by Peter Watson
The setting of the opera is the Lion Gate at Mycenae – after Krafft-Ebing, Heinrich Schliemann. Elektra uses a larger orchestra even than Salomé, one-hundred and eleven players, and the combination of score and mass of musicians produces a much more painful, dissonant experience. There are swaths of ‘huge granite chords,’ sounds of ‘blood and iron,’ as Strauss’s biographer Michael Kennedy has put it.12 For all its dissonance, Salomé is voluptuous, but Elektra is austere, edgy, grating. The original Clytemnestra was Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who described the early performances as ‘frightful…. We were a set of mad women…. There is nothing beyond Elektra…. We have come to a full-stop. I believe Strauss himself sees it.’ She said she wouldn’t sing the role again for $3,000 a performance.13
Two aspects of the opera compete for attention. The first is Clytemnestra’s tormented aria. A ‘stumbling, nightmare-ridden, ghastly wreck of a human being,’ she has nevertheless decorated herself with ornaments and, to begin with, the music follows the rattles and cranks of these.14 At the same time she sings of a dreadful dream – a biological horror – that her bone marrow is dissolving away, that some unknown creature is crawling all over her skin as she tries to sleep. Slowly, the music turns harsher, grows more discordant, atonal. The terror mounts, the dread is inescapable. Alongside this there is the confrontation between the three female characters, Electra and Clytemnestra on the one hand, and Electra and Chrysothemis on the other. Both encounters carry strong lesbian overtones that, added to the dissonance of the music, ensured that Elektra was as scandalous as Salomé. When it premiered on 25 January 1909, also in Dresden, one critic angrily dismissed it as ‘polluted art.’15
Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to do two things with Elektra. At the most obvious level they were doing in musical theatre what the expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc) were doing in their art – using unexpected and ‘unnatural’ colours, disturbing distortion, and jarring juxtapositions to change people’s perceptions of the world. And in this, perceptions of the ancient world had resonance. In Germany at the time, as well as in Britain and the United States, most scholars had inherited an idealised picture of antiquity, from Winckelmann and Goethe, who had understood classical Greece and Rome as restrained, simple, austere, coldly beautiful. But Nietzsche changed all that. He stressed the instinctive, savage, irrational, and darker aspects of pre-Homeric ancient Greece (fairly obvious, for example, if one reads the Iliad and the Odyssey without preconceptions). But Strauss’s Elektra wasn’t only about the past. It was about man’s (and therefore woman’s) true nature, and in this psychoanalysis played an even bigger role. Hofmannsthal met Arthur Schnitzler nearly every day at the Café Griensteidl, and Schnitzler was regarded by Freud, after all, as his ‘double.’ There can be little doubt therefore that Hofmannsthal had read Studies in Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams.16 Indeed, Electra herself shows a number of the symptoms portrayed by Anna O., the famous patient treated by Josef Breuer. These include her father fixation, her recurring hallucinations, and her disturbed sexuality. But Elektra is theatre, not a clinical report.17 The characters face moral dilemmas, not just psychological ones. Nevertheless, the very presence of Freud’s ideas onstage, undermining the traditional basis of ancient myths, as well as recognisable music and dance (both Salomé and Elektra have dance scenes), placed Strauss and Hofmannsthal firmly in the modernist camp. Elektra assaulted the accepted notions of what was beautiful and what wasn’t. Its exploration of the unconscious world beneath the surface may not have made people content, but it certainly made them think.
Elektra made Strauss think too. Ernestine Schumann-Heink had been right. He had followed the path of dissonance and the instincts and the irrational far enough. Again, as Michael Kennedy has said, the famous ‘blood chord’ in Elektra, E-major and D-major mingled in pain,’ where the voices go their own way, as far from the orchestra as dreams are from reality, was as jarring as anything then happening in painting. Strauss was at his best ‘when he set mania to music,’ but nevertheless he abandoned the discordant line he had followed from Salomé to Elektra, leaving the way free for a new generation of composers, the most innovative of whom was Arnold Schoenberg.*18
Strauss was, however, ambivalent about Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off ‘shovelling snow’ than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship (the revenue of the Liszt Foundation was used annually to help composers or pianists).20 Born in September 1874 into a poor family, Arnold Schoenberg always had a serious disposition and was largely self-taught.21 Like Max Weber, he was not given to smiling. A small, wiry man, he went bald early on, and this helped to give him a fierce appearance – the face of a fanatic, according to his near-namesake, the critic Harold Schonberg.22 Stravinsky once pinned down his colleague’s character in this way: ‘His eyes were protuberant and explosive, and the whole force of the man was in them.’23 Schoenberg was strikingly inventive, and his inventiveness was not confined to music. He carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Kandinsky was a fan), and invented a typewriter for music.24
To begin with, Schoenberg worked in a bank, but he never thought of anything other than music. ‘Once, in the army, I was asked if I was the composer Arnold Schoenberg. “Somebody has to be,” I said, “and nobody else wanted to be, so I took it on myself.” ‘25 Although Schoenberg preferred Vienna, where he frequented the cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl, and where Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl and Gustav Klimt were great friends, he realised that Berlin was the place to advance his career. There he studied under Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose sister, Mathilde, he married in 1901.26
Schoenberg’s autodidacticism, and sheer inventiveness, served him well. While other composers, Strauss, Mahler, and Claude Debussy among them, made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to learn from Wagner’s chromatic harmony, Schoenberg chose a different course, realising that evolution in art proceeds as much by complete switchbacks in direction, by quantum leaps, as by gradual growth.27 He knew that the expressionist painters were trying to make visible the distorted and raw forms unleashed by the modern world and analysed and ordered by Freud. He aimed to do something similar in music. The term he himself liked was ‘the emancipation of dissonance.’28
Schoenberg once described music as ‘a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.’29 Unfortunately, he found his own evolution slow and very painful. Even though his early music owed a debt to Wagner, Tristan especially, it had a troubled reception in Vienna. The first demonstrations occurred in 1900 at a recital. ‘Since then,’ he wrote later, ‘the scandal has never ceased.’30 It was only after the first outbursts that he began to explore dissonance. As with other ideas in the early years of the century – relativity, for example, and abstraction – several composers were groping toward dissonance and atonality at more or less the same time. One was Strauss, as we have seen. But Jean Sibelius, Mahler, and Alexandr Scriabin, all older than Schoenberg, also seemed about to embrace the same course when they died. Schoenberg’s relative youth and his determined, uncompromising nature meant that it was he who led the way toward atonality.31
One morning in December 1907 Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, Gustav Klimt, and a couple of hundred other notables gathered at Vienna’s Westbahnhof to say good-bye to Gustav Mahler, the composer and conductor who was bound for New York. He had grown tired of the ‘fashionable anti-Semitism’ in Vienna and had fallen out with the management of the Opéra.32 As the train pulled out of the station, Schoenberg and the rest of the Café Griensteidl set, now bereft of the star who had shaped Viennese music for a decade, waved in silence. Klimt spoke for them all when he whispered, ‘Vorbei’ (It’s over). But it could have been Schoenberg speaking – Mahler was the only figure of note in the German music world who understood what he was trying to achieve.33 A second crisis which faced Schoenberg was much more powerful. In the summer of 1908, the very moment
of his first atonal compositions, his wife Mathilde abandoned him for a friend.34 Rejected by his wife, isolated from Mahler, Schoenberg was left with nothing but his music. No wonder such dark themes are a prominent feature of his early atonal compositions.
The year 1908 was momentous for music, and for Schoenberg. In that year he composed his Second String Quartet and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. In both compositions he took the historic step of producing a style that, echoing the new physics, was ‘bereft of foundations.’35 Both compositions were inspired by the tense poems of Stefan George, another member of the Café Griensteidl set.36 George’s poems were a cross between experimentalist paintings and Strauss operas. They were full of references to darkness, hidden worlds, sacred fires, and voices.
The precise point at which atonality arrived, according to Schoenberg, was during the writing of the third and fourth movements of the string quartet. He was using George’s poem ‘Entrückung’ (Ecstatic Transport) when he suddenly left out all six sharps of the key signature. As he rapidly completed the part for the cello, he abandoned completely any sense of key, to produce a ‘real pandemonium of sounds, rhythms and forms.’37 As luck would have it, the stanza ended with the line, ‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten,’ ‘I feel the air of other planets.’ It could not have been more appropriate.38 The Second String Quartet was finished toward the end of July. Between then and its premiere, on 21 December, one more personal crisis shook the Schoenberg household. In November the painter his wife had left him for hanged himself, after he had failed to stab himself to death. Schoenberg took back Mathilde, and when he handed the score to the orchestra for the rehearsal, it bore the dedication, ‘To my wife.’39
The premiere of the Second String Quartet turned into one of the great scandals of music history. After the lights went down, the first few bars were heard in respectful silence. But only the first few. Most people who lived in apartments in Vienna then carried whistles attached to their door keys. If they arrived home late at night, and the main gates of the building were locked, they would use the whistles to attract the attention of the concierge. On the night of the première, the audience got out its whistles. A wailing chorus arose in the auditorium to drown out what was happening onstage. One critic leaped to his feet and shouted, ‘Stop it! Enough!’ though no one knew if he meant the audience or the performers. When Schoenberg’s sympathisers joined in, shouting their support, it only added to the din. Next day one newspaper labelled the performance a ‘Convocation of Cats,’ and the New Vienna Daily, showing a sense of invention that even Schoenberg would have approved, printed their review in the ‘crime’ section of the paper.40 ‘Mahler trusted him without being able to understand him.’41
Years later Schoenberg conceded that this was one of the worst moments of his life, but he wasn’t deterred. Instead, in 1909, continuing his emancipation of dissonance, he composed Erwartung, a thirty-minute opera, the story line for which is so minimal as to be almost absent: a woman goes searching in the forest for her lover; she discovers him only to find that he is dead not far from the house of the rival who has stolen him. The music does not so much tell a story as reflect the woman’s moods – joy, anger, jealousy.42 In painterly terms, Erwartung is both expressionistic and abstract, reflecting the fact that Schoenberg’s wife had recently abandoned him.43 In addition to the minimal narrative, it never repeats any theme or melody. Since most forms of music in the ‘classical’ tradition usually employ variations on themes, and since repetition, lots of it, is the single most obvious characteristic of popular music, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Erwartung stand out as the great break, after which ‘serious’ music began to lose the faithful following it had once had. It was to be fifteen years before Erwartung was performed.
Although he might be too impenetrable for many people’s taste, Schoenberg was not obtuse. He knew that some people objected to his atonality for its own sake, but that wasn’t the only problem. As with Freud (and Picasso, as we shall see), there were just as many traditionalists who hated what he was saying as much as how he was saying it. His response to this was a piece that, to him at least, was ‘light, ironic, satirical.’44 Pierrot lunaire, appearing in 1912, features a familiar icon of the theatre – a dumb puppet who also happens to be a feeling being, a sad and cynical clown allowed by tradition to raise awkward truths so long as they are wrapped in riddles. It had been commissioned by the Viennese actress Albertine Zehme, who liked the Pierrot role.45 Out of this unexpected format, Schoenberg managed to produce what many people consider his seminal work, what has been called the musical equivalent of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or E=mc2.46 Pierrot’s main focus is a theme we are already familiar with, the decadence and degeneration of modern man. Schoenberg introduced in the piece several innovations in form, notably Sprechgesang, literally songspeech in which the voice rises and falls but cannot be said to be either singing or speaking. The main part, composed for an actress rather than a straight singer, calls for her to be both a ‘serious’ performer and a cabaret act. Despite this suggestion of a more popular, accessible format, listeners have found that the music breaks down ‘into atoms and molecules, behaving in a jerky, uncoordinated way not unlike the molecules that bombard pollen in Brownian movement.’47
Schoenberg claimed a lot for Pierrot. He had once described Debussy as an impressionist composer, meaning that his harmonies merely added to the colour of moods. But Schoenberg saw himself as an expressionist, a Postimpressionist like Paul Gauguin or Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh, uncovering unconscious meaning in much the same way that the expressionist painters thought they went beyond the merely decorative impressionists. He certainly believed, as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did, that music – like mathematics (see chapter 6) – had logic.48
The first night took place in mid-October in Berlin, in the Choralionsaal on Berlin’s Bellevuestrasse, which was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945. As the house lights went down, dark screens could be made out onstage with the actress Albertine Zehme dressed as Columbine. The musicians were farther back, conducted by the composer. The structure of Pierrot is tight. It is comprised of three parts, each containing seven miniature poems; each poem lasts about a minute and a half, and there are twenty-one poems in all, stretching to just on half an hour. Despite the formality, the music was utterly free, as was the range of moods, leading from sheer humour, as Pierrot tries to clean a spot off his clothes, to the darkness when a giant moth kills the rays of the sun. Following the premières of the Second String Quartet and Erwartung, the critics gathered, themselves resembling nothing so much as a swarm of giant moths, ready to kill off this shining sun. But the performance was heard in silence, and when it was over, Schoenberg was given an ovation. Since it was so short, many in the audience shouted for the piece to be repeated, and they liked it even better the second time. So too did some of the critics. One of them went so far as to describe the evening ‘not as the end of music; but as the beginning of a new stage in listening.’
It was true enough. One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so ‘easy’ as they had been. Schoenberg, like Freud, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Weininger, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler, believed in the instincts, expressionism, subjectivism.49 For those who were willing to join the ride, it was exhilarating. For those who weren’t, there was really nowhere to turn and go forward. And like it or not, Schoenberg had found a way forward after Wagner. The French composer Claude Debussy once remarked that Wagner’s music was ‘a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.’ No one realised that more than Schoenberg.
If Salomé and Elektra and Pierrot’s Columbine are the founding females of modernism, they were soon followed by five equally sensuous, shadowy, disturbing sisters in a canvas produced by Picasso in 1907. No less than Strauss’s women, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was an attack on all previous ideas of
art, self-consciously shocking, crude but compelling.
In the autumn of 1907 Picasso was twenty-six. Between his arrival in Paris in 1900 and his modest success with Last Moments, he had been back and forth several times between Malaga, or Barcelona, and Paris, but he was at last beginning to find fame and controversy (much the same thing in the world where he lived). Between 1886 and the outbreak of World War I there were more new movements in painting than at any time since the Renaissance, and Paris was the centre of this activity. Georges Seurat had followed impressionism with pointillism in 1886; three years later, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Aristide Maillol formed Les Nabis (from the Hebrew word for prophet), attracted by the theories of Gauguin, to paint in flat, pure colours. Later in the 1890s, as we have seen in the case of Klimt, painters in the mainly German-speaking cities – Vienna, Berlin, Munich – opted out of the academies to initiate the various ‘secessionist’ movements. Mostly they began as impressionists, but the experimentation they encouraged brought about expressionism, the search for emotional impact by means of exaggerations and distortions of line and colour. Fauvism was the most fruitful movement, in particular in the paintings of Henri Matisse, who would be Picasso’s chief rival while they were both alive. In 1905, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, pictures by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin were grouped together in one room that also featured, in the centre, a statue by Donatello, the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor. When the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw this arrangement, the calm of the statue contemplating the frenzied, flat colours and distortions on the walls, he sighed, ‘Ah, Donatello chez les Fauvres.’ Fauve means ‘wild beast’ – and the name stuck. It did no harm. For a time, Matisse was regarded as the beast-in-chief of the Paris avant-garde.