Ross Alex. The rest is noice
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
261
face should have been.” On a given day Stockhausen and his comrades would
haul thirty or forty corpses into churches that had been converted into morgues.
Hans Werner Henze trained as a radio operator for Panzer battalions and spent
the first part of 1945 riding aimlessly around the ruined landscape. Bernd Alois
Zimmermann fought on the front lines of Hitler’s ill-fated invasion of the Soviet
Union. Luciano Berio was conscripted into the army of Mussolini’s Republic of
Salò and nearly blew off his right hand with a gun that he did not know how to
use. Iannis Xenakis joined the Greek Communist resistance, fighting not only
the Germans but also the British, who, in an early demonstration of Cold War
Realpolitik, made common cause with local Fascists when they occupied the
country. At the end of 1944 a British shell landed on a building where Xenakis
was hiding; after watching a comrade’s brains splatter against a wall, he passed
out and awoke to find that his left eye and part of his face were gone.
In July 1945, the young English composer Benjamin Britten, who had just
scored a triumph in London with his opera Peter Grimes, accompanied the
violinist Yehudi Menuhin on a brief tour of defeated Germany. The two men
visited the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen and performed for a crowd of
former inmates. Stupefied by what he saw, Britten decided to write a cycle of
songs on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the most spiritually scouring poetry
he could find. On August 6 he set to music Sonnet 14, which begins, “Batter my
heart, three person’d God.” Earlier the same day, the first operational atomic
bomb fell on Hiroshima. There is an eerie coincidence here, for J. Robert
Oppenheimer, the head of the American nuclear program, cherished the same
Donne poem, and evidently had it in mind when he gave the site of the first
atomic test the name Trinity.
On August 19, Britten finished his cycle by setting Donne’s sonnet “Death be
not proud.” The singer declaims the words “And death shall be no more” on a
rising scale; fixates for nine long beats on the word “Death”; and finally, over a
clanging dominant-tonic cadence, thunders, “Thou shalt die.”
In 1945 Germany was a primitive society such as Europe had not known since
the Middle Ages. The former citizens of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich were
living a hand-to-mouth existence, scavenging for food, drinking from drainpipes,
cooking over wood fires, living in the basements of destroyed houses or in
hand-built trailers and cabins. In 1948 the glamorous young American musician
Leonard Bernstein arrived in Munich to conduct a concert and reported back
home: “The people starve, struggle, rob, beg for bread. Wages are often paid in
cigarettes. Tipping is all in cigarettes. It is all misery.”
Millions of prisoners of war lived in camps; millions more roamed the roads,
having fled the Soviet occupation in the east or been expelled from neighboring
countries by policies of ethnic cleansing. No sooner had Hitler made his exit
than Stalin replaced him as a threat. The collected might of Anglo-American
industry, which had been used to obliterate one German city after another, now
became the engine of reconstruction. Germany would be reinvented as a
democratic, American-style society, a bulwark against the Soviets. Part of that
262
grand plan was a cultural policy of denazification and reeducation, which would
have a decisive effect on postwar music.
Germany and Austria broke apart into American, British, French, and Soviet
zones. The head of the American occupation—the Office of Military
Government, United States, or OMGUS—was an evenhanded, incorruptible,
staggeringly efficient man named Lucius Clay. What made Clay interesting was
that his background combined strict West Point training with a whiff of New Deal
idealism; in the Army Corps of Engineers he had coordinated building projects
with the WPA, and an early evaluation had called him “inclined to be
bolshevistic.” The military governor wanted to reshape and lift up Germany as
Roosevelt had reshaped and lifted up America. At a conference in
Berchtesgaden, near Hitler’s old redoubt, Clay said, “We are trying to free the
German mind and to make his heart value that freedom so greatly that it will
beat and die for that freedom and for no other purpose.”
The project of freeing the German mind went by the name “reorientation.” The
term originated in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme
Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, which was led by Brigadier General
Robert McClure. Psychological warfare meant the pursuit of military ends by
nonmilitary means, and in the case of music it meant the promotion of jazz,
American composition, international contemporary music, and other sounds that
could be used to degrade the concept of Aryan cultural supremacy.
One key member of General McClure’s staff was the émigré Russian composer
Nicolas Nabokov. “He’s hep on music and tells the Krauts how to go about it,”
one military man said of this ebullient, charming, and slippery personality. Back
in the twenties and early thirties, Nabokov had belonged to Serge Diaghilev’s
cadre of composers at the Ballets Russes. His music was relatively negligible,
his ability to cultivate high-level social and political connections positively
virtuosic; in the postwar era he would show a Zelig-like ability to appear in the
middle of any cultural imbroglio.
With the coming of OMGUS, Psychological Warfare evolved into Information
Control, taking responsibility for all cultural activity in the occupied areas. In
keeping with the reorientation paradigm, military and civilian experts were
brought in to guide extant organizations and encourage new, forward-looking
ones. Many in Information Control’s Music Branches had thorough training and
a progressive outlook on contemporary music. Two of the brightest were
stationed in Bavaria, the birthplace of the Nazi Party. John Evarts, who served
there from 1946 on, had taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina,
where Schoenberg’s pupil Heinrich Jalowetz was on the faculty. Joining Evarts
in 1948 was the Mississippiborn pianist Carlos Moseley, who had studied
alongside Leonard Bernstein at Koussevitzky’s music school in the Berkshires.
Moseley arranged for one of Information Control’s triumphs—Bernstein’s
startlingly successful conducting engagement in Munich in May 1948, which led
some experienced concertgoers to exclaim that this young American knew
German music better than the Germans. In a letter home Bernstein exulted: “It
means so much for the American military Government, since music is the
263
Germans’ last stand in their ‘master race’ claim, and for the first time it’s been
exploded in Munich.”
Moseley’s memories of his OMGUS service remained distinct more than five
decades later, when he spoke to the author of this book at a restaurant in
midtown Manhattan. Having arrived in Munich on a wet winter night, he had no
time to dry his clothes before reporting to senior operatives for briefings. A
senior general told him that one pressing task was to “look into that whole thing
going on in Beulah.” By this the general meant Bayreuth, where ideas for a
possible revival of the Wagner festival were circulating. Moseley went to
Bayreuth and walked up the Green Hill to the Festspielhaus. The roof was
leaking and water dripped into the amphitheater. Down in the orchestra pit,
Moseley saw instruments lying about, including a rack of bells. Remembering a
recording of Parsifal that he had listened to many times in his youth—the one
led by Karl Muck—he struck the notes C, G, A, and E, the Grail temple motif.
Afterward, Moseley went to Haus Wahnfried, Wagner’s home, which Allied
bombs had also damaged. Winifred Wagner, the widow of Wagner’s son,
Siegfried, had had to suffer the indignity of a denazification hearing, and she
watched helplessly as the theater was used for Italian opera, light
entertainment, and other “desecrations.” Soldiers played jazz on the Wahnfried
piano; doughnuts were baked in the festival restaurant. The Festspielhaus even
served as a barracks for African-American troops—a circumstance that Winifred
noted in her reminiscences with four exclamation points of horror. She gave
Moseley a tour of the ruins and showed him the Meister’s grave. “She began
talking about ‘unser Blitzkrieg’—‘our Blitzkrieg’—and reminiscing fondly of the
Hitler period. I froze up. I couldn’t take it. I just walked away from her, feeling a
definite terror in my veins.”
OMGUS’s music policies were summed up in a Psychological Warfare
document titled “Music Control Instruction No. 1,” which can be found at the
National Archives in College Park, Maryland. “It is above all essential,” the
memo says, “that we should not give the impression of trying to regiment culture
in the Nazi manner.” Instead, “German musical life must be influenced by
positive rather than by negative means, i.e., by encouraging the music which we
think beneficial and crowding out that which we think dangerous.” Only two men
occupied the “dangerous” category: Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner. “We
must not … allow such composers to be ‘built up’ by special concerts devoted
entirely to their works or conducted by them.” With this two-pronged approach,
the document concludes, “we shall have little difficulty in giving a positive
international direction to German musical life.” The anonymous author also
flagged Sibelius, noting that certain of his works might arouse anti-Russian
feeling; hence, Finlandia was discouraged.
If not Strauss, Pfitzner, and Sibelius, which composers would be acceptable in
the new Germany? The first order of business was to restore to the repertory
music that the Nazis had banned on racial and ideological grounds. One early
strategy had mixed results, as a report from August 1945 shows: “The rule of
having to perform at least one ‘verboten’ work on each program has led to a
stereotyped pattern of starting orchestral concerts with a Mendelssohn overture
264
… The Mendelssohn situation has become critical, ridiculous, and urgent.” The
author of this memo, Edward Kilenyi, was the son of Gershwin’s theory teacher.
Music Control also placed great emphasis on American music, promoting major
works of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson along with more
dubious fare such as Robert McBride’s Strawberry Jam Overture. There was a
sudden surge in performances of a symphony by the little-known Harrison Kerr,
who happened to work in the Cultural Affairs Division’s New York office.
Censorship departments that were monitoring the German mails reported that
on the whole American music was going down well, although symphonic works
had less traction than popular songs. “I hear such nice American music over the
radio,” wrote a German woman to a friend in Philadelphia. “I really like it very
much; I do not know why we were always told that it amounts to nothing. The
fact is, that our music is heavier and everlasting, but your songs and hits are so
jolly and light.”
The extroverted, jazz-tinged music of the Weimar era, as embodied in The
Threepenny Opera, had been condemned by the Nazis on political and racial
grounds. It might have qualified as “safe” for the new Germany. By this time,
though, Weill was entrenched as a composer on Broadway and uninterested in
returning to Germany; his premature death in 1950 made the matter moot.
Other young leftist composers who had thrived in twenties Berlin—the likes of
Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe—were evidently ruled out because of their
Communist associations. The entire Weill-ish school of song-driven
composition, whether because of its leftist leanings or because of its daring
synthesis of classical and popular styles, figured little in the calculations of
Music Control. Carl Orff, on the other hand, prospered, even though Carmina
burana had been a hit with Goebbels. Orff misleadingly presented himself as an
associate of the anti-Nazi resistance, and OMGUS gave him a clean ideological
bill of health. It helped that Newell Jenkins, the local theater and music officer,
had studied with Orff before the war.
The Americans placed highest confidence in musical progressives who lacked
either Nazi or Communist affiliations. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, the Munich
composer who dedicated his symphonic poem Miserae to the victims of Dachau
in 1935, was extolled by Music Control as “a man of the utmost integrity [who]
possesses a musical outlook which is astonishingly sound and fresh for a man
who has survived the nazi [sic] occupation.” Not long after the end of the war,
Hartmann organized a series of Musica Viva concerts in Munich, with emphasis
on “verboten” modernists. The OMGUS file dealing with Musica Viva is marked
“Reorientation Project No. 1.” The material is held in a stiff gray folder that had
evidently been appropriated from a Nazi filing cabinet; under the American
scrawl is a watermark reading “NSDAP.”
Alas, Munich music lovers did not flock to Hartmann’s series. John Evarts
wrote, “They are extremely shy of any sort of art created in an idiom of a period
later than, say, 1900.” One event drew fewer than thirty people. Carlos Moseley
decided to use OMGUS money to purchase 350 tickets, which he then
distributed to young musicians and composers. Thus, the American occupation
265
was not only providing funds for the concerts but also filling the seats—an
exceptionally generous form of patronage.
The city of Darmstadt, most of which had been leveled in an incendiary
bombing raid in September 1944, hosted another American-supported modern-
music experiment. The music critic Wolfgang Steinecke proposed to set up a
summertime institute so that young composers might familiarize themselves
with music that the Nazis had banned. Steinecke persuaded the local city
government to let him use the Kranichstein Hunting Castle, a picturesque pile
outside of town. The American authorities warmly backed the venture, which
was dubbed the International Summer Courses for New Music; the scholar Amy
Beal estimates that OMGUS contributed about 20 percent of the budget. GIs
even transported a Steinway grand up to the castle on the back of a jeep.
Instrumental to the growth of this soon-to-be-formidable institution was Everett
Helm, the music officer for the Hesse region and a composer himself. Helm
proudly noted that at Darmstadt “contemporary music only is taught and
performed—and then only the more advanced variety. R. Strauss and J.
Sibelius do not come into consideration.” Hindemith was designated a “natural
starting point,” but Schoenberg quickly emerged as the shining beacon for
young German composers.
Schoenberg had a prominent place in Darmstadt’s programs from the
beginning. The 1949 season coincided with his seventy-fifth birthday, and the
organizers very much wanted the composer to attend. John Evarts, who had
met Schoenberg in Berlin before the Nazi takeover, played a crucial role in the
negotiations. To his apparently skeptical colleagues in New York Evarts wrote:
“It would be both historically and personally an important final gesture for the
U.S. to help make the trip possible before the old man makes his final exit.” Red
tape interfered with the plan. Coming to Germany as a visiting expert would
have meant flying on an American military aircraft and passing a military
examination. “In my former army service I was not very fortunate with military
doctors,” Schoenberg wrote to Evarts. In the end, he did not feel well enough to
go.
All the same, Schoenberg’s spirit loomed over Darmstadt in the summer of
1949; there were performances of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, the Variations
for Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth String Quartet, and the String
Trio. Remarkably, the Trio appeared in an OMGUS-sponsored series devoted
to American chamber works, alongside quartets by Charles Ives and
Wallingford Riegger. Two summers later, just before Schoenberg’s death,
Darmstadt presented the “Dance Around the Golden Calf” from Moses und
Aron, the first performance anywhere of music from the opera.
Some official observers were uneasy about the direction that Darmstadt was
taking. Colonel Ralph A. Burns, the chief of the Cultural Affairs Branch of the
Education and Cultural Relations Division of OMGUS, noted in a June 1949
memo that the summer school had “acquired a reputation for one-sidedness.”
The previous summer, the Polish-born, Paris-based composer and theorist
René Leibowitz, the author of Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World, had
266
arrived to preach the gospel of twelve-tone music, and he caused great
excitement among younger German composers. Leibowitz returned in 1949 in
the company of the equally radical, though less doctrinaire, Olivier Messiaen.
The French contingent had an unsettling effect, as Burns reported in his follow-
up “Review of Activities for the Month of July 1949.” After extolling the virtues of
the Yale Glee Club, which had staged a successful German tour, he wrote the
following:
The Darmstadt Holiday Courses for New Music came to a close on 10
July with opinion as to their effectiveness sharply divided. The majority of
students and faculty felt that the idea of the school—to foster new music
through performances, lectures and courses—is splendid, but that the
execution of the idea was faulty. During the concluding four days, five
concerts were given under the title “Music of the Younger Generation.” It
was generally conceded that much of this music was worthless and had
better been left unplayed. The over-emphasis on twelve-tone music was
regretted. One critic (Neue Zeitung) described the concerts as “The
Triumph of Dilettantism.” A regrettable feature of the session was the
tension created between the French group and the rest of the school.
Led by their teacher Leibowitz, the French students remained aloof from
the others and acted in a snobbish way. At one concert, their conduct led
to open hostility. Leibowitz (an Austrian by birth [sic]) represents and
admits as valid only the most radical kind of music and is openly
disdainful of any other. His attitude is aped by his students. It was
generally felt that next year’s Holiday Course for New Music must follow
a different, more catholic pattern.
Here was a sign of things to come. The aggressive tactics of Schoenberg’s
young French acolytes forecast the musical divides of coming years, when
Pierre Boulez, the most “openly disdainful” of composers, would declare that
any composer who had not come to terms with Schoenberg’s method was
“useless.” Boulez himself did not attend that summer, but he had studied with
Leibowitz and had already created a stink at a Stravinsky concert in Paris.
David Monod, in his history of music during the American occupation, writes
that OMGUS inadvertently helped to bring about a “segregation of the modern
and the popular.” Darmstadt and similar organizations were wholly subsidized
by the state, the city, and the Americans. They had no obligation to a paying
public. Meanwhile, “classical music,” in the pejorative sense of performances of
wellknown opera and symphonic repertory, carried on as it had during the Nazi
period, with many of the same star conductors—Furtwängler, Karajan,
Knappertsbusch—in charge, despite the various ceremonies of denazification to
which they had been subjected. So there was, on the one hand, a classical
establishment that eluded denazification, and, on the other, an avant-garde
establishment that opposed itself so determinedly to the aesthetics of the Nazi
period that it came close to disavowing the idea of the public concert. The
middlebrow ideal of a popular modernism withered away, caught between
extremes of revolution and reaction.
267
The worst mistake of the American occupation, from the musical point of view,
was the accidental slaughter of Anton Webern, in Mittersill, Austria, on the night
of September 15, 1945. As the American military were preparing to arrest a
relative of Webern’s, a black marketeer who was suspected of ties to the Nazi
underground, a military cook named Raymond Bell collided with Webern in the
dark, panicked, and shot him dead.
In the years that followed, the composer’s reputation took an unexpected turn.
Webern had long languished as the most obscure and arcane of the Second
Viennese School composers, the one who made Berg sound like an over-the-
top Romantic. After death, Webern acquired a saintly, visionary aura, the super-
refined surfaces and intricate design of his works foreshadowing avant-garde
constructions to come. Ernst Krenek, who had studied with Webern in Vienna,
called him “the prophet of a new musical cosmos, torn from this world by a
dastardly fate.” When Webern’s Piano Variations were performed at Darmstadt
in 1948, young composers listened in a quasi-religious trance. That Webern had
been possibly the most avid Hitlerite among major Austro-German composers
was not widely known, or went unmentioned.
Richard Strauss remained in Garmisch. The “Off Limits” sign on his lawn
protected his property but not his reputation. Klaus Mann, Thomas’s son,
serving as a correspondent for the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes,
called on Strauss in mid-May 1945, identifying himself as “Mr. Brown.” He had
not forgotten that Strauss had signed a denunciation of his father in 1933. In a
letter home Klaus wrote that Strauss “happens to be about the most rotten
character one can possibly imagine—ingnorant [sic], complacent, greedy, vain,
abysmally egotistic, completely lacking in the most fundamental human
impulses of shame and decency.” The Stars and Stripes article was scarcely
less venomous, adorned with such headlines as “Strauss Still Unabashed About
Ties with Nazis,” “His Heart Beat in Nazi Time,” and “An Old Opportunist Who
Heiled Hitler.” Some of the dialogue attributed to Strauss sounds implausible.
Klaus claimed, for example, that Strauss showed no awareness of the
destruction of German cities and opera houses; other sources indicate that the
composer talked of little else. Incensed, Strauss wrote a letter of complaint to
Klaus’s father, but he never sent it, perhaps figuring that it would only add fuel
to the fire.
Other visitors were friendlier, charmed by the old man’s memories of America.
When Private Russell Campitelli mentioned that he came from Poughkeepsie,
Strauss nodded, and said, “Oh, yes, that is on the Hudson River.”
Several soldiers happened to be skilled musicians. One day an intelligence
operative named John de Lancie showed up at Strauss’s door, not to conduct
an interrogation but to express his admiration for the composer’s woodwind
writing; before the war he had played oboe in the Pittsburgh Symphony. De
Lancie boldly asked Strauss if he had ever thought of writing a concerto for
oboe. “No,” the composer answered. Several months later de Lancie was
astonished to read in a newspaper that Strauss had indeed written an oboe
concerto, at an American soldier’s request. It was music of unexpected
lightness, recalling the fleet-figured, Mendelssohnian scores that the composer
268
had written in his youth, before he fell under Wagner’s spell. Strauss’s
encounters with the Americans seemed to lift his spirits. In many later
photographs he wears a dour expression, but in a snapshot taken by de Lancie
his eyes are bright and his face is relaxed.
The long, strange career of Strauss faded out with the Four Last Songs of 1948.
“Im Abendrot,” or “At Sunset,” out-Mahlers Mahler in the art of looking death in
the face. The text paints the picture of an elderly couple walking into the
twilight—“Through joy and need we have walked hand in hand”—and the E-flat-
major music unfolds as one luminous arc above them. Friedrich Nietzsche
might have been describing this greatest of Strauss songs when he wrote:
“Masters of the very first order can be recognized by the following characteristic:
in all matters great and small they know with perfect assurance how to find the
end, whether it be the end of a melody or of a thought, whether it be the fifth act
of a tragedy or the end of a political action. The very best of the second-in-rank
grow restive toward the end. They do not plunge into the sea with a proud and
measured tranquility, as do, for example, the mountains near Portofino—where
the Gulf of Genoa sings its melody to the end.”
Strauss died on September 8, 1949. Three weeks later, OMGUS was dissolved,
and the American interregnum in German musical history was over.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” wrote the French poet
Charles Péguy in 1910. Morton Feldman, the maverick modernist who loved
Sibelius, applied this epigram to twentiethcentury music, describing how
grandiose ideas are made ordinary with the passage of time and become fodder
for a power struggle among ideologues and pedants. “Unfortunately for most
people who pursue art, ideas become their opium,” Feldman said. “There is no
security to be one’s self.”
The century began with the mystique of revolution, with the mind-bending
harmonies and earthshaking rhythms of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The
process of politicization was already under way in the twenties, as composers
competed to stay ahead of changing trends and accused one another of
complicity in regressive tendencies. In the thirties and forties, the entire
Romantic tradition was effectively annexed by the totalitarian state. But nothing
could compare to what happened when the Second World War ended and the
Cold War began. Music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions,
counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language
of modern music was reinvented on an almost yearly basis: twelve-tone
composition gave way to “total serialism,” which gave way to chance music,
269
which gave way to a music of freefloating timbres, which gave way to neo-Dada
happenings and collages, and so on. All the informational clutter of late-
capitalist society, from purest noise to purest silence, from combinatorial set
theory to bebop jazz, came rushing in, as if no barrier remained between art
and reality. Strange bedfellows were the order of the day. Following in the
footsteps of OMGUS, the CIA occasionally funded festivals that included hyper-
complex avant-garde works. Cold War politicians such as John F. Kennedy
promised a golden age of freethinking art, and twelve-tone composers at
American universities were the indirect beneficiaries.
The Second World War was the war that never really ended. The Allied
superpowers stayed on a military footing, and the introduction of atomic warfare
and the discovery of the death camps in the summer of 1945 brought about a
worldwide darkening of mood. The rhetoric of the early Cold War period crept
into the musical discussion as into everything else. Composers exploited
possibilities, annexed territory, neutralized the opposition, advanced, retreated,
changed sides. When Stravinsky shocked his colleagues by giving up
neoclassicism in favor of twelve-tone composition, Leonard Bernstein said that
“it was like the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful
regiments with him.”
The dominant aesthetic, in European and American music alike, was one of
dissonance, density, difficulty, complexity. The American composer Elliott
Carter explained why he gave up Copland-style populism and Stravinsky-style
neoclassicism: “Before the end of the Second World War, it became clear to
me, partly as a result of rereading Freud and others and thinking about
psychoanalysis, that we were living in a world where this physical and
intellectual violence would always be a problem and that the whole conception
of human nature underlying the neoclassic esthetic amounted to a sweeping
under the rug of things that, it seemed to me, we had to deal with in a less
oblique and resigned way.”
The most formidable proponent of sweeping nothing under the rug was Theodor
Adorno—Berg’s old student, Sibelius’s nemesis, Thomas Mann’s musical
adviser in the writing of Doctor Faustus. After the war Adorno acquired an
intimidating reputation as a postMarxist philosopher and deep-thinking musical
analyst. He was an effective practitioner of the politics of style, using every
device at his disposal to demean music that he considered retrogressive. One
objective of his 1949 book Philosophy of New Music was to destroy the
neoclassicism of Stravinsky: the very act of preserving tonality in the modern
era, Adorno proposed, betrayed symptoms of the Fascist personality. He
condemned Hindemith on similar grounds, arguing that the “New Objectivity”
and “music for use” were tantamount to Nazi kitsch. In his book Minima Moralia
Adorno mocked American composers of the populist persuasion, claiming that
Copland’s Lincoln Portrait could be found on the gramophone of every Stalinist
intellectual.
The only possible path for Adorno was the one that Schoenberg had marked
out at the beginning of the century. In fact, music would now carry its holy torch
into abysses where even Schoenberg had not dared to go. All familiar sounds,
270
all relics of convention, had to be expunged. The crucial passage in Philosophy
of New Music was this:
[New music] has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world.
All its happiness comes in the perception of misery, all its beauty comes
in the rejection of beauty’s illusion. Neither the individual nor the
collective wants any part of it. It dies away unheard, without echo. When
music is heard, it is shot through with time, like a shining crystal; unheard
music drops through empty time like a useless bullet. New music
spontaneously takes aim at that final condition which mechanical music
lives out hour by hour—the condition of absolute oblivion. It is the true
message in a bottle.
Such language, reminiscent of the sermons of Thomas Mann’s aesthetes (“Art
is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths”),
made perfect sense to the young composers who had recently witnessed
oblivion at close range. Schoenberg, having been denounced by Hitler and
Stalin alike, carried no taint from totalitarianism either on the left or on the right,
or so it seemed. Ernst Krenek went so far as to suggest that he had converted
to twelve-tone writing in order to distance himself from totalitarian aesthetics:
“My adoption of the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all may be
interpreted as an expression of protest and thus a result of their influence.”
Many who abandoned neoclassicism and other between-the-war styles may
have thought the same. René Leibowitz argued in his book Schoenberg and His
School that atonality displayed “uncompromising moral strength.”
Back on North Rockingham Avenue, Schoenberg delightedly witnessed the
resurgence of his music and ideas. Yet the fanaticism of some of his adherents
disturbed him. When Leibowitz criticized the persistence of tonal elements in
works such as the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, Schoenberg replied, “I do not
compose principles, but music.” He explained that in earlier years he had
avoided tonality in order to differentiate himself from what had gone before;
now, he said, “I would not consider the danger of resembling tonality as
tragically as formerly.” Schoenberg disowned Adorno’s attacks on Stravinsky
(“One should not write like that”) and found little more to like in the theorist’s
panegyrics to atonality (“this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of
philosophy professors”). Schoenberg probably had both Adorno and Leibowitz
in mind when he made a note to himself that the influence of the “Schbrg clique”
would have to be broken before his music could gain a proper hearing. He
repeated a remarkable prophecy that he had delivered back in 1909: “The
second half of this century will spoil by overestimation, all the good of me that
the first half, by underestimation, has left intact.”
In his seeing-through-walls way, Schoenberg had mapped out the coming era.
He understood that he was being elevated as the patron saint of a newly
militant avant-garde mentality, with whose premises he did not agree. While he
remained fiercely loyal to the nontonal language that he had pioneered at the
beginning of the century, he was no longer so quick to condemn his rivals.
Better than Adorno, Schoenberg understood the master dialectic of musical
history, the back-and-forth between simplicity and complexity. “I cannot deny