Ross Alex. The rest is noice
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
161
March 9, 1930, in Leipzig, where right-wing agitators greeted it with a riot. Three
weeks later, the last Social Democratic government dissolved, and that summer
Heinrich Brüning began governing by emergency decree, delivering a fatal blow
to the democratic process. Performances of Mahagonny in Essen, Oldenburg,
and Dortmund were canceled. The elections of September showed the Nazis in
ascendance, and the Brownshirts made their presence felt when the opera
came to Frankfurt the following month. The first performance went off smoothly,
but the second dissolved into bedlam. A hundred and fifty Nazis swarmed into
the hall, shouting, “Deutschland erwache!”
Stink bombs were thrown, fireworks
set off. In a subsequent brawl, a Communist acquiesced to death by a beer
stein to the skull.
“The great retaliation has begun, the revenge of a man’s world which has the
audacity to punish its own guilt.” Karl Kraus, the unforgiving satirist of Vienna,
idol of Schoenberg and Berg and a hundred other modernist youths, said these
words at a lecture back in May 1905. He was describing the world of
Wedekind’s plays
Lulu
Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, in which a bewitching young
singer named Lulu descends from the heights of society to the depths of
prostitution, meeting her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. She is, to some
extent, a grotesque caricature of the lethal female, fit for the misogynistic pages
of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character.
In the audience at Kraus’s lecture was Alban Berg. The novice composer
stayed transfixed through the ensuing performance of
Yet, as Kraus points out, Wedekind
reserved his utmost contempt for the haute bourgeoisie, which hypocritically
encourages its men to seek sexual satisfaction from prostitutes while
condemning those same women as bearers of disease and degradation. If the
woman is a monster, men are responsible. Lulu “became the destroyer of all,”
Kraus says, “because she was destroyed by all.”
Pandora’s Box, in which
Wedekind himself took the role of Jack the Ripper. Whether Berg imagined a
Lulu opera at that time is not known. Wozzeck became his chief obsession, and
after finishing it, he weighed various options for his next stage piece, including
an adaptation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Und Pippa tanzt! (about a blind
ocarina player who wanders Austria in search of his lost love). Only in the
summer of 1928 did he finally settle on Lulu, as he titled his synthesis of the two
Wedekind plays. (The subject was in the air: G. W. Pabst’s silent filmPandora’s
Box, starring the flapper icon Louise Brooks, opened the following year.) Berg
had not yet completed the orchestration of Act III at the time of his death, but his
intentions were clear enough that the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha was
later able to put together a three-act version, which had its premiere in 1979. By
turns hyper-Romantic and avant-garde, stately and brutal, empathetic and
inhumane, Lulu
Although Berg lived his entire life in Vienna, Berlin was the scene of his greatest
success—the premiere of
embodies all the raging contradictions of Central European
culture on the eve of the Hitler catastrophe.
Wozzeck, on December 14, 1925. Before that night,
162
Berg had been an obscure member of the Schoenberg circle; afterward, he
joined the ranks of the most illustrious composers of the day. Ovation upon
ovation greeted him when he walked onstage at the Staatsoper on Unter den
Linden. If Theodor Adorno is to be believed, Berg was upset by the response. “I
was with him until late into the night,” Adorno recalled, “literally consoling him
over his success. That a work conceived like Wozzeck’s apparitions in the field,
a work satisfying Berg’s own standards, could please a first-night audience, was
incomprehensible to him and struck him as an argument against the opera.”
Schoenberg, on his side, was jealous. “Schoenberg envied Berg his
successes,” Adorno observed, “while Berg envied Schoenberg his failures.”
Berg dutifully took up twelve-note composition, although his use of it was quirky,
to say the least. In a letter to Adorno he brazenly announced that what
interested him most about Schoenberg’s method was its capacity to generate
new kinds of tonality. For example, the row for the first movement of the Lyric
Suite
In a way, twelve-tone composition gave Berg the best of both worlds. It imposed
discipline on an unruly spirit, and, at the same time, it allowed for the smuggling
in of forbidden pleasures. The game reached its zenith in the Violin Concerto,
which Berg wrote in the summer of 1935, as a memorial for Alma Mahler and
Walter Gropius’s daughter, Manon. The main tone row allows not only the usual
tonal allusions but a living fragment of the music of the past—the first notes of
Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug.” The work ends in unambiguous B-flat major, with
the violin soaring toward a stratospheric G and the harp strumming
sympathetically. It sounds like nothing so much as the first chords of Debussy’s
—the work that spellbound Gershwin—splits into white-key notes (from the
scale of C major) and black-key notes (from F-sharp major). This arrangement
almost guarantees a resurgence of turn-of-the-century harmony in the vein of
Strauss and Mahler. Because of the rapid rotation of pitches, no chord can stay
in place for long: thus, late-Romantic harmony becomes a flickering mirage.
Berg’s works of the twenties are double layered in another sense: they allude to
the latest twists in the composer’s always complex emotional life. The
Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun.”
Lyric
Suite makes coded references to Berg’s hopeless affair with a woman named
Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, who is represented in the work by the notes B and F (H
and F in German notation). Those notes and their related triads can be found all
over Berg’s later works. A psychoanalyst might say that such romantic
skulduggery was the unsuccessful self-sabotage of a fundamentally innocent,
isolated nature. Berg was unfaithful to his wife in the same sense that he was
unfaithful to Schoenberg: he followed the letter but sinned in spirit. Helene Berg
knew of the situation. After her husband’s death she wrote to Alma, “Alban
invented an excuse to keep his poetic passion within those boundaries which he
himself desired. He himself constructed obstacles and thereby created the
romanticism which he required.” These words apply equally well to Berg’s
manipulation of the twelve-note method.
“Hereinspaziert! Step right up, lively ladies and distinguished gentlemen, into
the menagerie.” Lulu opens with an allegorical Prologue, in which an animal
trainer tries to entice passersby into his circus act. The most captivating
163
creature in the menagerie turns out to be Lulu, whom the trainer is carrying on
his back. His bid for the audience’s attention is typical 1920s stagecraft: think of
Cocteau’s Speaker in Oedipus Rex (“Spectateurs!”)
As the curtain rises on the first act proper, Lulu is having her portrait done by a
painter, who pledges his undying devotion. Her husband, a hapless doctor,
walks in on the two of them, shouting, “You dogs!” He falls dead of a heart
attack. By the second scene, Lulu is married to the painter, who, upon learning
of various irregularities in his wife’s sexual history, elects to slash his own
throat. By the end of Act I, the man in Lulu’s life is Dr. Schön, an editor, who has
known her long enough to know that he should have stayed away. In Act II,
Scene I, Schön makes an unexpected visit to his home in the middle of the day
and finds his new wife in the company of his son Alwa, an emotionally scattered
operetta composer. (As in
, or the alienating
announcers in Brecht, or the grimacing hosts of the Berlin cabarets.
Der ferne Klang and Jonny spielt auf, there is an
autobiographical dimension to the composer character: when Alwa remarks that
one could write an interesting opera about Lulu, the orchestra plays the first
chords of Wozzeck.)
We jump forward a year (here
Also in the room are an acrobat, a schoolboy, and a
lesbian countess, all besotted with the woman of the hour. Schön gives her a
revolver and instructs her to commit suicide. When she refuses, he prepares to
do the job himself. More or less in selfdefense, Lulu kills him.
Earth Spirit gives way to Pandora’s Box).
As in
Alwa,
the acrobat, and the countess have conspired to effect Lulu’s escape from
prison, where she was sent for the killing of Schön. When she ceappears, she
gives herself to Alwa, and as they press their bodies together, she asks the
immortal question “Isn’t this the couch on which your father bled to death?” Lulu
still has her wits about her, but her social trajectory is heading downward. She
starts off Act III in high style, consorting with her menagerie in the gaming room
of a Paris salon. The illusion of glamour collapses when the acrobat and a
disreputable marquis both threaten to denounce her to the police. Amid a stock-
market panic, she escapes again, but, being a Wedekind character, she has no
choice but to go to London to become an East End prostitute. Berg here
introduces an inspired stroke of dramaturgy: the singers who portrayed Lulu’s
“victims” in the first two acts return as her “customers.” The doctor becomes a
mute professor. The painter becomes an African prince, who bludgeons Alwa to
death. And Dr. Schön becomes Jack the Ripper. When Lulu retires with her final
client, there is an awful shriek. Jack emerges, stabs the countess, and leaves.
The countess sings that she will be with Lulu into eternity.
Wozzeck, the various acts and scenes are built around classical forms.
The third act also takes in operetta, vaudeville, and jazz; ever the good student,
Berg studied a how-to manual called Das Jazzbuch to get his orchestration
right. There are possible echoes of Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny, which Berg saw in Vienna in 1932. At the same time,Lulu is, like
Wozzeck, circular in design, churning through a tight configuration of tone rows,
leitmotifs, and harmonic relationships. In a way, it is a gigantic palindrome, the
midpoint of which is the interlude that ties together Earth Spirit and Pandora’s
Box. Borrowing a trick from Weill’s Royal Palace, Berg calls for the showing of a
164
short silent film, illustrating Lulu’s trial, escapades in prison, and escape. Right
in the middle of the interlude, the music literally begins running in reverse.
From then on, the opera is saturated in déjà vu. Motifs, passages, even entire
sections are repeated from earlier parts of the opera. Adding to the uncanny
atmosphere is the fact that most of the motifs relate to a single twelve-note row.
As in the Lyric Suite, the master row carries tonal implications, dividing into
white-key and black-key areas that correspond to C major and F-sharp major.
Indeed, sketchbooks reveal that Berg looked at his rows as funds for keys,
noting the triads that could be extracted from each.
Wozzeck plays like a film by Sergei Eisenstein or Orson Welles, its musical
images running together in a virtuoso montage.Lulu, by contrast, brings to mind
a coolly observed social satire by Jean Renoir or Stanley Kubrick, the sort of
film in which the camera dissects the complexities of human relations in gliding
movements. Opera’s camera can pass in and out of souls, and when it looks
into the hearts of the people of Lulu
Whenever the theme of Lulu and Dr. Schön reappears, it dramatizes a new
stage in the plunge of the characters’ fortunes. It is bellowed out at the end of
Act I, as Schön, having witnessed the painter’s end, realizes that he is next in
line: “Now comes the execution!” By then, the theme’s dreaming grandeur is
gone; Schön’s characteristic upward leap is undermined by the sudden
immobility of the harmony beneath him. The theme is heard again after Schön’s
death, when Lulu repeats that he was the only man she ever loved. Beneath the
sentimental phrase is a disquieting subtext: Lulu has not only killed Schön but
subsumed him. Berg provides a musical metaphor for this process of
depersonalization: in Schön’s last moments the lovers’ two rows are again
heard in tandem, now arranged so that we can clearly hear how the notes of the
one come from repeating cycles of the other. As Schön gasps, “Oh God, oh
God,” Lulu’s row plays one more time, alone. The man no longer has a self.
the effect is almost overwhelming. The
most powerful epiphany comes in the music that expresses the impossible love
of Dr. Schön and Lulu. Schön is the one man in Lulu’s life for whom she has
any sort of reciprocal feeling; the floodgates of emotion open when she speaks
the words “If I belong to one man in this world, then I belong to you.” The
grandiose leaps of Dr. Schön’s series, strongly implying D-flat major, define the
initial shape of the theme. But from the third bar on, Schön’s and Lulu’s series
unfold simultaneously—Lulu’s in a rapid stream, Schön’s at a more deliberate
pace. The result is a supersaturated harmony that feels like a fifty-bar Mahler
theme compressed into minimum space.
Schön’s chilly demise is nothing next to the soul-freezing mood that descends
when Jack the Ripper enters. The most disturbing thing about the scene is that,
in keeping with the repetitive structure of the opera, the Schön-Lulu theme plays
in the orchestra as Lulu and Jack bicker over the evening’s price. What does it
mean, to have such unabashedly romantic music unfurling as the soundtrack to
an act of prostitution that leads to murder? Perhaps Berg is suggesting, in a
faintly positive vein, that sympathy and ardor live on even amid total
degradation. Or perhaps he is perpetuating the Lustmord chic of the Weimar
era, the obsessive focus on sexual killings and other revolting acts. That
165
magnificent theme out of Mahler and Strauss is unmasked as the love song of
Jack the Ripper. To quote Otto Weininger, whom Berg read so intensely, love is
murder.
When Lulu is killed, the orchestra plays a monstrous chord of twelve tones. It is
built up out of fourths and fifths, not unlike the chords that underpin the Doctor’s
aria in Wozzeck
Countess Geschwitz has the last word: “Lulu! My angel! Show yourself one
more time! I am near you! I am always near! Into eternity!” In delivering this
eulogy, she picks up a lyrical fragment from the debris of the dissonant
detonation. As the curtain comes down, the implacable twelve-tone machinery
takes over: three trombones play three fateful chords, taken respectively from
Dr. Schön’s, Alwa’s, and the countess’s rows. The last chord is an ambiguous
entity, a chord of nowhere. It is the same chord that sounds in
(“Oh my theory! Oh my fame!”). There, twelve-note harmony
symbolized social cruelty; here, Jack the Ripper may represent, per Kraus’s
lecture of 1905, the collected malevolence of the male species. The death chord
is a prolonged assault on the senses, overkill in every way. In contrast, though,
to Wedekind, who could be accused of reveling in the role of Jack the Ripper,
Berg’s music has the effect of putting us in Lulu’s place: the chord falls with
terrible swiftness, stabbing at our ears. This is in keeping with the composer’s
nature. Many witnesses noted his exceptional ability to register the pain of other
people. “I always had the impression,” Schoenberg said after Berg’s death, “that
he had experienced beforehand what people close to him were going through,
as though he had already suffered with them when they were suffering, so that
when they came to tell him of it it did not catch him unawares but rather on the
contrary reopened old wounds. Wounds that he had already inflicted on himself
by his powerful sympathy.”
Wozzeck
In the climactic scene of
as
Marie’s life ebbs away. Berg called it his chord of waiting, of expectation. Every
time it is played, it rotates in the air, searching for the music that will complete it.
Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn stands in front of a
group of friends, who are expecting him to demonstrate his final work, The
Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Speaking in medieval dialect, he proceeds to
confess his pact with the devil. Only a few people remain in the room when he
finally begins to play. Serenus Zeitblom, the composer’s long-suffering Boswell,
reports: “We saw tears trickle down his cheeks and fall on the keys, which,
though wet, were now struck in a strongly dissonant chord. At the same time he
opened his mouth as if to sing, but from between his lips there emerged only a
wail that still rings in my ears.” It is like Lulu’s
Thomas Mann often thought of Berg while he worked on his musical novel. He
attended the 1937 premiere of
death shriek, now issuing from the
artist’s throat.
Lulu in Zurich—where the first two acts were
performed together with the orchestral music of the final scene—and he
probably had the opera’s ending in mind when he wrote of Leverkühn’s descent
into madness. Also, Mann apparently based his account of the final bars of The
Lamentation of Doctor Faustus on Adorno’s description of the Lyric Suite. “One
instrument after another falls silent,” Adorno had written. “The viola alone
remains, but it is not even allowed to expire, to die. It must play for ever; except
166
that we can no longer hear it.” Mann converted those sentences into one of the
most affecting passages in twentiethcentury literature, in which the icy-minded
composer seems finally to grasp a sliver of hope: “One instrumental group after
the other steps back, and what remains as the work fades away is the high G of
a cello, the final word, the final sound, floating off, slowly vanishing in a
pianissimo fermata.
Then nothing more. Silence and night. But the tone, which
is no more, for which, as it hangs there vibrating in the silence, only the soul still
listens, and which was the dying note of sorrow—is no longer that, its meaning
changes, it stands as a light in the night.”
167
Part II
1933–1945
Along the legendary embankment
The real—not the calendar—
Twentieth Century draws near.
—ANNA AKHMATOVA, POEM WITHOUT A HERO
168
THE ART OF FEAR
On January 26, 1936, Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the All-Union
Communist Party (Bolshevik), went to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow for a
performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera
Music in Stalin’s Russia
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District.
Stalin had lately taken an interest in Soviet opera. On January 17 he had seen
Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s
The Soviet dictator often attended opera and ballet at the Bolshoi,
where he made a show of being inconspicuous; he preferred to take a seat in
the back row of Box A, just before the curtain rose, and positioned himself
behind a small curtain, which concealed him from the audience without
obstructing his view of the stage. Phalanxes of security and a general
heightening of tension would signal to experienced observers that Stalin was in
the hall. On this night, Shostakovich, the twenty-nine-year-old star of Soviet
composition, had been officially instructed to attend. He sat facing Box A.
Visible in front were Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Andrei
Zhdanov, all of them members or candidate members of the Politburo.
According to one account, they were laughing, talking among themselves, and
otherwise enjoying their proximity to the man behind the curtain.
The Quiet Don, and liked it enough to summon the
composer to his box for an interview, commenting that Soviet opera should
“make use of all the latest devices of musical techniques, but its idiom should
be close to the masses, clear and accessible.” Lady Macbeth,
Two days later, one of the great nightmares of twentieth-century cultural history
began riding down on the nervous young composer.
the tale of a
vaguely Lulu-like Russian housewife who leaves a string of bodies in her wake,
did not meet these somewhat ambiguous specifications. Stalin left the hall
either before or during the final act, taking with him Comrades Molotov,
Mikoyan, and Zhdanov. Shostakovich confided to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky
that he, too, had been hoping to receive an invitation to Box A. Despite vigorous
applause from the audience, the composer left feeling “sick at heart,” and he
remained so as he boarded a train for the northern city of Arkhangel’sk, where
he was scheduled to perform.
Pravda, the official
169
Communist Party newspaper, printed an editorial with the headline “Muddle
Instead of Music,” in which Lady Macbeth was condemned as an artistically
obscure and morally obscene work. “From the first moment of the opera,” the
anonymous author wrote, “the listener is flabbergasted by the deliberately
dissonant, muddled stream of sounds.” Shostakovich was said to be playing a
game that “may end very badly.” The last phrase was chilling. Stalin’s Terror
was imminent, and Soviet citizens were about to discover, if they did not know
already, what a bad end might mean. Some would be pilloried and executed as
enemies of the people, some would be arrested and killed in secret, some
would be sent to the gulags, some would simply disappear. Shostakovich never
shook off the pall of fear that those six hundred words in Pravda
A few weeks before “Muddle Instead of Music” was published, a familiar face
appeared again in Moscow. Sergei Prokofiev, who had been living outside
Russia since 1918, arrived with his wife, Lina, to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
According to Harlow Robinson’s biography, Prokofiev attended a party at the
Moscow Art Theatre and remained there until five in the morning. Since 1927,
the former enfant terrible of Russian music had returned many times to his
native land; now he decided to live in Moscow full-time. He was well aware that
Soviet artists were subject to censorship, but he chose to think that such
restrictions would not apply to him. He was, at this time, forty-four years old, at
the height of his powers and in good health. He, too, would endure a long string
of humiliations, and was not granted the satisfaction of outliving Stalin. In a twist
that would seem too heavy-handed in a novel, Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953,
about fifty minutes before Stalin breathed his last.
cast on him.
The period from the mid-thirties onward marked the onset of the most warped
and tragic phase in twentieth-century music: the total politicizing of the art by
totalitarian means. On the eve of the Second World War, dictators had
manipulated popular resentment and media spectacle to take control of half of
Europe. Hitler in Germany and Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary,
and Franco in Spain. In the Soviet Union, Stalin refined Lenin’s revolutionary
dictatorship into an omnipotent machine, relying on a cult of personality, rigid
control of the media, and an army of secret police. In America, Franklin D.
Roosevelt was granted extraordinary executive powers to counter the ravages
of the Depression, leading conservatives to fear an erosion of constitutional
process, particularly when federal arts programs were harnessed to political
purposes. In Germany, Hitler forged the most unholy alliance of art and politics
that the world had ever seen.
For anyone who cherishes the notion that there is some inherent spiritual
goodness in artists of great talent, the era of Stalin and Hitler is disillusioning.
Not only did composers fail to rise up en masse against totalitarianism, but
many actively welcomed it. In the capitalist free-for-all of the twenties, they had
contended with technologically enhanced mass culture, which introduced a new
aristocracy of movie stars, pop musicians, and celebrities without portfolio.
Having long depended on the largesse of the Church, the upper classes, and
the high bourgeoisie, composers suddenly found themselves, in the Jazz Age,
without obvious means of support. Some fell to dreaming of a political knight in
shining armor who would come to their aid.
170
The dictators played that role to perfection. Stalin and Hitler aped the art-loving
monarchs of yore, pledging the patronage of the centralized state. But these
men were a different species. Coming from the social margins, they believed
themselves to be perfect embodiments of popular will and popular taste. At the
same time, they saw themselves as artist-intellectuals, members of history’s
vanguard. Adept at playing on the weaknesses of the creative mind, they
offered the seduction of power with one hand and the fear of destruction with
the other. One by one, artists fell in line.
Untangling composers’ relationships with totalitarianism is a tricky exercise. For
a long time discussion of Shostakovich revolved around the issue of whether he
was an “official” composer who produced propaganda on command or a secret
dissident who encoded anti-Stalinist messages in his scores. Likewise, people
have pondered whether Prokofiev knowingly aligned himself with Stalinist
aesthetics in order to advance his career or returned to the Soviet Union in a
state of unknowing naïveté. Similar questions have been posed about Richard
Strauss’s murky, unheroic behavior in the Nazi period, but they are the wrong
ones to ask.
Black-and-white categories make no sense in the shadowland of dictatorship.
These composers were neither saints nor devils; they were flawed actors on a
tilted stage. In some extra verses for “Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” Bertolt
Brecht wrote, “There are those who dwell in darkness, there are those who
dwell in light.” Most dwell in neither place, and Shostakovich speaks for all.
Lenin, the prototype of the twentieth-century dictator, had favorite authors and
composers, but he was too rigorous a materialist to bother much with art. He
had little patience for the avant-garde, and once had a fit when futurists painted
May Day colors on the trees in the Aleksandrovsky gardens. Music he regarded
as a bourgeois placebo that covered up the sufferings of mankind. In a
conversation with Maxim Gorky, he extolled the power of Beethoven, but added,
“I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say
stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such
beauty while living in this vile hell.” Nevertheless, he tolerated the activities of
various avant-garde factions, which lent a veneer of sophistication to the
thuggery of Bolshevism in its early days.
Revolution
Lenin’s chief artistic functionary was Anatol Lunacharsky, who from 1917 to
1929 headed the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Lunacharsky was not unlike
Leo Kestenberg in Berlin—a peculiarly smart and broad-minded bureaucrat with
a poor understanding of political reality. A philosopher by training, an observant
critic of Dostoevsky and other authors, something of a mystic, Lunacharsky
believed that a revolution in society should go hand in hand with a revolution in
art. Communism, in his view, was a new kind of secular rite, for which art should
supply the chant, icons, and incense. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, among
the first to join Lunacharsky’s crusade, joined him in believing that Communism