Marion Cook. He crows in triumph: “Across the sea comes New World brilliance / Inheriting old Europe with dance.” The cast also features a composer named Max, who, at the beginning of the opera, is seen sitting at the side of a grim glacier, which he addresses as “Du schöner Berg” (“you beautiful mountain”). Like Fritz in Der ferne Klang, Max cannot forgo the pursuit of a distant sound, presumably of the Schoenbergian variety. The subtext becomes amusingly obvious when Max says of the glacier, “Everyone loves it once they have got to know it,” as if quoting from propaganda literature of the Second Viennese School. The glacier eventually instructs Max, through the medium of an invisible choir of women’s voices, to “return to life.” In a climactic railway-station scene Max catches up with his beloved Anita as she rides off into the unknown. Jonny jumps up on top of the station clock and the chorus reprises his song of triumph. According to Krenek’s original notes, the opera was to have ended with the image of a 78-rpm recording spinning on a phonograph, the composer’s name inscribed upon it.

The entire plot was autobiographical. Before discovering a taste for jazz and other popular materials, Krenek had gone through his own wild-eyed semi-atonal phase, with Schoenberg and Bartók his guides. In writing Jonny, he was trying to live out Max’s epiphany, exposing his own glacier world to the warmth of Jonny’s violin. Furthermore, the character of Anita was based on Anna Mahler, Gustav and Alma’s daughter, to whom Krenek was briefly and tempestuously married. Not long after the relationship ended, the composer went to see Sam Wooding’s jazz revue Chocolate Kiddies, which was the rage of Europe in the mid-twenties, and he seized on Wooding’s polite jazz arrangements as a lifeline that would lead him out of the abysses of Central European despair. Interestingly, the revue contained at least one early Duke Ellington song, “Jig Walk,” and that tune bears a slight resemblance to Jonny’s big number. Alas, Krenek’s engagement with African-American music went about as deep as the blackface painted on the singer playing Jonny.

Zeitoper drew sharp criticisms from both ends of Weimar’s hyper-extended political spectrum. The Nazis attacked it as degenerate art. The Communist composer Hanns Eisler, meanwhile, wrote of Jonny in Die Rote Fahne: “Despite the infusions of chic, this is exactly the same mushy, petit bourgeois stuff that other contemporary opera composers produce.” Eisler was equally unkind to Hindemith’s “music for use,” dismissing it as a “relative stabilization of music” (a wry echo of German economic lingo). All modern music lived a Scheindasein, an illusory existence bereft of meaning or community. In 1928 Eisler wrote: “The big music festivals have become downright stock exchanges, where the value of the works is assessed and contracts for the coming season are settled. Yet all this noise is carried out in the vacuum of a bell glass, so to speak, so that not a sound can be heard outside. An empty officiousness celebrates orgies of inbreeding, while there is a complete lack of interest or participation of a public of any kind.”

What Germany needed, Eisler said, was music that told deeper truths about human society. Open the window when you compose, he instructed his colleagues. “Remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is made by man … Discover the people, the real people, discover day-to-day life for your art, and then perhaps you will be re discovered.” By that time, the revolution had begun; The Threepenny Opera was playing to packed crowds at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

Gestic Music

Kurt Weill’s schoolmates probably never imagined him as the cynosure of a decadent city. The son of a Jewish cantor in the town of Dessau, about seventy miles from Berlin, Weill grew up a shy, serious boy, devoted to music. Like Krenek, he admired Schoenberg in his youth, and yearned to study with the Master himself in Vienna, but the family’s limited finances prevented him from going. Instead, in the last weeks of 1918, Weill journeyed to revolutionary Berlin, where he ended up enrolling in Busoni’s master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts.

His first reactions to Weimar culture were skeptical. After a visit to the 1923 Frankfurt Chamber Music Festival, he reported to Busoni that “Hindemith has already danced too far into the land of the fox-trot.” Yet his ears were opening to a broader gamut of sounds: Mahler’s catchall symphonies, Stravinsky’s pop-tinged Histoire du soldat. The latter work appeared on the Frankfurt programs, and Weill was moved to admit—his snobbery was on the wane—that its “pandering to the taste of the street is bearable because it suits the material.”

As Krenek followed Schreker’s path out into the wider world, Weill followed Busoni, a magus-like musician who hovered over the early twentieth century like a spider in his web. A Tuscan of Corsican descent, a resident variously of Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig, Helsinki, Moscow, New York, Zurich, and Berlin, Busoni was a cosmopolitan in a nationalist age, a pragmatist in an era of aesthetic absolutism. In 1909, Busoni reprimanded Schoenberg for rejecting the old while embracing the new; as Busoni saw it, you could do both at once, and in the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music he called simultaneously for a reinvention of the “tonal system” and for a return to Mozartean, classical grace. Like so many Romantics and modernists before him, Busoni idolized the figure of Faust, but he delighted more in the science of magic than in the theory of heaven and hell. Doctor Faust, his unfinished operatic masterpiece, circumnavigated the globe of musical possibility, incorporating diatonic, modal, whole-tone, and chromatic scales, Renaissance polyphony, eighteenth-century formulas, operetta airs, and flurries of dissonance.

Perhaps the most effective lesson that Busoni imparted to Weill was a single sentence: “Do not be afraid of banality.” For a young German who had been raised to think that “banality” included almost everything Italian and French, this advice had an enlightening effect. Busoni showed how the great operas of Mozart and Verdi interwove naive tunes and sophisticated designs. He talked about the Schlagwort, the “hit word” or catchword, which can sum up in one instant an intricate theatrical situation—for example, the scalding cry of “Maledizione!” (“The curse!”) in Verdi’s Rigoletto. In a 1928 essay, “On the Gestic Character of Music,” Weill elaborated the related idea of Gestus, or musical gesture. The literary critic Daniel Albright defines Gestus as the dramatic turning point “in which pantomime, speech, and music cooperate toward a pure flash of meaning.” Bertolt Brecht, Weill’s principal literary collaborator, would give the concept of Gestus a political cast, describing it as a revolutionary transfer of energy from author to audience. For Weill, though, it always had a more practical meaning, one to which politics might or might not be attached.