Читать книгу The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Alex Ross - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSchoenberg, Debussy, and Atonality
One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the émigré novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. “Lies, Frau Marta, lies!” Schoenberg was yelling. “You have to know, I never had syphilis!”
The cause of this improbable commotion was the publication of Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Thomas Mann, a writer peculiarly attuned to music, had fled from the hell of Hitler’s Germany into the not-quite paradise of Los Angeles, joining other Central European artists in exile.
The proximity of such renowned figures as Schoenberg and Stravinsky had encouraged Mann to write a “novel of music,” in which a modern composer produces esoteric masterpieces and then descends into syphilitic insanity. For advice, Mann turned to Theodor W. Adorno, who had studied with Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg and who was also part of the Los Angeles émigré community.
Mann self-confessedly approached modern music from the perspective of an informed amateur who wondered what had happened to the “lost paradise” of German Romanticism. Mann had attended the premiere of Mahler’s Eighth in 1910. He had briefly met Mahler, and trembled in awe before him. Some three decades later, Mann watched as Schoenberg, Mahler’s protégé, presented his “extremely difficult” but “rewarding” scores to small groups of devotees in Los Angeles. The novel asks, in so many words, “What went wrong?”
Leverkühn is an intellectual monster—cold, loveless, arrogant, mocking. His music absorbs all styles of the past and shatters them into fragments. “I have found that it is not to be,” he says of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, whose “Ode to Joy” once spoke for mankind’s aspiration toward brotherhood. “It will be taken back. I will take it back.” The illness that destroys Leverkühn is acquired in a curious way. He tells his friends that he is going to see the Austrian premiere of Salome in Graz. On a secret detour he sleeps with a prostitute named Esmeralda, whose syphilitic condition is visible on her yellowed face. Leverkühn contracts the disease deliberately, in the belief that it will grant him supernatural creative powers. When the devil appears, he informs the composer that he will never be popular in his lifetime but that his time will come, à la Mahler: “You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.” Since Faustus is also a book about the roots of Nazism, Leverkühn’s “bloodless intellectuality” becomes, in a cryptic way, the mirror image of Hitler’s “bloody barbarism.” The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be not unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.
Schoenberg was understandably incensed by this scenario, which gave a pathological veneer to his proudest achievements. The real-life composer could be a bit spooky at times—“I can see through walls,” he was once heard to say—but he was hardly a cold or bloodless man. He set about revolutionizing music with high passion and childlike enthusiasm. As a born Viennese who venerated the Austro-German tradition, he could never have mocked Beethoven’s Ninth. As a Jew, he divined the true nature of Nazism sooner than did Mann. Aloofness was not his style; he was, among other things, a galvanizing, life-changing teacher, dozens of whose students, from the operatic Berg to the aphoristic Anton Webern, from the Communist Hanns Eisler to the hippieish Lou Harrison, played conspicuous roles in twentieth-century music.
Yet Mann knew what he was doing when he put his composer in league with the devil. Faust’s pact is a lurid version of the kinds of stories that artists tell themselves in order to justify their solitude. Eisler, when he read Mann’s novel, connected it to the perceived crisis of classical music in modern society. “Great art, as the Devil maintains, can now only be produced, in this declining society, through complete isolation, loneliness, through complete heartlessness … [Yet Mann] allows Leverkühn to dream of a new time, when music will again to a certain extent be on first-name terms with the people.” Other composers of the fin de siècle similarly conceived their situation as a one-man fight against a crude and stupid world. Claude Debussy, in Paris, assumed an antipopulist stance in the years before 1900 and not coincidentally broke away from conventional tonality in the same period. But Schoenberg took the most drastic steps, and perhaps more important, he set forth an elaborate teleology of musical history, a theory of irreversible progress, to justify his actions. The Faust metaphor honors the dread that Schoenberg’s juggernaut inspired in early listeners.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution splintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.
Vienna 1900
In his early stories Thomas Mann produced several lively portraits of a widespread turn-of-the-century type, the apocalyptic aesthete. The story “At the Prophet’s,” written in 1904, begins with an ironic ode to artistic megalomania:
Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit, lofty and spare. At the edge of large cities, where street lamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount til you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood; up into cheap studios with symbolic decorations, where solitary and rebellious artists, inwardly consumed, hungry and proud, wrestle in a fog of cigarette smoke with devastatingly ultimate ideals. Here is the end: ice, chastity, null. Here is valid no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values. Here the air is so rarefied that the mirages of life no longer exist. Here reign defiance and iron consistency, the ego supreme amid despair; here freedom, madness, and death hold sway.
In Mann’s 1902 story “Gladius Dei,” a young man named Hieronymus strides through Richard Strauss’s hometown of Munich, scowling at the extravagance around him. He goes inside an art shop and berates its owner for displaying kitsch—art that is merely “beautiful” and therefore worthless. “Do you think gaudy colors can gloss over the misery of the world?” Hieronymus shouts. “Do you think loud orgies of luxurious good taste can drown the moans of the tortured earth? … Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss; art is the divine flame that must set fire to the world, until the world with all its infamy and anguish burns and melts away in redeeming compassion!”
All over fin-de-siècle Europe, strange young men were tramping up narrow stairs to garret rooms and opening doors to secret places. Occult and mystical societies—Theosophist, Rosicrucian, Swedenborgian, kabbalistic, and neopagan—promised rupture from the world of the present. In the political sphere, Communists, anarchists, and ultranationalists plotted from various angles to overthrow the quasi-liberal monarchies of Europe; Leon Trotsky, in exile in Vienna from 1907 to 1914, began publishing a paper called Pravda. In the nascent field of psychology, Freud placed the ego at the mercy of the id. The world was unstable, and it seemed that one colossal Idea, or, failing that, one well-placed bomb, could bring it tumbling down. There was an almost titillating sense of imminent catastrophe.
Vienna was the scene of what may have been the ultimate pitched battle between the bourgeoisie and the avant-garde. A minority of “truth-seekers,” as the historian Carl Schorske calls them, or “critical modernists,” in the parlance of the philosopher Allan Janik, grew incensed by the city’s rampant aestheticism, its habit of covering all available surfaces in gold leaf. They saw before them a supposedly modern, liberal, tolerant society that was failing to deliver on its promises, that was consigning large parts of its citizenry to poverty and misery. They spoke up for the outcasts and the scapegoats, the homosexuals and the prostitutes. Many of the “truth-seekers” were Jewish, and they were beginning to comprehend that Jews could never assimilate themselves into an anti-Semitic society, no matter how great their devotion to German culture. In the face of the gigantic lie of the cult of beauty—so the rhetoric went—art had to become negative, critical. It had to differentiate itself from the pluralism of bourgeois culture, which, as Salome demonstrated, had acquired its own avant-garde division.
The offensive against kitsch moved on all fronts. The critic Karl Kraus used his one-man periodical, Die Fackel, or The Torch, to expose what he considered to be laziness and mendacity in journalistic language, institutionalized iniquity in the prosecution of crime, and hypocrisy in the work of popular artists. The architect Adolf Loos attacked the Art Nouveau compulsion to cover everyday objects in wasteful ornament, and, in 1911, shocked the city and the emperor with the unadorned, semi-industrial facade of his commercial building on the Michaelerplatz. The gruesome pictures of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele confronted a soft-porn art world with the insatiability of lust and the violence of sex. Georg Trakl’s poetry meticulously documented the onset of insanity and suicidal despair: “Now with my murderer I am alone.”
If members of this informal circle sometimes failed to appreciate one another’s work—the bohemian poet Peter Altenberg preferred Puccini and Strauss to Schoenberg and his students—they closed ranks when philistines attacked. There would be no backing down in the face of opposition. “If I must choose the lesser of two evils,” Kraus said, “I will choose neither.”
The most aggressive of Vienna’s truth-seekers was the philosopher Otto Weininger, who, in 1903, at the age of twenty-three, shot himself in the house where Beethoven died. In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece, and it made a posthumous bestseller of his doctoral dissertation, a bizarre tract titled Sex and Character. The argument of the book was that Europe suffered from racial, sexual, and ethical degeneration, whose root cause was the rampant sexuality of Woman. Jewishness and homosexuality were both symptoms of a feminized, aestheticized society. Only a masculine Genius could redeem the world. Wagner was “the greatest man since Christ.” Strange as it may seem in retrospect, this alternately incoherent and bigoted work attracted readers as intelligent as Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and James Joyce, not to mention Schoenberg and his pupils. The young Alban Berg devoured Weininger’s writings on culture, underlining sentences such as this: “Everything purely aesthetic has no cultural value.” Wittgenstein, who made it his mission to expunge pseudo-religious cant from philosophy, was quoting Weininger when he issued his aphorism “Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
The entire discourse surrounding the Viennese avant-garde demands skeptical scrutiny. Certain of these “truths”—fatuous generalizations about women, obnoxious remarks about the relative abilities of races and classes—fail to impress the modern reader. Weininger’s notion of “ethics,” rooted in Puritanism and self-hatred, is as hypocritical as anyone’s. As in prior periods of cultural and social upheaval, revolutionary gestures betray a reactionary mind-set. Many members of the modernist vanguard would tack away from a fashionable solidarity with social outcasts and toward various forms of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, even Nazism. Moreover, only in a prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience. The bourgeois worship of art had implanted in artists’ minds an attitude of infallibility, according to which the imagination made its own laws. That mentality made possible the extremes of modern art.
If the ethical justification of the modernist crusade rings false, composers did have one good reason to rebel against bourgeois taste: the prevailing cult of the past threatened their very livelihood. Vienna was indeed besotted with music, but it was besotted with old music, with the work of Mozart and Beethoven and the late Dr. Brahms. A canon was taking shape, and contemporary pieces were beginning to disappear from concert programs. In the late eighteenth century, 84 percent of the repertory of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra consisted of music by living composers. By 1855, the figure had declined to 38 percent, by 1870 to 24 percent. Meanwhile, the broader public was falling in love with the cakewalk and other popular novelties. Schoenberg’s reasoning was this: if the bourgeois audience was losing interest in new music, and if the emerging mass audience had no appetite for classical music new or old, the serious artist should stop flailing his arms in a bid for attention and instead withdraw into a principled solitude.
After seeing Salome in Graz, Mahler doubted whether the voice of the people was the voice of God. Schoenberg, in his worst moods, completely inverted the formula, implying, in effect, that the voice of the people was the voice of the devil. “If it is art, it is not for all,” he later wrote, “and if it is for all, it is not art.” Did the split between the composer and his public come about as the result of such ferocious attitudes? Or were they a rational response to the public’s irrational vitriol? These questions admit no ready answers. Both sides of the dispute bore some degree of responsibility for the unsightly outcome. Fin-de-siècle Vienna offers the depressing spectacle of artists and audiences washing their hands of each other, giving up on the dream of common ground.
Paris 1900
Schoenberg was not the first composer to write “atonal music,” if it is defined as music outside the major-and minor-key system. That distinction probably belongs to Franz Liszt, erstwhile virtuoso of the Romantic piano, latter-day abbé and mystic. In several works of the late 1870s and early ’80s, most notably in the Bagatelle sans tonalité, Liszt’s harmony comes unmoored from the concept of key. Triads, the basic three-note building blocks of Western music, grow scarce. Augmented chords and unresolved sevenths proliferate. The diabolical tritone lurks everywhere. These profoundly unfamiliar works puzzled listeners who were accustomed to the flashy Romanticism of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and other favorites. Wagner muttered to Cosima that his old friend was showing signs of “budding insanity.” But it wasn’t happening only in Liszt’s brain. Similar anomalies cropped up in Russia and France. The fabric of harmony was warping, as if under the influence of an unseen force.
Paris, where Liszt caused mass hysteria in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, was more or less the birthplace of the avant-garde as we now conceive it. Charles Baudelaire struck all the poses of the artist in opposition to society, in terms of dress, behavior, sexual mores, choice of subject, and style of delivery. The august Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé defined poetry as a hermetic practice: “Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.”
The young Debussy took that attitude as gospel. To his colleague Ernest Chausson he wrote in 1893: “Music really ought to have been a hermetical science, enshrined in texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief! I’d go further and, instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a ‘Society of Musical Esotericism …’”
Debussy shared with Schoenberg a petit bourgeois background. Born in 1862, the son of a shop keep er turned civil servant, he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he struggled for several years to write a cantata sufficiently dull to win the sinecure of the academically oriented Prix de Rome. He finally succeeded with The Prodigal Son, in 1884.
In his spare time, Debussy sampled the wares of Paris’s avant-garde scenes, browsed in bookshops stocked with occult and Oriental lore, and, at the Bayreuth festivals of 1888 and 1889, fell under the spell of Parsifal. He attended Mallarmé’s elite Tuesday gatherings from around 1892 on, and also delved into more obscure regions—cultish Catholic societies such as the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross and the Order of the Rose-Cross of the Temple and Graal. Alas, it does not seem to be the case, despite claims put forward in the bestselling books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, that Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion, which, according to a fabricated legend, guarded the secret of the Grail itself.
All this was standard-issue post-Wagnerian mumbo-jumbo. But Debussy’s honest quest for an unblemished, truthful musical language soon led him to other, distinctly un-Wagnerian sources. Just before his second trip to Bayreuth, in 1889, he attended the Paris Universal Exposition, which imported exotic sights and sounds from around the world, courtesy of a network of oppressive colonial regimes. It was here that Gauguin first became enamored of the tropical simplicity that eventually led him to take up residence in Tahiti. Debussy listened transfixed to the music of a Vietnamese theater troupe, with its effects of resonating gongs, and also to a Javanese gamelan ensemble, with its minimal scales of five notes, its delicate layering of timbres, its air of suspended animation. Gamelan music, Debussy wrote, “contained all gradations, even some that we no longer know how to name, so that tonic and dominant were nothing more than empty phantoms of use to clever little children.”
Debussy also immersed himself in painting and poetry, working out musical analogies for his sharpest aesthetic impressions. Although he was later labeled a musical “impressionist,” Renoir and Monet affected him little; he was influenced more by Anglo-American painters—by Turner’s way of suffusing a landscape with light, by Whistler’s way of subsuming a seascape into a single mood. He read the poetry of Paul Verlaine, whose Fêtes galantes he discovered on the shelves of his piano pupil and lover Marie-Blanche Vasnier. And Verlaine’s perfectly simple and elusive images—the color of moonlight, the music of rustling leaves and falling rain, the unreadable beauty of the sea, the motion of ancient dances, the souls of marionettes—fired Debussy’s musical imagination. To evoke the instrument of “Mandoline,” he wrote strumming chords in which fifths accumulate in dreaming towers. To capture the plain mystery of the line “singing branches,” he let common chords tumble over one another in defiance of textbook rules. In the midst of that kaleidoscopic rush of sounds, the whole-tone scale, one of Debussy’s trademark devices, made an early appearance. This, in turn, brought the young composer to the threshold of so-called atonality.
Musicians and listeners had long agreed that certain intervals, or pairs of notes, were “clear,” and that others were “unclear.” The quoted words can be found on a cuneiform tablet from the Sumerian city of Ur. The clearest intervals were the octave, the fifth, the fourth, and the major third, which form the lower end of the harmonic series (see, again, the opening measures of Thus Spake Zarathustra). By contrast, the tritone had for centuries been considered a disturbing entity. The whole-tone scale, which had begun showing up as an exotic effect in mid-nineteenth-century Russian and Central European music, consists of six equal steps in succession; if one goes upward starting from any C on a piano, it is three white keys followed by three black keys. The scale has the interesting property of being “clear” and “unclear” in equal measure. It abounds in bright major thirds, which can be obtained by moving two steps from any note. It also abounds in tritones (three steps). In visual terms, the scale generates a palette at once luminous and unreal, bright and hazy.
Debussy also made use of pentatonic scales, which he encountered many times at the Paris Exposition—those ancient, elementary five-note scales that crop up in folk traditions all over the world, from Africa to Indonesia. And he continued using diatonic (major-and minor-key) scales, though often in a spirit of nostalgia or satirical play.
The composer thought deeply about the physical facts underlying harmony. Hermann von Helmholtz, in his 1863 treatise, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, had explained the physics of the natural harmonic series and attempted to define human perceptions of consonance and dissonance in relation to it. As the waveforms of any two simultaneous tones intersect, they create “beats,” pulsations in the air. The interval of the octave causes a pleasant sensation, Helmholtz said, because the oscillations of the upper note align with those of the lower note in a perfect two-to-one ratio, meaning that no beats are felt. The perfect fifth, which has a three-to-two ratio, also sounds “clean” to the ear. Debussy may have known Helmholtz’s work; he certainly knew the eighteenth-century speculations of Rameau, who had linked standard harmony to the overtone series. Debussy loved to plant octaves and fifths in the bass and let a rainbow of narrower intervals shimmer in the upper air.
Debussy’s emblematic early work is Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” an orchestral narrative after a poem by Mallarmé, written and revised between 1892 and 1894. In the poem, a faun wonders how best to treasure the memory, or perhaps the dream, of two exquisite nymphs; he plays a song upon his flute, aware that music falls short of the viscerality of experience:
Long shall my discourse from the echoing shore
Depict those goddesses: by masquerades,
I’ll strip the veils that sanctify their shades.
The score begins by summoning the very music that the faun plays—a languid melody on the flute, descending a tritone and going back up. The harmony, likewise, swings across the tritone and comes to rest on a richly resonant B-flat dominant seventh, which, in classical harmony, would resolve to E-flat. Here the chord becomes a self-sufficient organism, symbolic of unbounded nature. Then the flute repeats its melody while a new texture forms around it. Debussy thus resists the Germanic urge to develop his thematic material: the melody remains static while the accompaniment evolves. Cloudy whole-tone sonorities mark the horizon of the faun’s vision, where shapes dissolve in mist.
All this suggestion eventually coalesces into a voluptuous, full-orchestral love song in D-flat major. The strings savor long, flowing unison lines, more akin to Indian ragas than to Wagner or Strauss. It is music of physical release, even of sexual orgasm, as Vaslav Nijinsky demonstrated in his undulating dance of the Faun at the Ballets Russes in 1912. “I hold the queen!” Mallarmé’s faun exults. Yet the tritone lingers in the bass, a mystery ungrasped.
With the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, sketched in the early 1890s and then extensively revised before its 1902 premiere, Debussy created a new kind of interior music drama, using Wagner as raw material. The text is by the Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and, as Strauss would do in Salome, Debussy set Maeterlinck’s play word for word, following its riddling prose wherever it took him. The love triangle of Pelléas, his half brother Golaud, and the inscrutable wandering princess Mélisande moves toward a grim climax, but most of the action takes place offstage; the score places the listener in a liquid medium into which individual psychologies have been submerged. Debussy’s established resources—whole-tone scales, antique modes, attenuated melodies that rise from wavering intervals—conjure an atmosphere of wandering, waiting, yearning, trembling.
Later come glimpses of a beautiful country on the other side. When Pelléas and Mélisande finally confess their love for each other—“I love you,” “I love you, too,” without accompaniment—the orchestra responds with a simple textbook progression moving from a tonic chord to its dominant seventh, except that in Debussy’s spectral scoring it sounds like the dawn of creation. A similar transfiguring simplicity overtakes the prelude to Act V, in which we discover that Mélisande has given birth to a child.
At some point, Debussy’s sense of himself as a sonic adventurer, a Faustian seeker, dissipated. By 1900 he was no longer calling for a Society of Musical Esotericism; instead, he prized classic French values of clarity, elegance, and grace. He was also listening intently to Spanish music—in particular, to the cante jondo, or deep song, tradition of Andalusian flamenco. His major works from the first decade of the century—La Mer; the Preludes, Book I, and Estampes for piano; and the cycles of Images for piano and for orchestra—intermingle familiar qualities of unearthliness with dancing movement and clean-cut lyricism. “Voiles” (“Sails”), in the Preludes, confines itself almost entirely to the whole-tone scale. “Steps in the Snow” revolves around hypnotic repetitions of a four-note figure. But “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” has a melody of the sort that begs to be whistled in the street; many people would be surprised to learn that it had been “composed” at all. And the “Interrupted Serenade,” a Spanish scene, intertwines flamenco guitar with Arabic scales suggestive of Moorish influence. Debussy did not learn to write such music in Faustian isolation; instead, he picked up clues from desultory nights at the opera, operetta, cabarets, and cafés.
Paris bohemia promoted an easy back-and-forth between occult esotericism and cabaret populism, not least because the two worlds were sometimes literally on top of each other. The Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross met in a room above the cabaret Auberge du Clou, and as the cabal debated its arcane philosophy, the insinuating tunes of the café-concert would have floated up from below.
In such places, Debussy often encountered Erik Satie, another clandestine revolutionary of the fin de siècle, and, in some ways, the more daring one. Satie, too, dabbled in Rosicrucianism, serving briefly as the house composer for the Order of the Rose-Cross of the Temple and Graal, which the novelist Joséphin Péladan had founded in a Parsifal daze. Satie’s music for Péladan’s play Le Fils des étoiles (1891) begins with a totally irrational string of dissonant six-note chords—the next step beyond late Liszt. Yet a life of experiment was not to Satie’s liking. The son of a publisher of music-hall and cabaret songs, he found deeper satisfaction in playing piano at the Auberge du Clou. He achieved liberation from the past in three piano pieces titled Gymnopédies, which discard centuries of knotted-brow complexity in favor of a language at once simple and new. In the first eighteen bars of the first piece, only six pitches are used. There is no development, no transition, only an instant prolonged.
The conductor Reinbert de Leeuw has written: “Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again.” The same could have been said of Debussy, who, in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex—“They smell of the lamp, not of the sun.” Debussy was describing the motivation for his latest work, the Nocturnes for orchestra, and in particular for the movement “Fêtes,” which depicted a festival in the Bois de Boulogne, replete with the sounds of soldiers’ trumpets and the cries of the crowd. This was the germ of an alternative modernism, one that would reach maturity in the stripped-down, folk-based, jazz-happy, machine-driven music of the twenties. In essence, two avant-gardes were forming side by side. The Parisians were moving into the brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction, illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.
Schoenberg
Schoenberg was born in 1874. His father, Samuel Schönberg, came from a German-speaking Jewish community in Pressburg, which is now Bratislava, in Slovakia. (Schoenberg dropped the umlaut from his name when he fled Germany in 1933.) Samuel Schönberg moved to Vienna as a young man to make a living as a shop keep er. There he met and married Pauline Nachod, who came from a family of cantorial singers. The couple lived in modest circumstances and did not own a piano. Their son learned much of the classical repertory from a military band that performed in a coffee house on the Prater. Arnold taught himself several instruments and played in a string quartet that occupied a room set aside for messenger boys. He learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata.
One way or another, Schoenberg absorbed so much music that he had no need for formal instruction. He did take some lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky, a slightly older composer who wrote fine-grained, lyrically potent music in the vein of Mahler and Strauss. Zemlinsky’s father was Catholic, his mother was the daughter of a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Muslim. In 1901, Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde, who, a few years later, would set off the central emotional crisis of his life.
After working for a time as a bank clerk, Schoenberg took on various odd musical jobs, conducting a workers’ chorus, orchestrating operettas, and writing sentimental songs. In late 1901, he moved to Berlin to serve as a musical director for high-minded revues at the Überbrettl cabaret, or, as it was later called, the Buntes Theater. This organization was the brainchild of Ernst von Wolzogen, who hoped to import to Berlin the streetwise sophistication of Paris cabarets such as the Chat Noir and the Auberge du Clou. In the wake of financial difficulties, Wolzogen quit his enterprise in 1902, and Schoenberg, short on work, returned to Vienna the following year. Aspects of the cabaret reappeared in the 1912 song cycle Pierrot lunaire, where the soloist floats between speech and song. If Schoenberg later characterized his atonal music as a gesture of resistance to the popular mainstream, in the early days his stance was significantly more flexible.
Sharp-witted, widely cultured, easily unimpressed, Schoenberg made himself at home in the coffee houses where the leading lights of fin-de-siècle Vienna gathered—the Café Imperial, the Café Central, the Café Museum. The great men in Vienna all had their circles of disciples, and Schoenberg quickly assembled his own. In 1904 he placed a notice in the Neue Musikalische Presse announcing that he was seeking pupils in composition. Several young men showed up as a result. One was Anton Webern, a stern young soul who may have seen the ad because it appeared directly beneath a report on the desecration of Parsifal in America. (The previous year, Heinrich Conried, Mahler’s future employer, had staged Parsifal at the Met, breaking the rule that made Wagner’s sacred opera exclusive to Bayreuth.) Another was Alban Berg, a gifted but feckless youth who had been working in the civil service.
The early works of Schoenberg always come as a pleasant shock to listeners expecting a grueling atonal exercise. The music exudes a heady, luxurious tone, redolent of Klimt’s gilt portraits and other Jugendstil artifacts. Brash Straussian gestures mix with diaphanous textures that bear a possibly not coincidental resemblance to Debussy. There are spells of suspended animation, when the music becomes fixated on a single chord. The chamber tone poem Transfigured Night, written in 1899, ends with twelve bars of glistening D major, the fundamental note never budging in the bass. Gurre-Lieder, a huge Wagnerian cantata for vocal soloists, multiple choruses, and super-sized orchestra, begins with a great steam bath of E-flat major, probably in imitation of the opening to Wagner’s Ring. Yet all is not well in Romantic paradise. Unexplained dissonances rise to the surface; chromatic lines intersect in a contrapuntal tangle; chords of longing fail to resolve.
The young Schoenberg encountered opposition, but he also received encouragement from the highest musical circles. The Mahlers regularly invited him to their apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz, where, according to Alma, he would incite heated arguments by offering up “paradox of the most violent description.” Afterward, Gustav would say to Alma, “Take good care you never invite that conceited puppy to the house again.” Before long, another invitation would arrive.
Mahler found Schoenberg’s music mesmerizing and maddening in equal measure. “Why am I still writing symphonies,” he once exclaimed, “if that is supposed to be the music of the future!” After a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Mahler asked the musicians to play a C-major triad. “Thank you,” he said, and walked out. Yet he made a show of applauding Schoenberg’s most controversial works, knowing how destructive the critics and claques of Vienna could be.
Strauss, too, found Schoenberg fascinating—“very talented,” he said, even if the music was “overloaded.” The two composers met during Schoenberg’s first stint in Berlin—Wolzogen, the director of the Buntes Theater, had collaborated with Strauss on his second opera, the anti-philistine comedy Feuersnot—and Strauss helped his younger colleague locate other sources of income. When Schoenberg later founded the Society for Creative Musicians in Vienna, Strauss accepted an honorary membership, and expressed the hope that the new organization would “blessedly light up many minds darkened by decades of malice and stupidity.”
Schoenberg withheld from Strauss the impertinence that he showed to Mahler. “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, honored master,” the future revolutionary wrote obsequiously in 1903, “once again for all the help you have given me at a sacrifice to yourself in the most sincere manner. I will not forget this for the whole of my life and will always be thankful to you for it.” As late as 1912, Schoenberg still felt nervous and schoolboyish in Strauss’s presence: “He was very friendly. But I behaved very awkwardly … I stammered and surely left the impression of a servile devotion on Strauss.” Schoenberg told himself that he should have been more of a “Selfian”—as proudly self-determined as Strauss himself.
In May 1906, the Schoenberg contingent had gone to see Salome in Graz. Beforehand, Schoenberg painstakingly studied the vocal score, which Mahler had given to him. It stood on his music stand, open to the first page. “Perhaps in twenty years’ time someone will be able to explain these harmonic progressions theoretically,” Schoenberg told his students. Aspects of Salome’s fractured tonality show up in the First Chamber Symphony, which Schoenberg wrote that summer. Yet this new piece was very different in tone and style from Strauss’s opera. Its strenuous working out of brief motivic figures recalled Viennese practice in the Classical period from Haydn to Beethoven. In a deliberate rejection of fin-de-siècle grandiosity, it was scored for a mini-orchestra of fifteen instruments, its sonorities rough rather than lush. Schoenberg was throwing off excess baggage, perhaps in anticipation of lean years to come. The process of condensation led to Pierrot lunaire, in which the soloist is accompanied by an agile band of two winds, two strings, and a piano.
Just as Debussy imagined new sounds while perusing images in Verlaine and Mallarmé, Schoenberg let poetry guide him. He relished the erotic visions of Richard Dehmel, who furnished the story of Transfigured Night. He also investigated, at Strauss’s suggestion, the plays of Maeterlinck; and in 1902 and 1903, he fashioned a large-scale orchestral tone poem on the subject of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, purportedly unaware that Debussy had just made a setting of the same text. But Schoenberg’s most crucial literary encounter was with the poetry of Stefan George, then the leading Symbolist among German writers.
George stood apart from his compatriots on account of his ardent Francophilia; he had gone to Paris in 1889, attended Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” (the poet dubbed him “one of us”), and translated the major French poets into German. He might have met Debussy, though there is no evidence that he did. So determined was he to honor his French masters that he dropped capital letters from German nouns. A self-styled artist-prophet in the fin-de-siècle mode, George surrounded himself with a bevy of acolytes, among whom could always be found several beautiful adolescent boys. George’s circle inspired Mann’s satire “At the Prophet’s”; minus the homosexual element, it might also have served as a model for Schoenberg, who treated his students as disciples and seldom appeared in public without them. More important, George showed Schoenberg a way out of the easygoing pleasures of Viennese aesthetics. The sheer density of the poet’s imagery did not permit easy access, although sensual secrets resided in the labyrinth.
Schoenberg’s voyage to the other side began on December 17, 1907, when he set a poem from George’s collection Year of the Soul, much of which is concerned with an intense scene of farewell. It begins: “I must not in thanks sink down before you / You are the spiritual plain from which we rose.” The music hangs by only the thinnest thread to the old harmonic order. It purports to be in B minor, yet the home chord appears only three times in thirty measures, once beneath the word “agonizing.” Otherwise, it is made up of a ghostly flow of unrooted triads, ambiguous transitional chords, stark dissonances, and crystalline monodic lines, approximating the picture of an “ice-cold, deep-sleeping stream” with which the poem concludes. The date of composition is telling: eight days earlier, Schoenberg had bid farewell to Mahler at the Westbahnhof in Vienna. If, as seems possible, the fact of Mahler’s departure impelled the choice of text, then it carries a double message: the young composer has been abandoned by a father figure, yet he is also liberated, free to pursue a different love.
The next leg of the journey took place in the midst of personal crisis. Schoenberg had admitted into his circle an unstable character named Richard Gerstl, a gifted painter of brutal Expressionist tendencies. Under Gerstl’s direction, Schoenberg had taken up painting and found that he had a knack for it: his canvas The Red Gaze, in which a gaunt face stares out with bloodshot eyes, has come to be recognized as a minor masterpiece of its time and place. In May 1908 Schoenberg discovered that Gerstl was having an affair with his wife, Mathilde, and that summer he surprised the lovers in a compromising position. Mathilde ran off with Gerstl, then returned to her husband, whereupon Gerstl proceeded to stage a suicide that exceeded Weininger’s in flamboyance: he burned his paintings and hanged himself naked in front of a full-length mirror, as if he wanted to see his own body rendered in Expressionist style. The suicide took place on November 4, 1908, on the night of a Schoenberg concert to which Gerstl had not been invited; evidently, that rejection was the final straw.
Schoenberg himself struggled with thoughts of suicide. “I have only one hope—that I will not live much longer,” he wrote to his wife at the end of the summer. In a last will and testament that may have been an unused suicide note, he wrote, “I have cried, have behaved like someone in despair, have made decisions and then rejected them, have had ideas of suicide and almost carried them out, have plunged from one madness into another—in a word, I am totally broken.” He warned that he would “soon follow the path, find the resolution, that at long last might be the highest culmination of all human actions.” But, in an intriguingly vague turn of phrase, he could not foresee “whether it be my body that will give way or my soul.”
Suicide was not Schoenberg’s style. Just as Beethoven, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, resolved to forge ahead into a life of misery, Schoenberg pressed on. That same summer of 1908 he finished his Second Quartet, in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forking in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music of the time. It contains fragments of the folk song “Ach, du lieber Augustin”—the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler (or so Freud said). For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is “Alles ist hin” (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals.
In the final two movements of the Second Quartet a soprano voice joins the string players to sing two George poems, “Litany” and “Rapture.” The texts come from a larger cycle that George wrote in memory of a handsome boy named Maximilian Kronberger, who died of meningitis one day after his sixteenth birthday, leaving the poet in spasms of grief. Schoenberg seems to identify not only with the poet’s emotion but also with his urge to manipulate pain to expressive ends, in the name of self-abnegation and purification. “Litany” cries out for a quick end to sexual and spiritual agony: “Kill the longing, close the wound!” “Rapture,” the culmination of George’s “Maximin” cycle, presents the solution. It begins in a state of profound estrangement, with the alienation of the individual turning universal:
I feel the wind of another planet.
Growing pale in the darkness are the faces
Of those who lately turned to me as friends.
This Martian breeze is mimicked in soft, sinister streams of notes, recalling the episode in Salome when Herod hallucinates a chilly wind. Special effects on the strings (mutes, harmonics, bowing at the bridge) heighten the sense of otherness, as singing tones become whispers and high cries. Then comes the transformation:
I dissolve in tones, circling, weaving . . .
I am but a spark of the holy fire
I am but a roaring of the holy voice.
The soprano declaims her lines in a cool, stately rhythm. The strings dwell on sustained chords, most of which can be named according to the old harmonic system, although they have been torn from the organic connections of tonality and move like a procession of ghosts. At the climactic moment, under the word “holy,” the composer’s motto chord, the dissonant combination of a fourth and a tritone, sounds with unyielding force. Even so, Schoenberg is not ready to go over the brink. At the close the motto chord gives way to pure F-sharp major, which, in light of what has gone before, sounds bizarre and surreal. The work is dedicated to “my wife.”
Schoenberg stayed in his Stefan George trance through the fall of 1908, when he completed a song cycle on the poet’s Book of Hanging Gardens. The otherworldly serenity persists, together with vestiges of tonality. Then something snapped, and Schoenberg let out his pent-up rage. In 1909, as Mahler was sinking into the long goodbye of his Ninth Symphony and Strauss was floating away into the eighteenth-century dreamworld of Rosenkavalier, Schoenberg entered a creative frenzy, writing the Three Pieces for Piano, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Erwartung, or Expectation, a dramatic scene for soprano and orchestra. In the last of the Three Piano Pieces, the keyboard turns into something like a percussion instrument, a battlefield of triple and quadruple forte. In the first of the orchestral pieces, “Premonitions,” instrumental voices dissolve into gestures, textures, and colors, many of them derived from Salome: agitated rapid figures joined to trills, hypnotically circling whole-tone figures, woodwinds screeching in their uppermost registers, two-note patterns dripping like blood on marble, a spitting, snarling quintet of flutter-tongued trombones and tuba. Erwartung, the monologue of a woman stumbling through a moonlit forest in search of her missing lover, is distended by monster chords of eight, nine, and ten notes, which saturate the senses and shut down the intellect. In one especially hair-raising passage, the voice plunges nearly two octaves, from B to C-sharp, on a cry of “Help!” This comes straight from Wagner’s Parsifal; Kundry crosses the same huge interval when she confesses that she laughed at the suffering of Christ.
Schoenberg’s early atonal music is not all sound and fury. Periodically, it discloses worlds that are like hidden valleys between mountains; a hush descends, the sun glimmers in fog, shapes hover. In the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra—the one titled “Farben,” or “Colors”—a five-note chord is transposed up and down the scale and passed through a beguiling array of orchestral timbres. The chord itself is not harsh, but it is elusive, poised between consonance and dissonance. Such utterly original experiments in shifting tone colors came to be classified as Klangfarbenmelodie, or tone-color melody.
The same rapt mood descends over the Six Little Pieces for Piano, Opus 19, which Schoenberg wrote in early 1911, as Mahler lay dying. The second piece is nine bars long and contains about a hundred notes. It is built on a hypnotic iteration of the interval G and B, which chimes softly in place, giving off a clean, warm sound. Tendrils of sound trail around the dyad, touching at one point or another on the remaining ten notes of the chromatic scale. But the main notes stay riveted in place. They are like two eyes, staring ahead, never blinking.
Scandal
“I feel the heat of rebellion rising in even the slightest souls,” Schoenberg wrote in a program note in January 1910, “and I suspect that even those who have believed in me until now will not want to accept the necessity of this development.”
Nothing in the annals of musical scandal—from the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.”—rivals the ruckus that greeted Schoenberg early in his career. In February 1907, his thornily contrapuntal, though not yet atonal, First String Quartet was heard against a vigorous ostinato of laughter, catcalls, and whistles. Mahler, leaping to Schoenberg’s defense, nearly got into a fistfight with one of the troublemakers. Three days later, the First Chamber Symphony caused “seat-rattling, whistle-blowing, and ostentatious walk-outs,” according to Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz. When the Second Quartet had its premiere, in December 1908, the critic Ludwig Karpath couldn’t wait until the following morning to make his feelings known, and shouted, “Stop it! Enough!” A critic friendlier to Schoenberg shouted back, “Quiet! Continue to play!”
The resistance to Schoenberg was deep-seated. It came not only from reactionaries and philistines but also from listeners of considerable musical knowledge. One early scandal, we are told, was fomented by pupils of Heinrich Schenker, a giant in the new discipline of musicology. Anti-Semitism played no significant role, despite some latter-day claims. (Two of Schoenberg’s most vehement critics, Robert Hirschfeld and Julius Korngold, were Jews, and their colleague Hans Liebstöckl was a Prague-born German of antinationalist and pro-Debussy tendencies.) Even Mahler had trouble accepting the “necessity of this development,” in Schoenberg’s words. “I have your quartet with me and study it from time to time,” Mahler wrote to Schoenberg in January 1909. “But it is difficult for me. I’m so terribly sorry that I cannot follow you better; I look forward to the day when I shall find myself again (and so find you).” When Mahler saw the Five Pieces for Orchestra, he commented that he could not translate the notes on the page into sounds in his head. Nevertheless, he continued to encourage his “conceited puppy” and, in his last days, was heard to say, “If I go, he will have nothing left.”
Strauss, for his part, thought that Schoenberg had gone off the deep end. That reaction must have been especially disappointing, for Schoenberg had written the Five Pieces in answer to Strauss’s request for some short works for his Berlin concert series. Schoenberg was so eager to show Strauss what he had done that he mailed off the Pieces before they were complete, and only ten days after the fourth of the set was finished. “There is no architecture and no build-up,” Schoenberg explained in an accompanying letter. “Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms, and moods.” Strauss politely wrote back that such “daring experiments” would be too much for his audience. Outwardly, he maintained his support, sending his colleague one hundred marks in 1911. But his true opinion surfaced three years later, when he made the mistake of writing to Alma Mahler that Schoenberg “would be better off shoveling snow than scribbling on music paper.” Alma showed the letter to Schoenberg’s student Erwin Stein, who decided that his teacher should be apprised of its contents. Schoenberg snapped that whatever he had learned from the composer of Salome he had misunderstood.
In the middle of these setbacks came a massive success, which, in the end, only magnified the composer’s anger. This was the 1913 world premiere of Gurre-Lieder, which had been sketched ten years earlier and exhibited a late-Romantic style that Schoenberg had since abandoned. The setting was Vienna’s Musikverein—the legendary hall where symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner had first been heard. The conductor was Franz Schreker, another Austrian composer who was moving through liminal realms of post-Wagnerian harmony. Signs of a triumph were already evident at intermission, as admirers crowded around the composer. But he was in a foul mood, and declined to receive new converts. When the performance was over, even the anti-Schoenbergians, some of whom had brought along whistles and other noisemakers in anticipation of a scandal, rose to their feet along with the rest of the crowd, chanting, “Schoenberg! Schoenberg!” The brawlers were weeping, one witness said, and their cheers sounded like an apology.
The hero of the hour failed to appear, even as the applause swelled. He was found, according to the violinist Francis Aranyi, “huddled in the most distant and darkest corner of the auditorium, his hands folded and a quiet, quizzical sort of smile on his face.”
This should have been Schoenberg’s hour of glory. But, as he recalled many years later, he felt “rather indifferent, if not even a little angry … I stood alone against a world of enemies.” When he finally walked to the podium, he bowed to the musicians but turned his back on the crowd. It was, Aranyi said, “the strangest thing that a man in front of that kind of a hysterical, worshipping mob has ever done.” Schoenberg had rehearsed this gesture; in 1911 he had made a painting titled Self-Portrait, Walking, in which the artist’s back is turned to the viewer.
The scandal to end all scandals erupted on March 31, 1913, again in the storied Musikverein. The program mapped Schoenberg’s world, past, present, and future. There were songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s only teacher; if the police had not intervened, the audience would also have heard Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Schoenberg was represented by his First Chamber Symphony. And new works by Berg and Webern offered up sonic phenomena that not even Schoenberg had yet imagined. The breaking point came during Berg’s song “Über die Grenzen des All,” or “Beyond the Limits of the Universe,” a setting of a brief, tantalizing poem by Peter Altenberg, at the beginning of which the winds and brass play a chord of twelve separate pitches—as if all the keys between two Cs on a piano were being made to sound at once.
“Loud laughter rang throughout the hall in response to that squawking, grinding chord,” one witness recalled. (It must have been a poor performance, because the chord is supposed to be very soft.) There were physical scuffles, and the police were called. A Dr. Viktor Albert complained that Erhard Buschbeck, the youthful organizer of the concert, had boxed him on the ears. Buschbeck responded that Dr. Albert had called him a “rascal,” making physical retaliation necessary. A lawsuit followed. “The public was laughing,” the operetta composer Oscar Straus testified in court. “And I openly confess, sir, that I laughed, too, for why shouldn’t one laugh at something genuinely comical?” The sound of the scuffle, Straus quipped, was the most harmonious music of the evening. The report of the trial took up almost an entire page of the Neue Freie Presse, pushing aside the murder trial of one Johann Skvarzil.
Atonality
The source of the scandal is not hard to divine; it has to do with the physics of sound. Sound is a trembling of the air, and it affects the body as well as the mind. This is the import of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, which tries to explain why certain intervals attack the nerve endings while others have a calming effect. At the head of Helmholtz’s rogues’ gallery of intervals was the semitone, which is the space between any two adjacent keys on a piano. Struck together, they create rapid “beats” that distress the ear—like an irritating flash of light, Helmholtz says, or a scraping of the skin. Fred Lerdahl, a modern theorist, puts it this way: “When a periodic signal reaches the inner ear, an area of the basilar membrane is stimulated, the peak of which fires rapidly to the auditory cortex, causing the perception of a single pitch. If two periodic signals simultaneously stimulate overlapping areas, the perturbation causes a sensation of ‘roughness.’” Similar roughnesses are created by the major seventh, slightly narrower than an octave, and by the minor ninth, slightly wider. These are precisely the intervals that Schoenberg emphasizes in his atonal music.
Psychological factors also come into play when the music is set in front of a crowd. Looking at a painting in a gallery is fundamentally different from listening to a new work in a concert hall. Picture yourself in a room with, say, Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), painted in 1911. Kandinsky and Schoenberg knew each other, and shared common aims; Impression III was inspired by one of Schoenberg’s concerts. If visual abstraction and musical dissonance were precisely equivalent, Impression III and the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra would present the same degree of difficulty. But the Kandinsky is a different experience for the uninitiated. If at first you have trouble understanding it, you can walk on and return to it later, or step back to give it another glance, or lean in for a close look (is that a piano in the foreground?). At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind.
Atonality was destined to raise hackles. Nothing could have been more perfectly calculated to cause consternation among the art-loving middle classes. But Schoenberg did not improve his situation when he set about answering his critics. He was a gifted writer, with a knack for turning out sharp-edged barbs: not for nothing was the acidulous Karl Kraus his literary hero. Starting in 1909, he issued a stream of commentaries, polemics, theoretical musings, and aphorisms. At times, he argued his case with charm and wit. More often, though, the fighter in him came out, and he summoned up what he called “the will to annihilate.”
In a way, Schoenberg was most persuasive in justifying his early atonal works when he emphasized their illogical, irrational dimension.
As far as we can tell, he composed them in something like an automatic state, sketching the hyperdense Erwartung in only seventeen days. All the while, the composer was in the grip of convulsive emotion—feelings of sexual betrayal, personal abandonment, professional humiliation. That turbulence may be sensed in some of the explanations that Schoenberg provided to friends in the period from 1908 to 1913. To Kandinsky he wrote: “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” To the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni he wrote: “I strive for: complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.” And he instructed Alma Mahler to listen for “colors, noises, lights, sounds, movements, glances, gestures.”
In public, however, Schoenberg tended to explain his latest works as the logical, rational outcome of a historical process. Perhaps because he was suspected of having gone mad, he insisted that he had no choice but to act as he did. To quote again his 1910 program note: the music was the product of “necessity.” Instead of separating himself from the titans of the past, from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he presented himself as their heir, and pointed out that many now canonical masterpieces had caused confusion when they first appeared. (That argument failed to impress some educated listeners, who felt with full justification that they were being treated like idiots. From the fact that some great music was once rejected it does not follow that any rejected music is great.) Schoenberg also cast himself in a quasi-political role, speaking of the “emancipation of the dissonance,” as if his chords were peoples who had been enslaved for centuries. Alternatively, he imagined himself as a scientist engaged in objective work: “We shall have no rest, as long as we have not solved the problems that are contained in tones.” In later years, he compared himself to transatlantic fliers and explorers of the North Pole.
The argument made a certain amount of sense. Levels of dissonance in music had been steadily rising since the last years of the nineteenth century, when Liszt wrote his keyless bagatelle and Satie wrote down the six-note Rosicrucian chords of Le Fils des étoiles. Strauss, of course, indulged discord in Salome. Max Reger, a composer versed in the contrapuntal science of Bach, caused Schoenberg-like scandals in 1904 with music that meandered close to the atonal. In Russia, the composer-pianist Alexander Scriabin, who was under the influence of Theosophist spiritualism, devised a harmonic language that vibrated around a “mystic chord” of six notes; his unfinished magnum opus Mysterium, slated for a premiere at the foot of the Himalayas, was to have brought about nothing less than the annihilation of the universe, whence men and women would reemerge as astral souls, relieved of sexual difference and other bodily limitations.
In Italy, where the Futurists were promoting an art of speed, struggle, aggression, and destruction, Luigi Russolo issued a manifesto for a “MUSIC OF NOISE” and began to construct noise-instruments with which to produce the roaring, whistling, whispering, screeching, banging, and groaning sounds that he had predicted in his pamphlet. In the United States, Charles Ives, a young New England composer under the influence of Transcendentalism, began writing music in several keys at once or none at all. And Busoni, in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music of 1907, theorized all manner of extra-tonal experiments, and realized a few of them in his own works.
The teleological historian might describe all this activity as the collective movement of a vanguard, one that was bent on sweeping aside the established order. Yet each of these composers was following his or her own course (to take Scriabin’s projected gender ambiguity into account), and in each case the destination was unique. Out of all of them, only Schoenberg really adopted atonality. What set him apart was that he not only introduced new chords but eliminated, for the time being, the old ones. “You are proposing a new value in place of an earlier one, instead of adding the new one to the old,” Busoni observed in a letter of 1909.
Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler all counterbalanced their novel sonorities with massive statements of common chords; dissonance and consonance existed in mutually reinforcing tension. Debussy, likewise, populated his foggy harmonic terrain with quaint melodic characters. Scriabin maintained a feeling of tonal centricity even in the most harmonically far-out stretches of his later piano sonatas. Schoenberg was the one who insisted that there was no going back. Indeed, he began to say tonality was dead—or, as Webern later put it, “We broke its neck.”
The first report of the death of tonality came in the pages of Harmonielehre, or Theory of Harmony, which Schoenberg published in 1911, with a dedication to the “hallowed memory of Gustav Mahler.” From the start the author makes clear his detestation of the prevailing musical, cultural, and social order. “Our age seeks many things,” he writes in the preface. “What it has found, however, is above all: comfort … The thinker, who keeps on searching, does the opposite. He shows that there are problems and that they are unsolved. As does Strindberg: ‘Life makes everything ugly.’ Or Maeterlinck: ‘Three quarters of our brothers [are] condemned to misery.’ Or Weininger and all others who have thought earnestly.” A musical morality is introduced: the easy charm of the familiar on the one side, the hard truth of the new on the other.
Harmonielehre turns out to be an autopsy of a system that has ceased to function. In the time of the Viennese masters, Schoenberg says, tonality had had a logical and ethical basis. But by the beginning of the twentieth century it had become diffuse, unsystematic, incoherent—in a word, diseased. To dramatize this supposed decline, the composer augments his discourse with the vocabulary of social Darwinism and racial theory. It was then fashionable to believe that certain societies and races had corrupted themselves by mixing with others. Wagner, in his later writings, made the argument explicitly racial and sexual, saying that the Aryan race was destroying itself by crossbreeding with Jews and other foreign bodies. Weininger made the same claim in Sex and Character.
Schoenberg applied the concept of degeneration to music. He introduced a theme that would reappear often as the century went on—the idea that some musical languages were healthy while others were degenerate, that true composers required a pure place in a polluted world, that only by assuming a militant asceticism could they withstand the almost sexual allure of dubious chords.
In the nineteenth century, Schoenberg says, tonality had fallen prey to “inbreeding and incest.” Transitional or “vagrant” chords such as the diminished seventh—a harmonically ambiguous four-note entity that can resolve in several different directions—were the sick offspring of incestuous relationships. They were “sentimental,” “philistine,” “cosmopolitan,” “effeminate,” “hermaphroditic”; they had grown up to be “spies,” “turncoats,” “agitators.” Catastrophe was inevitable. “[T]he end of the system is brought about with such inescapable cruelty by its own functions … [T]he juices that serve life, serve also death.” And: “Every living thing has within it that which changes, develops, and destroys it. Life and death are both equally present in the embryo.” Weininger wrote in similar terms in Sex and Character: “All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction, birth, and death are inextricably linked … The act of coitus, considered not only psychologically but also ethically and biologically, is akin to murder.” Moreover, Schoenberg’s description of those rootless chords—“homeless phenomena, unbelievably adaptable … They flourish in every climate”—actually resembles Weininger’s description of the effeminate, cosmopolitan Jew, who “adapts himself … to every circumstance and every race; like the parasite, he becomes another in every host, and takes on such an entirely different appearance that one believes him to be a new creature, although he always remains the same. He assimilates himself to everything.”
The weird undercurrent of racial pseudoscience in Harmonielehre raises the question of Schoenberg’s Jewish identity. He was born in Leopoldstadt, a section of Vienna that was heavily populated by former members of the eastern shtetl communities, many of whom had fled the pogroms. Like cultivated Austrian Jews such as Mahler, Kraus, and Wittgenstein, Schoenberg might have felt the need to distance himself from the stereo type of the ghetto Jew; perhaps this explains his conversion to Lutheranism in 1898, which, unlike Mahler’s conversion to Catholicism the previous year, was not motivated by the offer of an official post. Later, as anti-Semitism became ever more unavoidable in Austro-German life, Schoenberg’s sense of his identity underwent a dramatic change. By 1933, when he went into exile, he had returned to his faith, and remained intensely if eccentrically devoted to it thereafter.
In a way, Schoenberg’s journey resembles that of Theodor Herzl, the progenitor of political Zionism, whose early attacks on self-satisfied assimilated urban Jews could be mistaken for anti-Semitic diatribes. The scholar Alexander Ringer has argued that Schoenberg’s atonality may have been an oblique affirmation of his Jewishness. In this reading, it is a kind of musical Zion, a promised land in whose dusty desert climate the Jewish composer could escape the ill-concealed hatred of bourgeois Europe.
Schoenberg would prove uncannily alert to the murderousness of Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1934, he predicted that Hitler was planning “no more and no less than the extermination of all Jews!” Such thoughts were presumably not on his mind circa 1907 and 1908, yet to be Jewish in Vienna was to live under a vague but growing threat. Anti-Semitism was shifting from a religious to a racial basis, meaning that a conversion to Catholicism or Protestantism no longer sufficed to solve one’s Jewish problem. Rights and freedoms were being picked off one by one. Jews were expelled from student societies, boycotts instituted. There were beatings in the streets. Rabble-rousers spouted messages of hate. Hitler himself was somewhere in the background, trying to make his way as an artist, building a cathedral of resentment in his mind. As the historian Steven Beller writes, Jews were “at the center of culture but the edge of society.” Mahler ruled musical Vienna; at the same time, Jewish men never felt safe walking the streets at night.
All told, a Freudian host of urges, emotions, and ideas circled Schoenberg as he put his fateful chords on paper. He endured violent disorder in his private life; he felt ostracized by a museum-like concert culture; he experienced the alienation of being a Jew in Vienna; he sensed a historical tendency from consonance to dissonance; he felt disgust for a tonal system grown sickly. But the very multiplicity of possible explanations points up something that cannot be explained. There was no “necessity” driving atonality; no irreversible current of history made it happen. It was one man’s leap into the unknown. It became a movement when two equally gifted composers jumped in behind him.
Disciples
“This book I have learned from my pupils,” Schoenberg wrote at the top of the first page of Harmonielehre. With Webern and Berg he was able to form a common front, which eventually became known as the Second Viennese School—the first having supposedly consisted of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The notion of a “Viennese school,” which another pupil, Egon Wellesz, put into circulation in 1912, had the effect of lending Schoenberg an air of historical prestige, not to mention guru-like status. But Berg and Webern quickly made clear their independence, even as they remained in awe of their teacher. Schoenberg confessed in his diary in 1912 that he was sometimes frightened by his disciples’ intensity, by their urge to rival and surpass his own most daring feats, by their tendency to write music “raised to the tenth power.” The metaphor was apt: the modernist strain in twentieth-century music, as it branched out from Schoenberg, would complicate itself exponentially.
Webern was reserved, cerebral, monkish in his habits. The scion of an old Austrian noble family, he earned his doctorate at the Musicological Institute of the University of Vienna, writing a dissertation on the Renaissance polyphonic music of Heinrich Isaac. In his early works he drew variously on Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, and Debussy; the 1904 tone poem Im Sommerwind is a not exactly kitsch-free affair of lustrous orchestration, post-Wagnerian harmonies, and fragrant whole-tone chords. After entering Schoenberg’s orbit, Webern enthusiastically changed course and joined in the search for new chords and timbres, and, it would seem, he sometimes moved ahead of his teacher in the expedition to the atonal pole. Webern later recalled that as early as 1906 he wrote a sonata movement that “reached the farthest limits of tonality.”
In the summer of 1909, while Schoenberg was composing his Five Pieces for Orchestra and Erwartung, Webern wrote his own orchestral cycle, the Six Pieces, Opus 6. It is an incomparably disturbing work in which the rawness of atonality is refracted through the utmost orchestral finesse. Webern’s pieces, no less than Schoenberg’s, are marked by personal experience—here, lingering anguish over the death of the composer’s mother, in 1906. We hear successive stages of grief: presentiment of disaster, the shock of the news (screaming, trilling flocks of trumpet and horns), impressions of the Carinthian countryside near where Amalie Webern was laid to rest, final memories of her smile.
In the middle of the sequence is a funeral procession, which begins in ominous quiet, with a rumble of drums, gong, and bells. Various groups of instruments, trombones predominating, groan chords of inert, imploded character. An E-flat clarinet plays a high, wailing, circling melody. An alto flute responds in low, throaty tones. Muted horn and trumpet offer more lyric fragments, over subterranean chords. Then the trombones rise to a shout, and the winds and the brass fall in line behind them. The piece is crowned with a crushing sequence of nine-and ten-note chords, after which the percussion begins its own crescendo and builds to a pitch-liquidating roar. The age of noise has begun.
The Six Pieces was arguably the supreme atonal work. After writing it, Webern forswore grand gestures and found his calling as a miniaturist. When he heard Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908, he was amazed at Debussy’s ability to make so much from so few notes, and sought the same economy in his own music. The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10, show Webern’s art of compression at its most extreme: most of the movements last less than a minute, and the fourth piece contains fewer than fifty notes. A smattering of dolce tones on mandolin; soft repeated tones on clarinet; a couple of high muted cries from the brass; more plucks and plinks of harp, celesta, and mandolin again; and, to conclude, a tiny song on solo violin, “like a breath”—this music is practically Japanese, like brushstrokes on white paper. By clearing away all expressionistic clutter, Webern actually succeeded in making his teacher’s language easier to assimilate. He distributed his material in clear, linear patterns, rather than piling it up in vertical masses. The listener can absorb each unusual sonority before the next arrives.
Intellectuals of fin-de-siècle Vienna were much concerned with the limits of language, with the need for a kind of communicative silence. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, marking a boundary between rational discourse and the world of the soul. Hermann Broch ended his novel The Death of Virgil with the phrase “the word beyond speech.” The impulse to go to the brink of nothingness is central to Webern’s aesthetic; if the listener is paying insufficient attention, the shorter movements of his works may pass unnoticed. The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don’t play the note, only think it.
Webern’s works hang in a limbo between the noise of life and the stillness of death. The ease with which the one melts into the other is one major philosophical insight that arises from them. The crescendo in the funeral march in Opus 6 is among the loudest musical phenomena in history, but even louder is the ensuing silence, which smacks the ears like thunder.
Alban Berg was a debonair, handsome man, self-effacing and ironic in his attitude to the world. There was great empathy in his large, sad eyes; he was physically fragile, a chronic sufferer of severe bronchial asthma, and he identified strongly with all for whom life did not come easily. “Such a dear person,” one friend said after his death—not a common eulogy at the funerals of geniuses. Yet, as the novelist and essayist Elias Canetti said, “[Berg] wasn’t lacking in self-esteem. He knew very well who he was.”
Blessed with a fine-tuned sense of the absurd, Berg stayed somewhat aloof from the utopian fantasies of the Schoenberg circle. On one occasion Berg had trouble keeping a straight face when his comrade-in-arms Webern, at a rehearsal of his Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano, Opus 22, told the saxophonist to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal.” Berg feigned an asthma attack, fled the room, and burst into hysterical laughter.
Berg liked to think that he was descended from the aristocracy, cultivating the air of a dilapidated baronet who knows how far down in the world he has come. He was, in fact, a thoroughbred bourgeois, whose father, Conrad Berg, worked in an exporting firm and later went into business selling Catholic devotional items. (One of the family’s regular customers was Anton Bruckner, who brought in a favorite crucifix for repairs.) Conrad Berg died suddenly in 1900, leaving the family in financial difficulties. Johanna Berg, the widow, considered sending the then fifteen-year-old Alban to New York, so that he could work alongside his brother Hermann at the toy distributor George Borgfeldt & Co., with which their father had been associated. At the last minute, an aunt stepped in to subsidize Alban’s studies. Hermann, incidentally, later scored a sales coup by marketing the first teddy bears, three thousand of which he purchased at the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair.
Berg had an unpromising adolescence. He fathered an illegitimate child with a family servant, suffered academic failures, and, in the wake of another love affair, attempted suicide. Although he had been writing songs in Romantic and impressionist styles since the age of fifteen, his talent was hardly prodigious.
Schoenberg molded Berg into a substantial musical force, but there was a price to be paid for the transformation. For much of his youth Berg was essentially subjugated to Schoenberg’s will, sometimes functioning as little more than a valet. His tasks in the year 1911 included packing up a van when his teacher moved to Berlin, looking after bank accounts, engaging in fund-raising schemes, addressing legal problems, and proofreading and indexing Harmonielehre. After one barrage of demands, Schoenberg had the temerity to ask, “Are you composing anything?!?!” He dismissed as worthless several of Berg’s finest early works. The student never ceased his adoration, although a proud determination grew in him, together with hidden resentments.
Like Schoenberg and Webern, Berg was incubated in the golden age of Mahler and Strauss. So ardent was his Mahler worship that he once trespassed on the Master’s dressing room to steal a baton. Opulent, upward-and downward-lunging melodies of the Mahlerian variety appear in Berg’s scores from beginning to end. Strauss’s Salome made him swoon; he heard the opera in Graz, of course, and six more times in 1907, when the Breslau Opera brought its production to Vienna. “How I would like to sing to you Salome which I know so well,” Berg wrote to an American friend. His Altenberg songs, which incited the climactic outbreak of violence at the “scandal concert” of 1913, are structured around a mildly dissonant collection of five notes—C-sharp, E, G-natural, G-sharp, B-flat—which appears throughout Strauss’s opera and sounds as a single chord at the beginning of Salome’s final monologue. Luxuriating in this ambiguous sonority, the young composer seems reluctant to give up the degenerate, inbred language that Schoenberg condemned in Harmonielehre. Berg would soon be labeled the approachable Romantic of the Schoenberg school, the one who, as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas says, makes a turn toward the audience.
Yet it wasn’t Berg’s bent for nostalgia that worried Schoenberg. Instead, he chastised his pupil for displaying a “rather too obvious desire to use new means”—perhaps thinking of the twelve-note chord in the Altenberg songs. There were always two sides to Berg; he pined for sweet, kitschy sounds, but he also had a mathematical fetish, a love of complexity for complexity’s sake.
Berg’s contrary tendencies collided in the Three Pieces for Orchestra, which were written in 1914, five years after Schoenberg’s Five Pieces and Webern’s Six. They are fully symphonic in conception, Schoenbergian in content but Mahlerian in form. The final movement is a phantasmagoric March for full orchestra, replete with thudding drumbeats and craggy brass fanfares. Notes blacken the page; instruments become an angry mob, spilling from the sidewalks into the streets. Right at the end comes a brief mirage of peace: phrases curl upward in the orchestra like wisps of cloud, and a solo violin plays a keening phrase. All the while, the harp and the celesta strike monotonous notes, which sound like the ticking of a bomb. It explodes in the last measures, with a booming trombone-and-tuba tone, a flailing, upward-spiraling movement of the brass, and a final percussive hammerblow in the bass.
The date of the completion of the March—Sunday, August 23, 1914—happens to be an infamous one in military history. The First World War had commenced at the beginning of the month; a million German troops had marched through Belgium and broached the French border. On the twenty-third, French armies began a humiliating withdrawal to the Marne, and the British Expeditionary Force fell back after the Battle of Mons. Hundreds of thousands were already dead. German soldiers were carrying out reprisals against civilians who resisted. That same Sunday night, German troops gathered the citizens of the town of Dinant and began firing into their midst, killing almost seven hundred people, including a three-week-old baby. Two days later the medieval library of Louvain was set on fire. In a few short weeks, Germany had done irreparable damage to its reputation as a cradle of modern civilization.
Wozzeck
“War!” Thomas Mann wrote in November 1914. “We felt purified, liberated, we felt an enormous hope.” Many artists were exhilarated when the Great War began; it was as if their gaudiest fantasies of violence and destruction had come to life.
Schoenberg fell into the grip of what he would later call his “war psychosis,” drawing comparisons between the German army’s assault on decadent France and his own assault on decadent bourgeois values. In a letter to Alma Mahler dated August 1914, Schoenberg waxed militant in his zeal for the German cause, denouncing in the same breath the music of Bizet, Stravinsky, and Ravel. “Now comes the reckoning!” Schoenberg thundered. “Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.” For part of the war he kept a diary of the weather, in the belief that certain cloud formations presaged German victory or defeat.
Berg, too, succumbed to the hysteria, at least at first. After finishing the March of the Three Pieces, he wrote to his teacher that it was “very shameful to be merely an onlooker at these great events.”
The massacre at Dinant, the burning of Louvain, and other atrocities of August and September 1914 were not simply mishaps of the fog of war. They fulfilled the German General Staff’s program of destroying the “total material and intellectual resources of the enemy.” The notion of total war mirrored to an uncomfortable degree the apocalyptic mind-set of recent Austro-German art.
Not everyone fell victim to “war psychosis.” Richard Strauss, for one, refused to join ninety-three other German intellectuals in signing a manifesto that denied German wrongdoing at Louvain. In public Strauss stated that as an artist he wished to avoid political entanglements, but in private he sounded a distinctly nonpatriotic tone. “It is sickening,” he wrote a few months later to Hofmannsthal, “to read in the papers of the regeneration of German art … to read how the youth of Germany is to emerge cleansed and purified from this ‘glorious’ war, when in fact one must be thankful if the poor blighters are at least cleansed of their lice and bed-bugs and cured of their infections and once more weaned from murder!” The statement reads like a riposte to Mann’s panegyric to violence. The next time Germany went to war, the two men would switch roles; Strauss would be the figurehead, Mann the dissident.
There are comical pictures of the Second Viennese School in the uniforms of the Austrian army. Schoenberg, plump and balding, looks like a village schoolmaster who has volunteered out of solemn duty. Webern, dwarfed by his helmet, is the picture of the student-soldier. Berg, leaning back in a chair with a half smile on his face and one leg crossed over the other, resembles an actor in a silent movie, perhaps a tale of a young soldier in love with an enemy maiden. None promises to pose much of a threat to the kitschmongers on the other side. Indeed, physical limitations prevented them from seeing action at the front. Schoenberg ended up playing in a military orchestra. Webern, extremely nearsighted, was attached to a reserve battalion of the Carinthian Mountain Troops. And Berg, after spending a month at a training camp in the fall of 1915, suffered a physical breakdown and had to be hospitalized. For the remainder of the fighting, he was confined to a desk job, where a beastly superior made his life miserable.
Largely unable to compose, Berg filled his notebook with instructions for the proper conduct of trench warfare and bureaucratic military parlance. But, as the scholar Patricia Hall notes, the same book is dotted with sketches for a work that would put the war in a different light: an opera based on Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck.
Büchner was a strikingly original literary talent who died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three. Woyzeck—Berg retained a misspelling from the first edition—was based on the true story of one Johann Christian Woyzeck, a soldier turned barber who had murdered his mistress in Leipzig in 1821. Despite Woyzeck’s obvious signs of mental instability, the distinguished Hofrat Dr. Clarus—Felix Mendelssohn’s doctor—declared him competent to stand trial. Büchner used transcripts of Woyzeck’s psychological examinations as source material for the play; no writer had ever given such a matter-of-fact report on a murderer’s mind. In Büchner’s telling, Woyzeck is still a soldier when the action begins, and military discipline speeds his mental deterioration. He is subject to the whims of a fussy, pedantic captain; falls prey to a sadistically experimenting doctor, who puts him on an all-pea diet, with mutton to follow; and is demoralized by the callousness of his fellow soldiers, the mockery of tradespeople, and the diseased atmosphere of his ordinary-seeming town. After a time, he can no longer tell what is real and what is fantasy.
When Berg first saw Büchner’s play, in May 1914, he immediately muttered aloud that someone had to make an opera out of it. His military experiences hardened his resolve. “There is a bit of me in [Wozzeck’s] character,” he wrote to his wife four years later, “since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact humiliated.” All too well he knew real-life versions of the Doctor and the Captain (as Büchner named them); the sketchbook hints that a certain Dr. Wernisch furnished inspiration.
Berg set Büchner’s play “raw,” cutting and arranging the text himself rather than handing it off to a librettist. This was Debussy’s procedure with Pelléas, and also Strauss’s with Salome, and, in fact, Berg used both those operas as structural models. The project moved ahead in spite of Schoenberg, who pronounced the subject matter inappropriate. Berg went so far as to conceal his labors from his former teacher, at one point leading him to believe that he was working on an ostensibly more pressing task: a biography of Arnold Schoenberg.
Freud spoke of the “return of the repressed”; in Wozzeck, tonality will not be denied. When the curtain goes up, Wozzeck is administering a morning shave to his captain. The music scrapes like a razor: one abrasive five-note string chord slides down to another, comprising ten notes in all. But the top three notes in the first chord spell Dminor; the second chord contains the notes of A-flat minor; the remaining four notes in the opening group form a diminished seventh. (Think of those paintings by Turner and Monet in which familiar forms are buried under layers of impasto paint.) The latent tonalities emerge more clearly in the following scene, where Wozzeck collects kindling with a comrade and hallucinates a world on fire. They come to the surface in the third scene, with the entrance of Marie, Wozzeck’s common-law wife.
Marie is something more than a fin-de-siècle cartoon of instinctual Woman; although she stereotypically lusts for a muscular Drum Major, she is, on the whole, an independent, fully formed character, one who balances her sexual desires with strong religious feeling and dotes lovingly on her child. Marie’s lullaby to her son is unabashedly Romantic, richly if eccentrically tonal. It begins with a familiar sound—the five-note Salome chord that Berg had already quoted in his Altenberg songs. Yet the music is also intimately related to Wozzeck’s more dissonant gamut of sounds. The main motifs for husband and wife both contain the notes of a theme that is first heard in the opening scene, when Wozzeck sings of his desperate situation—“Wir arme Leut,” or “We poor people.” This signifies that both Wozzeck and Marie are victims of a larger injustice.
If there is one malign character in Wozzeck, it is the doctor, who does everything in his power to accelerate his patient’s decline, in the belief that this “beautiful aberratio mentalis partialis” will guarantee his immortality. The Doctor dominates the fourth scene of Act I, which takes the form of a Passacaglia, or variations over a ground bass. The theme is a row of twelve notes, which serves to represent the character’s ruthless rationality, his urge to reduce humans to data. The Doctor even sings a little aria to his intellect at the end: “Oh my theory! Oh my fame!” At one point there is a quotation from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. One wonders if the Doctor has a little Schoenberg in him. Berg loved to encode messages in his scores, and it may be no accident that when the doctor enters, the bass line moves from A to E-flat, or, in German lettering, A Es—Schoenberg’s initials. Wozzeck answers with the notes B-flat and A, which in German are spelled B A—Berg, Alban. (When Berg wrote this music, Schoenberg had not yet announced his twelve-tone method, which is described in Chapter 6.)
By the last scene of Act I, when the brutish Drum Major forces himself on Marie to the tune of dissonated C-major chords and the strains of “We poor people,” the method of the opera is clear. Strongly dissonant writing suggests the working of abstractions: the cruelty of authority, the relentlessness of fate, the power of economic oppression. Tonal elements represent basic emotions—a mother’s love for her child, a soldier’s lust for flesh, Wozzeck’s jealous rage. The scheme contradicts Schoenberg’s utopian notion that the new language could replace the old. Instead, Berg returns to the method of Mahler and Strauss, for whom the conflict of consonance and dissonance was the forge of the most intense expression. Consonance is all the sweeter in the moment before its annihilation. Dissonance is all the more frightening in contrast to what it destroys. Beauty and terror skirmish, fighting for Wozzeck’s hollow soul.
Berg took pride in the fact that each scene in Wozzeck is based on a historical form: Suite, Passacaglia, Rondo, and so on. Act II is a five-movement symphony, and in the opening Sonata Allegro, Wozzeck’s paranoia is developed like a classical theme. Once a level of maximum dissonance has been reached, there comes a sudden respite in the form of a C-major chord: this marks the moment that Wozzeck hands over to Marie the money he has earned for suffering through the sadistic games of the Captain and the Doctor. It is the last display of uncomplicated tenderness between the two.
In the second movement (Invention and Fugue on Three Themes), the Captain and the Doctor amuse themselves again by tormenting their charge, implanting in him the fatal idea that Marie has slept with the Drum Major. Wozzeck confronts his wife in the slow Largo movement, accompanied by the same fifteen instruments that Schoenberg used in his First Chamber Symphony (Schoenberg’s marital crisis of 1908 might be a subtext). The Scherzo of the “symphony” is set in an inn full of drunken revelers; a stage band plays a Mahlerian Ländler waltz, dissonantly distorted. Wozzeck’s humiliation reaches its height in the Rondo marziale, the last movement, when he tries unsuccessfully to find rest in a barracks full of atonally snoring soldiers. The Drum Major barges in, bragging of his conquest of Marie. Wozzeck whistles at him derisively and is beaten to a pulp.
At the beginning of Act III, Marie reads aloud from the Bible to her child, her mind swaying back and forth between the calm glow of Christian verities and the virus-like action of fear and guilt. A heart-stoppingly beautiful horn theme—an extract from a piano piece that Berg had written during his studies with Schoenberg—is almost immediately scrubbed out by twelve-note patterns and other “difficult” features. When Wozzeck enters, the note B begins droning in various sections of the orchestra, sometimes high and sometimes low. The couple walks by a pond. The moon rises, and each of them comments on the apparition. “How the moon rises red,” Marie says. “Like a bloody iron,” Wozzeck adds. Büchner’s writing here looks ahead to the Symbolist poetry of Wilde’s Salomé, and, as if on cue, trumpets, horns, and violas play a transposition of Strauss’s Salome chord, with its hint of outlaw sexuality on the brink of destruction.
Wozzeck takes out his knife as the timpani pound away at the fatal note. He kills Marie suddenly and unceremoniously, without much commentary from the orchestra. Once he rushes from the scene, though, the orchestra reenacts the death with an incredible succession of sounds. The B returns, humming almost inaudibly on a muted horn. Then instrument after instrument joins in on the same pitch, creating a super-bright beam of tone. As the composer and theorist Robert Cogan has demonstrated, by way of spectrographic imaging of sounds, the scoring of this single note produces an exceptionally rich mass of overtones, with a chord of B major at its root. After a climactic dissonant chord and a shuddering death-rhythm on the bass drum, the crescendo begins again, now with a battery of percussion added, so that clean overtones give way to a toneless wash of noise. “Like the murder scene,” Cogan writes, “this climactic passage reaches the ultimate in human limits, extending from the threshold of audibility to the threshold of pain.”
As if with a rapid cinematic cut, the scene changes to a tavern, where an out-of-tune upright piano is playing a rickety polka, employing the same rhythm that has just been heard on the bass drum. Wozzeck is seated at one of the tables, blood dripping from his hand. The locals stop their wild dancing to accuse him of murder, and he rushes back to the pond to wash away the evidence. As the orchestra plays rippling transpositions of a six-note chord, he sinks beneath the waves. The Captain and the Doctor walk by a moment later, marveling at the uncanny stillness of the scene. It is as if they were studying a canvas at a Secession exhibition.
Now comes the masterstroke. At the end of the next-to-last scene, the orchestra delivers a kind of wordless oration, which, in Berg’s own words, is “a confession of the author who now steps outside the dramatic action on the stage … an appeal to humanity through its representatives, the audience.” There is a palpable break in the musical language, as Berg makes use of a piece that he wrote back in 1908 or 1909—a sketch for a Mahlerian Sonata in D Minor. (The composer associated this music with the singer Helene Nahowski, whom he married in 1911, and he apparently inserted it in the opera at her request.) Dissonance stages a counterstrike: trombones deliver a stentorian “We poor people,” twelve woodwinds mass together in a twelve-note chord, and sheets of sound in the percussion replicate the terror of Marie’s murder. Finally, the bass instruments pound out a rising fourth, and D minor crashes back in. All this sounds like something more than a lament for two human beings; it may be a tribute to what Thomas Mann called the “worldwide festival of death”—the Great War itself.
The ending is breathtakingly bleak. We see Wozzeck and Marie’s child riding his hobby horse, oblivious to the fact that his mother is lying dead nearby. Berg, in a lecture on the opera, pointed out that the coda links up with the beginning; likewise, it is all too plausible that this child will grow up to be a replica of his father. A slow fadeout on an oscillating pair of chords points toward a despairing conclusion. As the chords rock back and forth, though, there are passing glimpses of G major, like transitory glimmerings of light.
Compare the ending of Debussy’s Pelléas, where Mélisande dies within sight of her newborn baby while the serving women fill the room. “It’s the poor little thing’s turn now,” says King Arkel. The onlooker is left to imagine the fate of these orphans of the fin de siècle: perhaps they will perpetuate the cycle of misery, breeding violence from violence, or perhaps they will escape to some great open city, where the children of unhappy families start anew.
