Notes for Moderns

Twentieth century music takes a lot of getting used to, and more often than not it turns out to be an acquired distaste.

The musical canon, especially if alliteration is your thing, still runs to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, with perhaps Berlioz and Bruckner tossed in as a bonus. These continue to be the composers whose works get patrons to fill concert halls. Busoni, Bartók, and Berio don’t have a comparable effect–indeed, they often have the reverse effect, keeping concertgoers away in droves. The serious music of the 20th century remains difficult, forbidding. We prefer to engage, or to indulge, simpler or more agreeable feelings in more readily intelligible forms, and the 18th and 19th centuries provide these as the recent past does not.

Why this should be so preoccupies Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, in his first book. It is because one hears the sinister darkness of the time in its music–think of Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg, Kurt Weill, Anton Webern, Dmitri Shostakovich, John Cage, Benjamin Britten, Pierre Boulez, and Adrian Leverkühn, the fictional antihero of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, who contracts syphilis deliberately in order to invoke diabolical creative powers–that the ordinary listener runs screaming to the comforting arms of Mozart. Yet there are countervailing tendencies in modern music as well, which offer succor and solace, sometimes in the very face of horror and pain.

Ross opens with the 1906 performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome that the composer conducted in Graz, Austria. Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, Schönberg, Berg–and Adrian Leverkühn–were all in attendance. Adolf Hitler may have been there, too.

The Judaean princess Salome is the epitome of sexually unhinged depravity who performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for her concupiscent stepfather, Herodes–as sopranos have grown slinkier, stage directors have increasingly enjoined them to end their dance nude–and demands as her reward the head of his prisoner Jochanaan, John the Baptist. After Salome kisses the decapitated head at the climax of a demented but undeniably lovely aria, Herodes orders his soldiers to crush her to death with their shields.

Ross analyzes the rising scale on the clarinet that begins the opera and finds it split between two “opposing harmonic spheres,” C-sharp major and G major; separating the notes C-sharp and G is the interval of three whole steps, formally termed the tritone and informally the devil’s interval, so called for its disturbing effect on the hearer. The primacy that auditory disturbance will assume in modern music is one of Ross’s themes.

Salome was a smash–and its overwhelming success came as a shock. An artistic flair for rendering the morally reprehensible with the sonically bizarre evidently could be made to pay off big. Although no less a musical authority than Kaiser Wilhelm II predicted that Salome would do Strauss “a lot of damage,” opera houses in 25 cities presently put on the work, and the composer would say that thanks to the damage he was able to build a villa in Garmisch.

Strauss’s great rival was Mahler, who thought Salome an esoteric masterwork but could not fathom why the public professed such a yen for it. At least according to his self-created legend, in his lifetime Mahler never was able to win the adulation that Strauss did, and therefore set his sights on the good opinion of future music lovers.

“I am what Nietzsche calls an ‘untimely’ one. .  .  . The true ‘timely’ one is Richard Strauss,” said Mahler. “That is why he already enjoys immortality here on earth.” But Mahler had no real reason to complain, Ross insists: The critics may not have loved his symphonies, but the public did. His popularity, more than Strauss’s, represented the twilight of ever-adored romanticism, however shot through with ironic modern monkeyshines it might have been.

With Schönberg, who followed Franz Liszt in breaking with the fundamental tradition of Western music and took to operating outside the boundaries of the major and minor key systems, modernity grew ever more grotesque blossoms. The Expressionist agonies of Schönberg’s music flowered from living sores. In the summer of 1908 he discovered his wife Mathilde in flagrante with the painter and scoundrel Richard Gerstl. After trying to make a life with her lover, Mathilde went back to Schönberg and Gerstl hanged himself with particularly lurid élan–naked in front of a full-length mirror.

The whole scandal brought Schönberg to the verge of suicide himself: “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.” Yet Schönberg was an artist who forged a style for his desolation. In his Second Quartet, completed that same summer, he wrote music of brazen novelty. As Ross writes:

He finished the Quartet with a soprano singing settings of Stefan George poems, serene and floating, then wrote a song cycle on George’s Book of the Hanging Gardens. But the otherworldly rapture gave way to a demonic fury against his own life. Erwartung, or Expectation, a monodrama for soprano and orchestra, in which a woman comes upon her murdered lover’s corpse in the woods at night, is a protracted shriek of convulsive morbidity. In the tract Harmonielehre, or Theory of Harmony (1911), Schönberg derides the bourgeois longing for comfort and extols the bracing plunge into icy depths of thought, citing August Strindberg on the ugliness of life and Maurice Maeterlinck on the prevalence of human misery.

Schönberg had some very able acolytes, who with their master formed the Second Viennese School. Ross particularly admires Anton Webern’s 1909 orchestral cycle, Six Pieces, Opus 6, written in unresolved mourning for his mother’s death three years earlier; austere frenetic beauty becomes cacophonous ugliness, and crashing chords send splinters of sound flying like debris from a terrible wreck.

Ross also rightly loves the operas of Alban Berg, Wozzeck and Lulu, excursions into terrifying derangement, flamethrower lust, and murder. There are passages in Lulu–the story of the descent into prostitution of an elegant slut, who ends up a victim of Jack the Ripper–in which romanticism receives its final send-off, as though Berg has shattered a magnum of the finest Mahler and is holding the broken champagne bottle to your throat. In 1923 Schönberg devised the twelve-tone system of composition, in which a chromatic series, or row, of twelve consecutive notes served as the basis for what Ross calls “thematic play.”

“All told,” explains Ross, “the chromatic scale contains a huge number of permutations–to be exact, 479,001,600, the factorial of 12.” That does leave room for play, but twelve-tone music mostly sounds like a lot of hard work.

In Paris they went at music-making in a different spirit. After getting ethereal solemnity out of his system with the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Claude Debussy turned increasingly to elemental festivity.

Erik Satie, who played piano at the Auberge du Clou, made his name with the score for the 1917 Ballets Russes production Parade, which united the talents of Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Léonide Massine, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Serge Diaghilev: “Satie’s score defines a new art of musical collage: jaunty tunes don’t quite get off the ground, rhythms intertwine and overlap and stop and start, sped-up whole-tone passages sound like Warner Brothers cartoon music yet to come, bitter chorales and broken fugues honor the fading past.” Finding even later Debussy too airborne for his taste, Cocteau spoke out for music of generous homeliness: “We need music on the earth, MUSIC FOR EVERY DAY. Enough of hammocks, garlands, gondolas! I want someone to make me music that I can live in like a house.”

Les Six–Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, and Georges Auric–led the postwar charge toward what Ross calls “modern, urban, non-Teutonic values.” A brief rapprochement between Les Six and the Second Viennese School–they played each other’s music and said nice things when they met–was succeeded by a renewal of animosities. Even when it came to music, the Franco-German antipathy was all but ineradicable.

There were some in Weimar Germany, however, who found French raciness and ease to their liking. Ross describes Paul Hindemith as a more rambunctious version of Milhaud; this antic master could perpetrate something as preposterous as The Flying Dutchman Overture as Sight-Read by a Bad Spa Orchestra by the Village Well at Seven in the Morning. Ernst Krenek introduced jazz, or something like it, to the operatic stage in Jonny spielt auf, or Johnny Strikes Up (1927), a signal work in the novel subgenre known as Zeitoper, or Opera of the Time, which favored distinctively modern settings such as factories or ocean liners, and often had its characters break into a tango or Charleston.

Hindemith composed a 1929 Zeitoper called News of the Day, featuring a nude soprano in a bathtub. When Hindemith wrote the opera Mathis der Maler a few years later in the hope of pleasing Hitler with what Ross calls “the holy-German-art ethos of Wagner’s Meister-singer,” the Führer, that blushing rose petal, remembered the scandalous earlier work and shut Hindemith out of his patronage. In 1939 Hindemith took the hint and headed for America, where he became a professor at Yale.

Other musicians and writers who fled the Reich–and settled in the warmth of Los Angeles–included Schönberg, Erich Korngold, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler; Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninov represented the Russian political exiles in L.A. One artist who remained in Nazi Germany was Richard Strauss, and he suffered frightfulness piled on humiliation. Hitler seduced him with flattery, then wound up leveling him when he protested the regime’s barbarity. It is painful to read of Strauss’s foolishness. His son had married a Jew and her grandmother was confined in the Theresienstadt concentration camp; Strauss showed up at the gate one day declaring he had come to collect her. The guards who turned him away must have howled like demons.

Like Hitler, Stalin took an interest in what his subject artists were producing, and they mostly would have preferred to do without his attentions, which often led to the camps or nine grams of lead in the back of the skull. Ross ably and even eloquently recounts the travails of Shostakovich and Serge Prokofiev under the Bolshevik regime.

In 1936 Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which Ross calls “the tale of a vaguely Lulu-like Russian housewife who leaves a string of bodies in her wake.” Stalin found the piece emphatically not to his taste. A 600-word editorial cum review in Pravda, “Muddle Instead of Music,” excoriated the young composer for his untamed dissonance. (Ross does not mention this, but the lewd trombones came in for an especially bad time.) The editorial put the fear of godlessness into Shostakovich. He was at work on his Fourth Symphony when the editorial appeared, and the finished composition did not satisfy the apparatchiks. In a fog of apprehension–the Great Terror was getting underway–Shostakovich withdrew the symphony without a performance. It would be nearly two years before he presented another major work before the public.

Some opponents of the regime took the Fifth Symphony to be a bold outcry of dissent, others a knuckling-under; some ardent Stalinists, for their part, protested that Shostakovich had failed to heed Pravda’s warning. “But the better part of the audience,” says Ross, “seemed to identify strongly with the symphony’s assertion of will–what [the composer’s son] Maxim Shostakovich called ‘the determination of a strong man to BE.'”

Critics have variously portrayed Shostakovich as a cowed stooge and as an esoteric dissident; Ross shows a frightened man who can seem like a “cut-out paper doll on a string,” as Shostakovich described himself with brutal self-contempt after submitting meekly to official criticism in 1948 but who also somehow summoned the courage to reveal in his music brilliant flashes of his soul, and of his nation’s soul, in the very teeth of the Soviet terror.

Many of the works discussed so far are what Olivier Messiaen called “black masterpieces,” because they deal in the malign and deformed. After the Second World War, what Ross dubs “catastrophe style” became the going thing. But there were those composers who resisted the impulse of the age to give in to melancholia and doomsaying. György Ligeti, a Hungarian Jew who lost most of his family to Hitler’s genocide and then suffered through 11 years of Communist oppression before he escaped to the West, developed a musical language of “luminosity and wit.”

“He opened himself to all music past and present,” Ross writes, “absorbing everything from the Renaissance masses of Johannes Ockeghem to the saxophone solos of Eric Dolphy, from the virtuoso piano writing of Liszt to the rhythmic polyphony of African Pygmy tribes.”

Messiaen, who wrote his Quartet for the End of Time in a German prisoner-of-war camp–the only instruments available were clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, so he wrote it for these–ended the piece with “sweetly ringing chords in the key of E major,” responding to “the mechanized insanity of the Second World War by offering up the purest, simplest sounds he could find.” Birdsong was to become an essential element of Messiaen’s sound world; the sweet beauty of God’s creation bemused this devout Catholic artist to the end of his days.

A commission by Alice Tully to write a piece for the American bicentennial brought him to the canyons of Utah in 1972, where he took in the sometimes-harrowing beauties of the landscape and the always-glorious calls of the birds. Ross considers the work Messiaen produced from this journey, From the Canyons to the Stars, perhaps his finest. His five-hour opera Saint Francis of Assisi surely rivals it, representing “the negation of the negation, the death of death.”

And then there was the all-American sound of the so-called minimalists such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams, who returned to harmonic fundamentals and a regular pulse, and introduced simple reiterated melodic patterns, sometimes to the point of stultification. As Reich put it:

How music expresses the heart and soul of a time and place, and how renegade geniuses such as Ligeti and Messiaen express their own heart and soul contrary to the prevailing spirit of the age, are the main themes of this book, and Ross develops them with fine intelligence. His strength is in description, the first task of criticism. He tends to scant judgment–although this may not be a major failing in what is principally a work of history. The Rest Is Noise is a significant book, valuable to the neophyte who wants an introduction to 20th-century music, and to the comparatively adept reader who wants to deepen his knowledge of the mysteries.

Algis Valiunas is a writer in Florida.